by Michelle Kuo
“But I had you.”
“That’s not enough.”
“It is for me.”
I shook my head.
He looked down at his sandals, now neatly tied with string.
I was worried about Patrick’s life after jail. What would he do in Helena? What employer would take him? Would he wander the streets again, sit on his porch? I couldn’t imagine his future.
“You with Danny and Lucy last night?” he asked.
“They asked me to be the godmother of their son,” I said, beaming a little.
“Aww, Ms. Kuo. Bet you wish you around for the baby birth.”
“I know. Lucy is so big now.” I made a gesture.
He smiled.
“You were there for Cherish’s?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He named the date without thinking, in June.
I jotted it down. “Danny and Lucy, they showed me the ultrasound picture.”
“The what?”
“It’s a picture of the baby before it’s born. Did you get to see one?”
“Naw.”
“You can see the head.”
He squinted, as if he was trying to imagine the picture.
“What was it like holding Cherish for the first time?”
“It felt—amazing, really. To have a daughter, a baby—my own baby. She be real tiny, four pounds and three ounces, like a little pink pig. Her eyes look real big, like—real bright on her face. I just remember her eyes looking into my eyes. And I be thinking, this…this my daughter…” He faltered.
Now his voice deepened. “I wasn’t ready to have no baby. I wasn’t doing nothing. I just looking into her big eyes and thinking I don’t got no degree, no job…”
His voice choked and he turned away.
I looked at his homework.
Dear Cherish,
I dreamt of us yesterday. In the dream you and I are crossing a rushing white mountain stream. The family in the farmhouse cooks for us fresh water salmon and the most delicious potatoes. Night is nearing. You point out the cabin lodge just above the hill. I say, “Yes, that’s where we will sleep.” The hike up the mountains is a six hour walk in length and a two hour walk in width, and is one of the most marvelous sights in the world. The trees are a gorgeous evergreen. The mountains are smoke gray with snow covered tops and jagged edges. The climate is always cool even in the summer. In the stream the water flows so rapidly, forming white bubbles like a Jacuzzi, and it runs into a beautiful waterfall. There is also a mysterious ditch the people have dug like a moat. It runs the length of the one farm and cabin. No further. The family told us that this is some of the most pure water in the country. We make our way along the mountain trail where blue birds, bald eagles, and sunbirds rest on low branches.
We see a flower called stargazer lily and it had pink and white polka dots. In the evening, when we are sitting by the stream, you say, Once we leave there will never be another place like this.
I am still awake in the middle of the night, amazed of the land. You roll over and look up at me. Suddenly a lizard, perhaps alone in the night, comes through the window and hides in a corner, as if it couldn’t have found a better place. You say it looks like a snake on little legs. At daybreak, when you awaken, it is already gone. Across the stream, above the hills, the smoke gray mountains of paradisal lines are clear in the sunlight.
He had come so far, but what struck me then and for many years afterward was how little I had done for him. I don’t mean this in the way of false modesty. I mean that it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books, and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.
Patrick had collected himself and turned back toward me.
“Can I keep this?” I held up his notebook.
He shrugged casually. Then he saw my face: It must have betrayed my disappointment. His notebooks, now nearly sacred objects to me, were not sacred to him.
Swiftly, he explained, “I be transferred in a month; they might not let me bring them. They get lost. You keep them, Ms. Kuo.”
I agreed. “Somebody might take them.”
At this he corrected me. “Ain’t nobody want that.” He chuckled to himself.
Maybe a record of someone’s private thoughts is worthless anywhere. Certainly in jail—contraband is worth more. But I wondered if it was especially worthless in the Delta, where a calm place to read was hard to come by; where there wasn’t a bookstore for a hundred miles and families couldn’t afford a book, anyhow; and where a teacher had once burst into my classroom to scold me for having the kids write about the death of a classmate, not wanting them to feel sympathy for him.
Patrick returned to the atlas, studying the legend as if it were a poem he was decoding. An inch represented a hundred miles.
“Ms. Kuo, where you from again? Massachusetts?”
“No. Michigan.”
He found Michigan. I showed him the county where I’d been born, Kalamazoo. “It was a good place to grow up,” I said, and he nodded soberly, as if my comment was profound and explained a lot about me.
Then he found Arkansas and, tracing the river, Helena.
Then: LITTLE ROCK, FAYETTEVILLE. He pointed at BATESVILLE and announced, “I be looking here.”
Batesville was small but still bigger than Helena.
“Making my escape route,” he joked. “I just need my getaway car.”
“Okay. Name the date, I’ll be there.”
We laughed.
“You gotta get going, Ms. Kuo?”
I checked the time.
“Yeah.”
I was thinking of the Merwin poem, and how he knew it by heart, and how he had written to his daughter, I know it by heart and I would love for you to know it, too.
