by Michelle Kuo
“California.”
He repeated carefully, “California.” He seemed to be trying to recall the word, or a map, in his mind.
I asked him how his family was.
“They be all right.” He paused and we both were silent. He realized that I expected him to say more.
“Yeah, sometime while back they visited. My sisters, my daddy, they all crowd inside the window,” he said.
“You’ve got three sisters?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“No brothers?”
“Naw.”
When I was a teacher, I had known very little about Patrick’s background. Certainly I hadn’t known that he had three sisters and no brothers. Now I realized that this was an essential fact. His mother must have asked him to look for his sister because he was the only son, the man of the house.
“Your mom didn’t come?”
He shook his head. “She got work and, really, it be…it be hard on her to see me. It’s been months since I seen them.”
His family did not live far from the county jail, no more than five miles away. I must have looked surprised, because he looked down. “To be honest, ma’am, I don’t like seeing them this way.” He stopped, searching for the right words. “I smile, but you know…but I don’t like to put on no front. So I just ask them not to come.”
Patrick fell silent again.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I offered.
School had been where we connected, and I wanted to know: Why had he dropped out? How had it happened? I cared as much about these questions as I did about the question of what had gone wrong one night a year ago. I suppose I believed, on some deep level, that none of this would have happened—that we would not be here in jail—had he stayed in school. Secretly I imagined there had been a noble reason for him to quit; perhaps somebody, his mother or one of his sisters, had gotten sick, and he needed to get a job to support her.
“So when did you”—I was about to say drop out—“stop going to school?”
My tone was unnaturally casual.
Patrick looked away. He didn’t want to talk about this, either. “I tried…” he began. “I wasn’t getting all that treatment you was giving me at Stars. I really didn’t learn too much trigonometry.” He enunciated the word slowly, not wanting to get a syllable wrong.
“Is that what got you down, math?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What grades were you getting?”
“Low grades.”
“Like we’re talking…Fs?”
He hung his head.
“I ain’t know nothing about trigonometry, to tell you the truth.”
“You were good at math,” I said, remembering his fractions.
“Not this math.”
“You didn’t ask your teacher for help?”
Patrick kept his head down.
“Did you think about asking him?”
I tried to keep my tone neutral. Then it occurred to me that it didn’t matter what tone I used or even what I said. It was an unsalvageable conversation: I had been his teacher, and he had dropped out.
“Just didn’t have a lot of…” His voice trailed off. “It be a lot of pressure to ask.”
There was no way—absolutely none—that our math classes at Stars had prepared him for trigonometry. Certainly my after-school math class hadn’t. And the official math teacher at Stars coached the baseball and football teams at Miller, which meant that he frequently left the school hours early, for games and practice, leaving the police officer to chaperone.
Just a few minutes ago I’d been mystified by the question of why Patrick had dropped out; now I could picture it perfectly. I could picture him in his math classroom, in a sea of thirty faces, slipping by unnoticed in a seat in the back, observing the others. I imagined him starting to miss classes. Math, in particular, is cumulative: If you miss one day, the next day you’re lost. I imagined him returning after having disappeared, hoping for a fresh start. Then he’d be given a worksheet that danced with triangles and shapes, with words like sin, cos, tan. He must have felt baffled. I had never known Patrick to ask for help. He took help if you offered it, but he didn’t ask for it.
Then I thought, coldly, that he did have a tendency to give up easily.
I leaned back in my chair. So the topic of school was like the topic of family: a dead end.
“So have you talked to your public defender?”
“My what?”
“Your lawyer.”
“Naw. I don’t know him.”
“Do you have a trial date?”
He shook his head. “Man, I don’t know nothing about that.”
“Do you know what you’re being charged for?”
For the first time Patrick leaned forward, realizing that I might know something that he didn’t about his case. He was flustered. “Ms. Kuo, what I be charged for? Nobody told me nothing.”
His charge—of course. This was what he wanted to talk about, what he thought I could do to help him now. I knew some basics but hadn’t expected that I would be the one to communicate them.
I chose my words carefully. Where once I had tried to think of creative ways to explain theme and symbolism, I tried now to avoid using abstruse legal terms: mens rea, malice aforethought.
“It all has to do with state of mind,” I began. “There’s first-degree and second-degree…” I paused, not wanting to say murder.
“First-degree is when a person intends to—”
Patrick broke into my words, the first time he’d interrupted me. His body tensed, his voice reached a desperate pitch. “I didn’t intend to hurt him; I was just looking for my sister. He got to talking crazy with me, about the bloods, the gang he be in. He be talking really crazy. I tried to walk off and he grabbed me.”
“Do you remember what he was saying?”
He drew back in his seat, embarrassed by his outburst. “I don’t remember much,” he said in a low voice. “It’s confusing, it all happen so fast.”
I cleared my throat. “How did you feel during that moment?”
“Ms. Kuo, I wasn’t really trying to hurt him, or to”—he stopped, gathering strength—“kill him.” At the word kill, he fell silent. “I just…I just started crying when they say what I’d done. I really didn’t intend to; I was really just looking out for my little sister.”
