The piece Caroline wrote was minimal. It had been her, she’d explained to Paul, who’d pitched the piece, and so even after the whole episode she had no choice but to write it. The piece sat off center, dwarfed by the color photography and coverage of a lavish parade the previous weekend.
SOMNAMBULISM AND CRAMP
Original Art by Jackson Bailey
More than 50 people crammed into to Paul Flowers’s studio on 24th and Hampshire for an art opening that began at 3 a.m. last Saturday, which no one promoted but everyone had heard about.
Curated deftly by Flowers with modest bits of cynical ephemera, Somnambulism and Cramp displayed the works of debut artist Jackson Bailey, whose close friends claim he makes art in his sleep.
The enraptured crowd stumbled in lacking any expectations and were slow to leave.
The pieces, reminiscent of dark fables or didactics for naughty children, remain unavailable for purchase.
The artist declined to comment, except to say, “They’re not mine.”
Below the article was a small black-and-white photograph of Jackson in the chair he’d loomed in the entire night, looking straight ahead, the I asked you nicely the first time piece on display behind him, and I knew, watching it as if waiting for it to move, what it must look like to everyone else. I saw a photograph of something private, an animal caught in its most intimate act, but I knew the photograph everyone else saw displayed a man with confidence and many years ahead of him. All my life, it had been he and I versus everyone else, but in his exit he’d made the equation convoluted. Us versus him versus me versus the rest versus him again. And while I have a mind for numbers, enjoy the construction and reconstruction, multiplication and simplification of variables, I couldn’t have extricated any solution if I tried.
~ ~ ~
You don’t remember, I used to say to him, first with semicomic dramatic incredulity and an open mouth. You don’t remember, quieter, the last couple syllables swallowed. The conversation grew in circles from his inability to recall, say, some punch line, a perfect afternoon some three years ago, the terrifying type of off-brand whiskey that we drank too much of and that allowed us to sleep together for the first time. The prompts pointed to something larger, of course, of the ever-present tightness in my throat born the moment my father explained the difference between shared blood and proximity. It might be safe to say that during all the years I spent hoping he needed me, I was simultaneously daring him to prove he didn’t by citing his small failures in documentation, in reverence. While I didn’t receive the traditional breakdown of reasons for leaving, didn’t get the chance to stutter and beg, my knowledge of him easily produced his answers: I can’t so determinedly classify every moment as an investment in the future. Hopes are different than plans, and even careful plans rarely actualize themselves exactly according to the blueprint.
A false cognate that’s always struck me: in French, “attendre” is not to attend but to wait. How different the structures of being there, present and participating, and waiting, how palpable the confusion between the two. I supposed I was expecting him to get somewhere. It’s a form of waiting that’s harmful, in that you’re really not anticipating any external force but rather some clear and brash interior shift. And did he ever get somewhere, bubbling over in a way that altered the course of our lives, though it was a different kind of destination, a different kind of event, than I was hoping for. I had plans for him of therapeutic transcendence, the wish that he could feel like the gruesome things he’d done while nightmaring had at least added up to a whole he could look at, examine, maybe experience a sense of pride. Instead they pushed him in another direction, instead they asserted his suspicion that no matter how he measured himself, there was this other darkness that insisted on living (and loudly).
I’d hoped it’d be a gift. Hoped he would feel, at last, forgiveness, support. The sense that however much he writhed, it was to a point. And selfishly, perhaps, I wanted him to look around and see that I’d accepted his worst and loved it.
It hurts to replay those conversations and find evidence of his effort, recognize his keens as a love I named insufficient. Of course I remember, he would say. Just in a different way. I remember by never putting too many ice cubes in your drink, because your teeth are ultrasensitive to cold. I remember by watching where you put your keys and pointing them out to you later. I remember when it’s early in the morning and I’m in the shower feeling the BB pellet you put in my back. I remember by watching you while you cross a room with the same stride you’ve always had, uneven and heavier on the right foot and bold. I remember by not having to explain myself. I remember. I remember. I remember.
~ ~ ~
Whether Jackson remained with James for days or weeks was never revealed to me. I only know that he stayed in his apartment and accepted kindnesses from the brother he’d barely spoken to — save the visit we made to him in the hospital, during which Jackson hardly opened his mouth — since we sat in a small room with no windows and James told us about the swings of the baseball bat, the sudden and encompassing swirl of blue and red lights. If they talked about the trial, Jackson’s guilt/remorse/resentment, the science-fiction novels and bland ham sandwiches James devoured in jail, the years in between, the bruises Jackson’s sleep left on my breasts and neck, neither chose to tell me.
Years and years and moments upon moments were suddenly negated. Since childhood I’ve spent my heart and words and a catalog of tiny, insignificant moments trying to merge with a bloodstream not mine. The achievements of assimilation many; the failures less often but grander in scale. My father had to take me aside when I was six and explain to me that while it might feel like it, honey, James and Jackson are not your brothers, and so it’s no good to be running around calling them that. And I crawled into his lap and cried and choked and gasped until I couldn’t, fingering the ivory buttons on his rough linen shirt and feeling, for the first time, the pain in trying to understand the word that should be simple: family. If not my brothers, then what, I asked? And he taught me another word that should be simple: friends.
And so while James brought Jackson food and books and the oatmeal soap he requested, I sat in the apartment my past bequeathed me and slowly began making the phone calls that other people dread answering. I swallowed my pride and a great deal of anti-anxiety medication Paul had brought, like everything else, without my asking.
These are the type of phone calls that everyone receives from time to time but that no one wants to admit making. They are to people one hasn’t spoken to in a significant amount of time, and they involve self-centered apologies, circuitous anecdotes, the repetition of stock phrases “I don’t know,” “It’s just that,” “If only.”
I had let myself forget: that honest-to-goodness, forever families are made of blood. That a history doesn’t guarantee a future. That no matter how many secrets Jackson and I had told each other; no matter how many times we’d returned home to find the other waiting; no matter how many seasonal colds and flus we’d spread back and forth, taking turns playing nurse; no matter how many, no matter how much, he was not my family. And neither was James, who was happy to be reunited with Jackson and wonder sweetly at the common acids, pigmentations, and chromosomal intersections.