The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

Paul’s gallery space was small, with well-worn hardwood floors and no windows. Still, it had gained respect in the concentric art world of our city, just as he had with his brand of quiet, earnest charm. He was a trust fund baby who lived modestly and took pleasure in funding projects and artists he felt to be noble. More often than not, there was some kid from East Lansing, Michigan, or Bentonville, Arkansas, or some other town you’d never heard of, a talent Paul had somehow “discovered,” staying on his couch until he found his feet in the city. In being so constantly generous, as well as having really quite the eye for art others were likely to overlook, he had built a following of people absolutely enamored with him and his pursuits, no matter how ridiculous. Every opening he held was full and buzzing with happy people, overflowing out the door and onto the street, talking passionately about the pieces inside, embracing individuals they’d just met. Jackson’s, unfortunately, was no different.

He had grudgingly agreed to a show, though not without a great deal of resentment, and mostly to appease Paul, whose interest was endearing and had only grown with Jackson’s aversion. After weeks of negotiation, Jackson had agreed to let his sleep’s works be shown in the gallery but had no interest in an opening. Paul, determined, had pushed for a “quiet unveiling” late at night in loyalty to the art’s conception; he promised there would be very little publicity and only modest curating that respected the artist’s queasiness.

These promises, of course, did not hold up. For all Paul’s munificence, he was still someone who generally got what he wanted from the world, and he had a hard time truncating his vision of desire. He made no posters or press releases, but his tongue was, as ever, free: word spread in the weeks preceding, and a substantial buzz began to sound.

Paul prepared furiously. He papered the ceiling of the space with pages of nineteenth-century French and German texts on sleepwalking and decided to name the exhibition after one of the titles, Somnambulism and Cramp, written by a man named Reichenbach who credited reports that sleepwalking was affected by the moon, and that sufferers were generally individuals with exaggerated sensory abilities; he called them “sensitives.”

In the shortening days leading up to it, Jackson maintained he would not be present for the unveiling, which was to take place at three a.m. He grumbled around the apartment and took on the reorganization of our closets, the waxing of our floors, the oiling of our creaky dead bolt. I caught him at the kitchen sink, sponge in hand and warm water running over his fingers into the empty sink, immobile and slightly smiling.

The morning of the event came, and we woke pleasantly. There had been no incidents the night before, save that Jackson had hopped into the shower asleep and gained consciousness with shaving cream covering his face and then decided it was time for a shave anyhow. The sun was shining, though the weather had predicted fog, and the birds outside did not sound like the kind that live in cities. He whispered me awake, tracing intricate patterns on the backs of my knees. He nibbled on my breasts as if he hadn’t a thousand times before, he kissed me like he might discover something by doing so, he didn’t let a strand of hair obscure my face, we f*cked for almost an hour with our eyes open the whole time. And in the nature of lovers, we pretended, afterward, that it had been perfectly natural, congratulated each other on stamina and technique, did not mention that the last time our bodies had interacted in this way, the month was classified under a different season.

I scrambled eggs with fresh produce from the Mexican market, made too-strong coffee, and brought it back to him in bed. He had moved to lean against the headboard but his limbs remained loose in satisfied exhaustion.

He smiled dreamily at the bright primary colors of the food on the plate, then shifted his lightness toward me, and said, with wonder, “I think … I think I’d like to go!”





Paul’s gallery was eight blocks from our place. The night was extremely warm, which happens in our city with no pattern, and at the most seven times a year. Jackson’s mood was hard to navigate in that it was, just simply: pleasant. He smiled broadly at a weaving drunk making his way home from God knows where; he gave money to the one bum still out begging; he insisted on holding my hand; he had brought along a six-pack of a beer he used to love but that I hadn’t seen him drink in at least two years. All of which made me nervous. Probably I had some idea of the evening’s turnout, but only in the way that stiff joints often indicate bad weather though they can’t accurately predict the how and when of the downpour.

