Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  At last the Greyhound bus materialized in the hazy suck of the distance and belched slowly toward her. At the station, it hissed to a stop, its flanks showing a dusty Texan brown over the deeper blackish grime of the East Coast. The windows were scratched with vandalism, the sides speckled with bleached-out spray paint, the whole thing like a lousy chunk of New York City, cut away and set on wheels. And there, the only passenger rising at the Alpine stop, was her own young New Yorker. Even through the puckering tint stickers of the bus windows, Eve could see how Charlie tried to keep up the air of an ordinary commuter, his posture a little theater of boredom. As if to tell her, before he said a thing, my existence has become so interesting that my return home is only a station stop on the excellent journey of my life! Like an oversized camel, the bus kneeled awkwardly to offload its rider, and Charlie stepped out, waving as if his mother were just some driver holding his name on a placard. But after the bus abandoned Charlie with a hiss, he was left to cross a field of asphalt, a tiny figure in the desert flat. Eve tried not to laugh to see him now, in his checkered poplin shirt, his painted-on jeans, his roguish mess of hair, buzzed at the sides. Charlie adjusted a pair of clunky tortoiseshell glasses—and since when did Charlie wear glasses?—with a self-consciousness that was almost touching.

  “Ma!” he cried, his voice an ironic reenactment of some mawkish scene of return in a TV movie. “Your baby boy has come home to you, dear mother!”

  “Oh, shut up.” Charlie in Eve’s arms: she could feel how his New York costume went deeper than his clothes. Charlie was now an anatomy lesson, bones and sinewy muscle. Charlie suppressed a little pained cry, and she noticed the swelling in his lip and his right cheek, the cast strapped over his left forearm.

  “My Lord, what happened to you?”

  “Oh, you mean this—appendage? Just took a bad stumble. Uneven sidewalks. Our mayor doesn’t care about those of us out on the margins. That whole city is fucked.”

  “Your face!”

  “I didn’t quite catch myself in time.”

  Eve clicked her tongue. “Looks to me like you could use some good mothering.”

  “Couldn’t we all?” The glare in Charlie’s silly new glasses forbade a good view of his eyes, showing Eve only her own tired face, reflected with the mountains and low buildings in the last of the day’s light.

  “And where is your poor pup?” Eve asked. “Oh God, please don’t tell me—”

  “She’s just fine,” Charlie said. “I’ve got a friend looking after her until I go back.”

  “Until you go back. And when do you plan on doing that?”

  Charlie sighed. “How about we take things one day at a time here?”

  “Right.”

  Charlie pointed with his plaster mannequin’s arm. “Holy shit. Is that Goliath?”

  “Old faithful.”

  “Faithful? That is the only car I’ve ever known that literally farts.”

  The doors to Goliath whined open and Eve made a face as Charlie cackled at the old beast puttering to dyspeptic life. So it was a comedy to Charlie, the fact that her dire bank account balance kept her saddled with this heap. An angry argument on the topic of her finances took shape in her mind as they drove away. The vaporous ghosts of other arguments were there, too; all the nights she had spent alone, delivering those silent tirades to this boy for abandoning her, for believing he could turn the tragedy of their days into a titillating story for public consumption. But in the warm, close air of Goliath, Eve could still smell, beneath the seedy funk in Charlie’s hair and the stink of his worn clothes, that old Charlie fragrance. That peanut-buttery scent, which cast an unfair effect, eliminating the last years and returning them, for a second, to the Zion’s Pastures of her mind. For the last year, her imagination had tagged along with Charlie’s days in New York, and her imagined city was filled with greater dangers than any actual ones. Her fretted-over Charlie had been beset by muggers, careening taxis, coins dropped from the top of the Empire State Building, air conditioners tipped from tenement windows, HIV-positive party boys. The relief that she could simply reach out a hand and feel for him now was irresistible. But then she felt the hard plaster of his cast and retreated, wrapping her fingers back around the cracked rubber grooves of the steering wheel.

  “Did you get to sleep much on the bus?”

  “Not really. I was too—awake?”

