Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
The Riverdale Theological Seminary was one of the oldest and most distinguished seminaries in the United States, overlooking the Hudson River just north of New York City. It had been a great honor for Harvey to receive an appointment as a fellow at this seminary after his graduation from college; my parents had boasted of nothing else for months. But now, Harvey seemed to be expressing contempt for it.
I was waiting for Harvey to suggest that we go downstairs to my car, and bring my things into his apartment—my hastily packed suitcase, a backpack and my laptop. But he didn’t seem to think of it. I couldn’t help thinking
He is waiting for me to be discouraged, and to leave.
It was then I saw: Harvey’s left ear had been injured. It looked mangled as if it had been partly bitten off and was covered in ugly dark scabs, all but hidden by his straggly hair.
“Harvey, what happened to you? My God.”
“What—where?” Laughing irritably Harvey tried to pass off my alarm as some curious foible of my own.“Your ear. Here.” Gingerly, I meant to touch the mangled ear but Harvey pushed my hand away.
“There’s nothing wrong with my ear. Jesus!” Harvey’s sallow face was flushed with embarrassment. I remembered how, as a child, usually a very well behaved boy, Harvey would suddenly flare up in anger if one of our sisters teased him a little too long or made a gesture to touch him.
I remembered the lanky-limbed “good” boy striking out with his fists. Kicking.
He turned on me, furious. It was the first time since I’d stepped into his apartment that Harvey had actually looked at
me.
“What about you? It looks like somebody blackened your eyes. Your face is bruised. What the hell happened to
you
?”
I’d forgotten my accident entirely. My face was more or less numb, and no longer throbbed with pain.
“I—I had an accident. I slipped on a staircase, and . . .”
Harvey clearly disbelieved me; nor did my explanation sound very plausible, even to me.
“I wasn’t
beaten
.
”
“Well. I wasn’t beaten, either.”
“But your ear looks mutilated. Part of the lobe is missing . . .”
Harvey ran his fingers rapidly over the scarred ear. “It was an accident, too. Dargo mistook me for someone else.”
“That horrible dog? He attacked you?”
“Leander—that’s Dargo’s master—wasn’t to blame. Leander wouldn’t hurt
me
. But it was a confused scene, there was a lot going on and the dog got confused. Such things happen, in Grindell Park.”
Wryly, Harvey rubbed the scabby ear. And then I saw that the tip of his little finger was missing, too, on his right hand.
A
night passed, and another day, and a night. Harvey was gentlemanly enough to lend me his bed—but such a lumpy, smelly bed, with grungy bedclothes and a pillow that looked as if it had been flattened with a baseball bat; when I asked Harvey for clean sheets he laughed at me and said the God damn sheets would be cleaned when someone took the laundry to the Laundromat, how else?
I thought this was probably an invitation, in my brother’s oblique way, to take the laundry to a Laundromat for him; to stay a while longer, and be of help.
Of course, Harvey would never have appealed to me directly.
So I drove to the nearest Laundromat, which was on Camden Avenue a half-mile away. There was a grocery store close by so I set out for the store while Harvey’s laundry was being washed.
And there on the sidewalk was Leander taller and more savage-looking in sunlight, half his face a lurid tattoo and dreadlocks falling down his back.
“Hiya l’l dude. How’s it goin.”
I was trying not to acknowledge him, not to see him. Except of course Leander recognized me and knew exactly who I was.
The relief was, Leander didn’t have the pig-pit-bull with him, straining at the leash. It seemed strange to see him alone on the sidewalk, not unlike an ordinary pedestrian. He said, in a mock-accusing voice: “Y’know—you’ brother owes somebody a sum. He told you this, eh? Like six hundred eighty-eight dollars the fucker owe. You will pay, eh?”
“I will pay—why?”
“You brother say you are here to help him. You here to get him well again. He love you, he say. My sister is the one of all the world, I love.”