I could hear it from a block away; it’s funny how the amalgam of many quiet conversations actually feels louder (or rather, more emphatic) than human noise that is booming and frenzied. Of course, it was amplified by the juxtaposition of the hour: the bars had closed an hour before and the homeless people had put down their crime pulp paperbacks and flashlights and settled into their nests of scratchy blankets and cardboard. When we got closer, saw the cluster of people, Jackson stiffened with regret; his eyes began to take a terrible vacation. I knew, then, his coming had been a mistake.

The doors were locked. Paul was inside making lastminute preparations; I felt as though I could feel his mania through the papered glass windows and feared they would crack. He was listening to Leonard Cohen’s Songs From a Room, the song “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” humming through the glass and hovering above the heads of the crowd, the lyrics dolorous and apropos: “In the hollow of the night / when you are cold and numb / you hear her talking freely then, / she’s happy that you’ve come, / she’s happy that you’ve come.” The refrain lilted and retracted as my heart quickened, and I tried to estimate just how many people were there, how many I knew. When I sobered, Jackson had left my side and was making through the crowd with a quick pace that furthered my anxiety. He was aimed for the entrance, and purposefully, coldly touched people’s elbows in the way that means Let me through. Let me through right now. Then he was knocking with increasing speed, the flat of his balled fist pounding rapidly. I couldn’t see his face, but Paul’s when he finally opened the door was an awful mirror. People were watching; whether they knew he was the artist was unclear, but it quickly turned the anticipatory murmur ominous, unsteady.

Through the crowd I saw James, knew instantly he’d been watching me the whole time. He arched his eyebrows not unkindly from where he stood on the outskirts. He was, as ever, strangely immaculate, and smoking his cigarette the odd way he always has, the filter held effortlessly between his middle and ring fingers. I was surprised he had heard about the show and more surprised that he’d come. The knots in my heart and chest reshaped themselves at the sight of my and Jackson’s brother and my brain formed several dark rooms surrounding the possibilities of their interaction, given both the long and stubborn silence between them and the state Jackson was in.

I made my way toward him, our eyes locked and my feet carrying me without my explicit permission. Hi there, kid, he said or I think he said through my ears’ insistent ringing. When he hugged me, I immediately let my body go limp, let myself focus for seven glorious seconds on not the impending doom but the way he smelled and has always smelled: like cedar and also fresh ground black pepper, like long loud nights and the ensuing regret, like history, like small but important reminders.

I, of course, needed to provide no explanations: he had seen Jackson’s pounding at the door, had seen my face thereafter, had felt how gladly I’d received his embrace.

“Wanna hear a joke?” He smiled slightly, and I nodded and felt grateful for his ability to manipulate his emotional surroundings and those of others.

“So a guy walks into a bar,” he said, already grinning, “and he stays there for the rest of my childhood.”

I let it settle, then laughed to the point of hooting, all the frantic blood in my body happy for an emotional release of a different sort from the one currently pending. James was laughing too and we fed each other’s joy, like only old friends who’ve been through much that is not funny can.


When the gallery finally opened, the people trickled in, all the more excited for the mysterious aggravated pounding of the man who, a girl who knew Jackson and me had revealed to the rest of the gaggle, was the artist. James entered by my side but took his cue and dissipated; my eyes found Jackson and I forgot instantly what had been so humorous minutes before. It seemed that Paul, if temporarily, had worked his magic. Jackson was, at the very least, still, but had arranged his body in a way that was a familiar, dangerous indication. He sat in the only chair in the room, one that no doubt Paul had scrambled to find in the hopes of placation. His left hand propped up his right elbow and his right arm crossed his body at a diagonal so that his beer rested on his left shoulder. It was an arrangement of limbs that simultaneously signaled inclusion, defense, fear, disgust.

