The Legend of Carla B. Jones

Carla B. Jones was ninety-three when she died.

She was ninety-two when I met her, and I admit at first she didn’t seem like a woman of much consequence. But that’s my fault.

I was hungover the day I was first sent to her apartment, and I had tried to quell the hangover with weed but couldn’t find my pipe and instead took a bong hit, which was decidedly not a good idea. By the time I sat down in her living room I was no longer drunk and no longer high, I was only completely and totally faded and every neurotransmitter in my brain was dreading the burden of interacting with this godforsaken Carla B. Jones.

“Great,” I thought, “lonely elder seeks earnest companion, only to be delivered a philosophy major who stinks of whisky.”

Carla was deaf. Not from old age, just deaf. She was born deaf, she lived deaf, and she died deaf.

I assume that’s why I was assigned to her, because I’m also deaf. I warned of this on the volunteer sign-up form, though I also asserted my ability to carry one-on-one conversations in well-lit rooms. That’s what the gig was—one-on-one conversations in well-lit rooms. One-on-one conversations with the skeletons of lives once lived and now stagnant in the solitude of old age.

Or the solitude of dementia.

Dementia, I figured, could be interesting.

Carla did not have dementia.

And unbeknownst to me until I tried to greet her in ASL, Carla did not sign. She never learned. Without spoken English nor American Sign Language, the only means of reliable communication she had for all her ninety-three years was the written word.

So through the written word was how I became acquainted with the legend of Carla B. Jones.

“What brings you here?” Her opening question was already written down on page one of a little black notebook. It lay open on the coffee table. Plain ivory pages, deceptively soft corners.

I adjusted into the armchair across from her. Hesitated. “I wanted to get to know someone new,” I wrote, “someone with a life story to tell.”

“Hogwash,” she wrote underneath, “you smell like whisky.”

So it began.

A well-meaning extrovert once told me that small talk builds trust. I tried to believe him, but it was exhausting to consider—that in order to convince another person I was trustworthy, I would have to endure days or weeks or even months tiptoeing through the superficies of relating. That nobody would befriend me if I didn’t puppet myself just right, master the performance of being a person amongst people.

God, it made me want to be a person alone. But that was lonely. I looked at the brown bag of bones in front of me, wrapped in a shawl, smiling. The hangover pulsed behind my left eye. Alright. Ninety-two. No time to waste on small talk when she might be dead tomorrow.

I picked the pen back up. “Frankly I have no idea why I’m anywhere,” I started, “Earth managed to sculpt itself from the dust of the cosmos and somewhere along the line I got dragged into it.” I paused. Then I was overcome with a vigor, a sensation I couldn’t identity at first but that soon became familiar: liberation, effortlessness. Flow.

I went on for six more pages, with no idea what I wrote or how I knew any of it. But there it was. And there Carla was, still smiling.

We filled 22 notebooks before she died. After we filled three, I insisted on buying the fourth. Ornamental cover, magnet closure. Thought I’d spoil her.

That’s when she showed me her library. I say “library” but it was the only other room in her apartment, and it was full of bookshelves lined with plain black notebooks. All with the same rounded corners, the same ivory pages.

Carla picked up a fresh one and slid her fingers under the elastic closure. “I let my conversations speak for themselves,” she wrote.

Carla almost killed herself once, back when she was my age. It came up in notebook two.

“My plan grew intricate, whisked away by my idle mind on the carriage of a bungling rollercoaster that cycled it into expanding convolutions until it was a labyrinth so dense I could no longer find myself in it. My name faded into a recollection, barely a whispered thought. Forgetting was all that was left of me.

Then a headache. It shattered me out of the maze—I had a head. I pictured it looking hollow, bones underneath sunken skin, and I grinned like a madwoman. I had skin. How strange and uncanny! I was so wrapped up in the fantasy I felt like I’d already died.

In a way, I did die. All that planning killed me. When I was sucked into that maze I walked through the whole thing: I jumped, my mother mourned, there was a decadent funeral. And now I was skin. A shell of flesh. I had nothing left to fill it with but the courage to be reborn.”

I stared at her. Could have sworn I felt my irises uncoil, like they were adjusting to the dark. But maybe my pupils were just relaxing. Releasing their usual tension.

“The last time I planned to kill myself I was working in a shop, wielding a flamethrower to temper metal with.” I wrote, “I looked to the gas bottle. I’d never seen it in real life, but in the movies it seemed straightforward—let the gas out, light a match. Likely quick and just. Fitting. I wanted the act to be an act of my being, bursting forth, even if it killed me.

I woke up one day, scouted for a field. Somewhere I knew I wouldn’t hurt anyone even if car parts flung a hundred yards. I drove and I churned, I drove and I churned, and I found a spot. Got out of my car and felt a rush of euphoria.