Leander spoke extravagantly. His speech was a kind of music. What he said was unbelievable but he spoke with such sincerity, you wanted to believe. As if it was Harvey and not Leander who spoke: Harvey the young idealist and not the burnt-out Harvey who was now.
“Well. I love Harvey, too.”
“There you go, girl! That be good for both.”
The dark-skinned boy loomed over me smiling and twitching his lips that were thick, protuberant. As his eyes were protuberant, like the eyes of a primitive African carving. The tattoo looked painted-on, savage; it appeared to be a copy of the Maori tribal tattoo that the ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson had had tattooed on half his face. Leander’s breath, too, was fierce—combustible. Heat lifted from his oily-dark skin, where he’d left partway open a smart black suede coat that fell to his knees; beneath the coat, he was wearing just a suede vest and a gold chain.
I said I didn’t have so much money. I said I was a student, like my brother.
Leander said, sneering, “You too old, be a student! Fuck that bullshit, man! Neither of you, specially
him
. Ain’t be any asshole gon believe you be
students
of—what?”
“I am a—a graduate student—cultural anthropology—”
“Cuntchural ’pology—bull
shit.
Like you’ brother sayin he gon be some kinda preacher. Is that fucked, man! He owe us this sum six hundred ninety-eight dollars, man. It goin up all the time, man—’int’rest.’ He say you come here, gon help him out.”
“But I—I don’t have six hundred dollars . . .”
In fact, of course I did have six hundred dollars. I had somewhere beyond sixteen hundred dollars, in a banking account near the University.
This was my stipend, or rather part of it. Monthly installments were wired to the account, not much, but enough to cover my expenses month to month. I had to suppose that Harvey too had such an arrangement at the Seminary, or had had such an arrangement before he’d dropped out.
Leander leaned close to me as if he could read my thoughts. I felt a sensation of faintness, quickness of breath. I thought
He can’t hurt me here in front of witnesses.
Yet—were there “witnesses” on Camden Avenue? Traffic moving in an erratic stream of stops and starts—a predominance of vans, trucks, buses—a scattering of dark-skinned individuals waiting at a bus stop—a few grim-faced pedestrians. In this part of Trenton, no one dallied: everyone had a mission, to get somewhere else. If Leander threatened me, or attacked me, would anyone so much as glance in my direction? Would anyone
care?
He was laughing at me. Between us there was a bond of some kind: as if we’d known each other in the past, intimately.
The Maori tattoo: an eerie curdled-cream-color, bracketing half his face like shark’s teeth.
“He say you’ name is—
Lyd-jai?
You gon be my friend, girl—you see. There’s ways of payin back what you’ brother owe, we work out just fine betwin us,
Lyd-jai.
”
These were ominous words. I did not quite hear these words.
I did hear
Lyd-jai
. Harvey must have spoken with Leander just recently, without my knowledge, telling Leander my name.
Leander reached out to touch my face—to frame my face in his hands. His movements were snaky-quick, I had no time to pull away.
Long fingers framing my face, a pressure of thumbs at the corners of my eyes.
“You be pretty-girl, you’ eyes some kinda
blue
—like sky. But not Trenton sky.”
Leander spoke with a mocking sort of tenderness. I stood very still, not breathing; just slightly on my toes, as he was pulling upward at my head, straining my neck.
He leaned his savage smiling face to mine. His nostrils were enormous. And the dark-purplish lips enormous. At the corners of my eyes, the pressure of his fingers tightened. I tried not to panic thinking
He could gouge out my eyes. He could snap my neck. He is restraining himself.
Instead, Leander stooped and took hold of my lower lip in his teeth. It wasn’t a kiss—it was a bite: a quick sharp nasty bite of my lower lip.
Then, a sudden release.
Laughter in my face, and release.
Dazed, I stumbled away. I managed to find a tissue in my handbag, to press against my bleeding mouth.
At first I wasn’t sure if it was blood that I was tasting, or saliva that seemed to be flooding my mouth.
