The Marijuana Chronicles, page 3
After a while it was quiet downstairs.
* * *
In the morning she woke to discover the lights still on downstairs and the rooms ransacked.
Ransacked was the word her husband would use. Ransacked was the appropriate word for the thievery had been random and careless, as children might do.
Missing were silver candlestick holders, silverware and crystal bowls, her husband’s laptop from his study. Drawers in her husband’s desk had been yanked open, someone had rummaged through his files and papers but carelessly, letting everything fall to the floor.
A small clock, encased in crystal, rimmed in gold, which had been awarded to her husband for one of his history books, and had been kept on the windowsill in front of her husband’s desk, was missing.
A rear door was ajar. The house was permeated with cold. In a state of shock Agnes walked through the rooms. She found herself in the same room, repeatedly. As in a troubled dream, she was being made to identify what had been taken from her.
Yet what the eye does not see, the brain can’t register. The effort of remembering was exhausting. Her head was pounding. Her eyes ached. Her throat was dry and acrid and the inside of her mouth tasted of ashes.
They hadn’t ransacked the upstairs. They hadn’t found her purse, her wallet and credit cards. They’d respected the privacy of her bedroom …
She had no reason to think that her niece had been involved.
Maybe Kelsey had tried to stop them. But Triste and Mallory had threatened her.
Agnes would never know. She could never ask. She tried to tell herself, It doesn’t mean anything—that she doesn’t love me. It means only that they were desperate for money.
Yet she called her sister to ask for Kelsey. Coolly her sister said that Kelsey didn’t live with them any longer, Agnes must know this.
Where did Kelsey live? So far as anyone knew, she lived with “friends.”
Kelsey was no longer attending the community college. Agnes must know this.
Bitterly her sister spoke. Though relenting then, realizing it was Agnes, the widowed older sister, to whom she was speaking, and asking why she wanted to speak with Kelsey.
“No reason,” Agnes said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
It was terrifying to her, she would probably never see her niece again.
Yet I still love her.
What was exhausting, when she wasn’t “high”—she had to plead for her husband’s life.
Hours of each day. And through the night pleading, No! Not ever.
Not ever give up, I beg you.
As soon as the diagnosis was made, the doctors had given up on him. So it seemed to the stricken wife.
Repeating their calm rote words: Do you want extraordinary measures taken to sustain your life, in case complications arise during or after surgery? And her husband who was the kindest of men, the most accommodating and least assertive of men, a gentle man, a thoughtful man, a reasonable man, one who would hide his own anxiety and terror in the hope of shielding his wife, had said quietly what the doctor had seemed to be urging him to say: No, of course not, doctor. Use your own judgment please. For this was the brave response. This was the noble response. This was the manly common sense response. In mounting disbelief and horror Agnes had listened to this exchange and dared to interrupt, No—we’re not going to give up. We do want “extraordinary measures”—I want “extraordinary measures” for my husband! Please! Anything you can do, doctor.
She would beg. She would plead. Unlike her beloved husband she could not be stoic in the face of (his) death.
Yet, in the end, fairly quickly there’d been not much the doctors could do. Her husband’s life from that hour onward had gone—had departed—swiftly like thread on a bobbin that goes ever more swiftly as it is depleted.
I love you—so many times she told him. Clutching at him with cold frightened fingers.
Love love love you, please don’t leave me.
She missed him so much. She could not believe that he would not return to their house. It was that simple.
In the marijuana haze, she’d half-believed—she’d been virtually certain—that her husband was still in the hospital, and wondering why she hadn’t come to visit. Or maybe it was in the dream—the dreams—that followed. High, I was so high. The earth was a luminous globe below me and above me—there was nothing …
After he’d died, within hours when she returned to the suddenly cavernous house she’d gone immediately to a medicine cabinet and on the spotless white-marble rim above the sink she had set out pills, capsules—these were sleeping pills, painkillers, antibiotics—that had accumulated over a period of years; prescriptions in both her husband’s and her name, long forgotten. Self-medicating—yet how much more tempting, to self-erase?