  Eve nodded. It had been like that for her, too, in those three days since the test. As if Professor Nickell’s fMRI had located also some inexhaustible new form of energy. Even now, unfocused with sleeplessness, she could plug back into it, the great wattage that morning still generated.

  “Oliver,” Eve had been saying into the microphone they had let her speak into, likely just to humor her. “Can you hear me? Oliver? It’s Ma. I need you to focus now, they need you to focus. Can you do that for me?” Her pep talk was awkward at first, but escalating in its natural conviction.

  Professor Nickell and his lazy-eyed underlings had been seated in front of their screens and gizmotic panels, dully performing their routine, but as for Eve? Even still, even then, she knew what every mother knows: despite whatever evidence, she knew her kid was different than the rest. And then? It was not as if anyone gasped or startled or even made much of a sound. But as she clutched Jed’s arm and hunched over the microphone, it was unmistakable. Some power was building in the room, in the way she read once that static electricity accumulates on the ground where lightning is about to strike. “Oliver?”

  One of the technicians, a goateed, potbellied guy, pulled away from his station and pressed the greenish crescent of a fingernail against the glass of the screen that showed her son’s brain, the image wholly unlike the black-and-white printouts from that MRI Oliver had undergone years before. Eve could see the cerebral folds and crevices, neural activity lighting up the gray matter in real time. Professor Nickell and the other technician went silent then, and though after all her online research bouts, Eve’s knowledge of human neurology may still have only qualified as amateur, she knew what she was looking at. She believed she knew. Just a human brain, lit up and pulsing with thought. “Oh, God,” Professor Nickell said, turning to the Lovings as he considered this little window opened onto the cell where the prisoner had languished, all but forgotten. “Oh, no,” Professor Nickell added.

  “Oliver,” Eve had continued into the coffee-scented microphone, trying to hold her voice steady, trying not to sob. “Oliver, brave boy, I always knew,” she said—or something like that, because then she sort of lost track of herself. She flushed, cold fire spreading across her skin. And just then it somehow seemed to Eve that Oliver would complete the transformation. As if the effect of that machine on his body would work like a mother bird beaking at the hatchling’s shell. As if Oliver might, right then, beat at the fragile eggshell his body had become, split right out of it, spread his wings. Though, of course, Oliver just lay there, beyond the window divider, shuddering as ever. But the beautiful bird was still beating its wings in the Technicolor display on the monitors, and in the three days that followed, Eve tried to accept it as miracle enough.

  “The important thing to do here,” Nickell had told Eve and Jed in an unscheduled post-test meeting back in Dr. Rumble’s office, “is not to rush to any conclusions at all. We just can’t know anything, not yet. For example, it’s true, the structure is remarkably intact. Remarkable, truly, the kind of activity that we’re seeing now. But we do also see some substantial degradation to the frontal cortex, dimness in the parietal. We’re just doing brain measurements here, we aren’t equipped to do any sort of cognitive assessment. Consciousness, it’s not an all-or-nothing thing. There are degrees, and that’s what we need to figure out now.”

  It seemed deliberately symbolic that as Professor Nickell delivered this opinion he occupied the armchair typically filled by Frank Rumble, the nice chesterfield by the sofa. Dr. Rumble, relegated to his distant desk, raised and lowered the slide of his bolo tie. “Degrees,
right,” Dr. Rumble lamely interjected. “And likely a very small degree. I really don’t think we should be getting hopes up.”

  “I wouldn’t say small and I wouldn’t say large,” Professor Nickell said. “I would say that we need to do some more extensive assessments here.”

  “So Oliver was what? Just misdiagnosed?” Eve asked. “Or did something change?”

  “Hard to say if anything changed, though that is certainly possible. Dr. Rumble here showed me the old fMRI results, from nearly ten years back. I think we can see some of the activity I’m seeing clearly now, even back then. But the machines were cruder in those days, and it’s hard to know for sure.”

  “I don’t understand this then,” Eve told Dr. Rumble. “You told me he was gone, Frank. Just his reptile brain, you said.”

  Dr. Rumble emitted a long sigh. “The fact is, we still just don’t know.”

