The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (11 page)

I
t 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?

J
ames’s answers are short, and I try to imagine where he is in his apartment, what sits on his coffee table, whether he and his neighbors are friendly. Trying to engage him in conversation is difficult, as he barely leaves the two-bedroom his inheritance covers. My father sends him fresh flowers once a week, through a local florist, and I have to wonder whether they’re placed in vases or just accrue on a sad, cluttered table.

“Not well,” he says.

“How not well?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

I insist I do, insist that whatever it is, I’d like to sit in his cage with him a moment. Since being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and then suffering from ensuing hallucinations and delusions, his voice has not changed; I think I wish it had. Because the next thing he tells me is that he has been writing funeral arrangements and eulogies for people who are not dead. That they are, if he does say
so himself, rather perfect. How many funerals had I been to, he asks, where the person was accurately represented?

“And do you … do you actually think they’re dead,” I ask, but don’t wait for the answer.

“Because if not, maybe it’s a useful exercise in, you know, honesty, the evaluation of those you care about, the qualities you both admire and take issue with—”

“Right,” he says, with cold precision. “Except I do. Believe they’re dead. It takes my shrink reminding me, and I only see him once a week.”

There is that myth, of course, which for a long time I let soothe me:
crazy people don’t know they’re crazy
. So he couldn’t be crazy, this boy I grew up with: profoundly sad, yes. A sad person whose intelligence fostered, in his illness, a duplicity—that somewhere, always, there was reason.

Because a stay in the hospital was expensive and never fixed anything, he has become skilled in the art of withholding from his therapist the catchphrases that signal suicide or harm to self. Learned to bathe his face in wistful optimism and indulge the doctor’s discussions of goals and hopes.

His first attempt was toward the end of Jackson and me; even now, I can’t tell whether it kept us together longer or brought speed and velocity to our close. Julia had moved to Mexico by then. She’d completed a medical interpreting/translating course and was living the good life with a crowd of expats she referred to by affectionate nicknames over the phone. When Jackson had finally gotten hold of her with the news, she hadn’t had much to say except that did he know that in Spanish, one didn’t get “the blues”—you got “the purples”! Could he believe it? It was no use
with her, he said after he hung up. When he formed statements like that, I wasn’t allowed to agree or disagree.

We rose late the morning we were to visit him and were forced to shower together. It was a tiny shower, but we were experts in the geometry of not touching by then, switching in and out of the water with precision, handing off shampoo and soap without prompt. The smell and tingle of the tea tree shampoo on my scalp and neck was close to burning, reminiscent of good, painful things. He finished before I did, and I let the water run over me for a minute and wondered if, from above, this looked like tenderness. Like intimacy.

In the common room where the nurse led us, the only thing that clearly distinguished the patients from the concerned loved ones were the
VISITOR
stickers on our chests. James wore slip-on canvas sneakers and a bulky tan cardigan with leather elbow patches. When we asked how he was, he shrugged like
Isn’t it obvious?
On the phone he had mentioned he was finding it impossible to read anything, so we had brought him a book of crossword puzzles. He scowled and said thanks, and I knew immediately it had been a bad choice, an insult even. Crosswords were for people with jobs, who wanted a chance to play in their brain on Sundays over coffee. All he had been doing, I saw now, was playing in his brain: dark, menacing, circuitous games, with no rules and no way to win.

I was the only one who talked. Jackson was reserved, suspicious. It seemed to me that he resented the pain James was in: it came in daylight, its victim had acute
knowledge of the disease’s spreading. The other patients I saw were likewise sedated, besides a chatty English guy with no visitors who made it his business to approach other people’s. The couches were clean and newish, and the thin blue paint on the walls could even be considered pleasant. From somewhere in the rear of the hospital there was yelling that gave into moaning and then yelling again. When it grasped at words, it was in Spanish. We didn’t ask, but James told us anyway.

“Carlos,” he said. “Schizophrenic, I think. Has this stuffed rabbit he carries around. The one nurse truly fluent in Spanish is on leave for two weeks, can you believe that? ”

The compassion in his voice made me hopeful, but his eyes darkened and he looked directly at Jackson for the first time.

“If only Mom was here, huh? Señora Bailey to the rescue.” And he began to cackle until tears came to his eyes. The nurse across the room moved from where she was crouching, speaking softly to a near catatonic young woman in braided pigtails, and surveyed the three of us for signs of alarm. Jackson was not laughing. He sat with his arms slack, palms up, as if waiting to receive or accept some understanding.

The screaming in Spanish had ceased and I had not noticed.

“Woo,” breathed James. “I haven’t laughed that hard since—”

It was a sentence he couldn’t finish.

W
hile Jackson was the older brother, it often seemed otherwise in the eyes of our peers. He was an inch taller than James but never interrupted people while they spoke, never walked ahead or declared himself, in silent ways that add up, a king. He drank just as much as the rest of us (which was too much) but rarely appeared as intoxicated and was most likely to help someone vomit or listen patiently to maudlin rants. He read voraciously. He was drawn to fiction, as I was, but just as equally to fact. He read a biography of Jacques Cousteau with a pen in his hand, occasionally taking notes. For several weeks I fell asleep with his hand on my waist, him staring at the ceiling and telling me about Nikola Tesla. He could explain the magic of science so well that, in my mind, they were as good as his inventions, and I took pleasure in all the proliferating ways I’d loved him since childhood. Our parents, by then, had given up any weak protest to us sleeping together, and figured, somewhat correctly, that we took care
of each other. It was mostly Jackson taking care of me, and me taking care of him by needing him.