Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Oh, you could hear all right: on certain nights, green with your room’s nauseating light, you could hear their muffled murmuring beneath the bed. What is it? you’d ask. Tell me.

  You could never make out an answer, but through the floor you could hear the familiar timbres and inflections. You knew whose muffled screams resounded in your room, shook your hospital bed. Pa! you shouted and yet did not shout at the floor. Rebekkah! Worse, you knew that it was your hospital bed that stood over the passage, trapping your father and Rebekkah in their own sealed dimensions. Tell me! you tried to scream at the linoleum. Can you hear me? They never could.

  Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, and even that boy tried to think of his fate as if it belonged to someone else. And yet each passing day was another cruel confirmation. Oliver, that boy was you. In a fraction of a second, one long ago night, you had been plucked out of an ordinary life and been given the life of a myth. But plucked by who or by what? You asked and yet could not ask the same question as everyone who visited your bed. “Why?”

  But you felt that maybe, if only you could have pulled just a word out of yourself and passed it to the woman bent over your bed, then she might be able to tug on that single thread and unravel the whole tangled mass. Maybe, you could feel, your mother really might pull all those words free, and so free you, too. You tried again to speak her name.

  Eve

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Eve.”

  “Who is this?”

  Eve knew who it was, of course. Even without caller ID, she would have known in the caller’s first syllable, or before that. The unmistakable quality of his breathing; even that silence seemed softened with a little sigh of apology. Still, for some reason, Eve felt she needed to play dumb.

  “It’s me.”

  “It’s you who?”

  “It’s Jed.”

  “Ah.”

  It was late morning at Desert Splendor. Eve was still wearing the same business suit, the gray, shoulder-padded number, the uniform she donned for thieving and for doctors’ meetings. She hadn’t eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours, as if her body, like Tinker Bell, had begun to dematerialize along with her belief. But the voice of her husband cruelly brought Eve back into her own fetid skin, the quaking toll of her spine, the cranky reports of her thoughts pounding back inside of her. It was eleven fifteen, but she wouldn’t be arriving for visiting hours today. For nearly a decade, Eve had volubly played both sides of their conversation, but she just couldn’t imagine what she might tell Oliver now, how she might explain any of it. And Jed’s voice on the phone seemed like some fitting vengeance he had contrived, in the same way that Charlie always seemed to know that abandoning her, as he had once again, would hurt her most. This was the first time Eve had spoken to Jed since the dump at Tusk Mountain, and she could hear him smoking as he tried to gather his thoughts.

  “Dr. Rumble called to tell me about what happened with Margot,” Jed said.

  “He did?”

  “Eve, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I thought you had officially decided not to get your hopes up,” she said.

  “I don’t know that’s a decision I could ever make.”

  Another conversation, one Eve and her husband had without saying a thing, conducted itself over the line.

  “Listen. Look,” Jed sputtered. “It’s just that—Dr. Rumble mentioned that Manuel Paz was there, too. And I’m wondering, why? Please tell me what’s happening.”

  “So now suddenly you want to know. Now you want to help.”

  “I know—”

  “What do you know?” Eve said, without exactly meaning it, just a bit of the decade-old harangue script on rerun in her brain. A moment later, her telephone screen was black on her kitchen table. Had they said anything else? Had she hung up on him? She couldn’t remember; her panic blotted away whole minutes at a time. She tried to breathe.

  But every time Eve let her thoughts settle, they fell, like a neurotic tic, back into an obsessive loop of the same terrible minutes from the morning before. It was, really, an absurdly simple test. A simple test, whose failure robbed Eve of every hope, pulled the air from her lungs, the oxygenated blood from her arteries. The test that had been prompted by her own son’s parking lot accusations. Manuel and Dr. Rumble had plotted it in a corner, enacted the whole exam in less than ten minutes. They sent Margot Strout to wait in a conference room down the hall, subjecting her to a sort of makeshift Cone of Silence as Dr. Rumble told Oliver the story of Hansel and Gretel, showed him a blue plastic cup, sang “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” When Margot returned, Dr. Rumble asked Oliver what story he had told, what object, what song. The EEG wires adhered to her son’s skull now looked to Eve like they were draining some vital substance from him.

