Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Peggy. Peggy! From the old diner!”

  “Oh, right. Hi there,” Rebekkah said, her voice fumbling. “I was just visiting Oliver, but now I need to go.”

  “What are you even doing here? I heard you were living in New York.”

  “I am. Just passing through and thought I’d make a little visit, but I really have to run.”

  “Not so fast! Don’t you want a picture with the boy? I bet he’d want it. His folks, too.”

  Please, you thought. Better for there to be no picture. Better for this memory to remain where it had taken place, behind your changed and strange skins. But of course you could not protest when Peggy produced a camera and gestured for Rebekkah to come huddle near your bed. As if this visit were just some excellent excursion you were all taking together, Peggy fixed her face into a wide grin, and she extended her arm for a group self-portrait. Rebekkah strained to brush the wetness from her face.

  And then whatever relief this visit might have brought sucked out into the Chihuahuan night. Peggy held her camera at arm’s length, snapping photo after photo. It was not the photos that you begged to end. It was the horrible thing that this camera of Peggy’s showed you. The screen lit with a bright image: an electronic mirror, the three of your faces pressed together.

  Your eyes, unfocused and scuttling, took a long while to find yourself and see. You only held the gaze for a second at a time, before your vision scared off in some other direction. But you did see, over and over and over. It was your face in the screen. And also, terribly, not. Your jaw had grown thick from the labor of its constant tremble. Your hair, as if from shame for the face beneath it, had begun to fall away. Your eyes looked at your eyes, like a senile man groping out of sleep for a clue as to where he’d woken. And you felt now that all the stories you had told yourself weren’t really true. Your buttons weren’t magical wormholes, just very lucid memories. In truth, you were just trapped in a hospital bed, not a passage between dimensions. You weren’t really a ghost inhabiting some other slain boy’s body. And yet, the only bit of yourself you could find in this vegetable staring back at you looked just like a ghost of you trapped in something else. A monster.

  After Rebekkah left that night, your only hope was that maybe, at last, you really could will your brain to pull its own plug. Yet that was just a fantasy, too.

  In the morning, Margot Strout arrived once more. “Here I am!” she said, that tragic woman come back to happily write her fictitious Oliver while the actual Oliver had only his silence. You tried to go slack, to will yourself to fall into that other place, where voices could once more become as meaningless as storm clouds over your roof. But the explosion of the floral hand grenade that was Margot Strout’s perfume was enough to rouse the dead.

  “A? B? C? D?” Margot asked. At last the computer replied, “Missed you.”

  That morning, for perhaps the blackest minute of your Crockett State years, there was nothing beneath your graying skin but rage. And it was not the usual anger at the young man who had put you into that bed, nor was it at the pungent woman writing her stories with your thumb. The fury, just then, was at another woman, the one who had spent all those years hunched over your transformation into this hideous creature. How many times, in your screaming silence, had you begged her to let you go? But Ma only carried on, as if her daily devotion to you were an act of selfless love, when it had always, or so it seemed to you now, been the opposite. Your mother, whose unspoken and darkest dream was always plainly visible to your brother and you: that you remain the perfect recompense for her sad, wandering childhood, that you and Charlie never grow away from her, your needs giving shape to the life of a woman who had never quite been able to make any other shape of herself. “I always believed,” she’d told you. But her belief was the cocoon in which you’d metamorphosed in reverse, turning into a grublike, wingless insect.

  And rage, too, at your father. The man who committed his sins with a nod of his head, the man who carried on as if he had no role, as if his family would right itself if only he kept his lips sealed. And Charlie. The boy who had run off into the world, as if your future were still out there somewhere, as if he could free you with a story, as if he could find some better, wholly whole Oliver someplace thousands of miles away.

  Over Bed Four, Margot Strout was speaking at you still, something about one of your favorite old books, Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry, which apparently Charlie had told her you’d loved. “Once you get past all the racism, he really does have quite a story to tell…”

  But then, an hour or so into that morning’s visit, Margot fell silent at another arrival to the room. Even with Margot’s domineering scent clogging your nostrils, the faint smell of vanilla shampoo in the air was unmistakable.

