The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (2 page)

The majority of our lives we were an exhausting display that others looked on, confused and ashamed to be watching.
I
, at least, was happy to bear witness. But even one letter changes a meaning entirely; no matter their proximity, different points of an alphabet refuse to be represented as the same: there’s no guarantee that someone standing at precisely the same longitude and latitude as you will remember the view the same way, no promise that one person’s memory of a moment or a month will parallel yours, retain the same value, shape the years of living that follow.

T
he walls of James and Jackson’s bedroom were covered with butcher paper that came in reams wider than it was tall. The paper was spliced together with the Scotch tape their mother kept in the drawer under the telephone, which also held a few photos not worthy of a place on the wall or even the refrigerator, and their father’s hammer, which every day acquired rust while we fought off robbers and sunsets.

The sun’s obstinate warmth lingered in the asphalt and sidewalk long into the evening while we dreamed. The sun came in through the window every morning at six thirty and offered life to the opposite wall, which displayed an incomplete and frenzied rendering of a circus. In the morning gregarious with childish enthusiasm, the paper circus shifted into a human drama; with the late-afternoon light, the characters became more determined to speak and live intricate, shadowed lives.

That summer, James and Jackson ate their dinners with admirable speed, stamina, and a teeth-baring spirit of anticipated
adventure. The forkfuls were violently shoved between their two rows of teeth, and the boys took marked pleasure in the scraping noise the utensils produced. They paused, generally in harmony, only at thirty-second intervals, to gulp down bright-colored juice out of bright-colored cups that their mother set out for them. Sometimes dinner was followed by a ride on their bright-colored bicycles, but mostly, just as fiercely as it began, the meal would end—Jackson’s fork would drop, then James’s, and the brothers would look up, expectant, to where their mother sat. Her consent was generally wordless: a quiet smile or a flick of hands upward that meant
Go
.

Jackson designated the five to ten minutes after dinner as a period for solemn thought to be followed by discussion. Jackson, at eight, knew himself to be older, wiser, and the obvious leader of a project that would surely outlast them. Despite any planning efforts on the part of his older brother, James almost always deviated from the strategy. Jackson understood space and logic, but were it not for James, the pumpkin-orange tiger on the tight wire would never have tottered there haphazardly. The circus performers would never have varied ghastly and comically in height and girth.

Several times their mother put the circus project on hold and the tiger stood still, the half magicians gruesome beneath the trapeze. Julia suffered migraines that twisted and writhed in her head, and she often became agitated by the arguing that swelled in volume from the boys’ bedroom. The source of the tension was, without fail, a matter of creative differences (e.g., Jackson did not find the oversized
tiger on the tightrope as believable or triumphant as the crown on the top of its head declared it to be). Upon Jackson’s expression of disdain for James’s artistic endeavors, the younger brother would defend himself violently. There were, he insisted, many reasons for a tiger king.

While we absorbed the paradise of indoor imaginations many afternoons, we valued the wide expanse of our block as well; out there was a wildness the three of us found and cultivated. Overgrown blackberry bushes reached to us through other people’s fences, and even after our lips and teeth and tongues were stained purple, the smell lingered and called to us at night while we tossed and turned in the slow heat, while we dreamed of vengeance in the water balloon fights of tomorrow. The brothers had both inherited their father’s penchant for sleep talking. Like their father, they spoke not in the stumbling tongues of so many sleep talkers but in full words and careful syllables, giving reason and rhyme to fantastical worlds and images. Unlike their father, though, Jackson and James had partners in their sleep talk. Only myself, the tiger king, the three-quarters-finished clown with crooked purple arms, and the beta fish, who swam the same circles in the same tank (which was situated exactly between the brothers’ beds on an end table), were aware of the conversations that took place in the middle of the night, threading strings between the dreamworlds of the brothers. I shared the secret with them, slept with my head almost directly beneath the fish tank, often still in my bright blue bathing suit, with my dark red widow’s
peak connected, by another invisible thread, to the tip of Jackson’s nose.

During the day, I made up for my sex and too-thin stature with calluses thicker than all of the boys’. The balls of my feet were agile and quick; they responded effortlessly to impossibly sharp-angled turns in games of tag and never complained of the heat or the oak roots that reached up through the sidewalk of Madrone Street to remind us of beginnings. I made up for my sex with curse words my father had not meant to teach me, but at night I kept watch of Jackson’s chest, monitoring its homogenized ups and downs; the first part of loving anyone is to make sure they’re breathing. And so it went that I was the first to witness Jackson and James speaking to each other in the semaphores of deep sleep. Their mother had not noticed; Julia didn’t notice a lot of things.

On the last evening of June in that particular circus summer, I sat at the head of Jackson’s bed, my legs crossed like a brave Indian warrior, counting his breaths, waiting for an anomaly, sometimes daring to run my index finger over the slight curve of his lips.

Jackson slept like a content old man then, with a slight smile on his face, as if remembering a few sweet picnics and two well-raised children, but I was always scared of him waking. I almost jumped the first time he spoke, before realizing everything was the same.

“In the blond one, where seas go,” Jackson said.

