Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “A? B? C? D?”

  “L,” Margot announced when she felt the twinned pressure of Oliver’s thenars at that letter. Then O, V, and E.

  “Love,” the robot voice said. And though the intent was already clear, Margot worked to give the full weight of the phrase. A minute later, the computer added, “You.”

  In the last hours of that day, before they broke for a Sunday off, Margot translated eighty-six words from her patient’s thumb into the robot voice. All these words on Finfrock-approved topics. To the question of comfort, “G-tube tight.” To the question of entertainment, “Tolkien” and “Dylan.” To the question of loneliness, “Sometimes.” To the question of boredom, “Sometimes.” To the question of desired visitors, “Dad.”

  “Dad?” Charlie said, glancing up to Margot, who squinted at her neurofeedback screen.

  “A? B? C?” Margot asked.

  “Want to see Pa,” the computer eventually pronounced.

  That evening, after Eve had customarily kissed Oliver’s cheek and gathered her things, she looked for a long while at Margot, unburdening her hand, flexing at its stiffness. When Charlie ran off to the bathroom, Eve spoke the woman’s name.

  “Yeah?” Margot looked up from the packing of her gear, sniffed wetly.

  “I don’t know,” Eve said. “It’s kind of ironic, right? That I don’t have words to tell you how—grateful? Thankful. I am.”

  “Just my job,” Margot said. “Just a very lucky part of my job.”

  “The thing is, what I want to say to you—I want to say that I know it can’t be easy. If I had lost a child, and then had to do what you are doing for Oliver now? I don’t think I could quite bear it. Or maybe I don’t know anything. But I want to say thank you.”

  Eve, after the fashion of the Loving family, had long ago learned to make her skin into stone, fortifying herself against the outside, bulwarking what was within. The way Margot took her hands was not merely surprising, it was existentially jarring, to be reminded that a human could respond to another human so nakedly. “No,” Margot said. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sunday morning. Charlie had left at dawn, depositing on the kitchen table a note that read only “Working. Be back later.” And so Eve, in retaliation, decided to offer no further explanation for her own day’s plans than a retaliatory missive that read, “Went out.” She looked at it for a while, penned onto a paper towel, and—deciding to take the higher road—added, “Hugs and Kisses, Ma.”

  An hour later, Eve pulled onto Paisano Lane in Marfa. She did a cursory inspection of the property, but Jed could not be found beneath the garbage angels strung up in his shed. Cupping her hands to a bit of filthy glass behind the dead circuitry of vines, Eve couldn’t find any sign of him among the frowzy furniture and grayed light of his living room. In the week since she had last visited, it seemed that the stage for their absurd trystings had gone dark, and the wistful nostalgia of romance they’d moaned about on the dun weave of that tired sofa shamed her now. It was Sunday, and she remembered Jed telling her that he got the weekends off, but where was he? Eve thought of the place he once told her about, where he went to “recover” his artistic materials. An industrial waste dumping ground, a pit dug into Tusk Mountain, to be filled in at the end of the year.

  She found the dump a dozen miles south of Marfa, a place so desperate as to be a little beautiful in a soulful way. A great crater in the desert, a bowl of West Texan refuse, as if an asteroid had perfectly struck and demolished a little town that once stood at the mountain’s base. Eve parked Goliath at the pit’s rim, and among the glinting metal, the visual cacophony of colors slowly coordinating themselves into brown-red rust and brown-gray rot, she saw a man in denim coveralls crouching in the trash, a cigarette fuming in his face, as he attempted to dislodge some object. In the direction of the sole survivor of an Armageddon, Eve waved both her arms, the motion of her scapulae igniting the fuse of her spinal cord.

  “Jed!”

  He stood. In lieu of a wave, Jed flicked his cigarette into the scrap, and Eve, for a breathtaking moment, had the apprehension the whole thing might explode.

  The way down into the pit was a ladder, bolted into the limestone edge. “You shouldn’t be here.” Jed reached to help lower her onto the spongy, creaking surface.

