I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Midway through the class Erma handed back the students’ self-portraits and asked for volunteers to read their work aloud, which induced a flurry of excitement and drama. On their papers she’d commented in detail, but without grading. (She dreaded the prospect of grading! How do you grade adult men and women who’ve spilled their guts to you, in utter trust?) When she handed back Arno Kethy’s paper she was shocked to see, rising stiffly from his seat at the rear of the room, coming reluctantly forward, a scowling man in his late thirties with a sunken, shadowed face and downturned eyes. His face was mysteriously ruined as if stitched together, a mass of scars. Razor scars, acne? His voice was an embarrassed mumble—“Thank you, ma’am.” In his self-portrait he’d spoken of Erma Schegloff’s face as a beacon of light and it seemed now he might be blinded by her, approaching her, refusing to meet her gaze, even as Erma smiled forcefully, determined to behave as normally as possible. She’d rehearsed this moment but Kethy took the paper from her fingers with no further acknowledgment, folding it at once, turning away and lurching back to his desk like an agitated child. So this was Kethy, Arno C. Not the handsome black man with the thin mustache who smiled at her so readily during class, but the Caucasian with the slovenly ponytail straggling down his back. He was tall but limp-boned like a snake gliding on its tail. His greasy hair was receding at the crown of his head, a coarse gingery-gray. His jaws had a steely unshaven glint. His eyes were evasive, in bruised, hollowed sockets. Yet he wore a cheaply stylish sport coat of simulated suede, fawn-colored, that gave him an incongruous sexy swagger; beneath it a black T-shirt with the logo of an obscene grinning skull out of whose mouth a floppy pink tongue protruded. A man who’d spent eight years of his life on Death Row, and might have been executed…

  Erma wondered if others could sense the intensity of emotion, the tension, in Kethy’s body. It seemed to radiate from his pallid skin like waves of electricity.

  Kethy returned to his seat without having looked the instructor in the face. His mouth was twitching. Erma steadfastly looked away. She’d planned to say to him Mr. Kethy…Arno?…this is very strong, compelling writing…If you’d like to speak with me after class… but the words stuck in her throat.

  At the end of the class, as a number of students gathered around the instructor wanting to talk to her, Arno Kethy left quickly by a rear exit. Erma saw that he didn’t glance back at her, nor was he walking with any of the others. A loner. A very strange man. Erma was light-headed with exhaustion after the lengthy class but determined to speak with the students as if she were delighted they wanted to speak with her. Later she would wonder if she’d been disappointed in the ex-convict’s eccentric behavior, or relieved that he’d kept his distance from her.

  ERMA HAD MADE a photocopy of Kethy’s self-portrait, and her detailed comments on it, for safekeeping. She was eager to see what he might write next. (Or did she halfway hope he might drop the course?) When a friend from graduate school called to ask how her first week of teaching had gone, Erma said vehemently, “I love it. I mean—I’ve never had such an experience before.” She could not have said what these tremulous words meant.

  You were a beacon to me. E. SCHEGLOFF.

  Your face I beleive I saw.

  In her office on the third floor of Greer Hall, at a temporarily assigned desk, Erma glanced up at a hesitant knock on the opened door, or a murmured approximation of her name. But, through the remainder of January, it was never Arno Kethy.

  Because she was only an adjunct instructor with a single-term contract, Erma Schegloff had no permanent office. She shared a battered aluminum desk, large and vaguely military in appearance, like a tank, with two or three other instructors who taught at other times, and whom she never saw. The desk drawers were stuffed with old, yellowed papers by students long since vanished, syllabi and memos and university print-outs. She’d neatly taped to a waterstained wall a reproduction of a beautifully austere painting by Georgia O’Keeffe—a steer’s skull floating in a pellucid-blue sky. Only just a coincidence, its resemblance to Kethy’s ugly T-shirt. On sagging bookshelves in the office, crammed and untidy, were aged books abandoned by their owners; hardcovers, paperbacks; textbooks, outdated dictionaries and university directories. On the uneven floor was a grimy carpet faded to the color of dishwater by the sun which, on clear days, flooded the office through a ceiling-high, ill-fitting window. The room smelled of dust, mouse droppings, forlorn desires. Lost or worn-out hope. Above the door, confronting Erma as she sat at the desk, was an old-fashioned clock that was not only no longer functioning but had somehow lost its minute hand.

