Althea and Oliver (27 page)

“Did Stella know?”

“Stella's the one who talked to her.”

“Fuck me till I die.”

“Are you okay?” Will asks.

“I think I want to sit down somewhere.”

There's a pool hall across the street and down a flight of stairs. “Come on,” Will says.

It's basically a rec center for grown-ups. In a row of booths by the door, groups of men and women in their twenties are playing all manner of board games: Scrabble, Connect Four, Battleship. Farther back, past the bar, the space widens considerably to accommodate air hockey, several pool tables, and a Ping-Pong area enclosed in white mesh, presumably to keep the players from having to chase the tiny white ball across the filthy floor every time someone scores a point. Underground, without windows, it's stale and close; the heat is cranked up, and it smells like everyone's wet jackets. A row of couches separates the pool tables from a cement clearing where several microphones and a row of instruments, including an organ, are plugged in and ready, waiting for their masters to attend to them.

“You want to shoot a game of eight-ball?” asks Will.

Oliver starts to say no. Just looking at the vacant pool table fills him with dread—not because he's bad at it, but because he's very good. Althea is the one who's useless with a cue, and a sore loser. But wait; he's not here with Althea. “Sure.”

After Oliver pays for the game, Will wins the flip for the break and sinks two solids; Oliver chalks up his cue and assesses what's on the table. When Will misses his third shot, Oliver steps up and takes a good look at Will's face, reassuring himself that this guy can handle losing a game of pool.

“What?” says Will.

Oliver smiles. “Don't blink or you'll miss it.”

He leans over his stick and lines up the first shot, which sends the thirteen ball trilling neatly into a corner pocket. Examining the new configuration, Oliver circles the table, searching for the best angle to exploit. It's just simple geometry, which he has tried to explain to Althea. He doesn't struggle to block out the sounds—balls rocketing heavily into the pockets, the plastic tapping of the Ping-Pong ball across the room, the steady thrum of enthusiastic, beer-fueled conversation—but as he zeroes in on his task the noise naturally recedes, as if someone has thoughtfully turned down the volume so he can concentrate. It all goes away until it's just him and six stripes, now five, now four. He focuses, and one by one, he clears the rest off the table.

“Eight ball in the side pocket,” Oliver says, not daring to look at Will until it's over in case he's judged wrong. If Will is standing there in tears or in a rage, he doesn't want to know, doesn't want this moment spoiled yet, would like at least to finish what he started. The eight ball goes exactly where he wants it, with a precision that feels nearly telekinetic, and Oliver is sorry to see it disappear, because it means the game is over.

I win,
Oliver thinks.
I win and it's no big deal.

Will isn't crying, of course, because he is a normal person, but he doesn't seem astonished by Oliver's performance, either, and this is disappointing. “Nice” is all he says, and starts racking the balls. Oliver wonders if this is how Will is cloaking his irritation with being beaten so handily, by feigning nonchalance. Isn't that what normal people do? There's a name for it, he thinks—passive-aggressive. This is new to him, steeped as he is in so many years of navigating the plain old aggressive.

Oliver rummages through the leather nets lining the table's pockets, retrieving the balls as he finds them and rolling them toward Will. He had forgotten how much he liked their shiny solid weight and the way they gleam under the hooded lamps. Cheers erupt from a smallish crowd over by the microphones. The population of the couches has doubled, and several rows of people are lined up behind them, obscuring Oliver's view of the stage that isn't really a stage. Apparently whomever this audience has been waiting for has just come on.

“Winner breaks,” Will says, removing the rack to reveal a perfectly symmetrical triangle.

“Sure,” Oliver says. Sliding the cue through his fingers, he thinks about lithium tremors and eye twitches. Two months ago, if a doctor had offered him such a troubled cure, Oliver would have taken it without hesitating, confident that he had nothing else to lose. It seems now that he has more left than he thought.

“What's wrong?” asks Will.

