The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

Paul forced his way in some six days or two weeks later and found me on the stained mattress watching television about the bottom of the ocean. I offered him something to drink and realized that all I had was long-expired soy milk (Jackson’s) and a bottle of apple juice that had begun to ferment. I held it to the light and tilted it wistfully, watched it unsettle; it made me happy, in a small way, to see something change by my own hand, to observe another form rotting quietly.

When I returned, Paul was sitting on the bed—it felt wrong to see him sitting so casually on the physical space where I’d lost the last of Jackson and me—sorting through the pile of pamphlets and pill bottles I hadn’t bothered to move.

“Jesus, Ida,” he said. “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” He looked down at where he sat, at the deep brown-and-red stain, and adjusted himself so that no part of his body touched it. He saw my face and froze.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—”

• • •

I don’t know how he managed to reach him, but he must have told Jackson, because shortly after the checks started coming; they bore no personal note, and absurd amounts of money. I called James, who confirmed that their grandfather, an oil-guy Texan they’d met twice who taught his dog to bark at the word “Democrat” and had never gotten along with his son and their father, had finally bit the old bullet and they’d both received enough money to last quite some time.





It’s too bad what I did to Paul. It’s also too bad this is the best way I have of expressing it, and funny because I imagine that this is the way Jackson describes the way he treated me, artfully deflecting any blame: “It’s too bad what happened with Ida.” Too bad refers to that which was unavoidable in the wake of something greater or more important. It’s too bad what I did to Paul, though in those months it grew to be a kind of playful diversion, testing the limits of manipulation possible through the arch of my back, the jut of my hipbones, a few words in the right places.

Paul clung even more heavily after the abortion and suggested in small ways how that particular expression of my vulnerability had begun to turn his feelings of friendship slowly into lust. He encouraged my every pathetic triumph and rewarded me with small tokens; whether I actively accepted them didn’t matter. He was pleased when I showered, tousled my wet hair and complimented my scent; he laughed loud and long when I made even the smallest, darkest joke; he praised the small herb garden on the fire escape (that I grew out of guilt for lying to James) and brought expensive fertilizers. It should also be said that he made his presence dependable when there were no small triumphs, when I began to revert to silence and starvation, and I began to rely on it. He was the only one who gave me permission. Instead of suffering alone, I let Paul come over and took pleasure in sending cruel words out of my mouth knowing there would be no consequences. Though I had, in a sense, grown to love them, these things I made, I forced him to watch while I hurled the potted plants off of the balcony and enjoyed his small moans.

He very nearly almost won. Somewhere in between the moments of the small triumphs and the fits, he nudged his way in. He made me smile. He showed up with Thai food and comforts and curiosities: an old cowboy belt buckle that concealed a fine silver lighter, sheets of luxuriously high thread counts, a bathrobe with deep pockets, etchings of various types of octopi.

And so, one night, while he happily supervised my consumption of too much whiskey and slowly placed his fingers on my back, I did not stiffen. And when he began kneading, it seemed, every single disk of my back into a singular and celebrated entity, I was grateful. And when he began to separate not just the muscles of my back but also my legs, I did not stop him. And when I couldn’t hear the sounds of the film we’d been watching over his desperate grunting, I didn’t complain, just kept staring and made up the characters’ words, wrapped my legs around the small of his back halfheartedly, and observed as the two people on the screen exchanged proclamations of love and humor I wanted to understand but couldn’t.

I am ashamed of the extravagant things I said and did in the weeks and months afterward, although I don’t feel I had much choice given the way he grinned after we had sex, how he told me he loved me during. We took a vacation to Mexico that was in all regards perfect besides it being a lie, but he must have known on some level the fallacy of the sparkling lemonade we drank on those beaches, must have suspected the real reason I wanted him only on top with his head buried between my neck and shoulders. I loved Paul and still do, but could only stand it if I was able to memorize the ceiling above us. Our whole relationship, in retrospect, seems an exercise in ceilings; I praised him and lavished him in words of adoration and felt shocked at the levels of devotion he was willing to believe I felt sincerely.

In the Mexico photographs we look happy. There are several of him gesturing excitedly next to an eight-year-old who was drawing portraits on the street at the cost of one American dollar; Paul of course took a liking to him and bought six, one of me and one of him and one of us together, and three more of strangers who had decided against it after seeing the finished product. There’s another in which I am holding up a margarita as large as my head and smiling so large my eyes and nose are overshadowed; another of me sleeping in the early morning, still wearing a cocktail dress from the night before, my hair falling off one side of the bed, nose perky, looking like someone you might like to cook breakfast for.