  Except that Erma’s office was three steep flights up from her classroom in the basement of Greer Hall, and therefore discouraging to visitors, she liked it very much. My first office! Until I’m expelled. She hadn’t had a particularly happy childhood back in Erie, Pennsylvania, amid a family of older brothers but she often recalled random moments when she’d stepped into an unexpected, magical space, indoors or out, but usually in, a space mysteriously waiting for her; for her alone; warm and dazzling with light. And even if the space was small, she felt a sense of amplitude. And this office was large, even cavernous; especially at night, when the windowpanes reflected only the interior.

  Instructors in the Night Division were required to keep two office hours a week, preferably before each class, and Erma’s were 6 P.M. to 7 P.M. Tuesdays and Thursdays; but she’d added an extra hour each evening, following class, for she wanted to give her students every opportunity to meet with her. “Come see me, please. I’ll be in my office upstairs.” After her initial euphoria over their self-portraits, Erma had come to a more realistic assessment of their writing skills. Two-thirds of the class performed at about the eighth-grade level, a few were virtually illiterate. And there were two or three, in addition to Arno Kethy, who weren’t turning in any work at all, for what motive Erma didn’t know.

  Yet she was feeling optimistic. Reckless!

  A mysterious strength suffused her days and even her nights. She rose, in the dark, at 6:30 A.M. to swim in the university pool, amid strangers; she spent hours each day at her scholarly work in the university library and in her apartment; she prepared diligently for Composition 101, choosing exemplary essays from their text to teach and scanning newspapers and magazines for clippings to bring to her students of good, forceful writing. She loved her solitude. She was never lonely. So physically lonely! Of that, I can’t speak. In fact she’d come to this aging post-industrial city on a famously polluted river partly to put distance between herself and a man for whom she’d felt a complex of emotions and she was discovering (contrary to what poetic sentiment might suggest) that the blunt fact of distance, sixty snowswept miles of interstate highway and monotonous, level countryside, was a remedy. Far from the intellectual and cultural center of the state, at the university’s main campus, Erma felt like a renegade from a proper, approved life. She felt illicit, and renewed.

  Not a man to be pushed, obviously. He’s suffered.

  Arno Kethy had not handed in the next two assignments (“description of a setting,” “description of an action or process”) and he’d offered Erma no excuse. She was determined not to call him to account, just yet. She would wait another week or so, before asking to speak with him privately.

  Am I afraid of him?

  I am not!

  Those eyes. Wounded, haunted. Ever-shifting. Fixed upon the instructor covertly, hidden behind his raised, big-knuckled hands.

  Often in the library, in the midst of researching the myriad religious schisms of the vanished seventeenth century, Erma found herself thinking of Kethy, Arno C. His deformed-seeming yet swaggering body. His ravaged face. And those eyes. He was standing in the cheap stylish coat and black T-shirt, not before her, but at the periphery of her vision, like an imperfectly recalled dream. His behavior was a riddle she would one day solve.

  In the meantime she’d become a true teacher. An instructor. She was discovering the very real satisfactions of
teaching motivated adults who yearn to know skills elemental to the lives they envision leading; not luxury skills of an affluent civilization, but skills of necessity. How impassioned Erma Schegloff felt, speaking to her students: “Many of you have these skills by instinct, and now you’ll be formalizing them. You’ll be revising your papers for me which means you’ll be steadily improving. That’s our goal!” Strange and wonderful, Erma’s students seemed to believe her. They seemed to like her. They must have forgiven her her youth and inexperience and were beginning to appreciate her oblique sense of humor. (Did Arno Kethy smile at her jokes? Erma didn’t dare look.) Other adjuncts in the Night Division warned Erma not to spend too much time on her course, these were low-paying, dead-end jobs in the university, but Erma thought stubbornly what was too much time when you were crucially involved with others? “They need me. Someone like me. Who will help them, and not judge harshly.”