There were dozens of pills here. Just a handful, swallowed down with wine or whiskey, and she’d never wake again—perhaps.
“Should I? Should I join you?”—it was ridiculous for the widow to speak aloud in the empty house, yet it seemed to her the most natural thing in the world; and what was unnatural was her husband’s failure to respond.
She would reason, It’s too soon. He doesn’t understand what has happened to him yet.
Weeks now and she hadn’t put the pills away. They remained on the marble ledge. Involuntarily her eye counted them—five, eight, twelve, fifteen—twenty-five, thirty-five …
She wondered how many sleeping pills, for instance, would be “fatal.” She wondered if taking too many pills would produce nausea and vomiting; taking too few, she might remain semiconscious, or lapse into a vegetative state.
Men were far more successful in suicide attempts than women. This was generally known. For men were not so reluctant to do violence to their bodies: gunshots, hanging, leaping from heights.
I want to die but not to experience it. I want my death to be ambiguous so people will say—It was an accidental overdose!
So people will say—She would not live without him, this is for the best.
What a relief, that Kelsey and her friends hadn’t come upstairs to steal from her! They’d respected her privacy, she wanted to think.
How stricken with embarrassment she’d have been if Kelsey had looked into the bathroom and seen the pills so openly displayed. Immediately her niece would have known what this meant, and would have called her mother.
Mom! Aunt Agnes is depressed and suicidal—I thought you should know.
At least, Agnes thought that Kelsey might have made this call.
“Zeke! Thank you.”
And, “Zeke—how much do I owe you?”
From a young musician friend, a former student, now years since he’d been an undergraduate student, she’d acquired what she believed to be a higher, purer quality of “pot”—she’d been embarrassed to call him, to make the transaction, pure terror at the possibility (of course, it was not a likely possibility) that Zeke was an undercover agent for the local police; she’d encountered him by chance in an organic foods store near the university, he’d been kind to her, asking after her, of course he’d heard that Professor Krauss had died, so very sorry to hear such sad and unexpected news … Later she’d called him, set up a meeting at the local mall, in the vast parking lot, she’d been awkward and ashamed and yet determined, laughing so that her face reddened. To Zeke she was Professor Krauss also. To all her admiring students.
A Ziploc bag Zeke sold her. Frankly, he’d seemed surprised—then concerned. He’d been polite as she remembered him, from years ago. She told the ponytailed young man she was having friends over for the evening, friends from graduate-student days, Ann Arbor. He’d seemed to believe her. No normal person would much want to get high by herself, after all.
As soon as she was safely home she lit a joint and drew in her breath as Kelsey had taught her—cautiously, but deeply. The heat was distracting. She didn’t remember such heat. And the dryness, the acridity. Again she began to cough—tears spilled from her eyes. Her husband had said, What are you doing, Agnes? Why are you doing such things? Just come to me, that’s all. You know that.
Mattia.
Running her forefinger down the Mattia listings. There were a surprising number—at least a dozen. Most young people had cell phones now. The Mercer County, New Jersey phone directory had visibly shrunken. Yet there was a little column of Mattias headed by Mattia, Angelo.
His first name hadn’t been Angelo—she didn’t think so.
Maybe—had it been Eduardo?
(There was a listing for Eduardo, in Trenton.)
Also listed were Giovanne, Christopher, Anthony, Thomas, E.L. Mattia …
None of these names seemed quite right to her. Yet she had to suppose that her former student, an inmate-student at East Jersey State Prison (formerly Rahway State Prison), was related to one or more of these individuals.
Impulsively she called the listing for Mattia, Eduardo.
If there is no answer, then it isn’t meant to happen.
The phone rang at the other end. But no one picked up. A recording clicked on—a man’s heavily accented voice—quickly Agnes hung up.