  And it wasn’t only Rebekkah who came back to your room that morning. “Margot,” your mother’s voice said. Your eyes jostling over the stippled foam ceiling tiles, you couldn’t get a good glimpse of the scene, but you could perceive a contest of silence in the room, the resolution Ma had come to. A body shuffled fuzzily into the wobbling periphery of your vision, but it wasn’t your mother’s hand that took your own. The crusty, familiar skin on your palm. Your father’s fingers.

  “Oh,” Margot said.

  Oh, you thought, as you felt some heft, the weight that kept you pinned in Bed Four, bleed away. You might only have been a paralytic man in a hospital bed, but it didn’t seem that way just now. You were a boy who had fallen into a nexus in the universe, a place where any reality might happen, where you really could slip on new skins. And now you put to good use the shape-shifting trick you had learned. You felt the marrow of your bones hollow out. Your vision tightened and telescoped. Your neck skin shriveled, dangled from the question mark of your spine. The hair of your arms rose and blossomed into bright feathers. As wings, you found your arms could move again. You flapped mightily, throwing your visitors into a minor hysteria. Someone had the good sense to open a window, and you cawed as you flew out of Crockett State. There was one Loving missing that morning, and now you rose over your barren, broken country, flapped your way into the distant hills, bound for your dusty state’s capital, to call your brother home.

  Charlie

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “You’re coming to Austin?” Charlie’s friend Christopher, who had quit Brooklyn months before, had seemed less than thrilled when Charlie called him, from a filling station somewhere near Odessa, to announce that he was at last going to take Christopher up on his long-standing, faintly romantic offer to come stay with him and his new friends in their bungalow on Austin’s east side.

  “You’re really coming?” Christopher had asked, again and then once more, the cheer in his question not at all convincing. In the midst of Charlie’s erotic spree in Brooklyn, Christopher and he had taken up together for a single exhilarating December week before Christopher left on a long trip to San Diego in his ongoing crusade to help undocumented immigrants. They had not resumed when Christopher had briefly returned to Brooklyn, but in Charlie’s long retinue of Nothing Reallys, he had often liked to think of Christopher as a Maybe Something, and the occasional sight of his name in Charlie’s inbox and those protest and beach photos of Christopher in his Facebook feed always sparked something in Charlie’s chest.

  At the doorstep to Christopher’s new house, however, Charlie had seen that the romance should have remained where they had left it, theoretical. “I can’t offer you much,” Christopher said, sweeping his sandy hair with a nervous hand, “but we do have a little space in the teahouse.”

  “Sounds like a dream.”

  Christopher’s bungalow turned out to be some sort of dissolute anarchist flophouse, over the transom window of which someone had affixed the stolen nameplate of a grand home called Trevor House, edited away the TREVOR with a blast of red paint, and replaced it with the silver-sprayed prefix ANTI-. The residents of Anti-House were young bearded men and unshaven wom
en who slept like puppies, cuddled together on cushions on the floor. Christopher’s own cuddle buddy was a seventeen-looking kid named Tom Zane—most probably, Charlie surmised, someone’s runaway son—who clung to Christopher like a baby sloth and who offered, in reply to Charlie’s few attempts at conversation, the wild and warning eyes of a boy who had nothing left to lose. By day, the residents of Anti-House dispersed to carry on their missions of organizing labor strikes and establishing communal gardens, and by night they ingested great quantities of hallucinogenics, nattering polemical congratulations to one another for their righteous fury beneath posters that carried such slogans as CAPITALISM IS CANCER, THE REVOLUTION STARTS WITH ONE, and MOTHERFUCK THE MAN. If anyone could have admired the antiestablishment work those unkempt anarchists were up to it should have been Charlie, the son of a borderland that had been caught for a century and a half between two nations, an ethnic tug-of-war that had at last ripped the town of Bliss apart. And yet, arriving to Anti-House from his return to his ruined hometown, all of their activities had seemed worse than futile. It all seemed quaintly deluded, kids playing at anarchists they’d seen in movies.

