The Rescuer

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “ ‘Leave the store’? I have no idea.”

  The obfuscatory way in which the woman spoke was bewildering to me. There was a secret here, a subtext.

  I thought Wystan has not left the store. He disappeared into the basement—into the books. No one has seen him since.

  Though she had not been very helpful I thanked the woman politely. It is one of the principles of my social behavior that I try not to repay rudeness with more rudeness; I try to repay ill treatment with a friendly smile, or at least a neutral smile.

  Under the woman’s dubious gaze I made my way to the Religion/ Anthropology shelves as if drawn by a magnet. It was a shock—not a good shock—to see a copy of the bound galley of Cleansing Rituals: Mother, Infant, Taboo—the doctoral dissertation published by the University of California Press which I’d been assigned to review, but had not reviewed. I felt a touch of vertigo, that a rival had so bypassed me.

  At the cashier’s counter the woman was squinting in my direction. As if to confound her suspicions of me I selected two paperbacks—God of the Oppressed, The Hermeneutics of Desire.

  But I wasn’t yet ready to leave Book Bazaar. My heartbeat quickened as I approached the stairs to the basement. Slowly I descended, step by step. I knew, or seemed to know—Wystan was there, in some way.

  As he’d told me, the large, narrow, cave-like room was filled with books—boxes, cartons, and shopping bags filled with books, floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, books stacked on the floor. Against one wall were rows of flattened cardboard boxes and emptied cartons. The air was close and smelled of dust, grime, Time—a faint odor that reminded me of my brother’s apartment, especially on humid days.

  Softly I whispered, “Wystan? Hello? It’s Lydia—a friend . . .”

  My eye was drawn to a farther corner of the cavernous room where the walls had become indistinct, as if dissolved in shadow; as if the dark earth beyond were pressing inward. There was a kind of pressure here, I felt—an indefinable yet palpable pressure.

  Cautiously I stepped away from the stairs. There were narrow pathways between partially unpacked boxes and cartons. How like a graveyard the room was, dimly lit by tremulous fluorescent lights overhead. Wystan had remarked that he’d heard voices here, whispers—he’d seen figures at the periphery of his vision. I steeled myself for these also but saw and heard nothing except the muffled sounds of traffic outside the grimy basement windows.

  I waited, scarcely breathing. Though Wystan didn’t reveal himself to me, I felt his presence. Almost, I saw the man’s face—a familiar homely-but-beloved face like that of a relative who is rarely seen yet nonetheless exerts an abiding spell over you.

  There was a sound of footsteps, the creaking floor overhead. As if someone were walking there, approaching the opened door to the stairs.

  Quickly I whispered, “Wystan? Good-bye. I think—I guess—I won’t be coming back . . .”

  There was a sound at the top of the stairs: the fattish middle-aged woman, suspicious of me.

  Was I rummaging through cartons looking for rare, signed first editions; was I going to hide a precious book inside my coat; was I to be trusted, who looked so furtive?

  The flat nasal New Jersey voice called down to me: “Can I help you, miss? Are you looking for anything in particular? Books in the basement haven’t been sorted and categorized yet, so we prefer that customers not come down here.”

  I returned to the ground floor. I made an effort to smile at the glowering woman who rang up my modest purchases on an old-fashioned cash register with an air of scarcely concealed impatience. I realized that she resented her life, she resented and hated books. She is not someone’s wife but someone’s left-behind wife. She too has been abandoned to the book graveyard.

  With my few remaining low-denomination bills I paid for my books thinking with what pleasure I would read them, as if Wystan himself had pressed them into my hand.

  * * *

  Like a large white finely cracked egg Harvey’s secret lay between us.

  The egg in the swans’ nest. Just visibly cracked, containing death and decay and not a fuzzy little cygnet.

  But when will the swans acknowledge the death-egg? Is it possible to choose a specific hour, a moment, when such an irrevocable truth must be uttered?

  Swans mate for life, it’s said. A sister and a brother too are “mated for life”—irrevocably, by blood.

