High Crime Area

by Joyce Carol Oates

“Yes. You are right. Yes—thank you.”

  I turned away, not wanting the woman to see tears of anguish welling in my eyes.

  Tears of chagrin, disappointment.

  Too dazed to sit with rows of patients and their relatives in the crowded and airless waiting room. Better to remain standing, or step outside into the cold air.

  Why hadn’t I known, or guessed? Why had I wanted to think that Harvey’s medical condition was only drugs? And why hadn’t Harvey told me? When I’d virtually cast away my life for him.

  When Harvey emerged from the interior of the clinic, nearly an hour later, I was still in a state of shock but had taken a seat by this time.

  Harvey complained in his affably embittered way of having to be “poked” for the blood work. “Fuck that needle! The tech can’t find a vein, God damn makes me feel like a Death Row prisoner they’re poking to get the death-IV in.” Harvey laughed as if he’d said something witty. Then he saw me, blinked and stared at me. “Lydia? You all right?”

  “Yes. I am—‘all right.’”

  “You know, I told you not to come to the clinic with me, I’m perfectly capable of coming here by myself.”

  “I know. You’ve said.”

  Exiting the clinic Harvey was about to propel himself down the steps then wisely hesitated. Wordlessly I slid my arm around his waist, as before.

  I’d glimpsed Band-Aids on the insides of both his bruised arms. Very likely there were Band-Aids on the insides of his legs as well, and on his ankles. I would not ask.

  Such pity for my brother, such love!—yet it was an angry love.

  For Harvey was to blame, I thought—HIV-positive!

  No wonder he’d left the seminary, escaped to another life where no one knew him and would not judge him.

  No wonder he’d taken up poetry as the most futile gesture of his life.

  Quietly I said, guiding his descent down the cement steps, “I don’t blame you, Harvey. If anyone is to blame it’s me.”

  A second time, as it was a final time, I returned to Book Bazaar. I yearned to see Wystan again. In my loneliness in Grindell Park—in my fevered imagination—the secondhand bookstore clerk had grown more attractive. I’d forgotten the disheveled hair, the baggy T-shirt and cargo pants—if Wystan’s face hovered in my memory it was now blurred with light, like those ghostly figures on TV that are being censored for reasons of privacy, or decency.

  Somehow, Wystan was merging with Harvey. With an old memory of Harvey. And hadn’t Wystan said that Harvey was a “patrician” of some sort—and so was I; hadn’t Wystan said that Harvey was “the most remarkable person” he’d ever met.

  The name suggested refinement—“Wystan.” And he’d seemed to like me—he’d followed me through the store. He’d hinted at treasures in the basement. He’d tried to acquire my address but, foolishly, I had refused him.

  “‘Wystan’? He doesn’t work here anymore.”

  A fattish woman of bleak and dissatisfied middle age regarded me suspiciously. In her mouth, “Wystan” had a flat New Jersey twang.

  So suspiciously, you would think that a succession of conniving females had trooped into the bookstore, each seeking the elusive Wystan.

  “Oh.” My disappointment showed in my face, clearly.

  “He didn’t give notice. Just quit. That is—disappeared. And without closing the store, or calling one of us.” The woman spoke with angry reproach, peering at me. “Are you a friend, miss?”

  “N-No. I guess—I’m not—a friend...”

  The woman frowned at me, as if I’d said something particularly stupid. For why would I be looking for the bookstore clerk, if I weren’t a friend; and why, if I weren’t a friend, was I looking for someone so shabby, so disreputable, so pathetic, and such a loser?

  Faltering I asked if she knew where Wystan had gone.

  Briskly, and with an air of mean satisfaction, the woman said she had no idea.

  Did he work somewhere else? I wondered. In Trenton?

  “I’ve told you, miss—I have no idea.”

  The woman’s curt manner suggested to me that she wasn’t a mere employee, as Wystan had been. Not the owner of the store, or a manager but—more likely—the disgruntled wife of the owner.

  Though I understood it was hopeless to try to engage the woman in any sort of exchange I heard myself asking, doggedly: “When did he leave the store?”

  “‘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 and 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 figured 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 h
er 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 email and to several emails from the director of the Newcomb program. Emails 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 would not take 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 change 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.”