The Body

I’m almost done with my junior year of college. Aram and I are still together, but I am dating other people, as he has done, when I begin hanging out with someone I shouldn’t. His name is Carl, and he’s everything Aram is not. Carl smokes, drinks, has secrets, a dark past, plays guitar in a band, and sings like a ragged rock star. He’s a version of the quintessential bad boy, and he’s a bad choice for me, but he makes me feel something Aram never could: normal.

We seem to always be smoking on the steps of the library at the same time every day. Soon we’re doing it together. The more time I spend with Carl, the more I realize that with Aram, the safety I feel comes with a side of judgment. Aram and I bonded over art and ideas, but Carl and I bond over the bad stuff, the hard parts of life that Aram never wants to know. Instead of feeling like the fucked-up one, I feel accepted. As I spill my life to Carl, I realize how ironic it is that Taylor, who once so covetously sought to unearth the dark parts of my life, has become the story he was so anxious to hear. It’s a challenge getting Carl to open up in return, and I savor the rewards of each effort. I don’t feel inferior to Carl, but the more we share, the more I realize I do feel inferior to Aram.

Aram knows about Carl and Carl knows about Aram and neither likes the situation. Aram is secure, healthy, and wholesome. He is smart, self-reflective, has good judgment, and is intellectually engaging, but he’s also so academically focused, he’s become boring. Carl has, in spades, what Aram lacks: edge. It’s this darkness in Carl I’m drawn to, although I don’t know why. He needs someone to take care of him. He’s fragile, damaged (he claims), and needs someone to rescue him, and I recognize these feelings. I’m afraid to spend my life feeling like I’m too much for someone, like everything that makes me me is better left to a therapist. All the things about me Aram thinks are troubled are just basic, everyday, normal things to Carl. My gut tells me I shouldn’t, but I accidentally fall in love with him.

I am issued ultimatums. I must choose. It’s either Aram or Carl. Two entirely different people who offer two entirely different lives, one of which I feel I’m inferior to and the other to which I feel equal. When summer comes and Aram and I are together again, he seems so simple and basic. Nothing like the complicated, secretive Carl. Early on, my gut told me Carl was not my guy, but I convinced my gut to believe otherwise, and now all of me is convinced. Aram is a good boy, and Carl is not. I fall somewhere in between. After four years together, I break up with Aram, with Carl at the ready to lift me up. Going from one person to another makes breaking up seem easy.

I am not that worried about Aram. He and his family are close—too close at times. They have meetings to discuss their feelings, and nothing ever goes unresolved. I find it all so weird and uncomfortable, unnatural even. In my house, nothing is discussed: We just get in fights and apologize when someone cries, but nothing is ever resolved. That type of communication feels natural to me. Carl is my kind of unhealthy. We’re made for each other.

Senior year of college I have my first ever stalker. He’s Dutch, and at first he’s just annoying, constantly inviting me to a play or a concert after I’ve said no thanks, I have a boyfriend. He’s relentless and won’t let up. I tell him to stop asking me. Carl tells him to stop asking me, but he won’t. Before long he’s barging in on conversations, inviting himself to sit down when I’m alone with friends. Then it escalates. He appears places without my knowing I’d been followed: the bank, an out-of-the-way art gallery; and then, he shows up in my classes. I file a complaint with the school, but they do nothing.

This is becoming a familiar pattern. Last year I took driver’s ed; on the first lesson the teacher drove me to the highway, and once we were on it, he said to think of the gear shift as his dick: I should touch it as much as possible. It was a driver/student car with two steering wheels, and somehow, through a barrage of lewd suggestions, I drove us home, where he sat in the car, below my bedroom window, for hours. I had no choice but to tell Jimmy, who stormed outside to tell the guy off, but the second he saw Jimmy, he drove away. We called the school and told them what happened; they promised to fire him, and then a week later they sent us a bill. The guy kept working there. I want to call Jimmy now and tell him about my stalker, but I’m too far away for him to scare the guy off.

