Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Oliver

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  If pressed to choose among your many Bed Four obsessions, it was perhaps the memory of running that obsessed you most. Your last minutes were horrible ones, but you often found some comfort in the thought that the last time you had been able to use your legs, you used them to their fullest, sprinting along the musty hallways of Bliss Township School at night. Oh, you were never what anyone could call athletic. And it’s true that at the end of your own walking life, you were already winded, your pulse pounding in your ears. And yet, what obsessed you was a certain moment when you strained at your limits. That speed was like a narcotic your body cooked up for itself, a hormonal oblivion. When you ran then, at least for a few seconds, you were unable to think. You were nothing but thoughtless speed. A blur of sun-bleached lockers and the ancient school trophies in their display cases. Your school might have been a drab place, but to you those were the beautiful sights of your walking life, which you left behind that night.

  What was it like, your body forever frozen beneath you, to remember such speed? It was a feeling not unlike thinking of Rebekkah Sterling. That delicious old vitality might have withered to a rind, but the rind remained there, cruelly, under your bedsheets, never letting you forget entirely.

  And yet, in certain dreamy hours, as the ticking of the wall clock blurred into a single, timeless groan, it could still seem that you had not yet spent all the momentum of your last great sprint. Just as you could still sometimes hear Rebekkah’s voice, speaking to you from the place where you left her, so too could you feel that the memory of such speed was enough to hurtle you back to that final moment. Still, impossibly, you could sometimes feel that you would at last pitch yourself just far enough, that somehow it might not yet be too late to save everyone, that you might even still save yourself.

  * * *

  In the fMRI machine in El Paso’s Memorial Hospital, you trembled under the hum of orbiting magnets. Familiar to you now, the fMRI’s tube felt almost cozy. It was a liminal place, like a waiting room, a twilight, your creekside cave, a nexus in the universe. A place outside of reality, where reality mattered less.

  “Try to put out all other thoughts, think only of running,” Dr. Ginsberg told you.

  Your legs had not lifted beneath you in years, but you once more motored them along your last memory of running, through the dim halls of Bliss Township School at night. Yes.

  “Oliver! That’s just wonderful,” Dr. Ginsberg said. “That’s just fantastic! So, okay. How about we try saying no? To say no, will you please sing yourself a song? Your mom said you like Bob Dylan. Me, too. Will you do that now, will you sing yourself a Bob Dylan song?”

  And yet, as much as you might have liked to lose yourself in those beloved lyrics, you did not sing, not then. The memory of your legs still powered beneath you.

  “Oliver? Will you please try to sing a song now?” When you still refused, Dr. Ginsberg began to sing for you. “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…”

  Over Dr. Ginsberg’s singing, the magnets hummed their own penetrating tone. Your twitching eyes turned the neutral arch of the machine above you into a beige smear. It took great focus not to sing along, and yet you kept your attention on your ghost’s legs, pumping and pumping.

  “Oliver?”

  Like your father and your brother, you had always been fascinated by that which cannot be seen: buried worlds and Spooky Action, the mysterious effects of Dark Energy and the mind-bending math of cosmic strings. Those intimations of a secret force behind the forces we can see. And could it have been only a coincidence that a boy like yourself was chosen to bridge the invisible distance between one world and the next? Maybe so. Maybe it was only coincidence. And yet, you had told yourself that you would make a reason out of what had happened, that yours would be a tremendous story of survival, when at last you told it. An interdimensional epic to outdo even the survivalist books you loved most, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s ordeal in the Antarctic, Saint-Exupéry’s crash landing in the desert of Libya. But you saw now that no story, if you told it long enough, was ever a story of survival. Survival was not a story you could tell. Survival was the telling, and that was the burden and the gift of the living.

