Crisis Hotline
Travis Hubbs
Read
this and fly to your family’s minivan—without permission. Drive—recklessly—to our
old apartment. There—what’s left of the door—you must knock. Put some
knuckle-brawn force behind those raps—who knows what volume should arouse
me—but a memory of that physique, that flesh and meat and carriage of my
desire, will do just fine. So make it loud is what I’m telling you. Disregard
the wooden perversity of the oral fixation characteristic of the residential
termites—about the door, what I mean is you must knock the hell out of
it—remind me that fist of yours, at least. The doorbell you remember, well you
can forget the doorbell, for one day without my knowledge she vanished, likely
defected to some other complex across town. I cannot blame her for this
decision, though I very much miss the arabesque jingling of her plaintive voice
whose discord you’d always despised more than the sum of this evil world
itself.
You’ve been there: there’s that sudden rushing moment of inhalation that catches in your throat—of course this is after you’ve been gone for a long time without knowing—and then like an explosion you know things have been wrong for a very long time. I might have showered yesterday but most likely I didn’t. Most likely I’ve stayed in bed for the better part of the past three weeks. You can bet I smell—Christ, I smell—but there’s always that morbid satisfaction when you settle into the routine. Goodbye hygiene, goodbye outdoors, goodbye breakfast, goodbye seasons, goodbye goodness--hello, evil.
After you left me once again with nothing but my own anatomy—threadbare and machinic—thingamabobs engineered—animation by widgetry—parts to my whole—I once held fast to an identity, a sense of self, the imago of a futural me.
Listen: you’ve got to come.
Do it for them—go outside and look at their faces and try to imagine what’s behind them—because can you not feel the weight of their desperate madness? Their lonely madness? Can you not feel the crying madness of the world, a desperate message lost in hyperspatial letters—addressed to you and you alone?
Christ, I can.
But I haven’t the strength to decipher the cries.
This is why you must bring your body back to me.
* * *
On a warm day in November, long before I learned to pass judgment on my family, Mother drove me to meet Aunt Jane. This was a name I’d heard my whole life, but only in whispers. This was name I’d seen, too, but only once a year, written on the front of a manila envelope addressed to me in the blackest of black Sharpies. My name and hers, once a year, black and lonely. I often imagined our lonely names were lonely people. I saw them travelling together, sipping coffee and reading newspapers all the way from Texas to Chicago, occasionally looking up from the current affairs to watch the nation’s breadbasket pass by out the window of the train, the jet, the bus, and I imagined our names would have serious faces and moustaches and distinguished, all-purpose frowns, which they might employ as they checked the time (probably with silver-crusted pocket watches) to how much longer before the mission’s end, before they arrived at snowy O’Hare with my Christmas book—Twain, Poe, Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien—which would never be read by anyone.
Now it was silly, I thought, to come all this way, to drive all this way, just so I could finally have a face to go with the name. Mother agreed.
“But after all,” she said, “I suppose Jane does have cancer.”
Mother talked to the dashboard most of the way while I stared out the window. Pretended to listen. Pretended to sleep. The interstate was boring. Texas was boring.
The last thing I remember about that drive was my impression of the giant Sam Houston statue: cold and white and monstrous, oddly massive and oddly out of place, standing there gripping his cane with such great vigilance.
“A true hero,” Mother was saying.
He was someone I should know about, she said, even though I’d been too young to remember when we lived in the city named after him—back when Dad had lived with us, but before they got back together and split up again.
I asked Mother what Mr. Houston had done that made him a hero.
“It’s difficult to answer questions while driving,” she said.
We exited through a forest of historical markers. I didn’t have anything against trees, much less trees with history, but I was cautious of people who lived in forests. Even historical forests protected by giant white heroes.
“I promise we’re not lost,” Mother said, reading my mind.
The road was paved with potholes and cattle guards. The farther we went, the more it deteriorated. Then it just kind of disappeared.
Mother killed the engine and got out. The ground was a mattress of leaves. It gave you this half-weightless feeling. It occurred to me that I’d been wrong about Mr. Houston—he wasn’t there to protect the forest from us. It was the other way around.
Aunt Jane, as a concept, frightened me. That’s what Mother wanted, of course.
* * *
It’s been three weeks since you moved out. Why have I suddenly decided to tell you about my dead aunt? It will make sense, I think, if you keep reading. Please keep reading.
For my first eight years, Aunt Jane was a footnote hastily jotted in the family’s margins. For my next twenty, I worked hard to convince myself that I could keep her there. I’ve tried to believe that her memory had nothing to do with why I came back to Texas for school or with why I stayed here for my doctorate or with why I still haven’t left. When the door slammed with you on the other side, Aunt Jane leapt into my mind more vividly than ever. Her image—frail, abandoned, selfless—has been impossible to erase.
Perhaps some people sleep soundly for the rest of their lives after making the calculated decision to let a loved one die alone in the middle of nowhere. I did for twenty years of mine.
* * *
I knew you were about to leave. I could feel it in your gaze.
You got up before me and made breakfast. Two things you’d never done, not once that whole year. Depressed people aren’t early risers, they aren’t breakfast eaters.
At any rate, I remember thinking: is it already time? Me standing at the table letting my eggs get cold, you sitting at the table saying don’t let your eggs get cold.
“You like eggs?” I said. “I’ve never seen you eat eggs.”
And then breakfast was over. You said:
“I’m cured.” Cured. Like it’s something I wouldn’t want you to be.
“You seem certain,” I said.
“I am.”
“Please,” I said, feeling stupid. “Don’t go yet.”
“I’m leaving,” you said. “Send me a bill.”
After that I told you to get the hell out. And then you did.
I’m not sure you ever loved me but I was going to ask you to marry me. I thought I had more time.
If I send this letter, it will probably be to your parents’ house. But even if I don’t send it, at least I’ve made up my mind to write it. Hopefully I’ll finish. Lately I haven’t been good at finishing things. I’ve given up on my dissertation. I’m working full time at Crisis Hotline. It’s good. They need me. Lots of people do.
* * *
Aunt Jane’s trailer had once been blue but now it was gray. Cinder blocks between it and the earth. Splintered steps, three of them, with holes and sagging. Next to the steps, a garden: smothered begonias, Juniper weed, vegetable vines without vegetables. Surely, I thought, my aunt didn’t belong here.
When the door opened, Aunt Jane’s face didn’t say whether she’d been expecting us or not. She certainly didn’t look like the person I’d expected. She was younger, more aware. Skin less pale, eyes greener and brighter. But her hair is what surprised me most—she shouldn’t have had any, I thought.
“Jane,” Mother said, “This is Charles. Your nephew.”
“Hello Charles,” Aunt Jane said.
“Hi,” I said.
Mother continued:
“Charles reads all the books you send.”
Which of course was a lie. I’d only read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“Where do you mail them?” I asked.
Mother laughed.
“The post office,” said Aunt Jane. I was glad she didn’t think I was joking.
“How far is it?”
“Charles,” Mother said, “Let’s go inside before we play twenty questions.” She went for the door.
“Pretty far, now that I think about it,” Aunt Jane said. She turned to let Mother in. “But I’d never thought about it.”
I thought we’d hug, but she turned and went inside and we didn’t even shake hands.
The living room was narrow and it backed up to a narrow kitchen and a narrow, black hallway. Hard brown carpet, linoleum tiles, brittle paneling. Boxes piled everywhere, some labeled, most not. A TV squatting in the corner, rabbit ears pointing at me. Shelves of books lining the walls like skin. Candles and shadows. Thick purple drapes half drawn. Sunlight coming through, putting us in a dim vanilla pudding.