  A grim few days had followed. But Charlie was glad to scowl from the “teahouse” the anarchists had granted him, a glass box that heated to approximately four thousand degrees under the Austin sun. Charlie had told himself, on the long and windburned journey, that he only needed to get his head straight. Much like his decamping from Zion’s Pastures more than five years earlier, he had decided—no, not decided, he had known it just as physically as thirst or hunger—that he could not perform the necessary cranial recalibrations when still in such close proximity to Ma and Pa. Let me know when you are ready to tell me the truth, he’d told his mother, and yet his phone never rang. Once, Charlie even called Crockett State to ask Peggy, “Is my ma around?” “Charlie!” she said. “Where did you go? Yes, she is, she’s just down the hall, with Margot and your brother.” “With Margot,” Charlie said. “That’s right. Should I get her?” “I think,” he said, “I’ll just try her again later at home.” Before Peggy could protest, he’d hung up.

  However (and this would be a late-blooming however, visible to Charlie only later, in retrospect) it was also possible that Charlie had not been willing to accept a truth himself. After all, the date of Oliver’s next test in El Paso, with that cognition expert and all her sophisticated neuroimaging, the exam that would finally and decisively determine what was left of his brother’s mind, had only been a few days off, and perhaps Charlie had not so much been fleeing his mother’s illusions as coddling another one of his own, preemptively absenting himself from whatever those results might show. Amid the copious marijuana and poppy plants the anarchists were growing in the teahouse, Charlie had tried halfheartedly to plot his own next chapter.

  No more schemes, he’d actually written in his Moleskine after hanging up with Christopher at the filling station. No great ambitions. A nice quiet life. Over the arduous, arm-numbing motorbike trek, Charlie had searched his mind for his archetype of such a life and decided, by the time the city’s lights began pinkishly to smear the eastern night sky, that he might never return to the Big Bend or New York, that he might just apply for a job at an Austin library. And if a future as a librarian seemed constitutionally impossible, Charlie resolved to keep his brother’s old journal close, hoping an occasional perusal would remind him how thoroughly he had failed.

  But this surreal anarchist existence in the Austin suburbs had turned out to be something else entirely, not a great failure’s aftermath but a strange new thing, and Charlie’s forays into his revised future had been as forbidding as his attempts to engage with the trippy milieu of Anti-House. Charlie spent most of his time in the teahouse, sweating to the verge of unconsciousness as he paged through the few novels the anarchists kept, the predictable collection of Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac, Vonnegut. At night, from the living room of Anti-House, it sounded as if a large family of stringed instruments were being slowly tortured to death. Charlie listened enviously to the anarchists’ heedless good cheer, wondering how those people believed in that sort of camaraderie, wondering what the hell was wrong with him, how he could have made his life into something as small and illusory as a series of abandoned word processor documents and a rumpled, coffee-stained, unfulfillable contract.

  Charlie had been staying there, among the blooming psychedelics, for three days when Christopher one night managed to grope his way clear of Tom Zane to come alone to the teahouse. Christopher attempted a sort of reenactment of the time they met, in a backroom dance party beneath the Williamsburg Bridge, kissing before they exchanged a word. Christopher came in someone’s second- or third-hand robe and a snug pair of boxer briefs, his face a little silly in its lascivious intent. He lowered himself over Charlie, pressing their mouths together.

  When Charlie slipped his hands against the young man’s sternum, and he felt the unusual convex shape he remembered, as if Christopher carried a doubled heart beneath his ribs, Charlie’s face went hot with tears. Christopher, at first mistaking the sound for encouragement, increased the friction on his cock, until at last Charlie pulled the hand away.

  “What happened to you?” Christopher asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If this is about Tom—”

  Charlie grinned. “It’s nice, how you’re helping that boy.”

  “Is it? Sometimes I think it might be better for him if I just made him go home.”

  “Well, I guess we can’t know.”