When we went to stay with my father, who needed supervision as Julia was visiting Jackson that weekend, I introduced Paul with no title. Paul assumed this was because I had already provided one in my biweekly telephone correspondence with my father, but in the living room he strained for recognition apologetically until finally he arrived at a beam and Paul returned it.

“Ah. Paul. I am so sorry. Our art dealer! Mr. Gallery. I’ve heard much about you, it’s just, I’m afraid, with so much going in this ailing body of mine, I’ve gotten bad with details. It’s such a relief to me, you being Ida’s friend through all this heartache. It’s hard for me and Julia, you know, being pretty much both of their parents …” and he trailed on, the sly smile of aging on his face.

“Friend?” Paul said to me on the drive home later, incredulously. “Friend?”

In the final ceiling Paul proposed in some sort of final threat, and I of course wept and told him I loved him but that I couldn’t, and of course he begged, and of course I ran out of weeping probably too soon and it got too quiet, and of course he left, and of course we don’t speak anymore.





While my magnetism to Jackson grew from an early age, it would be inaccurate to state he was the only magic. I loved James too—for being slightly younger and keeping me that way, for asking questions Jackson preferred not to, and later, for indulging in and nearly celebrating those unkempt aspects of his interior life.

Jackson considered; James evacuated then evaluated. As children, it was James who more actively encouraged that nonsensical landscape I remember and value. James who once fainted after individually bringing to life the eighty-five balloons he placed in his living room for no reason whatsoever except to surprise, then frustrate, then amuse his tired mother: it was hard to be actually mad at the playful air-filled globes, even if it made navigating through the space, after a twelve-hour day at a work, almost impossible. It was James who decided he would learn to juggle, and did, and insisted on teaching me though I was impatient and kept trying to give up, who clapped his hands and hollered in delight when I finally gave three oranges a place in the air. James who collected jokes and always had a new one to spare. Who remembered my mother’s birthday and insisted we celebrate it every year. Who constructed the most elaborate forts that even Julia and my father would sneak in and wonder at: sometimes our respective living rooms remained in disarray for a full week, the couch cushions and tables all sacrificed for the sake of a home within a home, the specific and comforting brand of light that comes through a flannel sheet. James who enjoyed, once he was old enough for that kind of control, spelling my name or Jackson’s in his urine, in immaculate cursive, all over town—who never stopped finding that hilarious. Eventually, I couldn’t either. James who once taught a particularly malicious and buff foreign exchange student—who enjoyed calling certain vulnerable boys faggot and whispering terrible threats in their ears—a string of made-up words that the kid began using so frequently that he didn’t make enough sense to be scared of anymore. On our own, James and I had a language, too. As children, we were best at concocting nonsense urgencies with mock terror, enjoyed breaking down the door of whichever available parent and crying: It’s Danny! Down at the old hotel with the hose again! never maintaining our composure for very long. And later, once words had grown from toys to tools to toys again, inventing idioms without breaking stride. You know what they say, James would begin, You don’t go crying into your soup and expect a steak. True, I would say. And likewise, there’s a good reason not to trust a sparrow in a gold mine.

James whose sweetness, if frantic, was almost always evident. Who always asked me, in the morning, what my dreams were like. Who gently prodded at my quiet, when it constructed in a dark way, suggested that we explore it.





Just after the deterioration of Paul and me, and just before James’s terrifying walks, he appeared in my doorway and we began sleeping together. It should be said that we remained fully clothed and never returned to the naked state we’d so many times shared in the bathtub as children, although I can’t assert that the level of intimacy did not reach levels that felt like betrayal to Jackson, whom I still felt I belonged to.

We were comparable to magnets. No choice but to join. Both with minds whirring darkly and constantly, both hoping the noise of the other might drown out our interiors. Mostly we slept. Sometimes I sobbed and James looked at me with a curiosity that was uncomfortably reminiscent of Jackson. Once we bought two boxes of the most expensive donuts our city had to offer and egged each other on to keep eating until we ran to the bathroom and vomited, our cheeks pressed against the other’s and our bile merging. I took up residence at his house, returning once a week or less if I could help it to the apartment that smelled less like Jackson and more like abandonment every day; I hurried in holding my breath and exchanged clothing for other clothing, as if I had anyone to impress who might notice I’d been wearing the same oversized sweater. Once, in a gesture I felt proud of for days on end, I opened all the windows and left them like that, as if to say: Let something fly in. Anything.

We ordered in and bought microwave dinners by the dozen. We let the garbage overflow onto the floor, a magnificent display of color and texture and smell, and took pride in how little we interacted with the outside world. We bought a sixty-pack of crayons and a two hundred-pack of paper and felt proud for coating the leaflets with such thick layers of wax.

