High Crime Area (11 page)

Then I was falling. I was screaming, and I was falling. It happened so fast! Faster than I can recount. Though even then thinking
You touched me at last. It was a human touch. You chose me because I am beautiful and desirable and young. You chose me over all the others.

But already my happiness has ended. I have fallen onto the track. I have fallen helpless, on my back. A smell of oil in my widened nostrils, something musty and cold. Out of nowhere the train is speeding. Oncoming headlights. My body is a boneless rag doll flopping and being crushed by the train. The emergency brakes are thrown but it's too late, it was too late as soon as you moved up stealthily behind me smiling whispering
Lorelei! Lorelei!
in your way of cruel teasing. You pushed me from behind, hard. Swift and hard the palms of your hands flat against my back between my shoulder blades. As if you've planned the act, you've rehearsed the act numerous times to perfection, and in the very act of pushing you are turning aside, to the left, taking care that the momentum of your act doesn't carry you over the edge of the platform and onto the track below with your screaming victim. And you are running, you are pushing past bystanders running and gone with your mysterious cruel smile as below the platform on the tracks inside the terrible grinding wheels my body is caught up, my legs severed at the knees, a wrenching of bone, my left arm is torn off at the shoulder, my skull crushed as you'd crush a bird's egg beneath your careless feet, scarcely knowing you'd crushed it. The silly high-heeled sandals have been tossed from my feet and will be found a dozen yards away. My blood is rushing from my body to congeal with the cold oil and filth of the tracks. My body is crushed, disfigured. You would no longer stare at my beauty. You would no longer recognize Lorelei. On the platform above, strangers are screaming. I want to cry, these strangers care for me. In that instant, they care for me. Fellow passengers who'd disapproved of me in the trains have now forgiven me and are crying Help! Get help! Oh God get help! A tall husky girl who might be Plastic Girl runs to the edge of the platform, can't see me because my body is hidden by the train skidding to a stop.

And Dunk, slack-mouthed in horror. Dunk with his bald-hippie pigtail gone gray. Dunk stunned and sick with grief he has lost me for the final time.

And you others who never knew me except to glimpse a girl pushed in front of a speeding train to her death, these others grieving for me, too. Never knew me in life but will never never forget me as I am in death.

Please love me?
My eyes beg. Glancing at the window beside your seat, uptown train flying through the tunnel, lights in the car flickering off, back on, off again and back on like the sensation before sleep. Lights in the car so bright you can't see outside, only your reflection in the grimy window, my own face, and sometimes you don't recognize that face.

Please love me? I love you.

1.

A call came from home. Your brother, they said.

It was like the crashing fall of a stalactite—a giant stalactite made of ice.

What of my brother, I said. I was the youngest sister of the brood and could not see what any of them had to do with me.

The voice was my father's but funneled through some sort of tunnel- or time-warp. These were people who refused to use cell phones and did not “do” email and their way of communication was the old-fashioned land-phone prominent in their kitchen on its special little table.

“Your brother needs help. He is not well. He refuses to speak to us and will no longer pick up the phone. We have tried and failed as you know. God knows we have tried and failed with Harvey and we are not young any longer.
You
are young, and live close to him.”

This was false. This was a lie. I lived at least two hundred miles from Harvey. It was all I could stammer—“No!
You
live closer.”

My father explained that Harvey had taken a
leave of absence
from the seminary and was living now in Trenton, New Jersey.

The term
leave of absence
was enunciated with care. There was the wish, on my father's part, that this term not be interpreted as
dropped out, been expelled, failed.

I had not heard this news. I was stunned and even a little frightened to be told that (1) my brother lived sixty miles from me; (2) my brother had dropped out of the seminary.

My God-besotted brother who was the only person I'd ever heard of who, already in middle school, was convinced that it was his destiny to be a “man of God.”