  “Maybe not. But here I am.”

  “No, I mean that it’s dangerous. This place used to glow. At night. Honest to God.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  As if to demonstrate, Jed plugged another Pall Mall into his sun-pleated face. He grimaced there, irradiating himself triply: the carcinogenic torching of his lungs, the penetrating UVs of the sun on his skin, the unstable nuclei of the waste beneath spinning off their beta particles and gamma rays.

  “Sweetie.” Eve recognized Charlie’s condescending voice in her own mouth. “You don’t need to play the martyr for me.”

  Jed nodded, turned back to the work she had interrupted, pulling at some protruding wooden knob as the fresh cigarette puffed tractorishly from his head. He lost his purchase on his grasp, fell drunkishly on his ass.

  “Will you at least let me help you with that?” Eve went to Jed and crouched as she tried to heft the sheet of corrugated asbestos that covered whatever he was tugging at. She passingly wondered at the strangeness of it all, that this was her life at this moment on earth, grunting and wheezing with her rumpled husband–cum–secret lover to deliver a garbage child. With their combined effort, Jed at last pulled the object free. An old tailor’s dummy.

  “The fifth one of these I’ve found,” he said admiringly. “I think I might do another series.”

  “Your mother was a seamstress, wasn’t she? During the war.”

  Jed didn’t answer. He gave Eve his cigarette to hold, then pulled away a brown crust of something stuck to the dummy’s armpit.

  “He’s speaking,” Eve said.

  Jed turned to her, pleated the leather of his forehead.

  “Remember Margot Strout? That speech therapist. She found some movement, in his hand. Just like I always said.” Eve described Margot’s palpating and her EEGs, the first yeses and nos, the alphabet. “It’s him, Jed,” she concluded in a low, exhilarated voice. “It’s Oliver.”

  “I know, I heard. Dr. Rumble called to tell me.” Jed looked at her, seeming to conduct some private tabulation.

  “So I don’t understand this then. My God, Jed! We should be celebrating. Why didn’t you come running over when you heard?”

  Jed eyed the headless mannequin, shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  Jed pinched the cigarette from Eve’s fingers, sucked at its trembling end. “Did you know that Charlie came to see me?” Jed said gently.

  “He didn’t.”

  Eve watched Jed rub his arm, the old posture of his silence, as if he literally had to hold his opinion in. “Well, he did.”

  “You didn’t tell him about—about us, did you?”

  Jed shook his head. “Eve? He asked me something.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “He asked me why we never fought them for more tests, second opinions. For Oliver. He asked why we didn’t know. Sooner. Years ago.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t know what to tell him.”

  “No one thought…” Eve said.

  “Why didn’t we make them?” Jed said meekly. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I? Why didn’t you ever stop me? If what I was doing was so wrong, why didn’t you tell me? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you were nowhere to be found. You were curled up at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.”

  Even now Jed didn’t speak. He gasped, the cigarette tumbling out, burning his arm. “Shit!” Jed clasped at his wrist, a fury in his eyes.

  “You want to know why I haven’t come?” Jed seethed. “I didn’t come because I really just can’t bear it. Because I really have no idea what t
o believe anymore.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning,” Jed said, “that I’ve been thinking of what that professor told us, how we just can’t know if Oliver can even understand us. And Margot Strout tried once with Oliver before, right? She tried, and she failed. And you said you didn’t trust her, remember? One of those fanatic Christian types, off in some world of her own. And suddenly she’s found something? Look. Maybe you’re right. But I just can’t let myself get my hopes up until I know for sure. Not anymore.”

  “Until you know? It’s him, Jed. Come to the place and see. It’s him.”

  “Okay. I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not saying you’re wrong.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  Jed shook his head. “I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me. What do I know? Nothing.”

  “So it’s finally happened,” Eve said. “You have completely lost the ability to believe good things. It’s very sad, really.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jed said. “You usually are.”