Despite having enough money to completely retreat into his troubled brain, James kept his job at the hotel, though complaints from customers grew more frequent and his manager gently suggested he think about taking a serious vacation. While he was at work I stayed in his apartment, watching a million of channels of cable. I cried when Thelma and Louise went off that cliff and thought about what I’d heard once at a party, that the filmmakers had nearly released the film with an alternate ending in which the car hits the ground and keeps going. I watched reality television shows about people with drug problems and felt envious of their families and friends who crowded around them in a gaggle of support and love and forgiveness. I drooled and breathed deeply while on the stand-up comedy channel black people talked about white people and white people talked about how it wasn’t okay to talk about black people. More often than not I fell asleep to lugubrious documentaries about the forgotten industrial wasteland of Middle America or black-and-white Hitchcocks; in my dreams I wandered through abandoned sewing factories or sat in the lush train cars of the 1940s, trying to remember my destination or realizing, when the conductor came by to collect tickets, that I had released mine out the window and watched it skirt the Midwestern winds. On good nights James would come back from the graveyard shift, turn the television off, and crawl into bed, adjusting his body to fit with mine; if I woke he would kiss the tip of my nose and whisper “How many?” as in “How many brain cells did you kill watching all that television?” and I would reply “So many I have lost the ability to count,” and draw him closer. On bad nights he didn’t get into bed at all. I would wake and find him on the tiny back patio, relating to a full ashtray, shivering and not wanting to talk or talking about things I couldn’t understand. I would coax him inside, take off his shoes, move his stiff joints so that I could remove his jacket, hand him the remote. The images from the still-on television reflected in his eyes, and he let them play there.

I left after three weeks, feeling, for the first time in so long, awake, and conscious of the fact I had done what Jackson had always wanted: I had slept and slept and slept. On my way to the door I stopped at the kitchen table, where James sat coloring, his beard overgrown and unkempt. I offered to take out the garbage but he shrugged and didn’t look up, and I understood that this was what James’s life was like, that my being there had prompted nothing. As much as I didn’t want it to be the case, what I had was different from what he did.





James has always been, by definition and religion, a walker; he has always used it as a freedom, an essential mental space to visit frequently. So when he began dissociating—the term we were taught later to use that referred to a tendency to lose all sense of his surroundings—it was initially difficult to recognize it as such. He had showed up at my apartment just before I followed him back to his and ended up staying. While he had the address but had never visited, while he told me he didn’t quite know how he had gotten there, it didn’t strike me as strange. I didn’t realize that he’d literally begun floating in and out of awareness, that he would look up and find he’d traveled miles without any memory of the trip. I told him I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here either and invited him in without a second thought.


Following the suicide attempt that resulted in hospitalization and the initial diagnosis of bipolar disorder, it seemed James learned pretty quickly and effortlessly how to avoid repeats, claiming he couldn’t afford to take off any more time at work. He was, is, a fascinating creature, and he had made a practice of using it to his advantage in social situations, not excluding psychiatry and therapy. During a brief experiment with group therapy he proved himself the most popular among the crumbling circle—the others found themselves identifying with his feedback the most, even sometimes asking the therapist to let him go on speaking after she’d identified a good “building point” or whatever and cleared her throat to begin.

Before Jackson left and prior to the onset of James’s new and disturbing type of walks, his therapist requested he bring in a family member, and he chose me. Given that he and his brother had barely spoken since the hospital, the both of them too uncomfortable with the parallel loss of control in their lives, the both of them insisting they were worse off, I agreed. It became clear almost instantly that this was meant to be some sick sort of in-joke between the two of us, him using every psychological cliché in the book and seeming desperate for the woman’s approval, her discussing with me the ways in which James had grown since their first visit.

I don’t know for certain that there were other attempts, though I do know that there were several occasions when I called the hotel on nights he always worked and some hoarse-throated older woman or squeaky-voiced kid answered and told me he wasn’t working. James never called in sick to work, and so this meant he was pained in a worse way.

On one of these occasions, hoarse-throated Patty asked who might be calling, please, and I said Ida, and she clucked her tongue.

“Oh, Ida, honey,” she said. “I am just so sorry. Know that I’m praying for you and James both,” and I rushed off the phone in a panic to call my father and affirm whichever awful truth.

My father picked up with a cheery clearing of the throat and a singsong “I was just thinking of you.” When I asked how he was, he said that everything was quite good; autumn had always been his favorite time of year, Julia’d tried her hand at mulled wine and they’d indulged heavily the night before (much background laughter on her part at this one), and his lungs had actually been feeling better than they had in months!


