Dis Mem Ber and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

Those moments when her presence is felt.

  Even before I learned that Miri Krim had lived in the brownstone building I passed every day, and that her second-floor window overlooked Humboldt Street, often when I passed the side of the building my eyes lifted to the second floor, to a window there—as if a figure in the window was beckoning to me.

  I did not see a face in the window but rather a rippling reflection of a (pale) face. If I paused to stare, the reflection dissolved.

  Soon after, when I learned that the nineteen-year-old from upstate New York had had a room in that building, I understood (I think I understood) why my eyes lifted to one of the windows and it did not surprise me (it would not surprise me when eventually I learned) that this was in fact the window of room 2D.

  If I had enrolled at the University a year earlier we might have seen each other: Miri Krim at the window as AlidaLucash (that is my name—I know, it is not a beautiful name) passed below on the sidewalk.

  In that fleeting way we “see” others who are strangers to us with no thought of how we will enter into each other’s life at a later time.

  Often then, after I knew, I would linger at the front entrance of the building and I would peer into the foyer. If no one observed I would enter the building (for there was no lock on the outer door) and I would examine the mailboxes. But the mailbox for 2D has no name—not even a small rectangle of white upon which a name might be printed.

  Excuse me! Are you looking for someone?—it might be asked of me. And I would say—Miri Krim. Did you know her? And the answer would be a pretense of ignorance, or outright denial—”Kim”? Some kind of Korean name?—and I would say Miri “Krim,” not “Kim.” She used to live here and the reply would be stiff and unfriendly: Well, I just moved in. Sorry.

  After Miri Krim’s partly decomposed body was discovered in the water tank The Magellan was immediately shut down by authorities and all tenants were relocated as a massive overhaul of the water pipes was required by the county board of health. Not surprisingly, few of these tenants wished to return to 803 Pitcairn and so it was possibly true, those who claimed not to have heard of Miri Krim might have been telling the truth.

  Since September 5 of this year I have been living at 22 Humboldt Street in a private residence in which I rent a single room and share a bathroom with another tenant, a young woman of my approximate age. Our landlady is a retired University professor.

  Humboldt Street is a street of (somewhat run-down) frame Victorian houses that have been partitioned into rooms. Proper lives—family lives—were once lived in such houses. Verandas and front porches, the remains of carefully tended lawns.

  In the weed-splotched back yard at 22 Humboldt, an aged, cracked clay birdbath containing what appeared to be the small skeleton of a bird but which turned out to be (when I inspected) some broken twigs.

  It is a three-minute walk to The Magellan at the corner of Humboldt and Pitcairn Avenue, fronting Pitcairn.

  Though there is a rear entrance to the apartment building. A narrow alley behind The Magellan where a Dumpster and trash cans are kept. A mild odor of rot prevails here.

  From the sidewalk you cannot see the water tank on the roof of The Magellan. From room 2D you could (possibly) see the roof of the brownstone apartment building on the other side of the street, where there is said to be an identical, 1,500-gallon water tank.

  In one of my courses the Professor inquired of the class how could we recognize the front of an object?

  The question was put to us like a riddle which the Professor did not (evidently) expect anyone to answer.

  I did not know the answer. I could not guess the answer.

  I am uneasy with riddles. I feel always that someone is laughing at me and (indeed) there was a smirk on the Professor’s face when finally no one in the class could think of an answer and so he said, “The front of an object is the side that provides the most information.”

  Is this so? I had never thought of such a thing before but it is true, the “front” of a living being tells you so much more about it than its rear or sides.

  However, there is minimum of information provided by the weatherworn façade of The Magellan. An entrance, a portico, six steps, a heavy door. Three rows of windows.

  Inscribed in a cornerstone, 1931.

  Often I linger in front of The Magellan. As if I am waiting for someone to come out and greet me.

  I have made a graph of my courses. Each assignment, each quiz, each test, each grade.

