The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

Our childhood was a love affair like any other. Were I to choose my details wisely, I could submit them in present tense to a romantic advice column. We went through ups and downs, lapses in communication, periods of feverish adoration, epochs of lasting alienation. During the week he was gone one summer, I hung my quite long hair over the edge of the stone wall on our porch as if in protest, awaiting his return. Surely the act was in some ways Rapunzel-inspired but also a demonstration of the similarities between human relationships and the skin that hangs around our faces though long dead. Because yet they are dead or at best dying, strands of hair are worshipped and brushed and in some idyllic cases gathered in blue or yellow ribbons. Long hair is at best respected and at worst wondered at in the way old, strange things are: it is proof. It is history. And in the time of children, which is punctuated oddly and cataloged eccentrically, a week without Jackson was no less than a crater. What needs not be said, of course, is that the longer hair gets, the harder it is to brush.

Seen through another lens, the image of a little girl, craning her neck and spilling her hair toward her father’s meager garden a few feet below, declaring that she misses her best friend, a little boy from down the street she’s grown up with, is sweet. People like to be reminded of the child’s pure compassion. It’s this fierce, often pathetic mourning of love so innocent, which for good reason cannot exist in adulthood, that drives people to buy those posters of two six-year-olds pursing their lips on a beach about to kiss, or sharing the sound of the ocean coming from a seashell.





Shortly before his tenth birthday, James broke his hand on the oak tree that devastated the sidewalk outside my house. I stood with my legs planted firmly, hands slicing the air decisively, instructing him on how to throw a perfect punch at the bare bark. James’s mother couldn’t believe her son had been convinced, as my right hand had been wrapped in pink plaster for two weeks at that point. My father had been my instructor, had duct-taped a throw pillow to the tree, not thinking any ten-and-a-half-year-old’s first attempt would make any serious contact.

I’d been physically pained but enthralled with my newfound power. I fell asleep in my new cast, fingering the ER bracelet, while my father cried down the hallway and thought of what he might say to my mother, to the woman who had birthed such a good punch. He thought he might apologize for his stupidity. He thought, or knew, that she would find it all hilarious. She’d call him an idiot and go to fix two more drinks, but the fifth would be gone, so she’d walk to the corner store and take so long returning that he’d begin to worry, but she would just be making small talk with the quiet-smiling Korean couple who owned the convenience store down the street. She would come back with a noisy paper bag and some little joke present for him: Jesus-scented incense, extra-large condoms in ludicrous gold wrappers. Then they would f*ck in their immaculately white bedroom until the sun peeked in the curtains, her mouth open and smiling the whole time. When it was over, she’d tell him oh honey, oh lamb, this life.

But sex with the dead is always unsatisfying, and even after his forcedly enthusiastic efforts in masturbation, even when he tried to think of the elegantly weary and olive-skinned mother of the brothers down the street, his testicles were left as aching and sad as the rest of him.





Our teenage years are just as engraved as the rest in my memory, but they are stories I am hesitant to speak about with anyone who wasn’t present: because they seem boastful, fantastic, no doubt exaggerated; because in telling them we seem to lose credibility as the responsible adults we tell ourselves and the world that we are now.

The river, which we sometimes named as the catalyst for all of it, wasn’t really a river. It was as an estuary, which is a fancy name for slough; it was referred to as a creek until 1959, when the town rallied for some national official or another to give it license as a river. Our parents were fine with calling it that, despite nothing about it being fresh or hurried, and just as accepting of what it spawned: walking bridges dotted with tiny lights, waterside restaurants that didn’t charge for the newspaper and where people spent whole mornings sitting, antique store after antique store.

Separating the cafés where they sat with us on their knees, adjusting their sunglasses as we squirmed, was the corpse of a railroad that hadn’t run since the town reigned as the egg capital of the world and every family had at least three chickens. Once we were old enough to walk, we tiptoed the steel lines in proud demonstration of newfound balance and secretly, gleefully hoped a train might still be coming. The rails are fenced off now, the wood more decomposed than not, and any drunk from one of the many nearby bars who is foolish enough to adventure onto them will most likely punch a foot through the sweet rot and fall fifteen feet into the filthy, barely moving water.

It’s just one murky winding euphemism, really. Everyone who lives there calls it the river as if in the summer there are lemonade stands, beach towels, the smell of sunscreen, lobster-colored children, young mothers leafing through magazines. The wood of the docks decays slowly as the shopping carts sink into the silt and grime beneath the surface, groaning occasionally and remorsefully to the carcasses of fish and forty-ounces.

When the tide was low in early March, it became harder to romanticize. The tourists on the cobblestone promenade above turned their heads and clapped politely for the bland jazz bands. Below them, we remained loyal and observed the secrets revealed among the hills of silt: parking cones whose bright orange urgency had faded, lifeless ducks facedown, tennis shoes whose brands were unrecognizable or forgotten, Grocery Outlet shopping bags. We named our haunts along the river or accepted those that had been passed down: K-Dock, Lundry’s Landing, The Woodbridge, Anus Beach, The Cop Shop.

Some meanings were forgotten; no one knew what the K stood for. Anus beach had once been Anise Beach, for the herb that grew there persistently. As for Bill Lundry, he’d fallen off the Woodbridge onto the putrid sand below; rumor has it that he finished his beer as he lay there half broken, that he would have died were it not for his sky-high blood alcohol concentration. I remember, still, the miniature jellyfish who returned from their travels once a summer for a month, briefly illuminating the river with undulating circles.

