The Rescuer Read Online Free PDF

signaling a new day. And even the sirens had subsided. For all who were to be taken to the ER, or the Mercer County morgue, or to one or another of the city’s detention facilities, had now been taken, and admitted. And I thought how easy life is for those who merely live it without hoping to understand it; without hoping to “decode,” classify and analyze it; without hoping to acquire a quasi-invulnerable meta-life which is the life of the mind and not the triumphant life of the body. Breathe in, breathe out. My lower lip throbbed in recalled surprise, pain. Yet I had not recoiled from the pain. You gon be my friend—you see. There’s ways of paying back what you’ brother owe.
    In the morning Harvey recalled little of the night. Laughing wryly as if he’d had some kind of hangover—“Metaphysical, felt like.”
    On the table we used for meals, in a corner of the living room, I’d placed for him a bowl of Cheerios, a small container of yogurt, a pitcher of milk and a half-grapefruit from Pinneo’s that wasn’t yet over-ripe. Harvey’s mouth moved as if he were unable to speak. He stared unshaven, red-eyed and barefoot and his hair straggling in his face. He had pulled off the sweat-soaked underwear in which he’d slept but he had not showered, only just pulled on T-shirt and boxers from the bureau drawer of recently laundered underwear I’d established for him. He muttered something that resembled Thank you Lydia. Thank you for my life.
    * * *
    The (very dirty) bathroom—(corroded) medicine cabinet—stained sink, stained toilet bowl, stained linoleum floor—holding my breath and my nostrils pinched I managed to clean, scrub, even polish to a degree with Dutch Cleanser, Windex, mangled sponges and paper towels.
    * * *
    He had an addiction, he confessed.
    Scattered about the apartment were ghostly white plastic bags imprinted BOOK BAZAAR , I’d been noticing since I’d first stepped into the apartment.
    A secondhand bookstore on State Street, downtown Trenton. He’d made “raids” on Book Bazaar he said, since he’d first discovered it.
    I’d noticed of course: in stacks on windowsills and any available surfaces were battered-looking books, some of them hardcover and many paperback; some of them looking as if they’d been left in the rain, and left to dry in the sun; some of them with titles like Sacred Texts of the Hebrew Bible, Intertextuality in Exekiel, A History of the Religions of Late Antiquity, The Formation of the Hebrew Bible, and some with such titles as Visions of Hell, An Anatomy of the Apocalypse, The Millennium Comics, Ballads of Heaven and Hell, Was Jesus Gay?, Jesus’ Son. These were recent purchases intended to supplement Harvey’s older scholarly texts which he’d brought in boxes to Grindell Park, yet unpacked.
    An addiction, Harvey said. Like a sickness.
    (Not an addiction I’d expected Harvey to confess though I didn’t tell him that.)
    For only books could help, Harvey believed. The human predicament.
    Human predicament?
    Human fate .
    I remembered from our childhood that Harvey was always reading—and writing. Always my older brother had felt that the next book he picked up might be the book to change his life and always he was disappointed—to a degree. There was the Holy Bible—he’d naively believed to be the word of God until he’d begun studying the history of the Hebrew Bible in college—one of those courses cunningly titled The Bible as Literature. Still, Harvey believed that the Bible contained great riches, to be properly decoded. Books provided not only histories of the world but also wisdom to help with one’s personal life; even, in his particular circumstances, if he was lucky, with his Aramaic translation. So, he said, he was always trolling at the secondhand bookstore to see what might change his life.
    He had a friend at Book Bazaar, he said. His only true friend in Trenton.
    Harvey went on to say that books were the soul of human civilization and