  “This is ridiculous,” Margot said, before even attempting to feel for an answer. “This isn’t how it works.”

  “How does it work, then?” Manuel asked.

  Margot, seated on her perch by Bed Four, ran her hands over her slacks, spoke calmly at her lap, as if reading from a manual. “It’s like tuning a radio. Sometimes all you get is static. But then the weather is good and you get a signal.”

  “And let me guess,” Dr. Rumble said, his accusatory tone some lame attempt to compensate for the embarrassment that he’d let Margot’s untested work get as far as it had. “Static on every channel this morning.”

  Margot shrugged her heavy shoulders to suggest that, sadly, this was the case.

  “How about you just give it a try? Just to humor us,” Manuel said.

  Margot shrugged again, as casually as she could, as if all her work—her career as a speech pathologist, her future by Bed Four, the sense she had tried to make of the senselessness of her daughter’s death—were not being put to the test. As if she were only indulging the whims of ignorant men. Eve watched Margot click on her EEG software, plug her fingers back into her patient’s palm. And if, as Margot Strout claimed, her brand of speech therapy was like operating a radio, now it was like tuning a cheap transistor model in a rainstorm. Eve could see beads of sweat pearling in the place where Margot’s hand met Oliver’s.

  Margot closed her eyes then, and Eve could sense how ridiculous, how perverse the whole tableau would appear to Manuel: the twenty-first-century medical version of an ancient palm reader or a necromancer channeling the dead. Seconds passed, and Eve felt the straining—not just Margot Strout, not just the suspicions accumulating around her. The thing that tightened to the verge of popping, it seemed, was whatever it was that kept Eve upright in this world. Oliver’s left leg spasmed for a moment, stilled.

  “Like I said,” Margot told her observers. “All static. Right now.”

  All Manuel had offered, at this second theft of Oliver’s voice, was a windy Texan “Oh, Lord.”

  “Is this what you wanted?” Eve snapped at Manuel. “Are you happy now?”

  “No, Eve. Not happy. Of course not. No.”

  A moment of silence had followed then, a collective aphasia. The air-conditioning groaned throatily, the clock clicked. But Margot’s face was blazing, certain, fixed, as if the only failure on display here was her audience’s galling lack of faith. It was a ministerial Dr. Rumble who made the first noise, his throat grunting with his low, eponymous sound. “Mrs. Strout?” he asked. “Have you ever heard of something called the ideomotor effect? I’ve just been reading about it myself.”

  Behind the tarantula legs of her plumped lashes, Margot rolled her eyes deeply. But Eve, too, had read about this ideomotor effect. In all her research, there were certain facts that Eve had long ago learned to banish from consideration. Like the diminishing chances of her son ever regaining neurological function, Eve had excommunicated from her awareness the conclusions of a few articles she had read about a controversial form of speech therapy called facilitated communication, sometimes misused with vegetative patients. According to a skeptical breed of researchers, that sort of labor was
vulnerable to this ideomotor effect, a.k.a. the Ouija board effect: speech pathologists were known, sometimes, to attribute the subconscious hopes of their own minds to the bodies they palpated for a reply. It was not that these poor therapists were liars but that they were perhaps something worse, so desperate to believe that they convinced themselves of their own illusions. Writing, like authors, in the voices of the characters whom they imagined to be real. A thought to sentence to the far Siberia of Eve’s mental life: like Eve, those deluded professionals could hear the lost voice speaking, beyond all evidence. With all Margot’s machinery—with those neurofeedback monitors and the fancy word processing and waveform analysis software she employed—Eve hadn’t believed that what she saw Margot perform at Bed Four had anything to do with Ouija boards. But now, as Margot’s haughty, dismissive condemnation of this notion burned hotly in her plump and painted cheeks, Eve saw the hideously obvious conclusion, the thought she had occasionally felt brushing at her neck but had never allowed herself to turn and see. Who more than another grieving mother might want to use her son’s hand to write her own little fantasy?