I never called out James on his lie, knowing he must have been off on a pretty terrible vacation to tell it. I called his landline—he has never and probably will never have a cell phone—about six times, with increasing frequency, but I never reached him and for some reason I just believed and hoped he was all right and just out on a walk instead of taking the bus over there or calling my father and Julia back to fill them in. It’s ridiculous the way all three of us retained that childhood bond of keeping secrets from the adults no matter the cost, insisted on naming it us versus them when it had become so clearly us versus us, when we as a unit had ceased to function in any benefit to each other and instead just rolled around like marbles waiting to be arranged.

The scary-long walks as opposed to the standard: they were a strong indicator that the just plain sad, which landed James once in the hospital and then in pretty regular therapy and an antidepressant haze, had mutated into something else. In the same us-versus-them philosophy we used with Julia and my father, I didn’t tell James’s therapist about the phone call in which he revealed his little project of writing eulogies for the living. Neither did I tell his therapist or our parents about the other increasingly terrifying phone calls and incidents. Sadness is one thing, insanity another, and the second I’ve so romanticized and linked with many other things (like beauty and art and love) that it was hard isolating it from the rest, holding it up to the fluorescent and brutally honest lighting it required.

He told me, at one point, that he was considering getting rid of his books. When I asked why, he told me nonplussed that he was holding a new belief that with so many old stories around, no other stories could be created. This was poetic up until he told me how long “it has been Tuesday.” He was convinced the books were linked to time, if only his conception of it; he mentioned that naturally his time was different from mine. Something sick had made a home in his head, and it had named itself after a day of the week and lent itself to his obsession.

I got off the phone and repeated his words in my head. Things become understandable with familiarity, and so I thought: It has been Tuesday for so long. It has been Tuesday for so long. It has been Tuesday for so long. I wanted to discern, but couldn’t, and it was then I admitted that James’s own personal Tuesday cage was something much beyond poetics or standard feelings of emptiness and worthlessness.

Despite my omissions, despite James’s talents for manipulation, he ultimately garnered a new diagnosis. “Borderline personality disorder” is a term that scares most people, but for all of us it was a relief, a label, a home. It framed his love affair with speed and called that compulsive behavior, named that haunting distinction he had held over time and Tuesdays an inflated sense of self. James finally had the license he’d been driving without illegally for so long—or rather, walking. We learned this after his walks became increasingly scary, and more than once did I have to take a cab to a strange neighborhood where he had somehow managed to find one of probably seven remaining pay phones in the city. Finally one evening, unable to see any beauty in his lost, incapable of branding it special, I called Julia and my father.

He lives at their house now and is mostly happy, his whims indulged, all the time to write songs he can manage and a ration of two beers a day (against doctor’s orders but my father insisted the man be allowed his hops). He is frustrated by not being able to go more than a couple blocks alone, but it being our hometown he pretty intelligently realizes he knows it all intimately and so is content to bake with Julia or just eat her baking, excel at the crossword puzzle and put it on the fridge, watch a marathon of The Twilight Zone.





Airports and airplanes, to me, still seem like the happy future we’ve all been told so much about. So many small pleasures exist in hurtling toward the ones we miss: the cheerful assistance of the steel moving walkway, the ready availability of anything we might need in miniature or in excess, the series of immaculate and anonymous spaces. Today is dark and I should not find joy in so many colors of toothbrushes, their frills reduced to syllogism—you will find no tongue scraper on this product, sir, only reds and blues and simple utility—but I can’t help it.

Today is dark and I should not take pleasure in the toilets that flush so promptly and politely, but I cannot help but find them kind and I thank them silently for removing the evidence I was there. I may be losing my mind.

I am hurtling toward what, today? What will I answer if a kind old woman happens to sit next to me in seat 17C (aisle)? Am I allowed to simply state, “Going to see my father”? And why should I feel guilty for not revealing the very whole truth to a woman I don’t know and will never see again? Why should I let my time in the air be about a funeral? I have paid several hundred dollars for the clear space, the small oval window, the seat designed to recline farther than ever, the odd-sized can of Coca-Cola, and I intend to enjoy them anyway I please.