Mother turned on the TV: a muffled voice telling us about altar candles starting a fire and burning the church to the ground. Mother covered her mouth. Aunt Jane just stared at the TV like she knew there was something to see if she could only figure out what it was.
* * *
We were both excited when you told your parents you were tired of believing in God. Then of course they kicked you out because Leviticus says they should. Weren’t we excited?
We sat on the couch and stared at the TV after we moved your boxes. We were thinking: here we are, now what?
“This will be good,” I said.
You agreed.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
You shrugged.
“Are you going to be happy here?”
Then you told me not to talk about being happy because that would ruin it. Then you put your head on my shoulder. Soon my shoulder was damp and getting damper but I didn’t mind—my dissertation needed dissertating badly—but I didn’t mind.
Then you slept for two months. I got you to stop seeing that doctor and save your money for college (have you applied yet?) because it’s alright to take one year off, but even sad people go to college (I should say most people who go to college are sad).
I made you stop the medicine, too, because have no idea how tricky serotonin can be. My dissertation is (was) on serotonin. I watched you more closely after that. I knew I could make you feel better than any pill, any doctor. And I did, didn’t I?
You sat on the couch for our first session. I moved the television to the (our) bedroom so I could sit on the table in front of you. At first you couldn’t look me in the eyes, do you remember? You stared at your shoestrings or the tops of your feet (I’m sure you weren’t wearing shoes) and your finger was constantly in your ear like we were looking for something in there that didn’t want to be found.
You wanted to quit at first, you said it wouldn’t work. You went back to bed. I wasn’t giving up on you, so I agreed to have the session in bed. I asked you how you felt, you said I knew damn well how you felt. You wanted to make things difficult, you wanted to test me—that’s what patients to make sure their doctor is good enough for them. You didn’t want to be my patient. I didn’t either but we needed to try because you were sleeping sixteen hours a day.
It took a month for you to open up. You told me about your parents and your brother (I already knew about them, of course, but it was important for you to hear yourself say it). You’d been on the SSRI since you were 16. You told me about your parents’ marriage, or lack thereof, and your brother’s problems at school, him coming home and whining about how hard community college was.
Your story was less complicated than I’d thought. I didn’t tell you that because patients like to think they’re complicated. Patients don’t like to fit into formulas, either. They don’t like it when a theory applies to them, when they see themselves being fit into a box, the same box as someone else. You said you didn’t want to hear a goddamn thing about Freud or how your anger comes from having a hole where your penis should have been. I said I didn’t want to talk about Freud either. I did, of course, and also about Jung and Lacan and Hartmann and Kristeva and Lazarus, but I didn’t mention any names.
You cried so often, I couldn’t bear to watch. You’d storm out of the apartment and disappear sprinting. I’d wait on the balcony until nightfall when you’d come back. You’d be ready to cooperate and we’d try again. Sometimes I’d block the door so you couldn’t leave. You made me a nervous that time you called the police, but by the time they showed up you were calm again, and then they left and we went back to bed.
You kept asking if I needed to be working on my own work, but I said my work was less important than your health and our sessions were basically the same thing as field hours. But I shouldn’t have neglected my work. It’s painful to think about all the people I could have helped.
* * *
For an hour we visited in almost-whispers. Then we swapped sighs for silence. The air was thick and tired. Mother and Aunt Jane whispered or murmured, mostly about me or Grandmother. Sometimes Aunt Jane spoke gibberish or just grunted. She burped. She farted. I was too terrified to laugh.
At one point Aunt Jane said:
“I don’t care about all this stuff. But Charles can have the books. If he wants.”
I nodded.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Mother said. “Charles appreciates that.”
I nodded.
Then Mother told me to go outside. She gave me the car keys for the radio, but songs would have been meaningless. When the door shut I put my ear to the thin wood and listened.
“Jane,” Mother said. “Jane.”
I couldn’t hear the response, if there’d been one.
“It would best,” Mother continued, “If you were a part of the family again.”
“What?” said Aunt Jane. Then she apologized for shouting.
“You didn’t shout.”
“I didn’t think I did!”
“Now you’re shouting.”
“I apologize. You’re right, I was shouting.”
“You know we love you. Mother and I both do. And Charles does.”
“I don’t want to live here anymore,” Aunt Jane said.
“That doesn’t sound like the Jane I know,” Mother said.
“I don’t sound like me?”
“Not a bit it doesn’t. I can’t remember a time when you haven’t loved it here. You never did like a lot of noise, you know. Mother and I found this place for you. We brought you here, remember? You wanted a quiet place and we brought you here.”
It got quiet for a minute and then Aunt Jane said:
“Yes, that’s right. You’re right about that.”
Then it got quiet again and all I could hear was TV static. Then Aunt Jane shouted:
“I won’t go!”
I stumbled off the porch and didn’t go back. I wandered around the property for while. Nothing but trees and leaves and squirrels. It was the loneliest place I’d ever seen.T
A green hose was mounted on the side of the trailer. I took it down. It surprised me to see water come out when I turned the knob.
It was pointless, I know, but I stood there and watered that corpse of a garden for what seemed like hours. I’d commanding a waterless hose to spout water—magic water—magical enough to resuscitate a dead garden. It broke my heart when I couldn’t.
It would be Christmas in less than a month. The first Christmas Aunt Jane would forget to put a novel in the mail. By Easter she’d be gone.
* * *
One time during an Easter sermon—this was back when your parents still thought church was the best thing for you and we weren’t living together yet—I looked over at you (our legs were touching and I thought that was great) and at that moment I’d never wanted anything as bad as I wanted to whisper in your ear how much I loved you. After we’d lived together a few months we started saying “love” instead of “I love you.” It’s strange but I can’t remember whose idea it was to start deleting the pronoun.
Your parents thought I was too old for you—I’d graduated college—but you did the right thing not listening to them. In the middle of a divorce giving relationship advice to their eighteen year-old who was more of an adult than they were anyhow. And Christ, your brother—that guy was something else—dropping out of college like that because of panic attacks and coming home and telling you to get rid of me because I had a psychology degree. He didn’t like his counselor—at a Tuscon community college for God’s sake—so I’m the antichrist for volunteering at Crisis Hotline instead of Baptist bake sales.
But I tried to win them over. It wasn’t my responsibility, you know that, but I loved you, so I wanted to try to love them. I’d shake hands with your father and hug your mother and give them sirs and ma’ams because I’d lived in this state when I was a kid and I know how much ya’ll love your sirs and ma’ams. I even ate dinner at your house like I was supposed to. All five of us at the table, you and I trying to ignore everyone— your parents as they muttered hurtful things back and forth and your brother as he sat there hyperventilating like he needed to inflate a hot air balloon in time to take it for a spin before sunset. It was bearable, though, and worth it, but I didn’t like watching how it affected you. You didn’t deserve all that.
I never told you this—one of those times I went out for secret drinks with your brother—at one of those bars where we wouldn’t run into anyone who might recognize him—I walked into the bathroom and found him crushing up pills on the fold-out baby-changing station, not even in a stall, and when he saw me he said, “Can you believe this place has one of these?”—meaning the baby-changing station—and then the crushed up powder disappeared like it had never been there. This was a Saturday night probably, so he would have been in church the next morning like nothing had happened, sitting next to your parents—who, between hymns, would be whispering about infidelities that had happened and infidelities that were going to happen--just you wait you bitch/bastard—and at home they had the nerve to pretend you were the crazy one. It’s what they needed to believe. It’s what they needed you to believe.
