Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  That first year Jacob had come in early just to spend an hour outside under the big willow tree by the duck pond, feeling like Keats, gazing up at the haunted spires and the patched, leaky roofs that were home to hunchbacks and gargoyles of his mind. At night he’d ducked out during moonless evening shifts and paced the snowy graveyard that still claimed the bodies of three dozen Wives of Christ, his heart stinging in his ribcage as the shadows whispered poems in his freezing ears.

  But now the great gray fortress stood indifferent to Jacob’s return. He kept his eyes downcast on the slush-eaten driveway, wary of slipping and breaking his neck. The ducks had all gone south, and the iced-over pond was an opaque prison to last year’s leaves and the trash that had blown over from the Chinese Boys Academy across the way. Jacob paused beside it, trying not to feel cold and trying to think how exactly it had all come to this.

  He’d gotten the job mainly because of his size—of that he was certain—and he’d accepted because being a poet wasn’t exactly lucrative. He remembered a professor, the hoary poet Penn Hazelwood, once telling their class, “Stop any guy on the street and ask him for the name of any living poet. Nine out of ten of them will say ‘Robert Frost’ or ‘Shakespeare’ or someone who’s been dead for decades or centuries. The other one will say ‘Billy Collins.’ And that’s the ball game, chowderheads. Sorry to drag you into this mess.”

  From his spot beside the pond, Jacob closed his eyes and with no effort at all, summoned an image of Irene just seconds after she’d died. He’d never seen that kind of pale before. What skin looks like without any blood left beneath it. Easy to remember, hard to think about. But from this memory he could rewind to the moments just before she’d died, when he had, true to form, gotten the last word in. He’d sneaked up to her bedside while the nurses were increasing her morphine drip and preparing to remove the breathing tube, and he’d whispered in her ear before “they” eased him out of the way again. He swore he’d seen the corners of her lips creak up.

  To Sara, he reported that he’d told Irene that, in her hospital gown, she was the spitting image of Grace Kelly in Rear Window. To George, he’d said that he had finally confessed to completely forgetting to water her plants when she’d gone upstate three summers earlier. But these had both been lies. As far as he was concerned, only two people needed to know what he’d actually said, and he was the only one left.

  Inside, at least, Anchorage House was warm, and the combination wheel to his locker felt familiar under his fingertips: 3–8–25. Orderly whites had been hanging there since November. Still a faint smell of bleach. In the men’s room, the same old graffiti—a three-inch hirsute penis, a misspelled Young Jeezy lyric, an offer for a good time if bibjguy4you@msn.com was contacted. In his clean white uniform, he felt like a new person, freshly born, rather than someone who had, forty days ago, watched his friend die.

  The door to Ward III was keycard-locked, but just past it the door to Oliver’s office was always open to both patients and staff. Because no one at work knew they were dating, Jacob fired off a casual “Hey, Dr. B,” while barely tapping the door frame. Inside, Oliver was chatting with Sissy Coltrane, head of art therapy, but instead of repeating Jacob’s “Hey!” Oliver froze as if he’d seen a ghost. Sissy turned, eyes wide. Jacob had spent enough time talking crap behind other people’s backs to see he’d just caught them speaking about him.

  “You’re back!” Sissy chirped, rushing to the door, her arms extended inside a scratchy, sleeveless wool sweater. It was like being hugged by a bird’s nest.

  “We’ve missed you! Oliver said you were with your poor friend in the hospital! That can be so tough. My mother had this operation on her rotator cuff once, and she was in bed for six weeks. I mean, I’m still reliving it. Terrible. Anyway, I hope everything worked out okay—”

  She kept talking, but Jacob was more intent on glaring at Oliver than listening. He had told Sissy about Irene, this much was clear. But had he not then also told her that Irene had died?

  Oliver mouthed a helpless apology behind Sissy’s back, making that look he always made. For how would he know that kind of personal information?

