Kathleen Alcott - The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

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.