I am going to see my father today, though he promises to look very much different and remain silent. That ghostliness aside, today I am also hurtling toward Jackson; I will see him for the first time in two years, four months, and sixteen days. When he began calling so casually seven months ago, just after I finally exited the city we’d called ours, I never once said: Please explain yourself. Please help me to understand what you did to me, what I did to you, what we did to each other. Instead I rose to the occasion of witty banter, and when he mentioned her I covered the mouthpiece so he would not hear the gnarled cough-sob that escaped without my permission. I was esoteric and clever and not actively kind, and made every effort to receive his phone calls but not dial his number and generally achieved the flippancy he had provided as the tone of our telephone interactions.

Oh-ha-ha, how very funny it all was—that the problem had ceased since us but he was pretending it hadn’t in order to save his ass. What a terrible person I am, he mused, and I laughed with him as if I hadn’t been directly ravaged by his terribleness. It was my fault just as much as his: I gave him permission to walk right back into the us versus them we’d spent so many years practicing.

I let him drop her name, her boring Midwestern name with its bland consonance, and said nothing when he went on about her virtues, how he didn’t quite appreciate them as much as he should, but was trying; how he knew blaming it on the sleepwalking was immoral but felt she’d be more hurt if she knew the full truth; how he just didn’t think she could handle that sort of pain and so it felt like the only option. And I didn’t need to say—then why not leave her? He answered that, too, as if I had asked: “She’s the sort of person I should love, I, and I think I will if I work at it.”





I had plotted the joining of our new adult-sized bodies carefully, certain that an event so many years in the making demanded forethought and atmospheric perfection. The afternoon preceding it, fifteen-year-old Jackson sat on my toilet while I cut my hair, bits of his face showing up in the mirror with the movement of my hands and elbows, his lips in the glass image positioned just so in the curvature of my armpit. The bathtub, once a container for our naked bodies and more innocent mischief, reflected also. Did he receive the glances I designed as seductive bouncing toward him? Did he understand that the thin black cotton of my shirt intentionally highlighted my chest? Did he have any idea?

I pushed the broom with efficiency and gestured for him to follow me. My mother’s long-weary bag, patched and repatched for over a decade, already packed with the supplies I’d deemed necessary. We took our normal route downtown, through the streets where our peers sat on benches waiting for their lives to start, down the cobbled alley that ran along the west side of the river, past the same waterside café where our parents had jiggled us on their laps and first begun to realize the full weight of adulthood. On the backside of the long-obsolete mill, which became a home to women’s clothing stores and wine bars and shops that sold rocks and candles, we climbed a set of steps to get to a balcony we frequented. From there, one could look down on the water and see it almost as innocent as the tourists did, feel a civic pride.

A few weeks before, I’d discovered a series of beams and pipes at the landing of the stairs. With a few shifts of weight they served as a ladder to a ledge onto the roof. The top of the mill was like an uninhabited city; it sloped in on itself and rose up again in tens of different places. Much of it was the corrugated steel of the exterior that was visible to passersby below, and other parts were gravel-covered concrete. It spanned almost two blocks. I’d begun escaping up there and eventually assembling a landscape with which to surprise Jackson. In a rectangular area lower than the rest, with four walls and the sky overhead, I’d placed sunflowers in pots around the perimeter, spread a quilt in the center.

He smiled when he saw it, threw his arms skyward in surrender. He’d lived alongside my elaborate plots long enough, seen them both fail and flourish. This one, surely, a success we could settle into for the afternoon. Feeling freed by the scenery, as I hoped he would, Jackson settled his head into my lap and I dared to stroke his hair behind his ears. Growing bolder, I asked him to sit, brought out the pint of whiskey and pulled on it and passed him the bottle. I started coughing, and so did he, and we slapped each other on the back until the coughing had ceased and we started to laugh. We passed the bottle back and forth in silence, both feeling a little sick. We talked about my father, about his mother, about people we found boring, the whole time trying to catch glances of the other like we so often do while passing by windows and wanting to get a look at ourselves. With the end of the bottle, my heart felt rich, and we were confusing syllables more often than not.

He cleared his throat in a serious manner, and I worried he suspected me, that he’d subvert my intentions before even exploring them.

“I have to tell you something,” he whispered.

“You have a very pretty hair and mouth”—I took his hand—“and also … I like boobs. I mean your boobs. I mean I like lots of boobs but I mean I think your brets are beautiful. Breasts.”

It felt like the moment at which you stand waist deep in the water, preparing your body for full submersion. Trying to feel what it means to be underwater beforehand, that release, though imagining it proves impossible.

“I have to tell you something too,” I managed through the weight of my tongue.

“Shoot,” he said, formed a gun out of his fingers and pointed it at the sky, then made a little ka-bloom sound and blew at the smoking gun but miscalculated and ended up spitting all over one of his knuckles.

