The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,52

so frequently that he didn’t make enough sense to be scared of anymore. On our own, James and I had a language, too. As children, we were best at concocting nonsense urgencies with mock terror, enjoyed breaking down the door of whichever available parent and crying: It’s Danny! Down at the old hotel with the hose again! never maintaining our composure for very long. And later, once words had grown from toys to tools to toys again, inventing idioms without breaking stride. You know what they say, James would begin, You don’t go crying into your soup and expect a steak. True, I would say. And likewise, there’s a good reason not to trust a sparrow in a gold mine.

James whose sweetness, if frantic, was almost always evident. Who always asked me, in the morning, what my dreams were like. Who gently prodded at my quiet, when it constructed in a dark way, suggested that we explore it.

Just after the deterioration of Paul and me, and just before James’s terrifying walks, he appeared in my doorway and we began sleeping together. It should be said that we remained fully clothed and never returned to the naked state we’d so many times shared in the bathtub as children, although I can’t assert that the level of intimacy did not reach levels that felt like betrayal to Jackson, whom I still felt I belonged to.

We were comparable to magnets. No choice but to join. Both with minds whirring darkly and constantly, both hoping the noise of the other might drown out our interiors. Mostly we slept. Sometimes I sobbed and James looked at me with a curiosity that was uncomfortably reminiscent of Jackson. Once we bought two boxes of the most expensive donuts our city had to offer and egged each other on to keep eating until we ran to the bathroom and vomited, our cheeks pressed against the other’s and our bile merging. I took up residence at his house, returning once a week or less if I could help it to the apartment that smelled less like Jackson and more like abandonment every day; I hurried in holding my breath and exchanged clothing for other clothing, as if I had anyone to impress who might notice I’d been wearing the same oversized sweater. Once, in a gesture I felt proud of for days on end, I opened all the windows and left them like that, as if to say: Let something fly in. Anything.

We ordered in and bought microwave dinners by the dozen. We let the garbage overflow onto the floor, a magnificent display of color and texture and smell, and took pride in how little we interacted with the outside world. We bought a sixty-pack of crayons and a two hundred-pack of paper and felt proud for coating the leaflets with such thick layers of wax.

Despite having enough money to completely retreat into his troubled brain, James kept his job at the hotel, though complaints from customers grew more frequent and his manager gently suggested he think about taking a serious vacation. While he was at work I stayed in his apartment, watching a million of channels of cable. I cried when Thelma and Louise went off that cliff and thought about what I’d heard once at a party, that the filmmakers had nearly released the film with an alternate ending in which the car hits the ground and keeps going. I watched reality television shows about people with drug problems and felt envious of their families and friends who crowded around them in a gaggle of support and love and forgiveness. I drooled and breathed deeply while on the stand-up comedy channel black people talked about white people and white people talked about how it wasn’t okay to talk about black people. More often than not I fell asleep to lugubrious documentaries about the forgotten industrial wasteland of Middle America or black-and-white Hitchcocks; in my dreams I wandered through abandoned sewing factories or sat in the lush train cars of the 1940s, trying to remember my destination or realizing, when the conductor came by to collect tickets, that I had released mine out the window and watched it skirt the Midwestern winds. On good nights James would come back from the graveyard shift, turn the television off, and crawl into bed, adjusting his body to fit with mine; if I woke he would kiss the tip of my nose and whisper “How many?” as in “How many brain