Then I thought of the birds. What if a bird got hurt? It seemed ridiculous when I reflected on it later. But it didn’t seem ridiculous standing in that field.”

“When was that?” she asked.

“Last week.”

Carla was five years old the day she found out her own name. Her parents could barely write theirs, and anyway, they figured she was just dumb. Congenitally feral.

At 6, she fell under the wing of an eccentric librarian who taught her to read, and by her teens she was befriending fellow gifted outcasts. Her first conversation records were on typewriter paper, stapled together in stacks. By her 20s she could afford notebooks, and by 50 she had a storage unit.

“Conversation is a journey,” she told me once, “and I like having a record of my travels.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around her social life at first. Maybe I didn’t want to, didn’t want to let go of the comfortable lamentation of my own deafness. It was the reason I was lonely. It had to be. Otherwise, what was?

“What about community?” I asked.

“I started learning to sign in my 20s, but community bored me to tears after I’d seen what a notebook could elicit. Once someone puts in the effort of pen and paper, they’re already in uncharted territory—the wilderness, the hidden.

Learning to sign for the sake of community was like traveling to a foreign country just to visit a busy intersection. Same old signposts for miles, directing traffic in the same old directions.

I reclaimed my notebooks after that.

I’m an explorer. So are you, dear. An explorer trying not to explore.”

I had been so absorbed in our conversation that the comment hardly registered at first, but on the drive home it made me chuckle and by nightfall it had risen to the level of furious epiphany.

I barely slept, instead cycling through despair, anger, absurd joy, sheer palpating panic. Hours and hours of panic as my life story rushed through me, the persistence of it leaving me surging with the heat, hot to the touch, an electric current spinning through a circuit in a frenzied readiness to short. The next morning, I drove back to Carla’s.

“I think I died last night.”

My last semester of university was almost surreal. I knew what my professors wanted and I wrote it, but I was no longer invested. Philosophy lost its shape, giving way to life. Life had a shape.

It was, at times, excruciating to watch life take shape. My thoughts had always been my refuge from feeling, but now, they were consumed by feeling. I felt my childhood, my adolescence. I explored.

Yet alcohol lost its intrigue and weed fell to the wayside. I wanted to feel. I reveled in sharing it with Carla. We wrote poetry together, filling notebook nine with breath and light. I’d leave her apartment, look at the sky, and see the soul of the earth.

My friends were not very interested in this new thing that I was. Many of them left.

“Does it feel like loss?” Carla asked, “Or the departure of excess?”

I kept going.

By notebook twelve, I crashed. By notebook fourteen, I rediscovered bliss. By notebook fifteen, I lost it again.

But my lows had a different quality to them now—sacred explorations. I was being lowered to tend to myself, gain the courage to be reborn.

Carla tended to me too.

After we filled our 22nd notebook, Carla had me bring her the last empty one. I picked it up from the top of her dresser and drove it to the hospital, but we never wrote in it. We sat.

She held my hand as it happened. I want to say I held hers, but we both knew it was for my own comfort.

Carla left me a lifetime of notebooks. I spent the next year poring over her relationships and encounters. I tracked down anyone I could. We’d meet up for coffee and be together until dinner, laughing and crying and nodding in vigorous understanding.

“Carla was my spiritual awakening,” said one.

“Her presence was therapeutic.”

“You’re kidding!” started an email from a deli owner Carla knew in her 50s, “I named a sandwich after her!”

Then there was Dan.

Dan was one of Carla’s more enigmatic encounters. Their conversation was brief, ended abruptly, and read with a sense of urgency.

We met at dawn.

In his hands was a little black notebook. The abrupt end, as it turns out, was not the end at all.

Dan was a writer, and Carla had let him keep the rest of their conversation—a singular occurrence as far as I can tell.

He undid the elastic, swiftly tugged the bottom of the ribbon bookmark, and opened to an underlined passage in Carla’s handwriting.

“Let me not become a legend until I die.”

And his response.

“I’ll hold onto your story.”

Soon he and I were poring over Carla’s notebooks together, assembling her life.

Dan remained enigmatic, sometimes disappearing for weeks at a time, but nonetheless we grew close.

One day, after he had been gone for nearly two months, I got a text. A publisher had just granted him a massive advance for The Legend of Carla B. Jones. He insisted on giving me my cut of the profits. A small percentage, he said, in gratitude.

It was $20,000.

I took out the last empty notebook, the one from Carla’s dresser, and wrote to her for the first time in years. I wrote and I sobbed, I wrote and I sobbed.

When I finally closed the book, a note slipped out of the inner pocket. The last words of Carla B. Jones:

“Thank you for thinking of the birds.”