Those losses, they were too mighty and too foreign for you to comprehend. They were the hordes of war-costumed barbarians at your gates, and so you went to battle against them. You couldn’t holler or swing your actual fists, but your trapped brain swung a ghost’s fists, screamed a ghost’s empty battle cry. You were only yelling into the wind, but for each day that followed, you yelled and yelled until you had exhausted yourself, fell asleep and woke up, rejuvenated for another day’s muted warfare.
You couldn’t direct your eyes where to look; they were like separate, skittish creatures inhabiting your skull. But still you became as familiar with the constellations in the foam ceiling of your room as with the freckles of your own hands. For company, when your mother left each day, you had only the western-themed artwork on the room’s walls. Desert landscapes, old poster advertisements for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Warner Bros.’ production of Calamity Jane, all yellowing in cracked wooden frames. Counting off time in this hellish predicament was a chintzy keepsake, a wood-rimmed clock, its hour and minute hands two tin bowie knives.
If you could have spoken, your first words would have been What about Rebekkah? So desperate was your need to know that one day, when none other than your former English teacher came to your bed to offer a prayer for the dead—Keith Larsen, Vera Grass, Roy Lopez, and Mr. Avalon, too, gone forever now—whatever grief you might have known was outshone by the wild relief that Rebekkah Sterling’s name was not among them. And yet, even there, even then, you were still the lovesick kid wondering why she didn’t visit you.
At last, one morning, you awoke defeated. You were too exhausted to muster the day’s counterattack against the past, so your mind fell silent, as silent as your mouth. All you wanted then was to draw that silence over you, like a blanket. And you found, at least for a while, that you could make yourself quite snug, wrapped up in that nothingness. The strongest feeling you let pass through yourself then was a horrible, interminable craving for any bite of actual food. You would have been delighted by the simplest saltine, any palatable alternative to the nutrient packs piped into your veins and into your digestive system’s obscene new aperture. But it was a vision of a particular burger from Café Magnolia that tormented you most. For a long while, as your body spasmed ceaselessly beneath you, your mind held nothing but numbed silence and a torture of fantastical cheeseburgers.
Your mind. After many months adrift in some immeasurable, white, insubstantial place, it had at last landed back on solid earth, the soft shore of Bed Four at Crockett State Assisted Care Facility. Didn’t that mean that someday your arms and legs and hands and voice would also return to you? You waited. They did not return.
Doctors strapped sensors to you. They shined flashlights into your eyes. They tested your reflexes with little rubber hammers. And still these alleged doctors spoke about you as if you weren’t there in the room with them. Sometimes, you convinced yourself you could still twitch your muscles, and so you strained, trying to produce a series of SOS signals. When your mother felt something in your left hand, she called for a doctor, who sighed and named it involuntary muscular contraction.
“I’m sorry to tell you again, Mrs. Loving…”
As ever, your mouth and your body were silent. The doctor believed your skull was silent, too. All you wanted then was to be equal to everyone’s expectations. And to answer the question plainly: yes. Many times, in those first months, you did resolve to join those theater students and Mr. Avalon, to end your own life by sheer force of will. You pictured the white hole of death and tried to force yourself through. But the machines stubbornly circulated the business of your heart, bladder, and bowels. You had no choice. Oliver, you had no choice but to live.
In the first months after, your mother always arrived to your room in makeup, like an obstinate hopefulness she had painted onto her face. One day—you couldn’t say why it was different from the dozens that had preceded it—she wore no makeup. Her graying hair tangled away from her at strange angles, looking like something her anxiety had pressed out of her narrow skull, like the fraying by-product of her exhausted hopes. This was the same day that she mentioned Hector’s name. Only now did you realize that she had never mentioned him before, not once in that room. That name, you understood, served as the cap that had bottled her grief. “Hector.” When she cracked it open, her grief poured forth. She tried to wipe away her tears, but they rained down on you nevertheless. Unable ever to weep on your own, those tears on your face were a kind of relief.
She asked the questions she knew you could never answer. But no, she did not ask: these questions came out as a grave, breathy chant, sentences she had recited to herself over and over again, for however long you had already been in that bed.
“What happened?” she began.
Questions sparked questions, which rose and spread into more and more: about Hector Espina, about what you had seen that night, about why you had been there in the first place, and did you feel any pain? Her interrogation had the logic of a house fire. It wouldn’t cease until it furied its way through all available material.
You tried, you did. To each of her questions, you formed your answer, and you tried your best to hurl your replies all the way across the vast chasm to your throat. But your explanations, your apologies, your assurances, and your confusion, they never reached the other side. The answers were all between you, in your mind’s eye. In your mind’s hand, you felt the reply, a single no or yes or maybe. You put your mind back into it. The answers your mother needed were six inches from her ear, but they might as well have been miles away, falling to dust on the desert floor.
And so what was left for you now? In your bed, you thought often of one of your granny’s tales, this one about Saynday, the great trickster in the stories shared among the Kiowa tribe. “According to the Kiowa,” your granny had once told you, “we humans were originally an underground species. We were down there, in the underworld, until the day Saynday turned us small as ants and then led us through a hole in a felled cottonwood tree. The humans climbed out, but at last there was a snag. A certain pregnant lady, she got lodged there like Pooh Bear in that opening. One half above, one half below. The Kiowa say that she’s still stuck there, half the people of the world trapped beneath.”