We laughed, falling into each other and redoing the big gun joke like can you believe how funny we are? And then redoing the gun joke again and laughing some more. When the explosions settled, we found ourselves with my legs around his waist. I crafted a pistol out of his left hand and my right one, and pointed the tip up at the sky.

Things I remember: the green-blue wrapper of the condom, the awkwardness of teeth in too-eager mouths, the seeming multiplication of limbs, the bits of gravel that made their way onto the blanket. That once he made his way in we gaped at how easy it really was to bind two people together. That when it came it almost hurt, that my hands spread out taut and joyous like starfish on his back, that it was warm and sweet and I wanted to make shelter within it.





When James called to tell me my father died, he told me he planned to take over his garden. “Basil and thyme and I don’t know maybe even an avocado tree or peaches I have heard are not always that hard if you’re … and tomatoes and anything you want, I, and you’ll always come for dinner and I’ll cook for you and it will be so delicious you’ll cry, I, because he’s not there to taste it, yeah, but mostly because he would have been so proud and …”

And he went on and on, and his mania was so generous it felt like an assimilation of gentle, and I felt like he was right next to me kissing my forehead too insistently, and I remembered that there’s not just one who calls me I. There are three of us.





My father retained such intellectual strength that over the phone it was often easy to forget the physical weakening, turn an ear away during the gasping pauses, but it was more and more impossible to paint it all brightly when Jackson and I, still a unit, visited him. It rattled Jackson more than it did me, probably because he’d chosen to love my father whereas I had since before I possessed the words to describe the loveliness that was hiding in his neck, safe in his narrative. He didn’t like seeing him bound mostly to his chair, would start biting the half-moons from his fingernails the moment my father started discussing the latest reports from the doctor. As if to thwart the topic’s mention, he always arrived so lively, so well-read, so full of other things to speak of. My father grinned at the interruptions, though when Jackson turned to Julia to overflow his charisma onto her, he would clasp my hand and twinkle at me in the slow the way the dying do, and I would nod. We were both more worried for Jackson than we were for ourselves.

Jackson and I began spending more and more weekends there with the fading of his health, though Jackson claimed it only a reprieve from the city, while I felt more at home under the pressing weight of my father’s disease. A newspaperman his whole life: this was just one more deadline, one more story going to press, and I liked to think of the moment he stopped typing and stood up and pushed his chair in with precision; of the way he would insist, after, on a drive; of the release he always felt, postpublishing; of his byline, the printed letters that formed his name behind the plastic of the newspaper box. Throughout my childhood, I would put a quarter in the slot, watch the frozen president disappear, slowly turn the steel latch, and reach into the dark space to bring my father into the light.


One Saturday at my father’s house, I woke to find my childhood bed still smelling but absent of Jackson. Julia, just waking with coffee in the kitchen, hadn’t seen him, and we set about calling his phone repeatedly, assuming the worst. His car—ours—was gone, and we hoped against hope his sleep hadn’t discovered how to move Park to Drive. When he never answered she grabbed her large key ring and we rolled through the downtown, only finding a new generation of young mothers, teenage café employees flipping signs to open, joggers intent on their journey. Back at home, we opted not to tell my father, distracting him instead with the newspaper, fresh-squeezed orange juice. At ten o’clock Jackson appeared, the look on his face the holiness that occurs after a long time alone, and told us to get in the car.

It was stunning to see him an administrator, to watch him wrap the blue silk tie around my father’s field of vision, grinning. Julia, who knew and spoke with the deterioration of my father’s health every day, cast nervous glances and fiddled with the radio and asked my father how he was doing back there one too many times. I held his fingers in mine, his portable oxygen tank between my knees as we curved up through the California hills, happy, for once, to yield, to be a passenger. When Jackson finally slowed to a halt on the uneven dirt shoulder, unbuckled the strap across his shoulder, Julia turned to me with such a panicked look that I reached for her hand and told her it would be okay.

“What will be okay,” my father asked. “What?”

“Mom,” Jackson asserted. “Please.” The first word confident, the second desperate.

He helped my father out of the car, put an arm around his waist, and gestured for me to do the same. We made our way down the incline, my father quiet though clearly petrified, his body unwilling to do the things it had loved so.

“Three points of contact,” I offered, then repeated, and he nodded and breathed the way they’d taught him, no matter that the exercises were meant to get him through a day at home, maybe around the block, and never down the untended earth.