* * *
That next April we’d start going through the boxes, mostly Mother and Grandmother, me on the couch watching. Though I did on several occasions poke my head in a few nooks. That’s how I found Aunt Jane’s poetry. Thousands of verses written on loose leaf pages and stuffed in shoeboxes. I took the poems outside and sat where the garden used to be.
There lived a wretched nightmare,
If living’s fit to call her
Wandering hateful wandering
Down the phallic halls.
Round corners, round them fast!
She hears it in the distance--
The festive jubilee--
The jubilee won’t wait
For sinners or for slowpokes.
She’ll get there if it kills her,
She’ll drown their revelry;
They’d better let her in,
This black and wretched nightmare,
She’ll show them what it’s like--
These fucking happy people--
To live their lives at night.
I learned about her I.Q. being high enough for people to call her a genius, like it was a bad thing to be called; about the forest; about Sam; about how much she hated herself and didn’t know why; about how much she hated God and didn’t know why; about how she wished Jesus had never been born; about how she’d been to prison; about how my Granddad left them for his second family in Utah; about how Grandmother blamed Aunt Jane for his leaving, since Mother had been too young for it to be her fault; about how Mother had grown up to be unhappy and quickly learned who to blame; about how she’d been married six times; about how her six sons were gone and she didn’t know where; about how she’d read a novel every day of 1980 and then stopped reading for the rest of her life; about the migraines; about the voices; about how one time she’d jumped into a cattle guard to see how it felt to break her leg; about how she’d dropped acid before each of her therapy sessions; about how an ex-senator had asked her to ghostwrite his memoirs and almost strangled her when a month later she’d handed him a two hundred page how-to essay outlining the steps for preparing the world’s best peanut butter and jelly sandwich; about how when she died she wanted to be cremated; about how some days she thought it might be a good idea to cremate herself.
Aunt Jane lived alone in the national forest for over twenty years. Her loneliness, I think, went away after the first year. That’s what I tell my callers after I read them her poems. You may think it’s a bad idea, reading these things to people who want to kill themselves—but it isn’t, not at all. They want to hear about despair, about all its shapes and sizes. They want to feel the sadness—soak it up like a morbid sponge—kill themselves with its impossible possibilities—and discover the meaning of nevermore.
Afterward they usually they ask about the author.
I tell them she was lovely.
* * *
You and I met for the first time on the steps of your therapist’s office. He’d just finished telling you God knows what.
And he’d just finished telling me—that morning—that believe it or not there is a timeline for completing a dissertation.
Does it condemn me forever, that after talking to you I sent you to my dissertation supervisor? That I’d planned the whole thing, our running into each other on the steps of his office building? I was so nervous that day, I felt sure you’d recognize my voice—and maybe you did, maybe you’d kept it to yourself the whole time—but were we doomed from the start because of my deception? I’d fallen in love with your voice and your story, immediately, like an awkwardly scrawled name on a manila envelope begging to be opened.
“How’s your head?” I asked, thinking I was being clever.
“I have to go,” you said, clearly horrified.
You ran down the steps and would have run into oncoming traffic and gotten yourself smeared all over South Congress if I hadn’t yelled for you to stop. You turned around and glared at me through tears.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you want?” you asked. You were crying pretty hard.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want anything.”
“I’m not crazy,” you said, wiping your face.
“I know. It was stupid. Just a stupid joke. I’m stupid, really.”
“I’m depressed,” you said. “Not crazy.”
Then you grabbed me and squeezed and suddenly we were hugging, which surprised the hell out of me. The white dome of the capitol was staring down at us. It was seventy degrees and the sun was out and we were happy together before we’d even known each other’s names. You didn’t let go.
“I’m Charles,” I said.
“I’m Sidney.” Your voice vibrated into my ribs and I asked you where you were from so I could feel it again.
“North Houston,” you said.
“Me too!” I said.
Then I told you about how my parents got divorced when I was little, about moving to Chicago with my mom, about my parents getting back together and splitting up again, and about coming to Austin to study psychology. I rambled on with my abridged life story but it was okay because you’d stopped crying.
“You want to eat lunch?” I said.
* * *
Mother said we’d better get going. It was past dinnertime—we hadn’t eaten anything—and oppressively dark under the helmet of forest. The trees merged with the melting night, a black quicksand sucking everything into its belly. I couldn’t see the garden as we went down the steps. Aunt Jane watched us from the doorway.
Aunt Jane stopped in the doorway and then I turned around and went back to the steps and looked her in the eyes.
“I love you,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, grinning. Like what I’d said was the most foolish piece of nonsense in the world.
Mother started the engine and turned on the headlights, bathing the decrepit trailer in its glow. Aunt Jane stood in the center of the yellow beam, one hand steadied on the doorframe. Then suddenly she stuck her foot out, hovering, feeling for where the next step might be. Her fingers stayed wrapped around the splintered doorframe until the last second when foot found the next step and she continued forward. Mother tried to ignore what was happening. She jammed the gears into reverse, looking out the back window. I kept my eyes on Aunt Jane. She’d reached the bottom step and showed no sign of turning back.
As our car lurched in the opposite direction, carrying us away, I felt the urge to leap out the door, then to scramble to my feet and somehow put a stop to this abandonment.
Aunt Jane reached the ground and started toward us, picking up the pace. I panicked—Mother should stop, I thought, or I should make her stop. What was happening? Why were we just leaving? I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but if I did I knew I wouldn’t have treated them like this.
Mother was still looking out the back window, finding the clearing that would take us to the road. My hand found the door handle. I curled my fingers around it, asking the ethers for strength to burst from the cabin.
Aunt Jane was reaching her arms out to us, her trembling limbs pale in the blonde haze of Mother’s high beams. We were picking up speed, taking the light with us.
Then I pulled the handle. The door lurched open: gasping air, grinding tires, crunching casserole of leaves and mulch. Before I made the jump I looked up and saw Aunt Jane: she’d fallen to her knees in the garden, rocking back and forth with two handfuls of wet dirt held up to the sky. To this day I believe she was asking God where the water had come from.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mother screeched. “Shut the goddamn door!”
“OK,” I said.
Then I shut the door and put my seatbelt on. But not because of Mother’s yelling.
I shut the door because of what I’d seen.
Because it would have been too embarrassing if Mother—or anyone—found out that I’d watered the corpse-garden.
* * *
I called Mother the day you moved out. I asked her if she wanted to see me. I hadn’t been home since I started school in Austin, and I’d stopped answering Mother’s calls. But I listened to the messages: she and Dad were getting back together again. I hated them for that.
Mother said she didn’t know if she’d be able to see me.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said.
“I’m not stupid. I’m a psychotherapist.”
She found this funny.
“Why do you want to see me?” she asked.
“My girlfriend left me,” I said.
“My son left me,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Your father left again too.”
I thought about hanging up but then I said, “I’m not really a psychotherapist. I quit school.”
“So what do you do?” she asked.
“I tell people not to jump.”
“Do they listen?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” she said, and I thanked her.
Then she offered to visit. I said I would like that very much and I told her to fly into Houston. The next day I picked her up from Intercontinental. I wasn’t prepared for how much older eight years had made her. She wasn’t prepared for how much older eight years had made me.
In the car she asked why Houston, why not Austin?
“It’s difficult to answer questions while driving,” I said.
