“Unfortunately, there is no such thing as normal. It’s a case-by-case thing. It takes patience. Sometimes a lot of it. And the truth is that we just don’t know yet how much Oliver can even understand. It’s important that we’re all very clear on that point. When they finally do that next test, that will be very useful information.”
Charlie heard a close, croaking noise; it took him whole seconds to recognize it came from his own nasal cavity. The round head of the woman seated before him softened impressionistically. “Ah,” Charlie said, slapping at his tears. “God, I’m sorry.”
And yet here, apparently, was the secret pass code to Margot’s fortified heart. She now took Charlie’s hand again, then his shoulders and torso, too. Charlie was drowning, gulping in the perfumed crevice of the woman’s considerable bosom. “No,” she said. “Don’t you apologize to me. Don’t you say sorry, dear boy. I’m so sorry if I’ve gotten a little gruff, but we’re all on the same team here, right? We all want the same thing.”
Charlie clambered free of the woman’s cleavage, braced himself on her shoulder. And now he was wondering about the empty house Margot must have returned to each day after work, the bravery or else child-simple belief that kept up her Christian cheer in those bleak rooms. “Here’s what I’ve learned,” Margot said. “You have to have faith. That is what the Lord asks of you.”
“The Lord?” Charlie said. “I’m afraid me and the big guy aren’t really on speaking terms these days.”
Margot smiled, almost nostalgically, as if Charlie’s faithlessness were a kind of developmental stage to be passed through, one she herself had long ago outgrown. “He’s all any of us really have, I think you’ll come to see.”
Charlie shrugged.
* * *
Certainly it was true that the miraculous resurrection of the Suzuki suggested the hand of the divine, but the bike could go fifty, tops: not at all fast enough—Charlie had learned in his first grim weeks back home—to outrun the anxieties that had pursued him halfway across the continent.
Since his arrival in the Big Bend, Jimmy Giordano had phoned Charlie sixteen times, and Charlie had answered zero times. Why, Charlie wondered, did he even keep his phone turned on when it was just his landlord who called him now? Even Terrance had given up on Charlie, his intermittent string of texts (You there? Everything okay? What’s going on? I’m worried about you) terminating the same way Charlie had ended every friendship and romance, into his own dithering indecision that became his nonreply. Over the last weeks, Charlie had received only one call he wanted to answer, but Rebekkah Sterling had hung up before he could put the phone to his ear. Why, after all the months of willful silence toward Charlie, had she suddenly decided to call? That next morning, Charlie had spent a long while on the spring-mottled mattress at Desert Splendor, Rebekkah’s number on his screen, as he contemplated the call button. In the end, Charlie settled on a jaunty little text message, which he regretted immediately after pressing send.
You rang? Charlie had watched the text message dialogue screen for a long while, applying the forces of mental telepathy to will her to reply. After ten minutes or so, the screen at last showed a pulsing ellipsis, indicating Rebekkah’s typing. Dot dot dot. Only three mysterious periods, but enough, or so Charlie felt, to transmit the whole scene through the skies. Rebekkah, once more in her silk robe, her phone casting the only light in the dimness of her bedroom. Edwina dozing throatily on a pillow. Rebekkah considering, reconsidering. In the end, however, that ellipsis apparently was the most that Rebekkah was willing to offer Charlie. Charlie’s fingertips went white against the telephone screen then, as he fumingly forwarded to Rebekkah the several recent news articles that Google had delivered to his phone, those substantially inaccurate, overly optimistic reports of the fMRI test results. No surprise: in the days that followed Rebekkah never replied.
But, of course, Jimmy Giordano kept on calling, and even when his phone was not actually ringing, Charlie’s dread had become like a second device that wouldn’t stop going off. A measure of his desperation: one afternoon, a week after his return, Charlie scrolled through his phone, drew his breath, pressed call on the name Lucas Levi.
“Well, well, well, Charlie Loving,” Lucas answered. “My favorite author.”
“Your favorite author. Hard at work!”
“So, uh, Charlie, what can I do you for?”
