She stood up and it felt as if that gesture was duplicated by a replica of her within me, displacing the blood in my mid-section and sending it in a rush to the five outermost points of my body. I forgot I was holding a wineglass and it dropped out of my hands; it landed upright but then it fell down.
Jade watched the mustard-colored carpet absorb the wine. She was nodding her head in that way that sometimes accompanies thought and sometimes means a tentative yes.
“Please,” I said, trying to impress my will on the moments as they flowed away from me, like a child lobbing stones into the sea.
She took a quick gulp of breath and then swallowed. She looked so tired and frightened. A pulse was beating in her forehead; her ears remained an astounding dark red.
“All right,” Jade said, in a careful voice, a voice that only pronounced the words, such as you might do if you were making a recording to teach English. “I better call the bus station and see when the next bus is.”
I thought she was going for the telephone but she took the three steps separating her from the edge of the bed and sat next to me.
I didn’t want to touch her or look at her or do anything to confuse the impulse that had brought her so close to me. I looked straight ahead at the spot she’d been sitting in and I felt her weight shifting. I felt her looking at the side of my face and then she leaned over and rested her forehead on my shoulder.
I longed to return the gesture with a caress of my own, but I knew better. I knew she meant more than one thing by her touch. I was someone she used to know who she was seeing on the day of her father’s funeral. It could have meant as little as that. It could have meant even less: exhaustion, sadness, that depletion of spirit that comes when we surrender to another’s will. Ye I was sure it was otherwise. There was something specific and deliberate in her touch. She was not merely laying her head against me. There was life in her muscles, in her neck and shoulders; she was making certain not to lean on me too hard. She was touching me and holding back in a way that seemed wholly calibrated, judging where to touch me and how hard, and that meant that not only was the center of her brow touching me but all of her. It added the dimension of decision to her gesture, of measurement and risk, and that made leaning against me as intimate as touching my face or taking my hand and pressing it against her breast. Moments passed, moments and moments, and it felt as if the whole of her being was concentrated in that stretch of brow that homed in on me, just as the entirety of a singer seems concentrated in her mouth as she hits her highest note.
I couldn’t put my arm around her without causing her to move her head, so I reached over and laid my hand on her leg, just above the knee. I laid it flat, without closing or even curling my fingers, so it wouldn’t seem as if I were trying to take possession of her, or even hold her.
I took measured breaths and tried to ignore my mind’s chaotic bursts of speculation and joy, but even so I was trembling.
Jade lifted her head and leaned away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have known I couldn’t touch you.” I pulled my hand away from her, but I continued to quiver. I stood up and walked to the window. I felt my heart pounding, felt it at the back of my throat, in my stomach, the tip of my penis, my legs. I leaned against the window and looked out. Moving above me was a piece of the black and gray nighttime sky. It could all end here, I thought, my life, all life, it wouldn’t matter. And the thought seemed so reasonable and did such justice to the wildness of my feelings that I almost said it aloud.
“Are you going to make trouble for yourself by coming here?” Jade asked.
“No.”
“But you’re not supposed to see any of us. You’re on parole. I’ll bet no one knows you’re here.”
“It doesn’t matter. No one will find out. I’ve been gone some of Friday and today. The weekend doesn’t count.”
She looked at me skeptically but didn’t want to pursue the thought: she had inherited from Ann the stylized belief that the best way to be for someone is not to show much concern over what they do.
“You know who I met on the plane coming out here?” I said. “Stuart Neihardt.”
Jade shrugged.
“You don’t remember him. He was in my class at Hyde Park High. He works for a dentist now and he’s in New York having gold teeth made.”
Jade nodded. She suspected I was inviting her to make an ironic remark about Neihardt and she wouldn’t do it. She was either too close to other people to make fun of them, or too far above them to bother: it depended on her mood.
“He remembers us,” I said. “He has this really sick grief over people he knew who were happy together. He was super lonely and got to hate all of us who weren’t. It was strange hearing about us from him. I never think about him so it was weird being remembered.”
“I don’t remember that name. What does he look like?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you knew him. But he said ridiculous things about us. He said he looked in your blouse when you were leaning over some exhibit at the science fair.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“It made me fantastically jealous. I grabbed his lip and twisted it.”
Jade winced. “God, David. You’re so violent and crazy.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are. You don’t know it but you are.”
“I’m not. What I feel, it isn’t violence or craziness. I don’t like violence, and craziness is sad and boring and frightening. I was with a lot of crazy people, you know, and was treated like one, too. I mean there were times when I wondered if I was insane, and then for a long while I wanted to be crazy, just for a way to be, a way to have it make sense being there. Something to occupy me, make me less the person I was, who was in so much pain, and more like some other person, someone unknown, whom I could watch. But I wasn’t crazy. That was the thing. I wasn’t crazy at all, though I know that’s the best way to prove you are, saying you’re not. All it took for me to get out—I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on—all it took was pretending I was changing, that I was starting to feel differently about myself and—” I paused for a moment, to give her a chance to diminish her attention if she wanted to “—about you. All it took was pretending that I was getting over you, that was all.” I was sitting next to her again.
“I don’t know why I call the people there crazy,” I said. “It’s not what they are. It’s a habit, a way of thinking about Rockville and keeping myself separate. You know what it is? All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they’re all right, for what it’s worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that’s what we call crazy and its not really completely wrong to call it that but it doesn’t say it as it truly is. It’s more like a lack of mobility, a transportation problem, getting stuck, being the us we are in private but not stopping, like those kids you’d know who would continue to curse and point and say the secret things even in school or in front of your parents. They wouldn’t know when to stop; they wouldn’t be the way people wanted them to be. And the thing that made it so terrible for us is that they’d be getting knocked out for doing things that we ourselves did—but we knew when not to do them, we could actually pretend we never ever did that kind of thing, and when it came down to the sticking point, we’d kick them in the ass just as hard as anyone else.”