She was tired from the flight so she shrugged and leaned her head against the window. Pretended to sleep. I talked a little, mostly to the steering wheel, and Mother kept asking where we were going and if I was all right. Finally I told her we were going to the Sam statue. And yes I was all right. She didn’t say anything else but I could tell she was a little nervous.
I parked next to Sam’s feet and looked up: gargantuan whiteness reflecting the afternoon sun, a limestone mirror holding us like fleshy ants under a microscope. It was the first time I’d seen him since the day I found Aunt Jane’s poems. He looked different now—shorter, duller, more benign. Maybe now I could see the humor in how out of place he looked, a great chalky authority towering over a whole lot of nothing.
There was a family of four—husband, wife, brother, sister—scurrying around the base of the statue. They snapped photos of Sam’s feet, photos of each other, photos of each other next to Sam’s feet. I opened the passenger door to let Mother out. I gave her a hug. It was the first time we’d touched.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I love you,” I said.
She laughed. “Okay,” she said with the same tone as her sister’s response.
“Tell me you love me,” I said.
“Charles,” she said. “You’re my son.”
“Please,” I begged her. “Please just tell me.”
“All right, son. I love you.”
Then I opened the trunk where I’d put one of the shoeboxes. I took one out and set it on the hood of the car. The kids were laughing in the background. I’d started to sweat a little.
I took off the lid and pulled a sheet from the top of the stack.
“What is this,” she said as I handed her the poem. “Charles, what’s going on? Why won’t you talk to me?”
“Read it,” I said.
But she let it fall to the ground and then she took my face in her hands and looked it my eyes like I was some kind of escaped convict.
“Charles,” she said. “Are you all right? I mean really all right?”
I pulled her arms down and then I went over and picked up Aunt Jane’s poem.
“Here,” I said. “Just read it. And then read the rest. There’s boxes full of them.”
When she finished I handed her another. She sat down at the base of the statue, oblivious to the family. They kept laughing and running around and snapping pictures. Mother was in the frame for some of them.
When she finished reading we drove to Austin. She stayed the night at my apartment. In the morning I took her to the airport. She’d planned on staying longer.
She didn’t break down, didn’t cry, didn’t react much in general. But at the airport she took me in her arms and asked me again if I was all right. She told me it wasn’t my fault. I knew that, of course. It should have been me holding her, me asking her if she was all right, me saying it wasn’t her fault.
But she wouldn’t let me.
All I could do was watch from the parking garage as her flight punched through the clouds, bridging the nation’s stomach like so many of my Christmas books.
* * *
The location of our call center is supposed to be a secret, for obvious reasons. It moved around from time to time but usually we’re answering from the communications building on Dean Keeton. Unless the film students need the space, in which case we take our two cubicles—me and this guy Dave—to a vacant room in the union. If there aren’t any vacancies in the student union, sometimes we go to Dave’s place.
We were at Dave’s the first time you called—the first time I heard your voice, the first time I fell in love. Is it possible to fall in love with a voice without a face or a name to go with it?
“I’m sorry,” was the first thing you said to me.
I knew instantly that I could help you. You learn to hear it in a caller’s voice, whether they or not you’ll be able to help, whether they want to be helped or whether they just want someone to talk to. You wanted to be helped. You wanted to be loved. I knew I could do both. And I did, didn’t I?
“I think I should kill myself,” you said.
I asked you why on Earth you’d want to do that. You said that your family wanted you to kill yourself and that killing yourself actually might not be a bad idea if you could decide on the best way to go about it. I asked you why on Earth your family would want you to do that.
“My parents are good people,” you said. “My brother is a good person. He’s in college.”
“You don’t think you’re a good person?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons,” you said.
“Can you give me one?”
We talked until sunset. You described your house—a nice place, it seemed, in Westlake. Your parents had money, they tithed weekly. When they started fighting, your father moved into your bedroom and you took the spare one. Your new room had a better view of the pond in the backyard, of the goldfish and the marble waterfall with the statue of Dolores watching. You’d sit at the window for hours, the sunlight moving over the water and your reflection. Mostly no one bothered you. Not until your brother came home from college and became your roommate. You didn’t understand how anyone could abandon freedom like he did. He said you wouldn’t understand the pressures of college life and as far as you could tell he was right.
“I don’t understand much of anything that happens in the world,” you said.
A few months later, your boyfriend at the time broke up with you. One day your brother found you in the backyard crying. He saw you talking to the Dolores statue and he told your parents about it. You needed to stop it, they said, and whatever other strange things you did. They said God and a good SSRI was what you needed. So they took you to church three days a week, to a doctor once a week, and once a day with breakfast you took the medicine they gave you. Back then you were still eating breakfast.
The time got away from me—the sun was setting behind the Capitol and it was beautiful. I asked if you wanted to hear a poem. You told me to read it slowly because you wanted to write it down. I imagined you by the pond writing, Dolores over your shoulder reading.
And that’s when I decided.
“I know a better doctor,” I said.
* * *
Strangers, when I tell them not to jump, are like panhandlers asking panhandlers for change. The whole thing is rotten. If it isn’t rotten, then you tell me why the world lets a guy like me sit here and answer this phone when he knows damn well he belongs on the other end of the line.
* * *
Dave answered and he said I could tell him anything. He said I could trust him.
“It’s all right,” Dave said. “Take your time.
“I don’t know where to start,” I said.
“Most people don’t. It’s all right. Just take your time.”
“I’m trying.”
After a while I tried harder. I told him some things. When I was finished Dave asked me how I felt.
* * *
I hung up and then sat around the apartment for a while before going to campus. When he saw me, Dave’s eyes were full of tears and I didn’t know what to do.
“Thanks for calling,” Dave said. “Thanks for letting me help.”
I couldn’t speak at first. I couldn’t look at his eyes I was so embarrassed. I asked him if he might give me a hug. He said he would, but then I just stood there.
“I understand,” Dave said.
“What do you understand?”
“How hard it is, the first time.”
“The first time?”
“The first time you call.”
That hit me harder than I can tell you, him confessing like that.
“It always makes me feel better,” he said. “To call.”
And then he came over and grabbed me, like he’s been giving hugs his whole life without thinking twice about it.
Then he left and I sat down. The phone started ringing but I just sat there like I’d been punched in the face. Who knows how many times Dave had called, how many times I’d talked to him without knowing. Maybe a million, it doesn’t make a difference. Not to me it doesn’t. With all the voices, all the strangers, it doesn’t make a difference. They could all be dead, every one of them at the bottom of some lonely bridge, and it wouldn’t make a difference. And all their deaths combined couldn’t make me feel as cold as I did right then. I’d never known after a million calls what Dave had known after just one: what it feels like to recognize a friend’s voice.
I went over to the window and saw him walking across the lot and getting in his car. Traffic followed him as he drove away, the Drag gulping his blue Nissan down with suds of metallic saliva. He disappeared slowly enough to make me think he was still there a half hour later. Then every car looked the same.
* * *
It never stops: a billion invisible mouths all over my skin, all over my skin where my pores should be—it’s really something—all of them are screaming—microscopic mouths all screaming at once—twenty-four hours a day—my screaming pores. So I don’t have time anymore for sleep. It wouldn’t matter if I did, though.
They’d still be in my dreams.
They’d still be in my dreams, and they’d still be screaming at the top of their lungs for me to help them, and they’d still wake me up with their loud screams and I’d still never know which side of consciousness was louder.