My position as guardsman was not found out. The fish still swam their circles, discussing bubbles and miniature
ceramic castles; James, on the other bed, still lay with one bootied foot outside the covers, but thirty seconds later he began to speak.

“Dragon time … is your time,” said some secret part of James.

And Jackson, after three to five moments: “Sea time?”

And James, whose sleeping head now faced his brother’s bed:

“Yesbutwith the          trains.”

“… with the trains
                  and the fish man.”

“but the fishandthe bridge,
                                     and the …”

“Ghost radio!” exclaimed James, and
that
was
that
.

I barely got to sleep that night, twisting and turning under the odd-smelling guest blanket, trying to make sense of the strange conversation I’d just witnessed. Ghosts: I knew plenty about those, having made a lifelong practice of reaching for my mother, standing in the room where she took her last breaths and whispering benign details about my day into the coffee cup my father said was her favorite. And then, with my father’s gift of walkie-talkies the prior Christmas, into those. There was the radio part, but it had never occurred to me that the link might exist underwater until I heard the disembodied words that floated across the boys’ bedroom. A bridge, of course. Of course you’d have to reach a bridge to get there. To get to her.

M
y father’s scissors were rusted and unwieldy, heavy like useful things just aren’t anymore, and carved shakily into the left blade was the word
COPYBOY
.

He was born to the editor of a small town’s newspaper in the South in 1941 and began writing for the
Courier
as a freshman in high school. When he was sixteen, he was caught skinny-dipping in the community pool, and his punishment was to write the article detailing the event in the crime log. He was unmerciful; he used the word “lascivious”; his father, the editor, was proud.

My father met my mother at the
San Francisco Chronicle
, where she began freelancing and eventually established herself as a fixture. She was tall and everything about her was long; the vertical-striped black-and-white pants she wore frequently that spring further contributed to the impression of a woman who went on forever in every direction. This hint of forever, not just in the length of limbs but also in other dimensions, was probably what initially
attracted him. He had hit forty without realizing it: instead of measuring by years, he’d counted his life by the love affairs he’d had in Europe, the red convertible he’d wrapped around an olive tree in Spain, the antiwar riots on college campuses that he’d been lucky enough to witness and report on, the year he’d spent in Hawaii and the volcano he’d watched erupting from his window. Whether there was panic inside him before he met her, or it was meeting her that spawned it, he knew my mother was to be his last conquest; he was confident she was enough to witness for the rest of his life.

She didn’t give in at first. She had met many men with bright smiles who tried to equalize her with nicknames, who respected her work but more so respected the vision of her balancing two phones against her cheekbones in a busy newsroom, the way her fingers moved on a keyboard, the top button of her white linen dress that she wouldn’t notice had come undone.

He called her “champ” and “scoop,” made efforts to be well-informed of her story assignments. He stopped by her desk with coffee, which she smiled and drank, but when he offered his help—I know a guy who such-and-such down at the so-and-so who could really—she was curt and unreceptive.

After four months of working there, she finally agreed to have a drink with him and some other guys from the paper in celebration of the triumphant finish of a particularly rough deadline. He made the mistake of guessing her drink—surely a woman looking like her wanted something
that suggested it tinkled and didn’t stain—she snorted. What then, Scoop, he joked, scotch? She accepted, and my father and the two other reporters watched in silence while she took the full brown body in her mouth in one swallow. As my father tells it, that sealed the deal then and there.

It was another month before my mother agreed to go out with just him. My father felt, for the first time in his life, unsure of his approach with a woman. She seemed unaffected by the traces of his drawl that so many females adored (the way he, for example, still called his days “Sundee,” “Mondee,” etc.), the pointed dress shoes he kept polished but not gleaming, the well fitting corduroy blazers with leather patches on the elbows, the ever-present pencil placed jauntily on his ear and through his thick wheat-brown hair, the perfectly delivered wink. Maybe the third time he asked her out and flashed his famous perfect smile, she had replied: What? I’m supposed to congratulate you on your big old teeth? (But the way she said it, he insists, was somehow not derisive. It was even, almost, pleasant.)

It was Friday. They were to go for dinner after work. My father was unusually transfixed by the glow of the Xerox machine, spilled coffee in the break room and took extra time to clean it up, returned to his station and made all the calls he should have, and still there were hours left in the workday. Usually, from a diagonal across the newsroom, he could see a sliver of her desk from his, but today there was some obnoxious cat figurine or mug that blocked it. When it was finally six, he crossed the newsroom. The people remaining were typing frantically; the
cartoonist had his curly head down, bits of eraser flying violently off his station with quick brushes of the stubby, ink-stained hand.

His heart sank when he reached her desk. She was still enmeshed. Surrounding her were yellow legal pads in various states of distress, clippings from their paper and others, a bit of lettuce and near it some crumpled wax paper, a stack of books, different makes of pens all showing signs of being savagely chewed on. Her glance up to him was a vague assimilation of an apology. He took off his blazer, took out something to read from the leather satchel he carried under one arm, and found a chair to sit on. He realized he had not eaten since eight that morning and made every effort not to look up at the row of clocks displaying the different times in Tokyo, London, New York.