  A cloud of some unspeakable decay, arsenic and death and something like yogurt, hit Eve’s nostrils. Whatever further reply Eve wanted to make was like a book from a dream, the words vanishing just as she tried to read them. But at least Eve understood now why she had waited to share the news with the walking five-foot-nine mood disorder that was her husband. His disbelief in any good news, the helplessness he’d learned over thirty years of false escapes in his painting shed.

  “Good luck with your dummies,” Eve said. “I hope they’re better company than us.” She made creaking, popping progress back toward the ladder.

  “You want to know what we’re doing here?” Jed spoke to her back, and she turned. “This whole thing of ours. We’re both just looking for an excuse.”

  “An excuse? An excuse for what exactly?”

  He retrieved the dropped cigarette, and what he said next he said in a practiced way, a sentence that he had scripted long ago. “For what we’ve let him become.”

  Eve looked at this sad-eyed drunk, his teeth going gray. Her anger burned on her neck, white-hot and consuming.

  “If you can sober up enough to drive over,” Eve said, “you might want to hear what Oliver has to tell you.”

  “I hope you’re right. I mean that.” His tone condescended in a way that even Eve could never have mustered. The sorrow of an old man, an aging priest, addressing a little girl.

  “You hope I’m right? This isn’t a matter of opinion. Really, truly, I can never understand you. Not at all.”

  * * *

  On the way home, Eve panicked a little as the traffic slamming up the westbound lane warped and blurred with the tears that were coming. But Eve focused on the yellow and white lines of the pavement, a textbook lesson on vanishing point, and she managed to make it back to Desert Splendor. Parked in the driveway, Eve dabbed furiously at her leaking nose. She jammed the heel of her palm into her eyes until her vision sparked and exploded. But, pulling her hands away, she could smell it: beneath the oily funk of the garbage she had handled, the acrid, nicotine scent of Jed Loving.

  Eve had never had any patience for smoking. Even when he claimed to have quit, her father still often smoked his cigars in motel bathrooms, the fumes leaking out underneath the door, an excellent example of his noxious decisions, their pernicious, secondhand effect on his daughter. Eve could never imagine the utter stupidity required to put death into your mouth and light it up. But that hated smell, the chemical tang of self-destruction, she furiously sniffed at now. The smell that had, in the haywire circuitry of her exhaustion, become inseparable from the warmth that cracked open when she was in close proximity to Jed. What was it about Jed’s sorrow that always overthrew her fury? Maybe it was her father, leaving some ruinous stain on her psychic life, setting a pattern she couldn’t break? Maybe she—Eve let the thought go when she located the odor’s epicenter, the knuckles of her left hand, and shoved them halfway into her tear-prickled nostrils. She inhaled and thought of turning the car around. She thought, also, This will be the last time I will smell him. A part of her knew she was being melodramatic, scoffed silently at that knuckle-sniffing Eve. The other part of her sniffed away, miserably.

  When Eve unbuttoned her jeans and worked the free hand beneath the elastic, the sensation was curiously like her megastore purloinings, the glee of appalling herself, this demonstrable if peculiar evidence that she was giving herself what the world refused her. Eve had not touched herself like this in a very, very long time; the lost Eve, the younger Eve, now communicated with the present aging knuckle-sniffer via her pressed fingers. She moaned loudly, obliviously, and so did not hear the sound of the car’s approach up her drive. She could not, however, miss the thump of a car door slamming. She startled, retracted her hand, did not quite manage to button her pants before Manuel Paz was tapping at the window.

  “Manuel?”

  Looming over her car, Manuel did not quite look like the man she knew, her occasional Bed Four visitor with his hangdog grimace. Now he was Ranger Captain Paz, making a gun shape of his hand, his stubby index finger for a barrel, which he pointed at Eve. She rolled her window down with a few angry cranks.

  “Look who came to drop by,” Eve said.

  “You really should have returned my call,” Manuel told her. “Why didn’t you just call me back?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Well,” Manuel said sadly, “next time you should probably call back when an officer phones you. Because now this conversation isn’t exactly optional.”

