An hour later, Eve pulled onto Paisano Lane in Marfa. She did a cursory inspection of the property, but Jed could not be found beneath the garbage angels strung up in his shed. Cupping her hands to a bit of filthy glass behind the dead circuitry of vines, Eve couldn’t find any sign of him among the frowzy furniture and grayed light of his living room. In the week since she had last visited, it seemed that the stage for their absurd trystings had gone dark, and the wistful nostalgia of romance they’d moaned about on the dun weave of that tired sofa shamed her now. It was Sunday, and she remembered Jed telling her that he got the weekends off, but where was he? Eve thought of the place he once told her about, where he went to “recover” his artistic materials. An industrial waste dumping ground, a pit dug into Tusk Mountain, to be filled in at the end of the year.
She found the dump a dozen miles south of Marfa, a place so desperate as to be a little beautiful in a soulful way. A great crater in the desert, a bowl of West Texan refuse, as if an asteroid had perfectly struck and demolished a little town that once stood at the mountain’s base. Eve parked Goliath at the pit’s rim, and among the glinting metal, the visual cacophony of colors slowly coordinating themselves into brown-red rust and brown-gray rot, she saw a man in denim coveralls crouching in the trash, a cigarette fuming in his face, as he attempted to dislodge some object. In the direction of the sole survivor of an Armageddon, Eve waved both her arms, the motion of her scapulae igniting the fuse of her spinal cord.
“Jed!”
He stood. In lieu of a wave, Jed flicked his cigarette into the scrap, and Eve, for a breathtaking moment, had the apprehension the whole thing might explode.
The way down into the pit was a ladder, bolted into the limestone edge. “You shouldn’t be here.” Jed reached to help lower her onto the spongy, creaking surface.
“Maybe not. But here I am.”
“No, I mean that it’s dangerous. This place used to glow. At night. Honest to God.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
As if to demonstrate, Jed plugged another Pall Mall into his sun-pleated face. He grimaced there, irradiating himself triply: the carcinogenic torching of his lungs, the penetrating UVs of the sun on his skin, the unstable nuclei of the waste beneath spinning off their beta particles and gamma rays.
“Sweetie.” Eve recognized Charlie’s condescending voice in her own mouth. “You don’t need to play the martyr for me.”
Jed nodded, turned back to the work she had interrupted, pulling at some protruding wooden knob as the fresh cigarette puffed tractorishly from his head. He lost his purchase on his grasp, fell drunkishly on his ass.
“Will you at least let me help you with that?” Eve went to Jed and crouched as she tried to heft the sheet of corrugated asbestos that covered whatever he was tugging at. She passingly wondered at the strangeness of it all, that this was her life at this moment on earth, grunting and wheezing with her rumpled husband–cum–secret lover to deliver a garbage child. With their combined effort, Jed at last pulled the object free. An old tailor’s dummy.
“The fifth one of these I’ve found,” he said admiringly. “I think I might do another series.”
“Your mother was a seamstress, wasn’t she? During the war.”
Jed didn’t answer. He gave Eve his cigarette to hold, then pulled away a brown crust of something stuck to the dummy’s armpit.
“He’s speaking,” Eve said.
Jed turned to her, pleated the leather of his forehead.
“Remember Margot Strout? That speech therapist. She found some movement, in his hand. Just like I always said.” Eve described Margot’s palpating and her EEGs, the first yeses and nos, the alphabet. “It’s him, Jed,” she concluded in a low, exhilarated voice. “It’s Oliver.”
“I know, I heard. Dr. Rumble called to tell me.” Jed looked at her, seeming to conduct some private tabulation.
“So I don’t understand this then. My God, Jed! We should be celebrating. Why didn’t you come running over when you heard?”
Jed eyed the headless mannequin, shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Jed pinched the cigarette from Eve’s fingers, sucked at its trembling end. “Did you know that Charlie came to see me?” Jed said gently.
“He didn’t.”
Eve watched Jed rub his arm, the old posture of his silence, as if he literally had to hold his opinion in. “Well, he did.”
“You didn’t tell him about—about us, did you?”
Jed shook his head. “Eve? He asked me something.”
“Oh, good.”
“He asked me why we never fought them for more tests, second opinions. For Oliver. He asked why we didn’t know. Sooner. Years ago.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I didn’t know what to tell him.”
“No one thought…” Eve said.
“Why didn’t we make them?” Jed said meekly. “Why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I? Why didn’t you ever stop me? If what I was doing was so wrong, why didn’t you tell me? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you were nowhere to be found. You were curled up at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.”
Even now Jed didn’t speak. He gasped, the cigarette tumbling out, burning his arm. “Shit!” Jed clasped at his wrist, a fury in his eyes.
“You want to know why I haven’t come?” Jed seethed. “I didn’t come because I really just can’t bear it. Because I really have no idea what to believe anymore.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning,” Jed said, “that I’ve been thinking of what that professor told us, how we just can’t know if Oliver can even understand us. And Margot Strout tried once with Oliver before, right? She tried, and she failed. And you said you didn’t trust her, remember? One of those fanatic Christian types, off in some world of her own. And suddenly she’s found something? Look. Maybe you’re right. But I just can’t let myself get my hopes up until I know for sure. Not anymore.”
“Until you know? It’s him, Jed. Come to the place and see. It’s him.”
“Okay. I’m only speaking for myself. I’m not saying you’re wrong.”
“So what are you saying?”
Jed shook his head. “I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me. What do I know? Nothing.”
“So it’s finally happened,” Eve said. “You have completely lost the ability to believe good things. It’s very sad, really.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Jed said. “You usually are.”
A cloud of some unspeakable decay, arsenic and death and something like yogurt, hit Eve’s nostrils. Whatever further reply Eve wanted to make was like a book from a dream, the words vanishing just as she tried to read them. But at least Eve understood now why she had waited to share the news with the walking five-foot-nine mood disorder that was her husband. His disbelief in any good news, the helplessness he’d learned over thirty years of false escapes in his painting shed.
“Good luck with your dummies,” Eve said. “I hope they’re better company than us.” She made creaking, popping progress back toward the ladder.
“You want to know what we’re doing here?” Jed spoke to her back, and she turned. “This whole thing of ours. We’re both just looking for an excuse.”
“An excuse? An excuse for what exactly?”
He retrieved the dropped cigarette, and what he said next he said in a practiced way, a sentence that he had scripted long ago. “For what we’ve let him become.”
Eve looked at this sad-eyed drunk, his teeth going gray. Her anger burned on her neck, white-hot and consuming.
“If you can sober up enough to drive over,” Eve said, “you might want to hear what Oliver has to tell you.”
“I hope you’re right. I mean that.” His tone condescended in a way that even Eve could never have mustered. The sorrow of an old man, an aging priest, addressing a little girl.
“You hope I’m right? This isn’t a matter of opinion. Really, truly, I can never understand you. Not at all.”