“Do you remember why you were crying?”
“They say I killed a man! I ain’t…I don’t know.”
His voice broke, its pitch strange and high. Patrick covered the sides of his head with his hands, his fingers gripping his scalp.
Until now I’d resisted wondering about who the dead man was. What had he been like? He must have had a family, a mother and a father and brothers and sisters. They were a strain to think about, these grieving others. Abstractly, I understood that their grief eclipsed that of Patrick’s family, but I could not summon them.
It seemed impossible to hold both Patrick and Marcus simultaneously in my mind. To have sympathy for one was to doubt the other. It was like some constraint of astronomy, where two stars could not be gazed at together, the light of one affecting the other.
“Manslaughter,” I continued. “Manslaughter is different from murder when”—I hesitated again, not wanting to use the word killing—“when what happened is not intentional.”
But Patrick had shut down, fatigued from his own memory. Shawn poked his head in, pointed at his watch, and disappeared.
I knew I had to leave soon, but I still hadn’t let Patrick read what I’d written about him. It was only fair, I thought, that he knew the writing existed.
I pulled the slim New York Times Magazine out of my bag.
“I wrote this about you,” I said. “It’s about you and my teaching at Stars.” Would he like to read it?
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, in a manner so automatically compliant that I knew he hadn’t really heard my question.
“Why don’t you start?” I said. I pointed to the fi
rst sentence on the page.
Patrick leaned forward, tense from concentration. Suddenly I realized he was nervous. When was the last time he’d read anything out loud—a book, a magazine? And with a teacher, no less? His left hand was shaking, and he clenched his fingers into a fist as if to tame it. His right fingers held the paper gingerly, as if it might tear.
I calculated how long it had been since I had him as a student. Three years and four months. He had dropped out of school the year after I left the Delta. Technically speaking, the last grade he had completed was the eighth grade.
I had an urge to stop the exercise, but Patrick had plunged forward. He started reading very fast, affecting confidence. But immediately he stumbled on the sentence referring to himself: There was something capacious inside him.
“Sorry, Ms. Kuo,” he said.
I saw his face burning, and then I realized mine was also.
We hobbled along. He read: a mixture of wry and pensive. Then he gave me a sideways glance, waiting for my correction.
“Sorry,” he said again. “I’m forgetting things.”
I saw his eyes darting downward to the last line, near the bottom edge of the page, which promised an end to the assault of consonants and vowels.
The ethics of writing about Patrick had occupied me so much that I hadn’t even imagined we would encounter this basic problem: He was so out of practice that he could barely read. This was the real Patrick, the one who I didn’t know because I was too busy remembering who he used to be.
Later that day I would ponder the self-absorbed foolishness of my exercise: What had been the point? I should not have put him in such a position; it was cruel, he was embarrassed. At least I could have explained to him, honestly and simply, why I had written it, the original reasons, before I had gotten caught up with my self-doubt: I wrote this because writing is how I understand things. I wrote this to get closer to knowing you, and myself, too. Or I could have helped him read, explained the meaning of words. But it had been so long since I’d taught that I’d lost my teacher’s instinct and let him stumble on alone, ashamed, uncomprehending.
Finally, Patrick reached the last lines in the piece: I haven’t been able to resist guilty feelings over Patrick. He hesitated at the word resist, the too-sibilant word faltering in his mouth. “Resist,” I corrected him, and he repeated the word.
When Patrick reached the end at last, he let out a breath. I sensed his shoulders loosening, heaving downward. I relaxed, too.
He traced the page with the tip of his index finger, as if enjoying its glossy surface, its feeling novel to his skin.
“What did you think?” I asked, my tone false and bright.
“It’s”—he searched—“good.”
We looked at each other. He sensed he ought to say more. He said, “You got good memory.” Then: “To be honest, Ms. Kuo, I don’t remember all that.”
I asked, “Do you remember when you brought in the bucket and mop?”
He shook his head.
I asked, “Do you remember when you escorted me to the car?”
He shook his head again.
I might as well have been writing about somebody else.
“I remember it raining,” he offered. “I remember all that rain.” Then he said, “You know, it wasn’t the best school, but you was there and you cared. It made going to school—you know, made it really mean something, somebody that care for you.”
He looked away. Then he flipped to the other pages, stopping only on the ones that had colorful pictures.
“You made all this?” he asked, after he had flipped through it.
I frowned, confused. Made what? “Oh, no,” I said, understanding. “It’s a magazine.” I flipped to the cover and said, “See what it says?”
He read aloud the cover, “The New York Times Magazine,” pronouncing every word.
Then: “People in New York read this?”
“Well,” I said, “a lot of people outside New York read it. Maybe millions.”
This number didn’t appear to mean much to him.
“You been to New York?” he asked.
I said I had.
“How do you get there?”
“I took a plane,” I said. He nodded, as if he understood. To make conversation, I asked him if he’d ever been on a plane.
“No, ma’am.”
“Have you been outside of Arkansas?”
“I been to Memphis one time.” He paused. “And I been to Mississippi, too, because you got to go through there to get to Memphis.”