Different people like to tell different stories about the river, about the steamboats that held lavish parties during Prohibition or the people who’d occasionally drowned in it. There was a worn redheaded man who sold pot out of his backpack who liked to say that it used to be different: clear and green like a Rolling Rock bottle, and sometimes kids would even swim in there. I was happy to believe it, and believing can feel dangerously close to knowing.


When I got to college and my peers shared their adolescent experiences, I was shocked. They got into movies for half price on Fridays because Alex or John so-and-so worked there; they had their first drinks before or after prom and became too violently ill to really enjoy themselves; their Midwestern social lives were restricted by distance and whether or not a car was available; their curfews were strictly enforced; they’d had at the most two awkward, unfortunate sexual experiences before leaving home; their parents were bankers or involved in insurance and had done everything they could to provide a normal, safe upbringing.

A normal, safe upbringing was what our parents had (at least told themselves they) wanted for us, but the place we were raised seemed, the more we looked, to lend itself in every way to an experience that was anything but.

Among ourselves we’ve tried, cautiously, to dissect it. The pedestrian nature of the town certainly had something to do with it: everything could be walked to (though even the few spots that seemed unfeasibly far, we still ventured to), and the centrality made it such that it was easy to feign a respectable bedtime for a school night and slip out a window an hour later. Rarely did we associate indoors; our town was overflowing with unenclosed physical spaces just hidden enough and begging to be occupied.

Below the steel bridge that bisected the town into east and west was a three-by-ten-foot grated platform reached by ladder, and as long as our descent was discreet, no one would suspect that beneath the passing of cars was a group of laughing teenagers dangling their legs, feeling the rumbling, passing a bottle of cheap whiskey in the dark. The roofs of the old buildings could be reached by climbing pipes and fire escapes, and once atop one, other rooftop landscapes were easily accessible. An old Victorian that had been converted to an office boasted an unfenced backyard thick with sound-muffling redwoods and a wooden back porch to sit on; an alley on either side offered a high probability of escape in the case of police.

The roof of the old mill (which housed hair salons, a gym, clothing stores for middle aged woman that sold shapeless hemp dresses and wooden jewelry, and a wine bar that always seemed to be hiring) was a triumphant discovery: a series of intricate angles and slopes that provided secrecy and a clear view of both the river and downtown. I shared it only with Jackson, and it was there that finally we touched each other for the first time since the fall I was seven. (Later, as revenge for breaking his heart the first of a few times, he brought a whole host of people up there. They were too loud, the cops were called, and for insurance reasons they were carried down one by one in a cherry picker. My father happened to drive by and witness Jackson’s abashed descent and declared it one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.)

They are fenced off now, only available to yacht owners who know the keypad’s code, but the docks then felt placed there for our purposes alone. We sat on them night after night, physically below the town though feeling above it, laughing and separating from the circle to walk a few feet and pee off the side into the river. When the tide was especially high they wobbled in mimicry of our intoxicated states.

Bizarrely, the post office doors were always open, perhaps for the P.O. Boxers, though we never saw any, and so the post office was ours, too, though the echo of our voices across the marble floor and the tall ceiling was just not as friendly as across the river or the rooftops, and we reserved it for quiet end-of-the-night beers or refuge from the rain.

On visits home I am sometimes dolorous at the sights of these places, or the spaces they used to occupy. The large railroad trestle we called The Woodbridge was taken down almost five years ago in the name of flood control, though probably the real reason was that it had been confirmed that a dead kid found floating in the river had begun his night drinking there. Barbed-wire fences have sprung up around many of the places we entered and exited freely, and the narrow, thickly leaved sloping alleys named Pepper School and Telephone, which once seemed forgotten, are now brightly lit and trimmed of excess foliage.

It’s not that I’d like to bring a brown bag of off-sale whiskey bought from the Central Club down to the docks and pretend that years haven’t passed. It’s that the lack of evidence makes the years spent distributing our weight in these places seem moot, makes it clear that our coming of age was improbable, that it shouldn’t have happened.





The hiss of my father’s oxygen tank punctuates our phone calls. His having to stop and force air through his lips every twenty seconds makes everything he says important, waited for. It always takes at least three or four rings for him to get to the phone; often he will pick up after I’ve begun leaving a message. He still has an actual answering machine, and I feel grateful in those times he is out to imagine my voice bouncing off the walls of the living room or perking the ears of the cat, who is unbelievably old and drooling at this point.

My father calls me dear heart even when he is frustrated with me. The fact that Jackson still calls him but not me is painful, and I can’t bear to think of my father pressing Play and smiling while my ex-lover tells jokes or anecdotes into the answering machine. The fact that my father still loves him feels like betrayal.

I do not ask, but he reports that Jackson is doing phenomenally well; the abrupt disappearance of his problem has turned out not to be a fluke, although fingers still crossed on the part of Jackson and Shannon. While my father must, must know the sort of reaction even hearing the woman’s name might elicit, it is unclear whether he believes there will be some sort of a therapeutic value or, having long ago accepted Jackson and James as a part of the family, feels the need to remind me that this is still the case.