  Harvey would not reveal his secret to me, I knew. Nor could I reveal Harvey’s secret to him—that I knew it.

  Did we love each other enough, to withstand such a secret? Or did we love each other too much, to withstand such a secret?

  For the first time in a very long time, I called my parents—tried to call my parents. But a recording clicked on: This number has been disconnected.

  Disconnected! I was shocked, and puzzled.

  I called one of my sisters who told me that of course our parents’ phone was disconnected—they’d made a big move, surely they’d told me about it?—to Orlando, Florida.

  Big move? Orlando? I knew nothing of this.

  “They’re living in a ‘gated retirement community’—‘no children allowed.’ I’ve seen pictures on the Internet, but we haven’t visited them yet. Haven’t been invited.” My sister laughed in that rueful way in which we’d learned to laugh, speaking of our parents.

  I was stunned by this news. I felt betrayed by this news.

  I hung up the phone, not knowing what I’d said to my sister, or if I’d said anything coherent at all.

  Guess where our parents are! I wanted to goad Harvey.

  Guess who has abandoned us, in Trenton!

  Of course, I never said a word to my brother.

  * * *

  Days had passed. Eventually, weeks.

  I had failed to reply to Professor A.’s e-mail and to several e-mails from the director of the Newcomb program. E-mails to me from these individuals had ceased.

  And so, one day I set out on a journey: to drive to the fabled University sixty miles to the north.

  The distance was not far. Yet, my uneasiness was such, the distance felt very far.

  Much of the drive would be along Route 1. I consoled myself, it should not have taken more than an hour.

  I tried to rehearse what I would say to Professor A. What I would say about my “progress” in translating the Eweian manuscript, and when I believed I might finish it. How I believed I would be interpreting the material in my thesis. I don’t agree with you at all, Professor A. I think you are an old fool and utterly mistaken. But I want your imprimatur on my thesis, Professor. I want your blessing.

  So too, my imagined words put to the director of the Newcomb program, were upsetting to me. I want the University’s money, that is all I want. The rest is bullshit.

  I had to have faith, more inspired words would come to me, as soon as I stepped onto the idyllic University campus that floated like a fairy-world just slightly above the polluted soil and waters of New Jersey.

  Yet soon then it happened, after leaving the Grindell Park neighborhood, I became lost on Trenton’s one-way streets. Twenty minutes were required to get to Camden Avenue, to which I could have walked in half that time! But once I was on Camden Avenue, some miles north I decided to turn onto Route 206, thinking that this would be a sort of shortcut, but then, somehow, I found myself routed into driving south instead of north—when I realized my mistake I was being shunted over a bridge crossing the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

  By the time I exited, and returned to New Jersey, I was feeling very agitated. Worries about my brother’s health assailed me, and thoughts of Maralena, from whom I hadn’t heard since our trip to Atlantic City, though she and her friends owed me a considerable amount of money . . . At last I found myself turning onto Route 1 north; but shortly afterward, in a rush of thunderous truck-traffic, I was unable to chang
e lanes out of an exit-only lane for Interstate 95, south toward Philadelphia.

  Philadelphia! Always I seemed to be routed south, when I wanted to drive north.

  Finally, I managed to exit the crowded interstate, and enter rushing traffic on Route 1 north. But by this time my head pounded with pain. A powerful yearning rose in me, to exit the state highway at Camden Avenue, and make my way home.

  That is what I did, that day.

  Harvey seemed annoyed to see me. Or maybe his grimace was meant to signal concern.

  “Back so soon? I thought you were going to meet with your dissertation advisor . . .”

  I couldn’t bear my brother’s jeering, mock-concern. I staggered into my bedroom and fell onto the sofa.

  He wants to see me humbled. But if I am broken entirely, he will have no one.

  Another day, a brightly sunny day that became inexplicably riddled with storm clouds within a few minutes after I left Grindell Park.