But see, notice this—notice how I don’t refer to my dreams as nightmares. I would never say that. Notice how difficult it is for me to feel fear—I don’t have time anymore for that—since so many people right now are screaming for my help, and I’ve got to see to all of them, one at a time I’ve got to see to all of them, one at a time I’ve got to see to all of them with the force of all my love.
And see, notice this—notice how I would never say to them—“I don’t love you”—I would never say that—it’s the worst thing you could do to them or anyone—in this world or the next—to declare from your heart’s voice—“I don’t love you.”
You’ve been there: there’s that sudden rushing moment of inhalation that catches in your throat—of course this is after you’ve been gone for a long time without knowing—and then like an explosion you know things have been wrong for a very long time. I might have showered yesterday but most likely I didn’t. Most likely I’ve stayed in bed for the better part of the past three weeks. You can bet I smell—Christ, I smell—but there’s always that morbid satisfaction when you settle into the routine. Goodbye hygiene, goodbye outdoors, goodbye breakfast, goodbye seasons, goodbye goodness--hello, evil.
After you left me once again with nothing but my own anatomy—threadbare and machinic—thingamabobs engineered—animation by widgetry—parts to my whole—I once held fast to an identity, a sense of self, the imago of a futural me.
Listen: you’ve got to come.
Do it for them—go outside and look at their faces and try to imagine what’s behind them—because can you not feel the weight of their desperate madness? Their lonely madness? Can you not feel the crying madness of the world, a desperate message lost in hyperspatial letters—addressed to you and you alone?
Christ, I can.
But I haven’t the strength to decipher the cries.
This is why you must bring your body back to me.
* * *
On a warm day in November, long before I learned to pass judgment on my family, Mother drove me to meet Aunt Jane. This was a name I’d heard my whole life, but only in whispers. This was name I’d seen, too, but only once a year, written on the front of a manila envelope addressed to me in the blackest of black Sharpies. My name and hers, once a year, black and lonely. I often imagined our lonely names were lonely people. I saw them travelling together, sipping coffee and reading newspapers all the way from Texas to Chicago, occasionally looking up from the current affairs to watch the nation’s breadbasket pass by out the window of the train, the jet, the bus, and I imagined our names would have serious faces and moustaches and distinguished, all-purpose frowns, which they might employ as they checked the time (probably with silver-crusted pocket watches) to how much longer before the mission’s end, before they arrived at snowy O’Hare with my Christmas book—Twain, Poe, Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien—which would never be read by anyone.
Now it was silly, I thought, to come all this way, to drive all this way, just so I could finally have a face to go with the name. Mother agreed.
“But after all,” she said, “I suppose Jane does have cancer.”
Mother talked to the dashboard most of the way while I stared out the window. Pretended to listen. Pretended to sleep. The interstate was boring. Texas was boring.
The last thing I remember about that drive was my impression of the giant Sam Houston statue: cold and white and monstrous, oddly massive and oddly out of place, standing there gripping his cane with such great vigilance.
“A true hero,” Mother was saying.
He was someone I should know about, she said, even though I’d been too young to remember when we lived in the city named after him—back when Dad had lived with us, but before they got back together and split up again.
I asked Mother what Mr. Houston had done that made him a hero.
“It’s difficult to answer questions while driving,” she said.
We exited through a forest of historical markers. I didn’t have anything against trees, much less trees with history, but I was cautious of people who lived in forests. Even historical forests protected by giant white heroes.
“I promise we’re not lost,” Mother said, reading my mind.
The road was paved with potholes and cattle guards. The farther we went, the more it deteriorated. Then it just kind of disappeared.
Mother killed the engine and got out. The ground was a mattress of leaves. It gave you this half-weightless feeling. It occurred to me that I’d been wrong about Mr. Houston—he wasn’t there to protect the forest from us. It was the other way around.
Aunt Jane, as a concept, frightened me. That’s what Mother wanted, of course.
* * *
It’s been three weeks since you moved out. Why have I suddenly decided to tell you about my dead aunt? It will make sense, I think, if you keep reading. Please keep reading.
For my first eight years, Aunt Jane was a footnote hastily jotted in the family’s margins. For my next twenty, I worked hard to convince myself that I could keep her there. I’ve tried to believe that her memory had nothing to do with why I came back to Texas for school or with why I stayed here for my doctorate or with why I still haven’t left. When the door slammed with you on the other side, Aunt Jane leapt into my mind more vividly than ever. Her image—frail, abandoned, selfless—has been impossible to erase.
Perhaps some people sleep soundly for the rest of their lives after making the calculated decision to let a loved one die alone in the middle of nowhere. I did for twenty years of mine.
* * *
I knew you were about to leave. I could feel it in your gaze.
You got up before me and made breakfast. Two things you’d never done, not once that whole year. Depressed people aren’t early risers, they aren’t breakfast eaters.
At any rate, I remember thinking: is it already time? Me standing at the table letting my eggs get cold, you sitting at the table saying don’t let your eggs get cold.
“You like eggs?” I said. “I’ve never seen you eat eggs.”
And then breakfast was over. You said:
“I’m cured.” Cured. Like it’s something I wouldn’t want you to be.
“You seem certain,” I said.
“I am.”
“Please,” I said, feeling stupid. “Don’t go yet.”
“I’m leaving,” you said. “Send me a bill.”
After that I told you to get the hell out. And then you did.
I’m not sure you ever loved me but I was going to ask you to marry me. I thought I had more time.
If I send this letter, it will probably be to your parents’ house. But even if I don’t send it, at least I’ve made up my mind to write it. Hopefully I’ll finish. Lately I haven’t been good at finishing things. I’ve given up on my dissertation. I’m working full time at Crisis Hotline. It’s good. They need me. Lots of people do.
* * *
Aunt Jane’s trailer had once been blue but now it was gray. Cinder blocks between it and the earth. Splintered steps, three of them, with holes and sagging. Next to the steps, a garden: smothered begonias, Juniper weed, vegetable vines without vegetables. Surely, I thought, my aunt didn’t belong here.
When the door opened, Aunt Jane’s face didn’t say whether she’d been expecting us or not. She certainly didn’t look like the person I’d expected. She was younger, more aware. Skin less pale, eyes greener and brighter. But her hair is what surprised me most—she shouldn’t have had any, I thought.
“Jane,” Mother said, “This is Charles. Your nephew.”
“Hello Charles,” Aunt Jane said.
“Hi,” I said.
Mother continued:
“Charles reads all the books you send.”
Which of course was a lie. I’d only read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“Where do you mail them?” I asked.
Mother laughed.
“The post office,” said Aunt Jane. I was glad she didn’t think I was joking.
“How far is it?”
“Charles,” Mother said, “Let’s go inside before we play twenty questions.” She went for the door.
“Pretty far, now that I think about it,” Aunt Jane said. She turned to let Mother in. “But I’d never thought about it.”
I thought we’d hug, but she turned and went inside and we didn’t even shake hands.
The living room was narrow and it backed up to a narrow kitchen and a narrow, black hallway. Hard brown carpet, linoleum tiles, brittle paneling. Boxes piled everywhere, some labeled, most not. A TV squatting in the corner, rabbit ears pointing at me. Shelves of books lining the walls like skin. Candles and shadows. Thick purple drapes half drawn. Sunlight coming through, putting us in a dim vanilla pudding.
Mother turned on the TV: a muffled voice telling us about altar candles starting a fire and burning the church to the ground. Mother covered her mouth. Aunt Jane just stared at the TV like she knew there was something to see if she could only figure out what it was.