She is a schoolteacher with apparently quite the gift for children; she is Midwestern with a rather pleasant phone voice and a warm laugh; she seems, according to my father, to be just the support system J needs in a time like this. He calls him “J.” I can’t remember him ever calling him “J” before.

My heart quickens and toes curl, but I stay quiet and do not ask my father to stop speaking of her. Instead my mind wanders and I think of the face that Jackson would make upon waking and surveying the damage he had caused or was still in the middle of causing: to find me up against the headboard, both my wrists pinned by his one, all of our bedding thrown to the floor and little pieces of down illuminated by the early morning coming through the window. His forehead crumpled from alien rage to bewilderment and desperation; he looked at me with disgust and pity, searching my face for a sign of guilt or fault. He had then, of course, turned away in shame and said nothing while I rose and showered and began to clean.

A coincidence, the fact that it has ceased since Us, is what those close to me have gently suggested out of obligation, but I remember that look. Though he wouldn’t come out and say it, Jackson believed I had something to do with it, because why else would I go on forgiving him?





At the height of his teenage fling with speed, James spent a great deal of time with this guy who could do the New York Times crossword puzzle in under ten minutes. He (James) could make vivid sense of his math homework (and mine, though I was a class ahead)—he had not just memorized the theorems but could apply them, as we’d so often been urged to do, and did so fiercely. The mental image that burns for me here is of James in a well-worn T-shirt in the middle of winter on my front porch, trying to whisper so as not to wake my father but failing miserably, sweating and gesticulating with both a need and the self-imposed authority to explain. He began writing songs that were both catchy and disturbing, often with Dillon, the crossword guy, who was also into speed and had been a good five years.

While Jackson and I waited for an explosion of some sort, James coasted on his high with a no-matter-is-created-or-destroyed-type efficiency. He got a job as the graveyard shift desk clerk at a cheap motel chain way across town, which he took joy in walking to. He was always clad in secondhand suits and wingtips eerily reminiscent of his father’s, and embodied that brand of extremely clean speed freak: hair always combed, no stubble whatsoever, hands raw from washing with the bar of soap he kept wrapped in wax paper in his pocket. He chain-smoked but also kept mints and cologne and tiny bottles of mouthwash in ready supply. His alert demeanor was perfect for the hours and even more perfect for the clientele: the drug addicts, the plain old homeless or near-homeless alcoholics, the crazy, the sad, the longtime alone—as a general rule, they all responded to James with submission and a vague assimilation of respect. If they attempted the usual hijinks, hot checks or soap theft or prostitution from their rooms, they forfeited almost immediately once he appeared at their door and bared his canine teeth grin offering a cigarette and a heart-to-heart. He spotted them stamps to send their insane letters, gave them more than two free refills of coffee; it was well known that if they wanted to wander in at four or six a.m. and sit in the little plastic lobby chairs while he composed his songs and talk or not talk, that was just fine with him. He was king of that place, and was after two months promoted to assistant manager.

With an obsequious shrug we accepted what the drugs made him and spent the night in the motel rooms he snuck us into. When it was just Jackson and me, we watched cable, passing the plastic ashtrays both listlessly and with an air of luxury, and later did what our parents would call making love but what we were still trying to figure out the nomenclature for. Some nights it was a whole group of us, and we did just the things you’d expect teenagers with free rein in a fourteen-by-twelve room all night to do. James would come in for ten minutes every once in a while, or however long it took to drink a beer; phone calls to and from the front desk just for the sake of a joke or were common and didn’t lose their charm. We demanded three more pillows, six towels, a plate of gilded duck and in a hurry. The hours slipped by until we had to stumble out into the early morning onto the concrete balcony and make our way, reluctantly, back home.





To feel the person I loved most thrashing beside me, to wish I could intercept the antagonists of his nightmares, led to such feelings of powerlessness that at first I accepted the way he reached for me as an honor or at least a duty; I was glad that even in the depths of his unconscious, he knew I was there. He would kick so hard the bed shook, rip the blankets and sheets from his limbs like they were leeches, encircle his arms around me and work his fingers into my flesh so intricately it was as if he was trying to reach my bones. Deep in my rib cage, the small of my back, the curve of my shoulder. The first time I bruised, he was horrified, but I skirted the issue with dark humor—Oh, honey, I know you only hurt me to teach me a lesson—or lessened the blow by identifying shapes, as if we were cloud watching. A purple that bloomed not unlike a cactus, another whose abstract likeness suggested a fish. He felt awful but I assured him I placed no blame, that I’d never fault him for holding me too hard. At least you’re not out smashing up buildings, I said. If the worst damage is a few points of soreness on my body, I’ll wear them like badges. He kissed my forehead before we fell asleep each night. “Apologies in advance,” he murmured darkly. Generally, our city wavered above or below a foggy sixty degrees all year long, and so the marks on my person rarely showed themselves. Jackson took to kissing them, somberly, slowly, and I petted the hair on his head and continued to forgive him.

There was no couch to sleep on in the San Francisco railroad flat we moved into shortly after college, but even if there had been, I doubt I would have retreated there or requested he do so: we’d shared everything since the beginning, and I couldn’t see how his nightmares weren’t mine. The children I nannied saw evidence of the bruises once in a while and wanted to know, like those their age always do, why, why, why. Accidents! I’d say brightly, knowing how they loved that word, its all-encompassing forgiveness. You could break, drop, lose sight of anything: cry accident and the universe said okay, all right.