  After Christopher had left that night, Charlie lay on the crummy futon, listening to the deep bass thump of the nightly revelry inside the anarchist bungalow. Some shadow appeared in the back door and fired a Roman candle into the night, white contrails arcing over the glass roof. Like someone’s grumpy neighbor, Charlie worried about the fire hazard. He was thinking, What do you have to celebrate? Yet he knew they had everything to celebrate. It was just being young and everything being in the future. They were at the beginning of their story, and Charlie felt at the end of his own. Charlie was only twenty-three, but he felt his bones aging beneath his skin, and as for what was beneath Oliver’s skin? Charlie felt that all of his journal obsessing, writing, and street stalking had been for naught, that all he had were his wrong stories.

  However. Here was the strange paradox: liberated at last from any possibility of knowing, of any hope that he might at last find his way to one of their old mythic passageways, Charlie felt freed to fail. He felt freed to indulge the nostalgia that pained him that night, free to set aside his doomed journalistic ambitions, free to imagine his own imagined, incomplete Oliver back into existence, if only on the pages of his own Moleskine. Just Charlie’s idea of Oliver, which had always seemed much clearer to Charlie than his idea of himself. Your name is Oliver Loving, Charlie wrote.

  When Christopher had come back that night with a hamburger in a Styrofoam clamshell he’d smuggled past his vegan cohort, he asked if Charlie might want to “take a stab at this Twitter account we’ve been talking about starting. Tweets from people who could never have access to a computer. Who often can’t read or write. Nigerian sex slaves, Vietnamese factory workers, the imperiled indigenous people of Brazil. That sort of thing. We’ll call it ‘Tweets from Hell.’ But the thing is that we’ll need a really good writer, and I was thinking that’s maybe where you come in.”

  “Who knows,” Charlie said. “Maybe that’s a job for me.”

  But, in the meantime, Charlie continued to fill pages. He purloined a stack of anti-McDonald’s flyers from the anarchists, the backs of which he filled with more words.

  Charlie knew his mother would call it textbook Charles Goodnight Loving. Charlie was still inhabiting a dream version of his brother, which he could describe with all the empathy in the world, as he meanwhile shut the actual Oliver away, just as he had turned away the daylight hours, turned off his cell phone and not turned it back on. Charlie had become a nocturnal animal, too busy in his moonl
it foragings through the past to think much about the present-day Oliver, the ongoing drama at Bed Four, the next exam in El Paso. The guilt pangs only made Charlie write more quickly.

  * * *

  But now, a week after his arrival, Charlie woke in the midst of one of his daylong naps to find that for once his skin was not crisping in the heat. He went outside, and he took a deep breath of coolish September. Even the mockingbirds sounded less ornery that late morning, as chirpy as orioles. Charlie tried to write in the daytime, but he felt blank, sun dulled. He thought a little ride around town might sharpen his mind, but he couldn’t get his bike to start. His loyal Suzuki apparently had been a desert creature; in the verdant, humid Austin streets, it had finally expired.

  It was that evening, as Charlie was pissing against a backyard live oak, shaking out the last droplets, that something furry brushed his ankle. He swung around wildly, clumsily stuffing himself back into his jeans, to find a black pug weepily clawing at his legs. The dog’s cockeyed face, features all cinched into an expression of lovable peevishness, was as unmistakable as it was impossible. Charlie stooped to pick up the pug, her overlong tongue working his forehead as he investigated the collar, where he found a pink rhinestone band, bearing a tag in the shape of a dog biscuit on which was printed the name EDWINA and Charlie’s own phone number.

  “Edwina,” he said, and the animal wept afresh. “How?”

  “Reunited and it feels so good.”

  Charlie pivoted, Edwina’s legs cycling in the air. A figure was standing on the slab of pavement just outside the back door. She was a vision from a film noir, her hips swaying gently to one side.

  “Rebekkah?”

  “Surprised, I’ll bet,” she said. “But the truth is that I didn’t have much choice. Edwina here wouldn’t stop talking about you.”

  “Funny,” Charlie said. “It was you that she used to go on and on about.”

  Rebekkah shrugged. “I guess times change.”