Oliver, when you were twelve years old you brought home a library book you’d found about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers. Remember it? It was the technical aspect that impressed you most. The distance between the buildings was vast, and Petit couldn’t just toss the 450-pound heft of his tightrope across the chasm. To establish that bridge, first he used a piece of fishing line, which he attached to an arrow that he shot from one roof to the next. Once the line was in place, Petit and his team used it to pull across a thicker string, then a cord, then a rope, and at last they could tug across the steel cable that would let Petit walk into the sky.
Oliver: a single spoken name, and already your family could feel a string drawing taut, the abyss bridged, the line to you thickening with detail. The oily swirl of your hair, like a follicular bonfire. The dreamy, abstracted way you’d sit through a dinner. A teenage-sweet diffidence that could make your every footstep seem tentative, an apology for itself. A seventeen-year-old boy, unnoticed in his school days, becoming visible again.
And it wasn’t only your family who came to your bed to try to restore you with a name. “Oliver,” the people of your town would say, as their weary faces bent over your bed: a tearful, waddled Mrs. Schumacher, a mustache-fondling Doyle Dixon, a Christianly singing Mrs. Wolcott, a couple of that night’s limping survivors, a number of pimple-scraping classmates. Once, even Hector Espina Sr. snuck in to see you, looking down at your body like a darkness to which his eyes could never adjust. Of course, you had been practically a stranger to the great majority of those people and so it was not just grief that brought them to your bed. It was that one same question: Why? And though you could not answer, they too could feel the connection to you taking on the heft of the specifics they remembered. Mrs. Schumacher talked to you about the poem you had written: “I never told you how beautiful—” Doyle Dixon blubbered about your first day of kindergarten, when you had brought him an ancient horseshoe you’d found. Your classmates hardly spoke at all; they just looked on, remembering the nervous way you’d skirt the school’s masses, wondering if your quiet had been some kind of an omen of what was to come. “Oliver,” they would say, again and again, and though you could never make a reply, every one of your visitors could sense it: an explanation that was still somewhere out there, in that impassable, far tower of your memory.
It took Petit’s team about an hour to draw across a series of cords until they fastened the cable that let him cross from one building to the next; it would take your family and the people of your town much longer. It would take ten years. But at last, Oliver, in this story split in two, there you are: taking your early tentative steps into that chasm. There you are, walking into your own next chapter, on one September night.
*
It was September fifteenth, just over two months before. A brightness was in your eyes, the dazzle of stadium lights. Banks of them, high over the Bliss Stadium, lighting the first football game in what would prove to be the final season of the Bliss Township Mountain Lions. Though, of course, no one could have known it then. The Mountain Lions would win that night. No one had any reason to suspect that the good times would not go on and on.
It had been more than three weeks since that night Rebekkah came to your family’s ranch, and there you were, in the artificial daylight of 8 P.M., September ninth, just an ungainly high school junior, ascending and descending the concrete stadium steps, a paper envelope of a hat on your head, a tray of peanuts and Coke cups strapped over your shoulders. A truly miserable job for a boy like you, who wanted only to pass unseen. Each school club took a turn at stadium concessions, a way to raise a little funding, and that week the task fell to you as dutiful president of your father’s Young Astronomers.
According to an article Pa clipped from an old issue of Scientific American and stapled to the bulletin board of his art classroom, which also hosted the bimonthly meetings of the Young Astronomers Club, America’s very best stargazing was in your mountainous region, unpolluted by the light of civilization. (“I’m not sure if that is a claim to fame or shame,” Ma told him.) It was true what the song said, the stars at night really were big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. But the Friday night lights, the megawattage that lit your matches against the Odessa Bronchos, the El Paso Tigers, the Alpine Bucks, were much brighter.
“Hey, Pizza Face! Are you yelling penis? Ha ha! I don’t want your fucking penis, Pizza Face. Stop trying to sell me your penis!”
“Peanuts!” you lamely corrected Scotty Coltrane, but your words were drowned in the tide of screams. The Mountain Lions had just put up their third unanswered touchdown. “Peanuts!”
Continuing on with your impecunious nut hawking, you thought, for the thousandth time, of quitting the Young Astronomers. But you also knew that, as one of two permanent members, if you quit, the club would cease to exist, and Pa had already suffered too many heartbreaks, ruined dreams, lousy canvases for you to bear to resign. Your club presidency, like your long-ago jamboree purchase of your father’s painting, had become your sturdiest notion of familial love: the effort required of you to maintain a loved one’s necessary illusion. Still, among the revelry of Bliss Township’s hysterical fandom, you were in a particularly rotten mood, and when you passed your brother, high up in the rafters, you showed him an aggrieved frown.
“This is the worst,” you told Charlie. “And I’ve made about six dollars. Subtracting the cost of supplies, I’m at negative thirty-two.”
“What are you talking about? This is fun. You just got to work it.” Charlie did a slithery thing with his hips, batted at an imaginary hairdo. You were appalled to find his own tray nearly empty, a suggestive nut-metric for the difference between you. How was it that in the west of Texas, your little brother, gay as a box of birds, was so vexingly popular?
Until very recently, you had known a big-brotherly obligation to protect Charlie from the glum truths of your family life—you described the work Pa did in his many liquored nights in his studio as “potential masterpieces”; you called your mother’s obsessive worry “just normal Ma behavior”; you many times tried to attribute her obvious favoritism for you as “only a kind of trick she does, to encourage you to get your grades up”; you performed for Charlie many of the ordinary parental tasks yourself, driving him to the movies, taking him for long hikes through the desert. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the two of you could sometimes feel like a sort of better second family, nested inside the larger one. But in recent months, it was Charlie who often tried to lift your mood, suggesting impromptu dance parties and movie soundtrack sing-alongs, flicking at your downturned face until you cracked a grin or at least comically swatted him away. But you saw less and less of him those days. Back at Zion’s Pastures you continued, as ever, in your creekside reading, your wistful cacti strolls, but Charlie was always off with one friend or another or another.
“C’mon. Here. I’ll take care of your nuts.” Charlie emptied half of your tray and really did skip his way back down the stairs.