A month or so after classes have begun, the stalker walks into my art class, eating a peach. He walks over to me and eats it slowly, right in my face, the juice dripping down his chin while he smiles. I flag down the teacher, who tells the guy to set up an easel, because—as I’m horrified to discover—he’s now in this class, too. I file another complaint. The school does nothing. When Carl walks in, I think it’s because he knows what’s happening, and he’s come to drag my stalker away, but instead he tells me there’s been a phone call and I need to call home. Instantly, I am back at camp, being tapped on the shoulder and walking through a dark field toward the end of my life as I know it.

“Is it my mom?” I ask Carl.

“No,” he says. “It’s Jimmy.” The words sound so strange coming out of his mouth.

Not until that moment had I ever given thought to Jimmy dying, but now that I fear he’s dead, I realize how attached I have always been to him. While he wasn’t the most involved parent, often exasperatingly absent when he was physically present, I knew he loved me and he knew I loved him.

When I call, Kara’s already home. Jimmy’s had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital now, but it sounds like maybe he’s going to be fine. I don’t need to come home, she says. I shouldn’t worry. I’m relieved, but not enough to return to class, or to get up off the couch. I’m glad he’s okay, but I’m still shaken; I’m not ready to lose Jimmy. When I was in high school, Jimmy got a fancy car, and one night while he was driving, some guys jumped in, put a gun to his head, and then pushed him into the street and took the car. He wasn’t hurt, and he joked about it after, but the image of what could have happened stuck with me. I want this to be the same, and I imagine him now, being released from the hospital and regaling us over and over at dinner for the rest of our lives about that time he had a heart attack and we all overreacted and thought he was going to die.

I’m still on the couch an hour later when Kara calls back to say Jimmy had a second, more serious heart attack, and now he probably won’t make it through the night. I need to come home. Mom is too upset to talk. When this second call comes, my roommate is there, but Carl is gone, and I am too confused and overwhelmed to move. My roommate gets me a ticket for the first plane out, drives me to the airport, and, somehow, although I don’t remember even getting on a plane, I arrive at the hospital. It’s late, near eleven, and my mom, Kara, and Nina have all gone back to MacDougal Street to get some sleep. Neon lights dance on medical machines and there is my stepfather, with tubes down his nose and throat. When I notice his eyes are taped shut, I begin to panic on his behalf. The nurse explains that it’s to help keep them moist, since he can’t blink.

I hear my own voice, hysterical. “Well, did anyone tell him that? Does he know why his eyes are taped shut?” The nurse shrugs, and I sit down next to Jimmy; he squeezes my hand to let me know he can hear me. I explain about his eyes and tell him he’s going to be okay. The nurse motions to my Walkman and says maybe I should play him something. I ask if he’d like to hear a song and he squeezes my hand again. I slip my headphones over his head, set them on his ears, and press Play. “Riding on a Railroad” by James Taylor is what’s playing, and he seems to like it. Standing there with my stepfather, the man who did the best he could being a dad to a houseful of kids that weren’t his, I know I’ll never hear this song the same way again.

I sit with Jimmy for a while, talking to him, not knowing whether or not I should be telling him he’s in a hospital and that he’s had a heart attack, but knowing I’d want to know if the situation were reversed. Being with Jimmy like this, with life’s surfaces stripped away, just the two of us, in a life-or-death situation, feels like our most intimate moment. He has always been practical, no-nonsense, and deems my emotions and vulnerabilities silly, but now he is the vulnerable one. He listens as I explain what’s going on, and then I tell him I’m going to get some sleep and I’ll see him tomorrow. He squeezes my hand and I feel it tell me he’s scared.

At home on MacDougal Street, Mom, Kara, and Nina are all upstairs, in Mom and Jimmy’s room. Nina just turned six and is asleep surrounded by all her new presents. Eddie is at his apartment, and Daniel, David, and Holly are at theirs. Kara gives me the play-by-play. The nurses don’t know if he’ll make it through the night. I tell Kara and Mom I played him a song, and he squeezed my hand. I sleep on her couch and when we wake up, we’re relieved the phone didn’t ring. When we call the hospital they tell us he’s still alive. Every morning we go to the hospital, and every night we fear a phone call will disrupt our sleep telling us what we don’t want to hear. After several days he has surgery, and all seems okay, so I’m told to return to school.