If he is infected. HIV, AIDS.
I walked away—no one on the street seemed to have noticed Leander and me.
Or, if anyone had noticed, he had not intervened.
I was headed for—where?—a grocery store.
Pinneo’s Market
: a corner store with a small littered parking lot.
Possibly Leander was watching me, hands on his hips, standing behind me. Or maybe he’d disappeared.
Grocery store!—food store! There was virtually no food in Harvey’s refrigerator. I recalled my parents enjoining me to shop for Harvey, cook for him, make sure that he ate . . . But I had to feed myself, too. By mid-morning of this first full day in Trenton, I was ravenously hungry.
In the little grocery store, which looked to be very old, family owned, smelling of Mediterranean spices, cloves of raw garlic, black olives, I pushed a rickety cart along narrow, congested aisles of mostly canned goods. Out of nowhere a boldly bright girl of about nineteen, with toffee-colored skin, and dyed-cranberry hair in stiff cornrows, approached me. At first I thought she worked in the store, then I saw that she was a customer, or had followed me inside.
“Say, girl—that my cousin L’nd’r I saw you just now talking with. Girl, I wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t—what?”
“Wouldn’t hang out none with L’nd’r. That be a mistake. Get too close with that type, y’know? L’nd’r no common cit’zen.”
The girl’s smile was a sneering sort of smile, yet not unfriendly. She was a gorgeous young woman of about my height, much fleshier than I was, with thick crimson lips and heavily made-up eyes like a model in a rap-music video.
“Girl, you hearin me? You lookin kinda—lost. What you got to know is, my cousin L’nd’r is not one for trifling.”
“He—he’s a friend of my brother’s . . .”
The girl laughed as if I’d said something witty.
“Girl, he ain’t no friend of any
brother
. Believe me, girl. You better run-like-hell in some other direction from L’nd’r is what I’m saying.”
“Thank you. I will ‘run-like-hell’ when Leander comes near, I
promise
.”
The girl laughed. She introduced herself as Maralena. I meant to continue shopping but she followed close after me. “There’s no good buyin ‘fresh produce’ in any store like this. It’s all old-stuff, see. You get it home, it’s goin brown. Just get like can-things, bottle-things, like that. Freezer-things, you got to check the date. He put the old crap up front, the new stuff at the back. You got to use your thinking, a place like this. He gonna cheat you he see you some white-girl dropped by ain’t gon be a steady customer.”
I felt a sensation of warmth for Maralena. She looked nothing like her dark-skinned cousin but she was as exotic as he with her beautifully cornrowed hair and glamorous eyes. She smelled strongly of something fruity, sweet—hair pomade? Her mouth was swollen-looking as if it had been vigorously kissed and sucked.
She wore clothes in layers. Long-sleeved black T-shirt over a tight little black short-sleeved T-shirt. Tight black skirt that barely covered her buttocks and beneath thin black leggings and black boots to the knee.
I’d placed a few items in the rickety cart. Pasta in a cardboard box, cans of “spaghetti” sauce. Boxes of cereal. A jar of applesauce, a quart container of yogurt, a container of vitamin-D-fortified milk. And cans of condensed soup. At the checkout counter I hoped Maralena would have gone away but there she was waiting for me, checking her cell phone. When she moved her head, the cornrowed plaits rippled.
“I better walk you to you’ car, girl. Maybe come along, you goin to Grindell Park. Don’t want nobody hittin on you.”
W
hy are you here. Why living in such a place.
What are these people to you. Harvey, answer me!
But Harvey shrugged off my questions. Harvey seemed scarcely aware of his surroundings. Of his old life as a seminary student he’d brought few clothes, books in boxes scattered about the apartment, folders of manuscript drafts, notes, and photocopied texts. (The texts were in languages unknown to me—extinct languages like Aramaic, Attic Greek, Koine Greek, Sanskrit and Latin.) Often Harvey hid away in his bedroom—(a squalid room he needn’t have forbade me to enter, one glance inside was enough to dissuade me)—working on translations of certain of these texts, or on his own “private” project.
