High Crime Area: Tales of Darkness and Dread

by Joyce Carol Oates

She’d never been “high” in her life. She’d never smoked marijuana—which her classmates had called “pot,” “grass,” “dope.” She’d been a good girl. She’d been a cautious girl. She’d been a reliable girl. In school she’d had many friends—the safe sort of friends. They hadn’t been careless, reckless, or stupid, and they’d impressed their influential elders. They’d never gotten high and they had passed into adulthood successfully and now it was their time to begin passing away.

  She thought I will get high now. It will save me.

  The first time, she hadn’t needed to leave her house. Her sister’s younger daughter Kelsey came over with another girl and an older boy of about twenty, bony-faced, named Triste—(Agnes thought this was the name: “Triste”)—who’d provided the marijuana.

  Like this, they said. Hold the joint like this, inhale slowly, don’t exhale too fast, keep it in.

  They were edgy, loud-laughing. She had to suppose they were laughing at her.

  But not mean-laughing. She didn’t think so.

  Just, the situation was funny. Kids their age, kids who smoked dope, weren’t in school and weren’t obsessing about the future, to them the lives of their elders just naturally seemed funny.

  Kelsey wasn’t Agnes’s favorite niece. But the others—nieces, nephews—were away at college, or working.

  Kelsey was the one who hadn’t gone to college. Kelsey was the one who’d been in rehab for something much stronger than marijuana—OxyContin, maybe. And the girl’s friends who’d been arrested for drug possession. Her sister had said Kelsey has broken my heart. But I can’t let her know.

  Agnes wasn’t thinking of this. Agnes was thinking I am a widow, my heart has been broken. But I am still alive.

  Whatever the transaction was, how much the dope had actually cost, Agnes was paying, handing over bills to Triste who grunted shoving them into his pocket. Agnes was feeling grateful, generous. Thinking how long had it been since young people had been in her house, how long even before her husband had died, how long since voices had been raised like this, and she’d heard laughter.

  They’d seemed already high, entering her house. And soon there came another, older boy, in his mid-twenties perhaps, with a quasi-beard on his jutting jaws, in black T-shirt, much-laundered jeans, biker boots, forearms covered in lurid tattoos.

  “Hi there Aggie. How’s it goin!”

  Agnes she explained. Her name was Agnes.

  The boy stared at her. Not a boy but a man in his early thirties, in the costume of a boy. Slowly he smiled as if she’d said something witty. He’d pulled into her driveway in a rattly pickup.

  “Ag-nez. Cool.”

  They’d told him about her, maybe. They felt sorry for her and were protective of her.

  Her shoulder-length silvery hair, her soft-spoken manner. The expensive house, like something in a glossy magazine. That she was Kelsey’s actual aunt, and a widow.

  The acquisition of a “controlled substance”—other than prescription drugs—was a mystery to Agnes, though she understood that countless individuals, of all ages but primarily young, acquired these substances easily: marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, OxyContin, Vicodin, even heroin and “meth.” Self-medicating had become nearly as common as aspirin. Recreational drugs began in middle school.

  She was a university professor. She understood, if not in precise detail, the undergraduate culture of alcohol, drugs.

  These were not university students, however. Though her niece Kelsey was enrolled in a community college.

  Like this, Aunt Agnes.

  It was sweet, they called her Aunt Agnes, following Kelsey’s lead.

  She liked being an aunt. She had not been a mother.

  They passed the joint to her. With shaky fingers she held the stubby cigarette to her lips—drew the acrid smoke into her lungs—held her breath for as long as she could before coughing.

  She’d never smoked tobacco. She’d been careful of her health. Her husband, too, had been careful of his health: he’d exercised, ate moderately, drank infrequently. He’d smoked, long ago—not for thirty years. But then, he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer and rapidly the cancer had metastasized and within a few months he was gone.

  Gone was Agnes’s way of explanation. Dead she could not force herself to think, let alone speak.

