As he shoved it into his bag, he spotted Ella’s portrait still hanging, gray, on the wall in the dark. She’d be back at school soon, and not even too far behind schedule. He worried, though, that she might get depressed again when she found out he’d quit. He figured he had better leave some kind of goodbye, so he tore a page out of the back of the Tolstoy and went over to the chessboard, thinking he’d write something and leave it there for Ella to find the next day.
Only when he sat down he found there was already a piece of paper wedged under there. He’d sworn he’d checked earlier, and there was no way Ella had left her room, but there it was — not a poem this time, but a letter, which read:
Hope you get back on your old schedule soon! Paul was up here watching group as usual. Did you know he picks his nose? There was a guy in here last year with OCD who picked his nose so much that they had to actually put mittens on his hands. I asked Dr. Wilkins about it. Rhinotillexomania. It’s a real thing! Before Maura, I had a roommate with OCD, and when she got nervous, she would pluck out her eyebrow hairs. The doctors warned her that it wasn’t like when you shave your leg hair. It doesn’t just grow back, but she couldn’t help it. After a week she didn’t have any eyebrows left! She tried to draw them back on with eyeliner, but it looked totally deranged, so I found a pen and shaded them a little, and that looked a little better, but then it came off in the shower a few days later. I told her we could just do it again… it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, but she said it was pointless. I heard they sent her someplace down in Florida that specializes in OCD. I kept thinking, “She’s right. It is pointless.” Was she going to spend her whole life drawing her eyebrows back on every time she showered? Someone told me they can tattoo them back on again, but that’s got to be pretty obvious. And if they ever did grow back, wouldn’t she pluck them out again? It wasn’t like walking around eyebrow-less was making her less anxious. So it was doubly pointless. Pointless squared. Just a pointlessness spiral, and then I got stuck in it. That’s how I get about things. That’s why I’m here. That’s what my parents don’t see. For them it’s easy to just say, “Well, it could be worse! She could have plucked out her eyelashes too!” and they’ll actually laugh about it and then go eat soup. I mean, hypothetically. They don’t eat, like, odd amounts of soup. It’s just that they do soup things. They do normal everyday soup things instead of, I don’t know, caring. You’re the first person I’ve met here, or really anywhere, who doesn’t just go eat soup. I hope that’s not weird to say. That day you talked to me about my picture was the first time anybody in this whole place ever asked me about something like that. Nobody looks closely. Not the other kids here. Not even doctors whose job it is to look. Everybody’s just got their nose in their own soup. They say they care, but they don’t put poems in books for me to read. They don’t tell me I can be a poet or call me chowderhead. They talk to me about “adjusting my expectations for the world.” And how I need to be realistic and just accept that this is how things work and that life is unfair and some people just don’t get to have eyebrows, which is at least better than being a baby who is born starving and sick which is at least better than being raped and murdered and I ought to be happy that I am smart and well-fed and have loving parents and clothes and a house and all that means I won’t have to think about those other things which aren’t in my control anyway so that’s why I’ve just got to “work on me” and stop worrying so much so I can get better and get out of here and do something with my life, which is a precious gift I never asked for. I know, I know, I know. Anyways, I hope you get back to your old shift again soon because Paul is the worst.
Jacob sat there a long time, reading the note twice more in the dark. He stared down at the pieces on the chessboard, both sides still trapped in their zugzwang, equally poised to lose. But then what was so bad about losing? he wondered. At least then you could start a new game. Worse to stand there forever. Idly by. Taking time off when there was so little time in the first place.
On the page from the book he’d ripped out, he wrote first in huge letters, “MAKE THE WORLD ADJUST ITS EXPECTATIONS OF YOU.” Then he added, in smaller letters, “Assignment: Write me a sestina about soup for Tuesday. And a sonnet about eyebrows for Sunday.” Then he folded it up and placed it back under the chessboard.
AUGUST
Solitude, it turned out, was something you could get used to, like anything else. Jacob finished Anna Karenina in two weeks and came up with a complete lesson plan for Ella. He continued to communicate with her via the chessboard, discussing poems along with whatever was going on during the daylight hours: Maura had a crush on one of the new patients named Roy, Paul’s nose-picking was continuing, and Sissy was teaching them all to crochet, though they had to use cumbersome plastic hooks that nobody could hurt themselves with and they were forbidden from making scarves or anything with long sleeves. There were a lot of potholders happening. Ella was attempting a beret. Also word must have somehow gotten out that Dr. Dorothy was the one who had ratted on Jacob, because someone (Maura) had apparently stolen her glasses during a dog-petting session (not even at Ella’s behest) and dropped the pieces into a vent.
Oliver had promised to get Jacob back on days just as soon as things quieted down (i.e., when Ella went back to school). Jacob didn’t hold it against him, but he worried that their time apart didn’t seem to be doing Oliver much good. He was increasingly despondent even on weekends. They still had sex in the morning on Saturday, and after that he seemed interested only in the television. Jacob sat through some political chatter about the Chelsea Clinton wedding. Oliver got a little choked up at the “candid” photos of old family moments: Bill and Chelsea and Socks watching a movie at the White House, Chelsea walking through an African village with her mother and making funny fish faces at her father.
“They’re so sweet together,” Oliver said.
“I guess,” Jacob replied. He wasn’t really paying much attention, flipping openly through the collected Keats, trying to choose which poem to excise when Oliver next went to the bathroom.
“I always wanted to have a daughter,” Oliver said, searching the cracks in the ceiling.
“Hmmm,” Jacob said, temporarily distracted by a commercial for the Stone Culligan movie. Had they really named it “Death Be Not Proud”? There ought to be a law.
Oliver trimmed his toenails, which he knew Jacob disliked witnessing, then changed the channel to BBC America, where an episode of Coupling was on.
Jacob watched as much as he could stand of the perilous minutiae of modern quirky relationships — about ten minutes — before he complained. “Can we watch something else?”
“I like this show.”
“You’re not even laughing!”
“I don’t laugh at everything I like.”
“It’s a situation comedy. You’re supposed to laugh at the hilarious situations they’re in.”
“I’m laughing on the inside.”
“Hilarity isn’t a cerebral thing, Oliver. You can’t wryly observe hilarity.”
“I can,” he said simply. Someone on the show walked out of a closet without clothes on.
“HA HA HA HA HA,” Oliver said.
Jacob smacked him with a pillow, and Oliver pinned him against the mattress, and they ended up having sex again. Afterward Oliver changed the channel to a nature show — a peace offering that kept Jacob in bed through lunchtime (cold cereal and half a banana, still in bed) — and they talked for a while about the oceans. Stunning, alien creatures that inhabited the depths. The British documentarian explained the reproductive cycle of the common Sydney, or gloomy, octopus. A little baby octopus floated there on the screen, about the size of a quarter, with pinkish flesh so translucent that a red lump of a brain was visible, floating behind its eyes.