The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

As a little girl, I was normally comforted by mathematics, soothed by the premise of one true, right answer, but in the next few days the powdery white numerals against the dusty green were written, erased, rewritten, multiplied—and I hardly noticed. I also loved words—for an entirely different reason, for the way they lent themselves to endless combinations—but the spelling lists, also, I copied down with little interest and did not study later.

My father, like the rest of the parents, grew more distraught as the weeks went on and Anna never appeared. Except while the rest of them could almost believe the lies they told their children about it being only a matter of time before she was back helping her mother garden in the front yard, my father spent as much time as he could in the newsroom looking for the gruesome answer. He looked through pages and pages of local and surrounding areas’ sex offenders, he reviewed the police report although he knew it by heart already, he read crime logs from the past six months, then a year and two years, but it was futile.

I made sense of it because I had to, or at least that is what I tell myself when the man’s face appears in my memory: half paralyzed, something about the blue eyes sloppy but essentially kind. He was the janitor at the junior high school and sat almost every day at a sidewalk table of an Armenian café that served bottomless coffee, looking at nothing in particular and sometimes laughing rather convulsively at what the old men who also sat there said. Perhaps he had suffered a stroke at a relatively young age; he dragged the left side of his body dutifully, like an older brother chaperoning his younger sibling at the fair with effort, though not unhappily. He talked slowly and thickly and mumbled pleasantly to himself as he walked. Surely, I thought, he was the man who walked and talked bad that my sleeping friends had alluded to. Surely he had fallen in love with Anna as she breezily crossed the courtyard from fifth to sixth period, while he emptied the trash cans overflowing from the eighth graders’ lunch. Surely he was hiding her.

Although I am cursed with a memory that forgives very little, the series of events that followed appear in matter-of-fact captions in my brain. The absence of typical floridity seems to imply that there can be no forgiveness for what I did. While my father was still at work, likely also sweating in the search to bring back Anna and what she’d taken with her of our little community, I called the number listed on the flyer and felt a strange giddiness at an action so independent. It was similar to the times my father had let me sit in his lap and steer; although his feet were on the brakes, I was happy to reign over the full circle of leather.

I supplied his name. They asked how old I was but still seemed willing to listen. When they asked what proof I had, I lied, though I had not planned on it. I said I had heard him talking to himself in the magazine aisle of the bookstore, picking up a glossy thing meant for young female teens and saying, “Anna will like this.” It was a complex lie for someone so young to tell, and thinking about it now I am both impressed and disgusted.

They did not find the missing girl in his tiny in-law, but they did find cats. More than forty cats: some diseased, most inbred, of different colors, in different states of filth and malnutrition. The smell that occasionally came from the house, neighbors later reported, had been awful, but they’d had no idea about the animals. The cottage was far enough back from the street that the sound of the mournful, elongated meows and hissing had not reached the families eating quiet dinners, and the landlord reported that the man seemed friendly enough and always paid his modest rent on time. The footage of him on the news showed him in tears, and the papers reported him as dimwitted though remorseful. The number of cats had grown rapidly, from ten to seventeen in just a few months, and he had naïvely hoped he could love and take care of all of them. By the time the number had reached forty, the situation was long out of control, but he worried what would happen if he told anyone.

There were threats of charges and a slew of highly vocal animal rights activists, but in the end the former were dropped and the latter found causes less wilted and easier to chant slogans at than the lonely, possibly mentally disabled man who swept up thirteen-year-olds’ messes.

I had never done anything to incite such a rage in my father. His anger took a subdued form that seemed to sit and percolate, wishing to avoid explosions, only outwardly expressing itself in a cupboard shut just too forcefully, a phone gripped just beyond necessity. The men in badges had come and given me a serious talking to, my father nodding in solidarity with his hands clasped between his knees. When they gave a roundabout implication that maybe I’d done this for the reward, I burst into hot, ignoble tears. They looked at each other and stopped. It was clear they’d said enough. My father shook their hands at the door and apologized again, closed the door, and laid his head, briefly, upon its frame. He took a brisk route into the kitchen, where he made a sandwich and left the ingredients sitting out. He spent the rest of the afternoon in his bedroom, and I tried to keep busy. I teased our unresponsive cat and rode my bike around the block fast and without pleasure; it became evening and my father had still not surfaced.

