High Crime Area

by Joyce Carol Oates

  (Too bad, there wasn’t God the daughter, too. But this notion of a family-God seemed wonderful to me, enviable.)

  Once, I’d said to Professor A., “Why is so much of primitive life ritual? What is ritual?” and Professor A. said, as if he’d answered this question many times in his career, “Ritual eliminates chance. The originality and errors of chance. Ritual is repetition. Repetition becomes ‘sacred.’ Our ancestors know, as we know, that we can’t trust ‘chance.’ We must have reasons for what we do, even if they are unreasonable.”

  I knew that I had misspoken: I should not have used the expression primitive.

  But when I tried to apologize for this politically incorrect, anachronistic term, Professor A. laughed as if conspiratorially saying, “Well, let’s be frank, Lydia. There are ‘primitive peoples’ even today—‘aboriginals.’ Much of the world—the African continent, surely—except for South Africa—is primitive. Witch doctors drilling holes in people’s skulls to release demons. Worse than the Roman Catholic exorcism—though that’s ‘primitive’ enough. And when the patient dies, it’s the demon who killed him, not the witch doctor.”

  Hesitantly I said, “‘Infanticide’—it’s the most powerful taboo. But animals commit it, we know—in the service of evolution. I mean, an animal mother will kill the ‘runt of the litter’ or let him die—or be eaten by his siblings—because she can’t care for him, and too much of her strength will be squandered in a lost cause.” I had not meant to say squandered but it was too late to retract it.

  Professor A. stared at me in surprise. Now truly I had misspoken.

  Darwinian evolutionary theory was not so very welcome in Professor A.’s field, for its simple, much-reiterated theorems about the instinct for survival at all costs and the instinct to reproduce the species trumped more complex scholarly speculations of a kind that required a lifetime to master. What if infanticide wasn’t a ritual taboo but—just a commonplace in animal and human life? Arcane texts, beautiful extinct languages, decades of struggle to define single words and phrases—what did precision of translation matter, if each ritual had as its primary concern the evolutionary advantage of the individual, and through the individual, the species?

  Coldly Professor A. said, “I think, Lydia—that is your name, isn’t it: Lydia?—it will be wisest for you to stay very close to your texts. Word by word, line by line, passage by passage—you are walking a tightrope over an abyss, as a responsible translator. All speculation—the lifeblood of other sciences—is abhorrent to the anthropologist, who deals in facts.”

  You will not disobey me. You are the captive daughter.

  In Grindell Park, at my makeshift desk, I puzzled over the Eweian text as if I’d never seen it before. Originally I’d been thrilled by the challenge—if my translation was a good one, and Professor A. approved it, very likely it would be published in a prestigious journal; such a publication would have an immeasurable effect upon my young career. Professor A. had virtually handed me this gift—yet now, irresponsibly, I had a fantasy of ripping it into pieces—that is, the photocopied text; but what good would that do? All that Professor A. had entrusted to me was a sixteen-page photocopy of the “sacred” text miraculously preserved from antiquity and now kept under lock and key in the University library’s hallowed special collection.

  I thought Individuals die, life endures. A copy of a text is destroyed but another takes its place—just like us.

  6.

  Voices inside. Unmistakable.

  And when I turned the doorknob, the door was locked.

  “Harvey? It’s—me...”

  The voices continued, punctuated by laughter. A sharp staccato series of barks—Dargo?

  “...it’s Lydia, will you let me inside?”

  I knocked on the door. Knocked, banged my fist. Manic dog-barking ensued. I thought I have the right, he can’t keep me out. I live here too, now.

  More soberly I thought If the door is opened, the pit bull will rush at me. No one will stop him.

  Still I waited in the hall. I pressed my ear against the door. I thought I heard Harvey’s voice—muffled, indistinct. I was sure that I heard Leander’s voice, and another male voice.

  Possibly, a female voice. Maralena?

  I was holding bags of groceries in both my arms, which I’d purchased not at Pinneo’s Market but several miles north in a Trenton suburb, at a ShopRite. In this store there was “fresh” produce, better quality food overall, and, unexpectedly, the price of my purchases was slightly less than it would have been at the corner market on Camden Avenue.