“A couple fancy cocktails. Maybe dinner.”
“Oh?”
“Kidding. Actually, I wanted to tell you about some good progress I’ve been making.”
“Really. And what sort of progress might this be?” Lucas asked.
Though the wave of articles that followed the news of “A ‘Miracle’ in the Big Bend” had quickly subsided, before dialing Lucas, Charlie tried to embolden himself with thoughts of his own privileged angle. The world—or at least some fraction of the world beyond their narrow slice of Presidio County—was paying attention again, and only Charlie had the inside scoop. He freshly imagined a whole book that would incorporate, in swiftly readable, emotionally riveting fashion, all the elements of his last weeks that, in truth, made Charlie go numb and nauseous to consider. Still, Charlie felt the possibility of relief, like a toe testing cool water, as he convinced himself that, in light of the remarkable developments, Lucas might be able to advance the rest of the cash owed to Charlie on completion.
“God,” Lucas Levi said, after Charlie had offered a manic, clumsy summary of his recent weeks: the results of Oliver’s latest test, Margot Strout’s work, the several news items about his brother that had appeared in the local papers.
“But you still don’t know if he’ll ever be able to communicate?” Lucas added.
“No,” Charlie said, and the line went silent for a few seconds.
“And so this progress?”
“That’s just the thing,” Charlie said. “The story is changing so quickly that I’m just going to have to start over, and that’s where I’m hoping you could help me.”
“Help you?”
“It’s just that I need a little more of my contract money. Whatever you can give.”
“Charlie.”
“I promise you! I’m moving quickly now.”
“Right.”
“Listen—”
“No,” Lucas said, “you listen. I hate to tell you this, but there’s no way around it. My boss? I have to tell you that he’s been talking about canceling this contract.”
“Canceling it?”
“Are you really so surprised? We agreed that you’d show me some pages by last December, and now it’s August. August! And every time we speak you tell me you are starting over.”
“But what about what you said? About the national shame?”
“Well, that’s true. It’s a tragedy, what happened to your brother, a great shame, like I said, but these shoutings are at like what, one a month now. Honestly? Can’t blame people for getting fatigued on the whole topic.”
Charlie bowed his head, nodded. According to the loud and brief burst of press that had desultorily followed the night of November fifteenth, Hector Espina’s motive might have been some misty conflation of mental illness, gun violence in the media, white xenophobia, and drug troubles, but in Charlie’s many feverish considerations of Hector Espina’s unknowable reason, the truest answer he had been able to offer himself was that Hector—a boy who hadn’t been able to pull his life together after he graduated from Bliss Township School—had hoped to make the whole unlistening world learn his name, that Hector had thought he might use the weapon in his hand like a different kind of machine, one that could convert his lonesome agony into the blackest kind of public fame, detonating private misery into public bloodshed. But it had gotten crowded, that wicked pantheon. Those lonely, hormonal, zealous, and demented young men, unleashing hell in classrooms, military bases, churches, nightclubs, movie theaters, shopping malls, and airports. His town’s tragedy had become a relatively small statistic, just a data point on the up
dated infographics to which liberal Congresspeople angrily gestured each time another demented young man attempted to outdo his predecessors. Over the years, a great number of friends and boyfriends had kindly suggested Charlie give his rage its appropriate outlet, joining the poster-waving set on the steps of state legislatures to fight for stricter gun laws. But, Texan that he was, Charlie knew how each catastrophe was just another excuse for the crazed citizenry to weaponize more elaborately.
“I’m not saying you are hopeless, Charlie,” Lucas added. “I do believe you probably will have a good book in you someday, when you are a little more, uh, mature as a writer. But editors can make mistakes. I’m starting to see that I made one myself.”
A dreadful pause. “But…” Charlie said, desperately wishing upon a dependent clause.
“How about this,” Lucas said. “How about you send me—I don’t know—say a hundred pages or so. By the end of the month. I’ll do what I can. But you should know, it ain’t looking good.”