One evening, amid a relative stillness, he brought his knee up so swiftly that it made contact with my lip. I stood in the bathroom, negotiating the swelling and bleeding, watching myself in the mirror, searching for signs of age and finding them. When he woke and witnessed the irregularity of my mouth in the morning, he wept and turned away. Asked me, please, not to touch him.





Shortly after Jackson’s twenty-fifth birthday, I began to hand him pieces of charcoal and large expanses of paper, glue, bits of tulle peculiar in color, string, broad-stroke paintbrushes. What followed were images so compelling that I could not help but put my palm to my mouth and tilt my head sideways and breathe a little quieter, out of respect. Skeletons of lovers slumped toward each other in embraces beneath the earth, almost part of the roots but not quite assimilated, their backs, you could tell, broken. Sad-looking monsters with jagged triangles of teeth, trying to hold the too delicate in their large claws: pretty little boxes ruined, birds dead or dying. All of it in lines make-no-mistake deliberate. Though there was a softness, it did not come from any hesitant or small movements on the part of the artist.

I had wished only for some other proof of the life that Jackson kept while he slept, evidence besides the destruction of our home, the bruises and scratches on my body, but it was an experiment he grew to resent me for. He did not wish to believe that all those lines and curves had come from him without his permission or trust; more so, he was uncomfortable with the fascination he felt, in the mornings, tracing his fingers over the routes of ink or paint, turning the pieces over as if expecting an explanation on the back. At first we experienced a certain joy in looking at them, together, his eyes bulging, a slow grin spreading on his face that allowed permission for mine, often him drumming his fingers down my spine in affection and knowledge.

But then he began pulling out the tools in the daytime, assuming that if he had created these glorious stretches of melancholy sea creatures and skeleton lovers and the like in his sleep, he could do so equally well at our kitchen table while the sun was still shining. It caused him great distress when he found that he couldn’t even hold the instruments comfortably, no less summon whatever inspired him so while unconscious. Cheap reproductions ensued. The lines had no confidence, and what had been stunning and jagged only seemed sloppy. That which was dark but hopeful and lovely in its desperation for redemption manifested, in the daytime, as only malevolent and one-dimensional.

His face, then, at the table he’d lovingly sanded, trying to speak a language he didn’t know, was unbearable. I could only imagine what it was to literally compete with yourself. Being with someone for so long—forever, practically, in our case—made witnessing an experience that private, unreachable by empathy, an elaborate act of torture.

After several weeks he gave up. He bought a large old trunk that locked and placed the pieces we’d hung inside it. He slept like I had never seen him sleep: no words gurgling through from his dreams, very little movement, breathing steady and predictable.

Rightfully so, I was holding my breath the whole time.





It wasn’t that James was unattractive, that there weren’t hordes of females attracted to his strange scent as the years went on and he grew into himself. For him, the mystery of the other sex’s body, the rituals, the phone calls, the tittering, the compromise of one’s intellect for a brief period spent naked and sweating and writhing—it seemed inefficient, inconvenient, secondary.

How he felt about what we did in the bed opposite him was never much discussed. We assumed he felt no choice but to stand witness to our strange bond, which had forever been his role, even if this new manifestation of it was more complicated and visceral, even if it meant turning over or smothering his ears with a pillow while I sighed and Jackson grunted.

When it began he was nearly fourteen; at that point he was still just strange, and not strange-enchanting. His limbs had grown in without his permission, and he walked around as if constantly trying to retract them, a look of focus and anguish on his face. He had a habit of twisting the hair near his right ear around his finger obsessively, so much so that the skin around it began to grow red; he bit the flesh around his fingernails until they bled and seemed entrenched in a privacy more disturbing than intriguing.

At first he kept deathly quiet, and I couldn’t help but take the split second between Jackson’s adolescent thrusts to wonder if James remembered the evening he found his brother and me, both of us still children, poking at each other’s naked bodies. If he remembered what his face felt like pressed against the unclean carpet as Jackson held his arms down and told him never to tell.

Any guilt I felt about it I allowed myself to smother in the justifications of love. Jackson and I had found adulthood long before our peers, were learning to combine limbs in inventive manners our friends would take years to master, knew what it meant to know the smell of someone’s perspiration so well one could nearly recreate it in memory. Even if Jackson denied it, I think he knew as well as I did that James was awake and listening—there was no sleep talking, none of the typical shifting, not even one squeak of his mattress to parallel the squeaking of ours. In the mornings on the way to school he was blank, just wrapped his hair around his fingers and let his strange limbs lead the way; when we parted ways at the junior high campus, he rarely said goodbye, and at the most gave us a smirk and a salute. Later I learned from my father, who’d learned from Julia, that he had been falling asleep in the majority of his classes.

We were young—too young to be having sex, especially too young to be having sex that meant anything, but we never thought it would have much effect on anyone besides us. We certainly didn’t predict the influence it apparently had on James, who kept quiet for nearly a year, who didn’t make a sound until he made a series of them: loud, unavoidable, terrifying sounds.