The surgery seemed to make things worse for him. Every few days I get phone calls that things look dire and I need to return, and each time he pulls through. One night Mom is waiting on a phone call from the nurse. Kara tells me to keep the phone clear and she’ll call to report. Carl is with me and we’re pacing. When the phone rings I lunge for it.

“Hello?”

“I am going to rape you,” the voice tells me.

I hang up fast, stare at Carl, then look at the curtainless windows, sprint to the door, double-lock it, and burst into tears. Carl doesn’t know what to do. Jimmy, I know, would. He’d have someone put in an alarm system and hang blinds. He’d have dealt with the external danger, even as he’d leave the internal world to someone else.

That weekend Carl drives me to the city. Because my stalker’s portentous phone call struck me as particularly apocalyptic, a sign of bad things to come, I pack not just my favorite things, but items I’ve imbued with false power and luck: the gris-gris necklace Jonathan gave me to wear on planes so they won’t crash (which I still carry, though Jonathan hasn’t spoken to me in three and a half years), some earrings Aram gave me, a shirt I love, my journal, and a worry stone. I’m hoping these things will commingle their power and keep Jimmy alive. In the car down to New York, I wonder what I would have done had I been given the opportunity to come home before Melissa died. Would I have been brave enough to sit with her in the hospital, hold her hand till the end? Would I have tried to save her, and would I be a different me if I had, knowing that she died anyway? All weekend long, I sit with Jimmy at the hospital. Nina is there, sitting on the radiator, kicking her legs against it and playing with an American Girl doll. My mom is chasing down doctors, taking notes, and gathering information. Holly knits in the waiting room. Daniel and David are walking around the neighborhood looking for roast beef sandwiches. Eddie is in and out. Kara is at home answering the phone and making calls. Jimmy has bedsores, and he is sedated. There are no more hand squeezes. He’s a shade of beige-green that matches the hospital lighting. I hate it here. Although the nurses are nice, I’m afraid of all the sickness. The smell reminds me of the nursing home they put Baba in and the urine he left on our couch cushion. In the waiting room, Holly won’t stop knitting. She looks like a little girl, scared and alone, and I can’t stop thinking that if Jimmy dies, she, Daniel, and David will all be orphans. Even if they’re in their twenties.

The morning that Carl and I have to head back to school I want to stop quickly and see Jimmy one last time, so we park the car outside the hospital and hurry upstairs so I can spend one more minute with him, in case it’s my last. Carl comes up, too, and stays in the waiting room. I duck into Jimmy’s room and sit beside him, studying his motionless face. Without Jimmy, I wouldn’t have stepsiblings; there’d be no Nina. He’s the Lego piece that connects our family. Without him, will we still be a family? Even if we fight and not everyone gets along, we’re all we have. How much will we lose if we lose Jimmy?

Carl is motioning to me from the waiting room; it’s time to go. I tell Jimmy I love him, give him a kiss, and say I’ll see him soon. When we get downstairs, there’s glass on the sidewalk. The windows on the car have been broken, and all our stuff has been stolen: Carl’s guitar, my bag with all my good-luck charms, and every last one of my favorite things. I’m too in shock to know what action to take. Carl goes to buy garbage bags and tape to cover the windows, and I stand next to the car, feeling unrecognizable to myself. Those good-luck things not only kept me alive, they kept me connected to the people who gave them to me. Now I feel pulled apart from Jonathan and Aram, and from my own self, and from all the luck I ever thought I had. My charms have instilled me with the confidence of someone protected by the Secret Service, and now how can I trust the world? I know this means that Jimmy is going to die. I recognize this for the bad omen it is. Am I still connected to Jonathan and Aram without the things they gave me? We drive seven hours back to Rochester, freezing, the car empty of our possessions, windows covered with garbage bags.