This was encouraging, I thought. Harvey was still connected with his scholarly work; he had not given up entirely.
“Certainly I haven’t
quit
. I never
quit
. I am in a kind of
suspended time,
that’s all.”
“But—is it an official leave? Does your advisor know where you are? Are you still getting money from your fellowship?”
“I refuse to be interrogated,” Harvey said coldly. “Worry about your own fellowship.”
Several times, I begged Harvey to share with me what he was working on. To read to me, for instance, a passage of Biblical Aramaic, which I had never heard read aloud, and then to translate it for me.
“No. Not possible.”
“But why not?”
“I said
no
.”
“But—I’m interested in Aramaic. In the cosmology of the Hebrew Bible. My work with the Eweian text, the theme of the ‘creation of the world and of the first man and woman’—all those instances of ‘sacred births’—I’m very interested, Harvey.”
“You don’t know enough to be ‘interested’ in my subject.”
Coldly and cruelly my brother spoke. But then, a moment later, I saw that his creased face shone with tears.
He’d begun to forget, he told me. His knowledge of ancient languages was “leaking” from his brain. He had to work many times longer at translating just a passage, than he’d worked a year ago . . . Sometimes he couldn’t recognize a word and when he looked it up in a dictionary he saw that it was a common word, one he knew well.
I persuaded Harvey to show me the photocopied text which he was trying to translate and of course it was incomprehensible to me. Yet, like the musical cadences of Leander’s and Marabella’s speech, fascinating.
Codes to be decoded. Secrets to be revealed.
Just to acknowledge the forbidden mystery. To approach it.
* * *
There was a room in Harvey’s apartment that must have been at one time a child’s room. A nursery.
A small room overlooking, at a little distance, desolate Grindell Park where drug dealers and their customers did business through daylight hours and well into twilight when their furtive and unvarying figures dissolved into night.
Take the room, no one’s using it, Harvey said. He’d given up expecting me to leave.
I had given up expecting to leave, for the time being.
For I was shopping now for Harvey, and preparing meals for him, as for myself.
I was able to work in these new surroundings, I’d discovered. A curious thrill came over me opening my familiar Eweian text in this new place, spreading out my papers, translator’s dictionary, drafts. Harvey’s apartment was not wired and so I could work on my computer only as a word processor; but if I wanted to do research on the Internet, I could take the laptop to the Grindell Park library which was open for limited hours three days a week, and plug it in there.
My room I swept, cleaned. There was even a table to serve as a desk and another, lower table, upon which I could spread my things.
Noises in the street, or on Camden Avenue, or in the park were not distracting as one might think. At the University, voices in the apartment beneath mine, or on the stairs, or the sound of music at a little distance were very annoying to me, as incursions on my privacy and my need to concentrate; here in Trenton, it came to be silence that was disconcerting for it is silence that precedes the most jarring noises.
In the distance, gunshots. More than once, I’d heard.
Leander and his flat-faced friend Tin—(I think that was the improbable name:
Tin
)—sometimes dropped by the apartment unannounced. And sometimes, with them Marabella.
At the window-table I sat staring. I was strangely calm, though apprehensive. If a script was being prepared it was not a script I could decipher, as I could not decipher Biblical Aramaic, and scarcely Eweian. Fantasies came to me as I stared at rainwater spilling out of a gutter beside the window, streaming black rain on a steep roof spilling out and falling in a noisy cascade, water losing its transparency and turning to blood. I thought
Harvey would not save me. I must save myself.
* * *
“Help me, Lydia! I th-think I need help . . .”
My brother’s skin was ashen. His teeth were chattering.
