Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Where are you headed?” he asked.

“Back to the common.”

“Let’s go the long way.” Without really thinking about it, he held the doors open to the outside.

Ella looked warily at him and then, just as he was about to apologize and explain he’d only wanted to get some air, she walked boldly past him and out into the world. They walked quickly, neither saying anything about the fact that they were hurrying to avoid being seen, and they didn’t slow down until they were back by the relocated Christ statue.

“Your folks left early?”

“They got us all tickets to a movie, but I told them I couldn’t—”

She glanced at him sideways, knowing that he knew she’d been cleared for an afternoon outing. That he’d know that it wasn’t what she’d meant by couldn’t .

Jacob thought about it a moment. “What movie?”

“That new one with Stone Culligan.”

She noticed his scowling. Jacob wished he could explain why the star annoyed him, and the argument he’d forever be reminded of by him, but bringing up Irene at all felt wildly inappropriate. It might even send Ella into a tailspin. He couldn’t reconcile it all himself. How could he explain what had happened to a girl who found telethons depressing?

“Check the DSM , but I think not wanting to see a Stone Culligan movie is proof of sanity.”

She sighed. “They were so disappointed! They never show it, but I know they were.”

“Why didn’t you want to go?”

“It looks sad .”

Jacob had seen a few commercials for it over Oliver’s shoulder, and there had been a review in the latest New Yorker . Fresh from rehab and now dating a different Israeli supermodel, Culligan was taking on substantial material for the first time. Playing one of four brothers uniting for their mother’s funeral, Culligan arrives sexily disfigured from a recent ATV accident, which in a fit of art-imitating-life turns out to be not an accident at all, oh my god!

“I take it you’re not a fan.”

“He’s not my type.” It was hard to tell if his implication had landed. Ella did get very quiet and remained so as they stepped around a half-dozen headstones.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why do people pay fifteen bucks to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers so they can watch actors pretend to be miserable for two hours when they can see it for free if they just open their eyes? And anyway, how do they get up afterward and just go across the mall and buy sensible shoes at Ann Taylor Loft?”

“Why do you like poetry then? At least in movies sometimes things explode.”

“Poetry makes things look more beautiful. That’s okay.”

Jacob checked his watch but made no effort to turn back. It would take them a few more minutes to realize Ella wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

“Shitty movies can make things more beautiful too. If Stone Culligan felt how you feel once and turned that into something, then that’s one less thing to keep to yourself all the time.”

Ella looked at him through fogged glasses, then removed them as if to wipe them clean but instead just waved them around. “I wasn’t going to jump. Off the cruise ship. I don’t know what you heard, but I wasn’t.”

Jacob shook his head. “I hadn’t heard anything. Who thought you were going to jump?”

She crossed her arms over her chest and walked ahead.

“My parents. The stupid deckhand guy who saw me on the railing. The asshole ship doctor — who becomes a doctor on a goddamn cruise ship? That’s what I want to know. That’s not a reputable career, you know? That’s not, like, a sign of excellence in doctoring, to spend your life bandaging kids’ skinned knees and — and—”

“Worrying a lot about Legionnaires’ disease, I imagine.”

“Exactly. Who would choose to do that? Who would work on one of those floating prisons all year long? Someone like that shouldn’t be taken seriously, is all I mean.”

Jacob didn’t say anything, though he was thinking that at least if he’d signed up for a year on a cruise ship, he could practice his backstroke once in a while.

Ella was stepping widely to avoid the ground in front of the nun’s headstones. “‘Here Lies Sister Mary Sullivan.’ ‘Here Lies Sister Alice McNally,’” she read as she leaped over the graves.

Jacob decided to try one too. “‘Here Lies Sister, Sister , American TV sitcom.’”

She laughed, and he wondered if she even got the joke. But then she said, “TGIF,” as she crossed herself and went along to the next.

“‘Here Lies Twisted Sister, who really aren’t going to take it anymore.’”

“You’re too young to know about them.”

“My dad still has all his old records.”

“And terrible taste, apparently.”

“Hey, speaking of taste, what’d you really think about my poem?”

Jacob had been wondering if she’d have the nerve to ask him face to face. He felt another small swell of pride that she had. “Just what I wrote.”

“But what do you really think? Like, do you think I’ve got what it takes? To be a poet?”

Jacob examined her closely. “You’re going to need a thing . Like white-person dreadlocks. Or a ponytail that goes down to your shins. Or wear a lot of rings maybe. Like an insane, abnormal number of rings.”

Ella frowned. “I was thinking about getting a tattoo.”

“You don’t have a tattoo yet? Oh, God. I’m not sure I can be seen with you, actually.”

Ella looked around perfunctorily to see if the coast was clear. “Do you have one?”

“I have the Chinese symbol for love tattooed on my left ankle.”

“You do not.”

“I can’t show it to you though, because these socks are really complicated.”

“Be serious.”

Jacob quietly used a headstone to scrape a bit of mud off his shoe. There was a poem engraved on it that he had never seen before, though he had been out in the graveyard a number of times and had, in his boredom, looked at all the sisters’ headstones plenty of times before. Somehow he must have missed this one. Or rather he felt as if he had read it before, ages ago in some anthology, for he half-remembered it even as he scanned the simple lines.

It is a fearful thing

to love what death can touch.

A fearful thing

to love, hope, dream:

to be—

to be,

And oh! to lose.

A thing for fools, this,

and

a holy thing,

a holy thing

to love.

At some point as he looked at the inscription, Ella had come over and begun reading it too. She waited for him to say something. He thought about simply saying that he had no way of knowing if she’d be a great poet or not, and that the odds were heavily stacked in the “or not” column, and that even if she managed to find her way to the other side, it meant doing a lot of work for nearly no compensation or recognition whatsoever. But standing there, reading those words on the headstone, he found himself unable to give his usual answer.

“I’ll tell you if you answer one thing for me first. In all seriousness. Why were you on the railing if you weren’t going to jump?”

Ella took a sudden interest in the twigs around her feet, kicking them this way and that.

“It was like being a little kid again. Like not being afraid, at all, of anything. I don’t know if you’ve ever been way out in the ocean like that. I never had been before. But when you’re out there far enough that you can’t see land from any side? It’s just incredible. Like being on a new planet. There’s nothing man-made, just the sun setting and these clouds that are just on fire . Every color imaginable. The whole crayon box. And when the wind picked up, I couldn’t even hear the engines going, or the kids crying down by the pool, or the birds shrieking down by the snack bar… it was just all gone, and I felt like I was in heaven. I wasn’t afraid of anything. It was like I was weightless. But I swear to God, I didn’t want to jump.”