Kathleen Alcott - The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

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?