I wanted badly to see James and Jackson, but they were spending the weekend with Julia’s mother in a dry, flat town four hours south. I was hungry. Though I was a reasonably autonomous girl and could easily have fixed myself something to eat, I did not. I reread part of a book about a brother and sister who run away to live in a museum and fell asleep with the light and all my clothes on, missing my mother fiercely.

I woke to the smells of breakfast and wandered into the kitchen, where my father gently asked that I sit. He put before me a heaping plate—a silent apology or an assimilation of one for not seeing to my dinner the night before—of two raspberry pancakes, two strips of bacon, and an egg-in-a-basket, the yellow-white a wondrously perfect circle against the even brown of the bread. He did not speak, did not look at me, and got up twice to refill his coffee. He did laugh lightly, perhaps sadly, certainly thinking of my mother, when a strand of my hair got into the syrup without my noticing.

I devoured every last bit. I was hungry from crying, from telling a useless lie, from what the missing girl had taken with her when she left, from the realization that had grown hard and final in my sleep: that she, and it, were not coming back. When he was sure I was done, he addressed me. We were to go to that poor man’s house and I was, in no uncertain terms, to apologize. Furthermore, I was to have no more ideas about solving the mystery of Anna Martin. There were plenty of adults doing the best they could. I was to keep doing well on my tests, to ride my bike, to feel the independence and responsibility a library card afforded, to make thoughtful decisions based on my growing set of rights and wrongs, to do all the things Anna could not.


As we approached the man’s little house and crossed the yard, which was thick with unraked leaves, I wished with all my concentration that he would not be home. As if he knew this, my father informed me that he had called Mr. Mortensen ahead of time and he was expecting us.

He opened the door in a pink pullover sweatshirt that was pilled and ill fitting and scared me, somehow. Though the cats had all been taken two days before, the smell was overwhelming. One sharp glance from my father let me know I was not to let the slightest acknowledgment of this so much as breeze across my face.

He looked at me, but not my father, with his down-turned and watery eyes.

“Come in … please,” he said, with a slowness and thickness that sounded more like a muted foghorn than words. He shuffled in, gestured to a futon with sun-faded cushions so thoroughly defaced with cat scratches that the foam showed through more often than not, and sat himself in an orange plastic chair that was very clearly once the property of a junior high school classroom. The only other objects in the living room were a television, on top of it a bunch of little white flowers in a novelty plastic cup bearing a faded endorsement for a children’s movie, and another school chair, but this one of dark blue. Tacked on the wall was a very old wedding photograph. The two people in the picture—presumably his parents—had their eyes slightly off center, and I tried to fixate on anything but that, the thought of him being a child once too much to bear.

“Ida?” My father asked. “Do you have something to say to Mr. Mortensen?”

The same hot tears began to stroll down my face. Tasting the warm salt in my mouth, I pushed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, willing the sibilant word I was here in this awful-smelling, sad excuse for a room to say.

“I’m suh, suh, sorry,” I sobbed. “I wanted … I just wanted … her to be back.”

The man gave me the look he probably received all day long, the look that says: I pity you, but not quite enough to take the time to understand you. He raised one hand, palm upward, and let it drop. He closed his eyes as if to make the vision of the lanky, crying girl go away. It was more than likely he wanted to share four walls with me as little as I wanted to share them with him. Neither the man nor I had the words for that moment, but my father did.

“Mr. Mortensen, I’ve explained the very serious consequences of her actions to my daughter, and she is, as you can see, extremely remorseful. I can’t imagine what you must have gone through, and can only apologize again for the nightmare that was brought into your home.”

The man, again, flipped his hand up in a gesture that could imply both receiving and offering. He nodded weakly, brought a remote from his pocket, and turned on the television. It was a signal as good as any, and we left.


Two weeks later, the case was solved—though “solved” seems the wrong word for it. (Were it solved, the girl would have been back in the neighborhood, all the photographs and votive candles would be taken off her porch, and our parents would not think twice if we were not home exactly within the ten minutes it took to return from school.) Though what all the parents wanted was for a broad-shouldered, fiercely virtuous detective type to come across a hidden clue that snapped all pieces together and led to the kidnapper, that was not what happened. There was no hero. Instead, a man with a criminal record that spanned years simply came forward and confessed. He had strangled Anna with a piece of yellow cloth, he said, and would lead them to her grave. The body had decayed for two months, but the blue-and-white-striped flannel pajamas Anna had been wearing served as instant identification. In the photograph that graced the front pages of all the newspapers, taken in the courtroom after the man was sentenced to death, he is smiling.