And yet, even then, Charlie had been able to dam his panic. He reasoned that he would simply write those pages, and his work would speak for itself. “Speak for itself,” Ma said when, with the false confidence of too much coffee two days later, Charlie tried to deliver to her a self-rallying account of his quote unquote incredible progress. “An interesting choice of words,” she added.
“Interesting?”
“You mean speak for us. You mean speak for your brother. And what about what he might have to say?”
“Exactly. What about it? That’s my whole point here—”
“I’m really too tired to argue. If you need a hobby, have a hobby. But maybe, if you are interested in actually contributing, you could poke around for some job.”
“I have a job. I have a contract, if you’d like to see it.”
“And how much money have you made at this job?”
“I’ve already made money! And there is more coming, but, see, I was going in the wrong direction all along. My job is really just starting right now.”
“Right,” Ma said.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Right.”
Charlie had been enormously relieved to return to his mother’s rent-free household, but he was beginning to see the true, hidden cost of his tenancy. And Charlie also saw this now: his back rent aside, the only way out of a permanent return to his mother’s home would be to write himself to freedom. “So I’m setting up shop down the street,” he told Ma, “where I can get a little space and distance to work.”
“What do you mean down the street?”
“I just think it’s important that we set up boundaries here.”
“Okay, but where down the street?” Ma fairly asked.
Charlie had spent the better part of that afternoon exploring the half-constructed houses of Ma’s failed neighborhood, and when he happened to come upon that rare Texan thing, a basement, beneath a house that would never rise, he knew he had found his next studio. This studio might only have been a lightless cement cube, but Charlie had visions of William Faulkner dashing out his tour de force, As I Lay Dying, on a jury-rigged writing table Faulkner had made out of a wheelbarrow he found in his night shifts as a power plant supervisor. When Charlie happened to find a similar wheelbarrow of his own, a behemoth of a cart made of rusting iron, the coincidence couldn’t be ignored. He kicked open the metal hatch to his new basement studio, rolled his worktable down the stairs, and laid a square of particleboard on top of it. On the first piece of paper Charlie placed before himself, he wrote a new dictum, the guiding thesis statement of his revised future. Tell the TRUTH. He looked at that cliché as if it were some revelation.
At that wondrous wheelbarrow, a night’s solitary work spreading before him like a promise, Charlie felt it again: the spine-tingle of the old bunk bed tales, the ancient magi’s incantation to raise the dead from the earth, the same giddy electricity that had pulsed over him the first time he had held Ma’s news to his ear at New York Methodist. He’s there, she’d said. He’s here.
But Ma had not told him the whole truth then, only her desperate version of it. It was not by chance, Charlie understood, that she hadn’t offered him a full report of those fMRI results until he was safely back home. He’s there, Ma had said, but it was still entirely possible that Oliver was not there at all, or not completely. Or maybe he had been there all along? Tell the TRUTH: but already, his marvelous new dictum hit a snag. What truth? A miracle, as Ma and the whole town said? Maybe. Maybe for them. But Charlie was also thinking that from a certain perspective—from the perspective that mattered most, from Oliver’s perspective—that even if the next exams Ma had scheduled in El Paso came back with the best, most miraculous results, even if this Dr. Ginsberg found that Oliver was still as awake and aware as anyone, couldn’t one also say that such a miracle wouldn’t be miraculous at all, but exactly the opposite? A confirmation of an unthinkable horror, perhaps the most hideous form of solitary confinement humankind had ever created, concocted by a gun-mad nation, twenty-first-century medical technology, and a mother’s smothering love? Or had Ma been right, on that last afternoon before Charlie left for Thoreau—had he committed the most selfish act of all, mourning the death of a brother who had lain just inches from him, listening to his farewell sobs? How, how, how could Ma have not insisted on another test over all the years? Worse: How could Charlie himself not have made her insist? Charlie had spent the first four years of aftermath tending to his mother’s needs, proudly polishing his Man of the House crown each morning, but with a painful lurching sensation in his esophagus, he wondered now if all those years of labor had summed only to his enabling of his mother’s ruinous delusions. Was he, in fact, as guilty as she? Charlie felt desperately alone in these questions.