Thinking to buy time, I said, “Let’s recite it again.”
The words came to us easily; they were a formality, a rite.
Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment.
We made it to the end without a hitch. “It’s a bit like singing to yourself, isn’t it?” I said. The words made sounds and the sounds kept thought away. After a while you stopped wondering what it all meant, because it’s become a part of you.
But even as I said this I could remember the first time we’d read it together, and I tried to make sense of it. It was back in March, five or so months into my time in Helena, and I’d asked him for his favorite line. Answering this question had just started to become important to him.
“We will be no older than we ever were,” he had said finally.
I asked why.
“Because whenever you go to this one place, it’s like—it’s like this place that last forever. It’s like this be a place where”—Patrick made a small sound in his throat—“where time don’t matter no more. Where time be just stopping.”
This place that last forever.
Where time be just stopping.
A place where time don’t matter no more.
I thought about all the time he felt he’d lost—no, not lost, wasted—by being in jail, and how this feeling had made him think, in turn, of all the time he felt he’d wasted during his life. For his vocabulary sentence he’d used the word oblivion to write: My teenage years were an oblivion.
“Do you have a place like that?” I now asked. “Where time lasts forever?”
Without hesitating, he said, “My mama.”
I blinked. I felt I was on the threshold of some kind of understand
ing.
No trick, no magic, no God could reverse the past, undo what happened: un-kill a man, bring life back, or give Patrick the chance to live his teenage years again. But poetry, or this poem, had brought him closer to a feeling, to a presence, to an immensity that could swallow death and do away with time. As supernatural as it all felt, it was just the memory of love: his mother waiting for him to come home.
There were moments when I was reading with Patrick that he appeared to me anew, as a person I was just beginning to know. In these brief moments, there seemed to exist between us a mystical and radical and improbable equality. This was what reading could do: It could make you, however fleetingly, unpredictable. You were not someone about whom another can say, You are this kind of person, but rather a person for whom nothing is predetermined. I had given him the books, I had taught him the mechanics, and still the words had moved us separately, as if we had heard the same bird singing and the song entered each of us, changed.
It was time to go. “I need you to do one last thing,” I said.
He picked up his pen.
I told him to put it down.
“You won’t have to write about this. You just need to relax.”
I told him to close his eyes, and he squeezed them shut. I told him to imagine a place he wanted to go. What did he see? He saw water, he said, and then, sand.
“Any sign of life?” I asked.
“A crab, all by itself.”
“Any human beings?” His eyelashes flickered, his mouth twitched.
“Cherish,” he said. I waited. “She’s squatting,” he continued. “Looking at the crab. She’s saying that it has little legs.” But, he said, his mouth in a faint smile, “her legs be little, too.”
11
* * *
Easter Morning
It is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man…
—A. R. AMMONS, “Easter Morning”
I LIVE IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, AND work at a nonprofit organization in the district of Fruitvale. One morning a pigeon flies into an open window at work and shits everywhere. This becomes a badge of honor I share with my fellow lawyers. On Thursday evenings we hold “clinics” for clients, mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants: day laborers, gardeners, dishwashers, construction workers, nannies, all either stiffed out of wages or facing eviction.
At the end of the day, we lock up the office and get drinks—a lot of drinks. They christen me with Spanish names: Michelada, Michelina. I am happier than I can remember. Fondo fondo fondo. Bottoms up. I am learning Spanish. Within a month, I meet someone at a bar, also a “public interest lawyer,” as we’re called. I can hardly believe I am already dating someone.
—
THEN I GET a letter from Patrick.
Not just one, but several at once.
He was transferred from the county jail to prison after prison, until he ended up at Calico Rock in northern Arkansas. He tells me that he got my letters and fills me in on his days.
But I have trouble focusing on what he writes, because I’m distracted by the “how.” Words are misspelled, apostrophes forgotten. His letters are larger, rounder. Where is the writing from just three months before, tiny and nearly calligraphic, which could pass as a kind of artisanal typeface? That handwriting was proof to me that I had not imagined his progress.
Be realistic, be generous, I exhort myself. Education isn’t like business or accounting—present loss of skill doesn’t diminish the value of the hours put in. Besides, Patrick reports good news: He’s taking advantage of programs at the state prison. He has the best scores in his GED classes. In October, he sends me a copy of his high school diploma in the mail.
In a letter he asks, Do you have a couple dollars to spare? He had to borrow money for a stamp.
I begin to worry. Not about Patrick, but about me. I begin to think that those seven months didn’t really happen, that I had imagined the mystical silences we shared while Patrick wrote. I must have dreamed the poems we memorized, because I cannot remember the lines anymore. On the way to work, holding the metal bar of a subway, I wonder what it was all for and consider the idea that once you stop thinking about something, it disappears.
