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.
Only you could see that history now. He was with you in that black hole, and his eyes showed his own skewed dimensions, displaying his memories to you like some grim cinema. The son of a sanitation worker, a punishing hiss of a father, whose limbs were heavy with the violence of his own youth. A boy whose mother was cuffed and sent back across the river when he was just five, evanescing into a vague memory of abandonment, a scar in his life that was visible to everyone. A kid who had grown up on the west side of town, in a community treated like itinerant labor, a community that itself treated him—a quiet, stammering boy—like a punch line to some joke; schoolyard couplets had been written about Hector’s pussyness, his supposed fartlike smell. A young man whose only comfort was his unspeakable dream of escape through the songs he’d learned to sing to himself when no one was around. One day, outside the schoolhouse, Hector had been crooning along to a track by Boyz II Men on his Walkman when a heavy palm fell on his shoulder. Wincing, Hector tugged the headphones off to find a mustached face grinning down upon him. “Get a load of that voice!” the theater teacher, Mr. Avalon, said. The next day, under the promise of singing lessons, Hector climbed into Mr. Avalon’s nice Cadillac.
All of this, in the jumbled time of your black hole, you could see at last. And now you understood that the kinship you’d known that night on Rebekkah’s lawn had a deeper cause. Hector was, in fact, a lot like you, but an Oliver of another, much darker planet. He was a stammering, angry creature, what your own awkwardness might have turned you into if not for your mother’s constant bolstering. He was another boy with thwarted artistic dreams, but whereas you could imagine many alternate futures, Hector was not so lucky. When Hector gazed down the forlorn tracks of his future, he could see only his father’s trailer, a blighted career in manual labor, a fate so much worse for the brief hope Mr. Avalon had given him, all the ways Mr. Avalon had used the hope to do with Hector whatever he liked, before losing interest in the boy completely. And no matter the exact events of November fifteenth, they were the sickness that you shared, the particular disease that had transformed you both, the curse that had turned you into some tall tale, shackling you together in that in-between.
Once upon a time there was a boy who fell through a crack in time, but he didn’t fall all the way. Like the woman in the cottonwood tree from his granny’s stories, his torment was to remain there, half of him on either side, pinning a desperate populace below, a cacophony that rattled his every night. But now, at last, hands were reaching to pull him free.
In a swift motion, Hector stooped over you. Ten years prior, he had found his own escape from the hell of his doomed hope, and now he had come back to deliver you the same mercy. Fear pounded in your temples as you waited for Hector to drag you off into his unknowable region, not heaven or hell, not the past or the future, just a relieving nothingness. You could see it: the placeless white place opening its bright, mute crevice. A benevolent eye cracking open. The endlessness that was the truth of time, a great blind sea that would mercifully sweep away the little dark mote of your few years on earth.
Hector reached to your neck, but just as his hands touched your skin, they turned vaporous. No, please, not yet, because now another morning had come to Bed Four, because even after you had failed that last test, your mother had returned.
“See?” Ma said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Someday she’s gonna give birth,” your granny had told you, and now, at the sight of your mother, even still hunched over your body, the story that pinned you there had begun to beat back to life inside you, kicking and clawing its way toward daylight.
Your story. After years of rehearsing the tale of your last days, it had come to seem hardly a story at all, just a life fractured by the bad coincidence of where you had stood at a certain moment in time. Why?: like your family, you had shouted that word, even when you couldn’t shout, and then you had turned an ear to the silence, even still believing that an explanation might come. It never had, at least not in any words you could hear. And yet, you had learned well from your father the cosmological mysteries forever tipped in life’s favor: the invisible and unending battle between matter and antimatter in which matter just slightly won out; the way that a few lifeless molecules, sparked in the right conditions, become a living chain of organic material. For reasons no scientist can name, the universe forever chooses something over nothing, and so why could it not also have chosen something for you? Maybe you had never needed to ask what the days and years in your bed had meant; maybe your survival was the answer. Locked in that space between one world and the next, your body was all that had held open the only passage to a place that no one else could see or know.