Thanksgiving is a few days away when Kara calls again, and I understand that this truly is the end. I need to get there before he goes. I want a chance to say good-bye, so he can know I appreciated him, even if I didn’t always show it. But when I arrive my mom’s body is flung over Jimmy’s, and she’s baying and howling. I missed it. I missed saying good-bye, and I feel oddly left out of an experience I’m not sure I even wanted to have. Nina doesn’t have a father. She’s just turned six years old, her siblings are all in their twenties, and her father’s just died, which means she doesn’t have a mother now either, at least until she’s done grieving. His body is waxy and skinny. His face has lost its shape, melted into an expression I’ve never seen. Like a sculptor is trying and failing to replicate him.

The doctors now call him “the Body.” They think because he’s dead he’s no longer human. The Body must be brought downstairs. The Body must be moved. The Body is fifty-nine years old. The Body’s name is Jimmy. I don’t want them to take him away just yet, although I don’t want his body to be my final memory of him. Eddie comes racing in. He was at a concert, and he missed it, too. When he sees Jimmy he bursts into tears, which triggers Mom to wrap herself over the Body again. I find it ironic that it was only in death he was able to reach his goal weight. Though I’ve held his hand in this bed countless times over the past few weeks, now I don’t want to touch him. Though I know better, I still worry, the way I did as a child about Melissa, that his death is contagious somehow.

It’s November 20, 1992. I’m twenty-two years old. Tomorrow the sky will turn back on, blue or gray as ever; eventually the snow will melt, the grass will grow, a gentle breeze on a hot day will lure me to follow it into the future, into time that won’t stop existing, that exists right now even without Jimmy. Time is my enemy. My resistance to moving forward is telling me something. I know I’m supposed to carry Jimmy with me, into every future stage of my life, but I want to stay stuck in time, and it’s this fact I’m embarrassed to recognize, because I’m not exactly certain what it means.

Soon the entire country will be celebrating Thanksgiving. Mom is hysterical with grief, collapsing in the bathroom, and waking up four times a night to burst into tears and cry into Nina’s neck, but Nina just goes about her business, unwilling or unable to mourn. The image of my mother thrown over Jimmy’s body, the sound of her keening howls, will not leave my head. She’s fragile. Because she believes she can’t handle the realities the world throws at her, she doesn’t handle them, leaving the reality to Kara. It’s Kara who takes care of Nina, as she once took care of me, and a small part of me feels threatened. We’re keeping Mom propped up, but no one’s keeping the rest of us upright. It feels like there’s no room for anyone else to grieve.

We all take turns with Nina, but Kara is the designated caretaker. I’ll have to go back to school at some point, but I don’t want to. I want to stay home until I’m old. Nina doesn’t have the same fears I had, but she’s attached to Mom, just the way I was, sleeping in bed with her. But Nina is also more like Mom than I was. Unlike me, she cares how she looks, happy to spend time smoothing ponytail bumps and festooning herself with bows and ribbons. She has temper tantrums, though, interminable ones that strike when she doesn’t get what she wants. We’re all grown and out of the house, so to Nina her siblings are more like parents. It will just be her and Mom in that big house together when we’re gone.

I call Jonathan to tell him the news of Jimmy’s death, but he doesn’t call me back. I write him a letter, but it goes unanswered. I don’t understand. It’s been three and a half years since I saw or heard from him last, and the only sense I can make of his disappearance is that he changed his mind about having me join him when he got tested because somehow he knew he was positive and he’d feel ashamed or embarrassed in from of me. I miss him.

Back at school, where no one understands the depths of my pain, I feel out of place. People try to commiserate by telling me about a cat who died or an aunt who passed away. I spend most of my time off-campus, trying to make up the classwork I’ve missed so I can graduate on time. Someone keeps calling and hanging up, somehow knowing to do it always when the sun is setting, kick-starting that fading trigger that has shadowed me for years on the street side of life. I’m sad; I’m depressed. Carl keeps asking if he did something wrong, if I’m mad at him. He doesn’t seem to understand that I can have feelings that have nothing to do with him. If I were with Aram, we’d have long conversations about death, about the term “passing away” versus “died.” He’d give me the space I need. He’d understand about the grieving process. Carl just wants to know if I still love him. I miss Aram. I want to hear his voice.

