by R. J. Jacobs
“When I came back to the regular world, I kept ordering everything around me like I did in the dark. Whenever I moved after that, I arranged my things—my toothbrush, hairbrush, clothes—the same way.”
Ms. Parsons touches her fingertips to the corners of her eyes, like she is trying to stop from sneezing. “I see how that helped you keep the world together. It can be hard,” she says slowly, “to try new ways of doing things when old ways have worked so well …”
There is a knock at Ms. Parsons’s door and she looks up. I look up, too. She frowns at me as if giving me a chance to explain it. No one ever interrupts our meetings.
I shrug.
“Just a second, Jessie,” she says on the way to the door. “I have to see what this is about.”
Through the glass I see a shadow. It looks familiar in a way that makes my heart begin to pound.
2
Ms. Parsons braces one hand against the wall as she cracks the door open.
“Oh, good morning,” she says formally, like someone trying not to sound annoyed. “We’re actually in the middle of our meeting. Can I talk with you afterward?” I glance over my shoulder, but I’m afraid to turn all the way round to see who she is talking to. I hear the squeaks of shoes and voices echoing in the hallway.
Ms. Parsons clears her throat, then drops the pretense of politeness. “Frankly, I’m not used to spot checks during my sessions. I would’ve been happy to send an e-mail later. That way, therapy time with my client …” I can see Ms. Parsons tapping her index finger against the door frame. “Is this really the only time?” she asks, before mumbling something I can’t quite hear.
When she opens the door, my parole officer, Ms. Carr, walks in, her footsteps click-clacking on the hard floor. She wears a maroon dress like someone in a movie might wear to church, so long it almost brushes the ground. Her hair is glossy and stiff with hairspray and is pulled back tightly. She nods once at me, then glances around Ms. Parsons’s office as if she’s come by just to have a look at the space.
My stomach tightens immediately, maybe because Ms. Carr reminds me of jail. My parole is supervised, meaning Ms. Carr checks in on me at least once a month. She likes to show up unexpectedly. Usually she comes to my apartment, where she mainly glares at me from the hallway. I know that I messed up at the concert—I hurt someone and scared a lot of people—but the hateful way Ms. Carr looks at me always cuts me to the quick. It’s as though she hopes to catch me doing something awful—like she wants to prove to the world that I’m fundamentally bad.
I realize that, if she can show up here, there’s no reason to think she wouldn’t show up at my job—a thought that makes me lightheaded. I try to push it from my mind.
Ms. Parsons closes the door behind her and quickly returns to her chair. Her eyes are wide open and pretend-calm, her demeanor very different than it was just a few minutes before. She runs her index finger around the rim of her tea cup. “Ms. Carr wants to join us for part of our session, to hear about the work we’ve done so far and talk about the work we’re planning to do. Is that all right with you?”
“It’s fine with me,” I say. I don’t see how I have any choice.
Ms. Carr opens a tablet in her lap slowly, like she’s not in a hurry. She unfolds the reading glasses that dangle around her neck, puts them on, then coughs once into her fist. She jabs the tablet’s screen roughly with her index finger and asks Ms. Parsons, “Has Ms. Duval been fully compliant with her treatment so far?”
“Absolutely. Jessie has been on time or early for each of our meetings.” She takes a sip of tea as if to show that she plans to keep her answers short.
Ms. Carr gives a tiny nod as her fingertip hovers above the screen. “Do you sense that Ms. Duval is a danger to herself or to others?”
Ms. Parsons’s forced smile grows as she shifts forward in her seat. She twists the fabric of her skirt nervously, as if she had misjudged just how uncomfortable answering questions about me, in front of me, was going to be. “You know, I actually think we should talk later,” she says.
“This is the time that I have,” Ms. Carr says back.
Ms. Parsons looks at me and then at the office door. “Jessie, would you mind if Ms. Carr and I spoke privately for a few minutes? That might let us get back to our meeting faster.”