It was a Thursday. That is to say, the day before Friday, which is the day we all looked forward to the most and detested once it came upon us, the thick slow classroom hours, every task more demanding, every question, it seemed, in several parts. So Thursday evenings, especially in the neighborhood we grew up in, which was overflowing with children then—Thursday evenings you could taste something bitter and anxious. It doesn’t go away with age, either, this frustration with not being able to fast-forward minutes or hours. James was a poor student even well rested; he was likely more in need of three o’clock Friday than Jackson or I. Finally, something in him gave way.

I noticed them first, the noises, but Jackson was too absorbed in the alleviation of his adolescent erection to place them as coming from any other source but me. We’d been sleeping together long enough to have fine-tuned our frenzy, but I still got the sense sometimes, with him on top of me, that he was far removed.

“You feel,” James panted in perfect mimicry of the words I sometimes uttered to Jackson during sex, “so good,” and proceeded to make little female moans, placing a grunt just like his brother’s every now and then for good measure.

I pressed against Jackson to stop but he was close to climax and took it for pleasure. “Please,” I said, and he kept going. It was only once he came, when the room was supposed to be silent and filled with the last half hour, that he heard James’s noises and reached for the lamp on the bedside table by the fish tank.

His underwear was off and his dick pointed straight toward the ceiling, but he was looking right at his brother, and I knew he had been the whole time. As Jackson processed, James began to smile. I wrapped the blanket around me but it couldn’t or wouldn’t cover every angle. Jackson looked straight at his brother and told me to leave, but I remained on the bed, trying to make my body smaller and smaller still, and I saw as Jackson leaped across the room how his penis looked flaccid in midair, and how James began to laugh and didn’t stop until Jackson’s hands around his neck had grown tight, and learned how the sound when someone is trying to breathe while being choked is like gurgling, and how punches sound when they are delivered slowly with the last bit of energy, and that you cannot only see blood but also smell it.

Even then, even bloody, even panting, still younger, still not quite the owner of his body, James locked his gaze on Jackson and grinned. He had won.

While it caused one of several breaks in communication between the two of them, I sometimes wondered through my shame whether what James had done had been his very best answer. He hadn’t the maturity to approach Jackson, hadn’t the power to scare him into stopping. Years later, when I woke next to the wrong brother, I felt like asking: and did you wish, always, that I had chosen you?





James’s answers are short, and I try to imagine where he is in his apartment, what sits on his coffee table, whether he and his neighbors are friendly. Trying to engage him in conversation is difficult, as he barely leaves the two-bedroom his inheritance covers. My father sends him fresh flowers once a week, through a local florist, and I have to wonder whether they’re placed in vases or just accrue on a sad, cluttered table.

“Not well,” he says.

“How not well?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

I insist I do, insist that whatever it is, I’d like to sit in his cage with him a moment. Since being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then suffering from ensuing hallucinations and delusions, his voice has not changed; I think I wish it had. Because the next thing he tells me is that he has been writing funeral arrangements and eulogies for people who are not dead. That they are, if he does say so himself, rather perfect. How many funerals had I been to, he asks, where the person was accurately represented?

“And do you … do you actually think they’re dead,” I ask, but don’t wait for the answer.

“Because if not, maybe it’s a useful exercise in, you know, honesty, the evaluation of those you care about, the qualities you both admire and take issue with—”

“Right,” he says, with cold precision. “Except I do. Believe they’re dead. It takes my shrink reminding me, and I only see him once a week.”

There is that myth, of course, which for a long time I let soothe me: crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. So he couldn’t be crazy, this boy I grew up with: profoundly sad, yes. A sad person whose intelligence fostered, in his illness, a duplicity—that somewhere, always, there was reason.

Because a stay in the hospital was expensive and never fixed anything, he has become skilled in the art of withholding from his therapist the catchphrases that signal suicide or harm to self. Learned to bathe his face in wistful optimism and indulge the doctor’s discussions of goals and hopes.

His first attempt was toward the end of Jackson and me; even now, I can’t tell whether it kept us together longer or brought speed and velocity to our close. Julia had moved to Mexico by then. She’d completed a medical interpreting/translating course and was living the good life with a crowd of expats she referred to by affectionate nicknames over the phone. When Jackson had finally gotten hold of her with the news, she hadn’t had much to say except that did he know that in Spanish, one didn’t get “the blues”—you got “the purples”! Could he believe it? It was no use with her, he said after he hung up. When he formed statements like that, I wasn’t allowed to agree or disagree.

We rose late the morning we were to visit him and were forced to shower together. It was a tiny shower, but we were experts in the geometry of not touching by then, switching in and out of the water with precision, handing off shampoo and soap without prompt. The smell and tingle of the tea tree shampoo on my scalp and neck was close to burning, reminiscent of good, painful things. He finished before I did, and I let the water run over me for a minute and wondered if, from above, this looked like tenderness. Like intimacy.


In the common room where the nurse led us, the only thing that clearly distinguished the patients from the concerned loved ones were the VISITOR stickers on our chests. James wore slip-on canvas sneakers and a bulky tan cardigan with leather elbow patches. When we asked how he was, he shrugged like Isn’t it obvious? On the phone he had mentioned he was finding it impossible to read anything, so we had brought him a book of crossword puzzles. He scowled and said thanks, and I knew immediately it had been a bad choice, an insult even. Crosswords were for people with jobs, who wanted a chance to play in their brain on Sundays over coffee. All he had been doing, I saw now, was playing in his brain: dark, menacing, circuitous games, with no rules and no way to win.