  I knocked another time. The dog’s barking was hysterical now. They must have known who was at the door, who was desperate to be admitted, but no one opened the door, no one spoke to me.

  I retreated to my car. Locked the groceries in the trunk and walked over to the little library to wait there, abashed and humbled, until closing time.

  He has betrayed me, my brother. It is strangers he loves.

  Another time when I was in my study working on the Eweian translation Harvey came to the doorway to inform me that he was shutting my door and that under no circumstances was I to open it—“Someone is coming here. If he sees you he’ll be suspicious. If he’s suspicious there could be trouble. There could be danger. Not only to me but to you.”

  “Danger? What—”

  “No time to quibble. Just don’t open this door.”

  “But—who is coming? What’s happening?”

  “God damn, Lydia, I’ve warned you—just don’t open this door.”

  Harvey’s eyes looked as if they were shadowed in grime. His smile had become gap-toothed. Overnight, in some bizarre episode of which I knew nothing, he seemed to have lost one of his lower front teeth. Like a deranged Hallowe’en pumpkin my brother grinned, or grimaced; his facial features were so agitated and twitchy, I couldn’t distinguish a grin from a grimace.

  “Stay inside. It will be fine. He’ll arrive, and he’ll depart. It will go well. Just don’t open the door and show your face.”

  Harvey shut the door. I heard him dragging something, a heavy piece of furniture, to buttress against it, to prevent my opening it.

  Immediately I went to the door, and tried the knob. I could not budge the door open, I was trapped.

  Soon there came a sound of someone arriving at the apartment: a man’s voice. Not a voice I recognized. And a second voice, also a man’s, and unrecognizable.

  Harvey’s voice was a murmur, indecipherable.

  Whatever the transaction was, it did not take more than fifteen minutes. By which time in my desperation I had worked out a plan. If they kill Harvey, I will not be trapped here. I can scream out the window. I can climb out the window onto the roof. I will not die here. Not with Harvey.

  Seven weeks, living with Harvey. As our parents had bade me.

  It was true, I now shopped for my brother. I prepared meals for my brother which sometimes he ate, or partially ate. There was an unexpected pleasure in this—the simplicity of providing meals for another. To prepare something that would give pleasure to another in the next several minutes. For otherwise, my connection to the world was purely abstract.

  Rarely did I think now of Professor A. Or of my room in Newcomb Hall where the residence advisor must have thought I’d quit graduate school without notifying anyone.

  Each morning I vowed to re-establish my residence at the University, if only through a telephone call or email. For I very much feared that my fellowship installments would be terminated.

  By each evening, I’d forgotten.

  Harvey seemed less resentful of me now. He seemed to have accepted it, I’d moved into his life.

  His secret life, I’d never entirely penetrated. Though I had ideas of what this secret life was—obviously.

  More frequently Harvey began to confide in me. When the shadow-grime was gone from his eyes, and his eyes were relatively clear. When his voice wasn’t raddled with phlegm but relatively clear. And the space where his t
ooth was missing wasn’t so visible.

  He hadn’t given up the seminary, he insisted. He was on a kind of—sabbatical.

  Nor had he given up his scholarly project. If I heard him muttering in his room, it was Aramaic he was speaking—to himself.

  “Obviously, a scholar who knows six languages is more equipped than one who knows only three or four. A scholar who knows sixteen languages is more equipped than one who knows only six. There’s no place for specialists who immerse themselves in a single culture now—that’s not the way things are done today.”

  He couldn’t proceed, Harvey said, without a more complete knowledge of Sanskrit than he had. He’d never learned ancient Macedonian, and knew just the rudiments of Mycenaean Greek.

  His voice quavered. I saw the madness shimmering before him like a mirage—you will never know enough languages, you will never know enough of anything. You are broken, defeated. You must throw your life away to avoid humiliation.

  Problem was, Harvey continued, his brain had finally cracked like a patch of arid earth. You’ve seen cracks in the earth, so Harvey described his cracked brain.

  This had happened, this cracking, about eighteen months before. He’d tried to keep going for as long as he could with his cracked brain but finally even his prescribed medications had failed him. He’d had to remove himself to Trenton where there were “some people” he’d come to know—“To save my life.”

