But that struck Charlie as too passive-aggressive, with a vaguely Oedipal note. He wadded it.
Dear Mother, I’ve come to see that it is impossible for me to be my own person in this place, where the past and its horrors and confusion are like cobwebs growing over my body, not letting me move. I know how selfish that must sound.
True enough, perhaps, but to Charlie it did sound selfish indeed. And he imagined the red ink of Lucas Levi’s handwriting in the margins: Overwrought. Was it possible, Charlie wondered, that he could not even write so much as a decent runaway note?
Dear Ma,
I think it will not come as a surprise to tell you that I couldn’t bear it here another day longer, and I’ve left. Someday, I’ll be in touch again. I’ll be thinking of you and Oliver every minute of every day.
Love,
Charlie
He saw that this note was a failure, too, but he marched back to his mother’s house and magneted it to the refrigerator, like the final book report he had written for the Zion’s Pastures Homeschool for Lovings. And at least there was this consolation: at last he had done it. With this note, he would at last thoroughly break Ma’s heart, end her last hope that Charlie might ever be the sort of son she needed him to be. Knock, knock, knock: Charlie’s thoughts were running back to what might still happen, the next test, more tests. No. He freshly reconvinced himself he had to go.
At five thirty, with a backpack holding four of his teenage outfits, Oliver’s journal, and the $142 that represented his entire estate, Charlie left his Suzuki in the drive, hiked out the forsaken stone perimeter of Desert Splendor, made his way to the tidal whooshing of big rigs barreling down FM Route 28. The dawn had just begun to make the headlights of passing traffic unnecessary, and right when he reached the ribbon of asphalt, the sun crested the eastern horizon, throwing his long shadow into the soft, diesel-hazed redness to the west. Charlie crossed to the far side of the road, to the side that represented the country’s ancient myth of rebirth and transformation, the westbound lane. Like a thousand hard-luck poets before him, he extended a thumb and pointed it in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. He was now entertaining a vague fantasy of San Francisco, a few nights in a YMCA, a resuming of his barback career.
But the thing that happened was that nothing happened. There was a very suggestive lull in the traffic. He waited five minutes and still the road was silent. The land to the east was a perfect flatness, but in the west it rose in disturbed waves, the farthest southern incursions of the Rocky Mountains. Over one of those distant hills, headlights winked at him, from the eastbound lane. With his preternatural susceptibility to signs and portents, Charlie lowered his thumb and made a decision then, a way to put a final and conclusive period on the sad ending of his youth he was that morning trying to contrive. Or maybe he was just looking for an excuse to delay the criminal selfishness of his scheme. Charlie took the eight paces to cross the street and once more extended his thumb, now pointing eastward.
* * *
After fifteen minutes and one very strange conversation—about polygamy, with a big-rig trucker improbably named François from Butte, Montana—Charlie was standing just a couple hundred feet from Bed Four, in the back corner of the parking lot. He would only need a few minutes inside, he told himself, and a half hour later he’d be off in the passenger seat of some unknowable future. He tugged open the back door.
Inside, the same sterile hallways he had walked each day with Ma. His footsteps chased the greenish reflection of fluorescent tubes across the linoleum. In case Donny Franco or one of the night shift spotted him, so long before visiting hours, Charlie tried to affect a gait that was at once swift, purposeful, and nonchalant, and when he arrived to the room, he pushed confidently through, then paused to catch his breath. The bed was around the corner, and to be sure he wouldn’t lose his nerve when the grim, snarled sight of his brother confronted him, Charlie prepared what he had come there to do, which was the exact thing he had tried to do in Rebekkah’s Eighth Street apartment weeks ago. From his bag, Charlie produced the albatross that had hung around his last years. Oliver’s journal in his hand, Charlie’s only plan was to deposit it on the bedside table, perhaps say a word or two to his brother, and go.
