“Started to feel what?”
“Here,” she said, pulling Charlie’s hand toward Oliver. Over the last weeks, Charlie had spent a great deal of time over Oliver’s searching eyes, his jaw forever chewing at nothing, his skin borderline jaundiced. Charlie had made good use of his teenage self-training, taking in the sight in only nanosecond glimpses. When Ma had kissed Oliver’s forehead before they left each evening, Charlie offered no more than a brotherly pat of his shoulder. But now, as Margot guided Charlie’s fingers into Oliver’s palm, he did not resist. Charlie could smell the coffee on Margot’s breath, see the pores on her nose, the wetness around her eyes, those little unsettling intimacies. “Just like that, do you feel that muscle?”
But what Charlie felt was not, at least not at first, this muscle Margot described. What he felt, what overwhelmed him, was the simple meaty fact of Oliver’s hand in his. It was like—just like an ordinary hand, like the hands of any of the men he had held in his coat pocket like lucky rabbits’ feet as he staggered out of some New Hampshire or New York dive. Instead of whatever little movement Margot expected him to locate pulsing under Oliver’s skin, Charlie received only another reminder of his wrongness, felt that all his reading and writing and imagining had been wrong. All that work seemed nothing next to the damp warm truth of his brother’s hand.
“I’m not so sure. What should I be feeling for?”
“It took me a while to find it. But if you just stay like that, just keep your fingers there until you start to ignore the tremble, it’s … well. It’s there.”
And then Margot turned to Bed Four and asked, “Isn’t that right, Oliver?”
As if holding to a cliff face to keep from sliding, Charlie dug his fingers tightly into the rough nap of Oliver’s skin.
“Same as before,” Margot was saying. “Twice for yes.”
And then it was as if the connection between hands became a live wire, sparking Charlie away. He dropped Oliver’s hand and grasped his own, nursed it. In Charlie’s fingers: the muscle memory of quick, twinned pulses. He could feel it still, as if, even now that they were apart, Oliver’s thenar muscles were still beating against him.
“And he can—”
“Seems he can understand just fine.” And now Margot completed the show of her technological sorcery. She returned to the work she’d been at when Charlie had come in and distracted her. She swung toward the bed a touch-screen monitor, its image divided in two. On the left, in a bright field of springtime green, was the word YES, and on the right, over stop-sign red, the word NO. “When the EEG reading spikes and he flexes twice,” Margot said. “I guide his hand to press YES, and when he flexes once, I have him press NO.”
Charlie was breathing through his gaping mouth.
“Oliver,” Margot said, “do you know who is standing here with me?”
“Wait—”
Margot turned to flash Charlie a frustrated look—or maybe that was just the resting state of her wattled face? She spun back to observe the neurofeedback monitor, pointing at the screen with her free hand. “There,” she said, and she guided Oliver’s limp fingers to the green panel. “Yes,” said the sprightly computer voice.
“Would you like to say hi to your brother?” Margot asked.
“Yes,” the robot voice replied.
In the quiet that followed, Charlie stumbled over the bag he had dropped, nearly fell into his brother’s lap.
“Oliver,” he said. Or did not say. Charlie could hardly shape the name out of the air.
“Yes,” the computer replied.
“You can really hear me?”
“Yes.”
“It’s still, I mean inside, it’s still really—” Charlie did not quite know how to finish the question.
“Yes.”
It was twenty minutes later when Charlie came back to himself and remembered why he had come early to Crockett State that morning. “Hey,” Margot interrupted his barrage of questions. “Maybe we should give your ma a call? I have the feeling she might be interested in asking your brother a few questions of her own.”
Charlie nodded frantically, clumsily grasped for the phone in his pocket.
“Ma?” Charlie asked the phone. “Ma?”
“Charlie? Where are you? What is it?”
Later, Charlie wouldn’t be able to remember how he explained any of this to her; at the time, he was too busy replaying in his mind his first conversation with Oliver in a decade. No, not the first conversation, just the first in which Oliver could reply.
“Yes,” Charlie had heard Oliver say, via his left hand’s thenar muscles, via Margot Strout, via a computer’s idiotic cheer.
“You can really understand every word?” Charlie asked.
“Yes.”
“I—what can I even ask you? What is it that I could even say?”
“Yes.”
“Ha. Ha ha!” There were tears in Charlie’s eyes then, as the sentences begat more sentences. And could you understand this entire time? Did you ever think no one would know? Do you know that Rebekkah is okay? I’ve seen her—she misses you still, she’s never been the same, I’m sure you must know that?
“Yes,” the computer speaker answered.
But it was not all yeses—to a number of questions, Margot had piloted his brother’s hand to the red panel for NO. “Are you in a lot of pain?” “No.” “Have we done everything we can to make you comfortable?” “No.” “Is it the bed? “No.” “Oh! Is it the window? Do you want it open?” “Yes.”
After all those years, Charlie knew his questions were insufficient. Given only binary replies, he couldn’t find the right things to say. But as Charlie cracked the window and so allowed Oliver to breathe possibly his first unfiltered air in years, Charlie understood that whether the robot voice said yes or no, it was truly just one question he had asked.
Yes. Though he had never told his mother in so many words, Charlie had always felt certain that if she turned out to be right, that if some part of Oliver really were awake inside his body, then his only answer to the question of that most pitiable life could be no. And yet, Yes. All of Charlie’s despair, all his ruined ambition, all the things he thought he could not bear—what was any of that, when Oliver, in the least form of life that was possible, still beat his thenar muscles, twice for yes?
“What are you telling me?” Ma asked, many times over, on the phone.
“The truth!” Charlie said. “The truth!”