If Ms. Parsons is asking, of course I don’t mind.
She leads me to a bench just outside her door. “I’ll be right inside,” she says, loud enough for Ms. Carr to hear. “Hopefully this won’t take too long.”
Then Ms. Parsons shuts her office door, the one with a glass middle that looks like scalloped oysters. Through it, I can see her shape as she folds her arms and leans against her desk. I can hear their voices when they start to talk—the way concerts sound if I put my fingers in my ears.
People always seem to think I can’t hear as well as I can. Maybe the abilities of anyone who is different are underestimated. My hearing is particularly clear, though, because of how sharp my ears became in captivity. Take away one sense and the others strengthen.
Ms. Parsons says, “Well, to answer your question, no. I don’t think she’s a danger to herself or anyone else. And honestly, you don’t even need to ask since I’m sure you understand my responsibility to warn the police and whoever might be at risk if I ever thought Jessie would put someone in danger.”
Ms. Carr’s voice is equally audible, “I have some responsibilities too. I have a responsibility to the James family and to the citizens of Davidson County.”
“You’re acting as if we’re not talking about someone with special needs,” Ms. Parsons says.
Special needs is a phrase I’ve heard many times before. I’ve also heard developmentally delayed, slow, intellectually challenged, and retarded. Each of those makes me think about dreams where you scream but can’t be heard.
Ms. Carr says, “With all due respect, I don’t think you know whom you’re dealing with here. We’re talking about someone who is very capable of being violent based on her previous behavior. Yes, she has a unique story. And yes, she has some deficits. I’m well aware of both. But this isn’t someone who can’t take care of herself. Jessie Duval followed a concert tour around the country for months, managing to elude security over and over so she could get close to Shelly and Owen James. She severely injured someone. It took three officers and a stun gun to subdue her. Now, she lives independently with only my once-a-month oversight.”
I have to hand it to Ms. Carr there. Most people don’t know who they’re dealing with when it comes to me. My talking isn’t very good, but I’m much more capable than people realize. I don’t mind their not knowing. I fold my hands and close my eyes, but then I realize someone could touch me when I’m not expecting it, and that would be very, very bad with Ms. Carr just inside the office door, so I open them again. I try to sit still while noise reverberates around the hallway.
Ms. Carr mumbles a question that I can’t quite hear, to which Ms. Parsons answers, “Oh, I’m sure she handles money fine and she’s generally really perceptive. But Jessie has some specific difficulties—mainly in productive speech and word recall. She has trouble naming certain things—feelings and other descriptive words, and with saying them out loud. She seems to understand everything said to her, though, and is good with procedures. Like you said, she holds down a job, gets around town just fine. She’s had tons of treatment before, been bounced around from one counselor to the next. But I mean to stick with her.”
Hearing Ms. Parsons talk about me makes me dizzy in a good way. It’s hard to connect what she’s said with me.
I see Ms. Carr’s shape dip as she looks down at her laptop. “Were these deficits she was born with?”
“We’re not sure. I’ve ordered a neuropsych assessment, but they’re scheduling seven months out. She easily has the worst case of childhood neglect I’ve ever encountered … held captive in a place of near-complete sensory deprivation and isolation for over a year. But it’s basically impossible t
o know what portion of Jessie’s language deficit and developmental delay is due to a lack of stimulation during that year …”
I’ve heard this said before, but not by Ms. Parsons. I feel my heart quicken again as she says, “… what that does to a human? Neglect is the worst form of abuse in my book. When physical abuse happens to a child, they can try to make sense of it, they can grow up and forgive. When a child is neglected, especially in a case as extreme as Jessie’s, it’s like denying that they are even there at all.”
I shiver, wrap my arms around my chest. I remember something I used to say to myself. I’m not here. This isn’t happening.
Sometimes being alone is best. It is safest, certainly.
Alone and never touched.