  Kelsey was a good girl, Agnes was thinking. She’d had some trouble in high school but essentially, she was a good girl. After rehab she’d begun to take courses at the community college—computer science, communication skills. Agnes’s sister had said that Kelsey was the smartest of her children, and yet—Silver piercings in her face glittered like mica. Her mouth was dark purple like mashed grapes. It was distracting to Agnes, how her niece’s young breasts hung loose in a low-slung soft-jersey top thin as a camisole.

  She brought the joint to her lips, that felt dry. Her mouth filled with smoke—her lungs.

  He’d died of lung cancer. So unfair, he had not smoked in more than thirty years.

  Yet, individuals who’d never smoked could get lung cancer, and could die of lung cancer. In this matter of life-and-death, the notion of fair, unfair was futile.

  “Hey Auntie Agnes! How’re you feelin?”

  She said she was feeling a little strange. She said it was like wine—except different. She didn’t feel drunk.

  Auntie they were calling her. Affectionately, she wanted to think—not mockingly.

  So strange, these young people in her house! And her husband didn’t seem to be here.

  Strange, every day that he wasn’t here. That fact she could contemplate for long hours like staring at an enormous boulder that will never move.

  Strange too, she remained. She had not died—had she?

  There was her niece Kelsey and there was Kelsey’s friend Randi, and bony-faced Triste, and—was it Mallory, with the tattoos? She wasn’t sure. She was feeling warm, a suffusion of warmth in the region of her heart. She was laughing now, and coughing. Tears stung her eyes. Yet she was not sad. These were tears of happiness not sadness. She felt—expansive? elated? excited? Like walking across a narrow plank over an abyss.

  If the plank were flat on the ground, you would not hesitate. You would smile, this crossing is so easy.

  But if the plank is over an abyss, you feel panic. You can’t stop yourself from looking down, into the abyss.

  Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

  Her young friends were watching her, and laughing with her. A silvery-haired woman of some unfathomable age beyond sixty in elegant clothes, rings on her fingers, sucking at a joint like a middle school kid. Funny!

  Or maybe, as they might say, weird.

  How long the young people stayed in her house Agnes wouldn’t know. They were playing music—they’d turned on Agnes’s radio, and tuned it to an AM-rock station. The volume so high, Agnes felt the air vibrate. She had to resist the impulse to press her hands over her ears. Her young friends were laughing, rowdy. Kelsey was holding her hand and calling her Auntie. It was a TV comedy—brightly lit, and no shadows. Except she’d become sleepy suddenly. Barely able to walk, to climb the stairs, Kelsey and another girl had helped her. Someone’s arm around her waist so hard it hurt.

  “Hey Aunt Agnes, are you OK? Just lay down, you’ll feel better.”

  Kelsey was embarrassed for her widow-aunt. Or maybe—Kelsey was amused.

  She was crying now. Or, no—not crying so they could see.

  She’d learned another kind of crying that was inward, secret.

  Kelsey helped her lie on her bed, removed her shoes. Kelsey and the other girl were laughing together. A glimpse of Kelsey holding a filmy negligee against her front, cavorting before a mirror. The other girl, opening a closet door. Then, she was alone.

  She was awake and yet, strange things were happening in her head. Strange noises, voices, laughter, static. Her husband was knocking at the door which inadvertently she’d locked. She had not meant to lock him out. He was baffled and panicked by the lo
ud music in his house. Yet, she was paralyzed and could not rise from her bed to open the door. Forgive me! Don’t go away, I love you.

  After a while it was quiet downstairs.

  In the morning she woke to discover the lights still on downstairs and the rooms ransacked.

  Ransacked was the word her husband would use. Ransacked was the appropriate word, for the thievery had been random and careless, as children might do.

  Missing were silver candlestick holders, silverware and crystal bowls, her husband’s laptop from his study. Drawers in her husband’s desk had been yanked open, someone had rummaged through his files and papers but carelessly, letting everything fall to the floor.

  A small clock, encased in crystal, rimmed in gold, which had been awarded to her husband for one of his history books, and had been kept on the windowsill in front of her husband’s desk, was missing.