Like bones rattling loosely in a tight taut envelope of skin his teeth were chattering audibly and he was leaning on me weak-kneed soon as I’d returned from working in the Grindell Park library—(one of the branch library’s few patrons, at a table still bright-polished as if it had not been used much in recent years and an object of some smiling attention from the sole white middle-aged female librarian)—and out of a heap of bedclothes and towels on the floor of his bedroom I found a ratty blanket to pull over him as he lay shuddering in the lumpy-mattressed bed. For the past eighteen hours Harvey had been remote and irritable and when I’d returned from the library with my laptop he had not unlocked the door for some minutes so I’d pressed my ear to the door listening jealously
Are they there? Leander, Maralena?
—but when finally Harvey stumbled to the door to open it he was alone, so terribly alone, my brother who’d once been a tall handsome bookish man now inches shorter and one of his bony shoulders higher than the other and his hair disheveled, his breath fierce as gasoline, staggering as I bore his weight into the dank bedroom, onto the dank bed, and if someone had been in the apartment with him there was no trace remaining except a smell of something acrid and harsh, had they been smoking hashish?—a jealous thought came to me as I shook down the thermometer, unexpectedly discovering a thermometer in Harvey’s very dirty bathroom in a corroded medicine cabinet above the badly stained sink; though I knew relatively little of first aid, as of anything practical in our lives, I did know that a sudden spike in temperature possibly signaling an infection often presented as convulsive shivering. And so I shook the thermometer down to 96˚F, then inserted it beneath my brother’s tongue that looked pale with slime, held the thermometer in place as Harvey continued to shiver and shudder and when at last I could read the thermometer the little red column of mercury indicated a temperature of 100.2 degrees. This was not dangerously high, yet—was it?—I wasn’t sure. Swaths of Harvey’s body were hot to the touch yet other parts clammy-cold. I gave him a double-strength Tylenol and brought him glasses of water insisting that he drink for he must not become dehydrated—(if he was taking drugs, a possible side effect might be dehydration, constipation)—and through the long night I watched over him at his bedside as he slept fitfully amid noises from the street, car engines and door-slammings and shouts, drunken laughter, in the distance the now-familiar sounds of gunfire—single shots, repeated shots—wailing sirens like maddened confetti illuminating the nighttime sky above the doomed city of Trenton; closer by, the seething life of Grindell Park which was more populated by night than by day though invisible in the night for which I felt an irrational envy, and yearning; for my labor with the Eweian manuscript was so very slow, painstakingly slow as if I were pushing a small bean across a tilted floor with my nose, craven and abashed and utterly broken-backed pushing this tiny black bean with my nose while all around me was a rich and unfathomable life unknown and unnameable by one like myself.
Some white-girl ain’t gon be a steady customer
.
Harvey moaned in his sleep. Tossed and flung his limbs in his sleep. I wondered what drug he’d taken, what Leander was selling him—cocaine?—heroin?— or maybe Harvey wasn’t using drugs but was self-infected, the toxins in his body now concentrated, gaining strength. Near dawn his forehead didn’t feel so scalding-hot to my touch and he seemed to have ceased sweating though his T-shirt and boxers were damp with sweat and smelled of his body. And now near dawn the jarring seductive unfathomable noises of the night were subsiding. A sound of heavy truck-traffic on Camden Avenue, signaling a new day. And even the sirens had subsided. For all who were to be taken to the ER, or the Mercer County morgue, or to one or another of the city’s detention facilities, had now been taken, and admitted. And I thought how easy life is for those who merely live it without hoping to understand it; without hoping to “decode,” classify and analyze it; without hoping to acquire a quasi-invulnerable meta-life which is the life of the mind and not the triumphant life of the body. Breathe in, breathe out. My lower lip throbbed in recalled surprise, pain. Yet I had not recoiled from the pain.
You gon be my friend—you see. There’s ways of paying back what you’ brother owe.
In the morning Harvey recalled little of the night. Laughing wryly as if he’d had some kind of hangover—“Metaphysical, felt like.”
