High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread

by Joyce Carol Oates

  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 storefronts, 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.

  Old books, many-times-sold books, battered books, wetted-and-dried books, a repository of strangers’ dreams to be decoded.

  There appeared to be just one clerk in the store—a youngish man in his thirties with his hair in a ponytail, receding hairline like Harvey’s and wire-rimmed glasses like Harvey’s glasses; within seconds of greeting me, he told me his name: “Wystan.” (“My parents named me for W. H. Auden. They were both English majors at Rutgers. Except now it’s just a weird name no one has ever heard of.”) Wystan wore cargo pants low on his narrow hips and a baggy black T-shirt imprinted with BOOK BAZAAR in red letters. Something glinted at his left ear—a little gold stud.

  Wystan stared at me with a peculiar little smile. Eagerly he followed me along the cramped aisles chattering and asking questions. I had the impression that he was lonely: very likely, few customers came into Book Bazaar and very few who looked like me—that is, like a graduate student at a good university, and white-skinned. When Wystan asked who I was, he wasn’t discouraged; with the air of one accustomed to rebuffs he simply changed his tact, and took up other subjects. He boasted to me that one of his duties was to comb through “estate libraries”—cartons of books stored in the basement—he “siphoned off” the very best books—first editions, copies signed by authors like Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Glenway Wescott, Isaac Asimov, Pearl Buck and H. L. Mencken. Once, he’d found a first edition of Innocents Abroad signed with a scrawled signature—just legible as Mark Twain.

  “Did you sell it?” I asked; and Wystan said, snorting in horror, “Sell it? Christ, no! It’s the gem of my personal collection.”

  Adding, in a lowered voice, “And another gem—a first edition of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake.”

  “Really! That must be quite a collector’s item, too. Where did you get it?”

  Wystan smiled slyly, waggling his fingers to suggest that he’d—possibly—stolen it.

  “Oh but—from where?” I tried not to sound shocked or disapproving.

  “A ‘mystery bookshop’ in Tribeca. It wasn’t easy, such a precious first edition wouldn’t be on an open shelf, but—there are ways, if you’re a book-person and in the trade.”

  I wondered why Wystan was telling me such things that did not reflect well upon him. I wondered if they could be true.

  I wondered what Wystan did with his collection. I could not imagine that his living quarters were very safe, if anywhere near this shabby Trenton neighborhood.

  “I sleep with my collection, virtually,” Wystan said, as if reading my thoughts. “My special books are in a bookcase beside my bed, and I’ve arranged a system of strings and little bells, that would alert me if someone tried to take a book.”

  “But when you’re gone, during the day?”

  Wystan frowned. “When I’m gone from a place, it shifts out of focus. It becomes background. I can’t be distracted by thinking of it. But I do have locks and bolts on windows and a double lock on the door of my apartment.”

  Then, a moment later, “Maybe you’ll see my collection, some day.”

  To this startling suggestion, I could not think of any polite reply.

  I worried that Wystan’s employer might overhear him, his voice was so squeaky-strident, but Wystan couldn’t help bragging and making me laugh.

  Next, he tried to talk me into coming into the basement with him—“Just to see what a ‘book mausoleum’ is like”—but I resisted. Not that I feared Wystan so much as I feared the airlessness of such a space. With a lurid sort of zest Wystan described to me how he had to crawl along the floor in certain parts of the (“not always dry”) basement, or clamber and crawl on top of the stacked cartons; he saw ghostly movements in the corners of his eyes and heard whispers and laughter; he even smelled hair oil, he claimed, of “another era.” Yet, he insisted adamantly he “did not succumb” to such ghosts. He did not “believe” in ghosts—“Do you?”

  “No! What a silly question.”

  “Good. We have in common the rationalist’s belief in this world only.”

  How appealing Wystan was, in his clumsy way. He reminded me of my brother when Harvey was being sweet and charming and not sarcastic or mean to me—a rarity.

  And I saw that Wystan was attracted to me. The curious way he peered at my face.

  Maybe noting my swollen lower lip, that had been bitten and bloodied.

  Gallantly Wystan helped me carry some of the books I’d selected from Religion/Anthropology shelves. (Lesser-known titles by Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Clifford Geertz; provocatively titled trade paperbacks Totem, Taboo and Mother-Child Rituals in Africa, and A Cultural History of Infanticide, grimy mass-market paperbacks on many topics including, for Harvey, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Unbelief and Forbidden and Denied: Apocryphal Books of the Bible as well as a half-dozen back issues of Journal of Early Christian Studies.) Each time I selected a book to buy, Wystan marveled at my “judicious taste.” His feeling for me, a mysterious young Caucasian woman who was clearly well educated, who’d entered the run-down secondhand Book Bazaar out of nowhere on a weekday morning, was touchingly clumsy as an oversized beach ball Wystan was obliged to carry in his arms, unable to pass on to another, or to set aside. For a dreamy hour I wandered the aisles of the store feeling as Harvey claimed to feel—that somewhere in all these thousands of books there was a singular book that would speak intimately to me, and change my life—but where was it?