Despite my overall queasiness and remorse, I recognized that the space looked gorgeous. The pages upon pages clinging to the walls were slightly shellacked and seemed to catch the light, then hold it. There was a modest assortment of strange items hanging from the ceiling on transparent cords: pieces of antique lace handkerchiefs, a faded pink rotary telephone, a rusted toy airplane (the left wing of which seemed to be half melted), several rings of skeleton keys, a mobile of a children’s carousel of gilded horses, a few sepia-toned photographs, a chandelier at a ninety-degree angle, a wine bottle covered in different blues and yellows of candle wax. It spoke clearly to the obfuscation of dreams, to their ability to unite discordant objects into a string that is supposed to mean something. The floors painted a matte gray-black that still gleamed with few footsteps, and Jackson’s pieces stretched and mounted as if they could ever be made uniform. Upon entering the gallery, the guests encountered a small block of text: a matter-of-fact narrative about how the pieces came to be and a biography of Jackson that was scant but made clear that he never, in his waking life, harbored artistic inclinations.

The people, who had been moments before factions of groups, became individuals, as is the result of all effective art. They put thumbs and forefingers to chins, they tilted their heads left and right, involuntary murmurs pushed out of their lips and rose. Paul stood at the back of the room, a few feet from Jackson’s chair, his face oscillating between expressions of pleasure and agitation and a combination of both. Jackson was dark in a way I had seen only few times; he seemed to deflect light and noise. He was obviously not looking for me, but I found my body leading itself across the room, expertly maneuvering through the onlookers lost in their own memories as they gaped at the wondrous and terrible that had come to life while I slept. I saw myself stand behind his chair, saw my hand reach for his shoulder. Heard him say through his vacancy, without flinching, “Don’t.”

Paul’s head snapped around as mine stayed still and unblinking, putting off processing what had just been said. He looked from me to Jackson and realized, in the case of the latter, that there was nothing to see. The “artist” had retreated.

Unfortunately, the man in the seat, who looked very much like the person I shared a bed with, fit the bill in a way that further excited the people in the room. They looked from him to the art and back again, imagining the threads between the two. They were convinced that his stance and gaze were of someone taking it all in, though the truth was in every way the inverse. They wanted to assume they were important to him, that he was gathering their reactions to a large piece of his soul to reference later; they saw his posture as sweet, as a symbol of someone who is afraid to share but must. A few of them, after taking in each piece three and four times, began to gravitate to where he sat. Assuming sensitivity to his vulnerable position as a heart exposed, they crouched and spoke softly. They raved and paid respect and when he began to look at them but did not speak, they loved him further for it. He was, they thought, happy to let his art speak to them, viewed their perceptions as truth and felt no need to comment. The bold ones patted his arm and thanked him.

They began to trickle toward the exit, satisfied, once again becoming parts of groups, eager to discuss what they’d seen and felt. Jackson had only moved to reach for more beer, and once he’d drunk all six, filled a large cup then another with the red wine Paul had placed on the table for guests. Paul came over with a cocktail I hadn’t asked for and gave my arm a squeeze. He let out the sigh he’d been holding in, and though I wanted to, I knew that this night would not be isolated. It would stretch many limbs out in just as many directions, and I’d be spending my every minute trying to chart them.

But then a woman I hadn’t noticed made her way back inside. She was wearing a loose pale blue linen dress belted at the waist, flat leather boots. Her dirty brown hair was messily pinned and some strands escaped and fell down her cheeks, and she seemed determined. She could have been twenty-five or thirty-eight; her age seemed like something she chose day to day.

As she crossed the room Jackson locked menacing eyes with her, and my ears began ringing again, the water of my body revolted. She did not crouch to his level as the others had done, but stood and addressed him from a distance of five feet that seemed not to be for his comfort or security but hers. She revealed herself as a writer for the local arts journal, the sort that is free at newsstands but still respected and commonly found on coffee tables of those in the know. All of me flashed, and when I turned to Paul in anger, he had his hands in prayer position pressed to his lips. He tried to silently communicate that he had kept his promise, had not directly contacted the press, but I could tell a small, secret part of him was still pleased. It was then I cursed him as selfish, began to convince myself that he had manipulated me or brought all this about, instead of the reverse.

I expected Jackson to gaze just beyond her, as he had with all the rest who’d approached, but instead he made small adjustments that signified opening: he uncrossed his arms and set his drink on the floor, made Xs of his fingers and stretched them, inspected her and smiled, small and calm.

