The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

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 e-mail. For I very much feared that my stipend 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 tooth 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,