  Only a week before I’d arrived Harvey had collapsed on the street, been brought by ambulance to the local ER where it was discovered that he was “severely dehydrated,” and so he was hospitalized, and IV fluids dripped into his veins to prevent renal failure. On the third day of his hospitalization he’d detached the IV line from the crook of his arm and managed to slip out of the hospital and find his way back to Grindell Park.

  Are you a drug addict?—I could not bring myself to ask. Are you a junkie?

  He needed to have professional help, I told him. If he’d allow me, I could assist him.

  “Help? Too late.”

  “A clinic, rehab—”

  “Rehab? Too late.”

  Harvey sneered, laughing. His eyes, which I’d believed to be clear and alert, seemed to be occluding over.

  Daringly I said, “What exactly is—what is it, Harvey? I wish you’d tell me.”

  “Nothing to tell except I’ve been rehabilitated. What you see before you is rehabilitation.”

  The air in Harvey’s apartment was so close and stale, I had to stagger out, outside. In my car parked at the curb I sat for a while dazed and stunned until several of the gangsta boys in Grindell Park drifted around the car, tapped at the windows, grinned and laughed at me mouthing words—(obscenities?)—my averted eyes could not decipher.

  Eventually, they drifted away. As dusk neared, their customers began to arrive. Quite possibly, I was under Leander’s protection. They would know this. They would honor this. I was one of Leander’s white girls, safe in his protection.

  Here was Harvey’s secret, revealed at last: he was writing poetry.

  “Poetry? You?”

  Chiseling poetry, it felt like. Digging in stone with his fingernails.

  (Saying this, Harvey lifted his hands to stare at his ragged broken nails. The stump of his smallest finger, right hand.)

  I did not know what to say in reply to Harvey’s sudden pronouncement. I associated poetry-writing with a brave and reckless futility beyond that of scholarly research into extinct languages and could not imagine taking up such a futility, of my own volition.

  Surely poetry-writing was a curse. Particularly in America where the poetry of street-speech, the poetry of popular culture, and the poetry of finance were supreme.

  “Can I see some of your poems, Harvey? Please.”

  It was one of our dinnertimes. When Harvey consented to eat, or partially eat, one of the meals I prepared for him. Many of our dinners were pasta, with (canned) tomato sauce to which I’d added onions, fresh tomatoes, and spices—oregano, basil, red pepper. Another of our meals was scrambled eggs, or an approximation of an omelet into which I’d stirred fried onions, red peppers, mushrooms. If Harvey was in an Up Mood he would eat, hungrily. (For poor Harvey was wasting away, his hands big-knuckled as the skin shrank and tightened over the knobby bones.) In an Up Mood, he might even praise me which suffused my heart like a surge of warm blood—how yearning I was, to be praised, therefore loved! (Though Harvey might also muddle my name, confusing “Lydia” with another of our sisters, to whom he’d been closer when we were growing up.)

  In a Down Mood, Harvey could not eat. And if he tried to eat, he became nauseated and began to gag. (And worse.) In a Down Mood Harvey was too restless to sit still for long but paced about the apartment’s airless rooms muttering to himself—Aramaic? (It might as well have been Sanskrit or Mycenaean Greek for all that I knew.) Compulsively he went to the window to peer out, and down at the street; he went to the door, to open it and peer out into the hall; each time his cell phone rang, he leapt to answer it; each time there was a noise out in the street, or on the stairs, he twitched and jumped as if he were being exquisitely tortured.

  If a call came on Harvey’s cell, he spoke in a lowered voice so that I couldn’t hear. Shortly afterward he would leave the apartment not to return until late that evening and if I tried to call his cell, which he’d taken with him, my call went directly to voice mail leaving me in a void.

  But it was in one of Harvey’s Up Moods that he told me about writing poetry—his “decision” to become a poet.

  At dinner he’d had two or three glasses of wine with our spicy spaghetti sauce and pasta. He was led to confide in me: “Poetry is not statement but sound. Poetry is music.”

  And: “A poet is one who communicates to the heart, through sound.”

  I asked Harvey to read me one or two of his poems but he seemed shy suddenly. Or whatever Harvey was when he retreated inside his head—stubborn, sulky.

  “You wouldn’t understand. You’re an ‘intellectual.’”

  I wanted to protest You’re an intellectual! I am just an imitation.