  A rear door was ajar. The house was permeated with cold. In a state of shock Agnes walked through the rooms. She found herself in the same room, repeatedly. As in a troubled dream, she was being made to identify what had been taken from her.

  Yet, what the eye does not see, the brain can’t register.

  The effort of remembering was exhausting.

  Her head was pounding. Her eyes ached. Her throat was dry and acrid and the inside of her mouth tasted of ashes.

  They hadn’t ransacked the upstairs. They hadn’t found her purse, her wallet and credit cards. They’d respected the privacy of her bedroom...

  She had no reason to think that her niece had been involved.

  Maybe, Kelsey had tried to stop them. But Triste and Mallory had threatened her.

  Agnes would never know. She could never ask. She tried to tell herself It doesn’t mean anything—that she doesn’t love me. It means only that they were desperate for money.

  Yet she called her sister to ask for Kelsey. Coolly her sister said that Kelsey didn’t live with them any longer, Agnes must know this.

  Where did Kelsey live? So far as anyone knew, Kelsey lived with “friends.”

  Kelsey was no longer attending the community college. Agnes must know this.

  Bitterly her sister spoke. Though relenting then, realizing it was Agnes, the widowed older sister, to whom she was speaking, and asking why Agnes wanted to speak with Kelsey?

  “No reason,” Agnes said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  It was terrifying to her, she would probably never see her niece again.

  Yet, I still love her.

  What was exhausting, when she wasn’t “high”—she had to plead for her husband’s life.

  Hours of each day. And through the night pleading No! Not ever.

  Not ever give up, I beg you.

  As soon as the diagnosis had been made, the doctors had given up on him. So it seemed to the stricken wife.

  Repeating their calm rote words Do you want extraordinary measures taken to sustain your life, in case complications arise during or after surgery and her husband who was the kindest of men, the most accommodating and least assertive of men, a gentle man, a thoughtful man, a reasonable man, one who would hide his own anxiety and terror in the hope of shielding his wife, had said quietly what the doctor had seemed to be urging him to say No of course not, doctor. Use your own judgment please. For this was the brave response. This was the noble response. This was the manly commonsense response. In mounting disbelief and horror Agnes had listened to this exchange and dared to interrupt No—we’re not going to give up. We do want “extraordinary measures”—I want “extraordinary measures” for my husband! Please! Anything you can do, doctor.

  She would beg. She would plead. Unlike her beloved husband she could not be stoic in the face of (his) death.

  Yet, in the end, fairly quickly there’d been not much the doctors could do. Her husband’s life from that hour onward had gone—had departed—swiftly like thread on a bobbin that goes ever more swiftly as it is depleted.

  I love you—so many times she told him. Clutching at him with cold frightened fingers.

  Love love love you please don’t leave me.

  She missed him, so much. She could not believe that he would not return to their house. It was that simple.

  In the marijuana haze, she’d half-believed—she’d been virtually certain—that her husband was still in the hospital, and wondering why she hadn’t come to visit. Or maybe it was in the dream—the dreams—that followed. High I was so high. The earth was a luminous globe below me and above me—there was nothing...

  After he’d died, within hours when she returned to the suddenly cavernous house she’d gone immediately to a medicine cabinet and on the spotless white-marble rim above the sink she had set out pills, capsules—these were sleeping pills, painkillers, antibiotics—that had accumulated over a period of years; prescriptions in both her husband’s and her name, long forgotten. Self-medicating—yet how much more tempting, to self-erase?

  There were dozens of pills here. Just a handful, swallowed down with wine or whiskey, and she’d never wake again—perhaps.

  “Should I? Should I join you?”—it was ridiculous for the widow to speak aloud in the empty house yet it seemed to her the most natural thing in the world; and what was unnatural was her husband’s failure to respond.

  She would reason It’s too soon. He doesn’t understand what has happened to him yet.

  Weeks now and she hadn’t put the pills away. They remained on the marble ledge. Involuntarily her eye counted them—five, eight, twelve, fifteen—twenty-five, thirty-five...

