High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Raising her voice to be heard over the racket of the train Plastic Girl started telling me about this place she was expected at, some kind of residence she wasn’t going back to, halfway-house, halfway-to-Hell house, except somebody there owed her, had clothes of hers and personal documents so she’d have to return except not by any fucking front entrance where you had to sign in, she’d get back inside by a window and it wouldn’t be broad fucking daylight, it would be night. I listened to Plastic Girl’s voice like it was a radio voice. It was a voice beamed to me that had nothing to do with me. Distracted by Plastic Girl’s heavy breasts swaying inside the T-shirt, and her belly above the zipper-crotch of the khakis pushing out round and hard like a drum. The bullet-shape silver ring that was the sign between us, that (maybe) Plastic Girl had seen also. And the thought came to me Is this the one? A female?

  But at the next station a swarm of people entered the car. A man pushed between us like Plastic Girl didn’t exist. Rude behavior but he was taller and bigger than Plastic Girl and knew she would give him no trouble. Smiling sidelong at me like he knew me, or was pretending to know me, this was a game we’d played before, him and me. (Was it?) A woman seated close by decided to move to another seat, uncomfortable with Plastic Girl and now this new guy hanging above her, each of them drawn to me, as eyes were drawn to me generally, and right away the guy took her place before Plastic Girl could sit down. You could see that Plastic Girl was angry. Baring her teeth like she’d have liked to tear at someone with those teeth. I looked up at her appealing with my eyes, sorry! I was sorry!—but Plastic Girl shrugged and moved off, took a seat farther down the car that had just opened up. As the train lurched I could see her shaved head glowing like a bulb and the platinum-blond quills quivering like antennae. I knew: Plastic Girl would keep her eyes on me, she would not let me go so easily.

  The man beside me nudged me—it was the first actual touch of this night, I reacted with a start—asking did I remember him? Huhhh?

  Did I remember him? Dunk’s the name.

  Dunk! I did not remember any Dunk.

  Laughed to hear such a silly name—Dunk.

  Sure you do, sweetheart. You remember Dunk.

  Then realizing yes I’d met Dunk before. More than once before. Why I’d felt sort of strange seeing him, sort of protected-by-him, the way you do with some individuals, though not with most men, not ever. A few weeks ago we’d got to talking in the subway and he’d taken me for coffee (at Union Square). Possibly I’d been dressed then as I was dressed now. And Dunk in the fake-buckskin jacket he was wearing now, and his steel-gray hair pulled back in a little pigtail at the nape of his neck as it was now. (Had to smile at this little pigtail since Dunk was near-bald except for a band of hair around his bumpy-looking head he’d let grow to pull into a pigtail.) There was something old and comfortable about Dunk, pothead hippie from long ago. Dunk said he remembered me, yes he remembered Lorelei, hey did I know I’d broken his heart? Dunk made a weepy jocular sound like a wheezing heart might make but mostly he was needing to blow his nose which he did in a dirty tissue, making a honking noise so I laughed. That was Dunk’s power: to make you laugh. The dirty wadded tissue in his hand was the sign for in my pocket was a dirty tissue stained with blood.

  Dunk had been a psychiatric social worker for the city. Had to quit after twenty-three years and take disability pay to save his soul, he said. In the coffee shop at Penn Station he told me of his life lapsing into a singsong voice like a lullaby. You could see that Dunk had told his story many times before but Dunk had no other story to tell. He was very lonely, he would confide. His skin exuded heat like a radiator. Made me laugh—(almost)—how his right eye drifted out of focus while his left eye had me pinned. In the coffee shop Dunk paid for my coffee and for something to eat, Dunk believed that I was too skinny. He said that I would never mature if I was malnourished. He said that my organs would age prematurely and that I would die prematurely. He told me of his patient who’d threatened to kill him and he’d said what difference did it make, we’re all going to die anyway aren’t we. He’d been so depressed. And something terrible had happened to his patient, and Dunk was to blame though no one knew. Though Dunk would not confide in anyone except me.