  Eve looked for a while at this bald Ranger, halfheartedly playacting the part of a serious law enforcement professional. Beyond Manuel, the land shimmered with heat in all directions, the sky bluely doubled in the earth. They could have been alone together, Manuel and Eve, in the middle of the ocean.

  “Okay, then,” Eve said.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, on the peeling veneer of Eve’s kitchen table, Manuel Paz had placed a fuzzy, still image from a camera at the electronics store, a grainy picture of Eve dropping a laptop computer into her purse. Eve oddly accepted this police evidence of her own larceny like a development that had happened long before, eyeing the five-by-seven glossy as if the woman in the picture were not quite she. Eve’s initial reaction to this image bothered her only in its suggestion of how unhealthy—how gaunt and mildly deranged—the woman in the picture looked to her. Even now, the fact that her son was communicating was like a velocity that could keep Eve running over any canyon, like Wile E. Coyote before he looks down. “The security guy sent some tape of a certain lady in a business suit,” Manuel explained. “Local cops couldn’t figure the thing out, though it didn’t take me but a second to recognize you.”

  Eve nodded, received this news philosophically. She was thinking of the glowing light, the computer’s electronic slumber. It seemed that she had been right; the laptop really had been a test. Though of what she couldn’t exactly say now. “I’ll give it back,” she said. “Of course I will.”

  Manuel squinted at her, worked a thumbnail between two upper bicuspids. “Right.”

  At last, Eve did look down. She was thinking of the irrefutable argument her fingers spoke to her just before they made their many petty thefts. Those same fingers, feeling a black chip in the surface of her tabletop: in this room they now seemed the hands of a madwoman.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Eve said. The sight of Manuel’s familiar, age-pocked face was going a little fuzzy. “I’m sorry.”

  “You know what that thing costs?” Manuel asked with a paternal kind of disappointment. “Two thousand dollars. Two thousand.”

  Eve hung her head. “And I never even would have turned it on, honestly. I can’t explain it.”

  Manuel felt for Eve’s fingers, gave them a squeeze. “Try,” he said, not entirely kindly.

  Eve nodded again, because hadn’t something in her, a wild something that began in her fingers, always thrilled at the thou
ght of being caught, the very private crisis that was her life forced into public view, when she would at last be made to speak the unspeakable? Had a scene like this, in fact, been the secret plot her fingers had been contriving for years? “It was for Oliver,” Eve found herself instantaneously relieved to admit. “I know how crazy that might sound. And I know it’s wrong, I know that. It’s hard to explain. But sometimes? I see something he would want. And it’s like—it’s like I’m a bad mother if I don’t. I think that you of all people might be able to understand that.”

  Manuel’s gentle demeanor broke now. He pulled away from Eve, and the frustration in the fist he made around a pen seemed oddly husbandly, resentment petrified to stone. “For your information,” Manuel said, “this ain’t the first time that one of those stores has sent pictures of you. For your information, you’ve given me some explaining to do over the years. The poor woman lost her son, she ain’t thinking straight. Just leave her be, don’t let her back in the store. I’ve even lied for you. Don’t know that person in the picture from Adam. This ain’t the first time I’ve had to lie for you, Eve.”

  Eve truly was appalled by herself, but only for three or four ticks of the wall clock. “I never asked you to lie,” Eve said.

  Manuel thinned his lips. “Though I think you might be a little grateful. You’ve really given me quite a burden to shoulder, you know.”

  “I’ve given you a burden, have I?”

  Manuel waved a blank sheet of paper, as if to show he was already so tired of this nonsense.

  “So arrest me now, if that’s what you want,” Eve said. “But maybe first you could do me the favor of explaining why it is then that you have chosen now, of all times, to have this particular conversation.”

  Manuel loosened his hand, puffed his cheeks, blew. “Maybe I’m here,” Manuel said, “because when this particular tape landed on my desk, I got to thinking that after all this covering I’ve done for you, I’m starting to feel like I just don’t want to do it anymore. Not when it turns out you weren’t straight with me from the get-go.”