Later, she returned to discover the phone directory which she’d left on a kitchen counter, open to the Mattia listings. She stared at the column of names. She thought—Was the name Joseph?
It had been a traditional name, with religious associations. A formal name. When Agnes had addressed the young man it was formally, respectfully—Mr. Mattia.
Other instructors in the prison literacy program called students by their first names. But not Agnes, who’d taken seriously the program organizer’s warning not to suggest or establish any sort of “inappropriate intimacy” with the inmate-students.
Never touch an inmate. Not even a light tap on the arm.
Never reveal your last name to them. Or where you live, or if you are married.
Agnes remembered the eagerness with which she’d read Mattia’s prose pieces in her remedial English composition class at the prison several years before. The teaching experience, for her, in the maximum-security state prison, had been exhausting, but thrilling.
A civic-minded colleague at the university had recruited Agnes, who’d been doubtful at first. And Agnes’s husband, who thought that prison education was a very good thing, was yet doubtful that Agnes should volunteer. Her training was in Renaissance literature—she’d never taught disadvantaged students of any kind.
She’d told her husband that she would quit the program if she felt uncomfortable. If it seemed in any way risky, dangerous. But she was determined not to be discouraged and not to drop out. In her vanity, she did not wish to think of herself as weak, coddled.
Her university students were almost uniformly excellent, and motivated. For she and her historian-husband taught at a prestigious private university. She’d never taught difficult students, public school students, remedial students, or students in any way disabled or “challenged.” At this time she was fifty-three years old and looking much younger, slender, with wavy mahogany-dark hair to her shoulders, and a quick friendly smile to put strangers at ease. She’d done volunteer work mostly for Planned Parenthood and for political campaigns, to help liberal Democrats get elected. She had never visited a prison, even a women’s detention facility. She’d learned belatedly that her prison teaching was limited to male inmates.
Of her eleven students, eight were African American; two were “white”; and one was Mattia, Joseph (she was certain now, the name had had an old-world religious association), who had olive-dark skin with dark eyes, wiry black hair, an aquiline nose, a small neatly trimmed mustache. Like his larger and more burly fellow inmates, Mattia was physically impressive: his shoulders and chest hard-muscled, his neck unusually thick, for one with a relatively slender build. (Clearly, Mattia worked with weights.) Unlike the others he moved gracefully, like an athlete-dancer. He was about five feet eight—inches shorter than the majority of the others.
In the prison classroom Agnes had found herself watching Mattia, in his bright-blue uniform, before she’d known his name, struck by his youthful enthusiasm and energy, the radiance of his face.
Strange, in a way Mattia was ugly. His features seemed wrongly sized for his angular face. His eyes could be stark, staring. Yet Agnes would come to see him as attractive, even rather beautiful—as others in the classroom sat with dutiful expressions, polite fixed smiles or faces slack with boredom, Mattia’s face seemed to glow with an intense inner warmth.
Agnes had supposed that Mattia was—twenty-five? Twenty-six?
The ages of her students ranged from about twenty to forty, so far as she could determine. It would be slightly shocking to Agnes to learn, after the ten-week course ended, that Mattia was thirty-four; that he’d been in this prison for seven years of a fifteen-year sentence for “involuntary manslaughter”; that he’d enrolled in several courses before hers, but had dropped out before completing them.
The dark-eyed young man had been unfailingly polite to Agnes, whose first name the class had been told, but not her last name. Ms. Agnes in Mattia’s voice was uttered with an air of reverence as if—so Agnes supposed—the inmate-student saw in her qualities that had belonged to his mother, or to another older woman relative; he was courteous, even deferential, as her university students, who took their professors so much more for granted, were not.
Mattia was the most literate writer in the class, as he was the sharpest-witted, and the most alert. His compositions were childlike, earnest. Yet his thoughts seemed overlarge for his brain, and writing with a stubby pencil was a means of relieving pressure in the brain; writing in class, as Agnes sat at the front of the room observing, Mattia hunched over his desk frowning and grimacing in a kind of exquisite pain, as if he were talking to himself.
