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 women 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.