“What would you give to make it stop?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Is there anything you wouldn't give up?”

“My balls,” says Will. “And my dick.”

“That's it?”

“I don't know. Maybe I could spare one ball.” So Oliver repeats what the doctor told him. “That's awesome.”

“Didn't you hear the rest of what I said?”

“You know what your problem is?”

“My fucking brain?” Oliver says.

“You're impossible to please,” says Will, shaking his head. “Did you think they would just wave a magic wand and make you better? Of course it's not perfect. It's an experiment.”

“So you're going to do it?”

“Shit yeah. As soon as we finish this game I'm gonna go back up there, put it all on black, and let them spin the wheel. Maybe they can just write me a script and send me home.”

“But it could turn you into a zombie.”

“I've been a zombie, believe me. I'm ready to take my chances with the devil I don't know. Now break already, so you can win and we can get out of here.”

As Oliver's aiming for the cue ball the organ starts in, and he knows the shot's no good before the balls have even stopped caroming. It's not a foul or a scratch, at least, but he loses his turn to Will, and with it goes whatever advantage Oliver might have had.

He is still processing—
an organ?
—when the music takes shape and a voice that is part James Brown rasp and part Baptist tent revival begins to sing, backed by what sounds like a chorus of three. Oliver's eyes meet Will's over the table.

Gospel?
Oliver mouths.

Here?
Will mouths back, gesturing around the room.

Oliver tilts his head in the direction of the music. Will nods, and they set down their cues in silent agreement, sidling up to the crowd so they can watch.

It is, in fact, a gospel band, led by a black woman in a white suit and a red beret covered in sequins. She's flanked by her female backup singers, who remind Oliver of three cardinals seated in a row on a telephone line, listening to the best news they've ever heard running through the wire beneath their feet. Poor Will is on his toes, trying to get a better look. Oliver takes his wrist and slips through to the front, where they quickly find a spot on one of the couches. Most of the audience is standing.

The woman in the beret is singing about love, but not the kind Oliver is used to hearing about in songs. There's nothing fleeting about the love she means; she's talking about something that doesn't go away when you're in a fight with your best friend or your dad dies or your mother leaves town to pursue her own nebulous destiny. Oliver supposes she might be singing about Jesus, but she doesn't call him by name, evoking instead the ideas of gratitude, courage, and compassion. Walking up and down the length of the crowd, radiant, she singles people out, turning her performance into a conversation. A thin Indian man wearing a porkpie hat over his shoulder-length, glossy black hair reaches out his hand and she clasps it with her free one, and they look into each other's eyes like there's nobody else around. Oliver assumes she must know him somehow, until she moves on and does the same thing to a tattooed girl with a Mohawk, who is in blissful tears by the end of their encounter.

In Wilmington, the same kids always turned up to see the punk shows, and among that particular clan there was not a whole lot of aesthetic variation; they looked the same because they had to, because that was how you recognized your people. But here there is no common denominator that Oliver can see, nothing that marks this group as a subculture. It's more like a cult that has drawn every kind of person, and the woman with the microphone is their leader. And if the purpose of Minty Fresh's band is cathartic stupefaction, to leave the audience feeling as though their brains have been scooped out of their heads like so many seeds from a pumpkin, then this music is meant to be the opposite. It's meant to fill you up with joy. Behind the audience, people are still playing their games of nine-ball and air hockey. How can they concentrate on anything other than this woman's sublime voice?

The band plays for over an hour. Will has forgotten his rush to get back uptown to the hospital and get busy with the devil he doesn't know. When the woman announces their last song, Oliver can't even bring himself to be disappointed, still reeling as he is from their amazing fortune at having stumbled upon them at all.

As the singer makes one final pass down the length of the crowd, Oliver reaches his hand out and she takes it. Her skin is warm and dry and chapped. For a few seconds, she sings directly to him, and that sense of possibility yawns before him again.
Hopelessness? Is that what that is?
he had asked the doctor, and it's still there, but it's turned transparent and he can see through to the other side, to a time when this will be the origin story he tells, the History of Oliver 101, and this moment was just the beginning. Everything is going to be okay—not now, not yet, but eventually he's going to have some kind of a life again.