* * *
We were both excited when you told your parents you were tired of believing in God. Then of course they kicked you out because Leviticus says they should. Weren’t we excited?
We sat on the couch and stared at the TV after we moved your boxes. We were thinking: here we are, now what?
“This will be good,” I said.
You agreed.
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
You shrugged.
“Are you going to be happy here?”
Then you told me not to talk about being happy because that would ruin it. Then you put your head on my shoulder. Soon my shoulder was damp and getting damper but I didn’t mind—my dissertation needed dissertating badly—but I didn’t mind.
Then you slept for two months. I got you to stop seeing that doctor and save your money for college (have you applied yet?) because it’s alright to take one year off, but even sad people go to college (I should say most people who go to college are sad).
I made you stop the medicine, too, because have no idea how tricky serotonin can be. My dissertation is (was) on serotonin. I watched you more closely after that. I knew I could make you feel better than any pill, any doctor. And I did, didn’t I?
You sat on the couch for our first session. I moved the television to the (our) bedroom so I could sit on the table in front of you. At first you couldn’t look me in the eyes, do you remember? You stared at your shoestrings or the tops of your feet (I’m sure you weren’t wearing shoes) and your finger was constantly in your ear like we were looking for something in there that didn’t want to be found.
You wanted to quit at first, you said it wouldn’t work. You went back to bed. I wasn’t giving up on you, so I agreed to have the session in bed. I asked you how you felt, you said I knew damn well how you felt. You wanted to make things difficult, you wanted to test me—that’s what patients to make sure their doctor is good enough for them. You didn’t want to be my patient. I didn’t either but we needed to try because you were sleeping sixteen hours a day.
It took a month for you to open up. You told me about your parents and your brother (I already knew about them, of course, but it was important for you to hear yourself say it). You’d been on the SSRI since you were 16. You told me about your parents’ marriage, or lack thereof, and your brother’s problems at school, him coming home and whining about how hard community college was.
Your story was less complicated than I’d thought. I didn’t tell you that because patients like to think they’re complicated. Patients don’t like to fit into formulas, either. They don’t like it when a theory applies to them, when they see themselves being fit into a box, the same box as someone else. You said you didn’t want to hear a goddamn thing about Freud or how your anger comes from having a hole where your penis should have been. I said I didn’t want to talk about Freud either. I did, of course, and also about Jung and Lacan and Hartmann and Kristeva and Lazarus, but I didn’t mention any names.
You cried so often, I couldn’t bear to watch. You’d storm out of the apartment and disappear sprinting. I’d wait on the balcony until nightfall when you’d come back. You’d be ready to cooperate and we’d try again. Sometimes I’d block the door so you couldn’t leave. You made me a nervous that time you called the police, but by the time they showed up you were calm again, and then they left and we went back to bed.
You kept asking if I needed to be working on my own work, but I said my work was less important than your health and our sessions were basically the same thing as field hours. But I shouldn’t have neglected my work. It’s painful to think about all the people I could have helped.
* * *
For an hour we visited in almost-whispers. Then we swapped sighs for silence. The air was thick and tired. Mother and Aunt Jane whispered or murmured, mostly about me or Grandmother. Sometimes Aunt Jane spoke gibberish or just grunted. She burped. She farted. I was too terrified to laugh.
At one point Aunt Jane said:
“I don’t care about all this stuff. But Charles can have the books. If he wants.”
I nodded.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Mother said. “Charles appreciates that.”
I nodded.
Then Mother told me to go outside. She gave me the car keys for the radio, but songs would have been meaningless. When the door shut I put my ear to the thin wood and listened.
“Jane,” Mother said. “Jane.”
I couldn’t hear the response, if there’d been one.
“It would best,” Mother continued, “If you were a part of the family again.”
“What?” said Aunt Jane. Then she apologized for shouting.
“You didn’t shout.”
“I didn’t think I did!”
“Now you’re shouting.”
“I apologize. You’re right, I was shouting.”
“You know we love you. Mother and I both do. And Charles does.”
“I don’t want to live here anymore,” Aunt Jane said.
“That doesn’t sound like the Jane I know,” Mother said.
“I don’t sound like me?”
“Not a bit it doesn’t. I can’t remember a time when you haven’t loved it here. You never did like a lot of noise, you know. Mother and I found this place for you. We brought you here, remember? You wanted a quiet place and we brought you here.”
It got quiet for a minute and then Aunt Jane said:
“Yes, that’s right. You’re right about that.”
Then it got quiet again and all I could hear was TV static. Then Aunt Jane shouted:
“I won’t go!”
I stumbled off the porch and didn’t go back. I wandered around the property for while. Nothing but trees and leaves and squirrels. It was the loneliest place I’d ever seen.T
A green hose was mounted on the side of the trailer. I took it down. It surprised me to see water come out when I turned the knob.
It was pointless, I know, but I stood there and watered that corpse of a garden for what seemed like hours. I’d commanding a waterless hose to spout water—magic water—magical enough to resuscitate a dead garden. It broke my heart when I couldn’t.
It would be Christmas in less than a month. The first Christmas Aunt Jane would forget to put a novel in the mail. By Easter she’d be gone.
* * *
One time during an Easter sermon—this was back when your parents still thought church was the best thing for you and we weren’t living together yet—I looked over at you (our legs were touching and I thought that was great) and at that moment I’d never wanted anything as bad as I wanted to whisper in your ear how much I loved you. After we’d lived together a few months we started saying “love” instead of “I love you.” It’s strange but I can’t remember whose idea it was to start deleting the pronoun.
Your parents thought I was too old for you—I’d graduated college—but you did the right thing not listening to them. In the middle of a divorce giving relationship advice to their eighteen year-old who was more of an adult than they were anyhow. And Christ, your brother—that guy was something else—dropping out of college like that because of panic attacks and coming home and telling you to get rid of me because I had a psychology degree. He didn’t like his counselor—at a Tuscon community college for God’s sake—so I’m the antichrist for volunteering at Crisis Hotline instead of Baptist bake sales.
But I tried to win them over. It wasn’t my responsibility, you know that, but I loved you, so I wanted to try to love them. I’d shake hands with your father and hug your mother and give them sirs and ma’ams because I’d lived in this state when I was a kid and I know how much ya’ll love your sirs and ma’ams. I even ate dinner at your house like I was supposed to. All five of us at the table, you and I trying to ignore everyone— your parents as they muttered hurtful things back and forth and your brother as he sat there hyperventilating like he needed to inflate a hot air balloon in time to take it for a spin before sunset. It was bearable, though, and worth it, but I didn’t like watching how it affected you. You didn’t deserve all that.
I never told you this—one of those times I went out for secret drinks with your brother—at one of those bars where we wouldn’t run into anyone who might recognize him—I walked into the bathroom and found him crushing up pills on the fold-out baby-changing station, not even in a stall, and when he saw me he said, “Can you believe this place has one of these?”—meaning the baby-changing station—and then the crushed up powder disappeared like it had never been there. This was a Saturday night probably, so he would have been in church the next morning like nothing had happened, sitting next to your parents—who, between hymns, would be whispering about infidelities that had happened and infidelities that were going to happen--just you wait you bitch/bastard—and at home they had the nerve to pretend you were the crazy one. It’s what they needed to believe. It’s what they needed you to believe.
* * *
That next April we’d start going through the boxes, mostly Mother and Grandmother, me on the couch watching. Though I did on several occasions poke my head in a few nooks. That’s how I found Aunt Jane’s poetry. Thousands of verses written on loose leaf pages and stuffed in shoeboxes. I took the poems outside and sat where the garden used to be.