  Jacob didn’t know what to say. Sara had been the one to call people, afterward. Then she’d posted this kind of creepy announcement onto Irene’s Facebook wall, prompting distraught replies from “friends” who hadn’t actually spoken to her in half a decade. Long, memorial messages filled with frowny faces and little hearts. Jacob had read every entry, waiting to be really nailed. Why not? Everyone else was crying all over the place. Even George was sniffling as he’d helped him snip obituaries out of all the newspapers Sara had notified. But Jacob had just sat there scissoring, quietly inhuman, as he stood now in Oliver’s doorway, Sissy’s eyes already beginning to leak.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t—it didn’t—she didn’t end up making it.”

  At least Sissy released him from her hug, as she turned to Oliver, horrified.

  Oliver looked worried, as if Jacob were a giant mess of wires and plastic explosives that he’d just deliberately kicked. But Jacob had been getting this look from nearly everyone since it happened. They expected him, of all people, to lose his ever-loving shit. It was, after all, what Jacob Blaumann always did. But they didn’t see—there was no “always” anymore. Sara, George, Oliver, his own mother—everyone had told him once or a dozen times to just let it out. It’s okay to be upset! Pitch a fit, pound some walls, you’ll feel better. But surely he owed Irene more than that. He could hold on to this thing for however many years he had left. Long, long after everyone else had forgotten, he would remain Irene’s cold, stone memorial. So all he did was say thank you politely—and, he hoped, not crazily—before walking away.

  FEBRUARY

  Jacob was assigned to monitor Dr. Feingold’s eight-thirty a.m. group, which met in the common area—a few worn couches facing each other, a couple of easy chairs facing the windows. Jacob sat in the corner by the board games as the assembled patients named their greatest fears.

  “Being alone,” said Jane with the Seconal-dead eyes.

  “Polka dots,” called Annabeth, bulimic, at one point down to a mere eighty-seven pounds.

  Jamal coughed and said, “Falling? Like off of a really high building or something?”

  Dr. Feingold nodded in amicable fascination at each offering, as if it were both astute and deeply informative. He pointed his pen tip at a girl with glasses so thick they looked as if they could melt pennies in strong sunlight. Dr. Feingold always went around the circle in group therapy counterclockwise. Yet her hand was raised—five bitten fingernails confidently aimed at the ceiling. Jacob didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean she was new.

  Corporate policy advised against fraternizing with the patients. A patient might try to use personal information. They were always wheeling and dealing for better food, private rooms, supervised trips outside. He couldn’t be bonding with them over their favorite films one minute and the next tackling them to the floor when they became gripped in a delusion that gorillas sent by their stepfathers had come to sell their kidneys on the black market.

  But this girl didn’t seem that crazy. With seriousness that Jacob didn’t doubt, she said, “My greatest fear is dying without accomplishing anything important at all.”

  Others in the group rolled their eyes quietly. “Thank you, Ella. That’s very brave,” the doctor said kindly.

  Ella lowered her hand and folded it in her lap calmly. She turned politely toward the boy next to her, as he began speaking about his fear of scorpions.

  Something about the girl bothered Jacob. Normally it was easy to pinpoint, as everyone in Anchorage House was off in some fairly obvious way: train-track scars on their wrists, vomit-stained yellow teeth, hair patchier in places where it had once been pulled out. Jacob knew whose tired eyes came from the morning’s dose of Xanax and which type of arm itching was a bad reaction to Ativan. But he
couldn’t see anything obviously broken about this girl—Ella Yorke, according to his roster. She was sitting up straight, while everyone else slumped. She was smiling patiently, but not with the halcyon glistening of antianxiety drugs or the defensive smirking of the sarcastically imprisoned. As she nodded her head in empathy with the scorpion boy, the realization rolled slowly toward Jacob like a Tiananmen tank: hers was an actual smile. It felt like years since he had seen one.

  Just before she turned to catch Jacob’s eye, he looked down, studying a chessboard, which had been abandoned midgame. He tried to work out who was winning. Black’s king was in a much safer position, but White was outflanking along the left side. He studied the board a little longer, trying to see what moves were coming up, but became stuck. He didn’t know whose turn it actually was. If it was White’s move, then White was in trouble, as both bishops were being threatened. But if it was Black’s turn, even if he did take either of the bishops, there was no move that wouldn’t leave his queen exposed to the White knight . . . Jacob felt his phone buzz twice.