Sometimes, during class discussion, Agnes saw Mattia looking at her—particularly, at her—with a brooding expression, in which there was no recognition; at such times, his face was mask-like and unsmiling, and seemed rather chilling to her. She hadn’t known at the time what his prison sentence was for but she’d thought, He has killed someone. That is the face of a killer.
But, as if waking from a trance, in the next moment Mattia smiled, and waved his hand for Agnes to call upon him—Ms. Agnes!
She loved to hear her name in his velvety voice. She loved to see his eyes light up, and the mask-like killer-face vanish in an instant, as if it had never been.
Instructors in the composition course used an expository writing text that was geared for “remedial” readers yet contained essays, in primer English, on such provocative topics as racial integration, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, freedom of speech and of the press, “patriotism” and “terrorism.” There was a section on the history of the American civil rights movement, and there was a section on the history of Native Americans and “European” conquest. Agnes assigned the least difficult of the essays, to which her students were to respond in compositions of five hundred words or so. Just write as if you were speaking to the author. You agree, or disagree—just write down your thoughts.
Most of the students were barely literate. In their separate worlds, inaccessible to their instructor, they were likely individuals who aroused fear in others, or at least apprehension; but in the classroom, they were disadvantaged as overgrown children. Slowly, with care, Agnes went through their compositions line by line for the benefit of the entire class. The inmate-students had ideas, to a degree—but their ability to express themselves in anything other than simple childish expletives was primitive; and their attitude toward Agnes, respectful at first, if guarded, quickly became sullen and resentful. Even when Agnes tried to praise the “strengths” in their writing, they came to distrust her, for the “suggestions” that were sure to come.
Mattia was quick-witted and shrewd, and usually had no difficulty understanding the essays, but his writing was so strangely condensed, Agnes often didn’t know what he was trying to say. It was as if the young man was distrustful of speaking outright. He wrote in the idiom of the street but it was a heightened and abbreviated idiom, succinct as code. From time to time Agnes looked up from one of his tortuous compositions thinking, This is poetry! When Mattia read his compositions aloud to the class, he read in a way that seemed to convey meaning, yet often the other inmates didn’t seem to understand him, either.
She couldn’t determine if the other inmates liked Mattia. She couldn’t determine if any of the inmates were friends. In the classes, it was common for inmate-students to sit as far apart from one another as they could, including in the corners of the room, since, in their cells, as Agnes’s supervisor had told her, they were in constant overly close quarters.
When, in class, Agnes questioned Mattia about the meaning of his sentences (taking care always to be exceedingly considerate and not to appear to be “critical”), Mattia could usually provide the words he’d left out. He seemed not to understand how oblique his meaning was, how baffled the others were.
“We can’t read your mind, Joseph”—so Agnes had said.
She’d meant to be playful, and Mattia had looked startled, and then laughed.
“Ms. Agnes, ma’am, that is a damn good thing!”
The rest of the inmate-students laughed with Mattia, several of them quite coarsely. Agnes chose to ignore the moment, and to move on.
During the ten-week course, Mattia was the only student not to miss a single class, and Mattia was the only student who handed in every assignment. Though she was to tell no one about him, not her supervisor, not her fellow instructors, and not her husband, Agnes was fascinated by this “Joseph Mattia”—not only his writing ability but his personality, and his presence. It had always been deeply satisfying to Agnes to teach her university students, but there was no risk involved, as the university campus represented no risk to enter; there was no prison protocol to be observed; as an Ivy League professor, she knew that if she’d never entered her students’ lives, their lives would not be altered much, for they’d been surrounded by first-rate teachers for most of their lives. But at this prison, Ms. Agnes might actually make a difference in an inmate’s life, if he allowed it.
