Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Margot picked at the flaking maroon edge of her left thumbnail, tore a crescent free. “They can’t stop me from coming to visiting hours. If I’m invited.”

  “And so now you are out to prove some point.”

  “You think I care about proving anything to anyone? Then you really don’t know anything about me. There were a hundred careers I could have chosen, but this is the path I went down. Something put me here, with you, for a reason. I know that now. What else could matter to me?”

  Eve felt for her eyes, gave a lash a firm tug. “Please stop,” Margot said, pulling Eve’s hands away from her face. “Be nice to yourself.”

  Eve crossed her arms, as if to show she couldn’t be persuaded. Yet she found herself checking the time on Margot’s knockoff Rolex to see if they might make it to the end of the day’s visiting hours. And what she said next she said in a voice she saved only for the hard canyon floor of her worst days, the voice displaying its own brokenness, which she had employed with Charlie just a couple of nights before as he stood with her in the attic, looking at her shoplifted booty, her own shameful enterprise to outshame even her son’s dealings with his landlord. “Do you promise?” Eve fairly pleaded with Margot now.

  Eve didn’t care that Margot saw her this way. Eve wanted Margot to see her like this. Eve wanted to remember Margot Strout seeing her like this. Eve wanted to store this moment for later, when Charlie came back, when Manuel Paz or Dr. Rumble or Jed berated her for inviting this shyster palm reader back into her family. She wanted to remember her brokenness in that woman’s blank apartment. I was broken. I was vulnerable. I was out of choices.

  “Of course I do,” Margot said. “And haven’t you learned by now? You can’t always listen to the doctors. There are certain things only mothers like us can understand.”

  * * *

  Except it wasn’t true, not exactly. Eve would have one more choice to make. Forcing her head to a high and confident angle as she led Margot down the retinal-frying brightness of Crockett State’s halls, Eve was trailed by that same shadow, the same decision that had always waited there around Bed Four, stalking her in the dark, just beyond the ring of fire that her insistence had thrown. If all those brain scans and cognition assessments Eve had scheduled in El Paso found no evidence that Oliver was still aware, then Eve, with medical power of attorney, could allow the inevitable conclusion. That Oliver would never speak, that he was lost in his body, that no suffering could be worse.

  Eve would have a choice, a choice you couldn’t ask a mother to make. Soon, as on any of the thirty-five hundred days behind her, it would take nothing more than a bit of paperwork, the disconnection of a feeding tube. But what did Oliver want? She knew the only way to answer the question she had asked—in silence, in whispers, occasionally in tearful pleading to Oliver’s quaking body—he might or might not hold in the palm of his hand. Margot had reassembled her gear over the bed, and she pressed so hard into that hand that the woman’s knuckles protruded whitely.

  “Oliver?” Margot asked. “Guess who has come back? A? B? C? D?”

  “Ma,” the machine replied.

  “See?” Eve told her son. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Four days followed that afternoon at Crockett State. There still had been no word from Charlie—where could he have possibly gone this time? But nothing impressed Eve more than her ability not to care much. She ignored the fact that Jed did not even call. She practically shoved Manuel Paz aside when he appeared at the doors of Oliver’s room one morning, asking Eve, “Are you sure you’re thinking straight? I know you’re hurting, but you can’t just carry on like nothing’s changed.”

  “This isn’t over,” Eve told him, trying to angle her way around his solid shape.

  “Well,” Manuel said, pausing her with an outstretched hand. “Sadly, I have to agree with you there.”

  Eve impatiently shifted her weight from foot to foot. “Meaning what?”

  “Just that I think you should know,” he said, palming the nape of his neck, “that I felt I had to mention the conversation we had about that Rebekkah business to one of those old task force guys. I’d suspect you’ll be hearing from them soon.”

  “Thank you so much for that, Manuel.” Eve said. “Really.”

  Manuel rested his hand on Eve’s raised shoulder. “All you have to do,” Manuel said, “is tell them the truth.”