  Sara texted him now three or four times a week. When are you coming up to Boston? Write me a poem! Are you still dating that doctor? Why don’t you quit that stupid job and come up here to be a lobsterman? His responses were absolutely minimal. Where? No. Yes. Gross. She was very excited about the U.S. team’s chances for gold in Vancouver, wasn’t he? He’d typed a reply about how he’d been boycotting the Olympics since A.D. 393 when Emperor Theodosius had kicked out the pagans, but then he deleted it. How could she be bubbly? How could she be watching sports?

  He was still annoyed that Sara had flipped out at him for not showing up at Irene’s wake last month (even though he’d said he wouldn’t come several times). Jacob hadn’t seen the point in getting drunk with a lot of arty scenesters who didn’t even know Irene except as the girl who took their coats at events. Jacob imagined them all standing around with their cocktails, sweating under layers of wool, wondering where is the damn coat-check girl? When the pictures went up on Facebook the next day, he was glad he hadn’t gone. How dare everyone be smiling? How dare they stand around in their Louboutin shoes, clutching their Michael Kors clutches with fucking lipstick smears on the rims of their goddamn plastic cups, playing a bunch of upbeat songs off Irene’s iPod?

  Who were all these people? If these were her friends, where had they been all year? How dare they enjoy themselves while what was left of Irene sat on a back wall shelf in that monstrous, tacky metal urn that George had picked out from the funeral home catalog? A room full of artists, and nobody could sculpt a goddamn urn to put her in? Knowing that crowd, it was probably lucky her ashes weren’t suspended ironically in a bottle of urine. What a seismic waste of time, money, talent, and life.

  Now Sara was talking about working with Juliette and Abeba to open a big show of all the artwork that Irene had left behind. To Jacob, this was the most unbearable. Not that he would expect them to understand. She’d made these things because she loved making them. For her, it had never been about getting recognition or selling pieces to collectors. Her work belonged in a museum. In its own museum. He ought to do it himself. Hang it all up somewhere in perfect spotlighting and then padlock the door before any else could ever see it.

  Sara just wanted to let it all go. Paste it into scrapbooks and move on. Start a new life in Boston as Mrs. George Murphy, a woman unpained. She kept bugging him about meeting her to go through the storage units and Irene’s old books to figure out which should be kept and which should be donated. She kept asking if he’d reach out to William, who hadn’t been heard from since the wake. At least in the photos he had the decency to look as if he hadn’t eaten all month. Sara and George, on the other hand, had been radiant—and Sara, with her new haircut! An edgy flapper bob to go along with her new job as social media director for The New Bostonian. George with his stupid Harvard Crimson bowtie. Jacob couldn’t stand it. They, of all people, ought to understand. Irene cuts our hair! he’d wanted to write in the comments section. George, what’d you do with the suit Irene hemmed? But he wouldn’t snap. Let them wonder why.

  “Wouldn’t have pegged you as a chess fan, Jacob,” Dr. Feingold said. “You any good?”

  Jacob looked up and realized that he was alone in the room with the doctor.

  “I’m actually Bobby Fischer in disguise,” he said. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  “I think Bobby Fischer died.”

  Jacob held his finger to his lips.

  Dr. Feingold stroked his bald spot for a moment. “Listen. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

  “Jacob Blaumann?” he laughed. “Irish Catholic, through and through.”

  He grinned. “Hey. Sissy mentioned what happened to your friend.”

  “Did she?”

  “She sort of brought it up in our last doctor’s meeting.”

  “I thought Sissy just had like an MFA in knitting or whatever.”

  Dr. Feingold smirked. “Look, I was just wondering if you’d been to synagogue. I thought you might not know of a good one up here.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not a templegoer, really.”

