The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (12 page)

Jackson had not told Julia about her younger son’s relationship with speed: partially out of a loyalty stemming from childhood, partially because she probably wouldn’t know how to deal with it any better than we could. He had dropped out of high school that fall, in his junior year, earned his GED, and bizarrely aced a few classes at the junior college (German, philosophy, marine biology) as well as assistant-managing the motel and writing music that grew consistently, and almost scarily, impressive. “Oh please tie a red balloon around my neck / the ribbon so long and the circle so full,” he sang from the back of his throat in a song that haunts me, “so if I can’t stay you’ll see me through the depths / the living so long and the breathing so dull.” The classes at the JC, he made clear, were not toward any sort of goal. They were for the sake of knowing—goddamn it—like they should be.

The explosion we’d been expecting came the summer before we were to leave for college, but not from the direction we’d expected.

J
ames stopped around twelve, the age most sleepwalkers generally do. Jackson persisted. It generally manifested in the benign and comical ways everyone thinks of: he would walk halfway to school before waking up and realizing it was Saturday; he would fill the fish tank with silverware; he would pick up the phone and mumble into it, then leave it hanging from its cradle so that in the morning the operator was still crooning
If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again
. So what happened, five months prior to Jackson’s and my leaving our hometown, was a shock—though it portended the life he and I would live years later.

I had taken up with Dillon, the much older speed freak James was so fond of, mistaking his hummingbird mind for brilliance rather than years of drug use. I hadn’t offered Jackson any real explanation or apology, just made small shifts in my attitude and ceased picking up his phone calls.

The rumors about Dillon were that he stole, he back-stabbed, he had once lit a tree in front of his house on fire and cackled while it burned until the cops came—but he took an interest in me, he wanted to talk about the books I was reading, began leaving strange packages on my doorstep, calling the high school pretending to be my father and getting me out early so I could come down to the bar where he worked and surreptitiously drink for free. He was my first sexual experience besides Jackson, and it was compelling. In his strange apartment, he stayed between my legs until I could barely move; he shook and sweat and called me names I’d never been called; he held me so tight afterward I had to breathe a different way; he told me I had a mind beyond my years and that he loved me.

The affair lasted all of a month. It wasn’t long before the exotic appeal wore off and I recognized him for what he was, which was downright scary, but it was during this time that James, sitting on the front porch on his night off, watched his brother exit their house fully asleep carrying a baseball bat that had been in the back of their closet for nearly four years.

The way James tells it, he had remained gentle the three blocks downtown, had tried to coax Jackson (whose fingers held the bat loosely as if it were merely an extension of his limp left arm) into turning around. But it was no dice, and so the younger brother followed the older brother dutifully, as he had so many times before. Given the considerable distance that had grown between them during the period of his drug use—and more recently since I’d spurned Jackson
and he’d grown even more solipsistic—James was glad to be alone with his brother, to do this small, quiet thing. The bat remained inert until, with a switch that seemed to affect Jackson’s every muscle, it didn’t.

All told, six windows were smashed and three cracked. When the cops arrived, Jackson was gone—how this happened, James can’t explain or even remember. He had finally wrestled the polished wood out of his brother’s hands, had stopped to catch his breath and shifted to find himself amid brilliant reds and blues encircling him where he stood with glass in his hair and blood on his hands from when he’d tried to intercept his sleeping brother’s blows to the Shoe Repair window after restraint had proved impossible. Jackson must have wandered off as easily as he’d stepped out of bed and into the night, and no one, had they been awake to witness him walk by unhurried, would have suspected him of menace. They would have seen, instead, a young man with all the hopes in the world, bearing a gracious half-moon smile, up for a midnight stroll in the hometown he knew and loved.

James, on the other hand, was already a favorite of the cops by his association with Dillon, was bloody and holding a bat, had the telltale dilated pupils and high pulse, did not answer questions easily. He was searched, remnants of drugs were found in his pocket, blood was tested.

Given the town’s quickly changing identity, or rather the fact that finally tourists had begun taking in its quaint values in hordes, there’d been a great deal of pressure from the city council to make an example of cases such as these,
to assert that these sorts of incidents were not permissible, were not to be repeated. Both drugs and vandalism were on the rise, and as luck would have it, James’s (Jackson’s) crime included both. He had managed to crack in half the sign of the Shoe Repair shop, which was over one hundred years old (both the sign and the shop); he was charged with possession, vandalism, and defacement of a historic landmark. Given his previous record (a minor in possession of alcohol as well as an evading arrest when we’d all run from the cops and gotten away but his pants had caught cartoonishly on a fence), it didn’t look good for him.