  And yet, the next day, when an ominous Austin area code rang Eve’s phone, she ignored that call, too. Once more, Eve found she could narrow the radius of her concern to the body before her.

  Outside, high cumulus clouds nearly gathered to rain, then tore apart in the wind. Soon, they would have to take the ambulance to El Paso and her world would change once again. And so why not just a few more days talking with her son? Or even a few weeks? Why not even push back those next exams at El Paso another month or so, until things settled down just a bit?

  “Back again,” Eve told her son on her last morning with Margot at Bed Four. “We’re both back again.”

  But, for once, the world would not permit Eve her desperate procrastinations. Soon, Eve would be made to understand: how, for years, she had forced Oliver to listen to his mother lovingly converse with nothing more than her own hope’s echo, deaf to the true story beneath, how ready she still was to let that God-fearing woman convince her to allow the one-way conversation to go on and on. An excuse, Jed had said, for what we’ve let him become.

  “A? B? C? D?” Margot asked.

  The robot voice made its reply; the oldest recipe, served afresh. “Love you,” the computer said.

  Oliver

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Oliver, almost ten years trapped in that in-between, and what, exactly, had you become? But how to describe a place like yours, where even words at last lost their shapes?

  For a very long time, you tried your best to stay on the right side of sanity. As the voices and faces over Bed Four began to bleed their specificity, as the whiteness in which you had been lost began to fade its way back into your days, you tried to remain diligent. Before the truer madness came, you invited minor illusion as the key to sanity. You learned how much a human body needs movement, how much you missed it. And so you devised a fiction of another place, your old house at Zion’s Pastures, in which you tried to believe. When Nurse Helen woke you under your purple felt blanket in the morning, you called the cell in which you found yourself your bedroom. The morning ablutions—the salving of your bedsores, the shaving of your face, the emptying of a foil sack of Jevity into your G-tube—you thought of as your old home’s bathroom. Ma’s daily visit was the front door thrown open, and as she spoke to you, you were strolling among the cacti and ocotillo, the bluffs and the buzzards. The occasional trip to the physical therapy room—where assistants tied your limbs to machines to spin, gyrate, flex the rot out—you thought of as a rare trip to town. Alone at lights-out, left with not even the company of the radio, only the endless electronic percussion of the machines that kept you alive—well, it took great effort to think of it as a dinner at your old dining room table. And yet, you tried to believe.

  A few months before your own imprisonment in Bed Four, you had read a story about a prisoner locked in the lightless cell of solitary confinement at Alcatraz. Denied light, a view, any material thing to focus his attention, this prisoner developed a blind game of solitaire. It was a very simple game. He tore a button from the thick wool of his uniform, chucked that button to ricochet against the black walls, and spent a long while on all fours, feeling for the metal tab. Victory was short-lived; just as soon as the button was in hand, the prisoner tossed it off again.

  In your own prison, you were not so lucky as to possess a button, nor could you lift a hand to throw, nor were you able to crawl around to search. But when your horror blunted to boredom, the boredom became unbearable. And so, in lieu of a button, you plucked a date at random, tossed it through the locked hallways of your awareness, then went fumbling around to see wha
t you could find.

  Your last Fourth of July: you sent that date skittering, and after a good long search, you felt its shape. The abrasive zest of gunpowder in the air of Bliss Stadium. Your father’s hands, sticky with the runoff of a Popsicle. A child puking something electric green on his Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. The image fizzing to black, you grabbed for another, your thirteenth birthday: the high bright sun over the national park. A picnic on the bald summit of the Lost Mine Trail. Charlie extending his arms as if he might attempt flight off the steep overhang. No, wait. That was your twelfth. Thirteen was laser tag in Midland: screaming with weapon in hand, Fatboy Slim thumping through the darkness. Dr Pepper, Doritos, and sheet cake in the linoleum-dull party room.

