The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,26

my father, to be just the support system J needs in a time like this. He calls him “J.” I can’t remember him ever calling him “J” before.

My heart quickens and toes curl, but I stay quiet and do not ask my father to stop speaking of her. Instead my mind wanders and I think of the face that Jackson would make upon waking and surveying the damage he had caused or was still in the middle of causing: to find me up against the headboard, both my wrists pinned by his one, all of our bedding thrown to the floor and little pieces of down illuminated by the early morning coming through the window. His forehead crumpled from alien rage to bewilderment and desperation; he looked at me with disgust and pity, searching my face for a sign of guilt or fault. He had then, of course, turned away in shame and said nothing while I rose and showered and began to clean.

A coincidence, the fact that it has ceased since Us, is what those close to me have gently suggested out of obligation, but I remember that look. Though he wouldn’t come out and say it, Jackson believed I had something to do with it, because why else would I go on forgiving him?

At the height of his teenage fling with speed, James spent a great deal of time with this guy who could do the New York Times crossword puzzle in under ten minutes. He (James) could make vivid sense of his math homework (and mine, though I was a class ahead)—he had not just memorized the theorems but could apply them, as we’d so often been urged to do, and did so fiercely. The mental image that burns for me here is of James in a well-worn T-shirt in the middle of winter on my front porch, trying to whisper so as not to wake my father but failing miserably, sweating and gesticulating with both a need and the self-imposed authority to explain. He began writing songs that were both catchy and disturbing, often with Dillon, the crossword guy, who was also into speed and had been a good five years.

While Jackson and I waited for an explosion of some sort, James coasted on his high with a no-matter-is-created-or-destroyed-type efficiency. He got a job as the graveyard shift desk clerk at a cheap motel chain way across town, which he took joy in walking to. He was always clad in secondhand suits and wingtips eerily reminiscent of his father’s, and embodied that brand of extremely clean speed freak: hair always combed, no stubble whatsoever, hands raw from washing with the bar of soap he kept wrapped in wax paper in his pocket. He chain-smoked but also kept mints and cologne and tiny bottles of mouthwash in ready supply. His alert demeanor was perfect for the hours and even more perfect for the clientele: the drug addicts, the plain old homeless or near-homeless alcoholics, the crazy, the sad, the longtime alone—as a general rule, they all responded to James with submission and a vague assimilation of respect. If they attempted the usual hijinks, hot checks or soap theft or prostitution from their rooms, they forfeited almost immediately once he appeared at their door and bared his canine teeth grin offering a cigarette and a heart-to-heart. He spotted them stamps to send their insane letters, gave them more than two free refills of coffee; it was well known that if they wanted to wander in at four or six a.m. and sit in the little plastic lobby chairs while he composed his songs and talk or not talk, that was just fine with him. He was king of that place, and was after two months promoted to assistant manager.

With an obsequious shrug we accepted what the drugs made him and spent the night in the motel rooms he snuck us into. When it was just Jackson and me, we watched cable, passing the plastic ashtrays both listlessly and with an air of luxury, and later did what our parents would call making love but what we were still trying to figure out the nomenclature for. Some nights it was a whole group of us, and we did just the things you’d expect teenagers with free rein in a fourteen-by-twelve room all night to do. James would come in for ten minutes every once in a while, or however long it took to drink a beer; phone calls to