—
STILL, I SEND Patrick postcards. One is a picture of sequoia trees—I’d gone to a park in California with friends. How are you? I ask. Look at these trees! They are the biggest and oldest in the world.
—
I MOVE AGAIN; the lease is up. I like my neighborhood but I want to try a new one. This time, Oakland Chinatown. My building is ugly, but in the mornings, from my window, I can see children walking to school. A hunched-over Chinese grandpa holds the hand of a little girl in pigtails; she is faster than he is, dragging him along. In the evening as I walk home, I pass by a store that says SINCERE HARDWARE. Good old Chinese.
I meet my family in Taiwan for the winter holidays. We four bike along rice paddies and wildflowers, near the island’s eastern coast. Though the view here is nothing like the flat inland of the Delta, the breeze and the blue of the water remind me of driving with the kids across the bridge, our windows rolled down. Meanwhile, my mother has lost the ability to ride her bike. She teeters; she clatters; she falls. We help her get up; she is cheerful and tries again. The mountains are blanketed in verdant forests, but in the heavy mist all we see is blue and then gray and then blue again. There are mountains everywhere, behind and ahead of us, so that it feels as if we are never moving away from them.
I remember one of Patrick’s poems. My mother is around the mountains, it began. The cliffs lift me up to see / Her voice is in the air. It has a lovely sound; I can hear it now: air and around, lift and cliffs. But especially wonderful is mother and mountain, two things he wanted to see; his writing gave them a home together.
—
PATRICK CALLS.
“I’m out. The prisons be overcrowded, so they let me go.”
Just like that.
“You’re out?” I repeat. “Where are you?”
“Home.”
He had served two and a half years. “I got paroled; I got good behavior.”
“That’s great,” I say. “How is it?”
“It ain’t real, Ms. Kuo.” I can see him grinning.
I put down the phone. What happens now?
—
FOR PATRICK, NOTHING and everything happens. He returns home. His mother greets him on the porch. Then, nine months later, his mother dies. She is forty-three.
Mary was taking a shower when she had the final seizure in a stream of diabetic seizures that had been occurring daily. She hit her head against the tub and died. Kiera found her body.
There was no wake. “That what she wanted,” Patrick tells me over the phone, soon after the death. “She had it all planned. She wanted to be cremated. She didn’t want make no big deal out of it. She didn’t want people crying too much or nothing.”
A month later he calls again.
I am at work and a client sits in my office.
“You don’t got no two dollars to spare?”
He’s insistent. Something in his voice, his breathing, his uncharacteristic pushiness, disturbs me. He is not himself. I think maybe he is on something. Is it drugs? Is it alcohol?
I am torn.
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
At first I think he’s hung up. But I hear him breathing.
“You there?”
“Yeah. It’s okay, Ms. Kuo. I understand.”
More silence. I feel trapped. I try to change the subject.
“How’s the job search?”
“I be trying, Ms. Kuo. But there’s nothing in Helena. I walk down the street and there’s nothing.”
> Still waiting, my client is polite, pretending not to listen, surely trying to determine whether this is a personal or professional call and therefore gauge the extent of my rudeness. A bank has nailed an eviction notice to her door. Her emergency reassures me, as if canceling out Patrick’s.
“I’ve got to go now. I’ll try you later,” I say. Then I hang up.
I don’t hear from him for six months.
—
A FRIEND TELLS me about the Prison University Project at San Quentin Prison, the only program in California that grants college degrees in a state prison. “You can volunteer there,” she said. “Teach.”
I join, and I am one of hundreds; we pour in during the evenings from organizations and universities scattered across the Bay Area. The disparity between the resources at San Quentin in California and those at the county jail in Arkansas could be measured in light-years.
At the prison I encounter the most motivated students I have ever met in my life. “On the fifth reading of this, I finally understood something,” a student would begin nonchalantly. Fifth reading? I try not to look surprised, because none of the students do. Nor is it the case, as people have surmised, that they have “nothing else to do.” For most, the day begins at around six in the morning, with manual labor—upholstery, carpentry, or other jobs for which they are paid roughly two dollars an hour. After that, group meetings, drug rehab, Alcoholics Anonymous, religious meetings, counseling. Somehow they manage to fit in homework.
I meet another teacher. In a sea of white and black teachers, he is one of the few East Asian teachers, my age. He’s the only one who looks somewhat like me. He’s speaking animatedly to a student. Not being immune to stereotypes, I assume he is teaching math. I eavesdrop. Greek tragedy, it sounds like. Antigone; no, Oedipus? These are the only Greek plays that I have read—a gap of mine. “So he gouges his eyes out. And the story’s about this: Can you change your fate?” Then the Not Math Tutor stops talking and pushes up his glasses. “What do you think?” he asks, smiling. He has a sunny disposition despite his choice of topic.