Though on paper I had only given local animal rights activists a cause to unite around briefly and community members an unpleasant aftertaste to gossip about, it seemed to Jackson that I had at least done something about the missing girl, and I think this is how he avoided the issue of my using what he may or may not have said in his sleep as a reason to go ruining the life of some poor disabled guy with a repulsive amount of cats—although years later, it showed up in his memory as an event altogether wrong, something he felt embarrassed to be even slightly connected to. What it did was make him think about consciousness in a way that children are hardly prompted to do. He’d pick things up just for the sake of dropping them; read aloud the backs of packages of macaroni and chicken pot pie his mother kept in the freezer, sounding out consonants; turn on the faucet to slight, medium, strong and feel the various pressures on different parts of his hand. All of these acts sacred, private, even beloved. He grew obsessed with navigation, pored over maps, saved up his allowance for a compass. It became very nearly a tic, the way he would take out the prized metal object and announce: north. northeast. southw-southeast! He urged us to try new routes to school, elaborate zigzags and “shortcuts”—just a left, a right, and a sharp right. More: he memorized the bones in his body in order to understand and own how they carried him. What felt like moments before, we’d felt a dumb pride in sticking needles into the thickness of our summer calluses, but now Jackson spoke in metatarsals and phalanges.

Burdened by a capacity he never asked for, Jackson began to process his ability to shift the world around him in his sleep without his specific desire and designed a reaction: he set about wanting small things and making them happen. Even if it meant pressing the doorbell and procuring the expected sound, the fact that he had made it happen, during the daylight, in his favorite thin red cotton shirt, felt important. When his mother regaled houseguests with stories of his sleepwalking and the adults cackled over the absurdity of, for instance, The Family Heirloom Jackson Put in the Fish Tank or The Time Jackson Tried to Put on a T-shirt as Pants, he felt so embarrassed that he had to leave the room. Oh, honey, his mother would say as he left, but she would continue to laugh and then offer her friends the even further hilarious anecdote of the time she found him allegedly using a roll of toilet paper as a telephone and asking more and more insistently to be connected to someone named Rick. Often the laughter at the Rick story carried enough that back in his room, he would stick his fingers in his ears and hum obsessively, or, if he let me, I’d lead us in song at increasing volumes, keeping in mind what my father told me: it’s hard to know all the words, so the ones you do know, you’ve got to sing really loud.

Jackson was still at the age where praying could be a vagary, and before he slept he made bargains with whoever might accept them. Please, he breathed in and out, let me stay quiet and I’ll be nicer to James. Let me stay in one place while I sleep and I’ll never again ridicule my mother’s cooking until she cries. Please.





The church around the corner from our street is long gone (at least in its identity as a church); for years it was left alone, the marquee blank and its plastic yellowing, although the drab add-on unit where the preacher and his family lived was rented briefly several times, always by single people who kept their curtains drawn behind the very small windows. Eventually a gay couple in their forties bought the building, oohing and ahhing at the high ceilings, laughing at the ironic potential of the altar, and envisioning many parties. They kept the windows open for days on end, letting out the smell of Christ, painting all the walls yellow and hand-oiling the floors with organic orange cleansers, shrieking with amusement, playing David Byrne or chaotic piano ensembles. But different sorts of noises began to echo out the windows, and the two gay men became one gay man who did not find the yellows to his suit anymore and certainly did not keep the windows open.

But: it was a church, and there was a preacher, and there was a preacher’s daughter, and her name was Heather, and Heather was in the same grade as Jackson and me, and we did something bad to Heather.

She had the brand of eerily white-blond hair that does not get darker with age, skin just as pale, and slits of brown eyes. Her father had encouraged her to befriend the children in the neighborhood, after her arrival in the third grade, and she took a special liking to me. Perhaps because I lived with just my father, perhaps because I did not attend church, perhaps because I was fearless on the rope swing that hung from the oak tree in the front yard. I didn’t want her around. I pushed her too high; she wrapped her legs tight around the two-by-six and squealed as if being held over a fire; I pushed harder and pretended to misunderstand her cries as joy.