This information was too confusing for me to process. My father continued to speak as my mother, who must have been leaning her ear close to the receiver, spoke also, more forcibly. The overlapping voices made me feel that my brain had split and the two halves were being shaken like chestnuts in a metal container—noise, static, all sense of words lost.

“I can't see Harvey. I—I have no time for—”

“Your poor brother is alone, and you know how innocent and unworldly he is. You know he has ‘moods'—‘fugues.' Please look in upon him, as you are his sister and our dear daughter. Be kind to him, if you can.”

Badly I wanted to break the connection. This was so unfair!

Mercilessly the voices droned on: “And if you could shop for him. And now and then cook a meal for him if you would be so kind...”

“I can't. I don't have time. I have my own life now.”

“God bless you, dear. If you can do these things for your poor brother, and your parents. We are so helpless here. We are not so well ourselves. We are not so young any longer and already the temperature is so cold at night and the wind whistling through this old house, and the terrible winter looming ahead...”

I'd stopped listening. A pounding of blood in my ears drowned out the yammering voices. I muttered
Good night!
and broke the connection.

Will not. Can't make me. No longer. I am not your captive daughter now.

Hurrying on the stairs and talking excitedly to myself and my heel caught in something frayed and suddenly I was plunging forward, downward, headfirst down the remainder of the stairs to strike the hardwood floor and for a stunned moment lying motionless trying to determine if I was alive, or not; if I was conscious, or not; if I'd broken any bones, or stimulated my heart into a wild crazed tachycardia; a chill blackness came over me, like something being swept by a faceless custodian with one of those wide brushy brooms; and someone was shaking my shoulder gently but urgently, a concerned face hovered above mine—
Hello? Are you all right? Let me help you
...

One of the young-women residents in Newcomb Hall. A kindly individual with a familiar face though I didn't know her name and now in my deep embarrassment I could only stammer thank you, yes I am all right, I am fine, pressing a wad of tissues against my nose that was leaking blood, thank you
so much.

Eager to escape! For I could not bear being exposed as clumsy, and pitiable.

Out of the residence hall then, walking swiftly if not very steadily in the cold wet air and I was halfway to my destination when I realized that I'd rushed outside without a coat. Snowflakes melting in my hair, on my eyelashes and warm cheeks.

Leaves stuck to the soles of my feet like sticky tongues. I felt a sing of terror kicking at them.

For a frightening moment I could not recall where I was. Where I was headed. Pulses beat angrily in my head
I am not your captive now!

I remembered then, I was due at Jester College, one of the University's residential colleges, where the master of the college was hosting a Newcomb Fellows reception. By the time I arrived at the Gothic archway of the master's entrance, my parents' hateful words were dissipated and lost.

In the Graduate College of the University, I was one of eleven Newcomb Fellows. We were four young women and seven young men and we were all graduates of good second-tier universities from which we'd graduated
summa cum laude
and for this reason the great University founded in the eighteenth century, buttressed against financial crises with an endowment of $20 billion, had cast out lifelines to us, to pull us out of the choppy cannibal sea and onto the floating island of the historic University. We were scholars in the humanities and social sciences; our futures shimmered before us like the most seductive of mirages—academic appointments at good universities, freedom to devote to scholarship, a commitment to teaching, too—a protected life, utterly enviable. My brother Harvey, older than I by several years, had preceded me into this insulated and protected world; he was a scholar-seminarian, or had been. I was twenty-three and very ambitious. My face was bland as smooth-carved soapstone yet felt to me, from within, like one of those pen-and-ink drawings by Matisse of sharp-featured females. My voice was low, murmurous, and gracious; my voice would be described as a distinctly “feminine” voice; if I did not modulate it, my voice would resemble the harsh cracked cry of a famished bird.