  “None of my poems are finished. I have hundreds of fragments—shimmering and transient as flies’ wings. Poetry is our revenge against the stupidity of society. Poetry is beautiful but can hurt, like whirring blades.”

  I had not heard Harvey speak so passionately for years. Once, he’d spoken in such a tone about God.

  In a voice carefully controlled so that no emotion was revealed Harvey recited: “‘Dawn-dusk-dew. Even-ing. Lunar scape. Rhomboidal radiance.’” He waited, breathing audibly. It was as if my very private brother had torn open his shirt to reveal his naked chest, his beating heart, to me.

  I felt a wild impulse to laugh. Rhomboidal radiance! It would be futile to ask what this could possibly mean, for of course, as Harvey would say, poetry does not mean.

  Harvey said, “It’s the dreamy vowels of ‘dawn-dusk-dew’ that are seductive. And the beautiful word which I’ve broken into twin spondees—‘even-ing.’ Note the drawn-out sound of ‘lunar’ and the harsher nasal sound of the ‘a’ of ‘scape.’”

  I told Harvey that it was very—interesting.

  “A poetry of sheer sound. For the inner ear—the soul.”

  Harvey paused, shutting his eyes. A noise in the near distance, as of a firecracker exploding, or gunfire, did not distract him. “‘Sleek-sleet-sky-shattering.’”

  “Very—striking.”

  “‘Tight fists of shit.’”

  Seeing my startled reaction Harvey laughed, pleased.

  “Actually, that’s my single complete poem, a haiku. The title explains all—‘Self-Portrait America 2012’—‘Tight fists of shit.’”

  This “haiku” was stunning to me. The ferocity with which Harvey recited it suggested a meaning far deeper than the merely musical.

  “It’s ingenious, Harvey. Three spondees, isn’t it?”

  “Essentially, yes. ‘Tight fists’ and ‘shit’ are spo
ndees—‘of’ is lightly stressed. If read properly, the poem embodies its (unintended) meaning: ‘Tight fists of shit.’ You will note the strong ‘i’ repetition.”

  Harvey opened his eyes wide now, and was staring rudely at me. As if he’d detected something forced and fraudulent beneath my schoolgirl enthusiasm.

  “Do you have any other poems? I’d like to—”

  “Not that you’d like, I think.”

  Harvey’s face shut up tight. A few seconds later, as if the caller had been purposefully waiting, his cell phone rang and he staggered off to answer it, in the other room.

  Then, there were interrupted mealtimes.

  Loud knocking at the door, and it was Leander, Tin, and Maralena.

  Harvey hurried to let them in. Harvey offered them wine, ordering me in a lowered voice to wash our glass tumblers.

  “Lydia was just making dinner. Will you stay? Eat with us?”

  Leander grinned and shrugged, as if he were doing us a favor. Tin frowned, staring down at the floor; he seemed deeply moved. Festive Maralena said, “Ohhh thank you, Har-vey! We would sure love that.”

  Maralena insisted upon helping me at the stove. Boiling pasta, checking to see if it was al dente before dumping it into the colander. In the cramped kitchen area Maralena laughed and gossiped with me as if we were old friends, or sisters. Several times she nudged against me as if accidentally, like a big upright purring cat.

  The men sat at the table, drinking. But they drank red wine as if it were beer, or a soft drink. Leander’s wild dreadlocks tumbled down his narrow muscled back and the Maori tattoo on his face glared whitely against his purplish-dark skin. Tin, flat-faced, small-eyed, vaguely Asian, was so solid-fleshed, the chair he sat in creaked and wobbled. Leander teased, “You fat-ass! Watch you’self you gon break these people’s nice chair.” It was part of Leander’s humor, the chair in which Tin was sitting was secondhand and the vinyl seat soiled and certainly not nice.

  Tin muttered what sounded like Fuck you. His flat face darkened with blood.

  Harvey seemed dazed by our visitors, whose presence transformed the bleak setting. Leander was swaggering and charismatic as a rap star, Maralena gorgeous as the singer whose name I didn’t know how to pronounce—Beyoncé. Even Tin, homely, strangely self-effacing, with a small mouth like a vise, exerted a curious sort of attraction. Beside these so physical individuals Harvey and I felt to ourselves like white-skinned wraiths.