  So far, my grades have not been as high as I have wished.

  To retain my tuition deferral status I must maintain a grade-point average of B.

  At the present time, my grade-point average is somewhere below B.

  I am determined to excel. I will not be discouraged. Except it is distracting to me, when I try to read my textbook assignments and take notes strange thoughts flood my brain that don’t belong to me but to another.

  Went missing! As if I was not taken. As if I’d gone—willingly.

  And my clothes torn from me. And what was done to me—ruled an “accident.”

  Such thoughts, inhabiting my brain. And the emotion borne with them, of hurt, anger. Fury.

  But these thoughts have caused me to think: what does went missing mean?

  As if you could go missing. Of your own volition.

  As if missing were a place you could go to, and not a condition.

  As if a missing person could be missing categorically. As if there is not (surely) someone who knows where she is (even if she does not know herself where she is).

  Missing person—missing body.

  Floating (naked) body of Miri Krim beneath a lid so heavy it required two men to lift it.

  So beautiful—the face perfectly preserved, like a doll’s face. Eyes open and unseeing.

  And the hair (previously brown) faded to silvery white, and thinned, floating around her face like a halo when the men heaved the lid up and an overcast light fell upon her.

  But the rest of her, submerged in water …

  … bloated, putrescent. Unrecognizable.

  Of course, Miri Krim had been raped. And worse.

  Terrible things done to Miri Krim, that would never be named.

  Why the coroner’s office “misplaced” the rape kit.

  Why the police have not arrested any “suspect.”

  Why no one wishes to speak of her any longer and it is fear of her death you smell on them.

  2.

  “My dear. Someone in this house is shamelessly wasting water. Candace has assured me, it is not her.”

  Our landlady Professor Ida Schrader regards me with reproach as soon as I enter the foyer of her house. But I am too quick for the frowning woman, already I am on the stairs and hurrying to the second floor, to my room.

  Not me, either, ma’am—these words are flung over my shoulder almost giddily, defiantly.

  And not a backward glance for I know very well how Professor Schrader is glaring at me through the thick lenses of her silly plastic glasses.

  Wasting water. Shameless!

  It is true, often I allow the water to run in the bathroom sink for some seconds. Maybe, a little longer.

  Dreading to hear if the old pipes protest. If the old woman downstairs whose hearing is not so sharp will hear the pipes and when she sees me next, berate me for wasting water.

  Everywhere I am obliged to use a bathroom, a lavatory, a public restroom, I let the water run for as long as I dare. Stooping to examine the water that gushes from the faucet. Its transparency. Its smell.

  The drowned girl took this route. This street, these steps.

  It is her advice to me, to fear airborne infections. For airborne bacteria are invisible, undetectable, unavoidable.

  Befouled water you can see, smell. Befouled air you can’t see and by the time you smell it, it may be too late.

  There is little choice, you have to breathe.

  I am feeling her presence on Pitcairn Avenue. At the underpas
s beneath the New York Central railroad tracks, that is always dank, dripping.

  Pavement always puddled, in the shapes of prone, sprawled figures. Shallow pools of stagnant water thick as pus.

  Like me, Miri Krim took this route to the University—of course.

  There is no other route from Pitcairn Avenue to College Avenue and the long hill to the Hall of Languages. No other choice.

  Quick! Run.

  Try not to breathe.

  Try not to breathe deeply.

  North of the underpass, College Avenue. Long sloping hill into the campus protected like a fortress by wrought-iron fences, gates.

  It is difficult to gain access to the University campus if you come from College Avenue. There are gates, and there are security officers.

  If you are “suspicious-looking”—(as most [white-skinned] students are not)—you must show your I.D. to a security officer at a kiosk.

  Sometimes, though I am white-skinned, the officer frowns at my I.D. and insists upon inspecting my backpack, instructing me to empty it out entirely and yet he seems still about to shake his head No.