And yet, yours was a story you could never have delivered on your own. Those hands—your mother’s hands, Margot Strout’s hands—even still you could feel that they were reaching down to help you. They were still there today, pulling and pulling. But your liberation would also take other hands, hands at last pushing from below, from that hell of silenced voices beneath your bed, that lost dimension, where you had trapped them. You could feel them there now, those two hundred trillion particles entangled with your own, pushing at your feet, allowing little gaps in the seal. Just tiny slits hissing apart, but you paused to look down into those openings. And at last, after nearly ten years, there they were. Rebekkah and your father, coming home.
Rebekkah and Jed
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Halfway down the jet bridge of gate six of the Midland International Airport, Rebekkah Sterling understood she had made a terrible mistake. She flashed on the feverish, chain-smoking image of herself from just two days ago in her apartment on Eighth Street, the self-chastising, resolution-making Rebekkah that Charlie’s condemning voice in her telephone had briefly let loose in her. But she found that this prior Rebekkah was a completely different person than the timid girl who emerged into the dull regional terminal. What could she possibly have been thinking to so impulsively buy a plane ticket? Rebekkah walked up to a woman wearing a silly sailor’s cap, fashioned in the corporate red and blue of her airline. “When is the next flight back to New York?”
“But you’ve just landed,” the airline woman pointed out.
Rebekkah nodded. “You’ve got me there. But when is the next one?”
There was one direct flight to New York a day, and the woman informed Rebekkah it was not until the next morning. Progressing toward baggage claim, Rebekkah hefted a mesh duffel, and through its screening, she spoke to the smushed face of its contents. After the heavy course of expectorants a vet had prescribed, Edwina could once more whine at guilt-inducing volumes.
“Don’t cry, pupster, we only have to be here for eighteen hours.”
One night on the phone, a few years before, when her mother had tried again tentatively to raise the topic of Rebekkah’s “plans,” Rebekkah had sighed and said that, with her alleged music career going nowhere, she might quite like to be a triage nurse, a wartime Red Cross worker, a stitcher of shrapnel wounds. “Fixing up the war wounded,” her mother replied theoretically. “Don’t have to think too hard about what a shrink might tell you.” Rebekkah’s mother didn’t push the point. Rebekkah’s father had long ago absconded to an early “retirement” in Thailand, and Rebekkah knew that her mother now needed Rebekkah much more than Rebekkah needed her. “I’m being honest,” Rebekkah told her mother. “I think it would be nice to give yourself over to something like that.” The appeal of suc
h employment, or so Rebekkah believed, was not in the mending of shattered history, but in the surrender to a force much greater than herself. Since November fifteenth—no, even before that, really—Rebekkah had always sought irrefutable directives from the world, and now she received the flight schedule of American Airlines like its own airtight argument. A half hour later, as she and Edwina climbed into a rental Ford Fiesta and emerged from the garage into that impossible blue sphere of Texan sky she remembered, Rebekkah tried to believe that this return wasn’t exactly her choice any longer, that the schedule of things had taken her choice away from her.
Of course it was Charlie’s phone call—his call and the terrible, astonishing things she had read about Oliver online—that had brought her back here, but even as Rebekkah piloted her Fiesta in the southwestern direction of the Big Bend, it was hard to imagine how she could really do it, how she could possibly do the thing she had come back to do, say the thing she had come back to say.
And as for visiting Oliver in his hospital bed? Too horrible for her even to consider just now. When Rebekkah still dreamed of Oliver, his skin was painted the vicious red-black of dried blood, studded with the pebbles and dust Oliver accumulated as he dragged his body toward her across a Chihuahuan flat.
The hugeness of the blue above her, the strewn material of desert earth; where, in this sky-blasted land, could Rebekkah go to try to reconstitute any of the resolve she had known two nights ago on Eighth Street? She pushed a lever, signaling a left turn to no one.
Rebekkah, whose family had only landed in Bliss for a three-year stopover on her fracking engineer father’s world-tour plunder of the earth’s petroleum resources, did not know any homecoming feeling or any tragic sense of lapsed time as she drove, two hours later, through the broken, decomposing stuff of Bliss. The town was in reality just what it had become in her memory, a rotting exoskeleton, harmful only if you got too close and inhaled its toxic spores. Rebekkah aimed the Fiesta and half closed her eyes as she passed by Bliss Township School.