  “Oliver.” Dr. Ginsberg’s voice grew weaker in the speakers. “Please. Just please try to sing yourself a song. How about a different one? Twinkle, twinkle, little star—”

  You knew that you hadn’t moved your legs in nine years and 314 days, and also that you would never move them again. You knew, also, that you would never tell your story, just as you knew Rebekkah had never loved you as you had loved her, just as you knew you could never be equal to what Ma’s love required of you, just as you understood that all your memories were likely just that: not some lost universe, only days that had passed and would never come back. But you didn’t let those facts trip you up now. You let yourself follow your family’s example. Your mother, her conversations with an imagined voice. Your brother, reading to you the story he had tried to write on your behalf. Your father, the parallel dimensions of his best hopes. Your town, its last prayer for an answer. That belief, that refusal of the meaninglessness of events, that idea that maybe, after all, your story meant something more than a long series of luckless days, that there really was a reason for it, beyond all logical reason. After all, what was it but those ten years you had endured that had at last delivered your family to the truth and so also delivered you to this day when you could set them all free? As Dr. Ginsberg still tried to cajole you to sing a no, you instead imagined that you were back, once more, at Bliss Township School, the bass line beating through the walls. Rebekkah and her fellow performers were still down the hall, buttoning up their costumes. And this time, when Hector Espina arrived, you would run quickly enough to get there first. Yes.

  After a long while, Ma’s voice replaced Dr. Ginsberg’s in the speaker.

  “Oliver? Please. Just give us a sign? Just tell us what you want?” But, in the examination room, your mother had already asked it. The same question that she had considered every day of the last years. The question that had made her glad, in a way she never let herself consider directly, that you had not been able to answer. Are you ready?

  And still you were sprinting, faster and faster.

  Listen. There will be those who will say that, on that day in El Paso, you did not even say yes, that what your family watched on the computer monitors was only a brain’s mysterious malfunction. After all, more failed tests followed that first exam in the fMRI. After your family was led out of the room, you were shown patterns, played tones, spoken to, prodded gently, subjected to other brain scans. “The only apparent response, all day long,” Dr. Ginsberg told your family in her office that evening, “was just there, in the motor cortex. But we did discover some abnormalities and damaged regions. The frontal lobes, that’s where higher-level thought comes from, it’s most troubling of all. Twenty percent reduction in mass, almost no activity in those areas. It’s incredible that as much of his brain has survived as it did. But I’m very, very sorry to tell you that the Oliver you knew, he just isn’t with us anymore. I’m so, so sorry that you’d gotten your hopes up for this.”

  But your family didn’t care what Dr. Ginsberg told them. They knew what they had witnessed there, on the other side of the glass. Yes, you had said, and for once in her life, even your mother had silenced her crazed hope, and heard you. Yes, your way to ask your family to let you go and also to make the end as painless as possible. Minimally conscious: you won that label in a marathon of imagined running, and the rest was a matter of paperwork.

  Still, there will be those who say that your replies to Dr. Ginsberg don’t mean anything about what you actually wanted. That you have not truly understood a word or spoken for yourself since the night of November fifteenth. That this whole story of you amounts only to imagination, or something worse. A fiction, a hoax, an intrusion, a desecration, guesswork from scant facts, the ideomotor effect
spun out over hundreds of pages. That your brother, at last writing this book, telling your family’s story as you might tell it now from your place outside of time, has no right to tell it in the way he has. That the voice he still hears is not your voice at all. There will be a great many who do not believe these words, even now. And yet, after so many years spent slipping into the infinite worlds of better memories, you also know that sort of belief is not something you can force anyone into, by argument alone. We all have to decide for ourselves what we believe.

  “Okay,” your mother told you through the speakers that day in El Paso. “Okay.” And still you just kept running, leaping over the land that was cracking open between you.

  “Everything in the entire cosmos,” your father had once said, “begins where it ends, in a single spot of brightness.” And it was then, as you flung yourself from the faltering ground, that the energy Dr. Ginsberg traced on her machines flared explosively inside you. That brightness ripped the lining from your clothes, the substance from your skin, sent all your buttons flying. So terrific was the explosion that this time when your buttons flew they shot in a different direction. After years of backward tossings, for once your precious tabs soared on ahead of you. They whistled through the atmosphere like the opposite of the bullets Hector Espina fired, projectiles that did not end stories but opened them. Your buttons burst forth, into a different kind of universe, one where you would be nowhere but also everywhere. And already you were chasing after them, into the future.