If Charlie had been asked to pick a single word that best summarized his existence on this planet at the age of twenty-three, the choice would have been simple: however. The History of Charlie Loving, he felt, was nothing but twenty-three years of however, his expectations and reality forever a dizzying double vision, the image never quite coming into focus. And here was the latest however: from the space beyond the corner in which he slouched, Charlie heard something curious. A high-pitched computerish sound, animated like some canned politician’s voice delivering good news. A robotic voice, saying the word yes. And when he glanced around the corner, Charlie discovered, bent once more over Bed Four, the floral-patterned shape of Margot Strout.
“Margot?” This time the woman startled so severely she nearly fell off her stool. Pivoting, her eyes looked something more than surprised, a touch manic and oddly naked. It was the first time that Charlie had seen her face without the dressing of her makeup. Unfeminized, Margot looked nearly butch. Over the bed, Charlie saw that Margot had rigged a touch screen on the swivel arm of a metal stand.
“Charlie. So early again. Very early, in fact. What is it, six? I couldn’t sleep, so thought I might as well get to work.”
Hoping to avoid Margot’s questions about just what he was doing there at that hour, hoping also to distract her attention from the book Charlie was presently slipping back into his bag, he asked, “What’s with that weird roboty sound?”
Margot and Charlie looked at one another for a strangely long moment. Apparently, all it had taken for Margot to recategorize him as a “dear boy” had been his teary little outburst the morning before. The woman smiled at him now, snapped her fingers in Charlie’s direction, held out her hand for him to take it. He did as instructed. “I was going to tell you both about it today.”
“Tell us what?”
“Charlie, sweetie,” she said, touching his cheek, blinking very quickly.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve finally made some, uh, progress?” Margot seemed to choose that deliberately vague word for the pleasure of loading it with implication.
“You don’t mean…” Charlie paused, feeling the simultaneous tremendous weight and helium lightness attached to the second half of that sentence.
“Like I told you,” Margot said, “with a head injury like Oliver’s, if there’s anything to be found, it’s usually neck up.” Margot’s lips curled then, the sly look of a great secret in the offing. “But I finally decided to listen to your mother. I tried his hands, like she’s always been saying.”
“His hands.”
“His left hand, more specifically. The thenar muscles. This little band of muscle between the thumb and the wrist.”
Charlie felt for his own thenar muscles, as if for a pulse.
“At first, it seemed like the same tremble as the rest. Just involuntary muscle contractions. But there was maybe something else there. It’s weird but purposeful movement, you sort of develop a sixth sense for it. Well, I stayed with it. All day long. I stayed with it, and I kept tracking his neurofeedback on the EEG.” She gestured to the little wired stickers that made an electronic Medusa of Oliver’s scalp. “That info alone couldn’t tell us much, of course, but when I matched it with what I started to feel—”
“Started to feel what?”
“Here,” she said, pulling Charlie’s hand toward Oliver. Over the last weeks, Charlie had spent a great deal of time over Oliver’s searching eyes, his jaw forever chewing at nothing, his skin borderline jaundiced. Charlie had made good use of his teenage self-training, taking in the sight in only nanosecond glimpses. When Ma had kissed Oliver’s forehead before they left each evening, Charlie offered no more than a brotherly pat of his shoulder. But now, as Margot guided Char
lie’s fingers into Oliver’s palm, he did not resist. Charlie could smell the coffee on Margot’s breath, see the pores on her nose, the wetness around her eyes, those little unsettling intimacies. “Just like that, do you feel that muscle?”
But what Charlie felt was not, at least not at first, this muscle Margot described. What he felt, what overwhelmed him, was the simple meaty fact of Oliver’s hand in his. It was like—just like an ordinary hand, like the hands of any of the men he had held in his coat pocket like lucky rabbits’ feet as he staggered out of some New Hampshire or New York dive. Instead of whatever little movement Margot expected him to locate pulsing under Oliver’s skin, Charlie received only another reminder of his wrongness, felt that all his reading and writing and imagining had been wrong. All that work seemed nothing next to the damp warm truth of his brother’s hand.
“I’m not so sure. What should I be feeling for?”