  Or maybe, I’d bought it.

  Finally I told Wystan that I had to leave.

  “So soon? You haven’t seen the third floor—sci-fi, dark fantasy, poetry, women’s studies, gay and lesbian, New Age.”

  “Thank you. But I have to leave.”

  “The basement! The ‘book mausoleum’ that contains unknown treasures...”

  “Thank you, Wystan. Not today.”

  “Next time, then! That’s a promise.”

  Clearly there was no one else in the store, since it was Wystan who checked out my books at the cashier’s counter. In his eagerness to stay at my side he’d ignored another, single, male customer who’d drifted in, and out, of the store without a purchase.

  My precious armload of paperback books came to just thirty-two dollars and ninety-eight cents. This, I paid with cash, but Wystan pressed me to give him my address so that Book Bazaar could send out notices of store events and sales—“It’
s a service to our favored customers.”

  When I looked dubious Wystan said, “Ten percent discount to our favored customers. Regular book sales.”

  But mutely I shook my head no.

  No thanks.

  “Or an email address, then.”

  But I was feeling cautious. No thanks!

  Wystan opened the door for me with a show of gallantry. I had to pass close by his extended arm, and I could smell his particular odor—book-dust, papery-dry-dust, long melancholy afternoons shading into night. Suddenly with a quizzical smile he asked me if I knew Harvey Selden?—and quickly I shook my head no.

  “You remind me of Harvey. Around the eyes, I think. And the nose—you both have a kind of ‘patrician’ nose.”

  My heart beat strangely. Why I felt such alarm, I don’t know. As if I were about to receive a profound and irrevocable revelation, and did not know if I was ready for it.

  Wystan said, with a look of regret, “Harvey is the most remarkable person I’ve met. Not that I know Harvey well—I don’t. Never did. He can read all kinds of crazy languages of ‘antiquity.’ He was translating something from the Bible, he thought would ‘transform’ the world. He used to come into the store two-three times a week when he’d first moved to Trenton in May. Bought lots of books—cheap paperbacks but great choices. He was a ‘seminarian’ he said—on ‘sabbatical’ for a term. But lately, last five weeks or so, I haven’t seen him and I kind of miss him. I’d been saving out some special old books for him. Someone who’d met Harvey here in the store, who sometimes hangs out here, said the other day, really shook me up, that Harvey had died—just last week.”

  “Died! Of what?”

  “In Trenton, it almost doesn’t matter how. Death just comes.”

  “But—how?”

  “That wasn’t clear. A drug overdose, maybe. Or a drug dealer wanting the money Harvey owed him.”

  5.

  Often when I returned home, the apartment was empty.

  A look as of having been ravaged, ransacked.

  Smells of tobacco smoke, or hashish. Distinctive yet inexplicable smells.

  Slowly I would make my way into Harvey’s bedroom, and then his bathroom—hoping I would not find his body collapsed on the floor.

  And in the little nursery at the rear of the apartment—a patch of shadow beneath my desk-table made me start, and cry out in alarm.

  “Oh!”—though I could see that it was nothing.

  Thinking It won’t matter how. It just—comes.

  And who else lived in the quasi-renovated English Tudor at 11 Grindell?

  Harvey knew none of his neighbors. They appeared to be, with the exception of an elderly white couple who lived below Harvey, on the first floor, a shifting population that sometimes included young children, mostly dark-skinned, with a scattering of “whites”—individuals who avoided my eye when we happened to meet in the vestibule, or on the stairs. In one of the third-floor apartments, a few days after I’d arrived to stay with Harvey, there was some sort of medical emergency: a loud siren, loud voices and footsteps on the stairs, a woman’s uplifted frightened voice, shouted instructions and cries and Harvey forbidding me to open the door: “You don’t want to know, Lydia. And I sure don’t, either.”

  Beneath Harvey, on the first floor, lived an elderly white couple who seemed rarely to leave their apartment, surname Baumgarten. They were so quiet, even in the aftermath of noise and clamor in my brother’s apartment, I worried for their well-being—“What if they’ve died, and no one knows? Shouldn’t we check on them?”—and Harvey said, frowning, “No. That’s a terrible idea.”

  Once, I did knock on the Baumgartens’ door, 1B. After a very long time the door was opened a crack, and a single eye, lashless, naked, staring in suspicion, appeared at about the level of my chin.

  Yes? What do you want?—a suspicious whispery voice inquired.

  And I could not think how to reply—Nothing! I want nothing from you only just—some evidence that you are—that you are not—that you are alive.