“Ida, Paul,” he said, and actually changed his position in the chair, “Would you mind leaving Caroline and I alone for just a minute? ”

And we did. We had no choice. Although the way he enunciated her name, with specious respect and cordiality, as if they were old friends with in-jokes, was terrifying. We had absolutely no reason to believe it would turn out well.

We stood outside together. The people had dissipated, but we could hear them making their leisurely, satisfied paths home, not far along and in no rush. The laughter and speech of educated people freed from a quiet space of intellect and reflection is instantly recognizable. It’s a sound I generally cherish, a sound in which I find comfort and whole rooms of pleasant memories in my head, but that night it echoed in my ears as masturbatory and self-indulgent.


As children, we often stand by doors listening, but the doors are larger and the sounds we’re searching for with our breaths held are of a different nature. They’re news of an adult world we don’t understand but wonder at the lexicon of, or perhaps the gurgle of a friend’s teenaged sister on the telephone. In the first case we’re probably hoping to hear what it is our parents are saying about the world we live in, and in the second we’re enraptured with a world every source says we’re bound for. Both occasions are somewhat joyous: as children, when we stand by doors, it is for a stolen pleasure.

Standing by a door listening as an adult always bears an ominous scent. It’s always an act we know we should not morally commit but are driven by some grave circumstance to anyway. We are never absorbing precious bits of other worlds, but pieces of our own we’re afraid to know but more afraid not to.

For the first minute, we heard close to nothing. Then Jackson’s voice escalating, the breaking of glass, the thud and clatter of flat things reaching the ground.

“They’re not mine,” we heard, emphatic if muffled, then the female protest—

“THEY’RE”—crash—“NOT”—crash—“MINE.”

We saw the doorknob jiggled and we parted in the arc of the opening door. Jackson, who strode into the middle of the street and made a sharp turn in the direction of our apartment. I allowed myself one peek into the gallery, where Caroline the journalist stood almost perfectly in the space’s center with her arms wrapped around her torso, looking like an art piece herself, her face not blank but searching for an expression or waiting for someone to walk by and comment, fill her with their own memories and interpretations, then walk away and leave her bare again.





Following him home, twenty feet behind; his momentum was in every way forward and unapologetic. The few taxis still out not bothering to honk but yielding to him, the flashing crosswalks urging him on in solidarity, the bits of city debris skirting his feet as if curious. The door of our apartment not opening, something massive pushed against it. Still trying the key over and over, if only to feel that I was making something move and turn. Knocking first daintily, as if it weren’t my home, then desperately, sliding down the doorframe and feeling the hum of the frantic beyond the wood.

I gave up after an hour or so and walked to Paul’s, the sun coming up behind something of a cruel reminder of what had changed since it had been out last. The fuzz of wine and nervous breath hummed on my teeth, and the homeless people who glared at me from their cardboard nests suggested I was no better, like at least they had known when to settle.

Paul was not surprised when he answered the door. He smiled weakly and pointed his index finger at the cleft of his chin like, Go ahead, I deserve it. Instead I fell into him and he raised me like his new bride, placed me on the smaller of the two couches. On the coffee table was half a fifth of fine whiskey and on the other couch was Caroline, covered in a beige fleece throw blanket, her mouth open, one arm hanging off the couch, one sock on, all elegance and confidence and mystery gone. I reached for the bottle and drank deeply; Paul nodded in encouragement and gestured for me to pass it. We didn’t speak, just drank and sighed, and I don’t remember falling asleep, only gaining consciousness with the sounds of the park below Paul’s window, the shrieks of children playing games. He and Caroline were both gone, and a note under the empty bottle detailed that there were strawberries and eggs in the refrigerator and that we should most certainly talk later if I felt strong enough.





