Cut to: Valentine’s Day. We are at the kitchen table, our fingers covered in glue and the filth it’s attracted, and my father has not taken pains to maintain any level of organization so that bow-tie pasta and bits of stained doily and construction paper and crayons are everywhere. Somewhere in the background you can hear Julia walking a rambunctious James around the house; she is singing “Baby Beluga” full force and he wholeheartedly despite not knowing all the words; my father tries to point the camera toward the sound but it can’t be framed and he switches it back to us.
“What,” he says, “is Valentine’s Day for?”
I ham for the camera and flirt and wiggle: “Loooove,” I say.
“And who do you love, honey,” says my father, but before I can reply Jackson butts in, his sticky fingers spread wide, grabs my face and plants that series of wet kisses only young children can, and I shriek and giggle.
“I love I!” yells Jackson. “I LOVE I.”
Cut to: a celebration ceremony at our kindergarten (the last substantial bit of video for a number of years). We have of course convinced the teachers to let us stand next to each other during the part of the “performance” where the class gets up to sing the alphabet. To his credit, my father covers all four rows of children, with the same historian penchant for accuracy and entirety I’ve inherited, before settling on the two of us. The many weak voices lilt and strain, and when it gets to “f,” you can see our faces widen and bodies tense.
“E, f, g”—Jackson and I look at each other—“h,” and then we positively explode as we scream our initials—“I J”—so much so that neither of us has energy for “k”; we’ve been holding our breath in our ambitious bodies for those two syllables the whole time, and we both sort of slump and stumble, and the shy boy in the tie next to us frowns at how we’re embarrassing him.
The majority of our lives we were an exhausting display that others looked on, confused and ashamed to be watching. I, at least, was happy to bear witness. But even one letter changes a meaning entirely; no matter their proximity, different points of an alphabet refuse to be represented as the same: there’s no guarantee that someone standing at precisely the same longitude and latitude as you will remember the view the same way, no promise that one person’s memory of a moment or a month will parallel yours, retain the same value, shape the years of living that follow.
~ ~ ~
The walls of James and Jackson’s bedroom were covered with butcher paper that came in reams wider than it was tall. The paper was spliced together with the Scotch tape their mother kept in the drawer under the telephone, which also held a few photos not worthy of a place on the wall or even the refrigerator, and their father’s hammer, which every day acquired rust while we fought off robbers and sunsets.
The sun’s obstinate warmth lingered in the asphalt and sidewalk long into the evening while we dreamed. The sun came in through the window every morning at six thirty and offered life to the opposite wall, which displayed an incomplete and frenzied rendering of a circus. In the morning gregarious with childish enthusiasm, the paper circus shifted into a human drama; with the late-afternoon light, the characters became more determined to speak and live intricate, shadowed lives.
That summer, James and Jackson ate their dinners with admirable speed, stamina, and a teeth-baring spirit of anticipated adventure. The forkfuls were violently shoved between their two rows of teeth, and the boys took marked pleasure in the scraping noise the utensils produced. They paused, generally in harmony, only at thirty-second intervals, to gulp down bright-colored juice out of bright-colored cups that their mother set out for them. Sometimes dinner was followed by a ride on their bright-colored bicycles, but mostly, just as fiercely as it began, the meal would end — Jackson’s fork would drop, then James’s, and the brothers would look up, expectant, to where their mother sat. Her consent was generally wordless: a quiet smile or a flick of hands upward that meant Go.
Jackson designated the five to ten minutes after dinner as a period for solemn thought to be followed by discussion. Jackson, at eight, knew himself to be older, wiser, and the obvious leader of a project that would surely outlast them. Despite any planning efforts on the part of his older brother, James almost always deviated from the strategy. Jackson understood space and logic, but were it not for James, the pumpkin-orange tiger on the tight wire would never have tottered there haphazardly. The circus performers would never have varied ghastly and comically in height and girth.
Several times their mother put the circus project on hold and the tiger stood still, the half magicians gruesome beneath the trapeze. Julia suffered migraines that twisted and writhed in her head, and she often became agitated by the arguing that swelled in volume from the boys’ bedroom. The source of the tension was, without fail, a matter of creative differences (e.g., Jackson did not find the oversized tiger on the tightrope as believable or triumphant as the crown on the top of its head declared it to be). Upon Jackson’s expression of disdain for James’s artistic endeavors, the younger brother would defend himself violently. There were, he insisted, many reasons for a tiger king.
While we absorbed the paradise of indoor imaginations many afternoons, we valued the wide expanse of our block as well; out there was a wildness the three of us found and cultivated. Overgrown blackberry bushes reached to us through other people’s fences, and even after our lips and teeth and tongues were stained purple, the smell lingered and called to us at night while we tossed and turned in the slow heat, while we dreamed of vengeance in the water balloon fights of tomorrow. The brothers had both inherited their father’s penchant for sleep talking. Like their father, they spoke not in the stumbling tongues of so many sleep talkers but in full words and careful syllables, giving reason and rhyme to fantastical worlds and images. Unlike their father, though, Jackson and James had partners in their sleep talk. Only myself, the tiger king, the three-quarters-finished clown with crooked purple arms, and the beta fish, who swam the same circles in the same tank (which was situated exactly between the brothers’ beds on an end table), were aware of the conversations that took place in the middle of the night, threading strings between the dreamworlds of the brothers. I shared the secret with them, slept with my head almost directly beneath the fish tank, often still in my bright blue bathing suit, with my dark red widow’s peak connected, by another invisible thread, to the tip of Jackson’s nose.
During the day, I made up for my sex and too-thin stature with calluses thicker than all of the boys’. The balls of my feet were agile and quick; they responded effortlessly to impossibly sharp-angled turns in games of tag and never complained of the heat or the oak roots that reached up through the sidewalk of Madrone Street to remind us of beginnings. I made up for my sex with curse words my father had not meant to teach me, but at night I kept watch of Jackson’s chest, monitoring its homogenized ups and downs; the first part of loving anyone is to make sure they’re breathing. And so it went that I was the first to witness Jackson and James speaking to each other in the semaphores of deep sleep. Their mother had not noticed; Julia didn’t notice a lot of things.
On the last evening of June in that particular circus summer, I sat at the head of Jackson’s bed, my legs crossed like a brave Indian warrior, counting his breaths, waiting for an anomaly, sometimes daring to run my index finger over the slight curve of his lips.