Back on Eighteenth Street, as the new month approached, Charlie had often seen his landlord out there, skulking around his building, sorting the garbage, smoking his blue packs of Parliaments, his aviator glasses seemingly aimed in the direction of Charlie’s windows, which he kept dark. Charlie knew he could not ask his parents for money. Such a request would serve as a crushing confirmation of his mother’s pessimistic view of the world, her damning insinuations about Charlie’s harebrained schemes for his place in it, her oft-repeated condemnations of Charlie’s book project and his entire Brooklyn existence in which he flagrantly divested himself of the endowment his granny had spent decades clipping coupons and buying off-brand groceries to leave for him. And to ask his father? Even if he weren’t penniless—Charlie knew the man was living on fumes, working the daytime shift at some new hotel in Lajitas—such was the state of things between them that Charlie would rather have taken his chances with Jimmy Giordano’s “collections guy” than break the five-year vow of silence that was his relationship with that drink-clumsy depressive he used to call Pa. In panicked fugues, Charlie ran through mental lists of who else he might hit up for the cash. But nearly every other name in his phone’s contact list fell in one of two categories: men he had slept with and then given the silent treatment, or friends from college he had neglected to write to since his arrival in Brooklyn. The fiction of his big city life was that he was not alone in it.
Charlie told himself that he was being ridiculous—that the money he owed wasn’t so very much, after all—but the fact was that he had become too afraid to leave his apartment, and he went to absurd lengths to make it appear he was not home. When the need for the toilet forced him to pass the window, he bellied the floor beneath the frame. Trying to work at his computer, he tented himself under a fusty comforter, to hide the laptop’s glow. Despite her yelping complaints, he made Edwina do her business on pages of The Village Voice, spread on the floor. And still he might have continued up there, subsisting on a jumbo box of granola, if Ma had not called.
Charlie had not answered. He couldn’t foresee any way he could speak to her without admitting to his money problems. It had been a long while since they had talked; but then, from another perspective, in the arguments about his life choices he silently conducted with her in his mind several times a day, they talked all the time. Charlie hadn’t answered, but then she called again. And then again. Her phone calls, over the past few years, had established a certain passive-aggressive pattern; she refused to call twice before Charlie called her back. But now she called once more. The last time they’d spoken, her list of Oliver’s maladies had grown so long he’d stopped listening. Bedsore infection, a blood clot in his leg, a chance of pneumonia, hypertension from the steroids—
“Stop ringing!” Charlie yelled at the phone, but it rang once more.
“Stop it, please, stop it,” he said, crying a little now.
She had called nine times and left four voice mails that evening; Charlie felt he had to do something, anything to get away from that apartment and the ringing of his phone. Charlie couldn’t know what she had to tell him, did not yet know a thing about the fMRI his mother had scheduled for that day, but he understood this much, from the insistence of her calls: the likeliest news was that at last it had happened, that at last what remained of his brother was gone.
“Oliver,” Charlie said, and shut the door behind him.
*
A half hour later, Charlie got off the subway at Second Avenue, then walked the six blocks of drunks, hobos, and mirthful hipsters toward Terrance’s place. Terrance was not what Charlie would have called a boyfriend. Four months, and their time together still worked in weekend-long hangs, silences that could go on for whole weeks. In the muggy, agitated climate of Charlie’s last months, he had always found reliable refreshment in the presence of Terrance and his moneyed degeneracy, but it remained a source of refreshment Charlie wasn’t at all sure it was healthy to enjoy, like the cool, microbe-laced breezes that preceded a subway train’s arrival through the filthy tunnels. And yet, at that moment, Terrance was the closest thing Charlie had to a relationship of any kind.
Like all the boys Charlie saw, it had only taken Terrance a little light googling to learn the only fact about Charlie anyone cared to know. Outside a Lower East Side dive, on their second meet-up, Terrance had greeted Charlie with the same giddy astonishment that was so wretchedly familiar to Charlie by now, the darkest brand of glamour that his own little part in a widening, nationwide crisis seemed to lend him. “My God,” Terrance said, “I had no idea. You read about that kind of thing on the news, but to think it actually could happen to someone I know?” Charlie shrugged, felt his pockets for his gum. “I don’t talk about that time,” Charlie said later, when, awash in third-drink intimacy, Terrance inquired directly. Partially, Charlie would have admitted, this was just a technique. The trick to a convincing broodiness, he had learned, was to withhold the deepest horrors. To give those guys a feeling that they had to prove they were worthy of entering his quote unquote darkest chambers. And yet, this was a chamber that Charlie would never open for anyone; he had locked those first days after in a safe that he dropped to the bottom of the sea. And yet, from time to time the safe still released a bubble that popped into Charlie’s awareness. Ma’s eyes wild on the opposite side of the hospital’s conference room, on that first night. Manuel Paz’s hand on Charlie’s shoulder, ushering him away from the image of weeping schoolchildren outside Bliss Township on the television screen. The thick, dimpled arms of the other mothers smothering him in the hallway of the hospital. The idiotic, cowboy-movie face of the state’s governor, speaking platitudes at Charlie as he crouched to his level.
Charlie did not tell Terrance any of this. He even lied when Terrance asked him where he got Edwina. “A West Texas dog rescue,” Charlie said, thinking of Edwina’s true provenance: that morning, a few weeks after, the only time Rebekkah Sterling ever came to the hospital. Rebekkah Sterling, the girl he had met just that once at Zion’s Pastures, the girl who had become to Charlie a kind of minor deity, the way she had walked out of that horror unharmed. Her presence in the hospital seemed to Charlie like some divination; he did not then think to ask her anything about what had happened that night. “I thought you could use a friend,” Rebekkah said, piling the restive pup in Charlie’s arms. “Her name is Edwina.” “Thank you?” Charlie accepted the animal out of instinct, like another of the bundles of flowers that Oliver’s old teachers and classmates were still delivering to the room. Ma had been down the hall, conducting one of her endless phone calls with the insurance company, and when she came back to the room, she only blinked at the dog in Charlie’s arms. “A puppy?” Ma said. “Now they brought you a puppy.” Charlie just nodded. There were too many unanswered questions back then, and they had no choice but to accept things as they came.
At the stoop for number 347 East Fourth Street, Charlie texted Terrance. Feel like company? I’m in your neighborhood. When a minute passed and Terrance had not replied, Charlie sent another: Actually I’m right outside your building. Need to talk.
The seconds passed like some kind of lecture delivered by time itself. But Charlie was also a little grateful to wait there, under a glaring lamp, the dull, municipal streetlight somehow making the potential horror contained in Ma’s many voice mails just another of his exaggerations. And at least this conversation with Terrance was a thing he could do, a much lesser catastrophe he could put right.
But Terrance would not buzz him in. Five minutes later, wearing only pajama bottoms, the guy emerged from the graffiti-tagged door to speak to Charlie outside, where he could keep the conversation short.
“I’m desperate, Terrance. That’s the reality here. You know I saw your bank statement? You left it on the desk, I’m sorry, but I saw.”