The phone calls won’t stop. Outside I always feel like someone is trailing me. Everywhere I am I feel Jimmy’s absence, which makes me feel unsafe, and now, with a stalker, I really am in danger. There’s no one to call: My mother is grieving, my sister is caring for Nina, and my boyfriend feels threatened by my despair. It’s winter, which makes the world feel smaller, and the sun sets earlier. After all these years, no one knows what happened to Etan Patz, only that something horrible happened to him when he was walking down the street, just the way I’m doing now. I begin to skip classes that meet at night. I see friends during the day, or invite them to my house at night, but I try not to go outside.

I meet with a university administrator and tell her the situation. She says she’ll speak to the boy and get back to me. While I wait, new fears invade my ability to function. When I was small, I was afraid that when I woke up my whole family would be dead. Now, though, I simply fear I won’t wake up myself. What if I die in my sleep like Melissa? I stay sitting up all night, and when I do fall asleep, I jolt myself awake, relieved that I’m not dead.

Carl works a block away from my apartment. One night, I’m supposed to go meet him there, but the minute I reach the sidewalk I’m gripped by a premonition that if I take one more step I am going to be killed. I dash back and lock myself in my apartment, call Carl, and tell him I can’t come, I can’t go outside. He doesn’t understand. What’s the big deal? It’s night, same as ever. But nothing’s the same as it was. It’s dangerous, and unhinged, like after Etan disappeared. Reality has ripped one of our players off the board, yet it expects us to continue on as though that didn’t change the game. To child-me, night became less scary when Jimmy moved in, because the worry of protecting everyone myself was alleviated, but now night is my responsibility again, and Jimmy isn’t here.

The paranoia gets worse and I make an appointment with a therapist. He was supposed to be a campus therapist, but it turns out his office is off-campus, and I’ll have to take a bus to see him. Each time I do, I am a lost sixth grader once again, terrified I will be raped and killed. Each time, I am grateful to the driver for letting me live.

The therapist is a student, inexperienced and not entirely helpful, but he listens to me and says soothing things that make me feel understood. He’s easy to talk to, and before I know it, I feel attached to him and look forward to the days I’m in his office, so I can explain my crazy feelings and he can nod and not ask me to reassure him or tell me my feelings are too dark to deal with. I keep asking him what I have, what’s wrong with me. I am still searching for a name for these feelings that have been plaguing me since childhood. They left when I took drugs with Taylor and trickled in and out after that, but now they’re back and worse, more feral than ever.

“If you had to diagnose me,” I push again, a few weeks in, “what would you say I had?”

“Well, I’d probably say you had mixed personality disorder.”

“What? Are you serious? Like Sybil?” I ask. How could I have been so duped by this guy?

“It’s just a guess.”

“Well, that guess sucked.”

I might not have the right answer, but I do know he’s wrong, and that all my teachers were wrong, and my mom was wrong. I don’t think I’m learning disabled, and I don’t think I have “alters.” I keep seeing him, though I no longer trust him. I badly need someone to talk to. Sometimes I am tempted to wrongly diagnose him, just to show him how it feels.

Carl is useless, too. What he’s always been best at is letting me care for him, but when it’s my turn, he’s lost, a little boy constantly asking me what I want him to do. When I’m silent because my fear won’t allow me to open my mouth, he’ll ask if I’m mad at him, or if he did something wrong. He’ll ask if I love him. Yes, I nod. As soon as he’s reassured, he falls asleep.

One morning I’m called back for a meeting with the school administrator. She’s met with my stalker, she says with a smile. She was charmed. “It’s a cultural thing.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“He’s Dutch. He’s just showing his affection like a European. It’s sweet.”

“He called and told me he was going to rape me.”

“He said that wasn’t him.”

“So you’re not going to do anything?”

“I can ask him to write you a letter of apology, if that’s what you really want. But I think you should give him a chance. He’s charming.”

I leave the office, feeling more naked than infuriated. He’s standing outside the office; he’s followed me here. I’m stopped in my tracks, and he comes close to my face and slowly blows on it, then walks away. I have nowhere to run, and no one to take care of me. I am crying and hyperventilating on the steps of the administration building. No one can help me. Not even my own self. I’m the last person I’d put in charge of me.