No more schemes, he’d actually written in his Moleskine after hanging up with Christopher at the filling station. No great ambitions. A nice quiet life. Over the arduous, arm-numbing motorbike trek, Charlie had searched his mind for his archetype of such a life and decided, by the time the city’s lights began pinkishly to smear the eastern night sky, that he might never return to the Big Bend or New York, that he might just apply for a job at an Austin library. And if a future as a librarian seemed constitutionally impossible, Charlie resolved to keep his brother’s old journal close, hoping an occasional perusal would remind him how thoroughly he had failed.
But this surreal anarchist existence in the Austin suburbs had turned out to be something else entirely, not a great failure’s aftermath but a strange new thing, and Charlie’s forays into his revised future had been as forbidding as his attempts to engage with the trippy milieu of Anti-House. Charlie spent most of his time in the teahouse, sweating to the verge of unconsciousness as he paged through the few novels the anarchists kept, the predictable collection of Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac, Vonnegut. At night, from the living room of Anti-House, it sounded as if a large family of stringed instruments were being slowly tortured to death. Charlie listened enviously to the anarchists’ heedless good cheer, wondering how those people believed in that sort of camaraderie, wondering what the hell was wrong with him, how he could have made his life into something as small and illusory as a series of abandoned word processor documents and a rumpled, coffee-stained, unfulfillable contract.
Charlie had been staying there, among the blooming psychedelics, for three days when Christopher one night managed to grope his way clear of Tom Zane to come alone to the teahouse. Christopher attempted a sort of reenactment of the time they met, in a backroom dance party beneath the Williamsburg Bridge, kissing before they exchanged a word. Christopher came in someone’s second-or third-hand robe and a snug pair of boxer briefs, his face a little silly in its lascivious intent. He lowered himself over Charlie, pressing their mouths together.
When Charlie slipped his hands against the young man’s sternum, and he felt the unusual convex shape he remembered, as if Christopher carried a doubled heart beneath his ribs, Charlie’s face went hot with tears. Christopher, at first mistaking the sound for encouragement, increased the friction on his cock, until at last Charlie pulled the hand away.
“What happened to you?” Christopher asked.
“I don’t know.”
“If this is about Tom—”
Charlie grinned. “It’s nice, how you’re helping that boy.”
“Is it? Sometimes I think it might be better for him if I just made him go home.”
“Well, I guess we can’t know.”
After Christopher had left that night, Charlie lay on the crummy futon, listening to the deep bass thump of the nightly revelry inside the anarchist bungalow. Some shadow appeared in the back door and fired a Roman candle into the night, white contrails arcing over the glass roof. Like someone’s grumpy neighbor, Charlie worried about the fire hazard. He was thinking, What do you have to celebrate? Yet he knew they had everything to celebrate. It was just being young and everything being in the future. They were at the beginning of their story, and Charlie felt at the end of his own. Charlie was only twenty-three, but he felt his bones aging beneath his skin, and as for what was beneath Oliver’s skin? Charlie felt that all of his journal obsessing, writing, and street stalking had been for naught, that all he had were his wrong stories.
However. Here was the strange paradox: liberated at last from any possibility of knowing, of any hope that he might at last find his way to one of their old mythic passageways, Charlie felt freed to fail. He felt freed to indulge the nostalgia that pained him that night, free to set aside his doomed journalistic ambitions, free to imagine his own imagined, incomplete Oliver back into existence, if only on the pages of his own Moleskine. Just Charlie’s idea of Oliver, which had always seemed much clearer to Charlie than his idea of himself. Your name is Oliver Loving, Charlie wrote.
When Christopher had come back that night with a hamburger in a Styrofoam clamshell he’d smuggled past his vegan cohort, he asked if Charlie might want to “take a stab at this Twitter account we’ve been talking about starting. Tweets from people who could never have access to a computer. Who often can’t read or write. Nigerian sex slaves, Vietnamese factory workers, the imperiled indigenous people of Brazil. That sort of thing. We’ll call it ‘Tweets from Hell.’ But the thing is that we’ll need a really good writer, and I was thinking that’s maybe where you come in.”
“Who knows,” Charlie said. “Maybe that’s a job for me.”
But, in the meantime, Charlie continued to fill pages. He purloined a stack of anti-McDonald’s flyers from the anarchists, the backs of which he filled with more words.
Charlie knew his mother would call it textbook Charles Goodnight Loving. Charlie was still inhabiting a dream version of his brother, which he could describe with all the empathy in the world, as he meanwhile shut the actual Oliver away, just as he had turned away the daylight hours, turned off his cell phone and not turned it back on. Charlie had become a nocturnal animal, too busy in his moonlit foragings through the past to think much about the present-day Oliver, the ongoing drama at Bed Four, the next exam in El Paso. The guilt pangs only made Charlie write more quickly.
*
But now, a week after his arrival, Charlie woke in the midst of one of his daylong naps to find that for once his skin was not crisping in the heat. He went outside, and he took a deep breath of coolish September. Even the mockingbirds sounded less ornery that late morning, as chirpy as orioles. Charlie tried to write in the daytime, but he felt blank, sun dulled. He thought a little ride around town might sharpen his mind, but he couldn’t get his bike to start. His loyal Suzuki apparently had been a desert creature; in the verdant, humid Austin streets, it had finally expired.
It was that evening, as Charlie was pissing against a backyard live oak, shaking out the last droplets, that something furry brushed his ankle. He swung around wildly, clumsily stuffing himself back into his jeans, to find a black pug weepily clawing at his legs. The dog’s cockeyed face, features all cinched into an expression of lovable peevishness, was as unmistakable as it was impossible. Charlie stooped to pick up the pug, her overlong tongue working his forehead as he investigated the collar, where he found a pink rhinestone band, bearing a tag in the shape of a dog biscuit on which was printed the name EDWINA and Charlie’s own phone number.
“Edwina,” he said, and the animal wept afresh. “How?”
“Reunited and it feels so good.”
Charlie pivoted, Edwina’s legs cycling in the air. A figure was standing on the slab of pavement just outside the back door. She was a vision from a film noir, her hips swaying gently to one side.
“Rebekkah?”
“Surprised, I’ll bet,” she said. “But the truth is that I didn’t have much choice. Edwina here wouldn’t stop talking about you.”
“Funny,” Charlie said. “It was you that she used to go on and on about.”
Rebekkah shrugged. “I guess times change.”
“You found him,” Christopher said, joining them a minute later.