  She wondered how many sleeping pills, for instance, would be “fatal.” She wondered if taking too many pills would produce nausea and vomiting; taking too few, she might remain semi-conscious, or lapse into a vegetative state.

  Men were far more successful in suicide attempts than women. This was generally known. For men were not so reluctant to do violence to their bodies: gunshots, hanging, leaping from heights.

  I want to die but not to experience it. I want my death to be ambiguous so people will say—It was an accidental overdose!

  So people will say—She would not live without him, this is for the best.

  What a relief, that Kelsey and her friends hadn’t come upstairs to steal from her! They’d respected her privacy, she wanted to think.

  How stricken with embarrassment she’d have been if Kelsey had looked into the bathroom and seen the pills so openly displayed. Immediately her niece would have known what this meant, and would have called her mother.

  Mom! Aunt Agnes is depressed and suicidal—I thought you should know.

  At least, Agnes thought that Kelsey might have made this call.

  “Zeke! Thank you.”

  And, “Zeke—how much do I owe you?”

  From a young musician friend, a former student, now years since he’d been an undergraduate student, she’d acquired what she believed to be a higher, purer quality of “pot”—she’d been embarrassed to call him, to make the transaction, pure terror at the possibility—(of course, it was not a likely possibility)—that Zeke was an undercover agent for the local police; she’d encountered him by chance in an organic foods store near the university, he’d been kind to her, asking after her, of course he’d heard that Professor Krauss had died, so very sorry to hear such sad and unexpected news... Later she’d called him, set up a meeting at the local mall, in the vast parking lot, she’d been awkward and ashamed and yet determined, laughing so that her face reddened. To Zeke she was Professor Krauss also. To all her admiring students.

  A Ziploc bag Zeke sold her. Frankly he’d seemed surprised—then concerned. He’d been polite as she remembered him, from years ago. She told the ponytailed young man she was having friends over for the evening, friends from graduate-student days, Ann Arbor. He’d seemed to believe her. No normal person would much want to get high by herself, after all.

  As soon as she was safely home she lit a joint and drew in her breath as Kelsey had taught her—cautiously, but deeply. Th
e heat was distracting. She didn’t remember such heat. And the dryness, the acridity. Again she began to cough—tears spilled from her eyes. Her husband had said What are you doing, Agnes? Why are you doing such things? Just come to me, that’s all. You know that.

  Mattia.

  Running her forefinger down the Mattia listings. There were a surprising number—at least a dozen. Most young people had cell phones now. The Mercer County, New Jersey, phone directory had visibly shrunken. Yet, there was a little column of Mattias headed by Mattia, Angelo.

  His first name hadn’t been Angelo—she didn’t think so.

  Maybe—had it been Eduardo?

  (There was a listing for Eduardo, in Trenton.)

  Also listed were Giovanne, Christopher, Anthony,Thomas, E. L. Mattia...

  None of these names seemed quite right to her. Yet, she had to suppose that her former student, an inmate-student at Rahway State Prison, was related to one or more of these individuals.

  Impulsively she called the listing for Mattia, Eduardo.

  If there is no answer, then it isn’t meant to happen.

  The phone rang at the other end. But no one picked up. A recording clicked on—a man’s heavily accented voice—quickly Agnes hung up.

  Later, she returned to discover the phone directory which she’d left on a kitchen counter, open to the Mattia listings. She stared at the column of names. She thought—Was the name “Joseph”?

  It had been a traditional name, with religious associations. A formal name. When Agnes had addressed the young man it was formally, respectfully—Mr. Mattia.

  Other instructors in the prison literacy program called students by their first names. But not Agnes, who’d taken seriously the program organizer’s warning not to suggest or establish any sort of “inappropriate intimacy” with the inmate-students.

  Never touch an inmate. Not even a light tap on the arm.

  Never reveal your last name to them. Or where you live, or if you are married.

  Agnes remembered with what eagerness she’d read Mattia’s prose pieces in her remedial English composition class at Rahway several years before. The teaching experience, for her, in the maximum-security state prison, had been exhausting, but thrilling.