  Then, Dunk said, he got bored with being depressed. I was listening with just half my mind. The other half yearning for you. By this time I’d realized that Dunk was not my destiny.

  This night, Dunk is asking would I come with him, we could have a meal together. Politely I said thank you, but I have an appointment with someone else.

  Who is my destiny? You?

  Whoever it was, I didn’t see. Never saw his face. Never saw but a shadow in the corner of my eye. Great bird spreading its wings. (I believe it was a man. I am sure it was a man. But even that fact, I can’t be one hundred percent certain of.) At the Fourteenth Street station. My plan was to take the uptown to Fifty-seventh Street. Past Times Square. I’d been disappointed in Times Square lately. The area around Carnegie Hall is very different. Lorelei would be more visible there. Now standing at the edge of the platform a little apart from a small crowd gathered for the next train. A few yards maybe. I didn’t believe that I was standing dangerously close to the edge. Something on the sole of my high-heeled sandal, something sticky and disgusting like a large wad of gum. And this gum was like a tongue. Ugh! Trying to scrape it off my shoe when I saw, or half-saw, your shadow in the corner of my eye, advancing upon me from the left. The thought came to me swift and yearning Please touch me because it was such a familiar thought, I did not believe that I was in danger. Touch me even if you hurt me. Oh please.

  Then I was falling. I was screaming, and I was falling. It happened so fast! Faster than I can recount. Though even then thinking You touched me at last. It was a human touch. You chose me because I am beautiful and desirable and young. You chose me over all the others.

  But already my happiness has ended. I have fallen onto the track. I have fallen helpless, on my back. A smell of oil in my widened nostrils, something musty and cold. Out of nowhere the train is speeding. Oncoming headlights. My body is a boneless rag doll flopping and being crushed by the train. The emergency brakes are thrown but it’s too late, it was too late as soon as you moved up stealthily behind me smiling whispering Lorelei! Lorelei! in your way of cruel teasing. You pushed me from behind, hard. Swift and hard the palms of your hands flat against my back between my shoulder blades. As if you’ve planned the act, you’ve rehearsed the act numerous times to perfection, and in the very act of pushing you are turning aside, to the left, taking care that the momentum of your act doesn’t carry you over the edge of the platform and onto the track below with your screaming victim. And you are running, you are pushing past bystanders running and gone with your mysterious cruel smile as below the platform on the tracks inside the terrible grinding wheels my body is caught up, my legs severed at the knees, a wrenching of bone, my left arm is torn off at the shoulder, my skull crushed as you’d crush a bird’s egg beneath your careless feet, scarcely knowing you’d crushed it. The silly high-heeled sandals have been tossed from my feet and will be found a dozen yards away. My blood is rushing from my body to congeal with the cold oil and filth of the tracks. My body is crushed, disfigured. You would no longer stare at my beauty. You would no longer recognize Lorelei. On the platform above, strangers are screaming. I want to cry, these strangers care for me. In that instant, they care for me. Fellow passengers who’d disapproved of me in the trains have now forgiven me and are crying Help! Get help! Oh God get help! A tall husky girl who might be Plastic Girl runs to the edge of the platform, can’t see me because my body is hidden by the train skidding to a stop.

  And Dunk, slack-mouthed in horror. Dunk with his bald-hippie pigtail gone gray. Dunk stunned and sick with grief he has lost me for the final time.

  And you others who never knew me except to glimpse a girl pushed in front of a speeding train to her death, these others grieving for me, too. Never knew me in life but wil
l never never forget me as I am in death.

  Please love me? My eyes beg. Glancing at the window beside your seat, uptown train flying through the tunnel, lights in the car flickering off, back on, off again and back on like the sensation before sleep. Lights in the car so bright you can’t see outside, only your reflection in the grimy window, my own face, and sometimes you don’t recognize that face.

  Please love me? I love you.

  The Rescuer

  1.

  A call came from home. Your brother, they said.

  It was like the crashing fall of a stalactite—a giant stalactite made of ice.

