Jacob Rubin: The Poser

“You are not me, you never have been and never will.” I was scratching my scalp. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do.”

“Giovanni, if you had brought up the situation with Amelia sooner, I would have been more than happy to discuss it. You’ve brought it up, so I’ve addressed it.” He said, “What led you to her?”

“So you can run and tell her?” I was nearly yelling. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.”

That’s how he was. He picked the best moments to surprise you. He waved her note. “At the least,” he said, “you’ll have to explain yourself.” A few minutes later, the session was over.

That evening I paced the grounds until the sky was black. You’ll have to explain yourself . I wandered by the birch trees, the mountains going from blue to black to blue again against the sky. You’ll have to explain yourself . Bats soared and dipped like pieces of night briefly torn free. In low clouds the fireflies rose and evaporated. I wandered into the woods, away from the house, stumbling over roots.

Explain yourself . The words had never sounded so strange.

Soon I was sprinting through the woods. It was like being erased. Smeared in with the trees and ground. An owl was saying, “Whooo?” and the needles crunched under me and just then, without warning, as if God had snapped his fingers, all the intervening years collapsed, and I was thirteen again, being dragged out of the classroom by Heedling. I could feel it. The collar tightening around my neck.

Explain yourself .

Then Max slapped my cheek in Dun Harbor. I felt it in the woods: the slap . I felt other things, too, felt them as though mugged, physically, by memory: felt Mama’s arms squeezing my waist, her chin digging into my shoulder. (“Up, up!” she’d said.) The spotlight warming the shoulders of my tuxedo. Lucy’s calves scissoring the backs of my thighs. The girls outside Derringer’s office, their grins like hobos’. Max’s notes in the margins of his papers swarming like ants.

Explain yourself, and before I understood what I was doing I had run back to the house. I found a pen and paper at the commissary and wrote back to this woman, Amelia Stern, explaining myself, scribbling in a state of exhilaration:

Amelia Stern,

I do not mean to stare. I’m sorry, please know I’m sorry. I’m barely even here these days, so it’s medicine to find a person who is. I was invisible, I thought. As loose change gets lost in a couch, that’s how I’m lost in my body. You have a superb way of walking, that’s all. You have a way of touching people on a shoulder I admire. Of eating soup, etc. My mother was killed. You will not turn and see me following you, I promise. Sometime long ago I was a well-behaved man and will be again. You’re sweet medicine, that’s all.

Giovanni Bernini

I must’ve entered into some new delirium since before breakfast that morning, after slipping the note under Amelia’s door; I visited the library and, with no plan at all, checked out a dictionary of sign language.

Like everything, borrowing the book seemed a frightful ordeal — what with surviving the solicitude of the nurses and the fluorescent lights of the library — but I managed to do it. In my room I practiced, and if it hadn’t been for the terror of failing and the terror of succeeding, I could have torn through the book in an hour, so closely did it play to my talents. My hands were two ticklish birds, two anythings. Dancing origami — my knuckles, my meanings. There was a civility involved, a silence, and theatrics.

Awake. Do you know how you say it? You mimic the opening of the eyes. You form two L’s with your hands and push them away from your temples.

Freedom. You make fists and cross your arms, then uncross them. Cross, then uncross.

Face. My favorite. With your forefinger, circle your face.

It was like cutting a hole in the air.

• • •

As much as it pained me, I kept my promise, switching with the doctor’s help to B Schedule, which meant I did everything Amelia did an hour after her. Because her routine was so exact, it was painful but not difficult to avoid her entirely.

My sessions with Orphels those two days were among the least helpful yet. I went on and on about the letter, pecking at him for her reaction.

“Giovanni, you know I can’t discuss this.”

“I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about what you’re up to. You’re like your father, Dr. Orphels. A master of justification.”

He grinned. “You distrust me, but that’s okay. I would prefer you to be distrustful of me and in possession of your health than the reverse. Please tell me.” He said, “How did it feel to write that note?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have to say.”

“That’s true.”

A long silence. “As you yourself observed, Amelia suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he said. “Must repeat most actions anywhere from three to forty times. Wash her hands. Open the door. She worked as a newspaper photographer, and this activity, photography, became a way of mitigating the obsession. Rather than touching a certain hydrangea bush three times, she would take three photos of it.”

“Big improvement,” I said.

“It was, actually. She’s suffered fewer obsessive episodes. There was, however, one lingering problem.”

“What’s that?”

“She did not like the photos,” he said. “Understand, the quality of the photographs was not a problem for me — I thought some of them were quite lovely — but Amelia hated them. None of those photos, in her mind, captured their subjects. Of course, I suggested many times that such ‘capture’ was impossible.”

“What happened? I still see her out there taking photos.”

“A twist.” He raised his finger. “She started taking photographs without any film in the camera.”

“No film?”

He nodded. “By snapping the photo but not actually committing the moment to record, she was acknowledging that she could never fully ‘capture’ the object, and yet was able to feel like she had.”

“There’s no film in that camera?”

He grinned. “It reminded me of you, you know.”

I said nothing.

“Maximilian’s quotation marks. That the stage is like a pair of quotation marks — everything you do inside them isn’t something you’re actually doing, but something you could be doing. Like taking photos with an empty camera, no?”

“You’re up to something here. I can feel it.”

“I know you distrust me. You will for a long time. But have I ever withheld anything from you?”

I was trembling.

“Tell me. It’s important for me to know. How did it feel to write that letter?”

I was looking off to the side, my hands cupped in front of me. “Crucial. Terrifying. I was trying to explain myself . Like you said, Doctor. Writing and betrayal. Writing and betrayal.”

• • •

I was returning to my room from one of these sessions when I nearly slipped on the note. It was folded primly in half, addressed to me: Giovanni . I held it, terrified. I brought it down with me to dinner, unopened, and, after eating, pondered it, folded, for a good half hour in order to savor the moment of knowing it had arrived but not yet knowing how it would disappoint me.

Again it featured those absurdly straight letters.

You’re a hell of a lot more charming on paper than you are stalking around with God-knows-what blasting in your head. Don’t think I don’t recognize you either, even with that bush of a beard. (To your beard I have this to say: Scram!) I covered one of your gigs for City Paper. Just now I shut my eyes and saw the shots from that night. I mean it: on the inside of my eyelids, little dancing movies. There’s one of you with a vein, size of a slug, popping out of your forehead. One of you wiping this fake tear from your eye. Digging real hard with your knuckle, like you were trying to fish out a silver dollar.