I’m small but I’ve learned how to make myself even smaller. I read a story once where a character could make himself dim. No one could see him, even when he was nearby. That’s what I picture myself doing. It’s particularly easy in the dark. I usually keep to the backs of rooms, like I did on the James tour. I’d stand against the wall and keep everyone in front of me and feel the music in my back.
Ms. Carr is saying something that Ms. Parsons interrupts.
“Why is she fixated on them? Probably because she grew up with no family at all, bouncing between foster homes until what happened, and then the system spit her out. It was probably a lot nicer to live in her imagination, don’t you think? Nicer to live in her mind with the Jameses than to be where she was. She has no family, so they became that for her, in her mind.”
When Ms. Carr and Ms. Parsons begin to talk about what got me arrested, I hum loudly to block the sound of their voices. A couple of people turn and look at me as they pass by. One shakes her head and glances at Ms. Parsons’s closed door.
I don’t want to hear about extreme neglect or sensory deprivation. I don’t want to be diagnosed anymore. I want to forget about that time in my life—and for the most part, I can. I don’t remember much about the actual house where I was kept in the dark except the rough texture of the carpet and that the owners had a dog who barked in a deep, throaty, scary way at weird times. I do remember, before I went in, the couple saying that I had soiled the bed. Years later, I sat across from them at an enormous wooden desk in a room with glass walls and a view of downtown Nashville and wondered if they would say it again, but then they didn’t say anything at all.
Instead, that same phrase Ms. Parsons used came up during those meetings: sensory deprivation. I didn’t understand what it meant at the time, because my senses always worked just fine in the closet. Maybe especially in the closet.
More than a year there.
I slept in blackness, woke, and slept again. There was no sun to make day, so I learned to see in zero light. I forgot thirst. Forgot hunger. I was a shadow, or a vampire, I thought—and it was not a bad thought. I counted strands inside strands of shag carpeting. I learned how to hold my breath so that I could be very, very quiet. I understood voices I wasn’t meant to hear. I deciphered tiny noises and distinctions between shades of nothing. I learned where the door’s smooth edge turned jagged and would bite and leave a splinter. I learned how far the wood panels would bend before they started to crackle like fire. I learned to wait and count to myself and to think and think and think, because what else was there to do?
I lived without language, without touch, without time. I knew there were other rooms in the house—and other doors between them—but not in the world where I lived. For me, there was only that one room, and only that one door—just one way in and out of how I lived. And darkness. Always darkness.
I felt footsteps before I heard them. When feet came near the closet door they were loud as thunder. Sometimes, there were voices. Mr. Clean and the woman. If I ever knew his real name I forgot it, but I called him Mr. Clean because he looked like the drawing I’d seen on bottles beneath cabinets, and because he did take away my mess. I know the state workers did their best trying to help me to never think about him or the woman again.
It was almost always Mr. Clean who came to the closet. Sometimes the foot thunder faded into silence, and sometimes it grew louder and louder until my door opened, when he would bring food and water bottles. Out went old towels and in came new ones. I had something that people later called a chamber pot. Mr. Clean took and emptied it. He and the woman didn’t seem angry, not really. No one hit me. I knew what mean was, and they were not mean in that way. It was more like they forgot about me—except for a once-a-day visit.
When the closet door opened, the light was so blindingly strong it made me afraid of heaven. I shrunk away, always, back into the dark. I had read somewhere that fish at the bottom of the ocean do this. When he came in, my muscles would turn rigid. I would straighten up, try to talk, sometimes embarrassed about how I must have smelled, how I must have looked. I would brush my fingers through the tangles of my hair that remained, that hadn’t yet fallen out.
“Good doggie,” Mr. Clean would say sometimes. I decided that I would treat dogs better if I ever got out. Mr. Clean tossed in food and gave me a few batteries for my CD player. The front said: D-I-S-C-M-A-N.
