Charlie tried to keep his mind off the silenced phone in his pocket, entertaining instead a panicked arithmetic, doing the math to plot his New York ruination. The math wouldn’t work out, he knew, but he had a desperate hope that if he drained his pitiful checking account and sold off his second-and third-hand furniture, he might be able to pay off enough of the back rent that he could throw himself on Jimmy Giordano’s mercy before vacating the apartment. And then go—where? Somewhere.
And what was so great about New York City anyway? The throngs of New York, which Charlie had giddily imagined since that night in the hatchback, were sickening to him now. Nearly a decade after, Charlie’s own reptilian brain—the instinctual fight-or-flight region that was impervious to reason—still maintained a threshold of a certain number of bodies it allowed into any room he occupied. And maybe, he thought, it was for the best that Pa only ever knew this city as an imagined escape. Charlie had come from his Big Bend childhood, from that state of strip malls and McMansions, with the usual Texan hunger for history, for a sense of a place with a past that went more than three or four generations back, but New York was mostly like any other placeless American place, only denser. Charlie saw that for the ways he spent his days—clicking around online, stopping by a Starbucks for a coffee, a Dunkin’ Donuts for a snack—he might have been living anywhere. And so leaving wasn’t such a failure after all, was it?
On Eighteenth Street, Charlie was profoundly relieved to find no landlord stalking the pavement as he staggered his way to the door. Back in his apartment, Edwina skittered across the floor as he lunged across the single room of his adulthood. He dragged a loose wicker chair beneath a chipped IKEA bookshelf, and he climbed up to reach the journal that he had banished to that high place weeks before. This journal still held the contents that it had for ten years, though its pages had begun to yellow at the edges and its ink had gone a little blurred from frequent exposure to the oils of Charlie’s fingers. Charlie had liked to think about his project in the portentous terms of fate, but recently he had wondered what might have happened if he had never opened that book. Considering it now was unbearable, each vanished future he might have inhabited full of snow-dappled mountaintops, fragrant Asian cities, windblown cabanas on Latin American islands; he could have inserted himself into that self-photographing, backpacking milieu, his old college floor mates and drinking buddies, whom he often envied on Facebook. But, once more, Charlie now carried his brother’s old journal to his kitchen table–cum–writing studio, where he set it next to his computer like some kind of talisman.
He flipped open his laptop. This dread, Charlie was trying to convince himself now, could be the necessary missing ingredient, the alchemical catalyst that might unite all his failed attempts to complete the book. This hopelessness, Ma’s messages in his phone, and the imminent threat of eviction or physical harm would chase him, like a cartoon devil with his glowing hot poker, through an entire draft of a book. Charlie fleetingly pictured a Kerouacian fit, pounding for a couple weeks, arriving bleary eyed to midtown, where he would at last plop the bound carcass of the document on his publisher’s desk.
“I did it,” he now said out loud, like those words could make it true. “I have slain the beast.”
And yet, even his laptop seemed to have grown listless under the years of revisions. The thing took a long time waking from its slumber, threw forth a few flashing glimpses of another moribund outline open on his word processor, and crashed.
“Edwina,” he said, “I think we’re fucked.”
Charlie lowered himself to the floor. Sitting there in the darkness, atop the grayish fuzz that grew in the deep gaps between the cracked floorboards, he sobbed, producing bubbles of phlegm. His only true friend, his stubby black pug, licked the effluvia from his face. But all the activity triggered her lung problem, her breathing now sounding like a panicked snorkeler’s, diving too deep.
“Edwina,“Charlie said, hammering the wall with his fist. He’s gone, his mother would gasp when at last he called her back, and what would he say to her? But how was it that even still he was infected by his mother’s crazy, tired hope, that her news might be just the opposite? Even now, Charlie couldn’t resist conjuring up an image of Oliver (somehow, impossibly) sitting up in bed, asking to speak to his brother.
In a single, thoughtless motion, Charlie did a crazy thing: he grasped his phone, and he pressed call on a number he’d found long ago in an online directory. The number of the only other person in his whole lousy city who might care about whatever his mother’s voice mail contained. And yet, for quite possibly the hundredth time, a robot lady answered Rebekkah Sterling’s phone, asked if he would like to leave a message.
Glancing around the kitchen, Charlie saw that his own upset had so upset Edwina that she had peed a little on the floor. And Charlie also saw this now: this room he was in—with its alcohol and nicotine refuse, its dashed and crumpled museum of misdirections—resembled nothing so clearly as his father’s old shed. In the book he had imagined he’d write, it always seemed to Charlie that he could convert what had happened to his family into something else. Like unstable plutonium, he had thought he could take the annihilating power of it and transform it into an astonishing source of energy. But at last he knew better, that he was just like the rest of his family, still pounding at the walls of an instant, now many years past.
CHAPTER SEVEN