  You clutched these little facts in your palm until your solitude came crushing back down upon you, and then you plucked another, throwing it as far as you could. And after a great many tossings, when you pressed your fingers around a day and held it up to your mind’s eye, the madness of your solitude transmuted it with a desperate kind of magic. A December fourth in your fist was no longer just some shining bundle of facts, trapped beneath the enamel. Your brother’s birthday—a horseback ride to the Window pour-off, your mother snapping photos of the wedge of sky over the canyon, your father smoking cheerily atop a boulder—now that memory cast bright light, like a single rip in a black window shade, filling the walls of your confinement with high Texan daytime. You poked at that light, and its edges crumbled, fell away. September third, less than ten weeks before: a paddle of prickly pear, the pinkened skin on your arms, the weedy scent of creosote, the morning sun slanting brightly into Rebekkah’s eyes as you found her there, outside Bliss Township School. “Oliver,” she said, your name in her mouth sounding, to your hopeful, prelapsarian heart, like an invitation. “There she is,” you found that you could reply, as you had not on the actual day. Because now your buttons worked like little wormholes to the lost universe of your memories; they worked like the great wooden doors to the school in front of you: an opening through which, for a time, you could escape the smoldering hell outside.

  And yet, of course, hell always came back to you, the bowie knife clock setting the metronome, parceling out your suffering in a series of ticks. Your body only lay there, enduring your mother’s attentions—her changing of your socks, her reading aloud of magazines, her shaving of your clenched jaw. What was left for you now? Someday you would tell your story: that was the only sense you could make of what your life had become. You told yourself that you were trapped there so that someday you could come back to the living and tell what you had seen. And so, for a long while, you spent your time retracing your steps back to that placeless place, feeling for your last days, searching for what they had shown you, if only you had known to look: the actual reason Rebekkah tossed away your hand outside the football stadium that night, the truth about the man you’d seen outside her door, the exquisite ache of the dozens of early-morning conversations with Rebekkah, when you had never pressed her to explain just a little bit more. And, of course, the greatest torment of all, that one button you sought more than any other. It caused you great pain, but that memory became an obsession, an infection in your palm. November fifteenth. The unblemished starscape over West Texas, Rebekkah swaying softly in a column of light. An understanding that had come too late.

  But there were only so many times you could relive those last tormenting days, and for whole weeks at a time, you set your buttons aside. And as Dr. Rumble, Nurse Helen, Peggy, your mother, and occasionally your brother and father continued to speak, their voices began to run together into a meaningless sound, distant thunder. You at last lost yourself into some dreamy, hazy state, the endless daydream of your life just a mirage of heat thrown off the baked Chihuahuan. You were nothing; you were vapor. Whole months passed that way, in your wordless place. There are no words for it.

  And yet, sometimes, a charge gathered in the atmosphere, and you felt yourself sharpening to a thunderbolt. The meteorological sciences are notoriously tricky; it could be hard to know what confluence of conditions churn the thunderstorm. A Bob Dylan song on the boom box, a nurse’s cool hand cupped to your jaw, the familiar smell of some foodstuff from the cafeteria. All those things, together, would strike you back to awareness, writing your whole sad predicament in lightning: Ma’s eyes, your empty throat, the giggle of the machine circulating the business of your bladder and bowels, your mechanized bed, breathing beneath you. Sometimes, however, the conditions were more obvious, a major new front sweeping into your room. One day, for example, after a very long time away, your brother’s face—or not exactly his face, but a stylish, bespectacled, adult rendition—returned to your bed. “It’s me,” Charlie said, and you could hear him perfectly. And in the weeks that followed, you continued to hear, too well.

  Another very unexpected arrival at Bed Four. You recognized something familiar in her doughty face, her intensive cheer. Once, very long before, she had spent a day whispering into your ear, palpating you. From time to time, in the months afterward, she came to your bed and wept, like so many others. “Hello, Oliver, remember me?” she said now. “I’m Margot Strout. I’m here to work with you again.”

