“They say I killed a man! I ain’t…I don’t know.”
His voice broke, its pitch strange and high. Patrick covered the sides of his head with his hands, his fingers gripping his scalp.
Until now I’d resisted wondering about who the dead man was. What had he been like? He must have had a family, a mother and a father and brothers and sisters. They were a strain to think about, these grieving others. Abstractly, I understood that their grief eclipsed that of Patrick’s family, but I could not summon them.
It seemed impossible to hold both Patrick and Marcus simultaneously in my mind. To have sympathy for one was to doubt the other. It was like some constraint of astronomy, where two stars could not be gazed at together, the light of one affecting the other.
“Manslaughter,” I continued. “Manslaughter is different from murder when”—I hesitated again, not wanting to use the word killing—“when what happened is not intentional.”
But Patrick had shut down, fatigued from his own memory. Shawn poked his head in, pointed at his watch, and disappeared.
I knew I had to leave soon, but I still hadn’t let Patrick read what I’d written about him. It was only fair, I thought, that he knew the writing existed.
I pulled the slim New York Times Magazine out of my bag.
“I wrote this about you,” I said. “It’s about you and my teaching at Stars.” Would he like to read it?
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, in a manner so automatically compliant that I knew he hadn’t really heard my question.
“Why don’t you start?” I said. I pointed to the first sentence on the page.
Patrick leaned forward, tense from concentration. Suddenly I realized he was nervous. When was the last time he’d read anything out loud—a book, a magazine? And with a teacher, no less? His left hand was shaking, and he clenched his fingers into a fist as if to tame it. His right fingers held the paper gingerly, as if it might tear.
I calculated how long it had been since I had him as a student. Three years and four months. He had dropped out of school the year after I left the Delta. Technically speaking, the last grade he had completed was the eighth grade.
I had an urge to stop the exercise, but Patrick had plunged forward. He started reading very fast, affecting confidence. But immediately he stumbled on the sentence referring to himself: There was something capacious inside him.
“Sorry, Ms. Kuo,” he said.
I saw his face burning, and then I realized mine was also.
We hobbled along. He read: a mixture of wry and pensive. Then he gave me a sideways glance, waiting for my correction.
“Sorry,” he said again. “I’m forgetting things.”
I saw his eyes darting downward to the last line, near the bottom edge of the page, which promised an end to the assault of consonants and vowels.
The ethics of writing about Patrick had occupied me so much that I hadn’t even imagined we would encounter this basic problem: He was so out of practice that he could barely read. This was the real Patrick, the one who I didn’t know because I was too busy remembering who he used to be.
Later that day I would ponder the self-absorbed foolishness of my exercise: What had been the point? I should not have put him in such a position; it was cruel, he was embarrassed. At least I could have explained to him, honestly and simply, why I had written it, the original reasons, before I had gotten caught up with my self-doubt: I wrote this because writing is how I understand things. I wrote this to get closer to knowing you, and myself, too. Or I could have helped him read, explained the meaning of words. But it had been so long since I’d taught that I’d lost my teacher’s instinct and let him stumble on alone, ashamed, uncomprehending.
Finally, Patrick reached the last lines in the piece: I haven’t been able to resist guilty feelings over Patrick. He hesitated at the word resist, the too-sibilant word faltering in his mouth. “Resist,” I corrected him, and he repeated the word.
When Patrick reached the end at last, he let out a breath. I sensed his shoulders loosening, heaving downward. I relaxed, too.
He traced the page with the tip of his index finger, as if enjoying its glossy surface, its feeling novel to his skin.
“What did you think?” I asked, my tone false and bright.
“It’s”—he searched—“good.”
We looked at each other. He sensed he ought to say more. He said, “You got good memory.” Then: “To be honest, Ms. Kuo, I don’t remember all that.”
I asked, “Do you remember when you brought in the bucket and mop?”
He shook his head.
I asked, “Do you remember when you escorted me to the car?”
He shook his head again.
I might as well have been writing about somebody else.
“I remember it raining,” he offered. “I remember all that rain.” Then he said, “You know, it wasn’t the best school, but you was there and you cared. It made going to school—you know, made it really mean something, somebody that care for you.”
He looked away. Then he flipped to the other pages, stopping only on the ones that had colorful pictures.
“You made all this?” he asked, after he had flipped through it.
I frowned, confused. Made what? “Oh, no,” I said, understanding. “It’s a magazine.” I flipped to the cover and said, “See what it says?”
He read aloud the cover, “The New York Times Magazine,” pronouncing every word.
Then: “People in New York read this?”
“Well,” I said, “a lot of people outside New York read it. Maybe millions.”
This number didn’t appear to mean much to him.
“You been to New York?” he asked.
I said I had.
“How do you get there?”
“I took a plane,” I said. He nodded, as if he understood. To make conversation, I asked him if he’d ever been on a plane.
“No, ma’am.”
“Have you been outside of Arkansas?”
“I been to Memphis one time.” He paused. “And I been to Mississippi, too, because you got to go through there to get to Memphis.”
I looked down, quiet.
Patrick said, “Yeah, these be broken and don’t fit.”
He thought I was looking at his sandals. They were orange and too big—like a clown’s shoes. The flap hung out.
“Oh,” I said. “That can’t be comfortable.”
“No, ma’am. It ain’t.”
We sat there silently. We stared at the shoes. He dangled his arm, fingering the lone seam that held together flap and sole.
Patrick shook his head and he opened his mouth to speak. Then he stopped himself. He seemed hesitant to tell me something.
I nodded at him expectantly.
“I got to think about my”—he trembled—“daughter.”
The word was like a foreign term in his mouth.
Startled, I asked how old she was.
“She be more than a year old now.” He stopped. Then he said, “I guess I ain’t no…no role model.”
To no one, he said, “It is what it is.”
Again silence.
Again I broke it.
“What’s her name?”
“Cherish.” Patrick’s face brightened slightly. “But I call her Cherry.”
“Who thought of the name?”