Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  According to Granny Nunu, when their family first established Zion’s Pastures, more than a century before, the descriptor “pastures” was more fitting. In the few uncommonly wet years that had followed the founding of their ranch, that property had been mostly such scrubby, low-lying grassland, assiduously mowed by their once-great herd. Even in Charlie’s earliest memories, the land was much grassier than now, its wide, reedy pitches wandered by their last feral, sentimental longhorn.

  The mesquites, as fragrant as Christmas trees, formed a sort of natural wall around this final pasture, giving the little field the atmosphere of an outdoor theater, the sharp half moon contributing a suitable spotlight. And just as Charlie’s breathing quieted enough to hear the insectival droning, the mythic protagonist of many of their long-ago bunk bed stories took the stage, so still that at first Charlie doubted his eyes.

  Charlie took a step forward. When the gigantic parentheses of the beast’s horns lowered, he gulped at the air. Even in the moonlight, Charlie could make out the patterns of brown and white, that bovine inkblot that still he could have drawn from memory.

  “Moses?” Charlie called, and began to move for the steer. Once upon a time, Moses would let Charlie and Oliver put their stubby fingers on his El Greco skull, would lick hay and salt out of their hands with his viscous and sentient tongue. Now, however, Moses flinched at Charlie’s approach and seemed about to dart off for the bramble and scree downhill. It would, Charlie saw, have been a pitiful darting. The longhorn was thin from rough living. He carried on his skeleton no more meat than a man. His joints bulged, the legs shaking arthritically.

  “Moses,” Charlie said more softly, from five yards or so. Close enough to smell his familiar tangy hay and mud odor. Close enough, also, that Charlie could see the wide oily globes of the animal’s eyes. The last of his family’s ancient herd, Moses had always seemed to carry the opposite of a cow’s lazy stupidity in his eyes. A rub of his nose was a blessing.

  But, of course, Moses was only a steer. Zion’s Pastures—with its little creek and romantically craggy landscape—was only a choice two-hundred-acre patch of desert real estate. Their house no longer existed. Charlie understood that the new owners likely were letting Moses end his days there for the touristy charm of a longhorn on the property, that a cow’s average lifespan made Moses no holy manifestation, just a tough old beast. And yet, even if he understood that no divine hand, no fate had wrangled poor old Moses to meet him there, Charlie was still powerless before this four-legged symbol, this last survivor of the old Zion’s Pastures, locking eyes with him in a clearing.

  In the moonlit meadow, he produced his phone from his pocket, pushed its single button, and the brightness of the screen blanked away the grasses, the stars, Moses. Charlie hit call on the same number he had called so many times before, to no answer. However.

  “Charlie.”

  “Please don’t hang up.”

  The line was silent for a long while, and Charlie expected to hear a click that would end the call.

  “Is it really true?” Rebekkah asked. “That e-mail you sent. All those articles. Is he really—”

  “Yes, it is,” Charlie said, as if his severe tone could in fact make that claim true. But if Oliver couldn’t twitch out a single word, how could anyone know what was left of him now? It had been weeks since that fMRI, and still all they knew of Oliver’s mind was just that mysterious plasmatic pulsation Ma had seen that day in July. Just a suggestion of thought whose depth and extent they could only guess at. In truth, Oliver’s present hour was as unknowable to Charlie as that night, a decade past. “Or anyway,” Charlie added. “that’s what they’re saying.”

  And what Rebekkah said next she said so softly that Charlie might have mistaken it for his own sigh. “How is he?”

  “How is he?” Charlie felt his anger bursting outward, but he breathed, and Moses’s gaze was still on him. Moses, starved from neglect, but still treading this last patch of pasture all along. “If you wanted to know, then why is it me who is calling you? Why is it always me who is begging you to talk, if you care so much?”

  “Well,” Rebekkah said, “I’m talking to you now.”

