The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,29

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?

James’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