  What of my brother, I said. I was the youngest sister of the brood and could not see what any of them had to do with me.

  The voice was my father’s but funneled through some sort of tunnel- or time-warp. These were people who refused to use cell phones and did not “do” email and their way of communication was the old-fashioned land-phone prominent in their kitchen on its special little table.

  “Your brother needs help. He is not well. He refuses to speak to us and will no longer pick up the phone. We have tried and failed as you know. God knows we have tried and failed with Harvey and we are not young any longer. You are young, and live close to him.”

  This was false. This was a lie. I lived at least two hundred miles from Harvey. It was all I could stammer—“No! You live closer.”

  My father explained that Harvey had taken a leave of absence from the seminary and was living now in Trenton, New Jersey.

  The term leave of absence was enunciated with care. There was the wish, on my father’s part, that this term not be interpreted as dropped out, been expelled, failed.

  I had not heard this news. I was stunned and even a little frightened to be told that (1) my brother lived sixty miles from me; (2) my brother had dropped out of the seminary.

  My God-besotted brother who was the only person I’d ever heard of who, already in middle school, was convinced that it was his destiny to be a “man of God.”

  This information was too confusing for me to process. My father continued to speak as my mother, who must have been leaning her ear close to the receiver, spoke also, more forcibly. The overlapping voices made me feel that my brain had split and the two halves were being shaken like chestnuts in a metal container—noise, static, all sense of words lost.

  “I can’t see Harvey. I—I have no time for—”

  “Your poor brother is alone, and you know how innocent and unworldly he is. You know he has ‘moods’—‘fugues.’ Please look in upon him, as you are his sister and our dear daughter. Be kind to him, if you can.”

  Badly I wanted to break the connection. This was so unfair!

  Mercilessly the voices droned on: “And if you could shop for him. And now and then cook a meal for him if you would be so kind...”

  “I can’t. I don’t have time. I have my own life now.”

  “God bless you, dear. If you can do these things for your poor brother, and your parents. We are so helpless here. We are not so well ourselves. We are not so young any longer and already the temperature is so cold at night and the wind whistling through this old house, and the terrible winter looming ahead...”

  I’d stopped listening. A pounding of blood in my ears drowned out the yammering voices. I muttered Good night! and broke the connection.

  Will not. Can’t make me. No longer. I am not your captive daughter now.

  Hurrying on the stairs and talking excitedly to myself and my heel caught in something frayed and suddenly I was plunging forward, downward, headfirst down the remainder of the stairs to strike the hardwood floor and for a stunned moment lying motionless trying to determine if I was alive, or not; if I was conscious, or not; if I’d broken any bones, or stimulated my heart into a wild crazed tachycardia; a chill blackness came over me, like something being swept by a faceless custodian with one of those wide brushy brooms; and someone was shaking my shoulder gently but urgently, a concerned face hovered above mine—Hello? Are you all right? Let me help you...

  One of the young-women residents in Newcomb Hall. A kindly individual with a familiar face though I didn’t know her name and now in my deep embarrassment I could only stammer thank you, yes I am all right, I am fine, pressing a wad of tissues against my nose that was leaking blood, thank you so much.

  Eager to escape! For I could not bear being exposed as clumsy, and pitiable.

  Out of the residence hall then, walking swiftly if not very steadily in the cold wet air and I was halfway to my destination when I realized that I’d rushed outside without a coat. Snowflakes melting in my hair, on my eyelashes and warm cheeks.

  Leaves stuck to the soles of my feet like sticky tongues. I felt a sing of terror kicking at them.

  For a frightening moment I could not recall where I was. Where I was headed. Pulses beat angrily in my head I am not your captive now!

  I remembered then, I was due at Jester College, one of the University’s residential colleges, where the master of the college was hosting a Newcomb Fellows reception. By the time I arrived at the Gothic archway of the master’s entrance, my parents’ hateful words were dissipated and lost.

