But now he halted, frozen by an impossible vision. So impossible, in fact, that he did a couple of spins, certain that somehow he must have gotten lost. It was disorienting to the verge of nausea; it was like a door from a dream, which you open not onto another room but an entirely different time.
The house of his childhood had been demolished and replaced. Was it even a house that stood there now? It seemed less an actual home than a magazine spread of a design concept in which it was hard to imagine actual people spending their days. Spotless squares for windows, white stucco for walls, something between a house and a work of minimalist sculpture.
“Whoa there.” A man’s voice.
The voice drew Charlie’s attention to the people he hadn’t noticed in his bafflement at the rectilinear architecture behind them. Four shadows, a mother and father, two children, looking like an old-fashioned silhouette portrait of a family, black against the decidedly new-fashioned blaze of halogen porch lights.
“This is private property,” the man called. “You’re trespassing here.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Charlie said.
The man took a few steps toward him, but Charlie seemed to be screwed to the spot.
“You have to leave now,” the man said across the new, chemical-lush lawn. “Joyce, call the police and get me my gun.”
“No. I—”
“I advise you to go back where you came from,” the man said, and at last Charlie flinched and bounded away, like a startled deer.
In his panic, his lostness in time, Charlie thought of the ancient escape route his brother and he once mapped “in case of invasion.” Now Charlie was the invader, but he took this trail anyway, sliding into the dense grasses that had overgrown their old machete work. By the time the lights of the impossible house had vanished from view, his arms were nicked and bleeding from the thorns and abrasive branches of the flimsy mesquites. He continued, through the sludge of Loving Creek, and pressed his way forward until he came to a clearing, a little swatch of knee-high bunch grass, where he caught his breath.
According to Granny Nunu, when their family first established Zion’s Pastures, more than a century before, the descriptor “pastures” was more fitting. In the few uncommonly wet years that had followed the founding of their ranch, that property had been mostly such scrubby, lowlying grassland, assiduously mowed by their once-great herd. Even in Charlie’s earliest memories, the land was much grassier than now, its wide, reedy pitches wandered by their last feral, sentimental longhorn.
The mesquites, as fragrant as Christmas trees, formed a sort of natural wall around this final pasture, giving the little field the atmosphere of an outdoor theater, the sharp half moon contributing a suitable spotlight. And just as Charlie’s breathing quieted enough to hear the insectival droning, the mythic protagonist of many of their long-ago bunk bed stories took the stage, so still that at first Charlie doubted his eyes.
Charlie took a step forward. When the gigantic parentheses of the beast’s horns lowered, he gulped at the air. Even in the moonlight, Charlie could make out the patterns of brown and white, that bovine inkblot that still he could have drawn from memory.
“Moses?” Charlie called, and began to move for the steer. Once upon a time, Moses would let Charlie and Oliver put their stubby fingers on his El Greco skull, would lick hay and salt out of their hands with his viscous and sentient tongue. Now, however, Moses flinched at Charlie’s approach and seemed about to dart off for the bramble and scree downhill. It would, Charlie saw, have been a pitiful darting. The longhorn was thin from rough living. He carried on his skeleton no more meat than a man. His joints bulged, the legs shaking arthritically.
“Moses,” Charlie said more softly, from five yards or so. Close enough to smell his familiar tangy hay and mud odor. Close enough, also, that Charlie could see the wide oily globes of the animal’s eyes. The last of his family’s ancient herd, Moses had always seemed to carry the opposite of a cow’s lazy stupidity in his eyes. A rub of his nose was a blessing.
But, of course, Moses was only a steer. Zion’s Pastures—with its little creek and romantically craggy landscape—was only a choice two-hundred-acre patch of desert real estate. Their house no longer existed. Charlie understood that the new owners likely were letting Moses end his days there for the touristy charm of a longhorn on the property, that a cow’s average lifespan made Moses no holy manifestation, just a tough old beast. And yet, even if he understood that no divine hand, no fate had wrangled poor old Moses to meet him there, Charlie was still powerless before this four-legged symbol, this last survivor of the old Zion’s Pastures, locking eyes with him in a clearing.
In the moonlit meadow, he produced his phone from his pocket, pushed its single button, and the brightness of the screen blanked away the grasses, the stars, Moses. Charlie hit call on the same number he had called so many times before, to no answer. However.
“Charlie.”
“Please don’t hang up.”
The line was silent for a long while, and Charlie expected to hear a click that would end the call.
“Is it really true?” Rebekkah asked. “That e-mail you sent. All those articles. Is he really—”
“Yes, it is,” Charlie said, as if his severe tone could in fact make that claim true. But if Oliver couldn’t twitch out a single word, how could anyone know what was left of him now? It had been weeks since that fMRI, and still all they knew of Oliver’s mind was just that mysterious plasmatic pulsation Ma had seen that day in July. Just a suggestion of thought whose depth and extent they could only guess at. In truth, Oliver’s present hour was as unknowable to Charlie as that night, a decade past. “Or anyway,” Charlie added. “that’s what they’re saying.”
And what Rebekkah said next she said so softly that Charlie might have mistaken it for his own sigh. “How is he?”
“How is he?” Charlie felt his anger bursting outward, but he breathed, and Moses’s gaze was still on him. Moses, starved from neglect, but still treading this last patch of pasture all along. “If you wanted to know, then why is it me who is calling you? Why is it always me who is begging you to talk, if you care so much?”
“Well,” Rebekkah said, “I’m talking to you now.”
“Not really,” Charlie said. “You’re just listening. Congratulations, Rebekkah! You’ve picked up your phone for once in your life.”