Kathleen Alcott - The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets

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.