“It took me a while to find it. But if you just stay like that, just keep your fingers there until you start to ignore the tremble, it’s … well. It’s there.”
And then Margot turned to Bed Four and asked, “Isn’t that right, Oliver?”
As if holding to a cliff face to keep from sliding, Charlie dug his fingers tightly into the rough nap of Oliver’s skin.
“Same as before,” Margot was saying. “Twice for yes.”
And then it was as if the connection between hands became a live wire, sparking Charlie away. He dropped Oliver’s hand and grasped his own, nursed it. In Charlie’s fingers: the muscle memory of quick, twinned pulses. He could feel it still, as if, even now that they were apart, Oliver’s thenar muscles were still beating against him.
“And he can—”
“Seems he can understand just fine.” And now Margot completed the show of her technological sorcery. She returned to the work she’d been at when Charlie had come in and distracted her. She swung toward the bed a touch-screen monitor, its image divided in two. On the left, in a bright field of springtime green, was the word YES, and on the right, over stop-sign red, the word NO. “When the EEG reading spikes and he flexes twice,” Margot said. “I guide his hand to press YES, and when he flexes once, I have him press NO.”
Charlie was breathing through his gaping mouth.
“Oliver,” Margot said, “do you know who is standing here with me?”
“Wait—”
Margot turned to flash Charlie a frustrated look—or maybe that was just the resting state of her wattled face? She spun back to observe the neurofeedback monitor, pointing at the screen with her free hand. “There,” she said, and she guided Oliver’s limp fingers to the green panel. “Yes,” said the sprightly computer voice.
“Would you like to say hi to your brother?” Margot asked.
“Yes,” the robot voice replied.
In the quiet that followed, Charlie stumbled over the bag he had dropped, nearly fell into his brother’s lap.
“Oliver,” he said. Or did not say. Charlie could hardly shape the name out of the air.
“Yes,” the computer replied.
“You can really hear me?”
“Yes.”
“It’s still, I mean inside, it’s still really—” Charlie did not quite know how to finish the question.
“Yes.”
It was twenty minutes later when Charlie came back to himself and remembered why he had come early to Crockett State that morning. “Hey,” Margot interrupted his barrage of questions. “Maybe we should give your ma a call? I have the feeling she might be interested in asking your brother a few questions of her own.”
Charlie nodded frantically, clumsily grasped for the phone in his pocket.
“Ma?” Charlie asked the phone. “Ma?”
“Charlie? Where are you? What is it?”
Later, Charlie wouldn’t be able to remember how he explained any of this to her; at the time, he was too busy replaying in his mind his first conversation with Oliver in a decade. No, not the first conversation, just the first in which Oliver could reply.
“Yes,” Charlie had heard Oliver say, via his left hand’s thenar muscles, via Margot Strout, via a computer’s idiotic cheer.
“You can really understand every word?” Charlie asked.
“Yes.”
“I—what can I even ask you? What is it that I could even say?”
“Yes.”
“Ha. Ha ha!” There were tears in Charlie’s eyes then, as the sentences begat more sentences. And could you understand this entire time? Did you ever think no one would know? Do you know that Rebekkah is okay? I’ve seen her—she misses you still, she’s never been the same, I’m sure you must know that?
“Yes,” the computer speaker answered.
But it was not all yeses—to a number of questions, Margot had piloted his brother’s hand to the red panel for NO. “Are you in a lot of pain?” “No.” “Have we done everything we can to make you comfortable?” “No.” “Is it the bed? “No.” “Oh! Is it the window? Do you want it open?” “Yes.”
After all those years, Charlie knew his questions were insufficient. Given only binary replies, he couldn’t find the right things to say. But as Charlie cracked the window and so allowed Oliver to breathe possibly his first unfiltered air in years, Charlie understood that whether the robot voice said yes or no, it was truly just one question he had asked.
Yes. Though he had never told his mother in so many words, Charlie had always felt certain that if she turned out to be right, that if some part of Oliver really were awake inside his body, then his only answer to the question of that most pitiable life could be no. And yet, Yes. All of Charlie’s despair, all his ruined ambition, all the things he thought he could not bear—what was any of that, when Oliver, in the least form of life that was possible, still beat his thenar muscles, twice for yes?
