the top of its head declared it to be). Upon Jackson’s expression of disdain for James’s artistic endeavors, the younger brother would defend himself violently. There were, he insisted, many reasons for a tiger king.
While we absorbed the paradise of indoor imaginations many afternoons, we valued the wide expanse of our block as well; out there was a wildness the three of us found and cultivated. Overgrown blackberry bushes reached to us through other people’s fences, and even after our lips and teeth and tongues were stained purple, the smell lingered and called to us at night while we tossed and turned in the slow heat, while we dreamed of vengeance in the water balloon fights of tomorrow. The brothers had both inherited their father’s penchant for sleep talking. Like their father, they spoke not in the stumbling tongues of so many sleep talkers but in full words and careful syllables, giving reason and rhyme to fantastical worlds and images. Unlike their father, though, Jackson and James had partners in their sleep talk. Only myself, the tiger king, the three-quarters-finished clown with crooked purple arms, and the beta fish, who swam the same circles in the same tank (which was situated exactly between the brothers’ beds on an end table), were aware of the conversations that took place in the middle of the night, threading strings between the dreamworlds of the brothers. I shared the secret with them, slept with my head almost directly beneath the fish tank, often still in my bright blue bathing suit, with my dark red widow’s peak connected, by another invisible thread, to the tip of Jackson’s nose.
During the day, I made up for my sex and too-thin stature with calluses thicker than all of the boys’. The balls of my feet were agile and quick; they responded effortlessly to impossibly sharp-angled turns in games of tag and never complained of the heat or the oak roots that reached up through the sidewalk of Madrone Street to remind us of beginnings. I made up for my sex with curse words my father had not meant to teach me, but at night I kept watch of Jackson’s chest, monitoring its homogenized ups and downs; the first part of loving anyone is to make sure they’re breathing. And so it went that I was the first to witness Jackson and James speaking to each other in the semaphores of deep sleep. Their mother had not noticed; Julia didn’t notice a lot of things.
On the last evening of June in that particular circus summer, I sat at the head of Jackson’s bed, my legs crossed like a brave Indian warrior, counting his breaths, waiting for an anomaly, sometimes daring to run my index finger over the slight curve of his lips.
Jackson slept like a content old man then, with a slight smile on his face, as if remembering a few sweet picnics and two well-raised children, but I was always scared of him waking. I almost jumped the first time he spoke, before realizing everything was the same.
“In the blond one, where seas go,” Jackson said.
My position as guardsman was not found out. The fish still swam their circles, discussing bubbles and miniature ceramic castles; James, on the other bed, still lay with one bootied foot outside the covers, but thirty seconds later he began to speak.
“Dragon time … is your time,” said some secret part of James.
And Jackson, after three to five moments: “Sea time?”
And James, whose sleeping head now faced his brother’s bed:
“Yesbutwith the trains.”
“… with the trains
and the fish man.”
“but the fishandthe bridge,
and the …”
“Ghost radio!” exclaimed James, and that was that.
I barely got to sleep that night, twisting and turning under the odd-smelling guest blanket, trying to make sense of the strange conversation I’d just witnessed. Ghosts: I knew plenty about those, having made a lifelong practice of reaching for my mother, standing in the room where she took her last breaths and whispering benign details about my day into the coffee cup my father said was her favorite. And then, with my father’s gift of walkie-talkies the prior Christmas, into those. There was the radio part, but it had never occurred to me that the link might exist underwater until I heard the disembodied words that floated across the boys’ bedroom. A bridge, of course. Of course you’d have to reach a bridge to get there. To get to her.
My father’s scissors were rusted and unwieldy, heavy like useful things just aren’t anymore,