  Eve had to fold her hands to keep from choking the doctor with his ridiculous necktie. Incompetence! Did she actually say the word? The evil of your incompetence! And yet, even then Eve knew the true nature of the combustion happening in her chest: years ago, even Frank Rumble had brought up the idea of a second opinion, though in his dismissive, pandering tone. But Eve had never been able to bring herself to insist on other hospitals, other tests.

  “Anyway,” Professor Nickell added, “I’ve already put in a call to a neuroscientist in El Paso, a brilliant woman called Marissa Ginsberg, an expert with cases like these. Dr. Ginsberg, she’s got a whole litany of tests she does, to assess just how conscious, how aware, a patient like Oliver might be. More brain scans, EEGs, a whole slew of stimulus tests. We’ve scheduled Oliver a long examination with her eight weeks from tomorrow, if you’ll agree.”

  “Eight weeks?” Eve asked.

  “It’s a wait, I know it,” the professor said. “Apparently, with Oliver’s insurance plan, it’s going to take that long for all the paperwork to go through.”

  “It’s more than a wait,” Eve said. “It’s a travesty.” And yet Eve was too overcome with hope even to maintain an appropriate rage for the negligent doctor pouting behind his desk. She understood that even this long-fretted-over test had not proven anything conclusively. But she couldn’t help it; her hope was all that kept the blood moving through her veins.

  “So what does all this even mean?” Charlie asked in the passenger seat now, after she filled him in on the basic details. “What do we do with these facts now? Eight weeks until the next test. What are we supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “We celebrate. We celebrate this incredible news.”

  “And what about he who shall not be named?” Charlie said. “Does he know?”

  “Your father knows,” Eve said. And, okay, maybe it was just habit, how quickly the lie came fully formed to her lips, the very little lie that would confirm a really, truly true portrait of a father who had never been present for a family like a father ought to be. “Dr. Rumble told me your father seemed very happy when they spoke on the phone. But I don’t think that ‘happiness’ can ever quite be the right word with that man,” she said, because Charlie’s return to her life was all the upheaval Eve could take right now, because she just couldn’t bear to invite Jed back into the mix. And why not let Jed go on brooding in his Marfa bungalow if that was what he wanted?

  The mountains were on fire with the sunset. With her son back in Goliath, some old impulse had misdirected Eve. She found that she had turned on the road not to Desert Splendor but to Zion’s Pastures. They had been driving that way for ten minutes when she slapped at her head, as if to fix a wonky contraption.

  “Don’t be like that. Of course it’s incredible,” Charlie said. “I mean that. That we know now. Of course it is.”

  “He’s back with us.”

  “Is he? We really don’t know that for sure, it sounds like. And if he is, does that mean he’s really been with us all along? Or did his brain, like, suddenly switch back on? Like a lightbulb or something?”

  “I’ve spent the last three days wondering exactly the same. These are questions for the professionals, I guess. For that next test.”

  “But Ma? If he really has been there, every single day, I mean really hearing and seeing us—” Charlie hesitated.

  “We didn’t know.”

  “It would be hell. Maybe happy news for us, okay. But for Oliver? That would mean he has been in hell.”

  “Ah. I had forgotten,” Eve said. “I had forgotten what it is like to have my son at home. This is good news, Charlie. The very, very best news. What about taking things one day at a time? Now that we know, we can help.”

  Determined not to let Charlie sense her directional error and so expound on its implications, Eve just kept on, toward Zion’s Pastures. It was dim enough now that when a coyote crossed the highway its eyes flared blue in the headlights.

  “Help?” Charlie asked. “How could we help?”

  “Do you remember Margot Strout?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “That speech therapist woman. Usually she works with stroke patients, people with dementia. But starting tomorrow, she’ll be working with Oliver every day. They say she’s a miracle worker.”