  Since she’d become an instructor, it seemed to her that the flaws of her personality, as she saw them—shyness, self-consciousness, insecurity, an excessive concern with detail and precision—evaporated as soon as she stepped into the classroom. As soon as her students saw her. As if the humming flickering fluorescent lights of the undistinguished room had the power to magically transform her.

  She was determined that Arno Kethy would not distract her. No one would have guessed (Kethy himself could have not guessed) that she was aware of him at all. The fact that he slouched in his seat at the back of the room, staring fixedly at her. She told herself That man is on my side. In three weeks Kethy hadn’t missed a single class but he never participated in the frequently lively discussion. So far as Erma could gather he shunned all contact with his fellow students. (As they shunned contact with him.) Often, as Erma spoke, he began to scribble rapidly in his notebook. He was left-handed, and writing involved some contortion of his body. A man imprisoned in a tight space. Her heart welled with pity for him.

  She meant to commiserate with Arno Kethy when at last he spoke with her. She rehearsed her words, even her facial expressions. She would be quietly sympathetic, she would urge him to speak. If he wanted to speak. She would say nothing (of course) about his fantasy of her; his conviction that he’d somehow known her before meeting her. Arno don’t give up hope. Arno I am awaiting you. She couldn’t help but wonder how close he’d come to being executed. Months, weeks? She believed that, in time, he would tell her.

  And she wondered what he’d done, or had been wrongly convicted of doing, to warrant a death sentence. It could only have been murder. Murders. In this Midwestern state executions had been rare for decades but were being reinstated under a Republican governor and legislature. Erma had made inquiries and learned that the state no longer electrocuted men but killed them by lethal injection.

  Yet when class ended at 8:15 P.M., Arno Kethy left abruptly. He didn’t drift forward to speak with her, nor even to say goodnight like the others. There he was gathering up his duffel bag, shrugging on an overcoat that looked too large for him, and with a practiced gesture flicking his gingery-gray hair over his collar. He departed swiftly by the rear exit. Erma saw how others moved out of his way.

  He can’t be judged by ordinary standards. A man who has survived Death Row.

  ONE NIGHT IN early February, Erma was in her office after her last student left. It was nearly 9:30 P.M. Greer Hall felt deserted as a mausoleum. She’d had conferences with several students, one of them the ebullient charmer Reverend Eldridge, and now she was alone, and realized that the corridor outside her office was unlighted. She felt the first tinge of concern, preparing to leave. During the preceding hour a custodian had been working in the main corridor, perpendicular to this corridor; when he’d finished he had evidently switched out all the lights on the floor, assuming everyone had left for the night.

  So Erma stood hesitantly in her office doorway. The overhead light in her office was still on; the switch was near the door. Some distance away, perhaps fifty feet, was a dimly lighted stairwell that led off the main corridor of Greer Hall. This was the stairwell she would take when she left; her car was parked close by, just behind the building. Heavy double doors with inserted windows divided the stairway from the corridor so that light falling back into the corridor was murky; between Erma’s office and the stairwell was an alarming darkness. Erma could barely make out the walls. There were office doors, bulletin boards, a drinking fountain, a custodian’s closet, all lost in darkness. Erma swallowed hard. She didn’t know Greer Hall well enough yet to remember where the light switch for her corridor was, though she assumed it must be near the double doors. On this large urban campus there were frequent assaults and attempted assaults against students, especially lone women; Erma knew this was a risky situation. She could telephone one of the university proctors, as they were called, to come escort her to her car…“God damn! I won’t be intimidated.” Asking for help when there was no discernible danger would only underscore a woman’s weakness. Erma Schegloff’s weakness.

