—
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.
The joke is on me. There are too many English teachers at the prison, and, that evening, I end up teaching math.
—
MONTHS LATER, PATRICK calls and says, unprompted, he’s sobered up.
“I’m better now,” he offers, before I even ask how he is. Inside, I swell with relief. I realize how tense I am when we talk.
“I just call to tell you I’m okay. I know you be getting all worried.” He has found work, he continues, at a tombstone store in Helena, on Plaza.
“I know exactly where that is,” I say, able to picture it. It’s on the same block as three funeral homes, where Brandon was shot and killed at the flower shop.
I ask him what his work is like. He says that his boss puts all the dates and names onto the stones, then Patrick loads them into a truck and hauls them to cemeteries across the county. He digs plots and sets the stones. “It be good work,” he says. “It be good to be outside, you know.” I remember a poem he wrote: Under scorching heat / A man is calmly working / Humming to himself.
He tells me his family has moved to a cheaper place. Without his mother’s salary they can’t afford the rent. Another family has moved into his old house, and another death occurs on the porch, also of a black man in his twenties. He is shot in the face. Patrick doesn’t know details beyond that.
“The same place,” Patrick says, and repeats that phrase again, with emphasis. “The same place.”