Heather was always regurgitating bits of her father’s sermons. Possibly she didn’t yet believe them, but they were the only bits of conversation she had to make, and she wanted badly to be my friend. I was quick and vile in response, and Heather didn’t seem to mind one way or another. It seemed to her that as long as both of us were making sounds, that meant we were bonding. She wanted to play innocuous games with my dolls. “Pretend,” she would say, “pretend she has to go to a dance, but, but”—her imagination was for shit. “But what, Heather?” I’d reply. “But her house is on fire? But Spanish pirates are about to kidnap her?” It was no use. Heather just dressed and redressed the dolls, asked me what I thought of the pink shoes with the blue dress. When I complained, my father said I had to be nice to her, but I think he found the way her normalcy intricately tortured me privately amusing. At dinner when she said please and thank you and talked about heaven, he had to suppress a smirk while I notably slammed my milk glass, scraped my teeth on my fork, made fart noises in my elbow. “Stop, Ida,” he said sternly, but later laughed until he cried and told me I was his favorite daughter. But I am your only daughter, I would say. That’s right, he said with a firm furrow of the forehead, the only one. When he said “only,” it meant something different.

Heather got the hint, or at least gave up trying. With the eventual relegation of dolls, the more complex math problems, the beginnings of breasts, Heather’s insipid nature leaned more toward cruelty. We arrived at junior high school and she took to carrying a Bible with her in the hallways, even leading this as a trend of sorts among other girls in high-buttoning shirts and beige pants. When we passed she took to tilting her head in mock sympathy and God-blessing me, she and her comrades snickering in my wake. In classes she raised her hand frequently, fingered the cross around her neck and offered her thoughts, generally framing them as direct from her Father or her father. She declined to engage in certain required reading, brought notes from her dad that forbade her from doing so.

Adolescence had descended on us, though not without our knowing. Jackson and I didn’t speak of the mysteries of antiperspirant versus deodorant, or the different kinds of underwear the girls in the locker room began to wear, but we related to each other differently, as if circling. We sat on my stoop but spoke of doing something else. We played catch from farther and farther distances down our street, and sometimes, watching the baseball land somewhere besides our mitts, neither of us went to grab it.

One of the first afternoons of spring that year, Jackson and I settled on my front lawn with our Spanish textbooks in our laps and conjugated verbs, learning all the different ways to eat, to listen, to cry, to run. Somewhere between past and present tenses, we lost direct contact with the newly returned sun and found Heather in its path there, blocking our warmth. She was clad in the deep sort of pink that looks good on no one, her backpack adjusted high up her shoulders.

Sensing my choice not to speak, Jackson did. “Hey,” he went, without warmth.

“Hi, Ida.” Heather spoke from her nose.

“I saw your father out walking late last night,” she accused.

“He likes to do his thinking like that.”

“My dad saw too. He says it must be hard on you.”

I went back to quiet, poured my energy into I go, you go, she goes, we go, they go.

“Growing up the way you do. Your dad always working. He thinks it’s not right, you spending all your time alone with those boys. But you know? I told him the Lord forgives you. Having basically no family and all. You’re always welcome for dinner at our place, you know. It might be good for you to be around a father and mother. People who really care for your soul.”

“Hey, Heather!” Jackson speciously enthused in the same voice he used when tricking James into doing his chores by some clever trade or another. “Wanna see something we just found? Out back?”

Her eyes lit up like she hadn’t just been pushing at the weakest folds of my heart, and she followed him but immediately.

The tree outside our living room window was sickly and small, but it served its purpose. How long Heather remained hanging there, strung by her wrists and ankles by a string of Christmas tree lights, a bandanna tied around her mouth, I’m not sure. She did not cry out or protest, and right before Jackson covered her thin, pallid lips she asked God to save us.

“Shut up!” cried Jackson. “Shutupshutupshutup,” his words coming fast like a metronome gone mad.

When I returned after dinner, terrified, the preacher’s daughter was gone, the ghosts of tiny lights hanging in apostrophe of the day’s events. I tore them violently from the branches, shaking boughs and loosening leaves, crossed the street, and placed them in my neighbor’s garbage can. The thud of the black plastic lid falling behind me as I raced across the asphalt was deafening, and I expected every window on the street to fill with light as if to ask: What are you doing? What have you done?