  What Erma might do: leave her office door open so that she could see into the corridor for a few yards, make her way quickly to the light switch (if she could locate it); turn on the lights, and return to her office to darken it and lock the door, behaving with caution, though if anyone were waiting to attack her it wouldn’t make much difference except of course she could see her assailant, and could scream, and screaming might scare him off…But yes, it would make a difference: lights would discourage an assailant even if no one else was in Greer Hall. A sane, reasonable assailant.

  Erma’s mind was racing. She heard her own quickened breath.

  She decided against such over-scrupulosity. The building was absolutely silent. There could be no one here. She switched off her office light and shut the door, acting as if the corridor were adequately lighted, not pitch-black, and she wasn’t terrified. She could see the stairwell ahead, dimly. She had only to get there. She wouldn’t run, for she might collide with something and hurt herself. She walked like a blind woman, groping one hand against the wall. Breathe naturally. Like swimming. Inhale on a stroke, exhale in the water. Don’t inhale water! She was reminded of the numerous times her brother Lyle had lain in wait for her…She pushed away all thoughts of Lyle, they were inappropriate here, never did she think of Lyle any longer, or the others, she was no longer the trapped girl who’d had to think of Lyle, and of her family. By the time she got to the stairwell her heart was beating so rapidly she felt faint. But she got there, safely. Clearly no one was waiting for her. Erma pushed through the double doors with a smile of relief, and there, squatting on the stairway landing, smoking a cigarette, like a nightmare figure calmly coming to life, was the stitched-faced, ponytailed Arno Kethy.

  Erma screamed. She’d never been so frightened in her life.

  Stammering, “W-What—what do you want—” knowing Kethy was there for her, unable to pretend in the crisis of the moment that he was not; that this an accidental encounter. Kethy rose out of his crouch at once. How tall he was, towering over Erma. He was a nocturnal creature blinded by light. He muttered something Erma couldn’t decipher, turning away from her and running down the stairs.

  She was faint with shock. She leaned against the railing weakly. Listening to a man’s footsteps echoing in the dim-lit stairwell until he was out of the building, and gone.

  2.

  “HE’S MAD.”

  But was it so simple? Could she dismiss him, and what he represented, with a blunt, ugly term?

  ASSIGNMENT #2: DESCREPTION

  Descreption of Edgarstown Death Row.

  The cell measures 6 feet 11 inches by 9 feet.

  There is the cot. The toliet. The locked door.

  There is the air which you have breathed and fouled

  and must breath again. Or suffocate.

  There is the concrete-block wall which is

  one wall on three sides.

  First, you are in the cell. Then, the cell

  is in you. If I shut my eyes (like no
w)

  I am there. When sleeping, I am there.

  But every time words are put to it,

  they are not the exact words.

  This descreption has been writen so many times.

  I would say that I have failed.

  They say that there are grounds for suing,

  for false incarceration. But to recall that other time

  (before Edgarstown Death Row) you would have to be

  that other person again. But he is gone.

  I confessed to what they said was done,

  for I did not know certainly that I had not done it.

  Later it was known to me, I was INNOCENT.

  I was 31 yrs old when put like an animal in a cage.

  He was #DY4889. But that person is gone.

  They sliced his face with a razor.

  He could not look to see the wounds. But,

  he could feel with his fingers.

  What you try to descrebe, a long time later,

  the words are false.

  E. SCHEGLOFF your name is please understand

  I was not born a beast. I said I was INNOCENT

  and they laughed. Thats what a beast

  always says they told me.

  If I hurt those people I was said to hurt,

  there would be a memory of their blood,

  I beleive. But it is my own blood I remember.

  Your face told me, always have hope.

  I had no knowledge of how you would be waiting.

  Descreption of Room #417 Greer Hall.

  It is three times larger than a cell on Death Row.

  There is a smell of mildue and time here.