I was the only one who talked. Jackson was reserved, suspicious. It seemed to me that he resented the pain James was in: it came in daylight, its victim had acute knowledge of the disease’s spreading. The other patients I saw were likewise sedated, besides a chatty English guy with no visitors who made it his business to approach other people’s. The couches were clean and newish, and the thin blue paint on the walls could even be considered pleasant. From somewhere in the rear of the hospital there was yelling that gave into moaning and then yelling again. When it grasped at words, it was in Spanish. We didn’t ask, but James told us anyway.

“Carlos,” he said. “Schizophrenic, I think. Has this stuffed rabbit he carries around. The one nurse truly fluent in Spanish is on leave for two weeks, can you believe that? ”

The compassion in his voice made me hopeful, but his eyes darkened and he looked directly at Jackson for the first time.

“If only Mom was here, huh? Señora Bailey to the rescue.” And he began to cackle until tears came to his eyes. The nurse across the room moved from where she was crouching, speaking softly to a near catatonic young woman in braided pigtails, and surveyed the three of us for signs of alarm. Jackson was not laughing. He sat with his arms slack, palms up, as if waiting to receive or accept some understanding.

The screaming in Spanish had ceased and I had not noticed.

“Woo,” breathed James. “I haven’t laughed that hard since—”

It was a sentence he couldn’t finish.





While Jackson was the older brother, it often seemed otherwise in the eyes of our peers. He was an inch taller than James but never interrupted people while they spoke, never walked ahead or declared himself, in silent ways that add up, a king. He drank just as much as the rest of us (which was too much) but rarely appeared as intoxicated and was most likely to help someone vomit or listen patiently to maudlin rants. He read voraciously. He was drawn to fiction, as I was, but just as equally to fact. He read a biography of Jacques Cousteau with a pen in his hand, occasionally taking notes. For several weeks I fell asleep with his hand on my waist, him staring at the ceiling and telling me about Nikola Tesla. He could explain the magic of science so well that, in my mind, they were as good as his inventions, and I took pleasure in all the proliferating ways I’d loved him since childhood. Our parents, by then, had given up any weak protest to us sleeping together, and figured, somewhat correctly, that we took care of each other. It was mostly Jackson taking care of me, and me taking care of him by needing him.

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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





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

We giggled with every discovery: two of the century-old doorknobs came loose with any turn slightly more than gentle; someone named Tobias had carved his name into the leftmost kitchen drawer; the shower supplied hot water for, almost infallibly, nine minutes and twenty seconds. In the days without furniture, we stretched out on the warped hardwood and imagined the rest of our lives, later drinking whiskey in thick socks under Jackson’s childhood quilt.

We tacked a map of San Francisco to the wall and consulted it daily, quizzing each other on bus routes and growing pleased at the way urbanity received us. We discovered the concrete slides built for adult-sized bodies in the crests of hilly affluent neighborhoods and flew down them on the pieces of cardboard left behind; the bars you went to when you wanted to be seen and when you wanted to hide; the hotel with a pool under a glass ceiling that required only finesse to sneak into. The little-known public roof gardens in the financial district brought to life by a statute dictating a certain ratio of public to private space: there, we let our lives leak out over the robin’s egg blue of the oxidized copper that topped the oldest buildings, then the sparkling bay beyond, and took comfort in the plentitude of available air.

Julia helped pay for a foam mattress that adjusted to our bodies and held our shapes gladly; my father donated my mother’s favorite coffee cup, a wooden dish rack, a coat hanger made of found driftwood, and an outdated standing globe featuring nonexistent countries that spun at a wobble. Jackson sewed three panels of curtains for the bay windows around our bed, each four thick strips of muted pastels: mauve, green, off-white, yellow. On the windowsill, a terrarium of moss and succulents where plastic dinosaurs loomed over tiny cowboys. On the nightstand, like ever, a bowl of fish.





The peaceful sleeping after the imprisonment of his unconscious creations lasted two, two and a half weeks, and all the art pieces remained locked and quiet, though I half expected them to speak. He made it clear I was not to mention the landscapes he’d brought to life while sleeping, and I wanted to believe, along with him, that maybe their creation had finally quelled the thrashing he’d lived in struggle against for so long. While a few times I rose in the early morning to find Jackson not next to me, I found him only in the kitchen, making coffee; when he wasn’t in the house, he was down the street buying donuts and fresh flowers. My careful awareness of his whereabouts made him angry; he wanted me to enjoy the baked goods and wide smiling sunflowers and believe, like he did, that it was over. In his mind, he hoped the art he’d produced in uneasy nearly dawn light was an expression that It had finally made what it wanted. And who could blame him, but it had stopped before, and there were still bruises on my body, faded and mottled purples and yellows.

