The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (13 page)

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my father donated my mother’s favorite coffee cup, a wooden dish rack, a coat hanger made of found driftwood, and an outdated standing globe featuring nonexistent countries that spun at a wobble.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.

T
he 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.

I walked half a block behind him. The homeless men still in their sleeping bags smiled and cheered for him—“Diggin’ that hat, brother.” “Woo lordy you got places to be”—but as I passed they scowled. He was lopsided, determined, had every right to be there, and I obviously had none. However dangerous, the parallel tracks he ran on were fascinating, and in my weakest moments, which
he came to despise me for, I didn’t have the heart to intervene.

He stopped outside an art supply store and something tilted his head—another string—with the theatrical astonishment of silent movie actors, and I struggled to write the caption that would run across the bottom of the screen. It was barely six, but the store had just opened, for our city ran wild with art students and large canvas bags in constant need of refilling. I didn’t follow him inside; I was ashamed to be there, ashamed not to have stopped him, ashamed to find amusement with this part of him that he so decried. Ten minutes later he was at the register, dumping materials in front of the clerk, who rolled his eyes and scanned them. Wonder of wonders, Jackson located his wallet and handed it across the counter: after thirty seconds of staring him down, the clerk shrugged, opened the wallet, and pulled out sufficient funds. We lived in a city full of crazy people, and this smiling man in a propeller hat and a suit buttoned incorrectly was not breaking any records.

He woke upon exiting the store, looked down at the bags in his hands clenched with a toddler’s unyielding force, and dropped them when his fingers unconsciously slackened. A homeless man he’d passed earlier scuttled by, flashing a peace sign and grin of familiarity. In his wake Jackson saw me where I waited for him on the bench, my whole body tense. He joined me, leaned forward, put one hand on his knee and one, curiously, on his hat. He took it off, flicked the propeller grimly, and tossed it into traffic. When I reached to touch him, his body stiffened.

“I want to sleep so badly,” he said. “To sleep and sleep and sleep, and to wake up in the same place, and have the world where I left it.

“I want,” he continued, with his eyes closed as if imagining it, “to tell those boring stories about the dreams I’ve had to whoever will listen.”

I cleared my throat with an air of solemnity. “I was your grandma but I wasn’t your grandma, and you were in a house that was also a doctor’s office?” I said.

“Yeah,” he answered, “only time was like, something I could touch.”

And we laughed and laughed until he kissed me hard on the mouth.

W
ith his permission, I began to show his pieces to friends who stopped by our apartment, though I was careful to do so only when he wasn’t home, and to put them back in the box where they stayed hidden. I needed to know that I wasn’t imagining how perfectly lonely they were, how deftly they implied whole universes, simply because there was finally a symbol I could hold in my hand of my lover’s other side.

Nathan, a friend of mine in grad school for philosophy, accepted my invitation eagerly as soon as I explained the situation. He was scary-smart, with a slightly broken nose that seemed even more broken when he smiled, and a tendency to overnod while listening. He chose words carefully, rarely swore, and seldom said a bad word about anyone.

“Jesus,” he said and put his hand to his mouth just like I had done.

“Completely asleep?”

I nodded.

After looking at it a full two minutes, he removed the first from the pile and began to move through them quickly, as if he didn’t know where to start, or that the next would surely clarify his feelings toward them. He paused and fixed on one I had a particularly hard time looking at.

It was mostly in charcoal, with some color added in pastel, as if saying
Go on. Smear me
. It depicted a nude woman with red strings of hair that trailed to her mid-thigh, head cocked and eyes closed in anguish; a hand was reaching out from her mouth, clutching a fistful of the hair that flowed down over her small, uneven breasts, the nipples of which pointed in different directions. The white of her too-thin torso was split open. Appearing grotesquely from her stomach was another hand, a leg kicking across the canvas at an odd, broken angle, and a male face smeared with blood. The face was round, bearded, smirking; the eyes looked straight ahead. The woman’s feet were far too small and she seemed to teeter on the earth’s surface.

Sometime after the last I’d looked at it, Jackson must have labeled it. In the bottom corner, in small milky black letters, it read:
I asked you nicely the first time
. I imagined him penning it, bitter and grinning darkly, desperate to assert authorship in some small way. Nathan put the pile next to him and clasped his hands in his lap.

“They—” He shook his head. “They have to be seen.”

T
hat night I phoned a friend who owned a small gallery. Though I had planned to seem neutral and merely curious as to whether he might have any interest, my words came across as imploring and desperate. My personal investment was obvious, and I shared too much about the effect the art was having on Jackson as well as myself. Paul listened as I blathered and did not interrupt. When I ran out of breath, he invited me over for dinner the following evening, probably more from concern for my well-being than interest in the pieces. I did not tell Jackson. Since childhood I had been using the eccentricities of his sleep in ways he hadn’t authorized, but this, I hoped, would be different.

Dinner at Paul’s was exquisite: pork chop with roasted peaches, sautéed green beans and mashed potatoes, a strong beer he had brewed himself. It was clear from my voice on the phone, he gently implied, that a large meal cooked with care would do me some good. While we ate
he permitted me to speak wildly, about how incredulous Jackson and I had been when it first happened, how it continued even with all the materials hidden, the trip he made to the art store in his sleep. It was clear he was wary. Not of the validity of my story—he had a willingness to believe in the unusual that was endearing and familiar to me—but of art that was, well,
schticky
.