  I retraced my original route to Route 1 north; I drove with care, remaining in the right lane despite impatient drivers behind me; but once I left Trenton, in the suburb of Lawrenceville, I seem to have made an error exiting, and was shunted around a gigantic cloverleaf that took me, like a transfixed child strapped in an amusement ride, to a gigantic mall—Quaker Bridge! Streams of traffic passed my car on both sides. I could not even see the highway any longer, nor guess where it was. In the parking lot behind a gigantic JCPenney’s I gripped the steering wheel and laid my head on my arms trying not to cry.

  They are taking my fellowship from me. My career. They will deny that they know me. I am being peeled away from them, picked off their skin like lice.

  * * *

  It was that day, or that evening, that, returning to my brother’s apartment, I realized that the smell of rot had grown stronger.

  Though I had not been gone for many hours, the apartment seemed to have been visited. My housekeeping had been confounded—the kitchen counters I’d cleaned were now sticky with spilled liquid, chairs were out of place in the kitchen and in the living room. Strangers had forced their way into my brother’s life, selling and buying dope. He had all but admitted it to me—he was helpless to keep the drug dealers out of his apartment that was, to them, so convenient a setting for drug deals. They had other residences in Trenton, they did not return to the same place for as long as a week sometimes, but they always returned. The smells of male perspiration, tobacco smoke, marijuana (?), hashish (?), beer, decay and rot made my nostrils constrict; turned my stomach; caused my head to ache. The futile effort to drive to the University had left me broken and defeated and there was Harvey sprawled in a ratty easy chair in the living room scribbling into his notebook. His hands were skeletal, but his fingers moved swiftly gripping a pen. His eyes were heavy-lidded, red-lidded. His lips were covered in scabs I had not noticed before. I shuddered to see that the smallest finger on his right hand was freshly bandaged—now, little more than a stub.

  “Harvey? What is that terrible smell? How can you stand it . . .”

  “ ‘Smell’? ‘Small smell quells all’—a haiku.”

  “Has something died in here? Inside a wall?”

  “ ‘Small smell quells all—inside a wall.’ No good.”

  “We should open the windows, at least. We should try to find the source of the smell.”

  “An experimental haiku, I meant. A classical haiku has seventeen syllables.”

  Maddening Harvey! He smelled the sickening odor of course but lacked the energy, volition, desire to seek out the source.

  There were only a few pieces of furniture in the living room. The easy chair in which Harvey sprawled, and several other chairs; a two-cushion sofa, of badly worn leather, upon which Leander and Tin usually sat when they came to the apartment—(Leander to the right, Tin to the left, invariably). There were scattered tables, lamps of which at least one was unplugged.

  The leather sofa had been shoved oddly into a corner, since I’d left the apartment. But behind the sofa, just visible from an angle, was what appeared to be a length of rolled-up carpet.

  As I approached the carpet, the smell grew stronger. It was unmistakable now—organic decay, rot.

  “Harvey? What is this? Something against the wall . . .”

  I was having difficulty breathing, the smell was so strong.

  Clumsily I pushed the sofa aside. For a small piece of furniture, it was heavy; and Harvey made no offer to help.

  I squatted over the rolled-up carpet. Holding my breath until my head spun. Desperately I managed to tug off a length of twine that had been securing the rug. (This was a rug that had been on the floor of Harvey’s bedroom when I’d first arrived.) Boldly, recklessly I managed to tug off the other length of twine, and to unroll the carpet—and there, arms stretched above his head, flat yellowish face dull as a much-worn coin and his eyes and mouth gaping open like a fish’s, was Leander’s lieutenant Tin.

  Tin’s flaccid torso was covered in a blood-soaked, dried-bloody T-shirt. He’d been shot, perhaps—or stabbed . . .

  He didn’t look young now. Something terrible had happened to Tin’s face, straining the skin to bursting.

  I screamed and stumbled back. I screamed and stumbled to Harvey. With a look of profound exasperation Harvey was regarding me as one might regard a lunatic. He’d had to set down his notebook and place his pen in his shirt pocket. As a schoolboy, Harvey was never without a pen or a pencil in his shirt pocket. In a disapproving voice he said, “God damn, Lydia—I told you not to look. Whatever you’ve found—it’s none of your concern. Just stop.”