And then, one morning, I woke cold. All the windows in our bedroom and kitchen were open, and our schizophrenic city had put the sun away somewhere and brought the fog back. A plate was set on the kitchen table; on the plate was a roll of toilet paper, our salt shaker, and a fistful of pennies from the jar we kept by the door. The door was open, and I dressed quickly. I was lucky this time and spotted Jackson half a block down crossing Mission, wearing his best suit and the hat I’d bought him at a joke shop; it sat slightly off balance and the little red plastic propeller lolled forward with the slight breeze. The balls of my feet were still agile, and they carried me through the mist just as a 49 pulled up and blocked my view of Jackson. The bus groaned as I approached it and Jackson floated up the stairs into it, gave the warm chuff of departure, its windows empty and smiling. I cursed and kept running, passing all things inert and defenseless—the Mexican market’s fruit stands, covered in tarps, collecting dew, hiding lumpy secrets; homeless couples pressed together under blankets meant for children, their collection of precious garbage placed carefully around them; the sleeping skinless cat in the window of the always vacant odds-and-ends shop.

It took five blocks to reach the bus. The driver, an aging woman at the end of her shift, did not acknowledge me as I fumbled for my pass. PLEASE RESERVE THE FRONT SEATS FOR SENIORS, the bus warned, AND OTHER PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES. He sat at the very back, his hands in his lap, the propeller on his hat moving with the air that came through the cracked window, a quiet, deranged smile fastened to him.

Had I sense or energy, I would have woken him or tried to redirect his course. But a shopping cart with a lazy wheel rarely cooperates, and there is something sweet in its commitment to annular wobbling. When the person you share a bed with snores or thieves the blankets or domineers the sleeping space, they are still the person you love. Jackson was still the person I loved, so I sat down and waited. The worst stretch of Market was beginning to wake: prostitutes cackling and playfully shoving each other outside single-residence occupancies, liquor store owners pushing the heavy rusted gates aside to unlock doors, the first of the train passengers descending underground, the hum of street sweepers. It was when I began to feel glad to be contained, carried, that he stood. The way he walked while sleeping was similar to the way children move while pretending to be soldiers: his knees lifted as if by strings, his back unnaturally straight as if a yardstick were concealed beneath his clothing, left-right-left-right-left.

I walked half a block behind him. The homeless men still in their sleeping bags smiled and cheered for him—“Diggin’ that hat, brother.” “Woo lordy you got places to be”—but as I passed they scowled. He was lopsided, determined, had every right to be there, and I obviously had none. However dangerous, the parallel tracks he ran on were fascinating, and in my weakest moments, which he came to despise me for, I didn’t have the heart to intervene.

He stopped outside an art supply store and something tilted his head—another string—with the theatrical astonishment of silent movie actors, and I struggled to write the caption that would run across the bottom of the screen. It was barely six, but the store had just opened, for our city ran wild with art students and large canvas bags in constant need of refilling. I didn’t follow him inside; I was ashamed to be there, ashamed not to have stopped him, ashamed to find amusement with this part of him that he so decried. Ten minutes later he was at the register, dumping materials in front of the clerk, who rolled his eyes and scanned them. Wonder of wonders, Jackson located his wallet and handed it across the counter: after thirty seconds of staring him down, the clerk shrugged, opened the wallet, and pulled out sufficient funds. We lived in a city full of crazy people, and this smiling man in a propeller hat and a suit buttoned incorrectly was not breaking any records.

He woke upon exiting the store, looked down at the bags in his hands clenched with a toddler’s unyielding force, and dropped them when his fingers unconsciously slackened. A homeless man he’d passed earlier scuttled by, flashing a peace sign and grin of familiarity. In his wake Jackson saw me where I waited for him on the bench, my whole body tense. He joined me, leaned forward, put one hand on his knee and one, curiously, on his hat. He took it off, flicked the propeller grimly, and tossed it into traffic. When I reached to touch him, his body stiffened.

“I want to sleep so badly,” he said. “To sleep and sleep and sleep, and to wake up in the same place, and have the world where I left it.

“I want,” he continued, with his eyes closed as if imagining it, “to tell those boring stories about the dreams I’ve had to whoever will listen.”

I cleared my throat with an air of solemnity. “I was your grandma but I wasn’t your grandma, and you were in a house that was also a doctor’s office?” I said.

“Yeah,” he answered, “only time was like, something I could touch.”

And we laughed and laughed until he kissed me hard on the mouth.





With his permission, I began to show his pieces to friends who stopped by our apartment, though I was careful to do so only when he wasn’t home, and to put them back in the box where they stayed hidden. I needed to know that I wasn’t imagining how perfectly lonely they were, how deftly they implied whole universes, simply because there was finally a symbol I could hold in my hand of my lover’s other side.

Nathan, a friend of mine in grad school for philosophy, accepted my invitation eagerly as soon as I explained the situation. He was scary-smart, with a slightly broken nose that seemed even more broken when he smiled, and a tendency to overnod while listening. He chose words carefully, rarely swore, and seldom said a bad word about anyone.

“Jesus,” he said and put his hand to his mouth just like I had done.

“Completely asleep?”

I nodded.

After looking at it a full two minutes, he removed the first from the pile and began to move through them quickly, as if he didn’t know where to start, or that the next would surely clarify his feelings toward them. He paused and fixed on one I had a particularly hard time looking at.

It was mostly in charcoal, with some color added in pastel, as if saying Go on. Smear me. It depicted a nude woman with red strings of hair that trailed to her mid-thigh, head cocked and eyes closed in anguish; a hand was reaching out from her mouth, clutching a fistful of the hair that flowed down over her small, uneven breasts, the nipples of which pointed in different directions. The white of her too-thin torso was split open. Appearing grotesquely from her stomach was another hand, a leg kicking across the canvas at an odd, broken angle, and a male face smeared with blood. The face was round, bearded, smirking; the eyes looked straight ahead. The woman’s feet were far too small and she seemed to teeter on the earth’s surface.