It was spectacular and whole and remains an image that feeds me. The reclining padded chair placed just so in the shallow edge of the clear river, a parasol worked into its crown. Just next to it, a tall metal table positioned in the stones, on it resting volumes of my father’s favorite writers, a single proud sunflower, a pen and paper, a cooler full of fruits and drinks and sweet things. Jackson returned my father’s sight once we emerged from the path onto the little beach, and his already struggling lungs just couldn’t cope, and he had to sit immediately and rest awhile before we escorted him to this throne. He barely touched the books that day, sampled only briefly the cherries, just sat there with his feet up and sipped the bitter favorite beer he rarely indulged in anymore. Across the river Jackson kept disappearing and reappearing on various points of the rocks that faced us, sprouting triumphantly like the unlikely green jutting out in strange angles, and my father yelled and cheered every time he leaped into the water, urging him to jump from higher and higher points and clasping the fingers of Julia, who hovered nearby, trying to find her home in the water.





Julia had prepared fanatically, as if trying to impress him or finally say yes, yes, I loved you, love you, will keep loving you.

When I arrived, James, in his mother’s apron, was on a manic upswing, chopping vegetables into fine and finer pieces in the kitchen, carrying snack plates back and forth from the kitchen, asking how I was but lacking the attention span to listen. He was twisting his hair like he used to, and a spray of half-smoked cigarettes kept accumulating on the front porch—he felt, I think, too guilty to smoke the whole thing, knowing this was the pleasure my father had lived and died for.

Photos of my father were everywhere; I could tell Julia wished they always had been, and as such had framed some of them and tried to place others in locations where people put photographs of those still alive: on the refrigerator at a jaunty angle, amid others on the couch-side table in the living room, on her bureau.

I found myself sneering. Hadn’t she been ready? This was obviously an expression of my own guilt for not admitting that his struggle really was reaching its end point. I replayed the last time we spoke on the telephone and attempted to gain some final piece of paternal wisdom. What had he said? And I? And how long did we pause between sentences? And did we laugh?

I tried to tell myself it was a shame, an unfortunate coincidence and nothing more, that the last dialogue I’d had with my father had lacked his general stubborn cheer. He hadn’t even feigned with the “There was something I wanted to tell you but have forgotten.” He came to me as an old man who wanted to talk and me to listen.

There was none of his softness. He cleared his throat and wheezed and began to tell me about the night before my mother died. “There’s no other way to put it, Ida. I had too much to drink. Had too much goddamn liquor. I’d been home all week with you—Mollie was out looking for a job and shopping for goddamn new paint samples for the kitchen even though we’d just—goddamn it we’d just painted the kitchen—and getting coffee with all these new women who went to private colleges in Vermont and had kids around your age—and finally I said, look, I’ve been here in this house all week and I need out”—he was talking too fast and stopped to catch his breath in big gulps, which was exactly what the exercises recommend he not do—“and she said okay fine, you’re right. Okay.

“So we got Julia to come over—her and your mom liked each other all right, actually—did you know the boys were with you the last night your mom was alive? And anyway, Ida, we went down to the Central Club on my insisting. I said, honey, I want a real bar with pool tables and cheap drinks, and your mother said yes even though she didn’t like the idea. That place was pretty bad then, worse than now if you can believe it, and pretty soon after we sat down it was a scary scene. Every guy in the place was staring at her—she was way too pretty, way too smart—and she didn’t like it. I tried to take her mind off of it, suggested we play a game of pool, but your mother … when she was mad like that, she couldn’t focus. She shot a terrible game and the whole time these a*sholes were starting to snicker, but your mother … she had always refused to let me treat her like a lady, do you understand? ‘None of that Southern charm shit,’ she always said, always pushed the door open for herself, rarely even let me”—he gasped here but in a different way, the kind that precedes a great opening up of the body for a sob—“never even let me coddle her. Ida, are you listening?”

(I was listening, was transfixed. I was also considering what else I had inherited from my father: that insistence that the audience look and listen. How many times had I pleaded to Jackson: Look. Listen. Are you listening? Do you understand? But not stopped to hear his reply. My father didn’t stop either.)

“And so I kept tough on her, didn’t give her any breaks. Pretty much all her balls were on the table and I had three left. She told me she was leaving and I said, hey, come on. Don’t be a poor sport. But she left, Ida, and I didn’t follow her—if I had tried to she wouldn’t have let me, do you understand? And so I stayed, had a grand old time feeling like I was, you know, ‘integrating with the locals.’ Some idiot was impressed by my being a newspaperman, the stories I told him, and he gave me, I kid you not, a hat and a steak. He was a meat delivery guy and his truck was out back, went out there and got me a steak and gave me the hat off his head. Don’t know why about the hat, still.”

My father laughed, here, and it was the closest to the hoot he once famously produced I’d heard in a couple of years, until he remembered what story he was telling, exactly.