  In that week of a great many reversals, not the least was the fact that—after all those years of shunning Margot in the halls, turning her head away as if the woman were nothing but an offensive smell with charging legs—Eve somehow now found herself in a position to extol Margot Strout’s virtues. “It’s a wonderful thing, ain’t it?” Dr. Rumble had once mused, after Margot passed by the window. “A woman like that—everything she’s been through, losing her daughter, and still she spends her life helping other people.” Eve had paused from her combing of her son’s thinning hair, turned to Dr. Rumble, and said, “What a hero.” But then, just one day after the test, it was none other than Margot Strout who knocked at the door.

  “How about this?” Margot said. “How about you and I try to start over?”

  Margot’s blue, thickly mascaraed eyes on Eve, so unafraid, so horribly, triumphantly understanding.

  “So now you might be ready to listen to me. Now you think I might not be so crazy after all,” Eve said.

  “I never said you were crazy,” Margot told her. “But you’re right. You were right, Eve! You were right all along, about Oliver.”

  Eve couldn’t resist letting the woman take her hands. She was so eager to share her joy with another human. Jed had walked away from that test as dazed as a man contemplating tax codes; Dr. Rumble and the nurses now tended to their patient like supplicants to a dying king. “I can’t imagine it,” Margot had added. “No, I can. If my daughter could suddenly come back to me? After all these years. Eve, Eve, dear woman. God is good, isn’t he?”

  “A miracle worker,” Charlie said to his mother now. “Good. Well. A miracle is what we need.”

  “We’ve already had one.”

  “Sounds like we need another. Oliver does.” Charlie sighed and shifted in that beleaguered way of his, as if the unfortunate truths of his life were weighty boxes she made him heft.

  “You know what that Princeton professor told me?” Eve was strangling the steering wheel, twisting her wrists. “Turns out that it’s more common than anyone knows. It’s horrible, but apparently people like Oliver are misdiagnosed all the time. God. Imagine it. But people don’t know this.”

  Charlie nodded, as though this fact dovetailed with the point he was trying to make. “We still just don’t know. We can’t know. What’s in Oliver’s head. What he might think of all this. What he might think of anything at all.” Charlie was speaking to the dashboard, to no one, to the audience he convened in his mind. “Or even how he might think. Now it seems to me—” But Eve had stopped listening. She blinked and blinked at the cooling purple of nothing in all directions.

  “What’s up?” Charlie said. “You stopped the car.”

  “It’s just too much. You are back here now. No. Not you, but a man with my little boy
’s face. And Oliver. And why can’t we, just for one minute, why can’t we just celebrate these facts? Why can’t you let me have just one happy night in ten years?”

  “C’mon, Ma. I’m really too tired for the martyr routine right now.”

  “Right. Because I’m just some hysterical, manipulative old shrew.”

  They were at the start of something, the same old thing. It had taken less than thirty minutes to arrive here. The thunder of the coming fight gathered behind the few words they’d spoken, but Eve was too exhausted to endure that storm now, too sore with the repetitive stress injury of her son’s condemnations. Charlie, who was always insinuating in his pseudopsychological way that there was some deeper part of her that she was unwilling to consider, when Eve’s entire mental life was just an endless spin cycle of consideration and reconsideration. Eve wanted to tear herself open, to let Charlie see all the way down to the deepest part of her where this self-fabricator, this manipulative shrew supposedly resided.

  “Just please, Ma, calm down now, okay? Listen to me,” Charlie reached for the back of her head, apparently forgetting the cast on his arm. Its corner slammed into Eve’s face.

  “Shit.” Ridiculous: even with the fireworks blooming painfully in her eye, Eve regretted swearing in front of her son.

  “Oh, no, Ma.”

  She clutched the injury, and Charlie reached with his good hand to pull her fingers away. Eve knew it was nothing serious—the pain had already passed—but she held on, making him suffer a little longer. Charlie lit Goliath’s weak dome lamp, and at last she relented, displaying her face to him, blinking furiously. Charlie was so close, and his eyes were still his eyes. Gray and bright.

  “We make quite a duo,” Eve said. “A regular slapstick act.”

  Charlie chuckled, and so did Eve. Just moments ago they were walking a delicate line, the edge of something vast and deep, and these quick laughs tripped them, pitching mother and son over the cliff. They didn’t just laugh then; they tumbled into laughter, down and down.