Terrance, oddly, grinned at this admission. Charlie could feel him recording the details of this scene for later amusing retelling.
“And it’s not even so much I’m asking for,” Charlie added. “Say, five thousand, and I’ll be able to finish. I’ll pay you back, and more. You can even have partial ownership of what I’m working on, like, I don’t know, shares of stock? I can show you the contract if you want.”
“Right,” Terrance said. “The book.”
“Just hear me out. I’ve never even told you what it is I’m writing. You’ve never really asked.”
“So tell me then.”
Charlie tightened his lips, looked down at the sidewalk as he delivered a clumsy version of the pitch he’d long imagined making to some interested journalist. Charlie had rarely spoken the truth about his childhood, but now he held forth about the almost-poet Oliver had once been, the stories they had invented together, the thing Oliver had become, his paralysis, his hopeless diagnosis. Charlie cleared the phlegm from his throat and continued. “For a while I didn’t know how I’d be able to carry on, and then the answer became clear to me. I had to tell our story.”
But the pitch was not going as Charlie had long imagined it. He felt tears dagger into the corners of his eyes. How could Charlie tell Terrance that this so-called book was all that he might have left of his brother now, and even that was slipping away from him, day by day? That even still he had no real plan or organizational scheme for his work, only an unnamable boyhood hope that he still might find a kind of actual crossing place, some way back to Oliver deep in his own pages? That his act of literary necromancy had done just the opposite, that the more he wrote the farther Oliver seemed from him?
Terrance looked at Charlie with bemusement or else pity. “So how many pages do you have?” Terrance asked.
“I can feel this great energy? It’s like something building up inside me that is just dying to get out. I’ll bet you I bang out the whole thing in three months. Four months, tops. Maybe five. With revisions.” Charlie looked down to see he was grasping Terrance’s wrist.
“Right. Or maybe six or seven,” Terrance said. “Or, quite possibly, never.”
“Please.” Terrance tried to liberate his hand, but Charlie dug in, renewing his sweaty grasp.
“I’m really sorry, I am.” Terrance shook his head paternally. “But it’s time to face facts, Charlie. You’ve brought all this on yourself. I must say that I don’t see any particular reason to get myself involved in this little catastrophe you’ve made.”
“You think I wanted all this to happen?”
“All those stories you tell about yourself. They’re all a little—boom.” Terrance made a gesture of an explosion with his free hand. “But I get it. Something truly, truly terrible happened to you, and so now you think terrible things are going to happen all the time. It must be a kind of paranoia, like some PTSD thing, right? And now you’ve invented a gangster who is out to break your kneecaps.”
It was rare for Charlie to stay with any man long enough to allow him the requisite data collection for such a damning assessment, and with a sharp jab Charlie found himself missing another guy he’d known for a few weeks named Christopher, a slight, impassioned man with a head of sandy, luminous hair, who had left for the Calexico border crossing to fight for immigrant rights. And yet, when Charlie had been with Christopher he had missed others he’d been with, longed for men he hadn’t yet met. The Loving Family Curse, Charlie called it, this damning belief that any place was far preferable to the present one.
“Invented?” Charlie asked Terrance. “If you want to meet Jimmy Giordano, you could just come to my apartment.”
“No one’s going to hurt you.” Terrance took a deep sigh. “No one is going to risk going to jail to collect five thousand dollars. But, really, I get it, you need the drama.”
“It’s not just the rent. Poor Edwina, have you noticed? She has some bad breathing problem. Water in her lungs or something. But you know, the vet’s office charges eighty dollars just to see the doctor.”
“Poor pug,” Terrance said. “Hitched her wagon to the wrong star.”
“He’s dead,” Charlie said. “My brother has died. I didn’t tell you that.”
“What? Charlie. When did this happen?”
“Today.” Charlie ran a spasming finger over his chin. “I just found out.”
Terrance cocked his head, as if to a strange odor. “What are you talking about?”
Charlie couldn’t answer. Maybe it was just that he needed to hear the words to prepare him for how his future would sound, in case it were true.
“I just needed to tell someone,” Charlie said. “I just needed to tell you.”
“Jesus, Charlie. Oh no.” Terrance glanced back into his building. “Hey, listen, maybe there is someone I could call for you? Maybe your parents?”
“Please,” Charlie said. “It’s just a loan. Just a very temporary loan. Please.”
Terrance put a hot hand on his shoulder. “Charlie. We have to call someone.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “He’s not really dead.”
“What?”
“Or he might be. I haven’t found the nerve to speak to my mother in a very long time.”
“Fuck you, Charlie. I mean it. Fuck you.”
“Please,” Charlie said again. “You don’t know what’s in me.”
“That’s true,” Terrance said, his eyebrows knitted. “Obviously I don’t.”
A miserable train ride back to Brooklyn, Charlie fretting over the sunk cost of his two-way subway fare. But out on Fourth Avenue, the humid, halal-scented air of Brooklyn helped bring Charlie back to himself. The New York City Charlie had found was a mostly antiseptic place, a glistening kingdom for the superambitious and the superrich, but a few corners still clung to the gritty charm Charlie had imagined he’d find. Across the street, a Hasidic man yelled at a team of construction workers; a flock of prepubescents hollered down the sidewalk on aluminum scooters; a spray-tanned woman said into her phone, “Honey, you ain’t getting any more milk till you buy the cow.” As Charlie passed an office with a red awning that brightly advertised ACCOUNTING, INVESTING, IMMIGRATION ASSISTANCE, LEGAL HELPS, AND CHECKS CASHED, he lit an American Spirit and commanded his legs to keep marching.