Sundays in our neighborhood: brash, bright, infectious. Whole generations of Mexican families in their church best, the smallest children fussing with their shellacked hair, mariachi bands, orchid plants of every size and color at special prices, street sales, vendors pushing their jingling carts of coconut ice cream bars or churros or bacon-wrapped hot dogs. The smells and sounds Jackson and I delighted in waking up to, an alarm clock of life if there ever was one. I waded through them unnoticed and saw, upon reaching our building, that our bedroom window was open and the curtains in their simple ritual of floating in and out of it.

Jackson had removed whatever had been blocking the door, just as he’d removed himself. He had taken the things that he considered definitively his; some of them I hadn’t even realized he recognized as clearly his until they were missing, and felt both guilty for not knowing and foolish for thinking they’d also been mine.

Our yellow cotton bedspread, on which I’d sewed a large patch of Jackson’s childhood cowboy sheets, was now just yellow with a large interior rectangle of brighter yellow, some of the thread of the stitches still clinging. It would have been less of an insult if he’d just taken the whole thing, would have left me cold more physically.

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.





What 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.





You 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.





Whether 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.


And so while James brought Jackson food and books and the oatmeal soap he requested, I sat in the apartment my past bequeathed me and slowly began making the phone calls that other people dread answering. I swallowed my pride and a great deal of anti-anxiety medication Paul had brought, like everything else, without my asking.

These are the type of phone calls that everyone receives from time to time but that no one wants to admit making. They are to people one hasn’t spoken to in a significant amount of time, and they involve self-centered apologies, circuitous anecdotes, the repetition of stock phrases “I don’t know,” “It’s just that,” “If only.”

I had let myself forget: that honest-to-goodness, forever families are made of blood. That a history doesn’t guarantee a future. That no matter how many secrets Jackson and I had told each other; no matter how many times we’d returned home to find the other waiting; no matter how many seasonal colds and flus we’d spread back and forth, taking turns playing nurse; no matter how many, no matter how much, he was not my family. And neither was James, who was happy to be reunited with Jackson and wonder sweetly at the common acids, pigmentations, and chromosomal intersections.

I called friends and feigned interest in catching up, but their good news made me resent them and their bad news paled in comparison to mine. Those who knew me more intimately let me cut to the chase, rehash the last three or five or twenty years of the relationship. And what I wanted was someone to simmer incredulously with me, to deny that all of this would last, but they always offered advice. I should take up jogging or tennis or, one suggested after I rejected everything else, perhaps smoking again, at least temporarily. The majority of conversations ended this way, but still I went on making the phone calls, “reaching out,” using words and terms like “profoundly sad” and “head space” and “grief” and “I wish he would just call and let me know where he is” and a great deal of expletives.

“F*ck,” I would say, after I’d exhausted the story for the fifth time that day. “F*ck!”

Besides friends I’d forgotten—who’d essentially forgotten about me—I called my father, who listened but would not commiserate.

“Dear heart,” he said with a sigh, “I want you to hear what I’m about to say and try not to be angry.

“You and Jackson …” he said, and all I heard was the familiarity of our names once again united, “… you and Jackson have had your time. I’m an old man, and I know what I’m saying when I tell you that just because you love someone, Peaches, just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’re right. For you. At least not forever. And how many times, Ida—how many times have I picked up the phone to you in a state of absolute disrepair because you’ve woken up to him gone? How many times have you worn long sleeves in the summer—I don’t care if it’s not his fault he hurts you, Ida, but the truth is he does. And you hurt each other. You’re my child and Jackson might as well be, and don’t hate me for saying this, honey, but I think he was right to go.”

When I had run out of old friends to call, and even my father said he’d be happy to talk with me about anything but Jackson, I began calling James’s hotel. He was required to pick up and so I was able to get in a few angry words, hammer out a few reluctant answers, but after two weeks he convinced his boss of a frequent prank caller and the need of a little box that he glanced at, then ignored, while the telephone wires ached and the numbers of my location pulsed and pulsed and pulsed.