  “Not really,” Charlie said. “You’re just listening. Congratulations, Rebekkah! You’ve picked up your phone for once in your life.”

  “So, here I am, listening, as you say. And what is it you want to tell me?”

  Charlie pressed the rounded edges of his phone into his cheek, but for a long beat he couldn’t think of any words to add. A few lines came back to him then, from Oliver’s journal. In a poem musing upon the silence that had fallen over his life’s only romance, Oliver had written, Is there anything worse / than the torture of lost time?/ Death would be kinder / than a lifetime this blind. Charlie looked into the blue-black night of Moses’s cataracts as he at last told Rebekkah the thing he had made out of this strange encounter, the lie that was Margot’s work, and his family’s horrible faith, too. That bounded little world the Lovings had made, where they couldn’t see the truth about each other at all. “It’s wrong,” Charlie said. “It’s so, so selfish, Rebekkah. That’s what I’m calling to tell you. That some part of him is still there, he just keeps going on and on, all alone. And never once have you come to visit him. Never once have you come to talk with us.”

  “To tell you what, exactly?” It sounded as if the tight weave of Rebekkah’s familiar contempt was coming looser now, distressed. “What is it you think that I could have told you?”

  “I don’t know. Something. I believe there is something. I believe that.”

  “Right. That’s what you believe,” Rebekkah said.

  “And I’m not saying I’m innocent, either,” Charlie told her. “I didn’t see him for five years, did you know that? Five years I left him there, rotting in his bed, with only our crazy mother for company. And you know what? I still can’t take it here. I can’t take it here another day.”

  “I’m sorry. I am.”

  “Okay. Then why don’t you do something about it?”

  “But now you think you somehow get to tell me what I’m supposed to do?” Rebekkah’s voice was rising. “And now you think you know about me, what I’ve been through?”

  “So tell me.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  “Right.” For years, Charlie had wanted just one conversation with her, but now he thumbed his phone to end it.

  Later, as he climbed back onto the Suzuki, tearing away from Zion’s Pastures, and from the Big Bend, too, Charlie was still thinking of Moses; he was still thinking of Oliver, wandering the barbed-wired desert of all those years, the locks on the gates set by his own family. The moon had sunk behind the Chisos, and the dark of the night hardly relented against the Suzuki’s fitful headlight. What lay beyond? Just the torment of everything Charlie still couldn’t see.

  And yet, even then, with the wind bearing into his throat, Charlie found his own old words in his mouth, the spell to conjure a story that had never materialized on his word processor; a spell to conjure, too, his brother back into this world. Just a dream of Oliver waking in his bed, an idea of what might have happened that Charlie still could not quit. Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time. Even now, all the answers unknown, Charlie couldn’t help but imagine it: some hidden, mythic version of his brother, even still waiting in some unseeable place, to tell Charlie the answers. Even still, Charlie was drafting his way into the dark.

  Oliver

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, and then what?

  Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, but the truth is that he didn’t fall all the way. Half of the boy remained there, on either side.

  Oliver, what were they like, those first seconds after you woke? You must have believed that you were still dreaming. How long, you wondered, would you have to wait in this blank sleep? But in this dream, time was indistinct. You had
been mouthing the polyurethane sealant of the schoolhouse’s plank floorboards on the night of November fifteenth, each second a gravely sharp thing in your throat. But then time drew out like cotton, in that gauzy, white-laced sleep.

  And then? Eventually your bright white dream took on the air-conditioned, Sheetrock-paneled confines of a hospital room. A downy translucence hung over everything, but after a time it began to pull away. Now faces were not just their fuzzy shapes. You could see their wrinkles and moles. These faces passed over like designs stitched into gossamer. Doctors, nurses, your mother, your father and brother, ministers, a rabbi, reporters, teachers, anonymous visitors. Never Rebekkah. You were still dreaming.