  It is a relief to me then, my heart floods with gratitude, when the officer mutters O.K.

  Wondering if Miri Krim had ever been rejected. If her skin had seemed, in a certain overcast light, a brown-tinctured skin, olive-dark, not “white.”

  But Miri Krim was a student, if but a student enrolled in the School of General Studies. She would have had a valid I.D., the security officer would have muttered O.K., and gestured her through.

  Hurrying up hill to the revered old Hall of Languages (1849). Ponderous gray stone that looks damp like something hauled from the depths of the ocean.

  The Hall of Languages bell tower is a famous bell tower illuminated by night and visible for miles like a moon.

  You would be able to see the bell tower clock in the distance like a glowing moon if you stood on a rooftop on Pitcairn Avenue. From a second-floor window, or from the street, you could not see it.

  But sometimes, in the stillness of the night, you can hear the bells tolling.

  Invisible bells, and the sound of their tolling almost inaudible, vibrations you feel rather than hear, like the beating of a great heart.

  It is strange: when I pause to listen to the bell tower, I am not ever able to determine what “time” it is.

  In University brochures you do not see the urban neighborhood that surrounds the historic old campus. You do not see the dripping underpass, or Pitcairn Avenue—of course!

  You see photographs of on-campus residences, and of the large, showy fraternity and sorority houses on the farther side of the campus, that is called Greek Hill, but you do not see pictures of off-campus residences.

  You do not see pictures of The Magellan.

  (Like me) Miri Krim was enrolled in the School of General Studies. It was her belief that she was enrolled in a pre-med program but so far as I have learned there is no pre-med program in the School of General Studies.

  I had not thought of medical school. Everyone in my family would be astonished. Miri Krim is an inspiration to me.

  My courses in the School of General Studies are introductory courses. Though my grades were A’s at Adirondack Community College I am not (yet) allowed to take any course numbered beyond 100.

  Would I be allowed to enter the pre-med program next year, if I do well in my courses?—I have asked the advisor assigned to me; and this kindly-seeming man told me, with a look of sympathy, or pity, for this may be a naïve question often asked by General Studies students, “Well, possibly. Yes. If you do well in your courses and can transfer out of General Studies and into Arts and Sciences.”

  If you do well. Can transfer.

  This is reasonable, I thought. Of course my fate depends upon my academic performance.

  Shyly then I asked, and daringly, in a rush of words: “And if I do well in pre-med, I will be accepted into the University Medical School?”—and my advisor said, with a little frown, “Why, yes. That is—possible.”

  The University includes a distinguished School of Medicine as well as distinguished Schools of Law, Finance, Engineering.

  I did not dare to ask Is there financial aid available for medical school?—for my advisor had been glancing at his wristwatch and seemed uncomfortable. Clearly it was time for me to leave.

  Other “older”—”part-time”—students like me were waiting in the corridor to see him. You signed up for an advisor, for ten-minute slots.

  Yet at the door I paused and asked, “Did you know a student named Miri Krim, Professor?”

  How strange, that I asked this question! I had not intended to.

  Adding, seeing the man’s quizzical look, “She was in this program too.”

  “‘Mu-ri Kim.’ I don’t think so.”

  “‘Miri Krim.’ A friend of mine.”

  “No. Sorry”—(my advisor glanced at my name, on the manila file before him which he was about to put away), “—’Alida.’ We have many advisees in the School of General Studies, you must know.”

  He did not type the name Miri Krim into his computer. How easily he might have done this. Yet he did not.

  He knows that she is dead. That is why.

  “Goodbye, Alida. Good luck with your courses.”

  My advisor spoke with a false sort of heartiness. And beneath, contempt and disdain that one as lowly as I would dare to speak of such matters.

  A notation was made in my file, which I would never see.

  They will hate you now. They will try to hurt you.

  From that point, my experience at the University was poisoned.