“That thing still working?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I heard his sighs of … the word for extreme dislike … I heard his sighs of disgust as he leaned against the door frame. I would wait to change the batteries when the door outside my door closed, when the thunder had all gone away. I could do it without looking, my fingers finding the tiny plastic grooves that were the edges of the world.
Each time, I changed the batteries gently. I would never let the D-I-S-C-M-A-N break.
Never, ever.
Once the batteries were fresh, a green light would come on, the album would restart, and Shelly and Owen James’s voices would start to sing again. The album’s first song was about a rainstorm and hope. I knew every single word.
There are plenty of things I can never describe about living in the dark, because that’s what comes from living in two worlds—the language of one doesn’t fit the other. There were times in the closet when all I had were feelings. They were so big I had to make up my own names for them. Regular, other-people words couldn’t describe them.
Eventually, a caseworker noticed I had too few school records for the year and called Children’s Services. When Mr. Clean’s answers didn’t add up, the police came to the house. The first new face I saw after more than a year belonged to a uniformed cop, who put his hand over his mouth as tears flooded his eyes. He talked to me in a calm voice until others came. They had to turn out all the lights before I could come out of the closet.
Coming out was like being born again. Some sensations—sight, hearing—felt like the world’s brightness and volume had been turned up way too high. My other senses seemed too dull. My hands suddenly had too much to do and my fingertips seemed to go numb, overrun by sorting through the millions of textures everywhere.
I was reintroduced to the world gently. First there were voices, then light, then water, then food. There were people who wanted to protect me, and another person, a “developmental psychologist,” who wanted to study what I had lost so she could learn about how kids grow.
I had to learn to walk again because I had sat for so long. I moved like a bird, I heard someone say once—in short, jerky movements. Even simple things made me afraid, like the fear that day-to-day being in the world might blind and deafen me. For the first six months, I wore sunglasses everywhere I went. When I went outside and during meals, I wore headphones over my ears, which my doctor at the time encouraged. She said I shouldn’t take in too much reality at once. There’s more than one reality, I told her, but I don’t think she understood. She smiled like she was thinking poor thing.
“Welcome back,” a therapist said to me the day after I came out. Her hair was pulled back by a cotton headband and there was a shield-shaped pin on her jacket that I knew was from a college. She smiled and swept her palm around like a game show assistant, like I was
about to win something. Through the window, I could see a courtyard—soft bushes and a bench covered in bright snow. Everything so real it seemed impossible. I had to tell myself over and over that what I was seeing was actually there, that I could trust my senses, that my eyes weren’t tricking me.
This isn’t the only world, I wanted to say. It’s just a physical place.
Later, we sat at a table, a tray of vegetables between us.
“This is a carrot,” she said. “Can you say ‘carrot’?”
I’d kind of forgotten how to talk, but I tried to say the word.
“Good,” she said, reaching over to pat my back.
I turned so fast that I knocked the tray over, and the carrots and peas and broccoli I was supposed to know the words for went everywhere. I tried not to cry as I helped pick everything up off the floor. I felt bad because I knew she was trying to help me. The therapist talked in a calm voice but looked over her shoulder at the door.
That was what life was like afterward, especially in the first few years. I messed up over and over and over again. I lost some things in the dark. Once, I looked in a mirror and didn’t know who I was seeing. I looked like a different person, someone who wasn’t me—a face and a body that things happened to.
Everyone was very nice for a while. Adults smiled and moved slowly, like I was made of something that could break easily. Before the closet, I went from one home to another, but afterward I lived in a place that was a lot like a hospital and a little like a jail. I lived in two more houses when I became a teenager. In both, I stayed in a bedroom by myself. I went to a small school run by the state for kids who had various disabilities. I hardly talked. No one knew what to make of me. Part of me missed the safety of being in the dark. And the structure. There was no time in the closet, but there was also plenty of time. I did what I wanted.
It is very, very hard to explain.
* * *