There lived a wretched nightmare,
If living’s fit to call her
Wandering hateful wandering
Down the phallic halls.
Round corners, round them fast!
She hears it in the distance--
The festive jubilee--
The jubilee won’t wait
For sinners or for slowpokes.
She’ll get there if it kills her,
She’ll drown their revelry;
They’d better let her in,
This black and wretched nightmare,
She’ll show them what it’s like--
These fucking happy people--
To live their lives at night.
I learned about her I.Q. being high enough for people to call her a genius, like it was a bad thing to be called; about the forest; about Sam; about how much she hated herself and didn’t know why; about how much she hated God and didn’t know why; about how she wished Jesus had never been born; about how she’d been to prison; about how my Granddad left them for his second family in Utah; about how Grandmother blamed Aunt Jane for his leaving, since Mother had been too young for it to be her fault; about how Mother had grown up to be unhappy and quickly learned who to blame; about how she’d been married six times; about how her six sons were gone and she didn’t know where; about how she’d read a novel every day of 1980 and then stopped reading for the rest of her life; about the migraines; about the voices; about how one time she’d jumped into a cattle guard to see how it felt to break her leg; about how she’d dropped acid before each of her therapy sessions; about how an ex-senator had asked her to ghostwrite his memoirs and almost strangled her when a month later she’d handed him a two hundred page how-to essay outlining the steps for preparing the world’s best peanut butter and jelly sandwich; about how when she died she wanted to be cremated; about how some days she thought it might be a good idea to cremate herself.
Aunt Jane lived alone in the national forest for over twenty years. Her loneliness, I think, went away after the first year. That’s what I tell my callers after I read them her poems. You may think it’s a bad idea, reading these things to people who want to kill themselves—but it isn’t, not at all. They want to hear about despair, about all its shapes and sizes. They want to feel the sadness—soak it up like a morbid sponge—kill themselves with its impossible possibilities—and discover the meaning of nevermore.
Afterward they usually they ask about the author.
I tell them she was lovely.
* * *
You and I met for the first time on the steps of your therapist’s office. He’d just finished telling you God knows what.
And he’d just finished telling me—that morning—that believe it or not there is a timeline for completing a dissertation.
Does it condemn me forever, that after talking to you I sent you to my dissertation supervisor? That I’d planned the whole thing, our running into each other on the steps of his office building? I was so nervous that day, I felt sure you’d recognize my voice—and maybe you did, maybe you’d kept it to yourself the whole time—but were we doomed from the start because of my deception? I’d fallen in love with your voice and your story, immediately, like an awkwardly scrawled name on a manila envelope begging to be opened.
“How’s your head?” I asked, thinking I was being clever.
“I have to go,” you said, clearly horrified.
You ran down the steps and would have run into oncoming traffic and gotten yourself smeared all over South Congress if I hadn’t yelled for you to stop. You turned around and glared at me through tears.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you want?” you asked. You were crying pretty hard.
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t want anything.”
“I’m not crazy,” you said, wiping your face.
“I know. It was stupid. Just a stupid joke. I’m stupid, really.”
“I’m depressed,” you said. “Not crazy.”
Then you grabbed me and squeezed and suddenly we were hugging, which surprised the hell out of me. The white dome of the capitol was staring down at us. It was seventy degrees and the sun was out and we were happy together before we’d even known each other’s names. You didn’t let go.
“I’m Charles,” I said.
“I’m Sidney.” Your voice vibrated into my ribs and I asked you where you were from so I could feel it again.
“North Houston,” you said.
“Me too!” I said.
Then I told you about how my parents got divorced when I was little, about moving to Chicago with my mom, about my parents getting back together and splitting up again, and about coming to Austin to study psychology. I rambled on with my abridged life story but it was okay because you’d stopped crying.
“You want to eat lunch?” I said.
* * *
Mother said we’d better get going. It was past dinnertime—we hadn’t eaten anything—and oppressively dark under the helmet of forest. The trees merged with the melting night, a black quicksand sucking everything into its belly. I couldn’t see the garden as we went down the steps. Aunt Jane watched us from the doorway.
Aunt Jane stopped in the doorway and then I turned around and went back to the steps and looked her in the eyes.
“I love you,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, grinning. Like what I’d said was the most foolish piece of nonsense in the world.
Mother started the engine and turned on the headlights, bathing the decrepit trailer in its glow. Aunt Jane stood in the center of the yellow beam, one hand steadied on the doorframe. Then suddenly she stuck her foot out, hovering, feeling for where the next step might be. Her fingers stayed wrapped around the splintered doorframe until the last second when foot found the next step and she continued forward. Mother tried to ignore what was happening. She jammed the gears into reverse, looking out the back window. I kept my eyes on Aunt Jane. She’d reached the bottom step and showed no sign of turning back.
As our car lurched in the opposite direction, carrying us away, I felt the urge to leap out the door, then to scramble to my feet and somehow put a stop to this abandonment.
Aunt Jane reached the ground and started toward us, picking up the pace. I panicked—Mother should stop, I thought, or I should make her stop. What was happening? Why were we just leaving? I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but if I did I knew I wouldn’t have treated them like this.
Mother was still looking out the back window, finding the clearing that would take us to the road. My hand found the door handle. I curled my fingers around it, asking the ethers for strength to burst from the cabin.
Aunt Jane was reaching her arms out to us, her trembling limbs pale in the blonde haze of Mother’s high beams. We were picking up speed, taking the light with us.
Then I pulled the handle. The door lurched open: gasping air, grinding tires, crunching casserole of leaves and mulch. Before I made the jump I looked up and saw Aunt Jane: she’d fallen to her knees in the garden, rocking back and forth with two handfuls of wet dirt held up to the sky. To this day I believe she was asking God where the water had come from.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mother screeched. “Shut the goddamn door!”
“OK,” I said.
Then I shut the door and put my seatbelt on. But not because of Mother’s yelling.
I shut the door because of what I’d seen.
Because it would have been too embarrassing if Mother—or anyone—found out that I’d watered the corpse-garden.
* * *
I called Mother the day you moved out. I asked her if she wanted to see me. I hadn’t been home since I started school in Austin, and I’d stopped answering Mother’s calls. But I listened to the messages: she and Dad were getting back together again. I hated them for that.
Mother said she didn’t know if she’d be able to see me.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said.
“I’m not stupid. I’m a psychotherapist.”
She found this funny.
“Why do you want to see me?” she asked.
“My girlfriend left me,” I said.
“My son left me,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Your father left again too.”
I thought about hanging up but then I said, “I’m not really a psychotherapist. I quit school.”
“So what do you do?” she asked.
“I tell people not to jump.”
“Do they listen?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” she said, and I thanked her.
Then she offered to visit. I said I would like that very much and I told her to fly into Houston. The next day I picked her up from Intercontinental. I wasn’t prepared for how much older eight years had made her. She wasn’t prepared for how much older eight years had made me.
In the car she asked why Houston, why not Austin?
“It’s difficult to answer questions while driving,” I said.
She was tired from the flight so she shrugged and leaned her head against the window. Pretended to sleep. I talked a little, mostly to the steering wheel, and Mother kept asking where we were going and if I was all right. Finally I told her we were going to the Sam statue. And yes I was all right. She didn’t say anything else but I could tell she was a little nervous.
