Charlie
He saw that this note was a failure, too, but he marched back to his mother’s house and magneted it to the refrigerator, like the final book report he had written for the Zion’s Pastures Homeschool for Lovings. And at least there was this consolation: at last he had done it. With this note, he would at last thoroughly break Ma’s heart, end her last hope that Charlie might ever be the sort of son she needed him to be. Knock, knock, knock: Charlie’s thoughts were running back to what might still happen, the next test, more tests. No. He freshly reconvinced himself he had to go.
At five thirty, with a backpack holding four of his teenage outfits, Oliver’s journal, and the $142 that represented his entire estate, Charlie left his Suzuki in the drive, hiked out the forsaken stone perimeter of Desert Splendor, made his way to the tidal whooshing of big rigs barreling down FM Route 28. The dawn had just begun to make the headlights of passing traffic unnecessary, and right when he reached the ribbon of asphalt, the sun crested the eastern horizon, throwing his long shadow into the soft, diesel-hazed redness to the west. Charlie crossed to the far side of the road, to the side that represented the country’s ancient myth of rebirth and transformation, the westbound lane. Like a thousand hard-luck poets before him, he extended a thumb and pointed it in the general direction of the Pacific Ocean. He was now entertaining a vague fantasy of San Francisco, a few nights in a YMCA, a resuming of his barback career.
But the thing that happened was that nothing happened. There was a very suggestive lull in the traffic. He waited five minutes and still the road was silent. The land to the east was a perfect flatness, but in the west it rose in disturbed waves, the farthest southern incursions of the Rocky Mountains. Over one of those distant hills, headlights winked at him, from the eastbound lane. With his preternatural susceptibility to signs and portents, Charlie lowered his thumb and made a decision then, a way to put a final and conclusive period on the sad ending of his youth he was that morning trying to contrive. Or maybe he was just looking for an excuse to delay the criminal selfishness of his scheme. Charlie took the eight paces to cross the street and once more extended his thumb, now pointing eastward.
*
After fifteen minutes and one very strange conversation—about polygamy, with a big-rig trucker improbably named Fran?ois from Butte, Montana—Charlie was standing just a couple hundred feet from Bed Four, in the back corner of the parking lot. He would only need a few minutes inside, he told himself, and a half hour later he’d be off in the passenger seat of some unknowable future. He tugged open the back door.
Inside, the same sterile hallways he had walked each day with Ma. His footsteps chased the greenish reflection of fluorescent tubes across the linoleum. In case Donny Franco or one of the night shift spotted him, so long before visiting hours, Charlie tried to affect a gait that was at once swift, purposeful, and nonchalant, and when he arrived to the room, he pushed confidently through, then paused to catch his breath. The bed was around the corner, and to be sure he wouldn’t lose his nerve when the grim, snarled sight of his brother confronted him, Charlie prepared what he had come there to do, which was the exact thing he had tried to do in Rebekkah’s Eighth Street apartment weeks ago. From his bag, Charlie produced the albatross that had hung around his last years. Oliver’s journal in his hand, Charlie’s only plan was to deposit it on the bedside table, perhaps say a word or two to his brother, and go.
If Charlie had been asked to pick a single word that best summarized his existence on this planet at the age of twenty-three, the choice would have been simple: however. The History of Charlie Loving, he felt, was nothing but twenty-three years of however, his expectations and reality forever a dizzying double vision, the image never quite coming into focus. And here was the latest however: from the space beyond the corner in which he slouched, Charlie heard something curious. A high-pitched computerish sound, animated like some canned politician’s voice delivering good news. A robotic voice, saying the word yes. And when he glanced around the corner, Charlie discovered, bent once more over Bed Four, the floral-patterned shape of Margot Strout.
“Margot?” This time the woman startled so severely she nearly fell off her stool. Pivoting, her eyes looked something more than surprised, a touch manic and oddly naked. It was the first time that Charlie had seen her face without the dressing of her makeup. Unfeminized, Margot looked nearly butch. Over the bed, Charlie saw that Margot had rigged a touch screen on the swivel arm of a metal stand.
“Charlie. So early again. Very early, in fact. What is it, six? I couldn’t sleep, so thought I might as well get to work.”
Hoping to avoid Margot’s questions about just what he was doing there at that hour, hoping also to distract her attention from the book Charlie was presently slipping back into his bag, he asked, “What’s with that weird roboty sound?”
Margot and Charlie looked at one another for a strangely long moment. Apparently, all it had taken for Margot to recategorize him as a “dear boy” had been his teary little outburst the morning before. The woman smiled at him now, snapped her fingers in Charlie’s direction, held out her hand for him to take it. He did as instructed. “I was going to tell you both about it today.”
“Tell us what?”
“Charlie, sweetie,” she said, touching his cheek, blinking very quickly.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve finally made some, uh, progress?” Margot seemed to choose that deliberately vague word for the pleasure of loading it with implication.
“You don’t mean…” Charlie paused, feeling the simultaneous tremendous weight and helium lightness attached to the second half of that sentence.
“Like I told you,” Margot said, “with a head injury like Oliver’s, if there’s anything to be found, it’s usually neck up.” Margot’s lips curled then, the sly look of a great secret in the offing. “But I finally decided to listen to your mother. I tried his hands, like she’s always been saying.”
“His hands.”
“His left hand, more specifically. The thenar muscles. This little band of muscle between the thumb and the wrist.”
Charlie felt for his own thenar muscles, as if for a pulse.
“At first, it seemed like the same tremble as the rest. Just involuntary muscle contractions. But there was maybe something else there. It’s weird but purposeful movement, you sort of develop a sixth sense for it. Well, I stayed with it. All day long. I stayed with it, and I kept tracking his neurofeedback on the EEG.” She gestured to the little wired stickers that made an electronic Medusa of Oliver’s scalp. “That info alone couldn’t tell us much, of course, but when I matched it with what I started to feel—”