  No matter how hard I studied for any quiz or test, no matter how much I researched a paper (in the University library, not merely on the Internet like other undergraduates), no matter how carefully, how obsessively I worked—my grades were low, barely passing.

  Errors were made in the bills sent to me. The interest rate on my student loan was raised without my knowledge. It was stunning news, that my debt to the University was $3,100—before I had completed even my first semester.

  Thursday evenings, at the University Medical Clinic on Eleventh Street.

  Lie on your side, dear. Make a fist.

  Giving blood is not painful. As the needle enters a kind of anesthetic/amnesia floods over me: cool, antiseptic. It is a white noise of the soul, and it is comforting.

  Sometimes at such moments I shut my eyes very tightly. The tolling of the hour, close by, yet sounding as if it were distant, muffled and fading, is calming to a quick-beating heart.

  Payment is cash. Thank God, not a check!

  We don’t trust checks. A check can be canceled.

  In time, I come to recognize some of the regulars. Of course, we are not allowed to sell our blood too frequently, careful records are kept.

  In a restroom stall hurriedly I count the bills. Shaky hands, one or two bills will flutter to the floor which is a filthy floor in rebuke of my greed.

  Not so much cash as I’d hoped. Or maybe I’d misunderstood.

  But it is something, and something is far better than nothing.

  And it is cash.

  South of the underpass. Pitcairn Avenue.

  Once, the avenue might have been a busy street. But no longer.

  Here are old brick and brownstone buildings grim as smudged erasures. Cracked pavement through which weeds poke like coarse lace. Stink of exhaust, diesel fuel. City buses groaning and heaving from curbs, spewing more exhaust. Off-campus student housing, married students’ housing, International Students’ Center, African-American Center, Hudson County Family Services. Old Victorian houses donated to the University for tax purposes. And close by, liquor stores, taverns, pawnshop and nail salon, Laundromat, Bethel Tabernacle Church, Rite Aid … The Magellan.

  A “mixed” neighborhood where some people are friendly-seeming and others stare at me as if they’d like to grab my backpack and run away with it.

  How many times Miri Krim must h
ave left The Magellan to take the underpass to College Avenue, and to the University. And on these many occasions, all except one, nothing happened to harm her.

  Had she been stalked? Had she been warned? Threatened?

  Had she had a premonition? Had she suspected—something?

  And so just once something happened to interrupt the routine of Miri Krim’s life. Almost certainly it happened on the south side of the underpass. In The Magellan. And the young life of Miri Krim was extinguished as you might blow out a flame.

  No arrests? Why are there no arrests?

  Why is the murderer (or murderers) being shielded?

  “Not a race thing. Not so simple.”

  It was Professor Ida Schrader, my landlady at 22 Humboldt Street, who insisted that the danger in the neighborhood had nothing to do with race but with drug dealing (which appeared to be “mixed-race”) and with the “downward spiral” in the American economy that matched a “downward spiral” in the American soul.

  Somehow, in Professor Schrader’s mind, this “downward spiral” was connected with global warming.

  It wasn’t clear if global warming had precipitated the decline of the economy, or if the decline of the economy had precipitated global warming.

  “That girl, the one who was drowned and her body left in the water tank just up the street—she is exactly what I mean.”

  These harsh words Professor Schrader spoke disapprovingly, with a shudder of her large tremulous bosom. As if the one who was drowned had brought such a fate on herself, endangering the rest of us.

  “Yes! Police said, she was involved with drugs. Probably she was high—or drunk—and went swimming in that water tank. Or, she committed suicide but the family paid to hush it up. Or”—Professor Schrader drew a deep breath of reproach—”one of her drug-addict friends murdered her, and now—we must live in the toxic fallout.”

  I did not like to hear such terrible words. Like poisoned toads hopping from the Professor’s mouth. And Candace Durstt, the other tenant, did not object but seemed actually to agree, in her eagerness to curry favor with our landlady.

  Females who should have been sympathetic with Miri Krim.