  But I could not utter such ridiculous words. I could not utter anything convincing or halfway reasonable stammering finally Excuse me! I’m so sorry to interrupt you, I think I have the wrong address...

  The door shut, the door was bolted from within.

  I never caught a glimpse of the Baumgartens again.

  One of the assignments I’d brought to Trenton was a bound galley of a slender book titled Cleansing Rituals: Mother, Infant, Taboo which appeared to be a doctoral dissertation by a young assistant professor of anthropology at UC-Berkeley.

  I felt that familiar thrill of rivalry! Envy.

  Yet: I was determined to be utterly fair and judicious in my review. Where I wasn’t qualified to criticize, I would not criticize. I would look for much to praise.

  It was an honor, I’d thought, and a matter of some pride, that the prestigious Journal of the Anthropology of Religion had asked me to do a brief, five-hundred-word review of the book. It was not common for editors of such a peer-reviewed journal to assign reviews to academicians like myself who were so young, and lacking a Ph.D., and had not yet published books themselves. But the editors of the Journal had heard me present a paper at a conference at Columbia University in September and had sent me the galley to review, to my surprise. Yet more of a surprise was my thesis advisor Professor A.’s reaction: he had scarcely been impressed but rather sourly he’d warned me not to “squander” my energy in transient tasks, at this time in my career when completing a substantial dissertation was crucial.

  I was disappointed, and hurt. It seemed to be a melancholy pattern in my life, I brought to others news of achievements which I would have thought might impress them, or cause them to feel pride for me; but the reaction was totally antipathetic. I could not predict.

  So frequently the term taboo occurs in anthropological research, it would be helpful to know what taboo means.

  But we can know only the taboos of others, which we can coolly deconstruct. Our own, private taboos are hidden to us as the contours of our own brains.

  My subject was a number of linked ancient texts dealing with rituals of childbirth/motherhood. In these texts, there were no father-figures—no father-deities—only the pregnant female, the female-in-childbirth, the female and her infant, and female “spirits” (“demons”?).

  The number of ancient manuscripts dealing with twins must have been hugely disproportionate to the number of twins born, which was a puzzle. In this culture twins were likely to be “sacred twins”—unless they were “demon twins.” The obsessive subject prevailed across different cultures and eras and into the present day in Africa—much about the rituals was similar, yet, unaccountably, there were rituals that seemed to contradict the others.

  Some twins were “sacred” and beloved. Some twins were “demonic” and were to be killed immediately at birth. In one text, the fullness of the moon seemed to be a relevant factor; in another, the nature of the delivery—whether it was exceedingly bloody, for instance. (If the mother died in childbirth, “sacred” twins were reared by the tribe; “demonic” twins were to be executed at once, and not buried with the mother.) Yet these issues were hedged with doubt and ambivalence and the effort of translating the relevant manuscripts was challenging, for there were words that, translated, might mean what they usually meant or their opposite. And there were key words that baffled translators. In such cases infanticide was not considered murder but “ritual cleansing.” Professor A. had written extensively of the puzzles and paradoxes of the Eweian texts which dated from A.D. 700 yet retained older, ancient passages and single words that had become extinct by A.D. 700 so it was not clear what the author of the text meant by them. Professor A. had spent much of his mid-career on this paradoxical subject and had tried to explain to me where the more crucial problems lay. Basically, Professor A. was involved in a genteel feud with other translators and scholars for it was his belief that the texts had been inadequately translated—the (un
clean) infants had not been murdered but in some literal way “cleansed.” There was a Eweian term—sRjAApuna—that can be translated as “cleansing”—“eradicating”—“purifying”—(more rarely) “destroying.” There were recipes for sacred ointments, baths, amulets to “purify”—or “protect”—the mother who had just given birth, who would have been, like all such mothers, then as now, extremely vulnerable to lethal infections; except these ancient people did not know about bacterial infections, only that mothers often died in childbirth, a time of terrible “uncleanliness.” In all this, the taboo functioned mysteriously: some sort of (never-spoken) acknowledgment of the Great Mother, represented as a genial sort of demon with ornamental skulls around her neck.

  Working on the Eweian texts, I sometimes felt that I understood the intent of the manuscript clearly, as if the author were not an ancient scribe—male, more likely than female—but a kindred soul; yet, the next day when I sat down to work, I felt that I did not understand at all, and that the arcane and forbidden vocabulary would never yield to my attempts to decode it.

  I did know, from my conversations with Professor A., that Professor A. would not favor any text-translation that suggested that the ritual cleansings were ritual murders—ritual infanticide. I knew this, and hoped that I would have enough integrity to insist upon my own interpretation, eventually.

  How I wished that I could work with Nyame manuscripts—the famous text of ancient times in which the “sacred trinity” is established: God the father, God the mother, and God the son. In all, to the Nyame people, who’d once lived in the general region of Zimbabwe, God was not a singular individual, not a master-monster, but a family.