The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (16 page)

What had he done with the fish? How could he possibly have taken all of them? Pictures formed in my head of Jackson distraught and carrying our fish in plastic bags, clutching them to his heart, asking then insisting people on the street move out of his way.

Some of the missing items seemed arbitrary. The bleach-stained bath mat, the antlers I’d found at a flea market and hung on our closet door as a coatrack. I wondered about where he’d gone but more so
how
. Had he stayed up all night frantically assembling what he considered his until the U-Haul office opened? It was possible, but the image in my head was that of a one-man band, limbs bent in odd ways to accommodate the various objects, already vestiges of our life together. How quickly other parties decide which is past.

W
hat about the fish?” I demanded, like the answer might reverse the past week. Like surely if I could locate the fish and bring them home, Jackson would follow out of default.

“Alive. Mostly.”

“
Mostly?
”

“Right. Mostly,” James said, already bored by the subject.

Eight days after the morning after, James called me on his graveyard shift at the hotel in the city where he’d worked for nearly half a decade, the place he’d graduated to given the glowing recommendations from the seedy franchise motel in our hometown. It was three thirty in the morning, and though I was awake, I feigned a hypnagogic calm that indicated I was still a normal, nondistraught human being who crawled into bed at a regular hour and woke eager for the day. Of course he probably didn’t believe me, but pretended for my sake. A large part of loving someone is knowing when to pretend and when not to; “make-believe” is a game
children play but adults wrote the rules to.
Pretend
, Jackson would say while we whispered in the postbedtime dark,
pretend we’re in the ocean and have to live our lives here. Pretend we’ve got to convince the sharks we’re good. Pretend
 … 
pretend I’ve got a sword the king of the fishes gave me. Pretend you’re scared
.

“How you doin’?” he said, and I regretted his dropping of the “g”; this was not a time for casual speech. I wanted hard consonants, harsh pronunciation. I wanted every word.

“I am … that’s a good question.” And I thought about it. “I’m just as you’d expect?”

James snorted. While what I wanted was a sigh or a cluck of the tongue or other subtle mark of sympathy, the snort required an honesty I appreciated.

“How are you?” I retorted meanly, but he didn’t take the bait. I could tell by his breath that he was outside smoking, the cordless phone straining to connect the two of us, the cars on Lombard passing over the speed limit, still reeling from their stint on the freeway.

“Look, kiddo, I don’t even want to tell you this, not supposed to … but … listen. He’s fine, all right? He’s, you know, respirating. And eating, sometimes. He’s fine. But Ida, he doesn’t want to talk to you, and I mean doesn’t. He had me take his phone away on account of all your calls and—”

(On the other end, across the city, I was silent. The phone call, the mention of him, made all of it real, made the past week where I’d sat in our haunted apartment barely eating or showering and wearing exclusively a shirt and pair of boxer briefs he’d left behind, the result of an actual event and not just some error in communications.)

“And honestly, I wish you’d stop. Think you should. Look, it’s not my place, or maybe it is—I’ve known both of you my whole life but Ida? What did you expect? How did you think he’d react?”

I interrupted him there although I knew I didn’t, hadn’t, wouldn’t have any authority over the conversation. I had, in the last week, lost any power, and in a strange way it was freeing, in a sense it allowed for behavior previously barred. I was permitted icy single-word answers, listlessness, the inability to listen.

“You know, it’s funny,” I lashed, “how you’re suddenly a big piece of our common history again. After for years I had to tiptoe around mentioning our past. And kiddo? Don’t call me kiddo. I was writing in cursive while you were still accidentally pissing yourself, pretty much.” Which was a lie, and both of us knew that.

“Ida, just listen. It’s the same. He’s never appreciated having decisions made for him and I know … I know you guys have been together forever. I know it must
feel
like you’re an extension of him and that you can, but you’re not. And you can’t.”

“He’s at your apartment, then.”

“Right. Yes. But not for long, and I promised I wouldn’t … don’t come here, okay? I’m sorry for how you must be feeling. But I think he’s probably right. What you did was—”

•  •  •

I didn’t go there. Didn’t much go anywhere. Conducted experiments in starvation and isolation. Paul called nonstop and baked and cooked and left feasts outside my door, which I stubbornly refused with the exception of the corn bread he dropped off on day three. He had wrapped it in a red-and-white-checkered linen cloth and tied a blue ribbon around it. It was a portion large enough for three, and still warm: I held it to my chest as if it were a child and lay on the couch with it and wished Jackson could see. It tasted perfect and made the whole room smell like fresh butter, but I’d waited too long to eat and attacked it like a savage; he hadn’t used enough flour and it fell to pieces. Eating off the floor is oddly satisfying. Honest.

The piece Caroline wrote was minimal. It had been her, she’d explained to Paul, who’d pitched the piece, and so even after the whole episode she had no choice but to write it. The piece sat off center, dwarfed by the color photography and coverage of a lavish parade the previous weekend.

