For a very long time, you tried your best to stay on the right side of sanity. As the voices and faces over Bed Four began to bleed their specificity, as the whiteness in which you had been lost began to fade its way back into your days, you tried to remain diligent. Before the truer madness came, you invited minor illusion as the key to sanity. You learned how much a human body needs movement, how much you missed it. And so you devised a fiction of another place, your old house at Zion’s Pastures, in which you tried to believe. When Nurse Helen woke you under your purple felt blanket in the morning, you called the cell in which you found yourself your bedroom. The morning ablutions—the salving of your bedsores, the shaving of your face, the emptying of a foil sack of Jevity into your G-tube—you thought of as your old home’s bathroom. Ma’s daily visit was the front door thrown open, and as she spoke to you, you were strolling among the cacti and ocotillo, the bluffs and the buzzards. The occasional trip to the physical therapy room—where assistants tied your limbs to machines to spin, gyrate, flex the rot out—you thought of as a rare trip to town. Alone at lights-out, left with not even the company of the radio, only the endless electronic percussion of the machines that kept you alive—well, it took great effort to think of it as a dinner at your old dining room table. And yet, you tried to believe.
A few months before your own imprisonment in Bed Four, you had read a story about a prisoner locked in the lightless cell of solitary confinement at Alcatraz. Denied light, a view, any material thing to focus his attention, this prisoner developed a blind game of solitaire. It was a very simple game. He tore a button from the thick wool of his uniform, chucked that button to ricochet against the black walls, and spent a long while on all fours, feeling for the metal tab. Victory was short-lived; just as soon as the button was in hand, the prisoner tossed it off again.
In your own prison, you were not so lucky as to possess a button, nor could you lift a hand to throw, nor were you able to crawl around to search. But when your horror blunted to boredom, the boredom became unbearable. And so, in lieu of a button, you plucked a date at random, tossed it through the locked hallways of your awareness, then went fumbling around to see what you could find.
Your last Fourth of July: you sent that date skittering, and after a good long search, you felt its shape. The abrasive zest of gunpowder in the air of Bliss Stadium. Your father’s hands, sticky with the runoff of a Popsicle. A child puking something electric green on his Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. The image fizzing to black, you grabbed for another, your thirteenth birthday: the high bright sun over the national park. A picnic on the bald summit of the Lost Mine Trail. Charlie extending his arms as if he might attempt flight off the steep overhang. No, wait. That was your twelfth. Thirteen was laser tag in Midland: screaming with weapon in hand, Fatboy Slim thumping through the darkness. Dr Pepper, Doritos, and sheet cake in the linoleum-dull party room.
You clutched these little facts in your palm until your solitude came crushing back down upon you, and then you plucked another, throwing it as far as you could. And after a great many tossings, when you pressed your fingers around a day and held it up to your mind’s eye, the madness of your solitude transmuted it with a desperate kind of magic. A December fourth in your fist was no longer just some shining bundle of facts, trapped beneath the enamel. Your brother’s birthday—a horseback ride to the Window pour-off, your mother snapping photos of the wedge of sky over the canyon, your father smoking cheerily atop a boulder—now that memory cast bright light, like a single rip in a black window shade, filling the walls of your confinement with high Texan daytime. You poked at that light, and its edges crumbled, fell away. September third, less than ten weeks before: a paddle of prickly pear, the pinkened skin on your arms, the weedy scent of creosote, the morning sun slanting brightly into Rebekkah’s eyes as you found her there, outside Bliss Township School. “Oliver,” she said, your name in her mouth sounding, to your hopeful, prelapsarian heart, like an invitation. “There she is,” you found that you could reply, as you had not on the actual day. Because now your buttons worked like little wormholes to the lost universe of your memories; they worked like the great wooden doors to the school in front of you: an opening through which, for a time, you could escape the smoldering hell outside.
And yet, of course, hell always came back to you, the bowie knife clock setting the metronome, parceling out your suffering in a series of ticks. Your body only lay there, enduring your mother’s attentions—her changing of your socks, her reading aloud of magazines, her shaving of your clenched jaw. What was left for you now? Someday you would tell your story: that was the only sense you could make of what your life had become. You told yourself that you were trapped there so that someday you could come back to the living and tell what you had seen. And so, for a long while, you spent your time retracing your steps back to that placeless place, feeling for your last days, searching for what they had shown you, if only you had known to look: the actual reason Rebekkah tossed away your hand outside the football stadium that night, the truth about the man you’d seen outside her door, the exquisite ache of the dozens of early-morning conversations with Rebekkah, when you had never pressed her to explain just a little bit more. And, of course, the greatest torment of all, that one button you sought more than any other. It caused you great pain, but that memory became an obsession, an infection in your palm. November fifteenth. The unblemished starscape over West Texas, Rebekkah swaying softly in a column of light. An understanding that had come too late.
But there were only so many times you could relive those last tormenting days, and for whole weeks at a time, you set your buttons aside. And as Dr. Rumble, Nurse Helen, Peggy, your mother, and occasionally your brother and father continued to speak, their voices began to run together into a meaningless sound, distant thunder. You at last lost yourself into some dreamy, hazy state, the endless daydream of your life just a mirage of heat thrown off the baked Chihuahuan. You were nothing; you were vapor. Whole months passed that way, in your wordless place. There are no words for it.
And yet, sometimes, a charge gathered in the atmosphere, and you felt yourself sharpening to a thunderbolt. The meteorological sciences are notoriously tricky; it could be hard to know what confluence of conditions churn the thunderstorm. A Bob Dylan song on the boom box, a nurse’s cool hand cupped to your jaw, the familiar smell of some foodstuff from the cafeteria. All those things, together, would strike you back to awareness, writing your whole sad predicament in lightning: Ma’s eyes, your empty throat, the giggle of the machine circulating the business of your bladder and bowels, your mechanized bed, breathing beneath you. Sometimes, however, the conditions were more obvious, a major new front sweeping into your room. One day, for example, after a very long time away, your brother’s face—or not exactly his face, but a stylish, bespectacled, adult rendition—returned to your bed. “It’s me,” Charlie said, and you could hear him perfectly. And in the weeks that followed, you continued to hear, too well.