And on the far side of Bliss was the end of the earth, or at least the end of human civilization. Not so much a landscape but a minimalist study, perfect cerulean dome above, perfect brown plane below. It was five in the afternoon and the sun went on and on.
Rebekkah continued through the Chihuahuan, in the general direction of the distant blue shapes of the mountains just gnawing their way over the horizon now. Edwina lolled on her back in the passenger seat, luxuriating in a slant of sunlight. This place had never been Rebekkah’s home. Rebekkah’s home was nowhere and everywhere. It was a string of McMansions, in Scotland, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Dubai, Norwalk. Then again, Rebekkah felt that West Texas was also exactly the place she was from, nowhere at all. She was a no one from a nowhere. She felt she was a dabbler, a failed musician, a dilettante, a bum who had made her hovel beneath the bridge of a trust fund—a kind of end-of-childhood bonus her grandmother had established for the successful survival of her first eighteen years. Her life was like an organism in a laboratory cage, and Rebekkah was the scientist studying it through a two-way mirror. What happens to a human after unchanging years, what was the smallest amount of human connection a person needed to live, what was the least that was necessary? She made music and shared it with no one. Her past, and the lost future, all of it belonged inside the cheap drywall, particle board, and chintzy masonry that constituted her family’s abandoned house in the Big Bend, alone on Monte Grande Lane, where Rebekkah now put the Fiesta in park.
Oliver. She was not so far from him now, but in the desert distances deceived. She was fifty miles from the actual Oliver in his bed at Crockett State, but the bland house standing on its gray patch of lawn was just like the boy she’d known. The doors locked, the rooms empty. But, no, not empty. It had, Rebekkah knew, been so much easier to believe that Oliver was only an empty house, too, devoid of animating life. And yet, when at last she found out the truth, it seemed to Rebekkah that she had already known, all along.
For nearly a decade, Rebekkah had practiced the words to tell her true story. Often, walking alone in the silent streets of Brooklyn, beneath another stranger’s body in the Lower East Side, burning through an insomnia in the bright lights of midtown, Rebekkah had sickened herself with the plain fact that she could have just told it to anyone. Any police officer, her mother, a therapist, a woman on the street, Charlie. But the words were still there, boxed up and filming with dust inside her.
Rebekkah cracked the car door and the immense heat outside crashed over her, a wave of memory, washing years away. The ache of acne was back on her teenage chin, her stomach cramped in the way it always had in those months. The unwashed body smell of her secret covered her. Rebekkah reached for the handle to reseal the door, but it was too late. Edwina had torpedoed out and was presently doing a manic relay race on the brown front lawn. Rebekkah inhaled a sorcery of dust. She was twenty-seven years old when she lifted a foot out of the rental car and put it on the combed cement. She was seventeen years old by the time she stood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
On a sofa fifty-five miles to the northwest, at 14 Paisano Lane in Marfa, Jed blinked from his nap, looked at his piebald hands, his grimy fingernails. For six nights straight, Jed had been battling angels. The archangels, the garbage angels, his latest so-called series.
Last night, fueled with a liter of Dickel and two orange Adderall pills he had scored off Francisco, the fifty-year-old hotel bellhop, the battle had raged beyond reason. Jed vs. the angels, and the angels had won. He had taken chain saw and blowtorch to the metal scraps of a great winged behemoth, but the angel’s face only grew more damning, his wings spreading more gloriously. Moonlight on rusting metal; a burn in his throat; steel and wood and plastic taking strange shape. His fight with Eve at the dump, all he had said and had never said. Metal filings burst into his goggles. He had burned through the night, the next day, too.
At 5 P.M., Jed was extinguished. The substances had made their gloomy exit, and his gums were bleeding from the clenching of jaws on dental negligence. Jed was nearly asleep again when some alarm cut through his fog, like a sharp smell in the air. His phone, screaming him back to the late afternoon in his Marfa bungalow. The state of Jed’s house: he had to search his phone acoustically, waiting for the next ring to suggest its location. The thing was beneath a wadded grease-stained sack, atop a pile of old newspaper he was saving for poor man’s drop cloth. On the seventh ring, he found the cheap purple plastic, lifted the receiver. He tried to collect himself, mask his exhaustion with volume. His voice ended up coming out like some television announcer. “Hello!”
“Jed? You’re there. Good. This is Manuel Paz speaking.”
