But the sea they had found at the island of Galveston was just like Texan desert: flat, lifeless, overheated, rich with petroleum. An oil tanker had recently spilled its black guts in the Gulf of Mexico, and their footsteps exposed the tacky slick of oil beneath the khaki sand. The apathetic waves tossed a confetti of tar balls. And Galveston itself seemed on its way to becoming the set of a horror film. The attractions on the old boardwalks were in disrepair—decapitated carousel ponies, a shuttered oceanfront bar whose collapsed tiki huts resembled the abandoned nesting place of some prehistoric bird-monster. Their rooms, at the Texan Paradise Hotel, were damply carpeted, tangy with a vaguely septic smell.
Charlie and his brother spent the week building perfunctory cities from the reeking sand, their hands growing tarred and unwashable. Beneath a plastic umbrella, their parents disappeared into their paperbacks. And as for Granny Nunu? Poor Granny: when a swift, brutal case of pneumonia ended her life just six months later, this trip would come to seem a grim farewell tour, as if the true cause of death had not been a pulmonary infection but rather her outrage at a transformed Texas she could never cotton to. She spent those Galveston days inside the planetary circumference of her straw hat, tsk-tsking and shaking her head at the disappointment. “You shoulda seen this place before the hurricane hit. It was the greatest Texas city of them all! A true tragedy.”
“Ma.” Pa looked up from his edition of Contact. “That hurricane hit in, what, 1900? You weren’t even alive. Your parents weren’t even alive.”
Granny Nunu shook her head once more. “You shoulda seen it then.”
On their fifth night at Galveston, as they all suffered the torture of a silent crab dinner at a restaurant called Fish ’n’ Chips Ahoy!, Granny smacked a female carapace with a mallet, like a judge ready to offer a verdict. “If you are all so miserable, then let’s just go home now.” The only real spirit of vacation Charlie had known, on his first and arguably only family road trip, was to pile into the station wagon that night. Back in the VW, Charlie had fallen immediately asleep, relieved to think he would wake up back among their home’s many acres.
But then, blinking out of his dreams, New York City! A billion twinkling mirrors, the geometric shapes of buildings outlined in neon, upturned floodlights ablaze. Charlie unbuckled his seat belt, pressed his face to the glass.
“And look!” Ma was driving that night, and even she was getting in on the act now, pointing to what must have been the Enron tower. “That huge skyscraper there, that’s called the Empire State Building.”
“Charlie!” Oliver said. “Did you see it? I just saw the Statue of Liberty!”
“Where? Where?”
Ma was rocking with laughter. From joy, Charlie assumed.
The New York City Charlie knew about came from Pa’s picture book but also from the panels of The Amazing Spider-Man he couldn’t yet read, the brightly saturated hues of the “Broadway Melody” montage in Singin’ in the Rain, the stylized black-and-whites of the film noirs that Ma sometimes let him watch with her. “Can we stop? Are we going to stop? I want to see it.”
“Um,” Ma said. “Maybe it’s time to stop torturing the boy.”
Pa, sitting next to Ma in the front seat, turned to face Charlie. He reached to put a hand on Charlie’s arm.
“That city,” he said, “is no place for kids. But someday, when you are all grown up, you should run off for it the first chance you get. No place for kids, but believe your pa when he tells you that our little town is no place for grown-ups.”
From the driver’s seat, Ma said, “Well then, Jed, have at it.”
The station wagon sped into the darkness to the west. The city retreated from view, unthreading into ranch houses, streetlights, and at last the black plains. But upon the generative membrane of Charlie’s kid-dreamy brain, as the actual city vanished it only grew larger still, its doors opening to Charlie, leading onto elaborate eateries, gilded elevators that rose among penthouse pleasure domes, rooftop lairs, zeppelins gliding whalelike in the altitudes.
Of course, Charlie soon knew that it hadn’t really been New York he’d seen that night. But he wasn’t too disappointed. If anything, he was a little awed to understand how it had only taken a few words to remake a lesser city into his own magical Oz. And it was around that time that Charlie and his brother began to test how far that trick could go. Almost every night, in the months that followed, they made up new stories about other impossible places and how they might find their way to them.
“So,” Oliver would say, “I was thinking about what Granny Nunu said, about how the Kiowa believed that all people originally came from a hole to the underworld, and then I was thinking, what if we found that hole today?”
“But how would we know where to look?”
“That’s just the thing,” Oliver said. “What if the ancients hid signs all over the planet, and we had to put together this great big map?”
“Like a scavenger hunt!”
“Precisely.”
Those stories Charlie invented with his brother in their bunks: all it took was the nightly twist of a lamp switch to absent them from the purple of the desert night, the angry droning of cicadas, their mother’s insomniac footsteps squeaking on the floorboards, the awareness of Pa a half mile away, blowing his Pall Mall smoke at another failed canvas.
Charlie knew that the tales they dreamt up in those bunk bed sessions might not have been anything so extraordinary, just the usual boyish dreamstuff—imagined battles with mythic beasts, discoveries of hieroglyphic maps, spelunkings of underworld chambers. But in their youthful ambition, these stories gradually evolved into an idea of a whole series of fantasy novels they would write, like the pulpy ones Oliver so loved.
They never actually wrote a word, of course, but over the years Charlie and Oliver would sometimes resurrect the tradition and pledge to begin again. And that, Charlie would later believe, was the best escape story they ever told, the story of their someday writing of those books. Unwritten, those novels were like the spirit world they sought, a complete and better world into which they would one day escape together.
And then, one night, Oliver really did find a passage into some other land, but they did not travel there together, as they had imagined. Oliver left Charlie on that ordinary planet to write those books on his own, and many years later, Charlie’s exhausted laptop showed the record of a one-man journey through a borderland without end, no magical map to show Charlie’s way to the place where he might find Oliver now. And as for New York City? On that July, of his twenty-third year, Charlie had come to understand that it was much better as he’d seen it from the back of the station wagon, better seen from a distance, mistaken for another, better, and imagined place.
*