  And it was true, she did work, or at least she tried. She interrogated your body, laboring all day. “Twice for yes, once for no.” And yet, it was also true that when her hands cramped up against your cheeks, your eyelids, your throat, she’d rub at the pain and tell you other things, not strictly related to work. “Oliver, you are the reason, the reason for everything that has happened to me. It’s clear as day to me now,” she said, as if it were a compliment. “Do you know that? Twice for yes, once for no.”

  To be kind, you did try to flinch, twice for yes. “Love you,” you heard the computer tell your mother a dozen times over, and sometimes you could nearly convince yourself it really was you speaking.

  In fact, you were not as troubled by all this as people might assume. Why not let your family believe whatever they needed? As the border between waking and sleep had grown ever more porous, you let yourself dream up stories of your own. You weren’t Oliver Loving at all, you decided, only a ghost who had taken possession of a vegetative patient named Oliver Loving. When your brother rubbed his hands against your hands that couldn’t rub back, when your mother embraced a body that could not embrace in reply, you would think that this Oliver Loving, this family, that past, none of it was actually yours. That you were, in truth, only a ghost subletting this skull, pitying the original owner. Soaking up that family’s heartache as if it were your own. In this story, you found you could even forgive your father for failing to come see you for so long. Divorced from yourself, you saw what torture it would have been to visit the body that once belonged to his son. As a ghost, you were the better form of yourself, copasetic, generous, accepting.

  All of that you could bear, but what you could not bear was to witness your mother lose the last hope that bound her to your bed. What object did we show you? What story? What song? your doctor asked you one day. Please, you tried to shout, and yet could not shout. Heartbroken, Ma left you there, alone in Bed Four. Please, you were still shouting that night, when at last a voice answered you.

  “Okay, okay. Quiet down now.” It was that night, almost ten years after, that a ghost visited you at Bed Four.

  But this ghost was very different from the kind you had nearly convinced yourself that you’d become. This was the sort of ghost that perhaps can only exist in a place like yours, where time is jumbled, where the dead can take on all the qualities of the living. His footfalls against the linoleum sounded just like any ordinary living person’s. And you could smell this ghost, piney marijuana and the locker-room tang of a depressive’s weak hygiene. You tried to ignore this reek and focus on your music, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, playing softly on your stereo, but the volume clicked off. No, you thought, wanting to close your eyes to sleep. But your eyelids were pulled shut only by the tide of your drowsiness, not something you c
ould choose to close at will. You were very awake and so you had to see. Hands grasped your ears and turned your head. Your gaze stuttered over the last face you had seen in the final instants of your walking life.

  “There’s a sight for sore eyes,” Hector Espina said.

  Hector Espina was a ghoulish rendition of the boy you had vaguely noticed around the school halls, the young man whose shape you had lit up with Goliath’s headlights one night outside Rebekkah’s house. But something was wrong with his face now. A third, unseeing eye, just over his brow, the wound of his suicide still faintly leaking. For a long while, you only looked at each other, Hector trying to gauge something in your eyes, which fluttered over the bleak wreckage of his face. You might never have spoken with Hector when you had your one chance, out there in front of the Sterling residence that night, but at last he was speaking to you now.

  “And so what,” he finally said, his voice a harsh whisper. A tone that suggested a certain black camaraderie, as if you were colleagues in wickedness, two gang bosses breaking from street warfare to renegotiate terms. “So now you thought you’d found a way out of here, is that it? And I’ll bet you think you have quite a story to tell.”

  Under the pressure of Hector’s proximity, you felt the magmatic force of your rage, which had, at the beginning of your stay in Bed Four, incinerated whole months. You had a senseless hope, burbling angrily inside you, that you might still find a way to say what you had never said. But then something struck you. Hector’s brimstone tears, sizzling on the skin of your arm.

  “You and I, Oliver, we’re more alike than you could know.”

  And Hector was right: when your gaze now met his, what you saw, in his weary and death-fogged eyes and in the small abyss in his brow, was something of yourself.