Amid all of this, my father and Julia undertook partnership wholeheartedly, almost as if it were their profession. They made an art form of consideration, compassion, frequently stumbling over each other to accommodate. Rolls of Tums showed up with the slightest mention of stomach upset, you-shouldn’t-haves exchanged like currency. Whatever tension there’d been decades ago, as young parents trying to survive in different ways, they relegated this like an old couch for the sake of something more comfortable. She moved from the room where I had slept as a child to his. Though they slept in the same bed, we understood this was not for the sake of lust but nearness; Julia wanted to be there in the middle of the night if my father’s breath grew troubled, and he felt obligated to receive whatever end-of-the-day or postdream thoughts she offered. In a word, Julia navigated all things physical and tangible for the both of them—trips to the post office and the pharmacy, groceries, whole days mopping and sweeping—and my father held her hand and listened, read her short stories by Latin American authors about little boys sailing and drowning in a sea of light.





There are photographs I could display, stories I could tell, that would mitigate harsh images like that of Jackson sitting demonic in the chair at Paul’s gallery, of him looking down at the most recent bruises on my breasts and turning away, not able to manage the information. There were whole days laughably perfect, those we memorize to nourish us later. Of course, I try to reject turning to these for hydration, given the subsequent drought and its crater I sat in speechless, but it would be unfair to him and, mostly, all that time, to say we faltered for the entirety of it.

There is a game we used to play, after sex, in which we’d try to stay connected afterward for as long as possible. As in we’d lie there, adjusting our bodies and breathing patterns to avoid possible displacement, having conversations about the books we were reading, the man at the corner store whom we loved, our parents, the status of the tomato plant we tried raising several times. It’s silly to describe, the next part even more so, but sometimes, on the heaterless winter mornings in our apartment, we’d try to get up like that, the comforter wrapped around both of us, my legs around his lower back, and he’d sometimes succeed at pouring a bowl of cereal that we’d then share, me still suspended and calves straining to grip, giggling but trying to refrain from doing so, wanting to be a part of the same warmth. We’d put our serious faces on again and he’d oscillate between an exhausted, happy still and an erection, and sometimes we’d enjoy each other again.

Were I testifying for a case of happiness, there’s much else I’d mention. For instance, the fact that we never bought a mop, preferring instead that childish thing where you attach damp cloths to your feet and slide across the floor. A Sunday evening ritual, with beers in hand that sometimes dropped and made the cleaning all the more necessary. There was much of adulthood we had no idea how to navigate, and new challenges arose all the time, but we found ways to live happily within them, and the shrieks as we cantered down the long hardwood hallway were loud.

I might also tell the jury how talented we were at presents. My because-it’s-Tuesday honey sticks countered with his fish of strange colors waiting to be named, my strings of little lamps made of mason jars complementing the cerulean he’d painted the living room as a surprise. I’d mention that he mostly always placed a glass of water and two Advil before me without my requesting it (he just knew), that he had a habit of buying fresh flowers and a knack for arranging them. That also a favorite joke between us was to tape a terrifying photo on the inside of the toilet seat or the cabinet, ideally at night so the other would find it in the morning: that famous mug shot of Nick Nolte, a particularly disturbing image of Carrot Top post steroids.

Everyone who visited our home found it just that. They clucked their tongues at the history it implied, some awed given their free lifestyles as just one person, some envious, some inquisitive. We hung photographs by wooden clothespins on a string that ran the length of the east wall. My father and Jackson, age nine, on the afternoon of the Fourth of July, Dad holding a fifty-dollar brick that Jackson is fixated on, fascinated by the promise of pyrotechnics. James and Jackson and myself, sitting on the steps of Julia’s porch on what was my first day of high school. James has grown shadowed already, turning his face away from the camera so that his awkward nose seems larger, doing that thing boys of that age do where they hide their hands inside the sleeves of their sweatshirts. Jackson in a worn shirt that details species of birds, his eyes so bright they’re almost garish. Me in a tight-fitting striped linen button-down that I adored and jeans I’d put holes in over the summer. There was evidence of later years also, of course. Jackson and me, home from college for Christmas, smoking cigarettes on someone’s absent parents’ back porch, in on a joke, our blooming intellectual freedoms nearly a third figure in the photograph, one itchy scarf wrapped around both our necks. Jackson pissing off the winding two-lane highway that follows the edge of California and sometimes closes for repairs when chunks fall into the ocean. A picture taken just after, the first morning of the camping trip we were driving toward, of our faces mashed against each other in the two sleeping bags whose zippers we tricked into meeting. James at sixteen with his guitar on Julia’s porch, singing and his mouth open as if waiting for the unbridled refreshment of a hose, Jackson and me barely visible in the background, smirking at each other; my father’s thumb in the bottom left corner, so intent on capture that he was careless.

