Like a tic in his brain, Charlie couldn’t help but imagine and imagine it, the impossible fact of it, what it would have felt like to be Hector Espina on that night, the hate that aimed that weapon upon children and fired. There was another kind of border there, a towering wall over which his imagination could not climb. There is no why: Charlie was beginning to see the wisdom in his mother’s motto. “There is no why,” Charlie told the dog that Rebekkah Sterling had delivered to Oliver’s room, as if Edwina might be in possession of some knowledge to contradict him. But Edwina just licked his nose.
By the so-called senior year of their so-called homeschooling, student and teacher exchanged hardly a word. Ma spent her days like an old lady, her movements gone slow and stooped, as she shuffled clumsily through whole lightless seasons, lost in a kind of internal arctic night. Somehow, Charlie managed to convince her to let him buy a used Suzuki motorbike, and he spent the better part of his senior year’s first semester making a tour of the freaks, goths, gays, and other various castoffs of West Texas. He frequented Atomic Age Comics and Fantasy, where he met a twenty-eight-year-old named Antonio Mendoza, whose silver-riveted tongue at last put to bed any final doubts Charlie might have harbored about his inclinations. But Charlie was only seventeen then, his youth itself seemed a promise of something, and he began hatching a plan for a greater escape. Very late one sleepless night, he unlocked the toy safe. He opened Oliver’s journal.
And what Charlie found there, in Oliver’s chicken-scratch script, was a fitful record of his brother’s attempts to become a poet. Many disembodied lines, dozens of abortive stanzas, a lot of rhymy, jangly nonsense, but also a few complete poems. Half of Oliver’s reply to the world, cut off midsentence.
When Ma had shown Charlie Oliver’s one published work, “Children of the Borderlands,” which Oliver’s old English teacher had sent to The Big Bend Sentinel, it had seemed so unlike the dreamy, fantastical stories they had imagined that it appeared to Charlie that it must have been written by another person entirely. The truth was that Charlie hadn’t loved that poem when he first read it; the clipped language seemed disjointed and strange. But Oliver himself had seemed disjointed and strange to him in those last months before, when a nameless rift had opened between their upper and lower bunks. (“What are you thinking about?” Charlie once asked his brother, a full half hour after he had shut the lights. “You wouldn’t understand,” Oliver told him.)
But now, on the inky, chaotic, loosely bound pages of this journal, Charlie knew he had found the missing link in his brother’s poetic evolution, from the lower-bunk storyteller he’d been to the almost-poet he’d become. Though the notebook lacked any sort of organizational scheme, Charlie identified the theme, announced on the fourth page.
I still can’t explain it,
I could never find time,
For my words couldn’t contain it,
And now I’m failing in rhyme.
Rebekkah.
I once heard of a land,
Where time bends its arrow,
Hours at our command
To widen or narrow.
So come away with me?
Through a hole in the sky?
Our little infinity,
To figure out why.
So overwhelmed was Charlie that he did not see any childlike clumsiness in Oliver’s lines. To his own seventeen-year-old eyes, these lines were like a signpost, establishing the poetic journey to follow. The majority of the journal’s poems fixated on the possibility of hidden, better realities, as borrowed from the stories they had told as children. In another world I might become anyone an Oliver unfurled with ten bodies in one But sometimes at night, in the darkness I’m freed to thinking that I still might / become whatever you need, one short poem read. In my dreams time is frozen, / a universe of you a single morning chosen to be endlessly true, another poem began. They were, Charlie saw, all love poems for the kind, vaguely sad girl he’d met once upon a time, on the night of the Perseid shower, the girl who had given Charlie his pug. Rebekkah Sterling, who clearly had not quite loved Oliver back. In one homage to his beloved Bob Dylan, Oliver had written, Though a Rolling Stone Might gather no moss Like a complete unknown / I gather just loss.
Charlie read patiently, staring down Oliver’s cryptic scrawl until it yielded its words. By the time he reached the journal’s conclusion, the dawn was beginning to gray the lechuguilla-dotted hills out the windows. The fantastical glee of their long-ago bunk bed sessions might have faded years before, but it was only now, seeing his brother’s last words, that Charlie felt a draft of that long-ago magic swirling back into the room. And then a thought occurred to Charlie. It was a silly, nostalgic notion, he knew that. But how else to explain what had happened to Oliver—how else to make sense of the mysterious linkage between the stories of hidden lands they had invented and the actual buried earth where his brother now resided—than to believe, in a space beyond understanding, that something really had chosen Oliver?
It was after that morning that Charlie began to hear another voice, the word that his heart softly but persistently beat: go, go, go. He had to go. In the Marathon Public Library, at a battered old computer terminal, its beige keyboard yellowed with a long history of fingers, he did an Internet search for the words homeschool and college, and that is how he found out about a place called Henry David Thoreau College, in Merrymount, New Hampshire. “In the autodidactic spirit of our namesake, our aim is a diverse campus of independent thinkers.” Thoreau College, the Web site informed him, was a school that “considers each student as an individual and bases admission decisions not on the common metrics but on the strength and originality of student writing.” The Web page featured the grinning faces of immigrants, reformed juvenile delinquents, and homeschoolers, all aglow in democratic New England light, autumnal sycamore leaves fanning over a Georgian colonial backdrop. The school’s message seemed to be that all he needed to join that hearty cohort was a high school graduation equivalency certificate and an original thought in his head.