I looked down, quiet.
Patrick said, “Yeah, these be broken and don’t fit.”
He thought I was looking at his sandals. They were orange and too big—like a clown’s shoes. The flap hung out.
“Oh,” I said. “That can’t be comfortable.”
“No, ma’am. It ain’t.”
We sat there silently. We stared at the shoes. He dangled his arm, fingering the lone seam that held together flap and sole.
Patrick shook his head and he opened his mouth to speak. Then he stopped himself. He seemed hesitant to tell me something.
I nodded at him expectantly.
“I got to think about my”—he trembled—“daughter.”
The word was like a foreign term in his mouth.
Startled, I asked how old she was.
“She be more than a year old now.” He stopped. Then he said, “I guess I ain’t no…no role model.”
To no one, he said, “It is what it is.”
Again silence.
Again I broke it.
“What’s her name?”
“Cherish.” Patrick’s face brightened slightly. “But I call her Cherry.”
“Who thought of the name?”
“Her mother. Because she got a niece named Treasure.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to say. Was my visit over? It didn’t seem right to leave yet.
“When was she born?”
“June,” he said.
“So you got to be with her for around three months.”
“Yeah.”
“What does she look like?”
“They say she look like me.” His mouth twitched, nearing a grin. “Big jaw, bright skin.” Then his mouth went slack again, the smile unfinished. “That what they say, anyway.”
“That is really sweet,” I said.
His head fell downward, his mind somewhere else. He lowered his voice.
“Ms. Kuo,” he whispered finally. “Somebody—” He stopped. “Somebody in here told me I stabbed a man thirteen times, fourteen times.”
He looked into my face searchingly. Suddenly I realized that he didn’t know whether it was true.
“Who told you that?”
“Just this guy who said he live across the street from me. He said he was there. He here in the sixteen-person cell now. He told a whole lot of people here that.”
“Patrick,” I said. “Look at me.”
He looked.
I didn’t remove my gaze. “I read the police reports when I came here before,” I said slowly. “They said you stabbed him twice in the chest, once in the arm. So—it’s not thirteen times.” My voice became very low. “Okay? Don’t believe what those people say.”
He let out a breath. Then his head drooped toward the floor. I watched the lines in the back of his neck.
“Hey,” I said. “Lift up your head.”
With reluctance, he bent his head upward. His eyes searched for mine but, finding them, darted away.
“People in your family love you very much,” I began. It had been so long since I had given a pep talk to a young person; I pressed forward with my clichés. “We all do.”
In the air my words sounded empty—who was I to speak, who was I to console him?—but Patrick had already leaned forward, alert for the first time, as if my words fed him in some primal way. I suddenly remembered my student Kayla; while driving her home, I’d given her a word of encouragement—a throwaway
line, perhaps that she was an intelligent young woman, which seemed utterly obvious. She radiated gratitude: “Ms. Kuo, that’s the first positive thing I heard all week.”
“I remember you so well,” I said to Patrick. “You were really wonderful in my class, and I know you—” I stopped. “I know you still are.”
He nodded seriously, trying to smile. In this painful gesture of civility, he was trying to show me that my words meant something to him, or perhaps that my effort to say encouraging words meant something.
I stood up to leave. He stood up, too.
“I’ll write you,” I said.
“All right,” he said.
He didn’t say, I’ll write you back.
He didn’t say, See you soon.
I reached for the door, but he got to it first. He opened it for me.
“Thanks for coming to visit me, Ms. Kuo.”
Ms. Kuo. Who else still called me that, with that tone? To him, I had no other name.
I looked for the guard, searching both ways down the dusty hall. Then I saw him, still holding the massive bag of chips. I nodded, signaling that we were done.
We walked side by side, passing by a door labeled LIBRARY. I halted suddenly.
“What’s that?” I pointed, excited.
He kept walking. “There ain’t nothing there but plastic silverware.”
—
I STEPPED OUTSIDE INTO THE motionless heat. The warmth startled me—it had been cold inside.
It was a Saturday morning and the downtown was silent. Businesses were shuttered. Stores were vacant. Next door a jumble of planks and litter lay on the ground. This was the Delta. How to describe this—the stifling absence of people, the stillness that was also beautiful?
I was twenty-two when I first came here. Antarctica attracts misfits who find beauty in the world’s end. I saw a similar beauty everywhere in the Delta: in the kudzu wilding up telephone poles, the cypress trees standing in high water. I had been told teaching here was hard, that it would break the weak. But what was a battle without a wound? Wounding was what I had signed up for.
Now I had left, moved on, survived, progressed. Now I was back as a visitor, and Patrick was alone. Inequality between us had widened. We’d both grown up, and the years divided us. He thanked me without expecting me to come back. He expected little from me or from anyone. Maybe he’d suspected things would go wrong. Maybe the shock that he was feeling was that it had now happened, in this way of all ways, he who stayed out of trouble, he who kept a distance from others, observed others hurt each other, hurt themselves. He hadn’t expected to escape from it all, but he never thought he’d end up here, at the bottom.