On the table we used for meals, in a corner of the living room, I’d placed for him a bowl of Cheerios, a small container of yogurt, a pitcher of milk and a half-grapefruit from Pinneo’s that wasn’t yet over-ripe. Harvey’s mouth moved as if he were unable to speak. He stared unshaven, red-eyed and barefoot and his hair straggling in his face. He had pulled off the sweat-soaked underwear in which he’d slept but he had not showered, only just pulled on T-shirt and boxers from the bureau drawer of recently laundered underwear I’d established for him. He muttered something that resembled
Thank you Lydia. Thank you for my life.
* * *
The (very dirty) bathroom—(corroded) medicine cabinet—stained sink, stained toilet bowl, stained linoleum floor—holding my breath and my nostrils pinched I managed to clean, scrub, even polish to a degree with Dutch Cleanser, Windex, mangled sponges and paper towels.
* * *
He had an addiction, he confessed.
Scattered about the apartment were ghostly white plastic bags imprinted
BOOK BAZAAR
, I’d been noticing since I’d first stepped into the apartment.
A secondhand bookstore on State Street, downtown Trenton. He’d made “raids” on Book Bazaar he said, since he’d first discovered it.
I’d noticed of course: in stacks on windowsills and any available surfaces were battered-looking books, some of them hardcover and many paperback; some of them looking as if they’d been left in the rain, and left to dry in the sun; some of them with titles like
Sacred Texts of the Hebrew Bible, Intertextuality in Exekiel, A History of the Religions of Late Antiquity, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible,
and some with such titles as
Visions of Hell, An Anatomy of the Apocalypse, The Millennium Comics, Ballads of Heaven and Hell, Was Jesus Gay?,
Jesus’ Son.
These were recent purchases intended to supplement Harvey’s older scholarly texts which he’d brought in boxes to Grindell Park, yet unpacked.
An addiction, Harvey said. Like a sickness.
(Not an addiction I’d expected Harvey to confess though I didn’t tell him that.)
For only books could help, Harvey believed. The human predicament.
Human predicament?
Human
fate
.
I remembered from our childhood that Harvey was always reading—and writing. Always my older brother had felt that the next book he picked up might be
the book
to change his life and always he was disappointed—to a degree. There was the Holy Bible—he’d naively believed to be the word of God until he’d begun studying the history of the Hebrew Bible in college—one of those courses cunningly titled
The Bible as Literature.
Still, Harvey believed that the Bible contained great riches, to be properly decoded. Books provided not only histories of the world but also wisdom to help with one’s personal life; even, in his particular circumstances, if he was lucky, with his Aramaic translation. So, he said, he was always
trolling
at the secondhand bookstore to see what might change his life.
He had a friend at Book Bazaar, he said. His only
true friend
in Trenton.
Harvey went on to say that books were the soul of human civilization and that a civilization without books would lose its soul. All that was significant had already been written and was waiting to be read, Harvey said.
The more ancient the text, the closer to the source of Truth.
The more recent the text, the farther from the source of Truth.
In the past several decades since the advent of the Internet, things are ever more swiftly flattening and thinning, Harvey said. You could acquire vast quantities of data but could not recall it after five minutes. You could process such data through your brain only with difficulty. The human brain was (de)volving, with each generation. It was like pouring water on an actual, exposed brain—most of the water just runs off. A few minuscule puddles might be retained but that’s it.
Harvey was one to talk! Missing part of an ear, a finger, and more recently his right leg had begun to seem shorter than the left.
* * *
One day, I drove downtown to Book Bazaar on State Street.
How disappointing Trenton was! I had anticipated an interesting old “historic” city, landmark buildings, churches—instead, the city center seemed to have undergone an urban renewal of such perfunctory architectural design, or lack of design, that there remained not a single building of interest; all were functional, unattractive storefront, slickly synthetic as a cheap stage-set. But 2291 State Street was at the edge of the city center in a yet-unbulldozed neighborhood of older buildings: basement, first, second, and third floors crammed with books.