The Rescuer

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I better walk you to you’ car, girl. Maybe come along, you goin to Grindell Park. Don’t want nobody hittin on you.”

  Chapter Four

  Why 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 ti
ny 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.

  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 university student and not a homeless vagrant who’d drifted in from the street to get out of the weather). When Wystan asked who I was, where I was from, and I only mumbled an inaudible reply, 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 collection.”

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

  I worried that Wystan’s employer or supervisor 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 the Religion/ Anthropology shelves. (Lesser-known titles by Margaret Meade, 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?