As for Jackson, he found himself sore and vaguely satisfied the next morning, as if in his dreams he’d swum hard and strong in a clear green river and his muscles had somehow experienced it. He began to feel uneasy as he rose into his usual Saturday morning routine of eggs-in-a-basket (he adored the concise circles like I did) and reading on the front porch. As the coffee began to take effect, he felt his body more clearly; the pleasant buzz in his lumbar region and the satisfied ache of well-used shoulder muscles sat outside the possibility of just a good dream. A smarting between his thumb and forefinger revealed itself as a small, deeply lodged splinter. When he opened the screen door, he found that James’s guitar was leaned against the railing and his precious shoulder bag, which was never without him, was lumped next to it. He retreated inside to find Julia. Not because he particularly wanted to talk to her, but because the sight of her buried deep under the blankets, snoring, one arm extended straight out over the edge of the
bed as if in greeting, or sitting up in bed staring at the wall remembering God knows what, was a signal of all things normal and familiar. Only she wasn’t there.

A note on the kitchen table, which he hadn’t noticed, read:
YOUR BROTHER ARRESTED WILL CALL
(The lack of punctuation and hurried scrawl made Jackson wonder, he told me later with a little laugh, whether his brother had been handcuffed and was waiting in front of a venue’s ticket box, though that made little sense.)

It was at this point that Jackson buckled and broke the silence he’d instated toward me when I’d begun my affair with Dillon. For better or worse, this is usually the way these silences end: something awful happens, and the affected party returns to familiar comforts, temporarily forgetting the wrongs committed. My father let him in and he crawled into my bed and woke me with his crying.

What James did was stupid; what James did was brave. Perhaps he thought there was no way in hell they’d believe him if he said his sleepwalking brother had been the one swinging the bat, but more likely his silence was an act of sacrifice. Julia did not fund a lawyer, and though the public defender was a spunky, articulate man who was quick to point out James’s steady and valued employment at the motel and his good grades at his one (and only) semester of junior college, the court found these red herrings and were more than willing to see him as a drug-addled youth whose potential did not excuse his actions.

Before his hearing, we went to visit him in the Juvenile Detention Center, where he’d walked into the visiting
room looking somehow daunting in the dark blue heavy cloth jumpsuit, and he told us everything—the likes of which Jackson had suspected by the splinter in his hand, the soreness of his body, and the baseball mitt he’d found lodged inexplicably between his bed and the wall. Like blackout drunks, Jackson always had the feeling after one of his sleepwalking episodes that
something
had happened, only he didn’t have drinking buddies to call up in a contrite state and question.

James took his usual time in storytelling: perfectly executed pauses, expertly placed details, hand gestures that shaped the air to his purposes. He even included that on Jackson’s first swing he had tapped the bat on the ground once, as if heckling the pitcher.
Swing, batterbatter. Swing!
By the time he’d gotten to Jackson’s remarkable vanish and the arrival of the police, the fifteen minutes were up, and so we couldn’t ask him the question caught in our throats:
Well? Are you going to tell them?

Jackson and I were to leave for college in the fall. We’d both been accepted at a small liberal arts school in the bland, ever-sunny southern part of the state, which had offered both of us a great deal of financial aid we’d have been foolish to turn down. A stay in jail, needless to say, would have put Jackson’s plan for higher education on hold.

At his hearing, James was dignified and solemn. He smirked at us as he was led into the courtroom and sat up straight as he was questioned. When that famous question was asked of him, he ran his right hand over his still immaculately groomed hair and looked right at his brother.

Jackson’s grip on my hand tightened so ferociously I winced and blinked in pain so that I heard, but did not see, “Guilty.”

That three-second look, delivered with stolid, terrifying purpose, was to be the last communication between the brothers for almost seven years, until Jackson would accompany me into the lobby of an entirely different kind of institution where we carefully wrote our identities on sticky name tags and leafed through pamphlets about depression and suicide while we waited to be buzzed in to our James.

T
he hiss of my father’s oxygen tank: I have not been listening for quite some time. Dear heart? He asks. I wish you two would talk, he tells me. You feel like you have a whole lifetime, but—He pauses. The hiss of his oxygen tank. My father has never stopped loving my mother, and I worry I may have inherited his capacity of never forgetting. Can it be called worrying when you already know?

A
fter wandering away and back to each other so many times to the dark amusement of our parents and friends, Jackson and I finally called it even and settled our bets, began looking for an apartment that would house our history. We wandered through the vacant rooms holding hands like curious tourists, opened every door and stood rapt by every window. We had few requirements, felt shocked and grateful that any of these spaces would even accept us. We took the first apartment offered to us. The landlord, an aging hippie who seemed to wear all pieces of her wardrobe at once, rolled her eyes in near fondness when we kissed after committing our signatures.