  “The ideomotor effect. You can’t be serious. Feel his hand if you don’t believe me. Feel it!” Margot had truly shouted. “It’s him.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dr. Rumble said in a tight, paternal voice. “I think the thing we have to do now is just wait. The fact is that we still can’t even know just how aware poor Oliver might even be. Those diagnostic exams in El Paso aren’t far off, and we just need to wait and see what happens.”

  Manuel Paz sighed windily then, a desert gale stirring the dead grass. “Eve,” he said, “truth is, we all let this thing get our hopes up too far. We all did. To think there might finally be some kind of change. Some kind of answer. Something. Wishful thinking, I’m guilty of that, too.”

  * * *

  Eleven fifteen, twelve fifteen, twelve thirty. Time had become restive, punchy, whole minutes elided, her thoughts darting about sparrow-like, swerving off into the sky just as soon as they landed. Eve looked around the grimed brightness of her living room. The wicked black cracks fissured through her ceiling like petrified lightning. The dust had already made new brown pillows on her window sashes. She hadn’t seen Charlie since that scene in the parking lot, and he hadn’t come home last night. Had he, what, slept in that basement he’d found down the street?

  And then a thought, a sharp blast from above that drove her hard back down to earth. An idea she was distressed to realize she should have had long ago, a thought to rewind time, return her to the question she should have asked in front of Manuel Paz and Dr. Rumble yesterday morning. Eve followed this line of thinking, this backward movement of time, back out of her house, back into the hot fug of Goliath’s interior, down forty miles of asphalt, through fields of abandoned oil derricks, their steel heads bowed in frozen prayer.

  Eve didn’t have Margot Strout’s address, but she knew the woman resided somewhere in an apartment complex called Vista de Chihuahua, a mass of eighty identical units erected a few years prior, just outside Study Butte. The buildings in Vista de Chihuahua were the same sort of anonymous homes her father had shuttled her among in her migrant childhood. Domestic cubicles, stacked atop one another, all fronted with desert-colored stucco. The immaculate sidewalks and central chlorine-blue swimming pool were empty on a Tuesday afternoon. There was so much Eve had never bothered to learn about Margot Strout, but she did know the woman’s car. And when she found the familiar white Corolla on another identical street, Eve parked, climbed a flight of metal stairs to the nearest door. A sticker affixed to the tin mailbox encased in the stucco read STROUT. Eve took a breath and worked the faux-brass knocker.

  “Oh. Eve.”

  Oddly, Margot seemed unsurprised to find Eve there on her doorstep. She poked her dumpling of a head from the dim space of apartment 15 out into the brightness of the day. Margot’s hair, untamed, rose in frizzy curtains, caught the sunlight like a blondish fire. Apparently satisfied that Eve had come alone, Margot waved her in.

  Eve walked a pace ahead, examining the living room as if for some detail that might explain something more about Margot Strout. But apartment 15, like Vista de Chihuahua in its entirety, was an austerely appointed no place. The furniture was blocky and cheap, as though mass-ordered from a catalog. No suggestive magazines or books on the coffee table. The artwork all hotel art, canyons and cordilleras honeyed in the ocher light of sentimentalized sunsets, a few of those vistas de Chihuahua unavailable through the sliding glass door, which gave a view onto an identical apartment module. Too horrible to think of all Margot’s hours alone in that boxed nothingness of a home, what on earth Margot might do with them. But then, what did Eve do with her own solitary hours? Eve gulped a breath and asked the question she should have asked days before. She spoke to the closed blinds of the neighboring unit.

  “How could you have known all that? About Oliver. How did you know about Rebekkah? Or even, I don’t know, about how he loved Tolkien? Or Bob Dylan? And so what? You just learned all this stuff about Oliver from what people told you?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Margot said. “People told me things, of course they did. But you’re right. I couldn’t have known everything. I didn’t.”

  “Then it’s impossible.”