Jed could hear, in the voice of this officer, a strange tone competing with Manuel’s old Texan formality. An unsteady undertow pulling at the vowels, drawing them out. Why had Jed answered? For days now, since Dr. Rumble called with the news of the bad test with Margot, Jed hadn’t turned up to work. He’d played possum both times that he had heard Manuel’s car in the drive.
“What? What is it now?” Jed was catastrophically sober, his eyes not working in parallel.
“I wanted to talk to you about this in person,” Manuel said, “but I couldn’t find you at the hotel, and nobody answered the door when I came by.”
“Doorbell’s busted.”
“Ah.”
Silence. Jed, a man who had lived inside of silence for fifty-seven years, felt all this particular silence might hold, all he still might not know. He thought of Manuel Paz, the boy he’d grown up with, the men they’d become.
“Manuel. Speak,” Jed said.
Sometime later. Jed was driving his pickup against the sunset, to the east. He didn’t know where he was going, but the need for movement was the first clear thought his wobbling sobriety could shape after Manuel had told him too much: Eve’s shoplifting, Margot still at work with Oliver, questions and questions about Hector, Rebekkah, and his son, those weeks, that night. “I k
now what you’ve been going through, and I’ve been trying to keep you out of it to spare you the agony, but I just can’t get my mind off it, and I need to know,” Manuel had said.
“I don’t know,” Jed had told him, several times over. As if, even now, even still, he could plug the black groundswell by pretending. By pretending that he could not still hear the ice river sloshing beneath every hour of his life, a time and place he had tried so hard to cover with flimsy material, with George Dickel No. 8, Pall Malls, white canvas, garbage. It hadn’t worked, not for long. Down there, Jed was still years younger. Seeing, not speaking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rebekkah was seventeen years old, standing outside her family’s house that August. Her third-period theater teacher, Mr. Avalon, had given her a ride home. Oddly, when Rebekkah stepped from his Cadillac, he exited, too, as if she had invited him into the house. This was how it began.
“They’re gone a lot, aren’t they?” Mr. Avalon asked. “I’ve seen you walking home a few times.”
Rebekkah shrugged. She tried to project the confidence she affected at school, the up-for-anything girl, but a half pint of her mother’s gin, which she had been rationing through the school day in her thermos, had gone to her head. The act of trying to straighten her spine was exhausting, and Rebekkah was chagrined at the sound of her own childish, teary sniffles.
“Poor thing,” Mr. Avalon said. He slung an arm over her shoulder as if this were how teacher and student were supposed to touch. What did Rebekkah know? Maybe it was. “I know how that goes, my folks were the same way. But listen, if you ever need anyone to talk to…” Mr. Avalon said, and Rebekkah nodded.
No denying it, when Rebekkah was near Mr. Avalon the air felt glamorized. Twenty years had passed since Mr. Avalon had found and lost a little fame playing Latino standards on the Tejano circuit, but still a strange halo of renown hung around the lean, aloof, olive-skinned man. “He looks like a rock star, doesn’t he?” the girls in her class asked, and Rebekkah had to agree. Mr. Avalon must have been near fifty now, but still some kind of feckless teenageness clung to him, in his lank, shining hair, his unbuttoned black shirts, the schoolboyish way he’d kick back at his teaching desk, sneakers crossed on the tabletop. Reginald Avalon’s Theater Club had an aura unknown to other school clubs. People treated a spot in his biannual Bliss Township Tejano Espectacular like a Broadway casting. His club offered only two performances a year, at the Homecoming Dance and at Prom, and the tryouts for this fall’s show had been a big drama. Even a newcomer like Rebekkah couldn’t fail to notice the deep antipathy in the way the school self-segregated, the gibberish Spanish that the showoff white boys barked at their Hispanic classmates, the menacing jocularity of the Latino guys who hung around the front gates, the occasional shoving matches that broke out in the halls. But, apparently, to get your heart broken by Mr. Avalon was one of the few activities for which the Hispanic and white students would line up together. Rebekkah couldn’t blame her fellow classmates for hating her a little. Rebekkah had a spot in the show, and she hadn’t even tried out. Mr. Avalon had just heard her sing a selection from Les Misérables in his theater class and simply insisted that she join.
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