SOMNAMBULISM AND CRAMP
Original Art by Jackson Bailey

More than 50 people crammed into to Paul Flowers’s studio on 24th and Hampshire for an art opening that began at 3 a.m. last Saturday, which no one promoted but everyone had heard about.

Curated deftly by Flowers with modest bits of cynical ephemera,
Somnambulism and Cramp
displayed the works of debut artist Jackson Bailey, whose close friends claim he makes art in his sleep.

The enraptured crowd stumbled in lacking any expectations and were slow to leave.

The pieces, reminiscent of dark fables or didactics for naughty children, remain unavailable for purchase.

The artist declined to comment, except to say, “They’re not mine.”

Below the article was a small black-and-white photograph of Jackson in the chair he’d loomed in the entire night, looking straight ahead, the
I asked you nicely the first time
piece on display behind him, and I knew, watching it as if waiting for it to move, what it must look like to everyone else. I saw a photograph of something private, an animal caught in its most intimate act, but I knew the photograph everyone else saw displayed a man with confidence and many years ahead of him. All my life, it had been he and I versus everyone else, but in his exit he’d made the equation convoluted. Us versus him versus me versus the rest versus him again. And while I have a mind for numbers, enjoy the construction and reconstruction, multiplication and simplification of variables, I couldn’t have extricated any solution if I tried.

Y
ou don’t remember
, I used to say to him, first with semicomic dramatic incredulity and an open mouth.
You don’t remember
, quieter, the last couple syllables swallowed. The conversation grew in circles from his inability to recall, say, some punch line, a perfect afternoon some three years ago, the terrifying type of off-brand whiskey that we drank too much of and that allowed us to sleep together for the first time. The prompts pointed to something larger, of course, of the ever-present tightness in my throat born the moment my father explained the difference between shared blood and proximity. It might be safe to say that during all the years I spent hoping he needed me, I was simultaneously daring him to prove he didn’t by citing his small failures in documentation, in reverence. While I didn’t receive the traditional breakdown of reasons for leaving, didn’t get the chance to stutter and beg, my knowledge of him easily produced his answers:
I can’t so determinedly classify every moment as an investment in the future. Hopes are different than plans, and even careful plans rarely actualize themselves exactly according to the blueprint
.

A false cognate that’s always struck me: in French, “attendre” is not to attend but to wait. How different the structures of being there, present and participating, and waiting, how palpable the confusion between the two. I supposed I was expecting him to get somewhere. It’s a form of waiting that’s harmful, in that you’re really not anticipating any external force but rather some clear and brash interior shift. And did he ever get somewhere, bubbling over in a way that altered the course of our lives, though it was a different kind of destination, a different kind of event, than I was hoping for. I had plans for him of therapeutic transcendence, the wish that he could feel like the gruesome things he’d done while nightmaring had at least added up to a whole he could look at, examine, maybe experience a sense of pride. Instead they pushed him in another direction, instead they asserted his suspicion that no matter how he measured himself, there was this other darkness that insisted on living (and loudly).

I’d hoped it’d be a gift. Hoped he would feel, at last, forgiveness, support. The sense that however much he writhed, it was to a point. And selfishly, perhaps, I wanted him to look around and see that I’d accepted his worst and loved it.

It hurts to replay those conversations and find evidence of his effort, recognize his keens as a love I named
insufficient. Of course I remember, he would say. Just in a different way. I remember by never putting too many ice cubes in your drink, because your teeth are ultrasensitive to cold. I remember by watching where you put your keys and pointing them out to you later. I remember when it’s early in the morning and I’m in the shower feeling the BB pellet you put in my back. I remember by watching you while you cross a room with the same stride you’ve always had, uneven and heavier on the right foot and bold. I remember by not having to explain myself. I remember. I remember. I remember.

W
hether Jackson remained with James for days or weeks was never revealed to me. I only know that he stayed in his apartment and accepted kindnesses from the brother he’d barely spoken to—save the visit we made to him in the hospital, during which Jackson hardly opened his mouth—since we sat in a small room with no windows and James told us about the swings of the baseball bat, the sudden and encompassing swirl of blue and red lights. If they talked about the trial, Jackson’s guilt/remorse/resentment, the science-fiction novels and bland ham sandwiches James devoured in jail, the years in between, the bruises Jackson’s sleep left on my breasts and neck, neither chose to tell me.

Years and years and moments upon moments were suddenly negated. Since childhood I’ve spent my heart and words and a catalog of tiny, insignificant moments trying to merge with a bloodstream not mine. The achievements of assimilation many; the failures less often but grander in scale. My father had to take me aside when I was six and
explain to me that while it might feel like it, honey, James and Jackson are
not
your brothers, and so it’s no good to be running around calling them that. And I crawled into his lap and cried and choked and gasped until I couldn’t, fingering the ivory buttons on his rough linen shirt and feeling, for the first time, the pain in trying to understand the word that should be simple:
family
. If not my brothers, then what, I asked? And he taught me another word that should be simple:
friends
.