Just as the first evening we spent tenderly examining each other’s bodies—an act with implications we were far, then, from understanding—was never mentioned, neither was what we did to Heather, or what Heather did to me. In school she made every effort to pass by my desk, sometimes giving my hair a little tug; I would look up from a spelling test to find her looking at me, unblinking, and she would grin and grin and grin. I spent the months after that waiting for a knock at the door, or to be summoned into the living room to find my father and the preacher, a balding man with hairy, stubby hands, talking in low voices about me, about Heather.

The knock never came. One day Heather showed up at school with her arm in a sling and did not take unnecessary routes to pass by my desk; the next day she was gone. That Sunday a crowd gathered outside the church, waiting to be saved, speculating as to why the doors were locked.

For weeks and months, the marquee displayed the same message:

WE ARE

NOT PERFECT

JUST FORGIVEN





Some nights I listen to my ragged breathing and remember: in the space behind my eyes, memories appear Technicolor. Pink and yellow light shines through the visions in my half sleep, as if they were constructed of rice paper, and I try, with such an aching, to replicate the smell of chlorine, to recreate the laughter of those long gone, to set these stories in my head in stone so they can be done with.

Some nights I remember peaches. Tonight is one of them.

Jackson had a job at the market one summer. He was seventeen, I was almost. The sunflowers in the front of the store were larger than any I’ve seen since, and the ancient cashier with the cigarette voice was named Paula. No: Linda. She called me rosebud and complimented my wrinkled sundresses. The bathroom was in the right front corner; it had only one stall and I can’t remember what the hand soap smelled of but I promise myself I will before I sleep. Jackson worked four days a week—or was it five—and his work shirt was never clean. It smelled definitively of him, even from where I would stand, across a display of clementines touted for peeling easily. I pretended I was a customer, crossed my arms and sighed over the selection of fruits and vegetables.

But what’s the difference, I whined as I fingered the donut peaches, and he smiled patiently with the left side of his mouth curving up like it had since we were kids. You see, ma’am, if you can believe it or not, and he’d pause with mock astonishment, these were cultivated especially for a Chinese emperor—and now I can’t remember the name of the emperor but I decide I will, before I fall asleep. Never mind the name. Remember the donut peach. You must, I tell myself. Must.

They were cultivated for a Chinese emperor, Jackson would say, who loved peaches but disliked the mess, so they designed the pan tao, the flat peach, which fit right in between his mustache and beard. It occurs to me between ticks that he may have made this up. No, no, he couldn’t have. Go on.

What about this one. I would say, it looks funny. Should the skin look like that? All white like that? Don’t judge a book by its cover, ma’am, and he would laugh politely, this here is the arctic white and I might say it’s finer than the rest of them. Oh, really? Why? Well, first you’ve got less fuzz, he’d say, and I’d acknowledge this with a huh and hand on my hip. They’re just about the sweetest peach you’ll get, but they ripen more quickly, so you eat these guys up once you get home, ma’am.

I force myself to remember, now lying on my side: freestone: the flesh falls away from the pit when you bite into it. Clingstone: it refuses to.

Inevitably my peach facts run out and I lie awake, feeling unsettled, knowing that there’s so much I’m forgetting. I get up.

In the bathroom I undress and examine myself. I arrange myself horizontally in the bathtub, and I turn the shower on and wrap my arms around myself, feel the water from its great height of origin. I try, this time, to remember nothing at all.





The first time we touched each other, I was seven, Jackson eight. My father, in a particularly good mood, had offered to take the boys off Julia’s hands, take all of us to a swimming spot he knew of. She hated my father, or maintained that she did for a large chunk of my childhood, but there was nothing Julia valued more than a moment away from the physical and psychic tugs that issued from her sons’ mouths day in and day out. (T is for Tired, read the alphabet book James would be assigned to write in school that year. If we are bad Mom gets tired. It was accompanied by a drawing of Julia, her hair in curlicues branching in every direction, her eyes the X’s that signified dead, and three pink triangles that represented a bathrobe. In a moment of black humor she taped it to her bedroom door, and we heard her and a girlfriend cackling about it late one night in the kitchen.)

School had started, but the weather had not changed: an unbearable incongruity. In protest, I wore my blue bathing suit, which had begun to pill around the crotch, underneath the brand-new denim and gingham blouses my father had bought me for the first week of classes. The first days, as always, seemed like a sort of play: surely they were not asking us to add and subtract numbers when just days before we had reigned the uneven sidewalks with games that lasted after dark. My father was nothing if not indulgent, and sensing this, put us in his large boat-sized car with bouncy seats the Sunday before the second week began.

