Certainly it was true that the miraculous resurrection of the Suzuki suggested the hand of the divine, but the bike could go fifty, tops: not at all fast enough—Charlie had learned in his first grim weeks back home—to outrun the anxieties that had pursued him halfway across the continent.
Since his arrival in the Big Bend, Jimmy Giordano had phoned Charlie sixteen times, and Charlie had answered zero times. Why, Charlie wondered, did he even keep his phone turned on when it was just his landlord who called him now? Even Terrance had given up on Charlie, his intermittent string of texts (You there? Everything okay? What’s going on? I’m worried about you) terminating the same way Charlie had ended every friendship and romance, into his own dithering indecision that became his nonreply. Over the last weeks, Charlie had received only one call he wanted to answer, but Rebekkah Sterling had hung up before he could put the phone to his ear. Why, after all the months of willful silence toward Charlie, had she suddenly decided to call? That next morning, Charlie had spent a long while on the spring-mottled mattress at Desert Splendor, Rebekkah’s number on his screen, as he contemplated the call button. In the end, Charlie settled on a jaunty little text message, which he regretted immediately after pressing send.
You rang? Charlie had watched the text message dialogue screen for a long while, applying the forces of mental telepathy to will her to reply. After ten minutes or so, the screen at last showed a pulsing ellipsis, indicating Rebekkah’s typing. Dot dot dot. Only three mysterious periods, but enough, or so Charlie felt, to transmit the whole scene through the skies. Rebekkah, once more in her silk robe, her phone casting the only light in the dimness of her bedroom. Edwina dozing throatily on a pillow. Rebekkah considering, reconsidering. In the end, however, that ellipsis apparently was the most that Rebekkah was willing to offer Charlie. Charlie’s fingertips went white against the telephone screen then, as he fumingly forwarded to Rebekkah the several recent news articles that Google had delivered to his phone, those substantially inaccurate, overly optimistic reports of the fMRI test results. No surprise: in the days that followed Rebekkah never replied.
But, of course, Jimmy Giordano kept on calling, and even when his phone was not actually ringing, Charlie’s dread had become like a second device that wouldn’t stop going off. A measure of his desperation: one afternoon, a week after his return, Charlie scrolled through his phone, drew his breath, pressed call on the name Lucas Levi.
“Well, well, well, Charlie Loving,” Lucas answered. “My favorite author.”
“Your favorite author. Hard at work!”
“So, uh, Charlie, what can I do you for?”
“A couple fancy cocktails. Maybe dinner.”
“Oh?”
“Kidding. Actually, I wanted to tell you about some good progress I’ve been making.”
“Really. And what sort of progress might this be?” Lucas asked.
Though the wave of articles that followed the news of “A ‘Miracle’ in the Big Bend” had quickly subsided, before dialing Lucas, Charlie tried to embolden himself with thoughts of his own privileged angle. The world—or at least some fraction of the world beyond their narrow slice of Presidio County—was paying attention again, and only Charlie had the inside scoop. He freshly imagined a whole book that would incorporate, in swiftly readable, emotionally riveting fashion, all the elements of his last weeks that, in truth, made Charlie go numb and nauseous to consider. Still, Charlie felt the possibility of relief, like a toe testing cool water, as he convinced himself that, in light of the remarkable developments, Lucas might be able to advance the rest of the cash owed to Charlie on completion.
“God,” Lucas Levi said, after Charlie had offered a manic, clumsy summary of his recent weeks: the results of Oliver’s latest test, Margot Strout’s work, the several news items about his brother that had appeared in the local papers.
“But you still don’t know if he’ll ever be able to communicate?” Lucas added.
“No,” Charlie said, and the line went silent for a few seconds.
“And so this progress?”
“That’s just the thing,” Charlie said. “The story is changing so quickly that I’m just going to have to start over, and that’s where I’m hoping you could help me.”
“Help you?”
“It’s just that I need a little more of my contract money. Whatever you can give.”
“Charlie.”
“I promise you! I’m moving quickly now.”
“Right.”
“Listen—”
“No,” Lucas said, “you listen. I hate to tell you this, but there’s no way around it. My boss? I have to tell you that he’s been talking about canceling this contract.”
“Canceling it?”
“Are you really so surprised? We agreed that you’d show me some pages by last December, and now it’s August. August! And every time we speak you tell me you are starting over.”
“But what about what you said? About the national shame?”
“Well, that’s true. It’s a tragedy, what happened to your brother, a great shame, like I said, but these shoutings are at like what, one a month now. Honestly? Can’t blame people for getting fatigued on the whole topic.”
Charlie bowed his head, nodded. According to the loud and brief burst of press that had desultorily followed the night of November fifteenth, Hector Espina’s motive might have been some misty conflation of mental illness, gun violence in the media, white xenophobia, and drug troubles, but in Charlie’s many feverish considerations of Hector Espina’s unknowable reason, the truest answer he had been able to offer himself was that Hector—a boy who hadn’t been able to pull his life together after he graduated from Bliss Township School—had hoped to make the whole unlistening world learn his name, that Hector had thought he might use the weapon in his hand like a different kind of machine, one that could convert his lonesome agony into the blackest kind of public fame, detonating private misery into public bloodshed. But it had gotten crowded, that wicked pantheon. Those lonely, hormonal, zealous, and demented young men, unleashing hell in classrooms, military bases, churches, nightclubs, movie theaters, shopping malls, and airports. His town’s tragedy had become a relatively small statistic, just a data point on the updated infographics to which liberal Congresspeople angrily gestured each time another demented young man attempted to outdo his predecessors. Over the years, a great number of friends and boyfriends had kindly suggested Charlie give his rage its appropriate outlet, joining the poster-waving set on the steps of state legislatures to fight for stricter gun laws. But, Texan that he was, Charlie knew how each catastrophe was just another excuse for the crazed citizenry to weaponize more elaborately.
“I’m not saying you are hopeless, Charlie,” Lucas added. “I do believe you probably will have a good book in you someday, when you are a little more, uh, mature as a writer. But editors can make mistakes. I’m starting to see that I made one myself.”