  Still, Dr. Feingold looked quite serious. “You should go. Be with other people. Say the Mourner’s Kaddish and all that. Sure it’s all a little dusty, but they wouldn’t be traditions if they didn’t do something for the people who say them. My father passed away a few years ago. Pancreatic cancer. Brutally painful, but at least it’s fast, since there’s nothing you can do for it.”

  “Sure,” Jacob said, fishing his phone out of his pocket as if it had just buzzed. The text message he’d received was indeed from Sara. I’m sending out Save the Date cards . . . He jammed the phone back into his pocket. It buzzed again, but he already knew what the second message would say: What’s your address?

  Jacob hadn’t even been to his apartment under the church since December, nor to the city at all. He didn’t know anybody there anymore.

  “Anyway, after my father passed, my rabbi told me I should take the year off. No big life decisions. No changing jobs, no starting new relationships, no moving to a new city.”

  “Sure. That seems smart. Wait for everything to settle. Well, that seems—sure.”

  But the last thing Jacob wanted to do was stay in this dead-end job. It was long past time to move on. Ever since Irene, he’d entertained a thousand escape routes. Heading up to Boston to be closer to George and Sara. Backpacking the Appalachian Trail. Joining a cult in Costa Mesa. Dusting off his old thesis and reapplying to Yale. Like crying, it seemed nice in theory, he was just out of practice.

  “So?” Jacob asked.

  “So what?”

  “So how’d it go?”

  Dr. Feingold thought about it. Finally he said, “Well, I’m still here.”

  MARCH

  Ward III was where patients came after being at Anchorage House for more than thirty days. Most kids were in and out in under a week, referred via psych consults and crisis managers and social workers and court orders. Oftentimes they just needed a break: an orderly schedule, a little counseling, an empathetic group session, and the usual medications. Lots of kids came in on stuff; lots had stopped taking whatever they were meant to be on. A couple of days, a week, and most had their heads screwed back on again. In Ward II, they could chill for twenty-one additional days. There the docs did what they could for the kids and then either released them, transferred them to special clinics, or moved them up to Dr. Boujedra’s group on Ward III. Long-term parking.

  The Ward III kids were neither well enough to go home nor sick enough to be shipped out. Languid, world-weary, they sat wistfully in psychiatric purgatory while others came and went. A few kids had been there for over a year, their parents happy to foot the bill and keep them safe, not to mention out of their own hair. Some had even come to feel at home, waiting for their Godots while trained professionals took a daily interest in their thoughts and
feelings. Not like the real world was so fantastic anyway. Jacob sometimes saw the appeal; who wouldn’t want to be constantly around people who were always hoping you’d soon be well?

  He suspected that Ella Yorke was in this last camp. She seemed almost happy to be there, raising her hand in group sessions, standing around by the sorry excuse for a library, earnestly staring out windows, always annoyingly smiling and meaning it. Jacob found himself passing the hours imagining how she’d ended up there: bad breakup, penned some dramatic Plath-esque ode to sharp cutlery in an English class somewhere, meeting with perplexed teacher, misfired hysterics, a call to campus security . . . et cetera, et cetera? Or was she more the shut-in type? Cutting class to watch SOAP Network, first a few hours a day, then eight, then twelve, then twenty? Who knew? She could be utterly batshit. Secretly collecting the tabs off soda cans to trade with the Plutonians when they came to harvest everyone’s earlobes for fuel.

  But Jacob had a hard time believing it was anything like that. Her biggest aberration was that she seemed so damn sincere about everything. He kept expecting to come in to find she had been released, but every time she was still there. And it began to be a strange reminder that he was still there, too. He hadn’t exactly decided to take Dr. Feingold’s advice to take the year off and avoid major life changes, yet every time the idea arose of actively pursuing something, he’d beg off.

  “Why don’t you go back and get your master’s degree?” Oliver asked him one weekend as he lay in bed beside Jacob. “Don’t you think Irene would have wanted you to?”

  Jacob stared up at the clean white carpet of Connecticut sky. What Irene would have wanted for him—he could answer ten different ways at ten different hours of the day.