I left after three weeks, feeling, for the first time in so long, awake, and conscious of the fact I had done what Jackson had always wanted: I had slept and slept and slept. On my way to the door I stopped at the kitchen table, where James sat coloring, his beard overgrown and unkempt. I offered to take out the garbage but he shrugged and didn’t look up, and I understood that this was what James’s life was like, that my being there had prompted nothing. As much as I didn’t want it to be the case, what I had was different from what he did.
~ ~ ~
James has always been, by definition and religion, a walker; he has always used it as a freedom, an essential mental space to visit frequently. So when he began dissociating — the term we were taught later to use that referred to a tendency to lose all sense of his surroundings — it was initially difficult to recognize it as such. He had showed up at my apartment just before I followed him back to his and ended up staying. While he had the address but had never visited, while he told me he didn’t quite know how he had gotten there, it didn’t strike me as strange. I didn’t realize that he’d literally begun floating in and out of awareness, that he would look up and find he’d traveled miles without any memory of the trip. I told him I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here either and invited him in without a second thought.
Following the suicide attempt that resulted in hospitalization and the initial diagnosis of bipolar disorder, it seemed James learned pretty quickly and effortlessly how to avoid repeats, claiming he couldn’t afford to take off any more time at work. He was, is, a fascinating creature, and he had made a practice of using it to his advantage in social situations, not excluding psychiatry and therapy. During a brief experiment with group therapy he proved himself the most popular among the crumbling circle — the others found themselves identifying with his feedback the most, even sometimes asking the therapist to let him go on speaking after she’d identified a good “building point” or whatever and cleared her throat to begin.
Before Jackson left and prior to the onset of James’s new and disturbing type of walks, his therapist requested he bring in a family member, and he chose me. Given that he and his brother had barely spoken since the hospital, the both of them too uncomfortable with the parallel loss of control in their lives, the both of them insisting they were worse off, I agreed. It became clear almost instantly that this was meant to be some sick sort of in-joke between the two of us, him using every psychological cliché in the book and seeming desperate for the woman’s approval, her discussing with me the ways in which James had grown since their first visit.
I don’t know for certain that there were other attempts, though I do know that there were several occasions when I called the hotel on nights he always worked and some hoarse-throated older woman or squeaky-voiced kid answered and told me he wasn’t working. James never called in sick to work, and so this meant he was pained in a worse way.
On one of these occasions, hoarse-throated Patty asked who might be calling, please, and I said Ida, and she clucked her tongue.
“Oh, Ida, honey,” she said. “I am just so sorry. Know that I’m praying for you and James both,” and I rushed off the phone in a panic to call my father and affirm whichever awful truth.
My father picked up with a cheery clearing of the throat and a singsong “I was just thinking of you.” When I asked how he was, he said that everything was quite good; autumn had always been his favorite time of year, Julia’d tried her hand at mulled wine and they’d indulged heavily the night before (much background laughter on her part at this one), and his lungs had actually been feeling better than they had in months!
I never called out James on his lie, knowing he must have been off on a pretty terrible vacation to tell it. I called his landline — he has never and probably will never have a cell phone — about six times, with increasing frequency, but I never reached him and for some reason I just believed and hoped he was all right and just out on a walk instead of taking the bus over there or calling my father and Julia back to fill them in. It’s ridiculous the way all three of us retained that childhood bond of keeping secrets from the adults no matter the cost, insisted on naming it us versus them when it had become so clearly us versus us, when we as a unit had ceased to function in any benefit to each other and instead just rolled around like marbles waiting to be arranged.
The scary-long walks as opposed to the standard: they were a strong indicator that the just plain sad, which landed James once in the hospital and then in pretty regular therapy and an antidepressant haze, had mutated into something else. In the same us-versus-them philosophy we used with Julia and my father, I didn’t tell James’s therapist about the phone call in which he revealed his little project of writing eulogies for the living. Neither did I tell his therapist or our parents about the other increasingly terrifying phone calls and incidents. Sadness is one thing, insanity another, and the second I’ve so romanticized and linked with many other things (like beauty and art and love) that it was hard isolating it from the rest, holding it up to the fluorescent and brutally honest lighting it required.
He told me, at one point, that he was considering getting rid of his books. When I asked why, he told me nonplussed that he was holding a new belief that with so many old stories around, no other stories could be created. This was poetic up until he told me how long “it has been Tuesday.” He was convinced the books were linked to time, if only his conception of it; he mentioned that naturally his time was different from mine. Something sick had made a home in his head, and it had named itself after a day of the week and lent itself to his obsession.
I got off the phone and repeated his words in my head. Things become understandable with familiarity, and so I thought: It has been Tuesday for so long. It has been Tuesday for so long. It has been Tuesday for so long. I wanted to discern, but couldn’t, and it was then I admitted that James’s own personal Tuesday cage was something much beyond poetics or standard feelings of emptiness and worthlessness.
Despite my omissions, despite James’s talents for manipulation, he ultimately garnered a new diagnosis. “Borderline personality disorder” is a term that scares most people, but for all of us it was a relief, a label, a home. It framed his love affair with speed and called that compulsive behavior, named that haunting distinction he had held over time and Tuesdays an inflated sense of self. James finally had the license he’d been driving without illegally for so long — or rather, walking. We learned this after his walks became increasingly scary, and more than once did I have to take a cab to a strange neighborhood where he had somehow managed to find one of probably seven remaining pay phones in the city. Finally one evening, unable to see any beauty in his lost, incapable of branding it special, I called Julia and my father.