He would write, but where? The answer to that question, Charlie believed, was also in the journal he carried onto the commencement stage. Rebekkah Sterling and he had not spoken since the gift of Edwina, but Charlie had been conducting routine Internet searches for her name. She had made it to New York, where her name appeared in the listings for a few nightclub music shows. Charlie was proud of her. New York! Just like that long-ago night in the VW, New York seemed the very name of freedom, which Rebekkah had already found and Charlie would follow. He pictured them becoming friends. He would become friends with the girl who his brother had chased after until that last night, the only person who could tell Charlie the story he needed most, about his brother’s last months before. He imagined long conversations with her in sidewalk cafés, Edwina panting at their feet, steam rising from their cappuccinos, Oliver regenerated in the mist. Never mind that Rebekkah had not yet replied to any of his e-mails. Charlie could convince her.
With the decent savings account Charlie had established, he and Edwina took over the Brooklyn studio apartment from a boy named Jared, who had graduated from his college the year before. What strangeness Charlie felt to find himself in a place so wholly the opposite of the one in which he’d been born, what loneliness he knew to stumble among the bustling millions, what dread he knew to watch his bank account dwindle: he resolved to overcome all these with work. Once upon a time, Charlie wrote fifty times over, there was a boy who fell through a crack in time.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, and then what? The fact that Charlie had not yet completed a single showable page didn’t stop him from setting up a meeting with a man named Lucas Levi, an editor at a small publishing house called Icarus, whose contact info Charlie found on the Thoreau alumni Web site.
Charlie liked Lucas immediately. The man was as compact and sleekly fashioned as a European sports car, and he was clearly gay, often touching a flirtatious hand to Charlie as he spoke. Lucas was just thirtyish, but he was prematurely gray, husky voiced, world-weary in a way that an older-brother-starved kid like Charlie craved. Over fifteen-dollar cocktails, Charlie hardly had to tell his story. Lucas had already read all about that worst night online, and the guy many times referenced his own fatally shot uncle (a gun range accident) like it lent them some kind of kinship. The conversation, it must be said, continued on to a second and then a third cocktail lounge, in whose rear garden, editor and author let their cigarettes burn to ash as they kissed in a patient and oddly tentative way, as if their flicking tongues needed to conduct a second interview of their own.
Three weeks later, Charlie sent Lucas a punchy, unsettled, forty-page document that included a few choice excerpts from Oliver’s journals, an introductory chapter explaining how Charlie had come upon his brother’s lost poems, and a seventeen-page speed-assisted “proposal” that amounted to a lot of fussy, sophomoric-academic meditations on the “reclamatory power of poetry and narrative forms.” Charlie had spent two weeks fretting over this proposal’s insufficiencies when Lucas Levi called to tell him that though he could not offer very much by way of an advance on royalties, this would be his “passion project.”
“The poems, of course, aren’t always great. Oliver was just a kid, after all, and what can you expect? But, framed by your brother’s whole story, they could be beautiful,” Lucas told him over the phone. “What you wrote about what has happened to him, to you all, it just broke my heart. The pages you sent me are rough, but I see a lot of talent here. And isn’t that why we editors go into this biz? To find and, uh, nurture talent?”
A silence followed, as if Lucas really did expect Charlie to answer this question for him. “Sure,” Charlie said.
“Plus,” Lucas added, “these rampages are a national shame, an international shame, and we’ve got to do something, right?”
It seemed to Charlie, the next morning, that overnight he had grown an extra vertebra or two; he truly did walk a little taller. When Charlie told Lucas Levi, “You won’t be disappointed, I promise you I’ll kill myself for this,” he meant it. Charlie even declined Lucas’s later drinks invitation, to keep things professional. Charlie would have walked three hundred miles in driving snow to chase the feeling Lucas Levi had just given Charlie with a single “yes,” the magnificence of having been chosen.
Pa. Was Charlie also thinking of his father on that glorious morning? In the months that would follow, Charlie would come to see that more than one ghost was there with him in the cluttered hovel in which he clutched his constipated pen. A notion to keep the lights blazing on his blackest nights: the greatest revenge Charlie felt he could take was to succeed where Pa had failed. After witnessing Pa’s years of thwarted visions in his cabin, Charlie could show his father what actual artistic triumph looked like, what it required. He would often fantasize his father’s envy, Pa shaking the thinning stuff of his hair over the award-festooned paperback edition of his son’s book in his hands. More than anything, however, what Charlie would imagine was his father’s gaze rising tearily from his last page, on some distant afternoon when Charlie would sit with him again. “You did it,” Pa would say.
Often, failing to write, Charlie set off with Edwina for long aimless jaunts through Brooklyn, and when he came upon some metaphorically pregnant detail—the way the pigeons congregated on the Islamic slaughterhouse on Hamilton Avenue, a team of workers soldering up on the suicidal heights of the Brooklyn Bridge, the annual twin columns of white shooting into the sky from where the towers had fallen, the subway sunrise of an F train writing its cursive of light along the grimed platform of the Seventh Avenue station—Charlie would think of his brother, all these sights Oliver once imagined he might see himself, and he’d rush back to the lousy 215 square feet he rented on the fourth floor of Jimmy Giordano’s vinyl-sided monstrosity, hopeful that the especially potent symbol he’d found on the street would be the flip of the switch, the drop of the ball, which would set the marvelous Rube Goldberg device of his book into whirling motion. But when Charlie read back what he had written, he saw pages filled only with pitiable wish fulfillment—half-written scenes of Oliver walking with Charlie through his Brooklyn days.
“And what about that Rebekkah girl?” Lucas asked over the phone one March morning. Charlie had promised his first pages to Lucas by December, but he had just admitted that it could be another month or two until he had something he could share. “You are sure that she’s willing to be a part of all this? I don’t want to seem fretful, but what you have on your hands here is a love story, at its heart, and I worry that without Rebekkah’s side of things, without showing just what Oliver and she both lost that night—well, what would this book really be?”
It was only now occurring to Charlie that it was a very strange thing indeed that Lucas had accepted Charlie’s poor proposal, that Lucas’s true motives might have been pity or else sex, and that in the months since they’d spoken, Lucas might have come to understand these were dubious reasons to issue a book contract.
“The way I see it, it’s Oliver and Rebekkah’s story, really, as much as your family’s, your town’s,” Lucas said.