When new friends came over and saw all of it, when they asked how long we’d been together, we had several answers.

“Since somewhere between simple addition,” I’d start, “and multiplication tables,” Jackson would finish.

“Since before cursive.”

“Hell, probably since before we knew the alphabet.”

Some of them wanted to know: And do you fight? And we would say: Yes. Of course. Doesn’t every family?





Paul couldn’t explain how it happened, but given the circumstances, it was the one blunder of the evening I forgave him for. Somewhere between Jackson’s frenetic outburst at Caroline and her subsequent breakdown, I asked you nicely the first time went missing. Though we both remembered Jackson leaving the space empty-handed, we both figured he had something to do with it. It was too obvious a symbol. He had asked us nicely the first time, hadn’t he? He had asked me not to provide him with the materials in his sleep. Not to let him take buses and wander into art stores. Not to show anyone, and certainly not to exhibit the pieces. He had asked nicely the first, second, and third times, but I had insisted, as always, on knowing that surely this would do some good and instead unleashed, once again, that which was diseased and clawing.

Three weeks later the piece appeared for sale on the Internet. Ridiculous, many-pronged threads ensued about how Jackson was a hack or Jackson was the biggest talent to emerge in years or Jackson was rumored to abuse women. A bidding war actualized, and the seller, whoever it was, let it rise. Paul called and asked if I wanted to pursue legal action, to find the thief, but I didn’t respond. Jackson had brought about explosions on several fronts, and it seemed only logical to me that there would be more.

What didn’t seem natural was the money that appeared in Paul’s mailbox with a handwritten note in neat capitals requesting he forward it to the artist. As Paul didn’t have any better idea of where Jackson had gone, I accepted it, but only to spite Jackson, to prove to him that I’d been right: what he did in his sleep, whether or not they were “his,” were gut-wrenching and compelling and other people loved them so fiercely they were willing to pay upward of a thousand dollars. That someone would steal the piece only to return the money would have to mean something to him, I thought.

I begged and manipulated James for his brother’s address. He refused and spoke in thick condescension.

“I really have to say here, Ida, I still agree with Jackson that it’s better if you two don’t talk. I am sorry, but no. No can do. Nope.”

On my second try, he was just as short but slightly more kind, had forgotten how much he was supposed to hate me as per his brother’s instructions, and I played it for everything it was worth.

“How you doing tonight, kid?” he asked, and I let him call me kid; being the needy versus the needed was essential.

“Oh, you know,” I said and composed a self-aware titter, “it goes up and down. But I’m trying to think of other things? And let myself feel but not sit in it?”

“That’s good. That’s real good.”

“Yeah! And I even started a little garden on the fire escape today.”

I was lying through my teeth. There was absolutely no happy-go-lucky gardening going on, no brightening at the thought of readily available fresh rosemary.

“All good things,” he said.

I hedged my bets and let him talk about himself for a while, resolved to let it wait.

On the third try, I embarrassed even myself with insipid, upbeat blather that filled the telephone lines until they could barely stand it, and without taking a breath posed the question again. I used my very best manipulative lilt, stressed that he really could probably use the money, considering he was starting his life over, that this wasn’t at all about making contact with him.

“You know,” I posed, tried to imbue my voice with all the begrudged wisdom I could, “despite everything, I still care about him. He did what he felt he had to do.”

