The Rescuer Read Online Free PDF Page A

. . .”
    My brother’s skin was ashen. His teeth were chattering.
    Like bones rattling loosely in a tight taut envelope of skin his teeth were chattering audibly and he was leaning on me weak-kneed soon as I’d returned from working in the Grindell Park library—(one of the branch library’s few patrons, at a table still bright-polished as if it had not been used much in recent years and an object of some smiling attention from the sole white middle-aged female librarian)—and out of a heap of bedclothes and towels on the floor of his bedroom I found a ratty blanket to pull over him as he lay shuddering in the lumpy-mattressed bed. For the past eighteen hours Harvey had been remote and irritable and when I’d returned from the library with my laptop he had not unlocked the door for some minutes so I’d pressed my ear to the door listening jealously Are they there? Leander, Maralena? —but when finally Harvey stumbled to the door to open it he was alone, so terribly alone, my brother who’d once been a tall handsome bookish man now inches shorter and one of his bony shoulders higher than the other and his hair disheveled, his breath fierce as gasoline, staggering as I bore his weight into the dank bedroom, onto the dank bed, and if someone had been in the apartment with him there was no trace remaining except a smell of something acrid and harsh, had they been smoking hashish?—a jealous thought came to me as I shook down the thermometer, unexpectedly discovering a thermometer in Harvey’s very dirty bathroom in a corroded medicine cabinet above the badly stained sink; though I knew relatively little of first aid, as of anything practical in our lives, I did know that a sudden spike in temperature possibly signaling an infection often presented as convulsive shivering. And so I shook the thermometer down to 96˚F, then inserted it beneath my brother’s tongue that looked pale with slime, held the thermometer in place as Harvey continued to shiver and shudder and when at last I could read the thermometer the little red column of mercury indicated a temperature of 100.2 degrees. This was not dangerously high, yet—was it?—I wasn’t sure. Swaths of Harvey’s body were hot to the touch yet other parts clammy-cold. I gave him a double-strength Tylenol and brought him glasses of water insisting that he drink for he must not become dehydrated—(if he was taking drugs, a possible side effect might be dehydration, constipation)—and through the long night I watched over him at his bedside as he slept fitfully amid noises from the street, car engines and door-slammings and shouts, drunken laughter, in the distance the now-familiar sounds of gunfire—single shots, repeated shots—wailing sirens like maddened confetti illuminating the nighttime sky above the doomed city of Trenton; closer by, the seething life of Grindell Park which was more populated by night than by day though invisible in the night for which I felt an irrational envy, and yearning; for my labor with the Eweian manuscript was so very slow, painstakingly slow as if I were pushing a small bean across a tilted floor with my nose, craven and abashed and utterly broken-backed pushing this tiny black bean with my nose while all around me was a rich and unfathomable life unknown and unnameable by one like myself. Some white-girl ain’t gon be a steady customer .
    Harvey moaned in his sleep. Tossed and flung his limbs in his sleep. I wondered what drug he’d taken, what Leander was selling him—cocaine?—heroin?— or maybe Harvey wasn’t using drugs but was self-infected, the toxins in his body now concentrated, gaining strength. Near dawn his forehead didn’t feel so scalding-hot to my touch and he seemed to have ceased sweating though his T-shirt and boxers were damp with sweat and smelled of his body. And now near dawn the jarring seductive unfathomable noises of the night were subsiding. A sound of heavy truck-traffic on Camden Avenue,