I don’t ask. I am done, for now, with questions. I follow my escorts inside, and I am overwhelmed by noise: a vigorous open-air bazaar is in full swing in the lobby of the Mirage, with market stalls set up and lines of customers haggling over clothing and food and small housewares.
“Six bucks? Fuck you,” says a beefy guy, shaking his head at a small woman with wiry hair and a handkerchief over the lower half of her face.
“No,” she says, tugging down the kerchief so she can enunciate better, “fuck you.”
The beefy guy steps up to the lady, making fists of both hands. The cop with the mustache steps toward the confrontation, but his partner, the young woman, stops him. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I got it.”
She strides over, hand on her gun, as I dodge a wheelbarrow laden with what looks like toasters and pencil sharpeners. Mustache takes my arm.
“You doing okay?”
“No,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I bet you’re not. C’mon.”
He leads us through the lobby, past the elevator bank, into a quiet dark room, and the feeling of the place is immediate and unmistakable: across all space and time, in whatever universe I may stumble into, the smell and feel of being in a bar remains the same. People are scattered at small tables throughout the room, nursing small glasses, and there’s a bored-looking bartender, a guy in round sunglasses with spiky hair, reading a book with the paper cover folded back. Before him, across the bar, is a man in a gigantic motorized wheelchair, nursing a glass of his own.
“Hey,” says the cop, and everybody looks up. But he’s talking to the guy in the wheelchair. “Hey Charlie. I believe this man belongs to you.”
The man in the wheelchair moves his right hand, just his right hand, to work a device on his armrest. Slowly the machine turns, and I can see his face.
“Charlie,” I say. “Oh, Charlie.”
The chair moves slowly toward me, and I walk toward him, almost as slowly as he comes toward me, so baffled am I, so weighted with astonishment. My feet plant and lift themselves one heavy step at a time as he rolls across the tile floor of the bar, the mechanics of his chair whirring as he comes. The cop steps back and crosses his arms, watching our reunion, and the bartender goes back to his book. Halfway across the bar, the front wheel of Charlie’s chair catches on a lip of tile, and the whole thing nearly totters over backward. He stops, fusses with his buttons, and navigates the obstacle.
“Lashed to the mast”. The phrase appears in my head. My long-lost brother, living still, is lashed to the mast.
We meet in the center of the room, and I crouch before him and put my hands on his narrow shoulders.
He cannot move his neck.
He says something, but I can’t hear him. His mouth barely moves and the words are faint and garbled. I bend closer.
“Heya, dickhead,” he whispers.
I follow him as he moves across the hotel, through the crush of people in the market. Old decommissioned casino games are shoved against the walls, unplugged. Felt tables have been made into market tables laden with goods. Way up above me are hotel rooms, doors hung with wreaths. Clotheslines are drawn between the mezzanine railings.
I stand beside Charlie in the elevator, shaking my head. His whole physical self is gone, his broad swaggering body is blasted and burned and shriveled, but I would know him anywhere. I would know him a thousand times.
“Welcome to”
Charlie writes those two words and I take the paper and wait while he writes more.
“my swinging”
I am smiling already, but I wait for it, for the third scrap of paper. He holds the nub of a pencil in his hand, between middle and pointer finger, clutching it fiercely between two knuckles, and it trembles wildly as he writes.
“bachelor pad”
I laugh. His face does not move. He is frozen. His face is a mess of old scars and burn marks, pocked and pitted and locked in place. His mouth is a sideways oval, a bent O angled toward his right cheek.
Charlie can’t talk. Not really. Each word he utters is a triumph of sustained effort and still comes out as a strangled, unearthly whisper.
“Charlie,” I keep saying, tears rushing down my cheeks, a hot rush. I feel like a dummy.
He has a sheaf of loose papers balanced in his lap. He writes, holds up papers for me, one at a time.
“Knock it off”
And then:
“you baby”
I would knock it off if I could. Instead I crouch down before him and hug his withered legs. His body is a coil of wire, bent up into a seated shape. He is impossibly thin, and immobile, slumped into the movable chair, head fixed in a half tilt, the muscles of his face unmoving.
I have presumed my brother dead for so long, though, and here he is, alive. There is terrified joyful movement inside my chest, small birds opening their wings.
The balcony of Charlie’s room’s has a view of the central courtyard of the hotel. From Charlie’s room you can look across at other rooms just like it, look up and down at other floors just like this one. The bazaar I walked through on my way in continues down below: as we talk, the sounds of haggling, contentious commerce waft up in a continuous stream.
The room is full of paper. There are the loose pages scattered on Charlie’s lap for these small conversational notes, but that’s just the beginning of it. His coat is overflowing with paper, his jacket pockets stuffed with paper. The room is full of filing cabinets, shelves, boxes, and I am certain that they’re stuffed with paper.
“You OK?”
I shake my head. “Not really. I went to your funeral, Charlie.”
He writes. The pencil jiggles between his knuckles.
“Me too”
I laugh. Good old Charlie. He’s still writing, writing two words at a time, writing—
“Arlo: smart”
I read it and his fingers are curling for me to give the note back. I do, and he scribbles, crosses out and amends, and hands it back.
“Me: smarter”
I don’t have to ask him about what happened next, once he disappeared from the Golden State. I spent twenty-four hours, give or take, in exile, in the desert between the Golden State and this place, whatever this place is. I know how I feel now, burned and blasted, twisted and wracked. My throat still feels dry and full of sand. So here’s my Charlie, after my day in the desert, plus months. Plus years. However long until he made it here.
He’s looking at me while I look at him, and then he does his effortful writing again, creating just one word:
“Beard?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I say. I put my hands up to my face self-consciously. “I started it after you were gone. I dunno why. Just—I dunno.”
His eyes don’t move. They are settled on my face. His chin ducks down then, very slightly, which seems to be the extent of movement he’s got, as far as moving his head. I crouch down before him, put my ear to his thin lips.
“It looks like shit.”
I laugh. He is not laughing but I know that he is.
“Fuck, Charlie,” I tell him. “You cheated death.”
His pencil moves across the paper. I wait for it.
“No. The”
I wait. Listen to the noise of the bazaar. Look around the cluttered, paper-ridden room.
“other way around”
It takes a long time for Charlie to explain everything that he wants me to understand. And it is a mark of how much Charlie remains Charlie—world-beating, stubborn, domineering Charlie—that he does not give a shit how long it takes.