Another very unexpected arrival at Bed Four. You recognized something familiar in her doughty face, her intensive cheer. Once, very long before, she had spent a day whispering into your ear, palpating you. From time to time, in the months afterward, she came to your bed and wept, like so many others. “Hello, Oliver, remember me?” she said now. “I’m Margot Strout. I’m here to work with you again.”
And it was true, she did work, or at least she tried. She interrogated your body, laboring all day. “Twice for yes, once for no.” And yet, it was also true that when her hands cramped up against your cheeks, your eyelids, your throat, she’d rub at the pain and tell you other things, not strictly related to work. “Oliver, you are the reason, the reason for everything that has happened to me. It’s clear as day to me now,” she said, as if it were a compliment. “Do you know that? Twice for yes, once for no.”
To be kind, you did try to flinch, twice for yes. “Love you,” you heard the computer tell your mother a dozen times over, and sometimes you could nearly convince yourself it really was you speaking.
In fact, you were not as troubled by all this as people might assume. Why not let your family believe whatever they needed? As the border between waking and sleep had grown ever more porous, you let yourself dream up stories of your own. You weren’t Oliver Loving at all, you decided, only a ghost who had taken possession of a vegetative patient named Oliver Loving. When your brother rubbed his hands against your hands that couldn’t rub back, when your mother embraced a body that could not embrace in reply, you would think that this Oliver Loving, this family, that past, none of it was actually yours. That you were, in truth, only a ghost subletting this skull, pitying the original owner. Soaking up that family’s heartache as if it were your own. In this story, you found you could even forgive your father for failing to come see you for so long. Divorced from yourself, you saw what torture it would have been to visit the body that once belonged to his son. As a ghost, you were the better form of yourself, copasetic, generous, accepting.
All of that you could bear, but what you could not bear was to witness your mother lose the last hope that bound her to your bed. What object did we show you? What story? What song? your doctor asked you one day. Please, you tried to shout, and yet could not shout. Heartbroken, Ma left you there, alone in Bed Four. Please, you were still shouting that night, when at last a voice answered you.
“Okay, okay. Quiet down now.” It was that night, almost ten years after, that a ghost visited you at Bed Four.
But this ghost was very different from the kind you had nearly convinced yourself that you’d become. This was the sort of ghost that perhaps can only exist in a place like yours, where time is jumbled, where the dead can take on all the qualities of the living. His footfalls against the linoleum sounded just like any ordinary living person’s. And you could smell this ghost, piney marijuana and the locker-room tang of a depressive’s weak hygiene. You tried to ignore this reek and focus on your music, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, playing softly on your stereo, but the volume clicked off. No, you thought, wanting to close your eyes to sleep. But your eyelids were pulled shut only by the tide of your drowsiness, not something you could choose to close at will. You were very awake and so you had to see. Hands grasped your ears and turned your head. Your gaze stuttered over the last face you had seen in the final instants of your walking life.
“There’s a sight for sore eyes,” Hector Espina said.
Hector Espina was a ghoulish rendition of the boy you had vaguely noticed around the school halls, the young man whose shape you had lit up with Goliath’s headlights one night outside Rebekkah’s house. But something was wrong with his face now. A third, unseeing eye, just over his brow, the wound of his suicide still faintly leaking. For a long while, you only looked at each other, Hector trying to gauge something in your eyes, which fluttered over the bleak wreckage of his face. You might never have spoken with Hector when you had your one chance, out there in front of the Sterling residence that night, but at last he was speaking to you now.
“And so what,” he finally said, his voice a harsh whisper. A tone that suggested a certain black camaraderie, as if you were colleagues in wickedness, two gang bosses breaking from street warfare to renegotiate terms. “So now you thought you’d found a way out of here, is that it? And I’ll bet you think you have quite a story to tell.”
Under the pressure of Hector’s proximity, you felt the magmatic force of your rage, which had, at the beginning of your stay in Bed Four, incinerated whole months. You had a senseless hope, burbling angrily inside you, that you might still find a way to say what you had never said. But then something struck you. Hector’s brimstone tears, sizzling on the skin of your arm.
“You and I, Oliver, we’re more alike than you could know.”
And Hector was right: when your gaze now met his, what you saw, in his weary and death-fogged eyes and in the small abyss in his brow, was something of yourself.
And so, in the Legend of Oliver Loving, you had at last arrived to the monster in your labyrinth. But your monster was much more terrifying than that burnt-out, bald-headed kid your town had vilified. Your true monster was just an aspect of yourself, in Hector’s face. Years had passed; you had fallen asleep a boy and woken as an aging man. You had not yet seen your face in a mirror, but Hector’s face suggested what you might find. Something deformed by death and time. Hector Espina: another boy your town had turned into a myth, ignorant of his true story.