I parked next to Sam’s feet and looked up: gargantuan whiteness reflecting the afternoon sun, a limestone mirror holding us like fleshy ants under a microscope. It was the first time I’d seen him since the day I found Aunt Jane’s poems. He looked different now—shorter, duller, more benign. Maybe now I could see the humor in how out of place he looked, a great chalky authority towering over a whole lot of nothing.
There was a family of four—husband, wife, brother, sister—scurrying around the base of the statue. They snapped photos of Sam’s feet, photos of each other, photos of each other next to Sam’s feet. I opened the passenger door to let Mother out. I gave her a hug. It was the first time we’d touched.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I love you,” I said.
She laughed. “Okay,” she said with the same tone as her sister’s response.
“Tell me you love me,” I said.
“Charles,” she said. “You’re my son.”
“Please,” I begged her. “Please just tell me.”
“All right, son. I love you.”
Then I opened the trunk where I’d put one of the shoeboxes. I took one out and set it on the hood of the car. The kids were laughing in the background. I’d started to sweat a little.
I took off the lid and pulled a sheet from the top of the stack.
“What is this,” she said as I handed her the poem. “Charles, what’s going on? Why won’t you talk to me?”
“Read it,” I said.
But she let it fall to the ground and then she took my face in her hands and looked it my eyes like I was some kind of escaped convict.
“Charles,” she said. “Are you all right? I mean really all right?”
I pulled her arms down and then I went over and picked up Aunt Jane’s poem.
“Here,” I said. “Just read it. And then read the rest. There’s boxes full of them.”
When she finished I handed her another. She sat down at the base of the statue, oblivious to the family. They kept laughing and running around and snapping pictures. Mother was in the frame for some of them.
When she finished reading we drove to Austin. She stayed the night at my apartment. In the morning I took her to the airport. She’d planned on staying longer.
She didn’t break down, didn’t cry, didn’t react much in general. But at the airport she took me in her arms and asked me again if I was all right. She told me it wasn’t my fault. I knew that, of course. It should have been me holding her, me asking her if she was all right, me saying it wasn’t her fault.
But she wouldn’t let me.
All I could do was watch from the parking garage as her flight punched through the clouds, bridging the nation’s stomach like so many of my Christmas books.
* * *
The location of our call center is supposed to be a secret, for obvious reasons. It moved around from time to time but usually we’re answering from the communications building on Dean Keeton. Unless the film students need the space, in which case we take our two cubicles—me and this guy Dave—to a vacant room in the union. If there aren’t any vacancies in the student union, sometimes we go to Dave’s place.
We were at Dave’s the first time you called—the first time I heard your voice, the first time I fell in love. Is it possible to fall in love with a voice without a face or a name to go with it?
“I’m sorry,” was the first thing you said to me.
I knew instantly that I could help you. You learn to hear it in a caller’s voice, whether they or not you’ll be able to help, whether they want to be helped or whether they just want someone to talk to. You wanted to be helped. You wanted to be loved. I knew I could do both. And I did, didn’t I?
“I think I should kill myself,” you said.
I asked you why on Earth you’d want to do that. You said that your family wanted you to kill yourself and that killing yourself actually might not be a bad idea if you could decide on the best way to go about it. I asked you why on Earth your family would want you to do that.
“My parents are good people,” you said. “My brother is a good person. He’s in college.”
“You don’t think you’re a good person?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons,” you said.
“Can you give me one?”
We talked until sunset. You described your house—a nice place, it seemed, in Westlake. Your parents had money, they tithed weekly. When they started fighting, your father moved into your bedroom and you took the spare one. Your new room had a better view of the pond in the backyard, of the goldfish and the marble waterfall with the statue of Dolores watching. You’d sit at the window for hours, the sunlight moving over the water and your reflection. Mostly no one bothered you. Not until your brother came home from college and became your roommate. You didn’t understand how anyone could abandon freedom like he did. He said you wouldn’t understand the pressures of college life and as far as you could tell he was right.
“I don’t understand much of anything that happens in the world,” you said.
A few months later, your boyfriend at the time broke up with you. One day your brother found you in the backyard crying. He saw you talking to the Dolores statue and he told your parents about it. You needed to stop it, they said, and whatever other strange things you did. They said God and a good SSRI was what you needed. So they took you to church three days a week, to a doctor once a week, and once a day with breakfast you took the medicine they gave you. Back then you were still eating breakfast.
The time got away from me—the sun was setting behind the Capitol and it was beautiful. I asked if you wanted to hear a poem. You told me to read it slowly because you wanted to write it down. I imagined you by the pond writing, Dolores over your shoulder reading.
And that’s when I decided.
“I know a better doctor,” I said.
* * *
Strangers, when I tell them not to jump, are like panhandlers asking panhandlers for change. The whole thing is rotten. If it isn’t rotten, then you tell me why the world lets a guy like me sit here and answer this phone when he knows damn well he belongs on the other end of the line.
* * *
Dave answered and he said I could tell him anything. He said I could trust him.
“It’s all right,” Dave said. “Take your time.
“I don’t know where to start,” I said.
“Most people don’t. It’s all right. Just take your time.”
“I’m trying.”
After a while I tried harder. I told him some things. When I was finished Dave asked me how I felt.
* * *
I hung up and then sat around the apartment for a while before going to campus. When he saw me, Dave’s eyes were full of tears and I didn’t know what to do.
“Thanks for calling,” Dave said. “Thanks for letting me help.”
I couldn’t speak at first. I couldn’t look at his eyes I was so embarrassed. I asked him if he might give me a hug. He said he would, but then I just stood there.
“I understand,” Dave said.
“What do you understand?”
“How hard it is, the first time.”
“The first time?”
“The first time you call.”
That hit me harder than I can tell you, him confessing like that.
“It always makes me feel better,” he said. “To call.”
And then he came over and grabbed me, like he’s been giving hugs his whole life without thinking twice about it.
Then he left and I sat down. The phone started ringing but I just sat there like I’d been punched in the face. Who knows how many times Dave had called, how many times I’d talked to him without knowing. Maybe a million, it doesn’t make a difference. Not to me it doesn’t. With all the voices, all the strangers, it doesn’t make a difference. They could all be dead, every one of them at the bottom of some lonely bridge, and it wouldn’t make a difference. And all their deaths combined couldn’t make me feel as cold as I did right then. I’d never known after a million calls what Dave had known after just one: what it feels like to recognize a friend’s voice.
I went over to the window and saw him walking across the lot and getting in his car. Traffic followed him as he drove away, the Drag gulping his blue Nissan down with suds of metallic saliva. He disappeared slowly enough to make me think he was still there a half hour later. Then every car looked the same.
* * *
It never stops: a billion invisible mouths all over my skin, all over my skin where my pores should be—it’s really something—all of them are screaming—microscopic mouths all screaming at once—twenty-four hours a day—my screaming pores. So I don’t have time anymore for sleep. It wouldn’t matter if I did, though.
They’d still be in my dreams.
They’d still be in my dreams, and they’d still be screaming at the top of their lungs for me to help them, and they’d still wake me up with their loud screams and I’d still never know which side of consciousness was louder.
But see, notice this—notice how I don’t refer to my dreams as nightmares. I would never say that. Notice how difficult it is for me to feel fear—I don’t have time anymore for that—since so many people right now are screaming for my help, and I’ve got to see to all of them, one at a time I’ve got to see to all of them, one at a time I’ve got to see to all of them with the force of all my love.
And see, notice this—notice how I would never say to them—“I don’t love you”—I would never say that—it’s the worst thing you could do to them or anyone—in this world or the next—to declare from your heart’s voice—“I don’t love you.”