“But Ida I stayed ’til last call. I don’t really remember the walk home, quite, but I know I had the mind to put that steak in the freezer and crawl into bed. And that’s it. I remember vaguely that I was looking forward to telling your mother about this guy, about him insisting I take his meat and the hat, that I knew she would laugh at what an a*shole she’d been to leave and what an a*shole I’d been to stay and get so tossed. I remember planning on a big dinner for the three of us the next night—even though your teeth weren’t ready yet, I remember thinking, yeah, baby’s first steak, and smiling at the future memory.

“Only, Ida, I didn’t hear her. I was sleeping off the cheap whiskey the steak guy bought me and I didn’t wake. The only time in her life your mother actually needed me, actually called out for me, and I didn’t hear her.”


I was touched that my father had come to me and not Julia. Touched that he saw me stable enough to take this, digest it, and still love him; touched he was still able to laugh about the hat and the steak; touched by how clearly I was a combination of the both of them; touched by being a part of a real live, honest-to-goodness family made of bloodlines and shared genetics who did not up and go whenever they felt like it except when death gave them no choice. When I went to respond, though, my father stopped me.

“Dear heart,” he gasped, “I shouldn’t … I shouldn’t have talked like that so long. Gets my blood pressure high and my heart sad. Tired, now. I’ve got to get off the phone, okay?”

He sounded panicked. I wanted to tell him I loved him and ask where Julia was, whether he was all right, but he was already gone. I almost called back several times that night, but part of the deal between us was that mostly we pretended the other was fine—it helped us believe it to be true about ourselves.


I was replaying this conversation for perhaps the twenty-second time that day when Jackson arrived. He was dressed far too well in clothing I’d never seen before, and it pained me to think of him in that dressing room across the country, turning his cheek under the flattering lights, strolling out to show Shannon the precision of the wool slacks and the softness of the sweater. We locked eyes and I was the first to break and turn, but he crossed the room and wrapped his arms around me, and I let him. I remained in the pocket between his shoulder and chest too long, taking pleasure in the fact that his scent had not changed.

There were still three hours before the Ceremony of Life Julia had planned. Jackson suggested a walk and I obliged, seeing as Julia’s buzz was pretty thoroughly terrifying and evidence of my father was everywhere. We walked past the park where we had smoked pot for the first time together, in the rain under the shelter of a slide long gone and replaced with one of bright plastics; cut through the playground and kicked the sand in defiance. It was bright and ninety degrees and the moments rippled into the next unnaturally. Sensing my discomfort, Jackson pulled out a pair of sunglasses and placed them on my face, and under their costume my eyes became oceans. We didn’t speak as we crossed by the picnic tables, although Jackson did stoop to see whether the words he’d engraved with his knife remained on the underside of one of them, and though he didn’t tell me what he was looking for I knew what it meant when he nodded with satisfaction.

Like always, we were headed for the river. It smelled especially strong in the heat, and we walked the lengths of the docks sneering at the tourists, who were out on the decks of their yachts on chairs of stretched pale pink linen and cherrywood. My father had always joked about buying a shitty boat to park next to theirs, naming it Privilege and barbecuing discount chicken wings and publicly drinking the cheapest beer available all day long and being just unyieldingly friendly to all of them.

Instead of talking about my father, though, Jackson and I talked about him. About how he started having sex with other people and not coming home to Shannon and telling her the sleepwalking had started again and he didn’t know where he’d been those times she woke up to find him gone. About how she’d been unbelievably forgiving and sympathetic and offered to give up sleep to watch over him or maybe find them a house in the country and invest in very complicated locks. About how she had listened and nodded while he talked about me and asked questions and tried to believe his reflections on our disintegration were healthy, even integral. About how when he started pushing it and even going so far as to steal Shannon’s car in the middle of the night and f*ck this bartender with a long black braid in the backseat and purposefully come all over the upholstery and feign complete wonderment, Shannon just, well, took it, and started buying literature about sleep disorders and highlighting the texts in neat, cheerfully colored lines and joining online discussion groups. About how finally he slept with one of her best friends, a blonde with decent breasts but a slight limp from some growth disorder or another, and while following this instance he offered no apologies or excuses or displacement of blame, Shannon even tried for a little while to convince herself and him that he had slept through it. And so when he got the news about William, he said, that seemed like a pretty good reason to pack up and return to the familiar part of the country.

Ida, he said, upon waking from his story, I miss you. And I couldn’t say anything, because he’d offered the words I’d needed for so long, only now they seemed hollow and extra, now they floated in front of us with neither a home nor a future.