  But then the distant groan in your ears resolved into a clock’s ticking. Your mother’s face was above you. She was telling you something. What? A story about your brother, and her tone struck you as odd. She had complained about Charlie before, of course, but never so honestly. Never, at least not with you, had she used this tone, the one that in your childhood she typically reserved for your father.

  “And, to tell you the truth, I even understand why a kid like Charlie could start to feel a little—cramped. Cabin feverish. At home all day. But can’t he see what would have happened to someone like him in the Texas public school system—”

  You couldn’t say why it happened then, but that’s when you woke, from your deep white sleep. And now you were just your mother’s son, in a hospital room, in an afternoon.

  “Huh?” you said. And yet, could not say.

  “Ma?” you said. And yet, could not say.

  “Ma,” you shouted, but your face held some nostril-interfaced tubing. You reached up to swat that tube away. But could not reach.

  “Honestly, it’s like he thinks he’s some sort of therapist or something. He just loves to tell me how we need to quote unquote learn to cope. What I can’t get is how anyone, and especially a son of mine, could be so selfish.”

  You gathered your strength; you pressed together all your panic. And yet.

  Your mouth was still. Your arms were silent. Your body slept soundly beneath you. But your mind? It was a leashed monster, a jailed dragon, thrashing furiously and futilely at its chains. And as you steeled yourself for another assault on your invisible, inexplicable tethers, you felt a word gather deep in your stomach. It rose with a gag in your chest. It passed by the useless orifice of your mouth. And then it burst in your brain. Rebekkah.

  As the clock had begun to tick, as your mother’s face had become legible, your memory, too, had resolved, and terribly. And now you lay there, gaping up at one of the last things you remembered. The thing you’d understood, only too late. The name you tried to yell, and yet—

  Those losses, they were too mighty and too foreign for you to comprehend. They were the hordes of war-costumed barbarians at your gates, and so you went to battle against them. You couldn’t holler or swing your actual fists, but your trapped brain swung a ghost’s fists, screamed a ghost’s empty battle cry. You were only yelling into the wind, but for each day that followed, you yelled and yelled until you had exhausted yourself, fell asleep and woke up, rejuvenated for another day’s muted warfare.

  You couldn’t direct your eyes where to look; they were like separate, skittish creatures inhabiting your skull. But still you became as familiar with the constellations in the foam ceiling of your room as with the freckles of your own hands. For company, when your mother left each day, you had only the western-themed artwork on the room’s walls. Desert landscapes, old poster advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Warner Bros.’ production of Calamity Jane, all yellowing in cracked wooden frames. Counting off time in this hellish predicament was a chintzy keepsake, a wood-rimmed clock, its hour and minute hands two tin bowie knives.

  If you could have spoken, your first words would have been What about Rebekkah? So desperate was your need to know that one day, when none other than your former English teacher came to your bed to offer a prayer for the dead—Keith Larsen, Vera Grass, Roy Lopez, and Mr. Avalon, too, gone forever now—whatever grief you might have known was outshone by the wild relief that Rebekkah Sterling’s name was not among them. And yet, even there, even then, you were still the lovesick kid wondering why she didn’t visit you.

  At last, one morning, you awoke defeated. You were too exhausted to muster the day’s counterattack against the past, so your mind fell silent, as silent as your mouth. All you wanted then was to draw that silence over you, like a blanket. And you found, at least for a while, that you could make yourself quite snug, wrapped up in that nothingness. The strongest feeling you let pass through yourself then was a horrible, interminable craving for any bite of actual food. You would have been delighted by the simplest saltine, any palatable alternative to the nutrient packs piped into your veins and into your digestive system’s obscene new aperture. But it was a vision of a particular burger from Café Magnolia that tormented you most. For a long while, as your body spasmed ceaselessly beneath you, your mind held nothing but numbed silence and a torture of fantastical cheeseburgers.

  Your mind. After many months adrift in some immeasurable, white, insubstantial place, it had at last landed back on solid earth, the soft shore of Bed Four at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility. Didn’t that mean that someday your arms and legs and hands and voice would also return to you? You waited. They did not return.