  In the Graduate College of the University, I was one of eleven Newcomb Fellows. We were four young women and seven young men and we were all graduates of good second-tier universities from which we’d graduated summa cum laude and for this reason the great University founded in the eighteenth century, buttressed against financial crises with an endowment of $20 billion, had cast out lifelines to us, to pull us out of the choppy cannibal sea and onto the floating island of the historic University. We were scholars in the humanities and social sciences; our futures shimmered before us like the most seductive of mirages—academic appointments at good universities, freedom to devote to scholarship, a commitment to teaching, too—a protected life, utterly enviable. My brother Harvey, older than I by several years, had preceded me into this insulated and protected world; he was a scholar-seminarian, or had been. I was twenty-three and very ambitious. My face was bland as smooth-carved soapstone yet felt to me, from within, like one of those pen-and-ink drawings by Matisse of sharp-featured females. My voice was low, murmurous, and gracious; my voice would be described as a distinctly “feminine” voice; if I did not modulate it, my voice would resemble the harsh cracked cry of a famished bird.

  At the reception, Newcomb Fellows were introduced to older post-docs and professors in the humanities. At such occasions, I maneuvered myself very well. I am a small light-boned person with a pleasing smile that lights up as automated lights switch on when a human presence approaches. And unobtrusively I made a small evening meal out of the appetizers served at the reception, for I was very frugal, and meant to save money in any way that I could; in my book bag, I secreted away a few extra appetizers wrapped in paper napkins, for midnight when I was likely to be famished.

  My scholarly dissertation was to be in the cultural anthropology of religion. I was studying with Professor A. who was a world authority on the both the Abrahamic religions of Africa and several indigenous African religions with long histories in the regions now known as Zimbabwe and Sudan. Professor A. had entrusted me with a rare manuscript in the now mostly extinct Eweian language, which had been several times translated, but never, in Professsor A.’s opinion, accurately; under his guidance, I would translate it, and interpret it.

  At the crowded reception I sighted Professor A. across the room. His gaze moved over me, I thought, without recognition; but perhaps the elderly white-haired gentleman had not seen me.

  Others were glancing toward me—at my face which was throbbing with heat. A thin trickle of something liquid ran from my nose but I’d captured it in a paper napkin, I’d thought, and blotted it away, before anyone could see.

  Someone asked if I’d hurt myself, my eyes and my nose appeared to be bruised. Quickly I denied this. I had not hurt myself. I was fine except—a family crisis made it necessary for me to leave the University
for a few days, unavoidably.

  Family crisis? What was this?

  It was utterly shocking to me—my crow-voice, not my soft-modulated feminine voice, had spoken, uttering words I had not meant to speak.

  Now I worried that there were blood-drops on my clothes. I could not bring myself to glance downward, to see.

  2.

  It was a surprise and a shock to see where my brother was living.

  The house at 11 Grindell Park did not even look inhabited. It was a weatherworn English Tudor that had once been impressive, you could see—like other, similar houses built in a semi-circle around the derelict park where at the apex of the semi-circle was a small Greek Revival temple that appeared to be a public library, its columns and walls now defaced with graffiti. The park was deserted except for a scattering of homeless individuals who sat, or lay, unmoving as corpses, and dark-skinned boys with pants halfway down their hips as in gangsta films and videos. There were a few others, adult males, who seemed to be arranged like chess pieces, each near-stationary in his own part of the park yet keenly aware, you sensed, of the others. You were made to think of vultures except these were ground-creatures and the storm-damaged trees of the abandoned little urban park would have been too weak to support their weight.

  Grindell Park was just inside the Trenton city limits, two blocks from traffic-clogged Camden Avenue. In this part of the city Camden Avenue was a succession of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and small businesses of which a conspicuous number were shuttered and their properties for rent. Beyond the busy street was a neighborhood of run-down wood frame houses, many of these for rent or abandoned as well. And then there was Grindell Park, another block farther from Camden Avenue, a once-prestigious Trenton neighborhood. It was mystifying to me, as to my parents, why Harvey had moved to Trenton, where he could have known no one; and why to such a neighborhood?