“What are you telling me?” Ma asked, many times over, on the phone.
“The truth!” Charlie said. “The truth!”
The truth shall set you free. Charlie’s friend Christopher had liked to quote that adage from his AA program. Fifteen minutes later, Charlie was in an expansive, forgiving spirit, thinking about Rebekkah and Pa, thinking that he might call to tell them the wondrous news, thinking it might free them, too, thinking that he would at last tell Ma the whole shameful, dangerous truth about Jimmy Giordano and his “collections guy” and beg for her help, because wasn’t that what family was for?
A decade prior, on the steps outside Bliss Township School, Hector Espina had liberated himself from this world, and at last Charlie knew that his brother had found a chink in his own jail walls, a brightness between the bricks, a starter tunnel, an actual crossing place from his nebulous spirit world. Why? Now that the rapping fist had found a door, it was louder than ever, but maybe they could finally turn the dead bolt, twist the knob, and at last …
Charlie would later remember grinning at a canyon lizard sprinting giddily across the parking lot. It would be difficult to forgive himself that morning’s unquestioning optimism, his old pluckiness kicking back to life, his immense anticipation like some promise that his life’s vexing conjunction was at last done with him. However. It did not occur to Charlie then, not at all, that the coincidence of Margot’s eleventh-hour miracle work might have been no coincidence, only a scene Charlie himself had set in motion.
Oliver
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Spooky Action at a Distance: it wasn’t only your family or the people of your town that were tangled up with you in that vexing physics. Thousands of miles away, in an apartment on Eighth Street, Brooklyn, sat another of your entangled bodies, in a very different sort of prison. Ah, that apartment, lost tenancy of your future! Dark mahogany bookcases, gingko trees filling the window greenishly, a spit of sunshine angling between the buildings. And there she was, Rebekkah Sterling, on another unremarkable afternoon, sitting alone in an upstairs room, plucking something tuneless from a guitar, tossing aside the guitar, grabbing a coat, and stepping out into the
day.
Rebekkah Sterling, in her mid-twenties now: another prisoner of that night, setting the reel for another montage of miseries. Her guitar noodlings, her thousand meals of hummus and crackers, her two thousand pots of coffee. Her many abortive careers (an editorial assistant at a magazine: six months, a junior real estate broker: three months, a yoga instructor: abandoned before she had even completed her training at an ashram upstate), the retinue of strangers she brought back to her bed and quickly expelled (“A meeting in the morning,” Rebekkah would say, or just “I’m not so good at sleeping with another person”), countless sobering 3 A.M.s, alone again in her bed. Miserable scenes, but maybe they would have been a kind of solace to you, Oliver? Years had passed, miles stood between you, but Spooky Action didn’t care about these metrics. The long-lost love of your teenage years might have been thousands of miles away, might have grown into a future in which you’d have no place, but she was also still there with you in your bed, bound by that mysterious force. Bound, like you, in silence.
And yet, sometimes there at 511 Eighth Street, she would begin to type some confession into her computer; she would lift her phone and consider your brother’s name. But always, in the end, when it came to the only story that mattered, she was as voiceless as you.
Of course, you would have envied those many men in Rebekkah’s bed, but at least there was this comfort: not a one of them, no one Rebekkah knew there in Brooklyn, could know what you knew. The bad fact that turned the lock on apartment three, set the security chain. The sight you’d witnessed one October night.
* * *
October fifteenth. The sun had burned off the cloud cover by late that afternoon, when you were once more hanging outside the school. You had a half hour to kill as your father conducted an after-hours detention session, and you were sitting in Goliath, wanting the intensity of the summery warmth still in the car’s interior to make your thoughts go fuzzy. Even the Hispanic kids’ gathering out front had suffered from the heat. Like water, it had vanished into the afternoon haze, leaving behind only a couple doughy boys silently sipping cans of Dr Pepper.
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