At the reception, Newcomb Fellows were introduced to older post-docs and professors in the humanities. At such occasions, I maneuvered myself very well. I am a small light-boned person with a pleasing smile that lights up as automated lights switch on when a human presence approaches. And unobtrusively I made a small evening meal out of the appetizers served at the reception, for I was very frugal, and meant to save money in any way that I could; in my book bag, I secreted away a few extra appetizers wrapped in paper napkins, for midnight when I was likely to be famished.

My scholarly dissertation was to be in the cultural anthropology of religion. I was studying with Professor A. who was a world authority on the both the Abrahamic religions of Africa and several indigenous African religions with long histories in the regions now known as Zimbabwe and Sudan. Professor A. had entrusted me with a rare manuscript in the now mostly extinct Eweian language, which had been several times translated, but never, in Professsor A.'s opinion, accurately; under his guidance, I would translate it, and interpret it.

At the crowded reception I sighted Professor A. across the room. His gaze moved over me, I thought, without recognition; but perhaps the elderly white-haired gentleman had not seen me.

Others were glancing toward me—at my face which was throbbing with heat. A thin trickle of something liquid ran from my nose but I'd captured it in a paper napkin, I'd thought, and blotted it away, before anyone could see.

Someone asked if I'd hurt myself, my eyes and my nose appeared to be bruised. Quickly I denied this. I had not
hurt myself
. I was fine except—a family crisis made it necessary for me to leave the University for a few days, unavoidably.

Family crisis? What was this?

It was utterly shocking to me—my crow-voice, not my soft-modulated feminine voice, had spoken, uttering words I had not meant to speak.

Now I worried that there were blood-drops on my clothes. I could not bring myself to glance downward, to see.

2.

It was a surprise and a shock to see where my brother was living.

The house at 11 Grindell Park did not even look inhabited. It was a weatherworn English Tudor that had once been impressive, you could see—like other, similar houses built in a semi-circle around the derelict park where at the apex of the semi-circle was a small Greek Revival temple that appeared to be a public library, its columns and walls now defaced with graffiti. The park was deserted except for a scattering of homeless individuals who sat, or lay, unmoving as corpses, and dark-skinned boys with pants halfway down their hips as in gangsta films and videos. There were a few others, adult males, who seemed to be arranged like chess pieces, each near-stationary in his own part of the park yet keenly aware, you sensed, of the others. You were made to think of vultures except these were ground-creatures and the storm-damaged trees of the abandoned little urban park would have been too weak to support their weight.

Grindell Park was just inside the Trenton city limits, two blocks from traffic-clogged Camden Avenue. In this part of the city Camden Avenue was a succession of fast-food restaurants, gas stations, and small businesses of which a conspicuous number were shuttered and their properties for rent. Beyond the busy street was a neighborhood of run-down wood frame houses, many of these for rent or abandoned as well. And then there was Grindell Park, another block farther from Camden Avenue, a once-prestigious Trenton neighborhood. It was mystifying to me, as to my parents, why Harvey had moved to Trenton, where he could have known no one; and why to such a neighborhood?

Until now I'd imagined that I knew my brother. I had not always liked him—(to be candid, Harvey hadn't much liked me, or even noticed me)—but I had always admired and envied him and hoped to emulate him in his strategies of escape from our household.

Parked my car at the trash-littered curb in front of 11 Grindell and by the time I removed the key from the ignition the sharp-eyed gangsta boys in the park had already checked it out—secondhand, tarnished, economy-sized, foreign (“Mazda”)—and dismissed it.

Still, I locked the doors. My laptop computer was inside, beneath a pile of clothes.

The English Tudor house, once a private home, had been crudely renovated and partitioned into apartments. What must have been an elegant front foyer was now an entryway with a scuffed and soiled tile floor and along one wall a row of cheap aluminum mailboxes.

At a distance of several feet I could recognize Harvey's pinched little block letters—
HARVEY
SELDEN
,
APT
. 3
B
.

Two hulking young men in their twenties were descending the stairs, loudly. With them was a large bald dog that, sighting me, began barking hysterically.