  “It’s Tin—he’s dead. It’s Tin’s body, rolled up in your carpet. We have to call the police . . .”

  Harvey cursed me, in a lowered voice. In moments of acute exasperation he lapsed into one of his ancient, extinct languages—might’ve been Aramaic, Sanskrit or Greek. He said, “I told you this was not a good idea, Lydia—living here with me. I warned you it was not a good environment for you. I said—stay away. And now.”

  “Harvey, my God! We have to call the p-police . . . Tin is dead, Tin is behind the sofa, somebody has shot Tin in our apartment . . .”

  “There were no gunshots, that I heard. And we will not ‘call the police.’ No.”

  “A man has been murdered, in our apartment. We have to call the police . . .”

  Sighing, Harvey swung himself out of the easy chair, that had sunken and shaped itself to his buttocks. It was always startling to me, that my brother had grown so short.

  We would re-fit Tin’s heavy body into the blood-soaked interior of the carpet roll exactly as it had been fitted previously. We would re-roll the carpet and secure the ends with twine. Clearly, others had addressed the logistics of this problem, or the first stage of the problem; we could not have improved upon their method, and did not try. When Harvey did not respond to my desperate words, my emotion and my tears, I fell silent—like Harvey.

  Had Tin’s body been in the apartment, without my knowing? Since when—the previous day? Two days? It had not seemed that he’d been murdered recently. The blood had ceased flowing, and had partially dried. Poor Tin! He’d looked at me with an expression of inarticulate longing, from time to time. Yet he’d never once uttered my name.

  Now, it was too late.

  “This problem would’ve been dealt with, Lydia, without your interference. But now you’ve interfered . . .”

  I had no idea what Harvey was saying. His voice was edgy, not so calm as he’d tried to suggest; his jaws were trembling, as with a spell of extreme cold.

  When it was sufficiently night, when Grindell Park was more or less vacated of dealers and customers and only a few homeless bundles of rags slept on the benches, and wouldn’t give so much as a glance to two figures struggling to drag a strangely heavy length of rolled-up carpet across the desiccated grass, we managed to transport Tin’s body
into the most remote corner of the park where we hid it amid debris from tree cuttings, as children might try to hide something from the eyes of their elders.

  “The freezing air will impede the decay. The Trenton police won’t be able to calculate when he died, or where.”

  Harvey spoke shrewdly, as if this were a statement of fact he’d had occasion to pronounce in the past.

  When we returned to the apartment it was nearly 4:00 A.M. In two hours, it would be dawn. Though we were exhausted and light-headed we took time to open all the windows, in my bedroom and in Harvey’s bedroom as well. Not soon, but eventually, the putrid odor would fade. Or, the putrid odor would mingle with other, near-similar odors in the old house as in the air of Trenton, New Jersey—smells of smoldering rubber, diesel exhaust from giant rigs lumbering along Camden Avenue, the toxic-sweet odors from chemical companies long extinct. And one balmy April afternoon when I was returning from ShopRite, on a crumbling Camden Avenue sidewalk there stood a brash young man with dreadlocks tumbling down his back and a Maori tattoo on half his face, a velvety-dark-skinned Leander who sighting me shot out his hand, his large thumb, to hitch a ride with me in the Mazda—(only with me, his friend Lydia, for he hadn’t been hitchhiking a moment before, I was sure)—and shrewdly I thought Oh no! not a chance even as my car braked to a stop, yes it was too late, yes but it was an instinctive involuntary gesture and so I heard myself say as Leander in tight-fitting suede deep-purple jacket, vest, trousers opened the passenger’s door and slid his long legs inside with a wide grin and an air of companionable ease—“Well, all right. I can give you a ride. But I’m not going farther than Grindell Park.”

  Please enjoy this preview from Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel The Accursed, coming from Ecco in March 2013.

  A major historical novel from “one of the great artistic forces of our time” (The Nation), The Accursed is an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.