Since his arrival, Charlie hadn’t gone anywhere near Marfa, but he sensed Pa’s presence in the way a body feels the years, a gentle but accumulating sway, something insidious and intractable, bending him toward the ground. But what would he possibly say to the man? How’s tricks, Pops?
On the wheelbarrow Charlie wrote, Faulkner said the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past. But out in West Texas, it’s something worse. It’s the future. He excited himself with the clarity of his anger, as if the meaning of things could reveal itself on the page before him, like the floating message in one of those novelty Magic 8 Balls. And yet, sitting each night at that wheelbarrow, he found himself scrawling only more aimless pages. As the days passed, Charlie lost the thread of his latest idea; he lost even the conviction of his anger. On his phone, Charlie spent hours clicking through his social media profiles, his obsession fixated on the anarchist guy he’d known for a week in Brooklyn. Christopher, whose many shirtless pics Charlie often enlarged, gazing upon his extraordinary stomach musculature like the map of some better land, a reassurance that Charlie’s life had, at least for a short interval, taken place somewhere beyond this desiccated and fissured country. Christopher was living in Austin now, and though that city might have sat eight hours from his mother’s crumbling house, Charlie several times looked up driving directions, contemplating the bluely highlighted routes in his phone.
“So, Charlie Dickens,” Ma said on a Friday, on another drive back from Crockett State, “how goes the writing?”
“Hard to write,” Charlie said, “when the story is still ongoing. But I’m sticking to it.” He looked for a long time at his mother then, took in the wrinkling around her eyes, her lips thinned by age to near nothingness, the gauntness of her neck, the way her gaze could never seem to land on his, as if in all those years alone she’d become just a little touched, a little unwell in ways not immediately apparent. She was halfway on a journey to become the kind of tiny, cranky old lady Charlie had often encountered on Brooklyn streets, elbowing her lonely way through the crush of her days. And so wasn’t it pathetic, what he still wanted from her? From his mother, teacher, principal, only friend, and loving jailer of his high school years—from that Supreme Being of his neuroses—he still
wanted, needed, validation.
“It’s not a story, Charlie. It’s our lives. This is real life. And please stop making that face at me.”
* * *
A half hour after leaving Margot and his brother at Crockett State, Charlie was straddling his motorbike, speeding through the desert, its veins of fossilized flooding, its million stones showing their blank, sunny faces, a geriatric audience. Charlie was on his way to a brunch.
“A brunch in your honor,” his old principal, Doyle Dixon, had said, the city word brunch sounding silly in his mouth over the phone.
“Brunch?” Charlie had asked.
“A bunch of people would love to see you,” Principal Dixon told him. “If you’d be willing. I know it’d make their day. Their whole month, really.”
“What people?”
“A few of my dear old teachers. Manuel Paz, too. We all were hoping for a better chance to talk. And I thought a brunch would maybe be a nice occasion to shame me into straightening up my place.”
“Manuel Paz?”
“That’s right.”
Charlie had paused, thinking of that balding, old-Texas holdover he’d seen at Crockett State. The idea of a brunch with Manuel Paz and those gossipy teachers was unsettling in the extreme, but Charlie thought of his directive to himself. Tell the TRUTH. A brunch, he decided, might be endurable, but only as research.
“I’d like that,” Charlie had said.
Doyle’s house was just beyond the western edge of the park, and Charlie chose the scenic route. He passed beyond the Austin-stone gates into the twelve hundred square miles of immaculate desert, alpine mountains, and Rio Grande–gorged canyons that constitute Big Bend National Park. Just beyond the ranger station, Charlie passed a grim gathering: a couple of Minutemen conferring with a police officer near a Hispanic guy seated on the curb, bowing his head over his handcuffs. And beyond this forlorn scene, the view before Charlie could have been a sepia-tinted photograph of Mars. It was no surprise, he thought, that this desert spawned so many amateur astronomers, that it made telescope people out of his father and brother. Nowhere more than in this desert had Charlie ever felt himself so clearly on a sphere of rock hurtling through the cosmos.
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