Sometime after the last I’d looked at it, Jackson must have labeled it. In the bottom corner, in small milky black letters, it read: I asked you nicely the first time. I imagined him penning it, bitter and grinning darkly, desperate to assert authorship in some small way. Nathan put the pile next to him and clasped his hands in his lap.

“They—” He shook his head. “They have to be seen.”





That night I phoned a friend who owned a small gallery. Though I had planned to seem neutral and merely curious as to whether he might have any interest, my words came across as imploring and desperate. My personal investment was obvious, and I shared too much about the effect the art was having on Jackson as well as myself. Paul listened as I blathered and did not interrupt. When I ran out of breath, he invited me over for dinner the following evening, probably more from concern for my well-being than interest in the pieces. I did not tell Jackson. Since childhood I had been using the eccentricities of his sleep in ways he hadn’t authorized, but this, I hoped, would be different.

Dinner at Paul’s was exquisite: pork chop with roasted peaches, sautéed green beans and mashed potatoes, a strong beer he had brewed himself. It was clear from my voice on the phone, he gently implied, that a large meal cooked with care would do me some good. While we ate he permitted me to speak wildly, about how incredulous Jackson and I had been when it first happened, how it continued even with all the materials hidden, the trip he made to the art store in his sleep. It was clear he was wary. Not of the validity of my story—he had a willingness to believe in the unusual that was endearing and familiar to me—but of art that was, well, schticky.

“It’s maybe a poor comparison,” he said, taking a sip of his beer, “but I’m reminded of that two-year-old who was recently lauded as an abstract expressionist prodigy. It was all over the place for a few months. The parents were both artists. They started giving her more than your average finger paint and printer paper. Canvasses, expensive oils and brushes, the works. And boom—through their connections they get her a show at a gallery, then another. The paintings started selling for ridiculous prices, and there were critics calling her Pollock reborn. And of course her success was propagated by all the controversy, whether her parents had helped or manipulated her, and then the big split between people who wanted to believe the paintings were real and were special, and those who called them phony. And before you knew it, it was more about the argument between the two groups, the believers calling the nonbelievers cynics, than the art itself.”

Paul smiled bashfully and realized he had gotten lost in his excitement. He poured me more beer.

“And then,” he continued more zealously, “that thing last year? With the elephants painting? Somewhere in Australia, I think. They gave the elephants paintbrushes and filmed it, and the footage cuts between the brush held in the snout and the canvas, and the end result is some real, like, thick Matisse-eque lines in a representation of an elephant. And what a sweet idea, I’ll give ’em that, to think that an elephant would draw what he knew: other elephants. There’s lots of evidence the footage is doctored, but people were willing to pay upward of twenty thousand dollars for an at best mediocre painting, just because it may or not have been done by a zoo animal. Meanwhile artists with vast talent and sincerity are not getting anywhere, and often, more often than I’d like to believe, it’s because they have no scheme. They’re not toddlers or elephants, they don’t, like, coauthor their work with an antique robot, they—”

He faltered and I smiled.

“Paul?” I asked. “Just look at them.”

“All right, all right. But I promise nothing.”

I brought the box to the table and placed it in front of him where he was propped up on his elbows, smiling wryly. I brought our dishes to the kitchen and washed them carefully, letting the water run longer than necessary, feeling calmer than I had in a long time.

He was enraptured and didn’t notice me come in. I placed a hand lightly on his shoulder and he jumped. I sat in the chair next to him and watched his face, which was glued to the pieces with consternation.

“Ida. Ida, I am so, so sorry. They’re … they’re nothing like what I expected. I don’t know … I don’t know what I expected, but not this. Not. This,” and he waved his hand over the same piece Nathan had become stuck on.

“ ‘I asked you nicely the first time’?! My God. So terrifying. And his face!” He stood and started moving.

“I’ll show them. In a heartbeat. We’ve got to. The only thing is … him, right? He doesn’t like them, is that right? Over the phone you said—”

“It’s not quite that he doesn’t like them. He just feels, I guess, that they don’t belong to him, that he doesn’t have any right to be congratulated for them. He can’t, you know, do anything like them while he’s awake.” My throat caught, but he didn’t notice.

“It’s perfect,” Paul exalted. “The best example of art that must … that there’s just no choice about.”

He was ecstatic and insisted I stay longer, refilling my glass of beer without asking and not noticing that my spirits did not lift with the warm carbonation. And why didn’t they? I couldn’t figure it out, quite. Wasn’t this what I wanted, for an authority on the subject to be as moved as I was? The omission rang out: in Paul’s praises of the pieces there was none of the struggle on my Jackson’s face in the morning as he wondered at a secret part of him so gruesome. None of the pain of opening your eyes in a different place than you’d closed them, of feeling unsure of where you’d been and knowing you had changed the world in small ways. I left Paul’s with the promise I would convince Jackson. I felt heavy with guilt and a familiar, obscure failure, like I had many years before when I’d tried to bring back what had been stolen and had instead unleashed forty-odd diseased, starving cats, clawing their way out of confinement, releasing a stench that drowned all else.