  “Yes. It would be impossible. You’re right about that.”

  When Eve turned, she found Margot nodding at her, the way Eve once nodded at her sons as they puzzled through a math problem. You’re almost there.

  “Eve,” Margot said. “In our classes, when I was training in Austin, the professors used to say that being a speech pathologist is not just about helping patients speak. It’s about opening a mind to the world. But it’s an imperfect art. And I’ve always said this. I’ve never claimed to get it right every time. I don’t know why Dr. Rumble can’t understand that.”

  “You didn’t say that. You didn’t! My God, I should have been making a transcript, if I’d known how you would lie. I should have been recording you. You never said that.” Eve’s back seized and faltered; she was fortunate that there was a sofa to catch her fall.

  Margot pulled a clunky wooden chair away from a table in the corner, dragged it close. She made that same concentrated face she had always shown her patient—brow furrowed, mouth a pinprick of careful attention—as if she were now facilitating another mind, the one locked behind the aching musculature of Eve’s aging body.

  “Listen. Listen,” Margot said. “After I lost Cora—have I ever told you this?”

  “What on earth does your daughter have to do with anything now?”

  “I’m just trying to explain something. I wish you would just let me explain.”

  Margot patted Eve’s hand twice, and Eve sharply retrieved it, as if bitten. “Okay, fine,” Eve said. “So I’m listening.”

  Margot sealed her eyes then, inhaled deeply, as if she were about to dive into cold water. “For a year or so after. Eve? The truth is, I just couldn’t believe it. I was still living in my old place, out near Terlingua. I was still living in the house, and I couldn’t change a thing about my daughter’s room. I kept her tiny bed just as she had left it the morning I drove her to the hospital. I never made the bed. No. It’s worse than that. Honestly, I’d still make her a breakfast sometimes. I even spoke to her picture, I did. I did that. Talking to her like she was still with me. But there was just my silent house.”

  “And so?” Eve said. Every little instant now was a battle, and Eve was furious that she couldn’t quite stanch her tears.

  “And so eventually I tried to start over. I went back to school. I got this job. I worked. I tried to spend each day acting like I believed my daughter was really gone forever. And the truth is, I still can’t believe it. Where do all your words go when there is no ear left to hear them? And so you believe in an ear, because what choice do you have? I know you think I’m some Jesus freak, but it isn’t a choice, my faith. It’s faith or death. For me, at least, but maybe
for you, too?”

  Somewhere in the apartment complex, an engine turned a few grunting times, wouldn’t catch. “And so you are telling me that this is what you’ve done,” Eve said. “You’ve come back here to use my son to act out some ridiculous fantasy.”

  “No.” Margot spread her hands like a supplicant, or else a woman comparing two invisible weights. “All I’m trying to tell you is that like everything else in this world, in the end it comes down to faith. For me, I know the truth. I know it. It’s imperfect, what I do. I’ll be the first to admit it, but that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”

  “I don’t understand this.” Eve shook her head. “I don’t understand all this garbage you are telling me now about faith. You are a medical professional, Margot. Or at least I thought you were.”

  “But it’s just like you said, isn’t it? How could I have known all that, everything about Oliver? And so all I’m saying is that, well, what choice do you have? What I’m saying is that even if those next tests turn out good, and we know that Oliver can still hear and understand, how could we help him if he can’t speak back to us?” Margot’s voice had shifted into something more breathless, popping with phlegm. “And so? And so if you think there’s any chance at all that I might be right, then you really don’t have a choice, and no one could blame you for that.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Eve said as she stood.

  “Eve. There’s a reason you came here to see me. Seems to me that you’ve already chosen and you’re just hoping that I’ll tell you what you want to hear. But I can only tell you what I know. It’s up to you if you want to believe it.”

  The larger part of Eve was still incredulous, lectured by this woman. Eve knew things about this world that this simple, Christ-loving lady, whatever her own losses, could never know. But there was also another part of Eve, a little vulnerable piece of her, who sighed and asked, “How could you even go back? I thought Dr. Rumble told you to keep away.”