It was an evil game I was playing, outsmarting James, taking advantage of someone who couldn’t help but bow to our history. Despite years, despite so many divergences, I was still the older girl from down the street who held his head while he vomited after too many popsicles and so couldn’t tell his mother he was ill, still the girl who slept in her underwear on the floor five feet from him for years after society deemed it permissible because I was, after all, essentially his sister. Still the owner of the first pair of breasts he ever saw in person, when Jackson and I broke into the high school pool and swam naked and kissed naked and did other things naked while James sat on the bleachers silent and sullen and clothed.

We were family, and though the person who mattered most was far away in another city and had forgotten, I had won. James agreed to give me his brother’s address as long as I promised to send the check and only the check.





Jackson returned the check and I sent it back and he returned it and I sent it back and it went on for nearly a month. It felt nearly like flirting, the interval between its return becoming shorter and shorter until the fourth week, when I waited to spring with my supply of stamps and envelopes and it never came. It was supposed to feel like winning, but didn’t, and though I’d searched each envelope he’d returned for any sign of him and never found anything, when they stopped appearing through the brass slot and falling onto the crooked floors that had been ours, I wished I had searched harder, was sure I had missed something. When my father called and I told him with a pathetic giggle of our exchange, he danced deftly around the topic.





The plus or minus sign is supposed to appear within two minutes, but on all three the former appeared immediately.

There was absolutely no question of “keeping it”—as if it were something found—but still, I mentally drew Punnett squares like in high school biology class, remembered that blue eyes like mine are a recessive trait, as is my widow’s peak. The nausea not just in the mornings. The constant glances into mirrors and the windows of trains, begging they forgive my vanity, silently explaining it’s not just me I’m looking at or for, that I should have paid for three tickets.

I wanted to tell everyone, wanted to tell no one. I saw pregnant women and wanted to say I’m seven weeks, wanted to glow with them and not disclose that seven would not turn to eight. The dreaminess, the pernicious hunger. My hand wandering onto my abdomen without my permission, every gesture an apology.

The day before the clinic I woke early, took half of Jackson to a museum and showed him—I was sure it was a him—my favorite Rauschenberg and stood there twenty minutes so that he would remember. I splurged on fine coffee, sparkling water from France, fresh-squeezed orange juice thick with pulp. The sun was out for the first time in weeks so we headed to a roof garden with a view of the water and I read poems and stories that I hoped would help him to understand what it is I was saving him from. At seven weeks, his lungs and liver and ears and mouth were being formed, and his heart, beating with one chamber, would soon have formed a dividing wall. Since his couldn’t, I swore to form divisions in my own.

The terms they use at the clinic versus the ones they must use with happy couples at the regular doctor’s: I see the pregnancy, said a nurse named Viv, not I see the baby. I asked to see and collapsed into sobs but still not letting her turn the screen away. Using the scratchy paper draped over my naked bottom half to wipe my face. I remembered hearing how abortion clinics in the Midwest are required to show the sonogram, that a significant number of children are born because of this.

Viv asked after my support system, which really meant: and what about the father?

“Oh, he’s been great,” I lied, shocked at myself. “We’re both just real sad we can’t keep it, but our financial situation—you know.”

Viv didn’t believe me, but she nodded, smiled wide and long.

I chose the at-home option, because three to five minutes under anesthesia just didn’t seem like enough suffering. The literature warned that some blood clots could be as big as lemons or oranges, and I couldn’t help but think that fruit seemed a malicious analogy.

The painkillers did not help so much as abbreviate the wincing into smaller, simpler blocks. Despite precautions, the sheets were left stained; I disposed of them the next day and slept on the bare pilled mattress for nearly a month. I didn’t tell anyone and simply stopped going to work, because the thought of nannying someone else’s child seemed as impossible as time travel. The family left increasingly angry, then panicked voice mails. Sometimes I didn’t hear the phone and sometimes I did, in which case I would watch it light up and vibrate with wonder. That the family I had worked for before—all things now categorized as before and after—still existed, still managed to force Brie and apple and candied walnut salads into their children’s mouths before rushing out of their multimillion-dollar home, was hard to believe.