A dreadful pause. “But…” Charlie said, desperately wishing upon a dependent clause.
“How about this,” Lucas said. “How about you send me—I don’t know—say a hundred pages or so. By the end of the month. I’ll do what I can. But you should know, it ain’t looking good.”
And yet, even then, Charlie had been able to dam his panic. He reasoned that he would simply write those pages, and his work would speak for itself. “Speak for itself,” Ma said when, with the false confidence of too much coffee two days later, Charlie tried to deliver to her a self-rallying account of his quote unquote incredible progress. “An interesting choice of words,” she added.
“Interesting?”
“You mean speak for us. You mean speak for your brother. And what about what he might have to say?”
“Exactly. What about it? That’s my whole point here—”
“I’m really too tired to argue. If you need a hobby, have a hobby. But maybe, if you are interested in actually contributing, you could poke around for some job.”
“I have a job. I have a contract, if you’d like to see it.”
“And how much money have you made at this job?”
“I’ve already made money! And there is more coming, but, see, I was going in the wrong direction all along. My job is really just starting right now.”
“Right,” Ma said.
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Right.”
Charlie had been enormously relieved to return to his mother’s rent-free household, but he was beginning to see the true, hidden cost of his tenancy. And Charlie also saw this now: his back rent aside, the only way out of a permanent return to his mother’s home would be to write himself to freedom. “So I’m setting up shop down the street,” he told Ma, “where I can get a little space and distance to work.”
“What do you mean down the street?”
“I just think it’s important that we set up boundaries here.”
“Okay, but where down the street?” Ma fairly asked.
Charlie had spent the better part of that afternoon exploring the half-constructed houses of Ma’s failed neighborhood, and when he happened to come upon that rare Texan thing, a basement, beneath a house that would never rise, he knew he had found his next studio. This studio might only have been a lightless cement cube, but Charlie had visions of William Faulkner dashing out his tour de force, As I Lay Dying, on a jury-rigged writing table Faulkner had made out of a wheelbarrow he found in his night shifts as a power plant supervisor. When Charlie happened to find a similar wheelbarrow of his own, a behemoth of a cart made of rusting iron, the coincidence couldn’t be ignored. He kicked open the metal hatch to his new basement studio, rolled his worktable down the stairs, and laid a square of particleboard on top of it. On the first piece of paper Charlie placed before himself, he wrote a new dictum, the guiding thesis statement of his revised future. Tell the TRUTH. He looked at that cliché as if it were some revelation.
At that wondrous wheelbarrow, a night’s solitary work spreading before him like a promise, Charlie felt it again: the spine-tingle of the old bunk bed tales, the ancient magi’s incantation to raise the dead from the earth, the same giddy electricity that had pulsed over him the first time he had held Ma’s news to his ear at New York Methodist. He’s there, she’d said. He’s here.
But Ma had not told him the whole truth then, only her desperate version of it. It was not by chance, Charlie understood, that she hadn’t offered him a full report of those fMRI results until he was safely back home. He’s there, Ma had said, but it was still entirely possible that Oliver was not there at all, or not completely. Or maybe he had been there all along? Tell the TRUTH: but already, his marvelous new dictum hit a snag. What truth? A miracle, as Ma and the whole town said? Maybe. Maybe for them. But Charlie was also thinking that from a certain perspective—from the perspective that mattered most, from Oliver’s perspective—that even if the next exams Ma had scheduled in El Paso came back with the best, most miraculous results, even if this Dr. Ginsberg found that Oliver was still as awake and aware as anyone, couldn’t one also say that such a miracle wouldn’t be miraculous at all, but exactly the opposite? A confirmation of an unthinkable horror, perhaps the most hideous form of solitary confinement humankind had ever created, concocted by a gun-mad nation, twenty-first-century medical technology, and a mother’s smothering love? Or had Ma been right, on that last afternoon before Charlie left for Thoreau—had he committed the most selfish act of all, mourning the death of a brother who had lain just inches from him, listening to his farewell sobs? How, how, how could Ma have not insisted on another test over all the years? Worse: How could Charlie himself not have made her insist? Charlie had spent the first four years of aftermath tending to his mother’s needs, proudly polishing his Man of the House crown each morning, but with a painful lurching sensation in his esophagus, he wondered now if all those years of labor had summed only to his enabling of his mother’s ruinous delusions. Was he, in fact, as guilty as she? Charlie felt desperately alone in these questions.
Since his arrival, Charlie hadn’t gone anywhere near Marfa, but he sensed Pa’s presence in the way a body feels the years, a gentle but accumulating sway, something insidious and intractable, bending him toward the ground. But what would he possibly say to the man? How’s tricks, Pops?
On the wheelbarrow Charlie wrote, Faulkner said the past isn’t over, it isn’t even past. But out in West Texas, it’s something worse. It’s the future. He excited himself with the clarity of his anger, as if the meaning of things could reveal itself on the page before him, like the floating message in one of those novelty Magic 8 Balls. And yet, sitting each night at that wheelbarrow, he found himself scrawling only more aimless pages. As the days passed, Charlie lost the thread of his latest idea; he lost even the conviction of his anger. On his phone, Charlie spent hours clicking through his social media profiles, his obsession fixated on the anarchist guy he’d known for a week in Brooklyn. Christopher, whose many shirtless pics Charlie often enlarged, gazing upon his extraordinary stomach musculature like the map of some better land, a reassurance that Charlie’s life had, at least for a short interval, taken place somewhere beyond this desiccated and fissured country. Christopher was living in Austin now, and though that city might have sat eight hours from his mother’s crumbling house, Charlie several times looked up driving directions, contemplating the bluely highlighted routes in his phone.