That’s the last word on that page, “America,” and then it skips down a few lines and someone else in different handwriting has written, in parentheses and in very small letters, (“term?”).
It goes on. I can’t read anymore. I laugh at myself, shaking my head. I sit with the book in my lap, looking out the window of Charlie’s little room. The sky isn’t poisoned with lies, you idiot. It’s poisoned with poison.
“Hey,” says Charlie, working hard to get the word out. “Hey.”
He is holding out his working hand for the notebook, and I hand it to him. He flips back to the first page, takes his pencil and presses down hard, underlining a single word, the fourth word in the paragraph: “provisional.”
The roof of the Mirage is all farmland.
I followed Charlie up here in the elevator, and now I lope behind him through yet another alternate universe, a landscape of self-sufficiency rolled out high above the street.
The rooftop has been covered in soil, built over with greenhouses and silos. I follow in Charlie’s wake as he maneuvers past patches of unsown field, cornstalks growing in bent rows. He ably navigates the bulk of his chair between piles of mulch and a clatter of unused shovels and rakes. Dark soil is laid out right to the lip of the roof, with roots twisting into it deep, with the bulging, uneven bulbs of pumpkins twisting up out of the dirt.
Charlie writes.
“Mine all mine,” his note says.
He owns the pumpkin patch. He has papers for it. Other pieces of this common garden are owned by other people, all of it pipelined to the bazaar down below. The people of Las Vegas determined, one way or another, to create a civilization, dragging themselves along as they go.
Charlie angles his chair very close to the edge of the building to show me what he wants me to see: a wooden machine that he built, or maybe had built, right up at the lip of the roof. It’s a very simple structure, just a plank of wood balanced on a triangle, like a teeter-totter, suspended in place with a thick elastic band. And there’s a pumpkin placed, delicately, at the near end of the plank. It’s a catapult, and it’s loaded. Waiting to fire.
We regard this primitive invention for a moment in silence. I feel the heat of the day finally starting to dissipate as it gets closer to nighttime.
Charlie writes one of his notes, and I bend over him to read it:
“What happens?”
“What do you mean?”
But he doesn’t write anymore. He holds up the same paper again. “What happens?”
Meaning, I gather at last, dense Laszlo, what happens when you fire it? When you let loose the pumpkin? What happens?
“It’ll—it’ll go down. Fly over the side.” He waits. I look at his rickety machine, and then back at Charlie, still holding his paper, the scrap of interlocution, patient, insistent. “It’ll fly down and then smash on the ground below.”
I peek over the edge of the hotel, shade my eyes. I think I can see, just barely, the parking lot, littered with the smashed carcasses of pumpkins.
I step up to the machine. I haven’t seen him do it before, and I would have said it was impossible, but Charlie arches his eyebrows: mischievous. Daring.
So I fire the pumpkin. Release the band, step back, and watch the pumpkin fly off the board and disappear over the edge. Together we watch it go: hurtling down and down, arcing outward, tracing a long wobbling parabola until it makes its satisfying smack, loud on the pavement, and bursts into its gore atop and around the existing pile.
I look at Charlie. I’m grinning, weirdly exuberant. He’s already writing.
“Again”
“Again?”
“Again”
We fire the gun over and over. Six pumpkins, ten. The orange corpses pile up far below us.
I’m trying to figure out what the point of this is, what Charlie wants me to see by showing me his jury-rigged pumpkin-firing machine. But after the third or fourth pumpkin I’m mainly lost in the spectacle, holding my breath each time we launch a new projectile and it flips and spins in its ballistic descent toward the climax, the explosive moment of contact with the hard, flat parking lot, the bursting into chunks and lumps of stringy goo. And I laugh with delight and turn to Charlie and he’s waiting, head angled toward the pile, waiting for me to load the next one. This is not just fun, this is a demonstration of some kind, I’m sure, some lesson to be learned about the Golden State, about how we have huddled fearfully away from the edge of the world, burrowing molelike inside our small store of truth, blinding ourselves to the possibility of more. Or maybe the idea here is something even more elemental, more base—Charlie sphinxlike in his wheelchair, watching me work the machine, waiting for me to get it—maybe the message is that Arlo and his revolutionaries, with their contempt for the very idea of truth, that they are wrong, too, and that they are even wronger. Maybe what Charlie wants me to get is just that when you shoot a fucking pumpkin off a roof the same thing happens every time. Every single time.
But then when we’re done, when we’ve depleted our whole pile of pumpkins, before we go back to the elevator, my brother struggles his one working hand off the armrest, lifts one finger to jab me in the center of the chest. He pushes at my sternum, above my heart, with a push that is surprisingly firm. Then he takes the same finger and slowly pushes it into his own chest. Drawing an invisible line between his heart and my own.
-
This is a novel.
Some of the words in it are true and a lot of them are not and a lot of them are of that indeterminate third