  CHILDREN OF THE BORDERLANDS

  Quiet children

  today’s lesson

  is on Texas history

  that happened

  with guns and cows and oil

  but also on Texas history

  that never happened

  because you never said

  what was so wrong with us

  just speaking

  a word

  might have changed everything

  and yet

  today’s lesson is on astronomy

  that can be seen

  on an ordinary night sky

  the blackness between stars

  is proof that the universe ends

  because if it were infinite

  the starlight would blind us

  and yet

  today’s lesson

  is on cosmology

  that might be true

  if certain scientists are to be believed

  other universes

  an infinite number

  might somewhere exist

  and sometimes

  there might be

  a crack

  in the sky

  a darkness or

  a brightness or

  quiet children

  today’s lesson is on grammar

  when I say nothing at all

  when I am very still

  and I can hear

  my young heart

  beating in a someday man

  who is old enough to hear

  where there should be only silence

  there is a something

  a sigh

  a life

  between this pen and this paper

  I still can’t explain it

  but I know that

  somewhere

  we are still speaking

  all the words

  we never said.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel would never have existed without the enthusiasm, advocacy, and tireless editorial wisdom of my agent, Bill Clegg, and my editor, Colin Dickerman. I’m also deeply fortunate to have found such an excellent publishing team: Marion Duvert, Anna Webber, Chris Clemans, Henry Rabinowitz, Simon Toop, David Kambhu, and the rest of the staff at The Clegg Agency and United Agents; Whitney Frick, James Melia, Amelia Possanza, Marlena Bittner, Greg Villepique, Keith Hayes, Jeff Crepshew, Bob Miller, and everyone else at Flatiron Books; and Will Atkinson and the whole crew at Atlantic Books. I must also give special thanks to the commitment and guidance of all my wonderful publishers abroad.

  For their gifts of time, space, and friendship, I will forever be grateful to the foundations that supported the writing of this book and the generous people who make those programs run: Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, Andrew Sean Greer, Alexander Starritt, Nayla Elamin, Brigida Baccari, and Joao Coles at The Santa Maddalena Foundation; Michael Adams at the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin and The Texas Institute of Letters’ Dobie Paisano Fellowship program; Pietro and Maddalena Torrigiani Malaspina at Castello di Fosdinovo; and Noreen Tomassi at The Center for Fiction.

  For their insights, encouragements, and creative contributions along the way, I’d like to thank Anne Thibault, Steve Toltz, Judith Thurman, Jami Attenberg, David Goodwillie, Teddy Wayne, the Bauman family, Mary Mayer, Peter Mayer, William Paul, and my family: my brother, Aaron Block, and my parents, Andrew Block and Deborah Block. My wife, Liese Mayer, edited this book for the first time when it was nearly a different book altogether, and it was Liese who always showed me the map and compass whenever I lost the trail.

  While writing this novel, I relied on the work of a number of nonfiction writers, scholars, and photographers. I’m especially indebted to the following: Tales of Old-Time Texas, The Longhorns, and Coronado’s Children by J. Frank Dobie; Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans by T. R. Fehrenbach; Goodbye to a River by John Graves; Crazy from the Heat: A Chronicle of Twenty Years in the Big Bend by James Evans; The Big Bend: A History of the Last Texas Frontier by Ron C. Tyler; Desert Survival Skills by David Alloway; Encyclopedia of The Great Plains, edited by David J. Wishart; The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene; Cosmos by Carl Sagan; The Universe in a Nutshell and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking; Columbine by Dave Cullen; The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield by Daniel Engber; Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius; and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby.

  ALSO BY STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK

  The Story of Forgetting

  The Storm at the Door

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Texas. His first novel, The Story of Forgetting, won Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize, and the 2009 Fiction Award from the Writers’ League of Texas. The Story of Forgetting was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre, and The Center for Fiction. The Storm at the Door is his second novel. He lives in Brooklyn. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this

  Flatiron Books ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Tw
o

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Children of the Borderlands

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Stefan Merrill Block

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  OLIVER LOVING. Copyright © 2017 by Stefan Merrill Block. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.flatironbooks.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-16973-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-12286-5 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781250122865