The crisis came silently in the night. A message from Jonathan, delivered to my phone at three in the morning, read, “I’ve been dealing with an emergency. Feel free to call me when you can.” I just about stopped breathing when I read it, in the bleary-eyed early minutes of the morning where reality and dream struggle to separate. “Feel free…” Jonathan hasn’t asked me to call him in a moment of crisis in what felt like years. Most often than not, he opted to struggle by himself, only permitting me into what has happened hours or days later.
I called, and a very faint version of his voice spilled through the phone. “I barely got time to sleep but… did you want to hear what happened?”
Less than an hour later, I laid next to him in his bedroom apartment, his arm holding me close to him. What happened, he explained, was a rather unnerving encounter with his sister over the phone — which I don’t permit myself to retell. Let it rest that her state of health greatly deteriorated as their call the night before stretched longer and longer, and Jonathan made the difficult decision to get the health authorities involved over a call. He couldn’t get in touch with her since then, and feared the worst. Was she still alive? Did she hate him for calling health services on her, a Black woman living in the middle of American class difference and snobbery in New Haven? We did not know, and fumbled around the shape of our ignorance as we called on my drive to him. I assured him that the shock of terrible things like these was always worst in the first twenty-four hours. Would I be proven wrong? I felt something within me had slightly cracked, and something out there in the world might see it as a fine entry point for a wedge.
In any case, there I was, listening with mixed curiosity and worry at the sounds of him sleeping. A subtle, slight, rhythmic crack emanated somewhere near his mouth every couple seconds, like a slow clock. Was he grinding his teeth? What as I to do?
Another maxim of mine that felt shakily dubious under the weight of the situation: “you’re only responsible for yourself, just like I’m responsible for myself.” What did that word mean anyways, “responsible?” If you witnessed someone grinding their molars away, and only you notice, and not they, what then? If a friend got too high at a party and started throwing themselves into the arms of dangerous men, who’s responsible for who? I read to distract myself from these nagging thoughts — Octavia Butler’s Kindred — but knew they’d just resurface later in some form or another. Maybe the queen of speculative fiction could teach me something in the folds of her prose. Butler, though, seemed to respect me more than that. All her characters were just as confused as I was about how to go about their twisted lives dissected by unconsenting time travel. Comforting, at least, that Dana, Kevin, Rufe, Tom, Sarah, and Nigel all had their different conflicting definitions of “responsible.” There had got to be as many “right answers” in that story as there were members of the Weylin plantation.
Jonathan all the while had been doing his usual tossing and stumbling in and out of rest or sedated thinking — exactly which it was I could never tell. Then, he got the call. “Oh, Rebecca!” he exclaimed. I got my headphones in — but not before my itching ears could hear Rebecca explaining that she was okay in an everyday tone of voice. Silently, I sighed. I wasn’t too off the mark after all.