  Doctors strapped sensors to you. They shined flashlights into your eyes. They tested your reflexes with little rubber hammers. And still these alleged doctors spoke about you as if you weren’t there in the room with them. Sometimes, you convinced yourself you could still twitch your muscles, and so you strained, trying to produce a series of SOS signals. When your mother felt something in your left hand, she called for a doctor, who sighed and named it involuntary muscular contraction.

  “I’m sorry to tell you again, Mrs. Loving…”

  As ever, your mouth and your body were silent. The doctor believed your skull was silent, too. All you wanted then was to be equal to everyone’s expectations. And to answer the question plainly: yes. Many times, in those first months, you did resolve to join those theater students and Mr. Avalon, to end your own life by sheer force of will. You pictured the white hole of death and tried to force yourself through. But the machines stubbornly circulated the business of your heart, bladder, and bowels. You had no choice. Oliver, you had no choice but to live.

  In the first months after, your mother always arrived to your room in makeup, like an obstinate hopefulness she had painted onto her face. One day—you couldn’t say why it was different from the dozens that had preceded it—she wore no makeup. Her graying hair tangled away from her at strange angles, looking like something her anxiety had pressed out of her narrow skull, like the fraying by-product of her exhausted hopes. This was the same day that she mentioned Hector’s name. Only now did you realize that she had never mentioned him before, not once in that room. That name, you understood, served as the cap that had bottled her grief. “Hector.” When she cracked it open, her grief poured forth. She tried to wipe away her tears, but they rained down on you nevertheless. Unable ever to weep on your own, those tears on your face were a kind of relief.

  She asked the questions she knew you could never answer. But no, she did not ask: these questions came out as a grave, breathy chant, sentences she had recited to herself over and over again, for however long you had already been in that bed.

  “What happened?” she began.

  Questions sparked questions, which rose and spread into more and more: about Hector Espina, about what you had seen that night, about why you had been there in the first place, and did you feel any pain? Her interrogation had the logic of a house fire. It wouldn’t cease until it furied its way through all available material.

  You tried, you did. To each of her questions, you formed your answer, and you tried your best to hurl your replies all the way across the vast chasm to your throat. But your explanations, your apologies,
your assurances, and your confusion, they never reached the other side. The answers were all between you, in your mind’s eye. In your mind’s hand, you felt the reply, a single no or yes or maybe. You put your mind back into it. The answers your mother needed were six inches from her ear, but they might as well have been miles away, falling to dust on the desert floor.

  And so what was left for you now? In your bed, you thought often of one of your granny’s tales, this one about Saynday, the great trickster in the stories shared among the Kiowa tribe. “According to the Kiowa,” your granny had once told you, “we humans were originally an underground species. We were down there, in the underworld, until the day Saynday turned us small as ants and then led us through a hole in a felled cottonwood tree. The humans climbed out, but at last there was a snag. A certain pregnant lady, she got lodged there like Pooh Bear in that opening. One half above, one half below. The Kiowa say that she’s still stuck there, half the people of the world trapped beneath.”

  You were like the woman from that Kiowa creation tale, jammed in your own passageway, but it wasn’t a pregnancy that had pinned you there. It was the story of your last days, thousands of words, knotted and dense, swelling inside you.

  “Half the world’s population on this side of the earth, the other half still trapped beneath,” your grandmother had added. “And sometimes, if you are real quiet, you can hear the humans beneath us knocking at the ceiling of the underworld. Just as those down beneath, from time to time, can hear the clunking of our footsteps. The poor pregnant lady, she split us in two, and all we can do is wonder about what life is like for the people on the other side of things. But listen now. Saynday is a trickster, and here is his greatest trick of all. He left the pregnant lady there, sure, but the thing about a pregnant lady, someday she’s gonna give birth.”