And it's going to be awesome.

When the set is over and the band has departed, their listeners in a happy daze, Oliver and Will stumble around looking for their jackets.

“I didn't know I like gospel music,” Will says.

“Today has been full of surprises.”

On their way out, they pass a couple in a booth huddled over a game of Candy Land. Oliver pauses, watching. He wonders why these adults would be playing such a simple game, one without strategy that requires virtually no thought. All you do is pull a card from the deck and move your piece to wherever it tells you to go, and if you happen to cross the finish line first it's a testament to luck, not skill. But they don't care about who wins; he can tell by their faces. The game is just an excuse to sit together drinking beers and laughing, their feet touching slightly under the table, coats in a heap beside them. Whoever loses is not going to throw a fit, hurl their pint glass to the floor, and stomp out of the bar; there's no drunken confrontation brewing, no uneasy subtext beneath their conversation. They make it look so easy.

“I want to talk to her,” Oliver says. “I want to talk to her right now.”

“Then do it,” says Will.

It's still snowing outside, and the street around the pay phone seems to shimmer. Oliver listens impatiently as the phone rings and rings in Althea's house, and just when he thinks no one is going to pick up, Garth answers in his very sleepiest voice.

“It's me,” Oliver says.

“It's a little late to be calling, Oliver.”

“Sorry, sir. I didn't mean to wake you.”

“It's all right, you didn't really. Are you still in New York?”

“Yeah.”

“How's it going up there?” Oliver can hear Garth rearranging himself on the couch in his study, sitting up, taking a sip of his drink, moving a sheaf of papers from one place to another.

“I don't like hospitals and I don't trust doctors.”

“Sounds like you're learning all kinds of things about yourself.”

“The revelations, they just keep coming. How's the book?”

“Great fun. I'm leaving soon on a research trip to Mexico.” Garth sounds strange, unusually loose and jovial.

“You gonna stay at one of those resorts with the cabanas and a swim-up bar?”

“Think ancient temples and dusty manuscripts.”

He's drunk,
Oliver realizes with astonishment. Garth Carter has been hanging out alone in his study getting lit on his good scotch. Garth always has a drink in his hand, but Oliver has never once seen him intoxicated. “So, more Indiana Jones than winter break?”

“Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”

Oliver's shock must be showing on his face. Will is gesturing wildly, trying to get Oliver to give him some clue of what's going on.
It's her dad,
Oliver mouths.
I think something's wrong.
“Just don't drink the water,” he tells Garth.

“Don't worry, Ol. It's not my first rodeo.”

“What's Althea going to do while you're gone?” Oliver looks at Will and shakes his head. He pulls the handset away from his ear a little. Will squeezes into the kiosk, leaning in to listen.

“She's going to go with me. We're leaving after New Year's, as soon as she gets back from New Mexico.”

“New Mexico? But she hates Alice.”

“There's been some trouble since you left. Althea managed to get herself expelled in a particularly spectacular fashion, and things have been very difficult for her. Trust me. The best thing was for her to leave Wilmington for a little while.”

Will covers the receiver with his hand. “Maybe I was wrong,” he whispers. “Maybe it wasn't her.”

Oliver shakes his head again. “Now I know for sure that it was. She hates her mother.” He speaks into the phone. “I want to talk to her. What's Alice's number?”

“Oliver, do you remember the story I told you about Cortés? How he burned the fleet of ships he used to cross to the New World to force the loyalty of his soldiers?” Garth uses a cautionary tone that's hard to take seriously, considering he's slurring his words.

Is he drunk?
mouths Will.

Oliver nods, bewildered. “That guy was messed up.”

“Just be careful. Loyalty isn't always the virtue we think.”