We made our way up the winding hills of Marin County, me sticking my head out the window pretending I was a happy golden Labrador, my father singing along to radio. Buddy Holly. Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer: I could tell he loved that song, and had for a long time. James sang it: Everyone says go ahead and catch her, instead of ask her, as if it were a ballad of capture the flag.

We had to park on the edge of the road, which sat essentially on a cliff, and get out of the slightly tilted car on the side of traffic. We all chained hands and pretended not to be scared of the cars whizzing by, appearing from around the curves. The path down was sometimes uneven and at those points my father reminded us: “Three points of contact.” That meant have at least one hand and two feet, or two hands and one foot, on the ground or a steady rock or whatever you can find. This phrase still comes to me, sometimes, my father’s voice didactic but soothing. Three points of contact.

They were called the inkwells, the pools of water that flowed into ones below them by miniature waterfalls. We took turns jumping off the rocks into the deeper pools, marveling at being suspended, if briefly, in the air above the water. James played a secret game with himself up by the trees, his lips pursed and spitting sometimes as a result of dramatic sound effects. My father, treading water, placed his hands on the small of our backs while we floated and looked up at the early September sky: it was better, somehow, than our beloved August’s and July’s had been. I remember that moment as a blinking cursor, as if our buoyancy gave us the freedom, the permission we needed to press the boundaries we did that evening.

My father had taken us out only under the condition that we study for our spelling test that evening. We sat on the floor beneath the open window of the brothers’ bedroom, still in our bathing suits, taking turns drilling one another, but my mind kept returning to Jackson sneaking up underwater and nibbling my toes.

“S’hot,” he kept complaining. Tired of his whining and likewise heated, I removed my bathing suit, simultaneously proud and embarrassed. “Now you,” I insisted. We balked at the silliness of our naked bodies and began the scientific exploration, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, parallels of gender and the entire universe as we understood it. What he had was much different from mine: I held it in my hand and let it drop, held it in my hand and let it drop. In retaliation he began to poke at me. Quick, tentative jabs, the tiny pink knob that would be with me forever listening, waiting. If this was wrong, it was only because, like our classmates taunted, secrets don’t make friends, and this was certainly a secret.

Julia was in the kitchen, washing dishes, and James, we thought, asleep in front of the television. It was Jackson who saw him in the crack of the doorway, who grabbed his arm and dragged him in.

“Why are you naked?” James asked.

“Because it’s hot,” Jackson tested, and it seemed for a minute that James would believe it, before he drank in the particular pink of our cheeks and guilt in our eyes and catch in our breaths. Before he got to the “o” of Mom, Jackson’s hand was over his mouth and he’d wrestled his little brother to the floor, made him promise not to tell. James was crying, and it occurred to me later it was not for the threat or the physical force, but because he had just witnessed something private, that he wasn’t a part of: he felt, for maybe the first time in his life, alone. Like tourists tracing their fingers over the maps of the underground trains, wondering at how vehicles of the same origin so quickly split into branching.

We did not continue our experiments, nor did we mention them. But in the bath, beneath the bubbles, I touched myself and tried in vain not to feel my fingers, tried to understand why it was so different when someone else did it. I rubbed my crotch back and forth on the monkey bars at the park down the street, and though the metal was foreign, it was not the same as someone else’s flesh.

(When I brought it up years later, Jackson denied its truth, looked at me the way people might look at an academic who has written a lengthy book on a subject so pigeonholed, so inaccessible, that the time and research involved seem at once pathetic and awe-inspiring in how unfathomable the reality. A memory so fierce as mine leaves one lonely.)

When my father caught me masturbating under the dinner table, he was gentle: he explained that it was perfectly normal but meant for private settings. When I grew up, it would be something very special to share with someone else. Nonetheless, my face grew red and I cried from shame. Later in my bedroom, I rubbed myself hard and wished determinedly for the time when someone else would be present for this warmth, this friction. And I knew, even then, whom that someone would be.

The secret, shameful feeling about sex that I’ve grown to have, which it’s now clear Jackson long suffered, grows as I go farther back in eidetic memory, deeper in roots. It’s been a part of my life longer than it seems it should have, which did not occur to me as good or bad until the latter lit up in bright lights—the type that shine through symbolical windows and keep one from sleeping.