Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  "That's my friend," he would announce with elation. "That's my friend. I know him. I know him from play group. That's my friend also." Sometimes he would wave and they would rush to greet each other or they would bump shoulders wordlessly in recognition as they passed. "That's my friend also from play group," he would continue every time. "That's my friend too. He's older."

  He took so much pleasure in having them, as though he had never before conceived it possible that he could be on sociable terms with so many people. He was radiant when any came to the house looking for him; he would entice them inside to show them off.

  ("This is my friend," he would say. "These are my friends."

  My daughter was that way too when she was little, still is with boys, but much more subtle and blasй in the manner in which she takes pains to let us see or find out about a boy she wants us to think is interested in her. I wonder what in the world my wife and I ever did to our children to make them believe we thought they would never be able to make friends. I'm not sure anymore that we did anything, that all of it is our fault.) It was almost as though he could not contain quietly all the intense happiness he was experiencing.

  It did not last. It ended early for him. Things soon began happening at that play group to disquiet him, and before long he was as reluctant to go there as he is now to go to gym and Forgione. He welcomed the foot races and the guessing games and play-skits indoors on rainy days; but there was rope climbing there too (but only for the older boys, we were able to find out) and a trampoline in view that he was leery of (so was I. And so was my wife. I don't know what my boy thought because I did not want to generate any apprehension in him by asking, but I know what I thought: I was afraid he might go bouncing up all the way to the surface of the moon, bump his head, and come bouncing back down to that trampoline on the back of his neck with his spine broken and both his legs and arms paralyzed — I just did not want him to have to try it), and far in advance he was tormented by the deep-water swimming test he was told all the boys in his age group would have to pass before the summer was over and be given lessons to pass. (He didn't even want the lessons. There were also constant rumors of jellyfish in the water, and sea lice and horseshoe crabs.) There were rumors of boxing bouts and wrestling matches; he spied a pair of boxing gloves on a hook in a shed and believed he would have to fight (although there never was any boxing or wrestling. There never was anything dangerous there for the children. It was a good day camp, I guess, as far as good day camps go, but I soon found myself detesting it because my boy began having dilliculties there). New games were introduced quickly that my boy did not understand and other children from previous years there did, and no one, not the counselors or any of his friends in the play group, took sufficient time to explain or was tolerant and considerate of his blunders when he made them. He was too shy to ask any question more than once, even when the reply he received was incomprehensible or incomplete; he was doing things wrong consistently. The counselors were busy flirting with each other. (That old stewing concupiscence was germinating hotly there too. The girls wore knitted T-shirts; many wore no bras, and even the tiny-titted ones looked good. It's so much sweeter when you're young, so much hotter, so much more fun. I wish I had that frenetic heat back now instead of this sluggish, processed lust I put myself through and frequently have to make a laborious effort to enjoy.) I hardly blamed them, although I blamed them like hell at the time when their negligence affected my own boy. (I remember my own scalding, urgent drives and fits for two summers in the woods as a camp counselor near a camp with girl counselors just across the lake. There were many activities the two camps did together. I really didn't give a fuck about the welfare or development of any of the kids, so long as they didn't drown, get scarlet fever or polio, or kill each other with ropes or rocks. All I had my entire soul concentrated on for most of those summers was reaching some bold and naughty juicy slut of an experienced girl from town or the other camp who would meet me on the ground in the woods and make me come fast. So I wouldn't have to do it myself. Oh, how I always wanted to come. I used to enjoy doing it to myself in those days as much as I enjoyed it any other way.) He felt himself sinking steadily into disgrace. He was less and less able to figure out what to do. He faked limps at play group in order to be excused from activities he was not utterly positive he understood and began complaining at home at breakfast of nausea and sore throats. (It was like it is at school now. There was no beginning, it seems, and there might be no end.)

  One morning he retched and seemed to throw up the very little he had eaten because he did not want to go. We took his temperature, and he had no fever. We made him go. (It was wrong of us to make him go. I know that now, and everybody we talk to about it says it was wrong. But nobody has been able to tell me what would have been right.)

  I wandered by there secretly later that day to observe him, and I was jubilant at what I saw. It was a relay race, and he was ten yards ahead, my joyous little boy (I was so proud to spy him), carrying a heavy medicine ball in his arms that he had to deliver to the next runner on his team. He was laughing; his giggles rang out clearly over everything; he was laughing so hard as he ran that he was faltering in his stride, and his knees wobbled and buckled; he was reeling with greater and greater outpourings of laughter and soon staggering and almost falling, doubled over with his deep, choking blasts of irrepressible merriment, as he leaped and stumbled and lumbered and galloped through the sand, slowing down steadily, intentionally, it appeared, for he was motioning heartily to the fat, wheezing, unhappy little boy he was racing against on the other team to hurry and catch up, so they could laugh together and run the rest of the way side by side, as though he had something funny he wished to reveal to him before they got there.

  My boy was still laughing (his face and teeth and mouth were all gleaming) when he handed the medicine ball off to the next boy on his team, who, instead of running, flung it back at his feet, and a whole surly gang of enraged people, it seemed, including some of those tall, sun-tanned counselors in white T-shirts, descended upon him like ferocious animals and began screaming and swearing at him. (A few were soon screaming at each other and shoving. My heart stopped and I was frozen to the spot. I could not believe it.) It was a mob scene. My boy was aghast. He did not know how he had sinned. He did not know what to do. As he stood there dumbfounded, twisting grotesquely in bewilderment, a bigger, broad-shouldered boy with black hair and a furious face charged up to him out of the swirl of others like a bull gone berserk and rammed him viciously in the chest with the hardened heels of both hands. My boy fell back a few steps (his knees were buckling again), turned white as a sheet (Oh, God, I thought — he's going to vomit, or faint. Or cry. And make me ashamed), and waited limply. He did nothing else. He stood there. He did not speak or protest, or cast his eyes about. He did not even lift his arms to protect himself or hit back as the other boys made ready to run at him again; but he did not look as though he intended to flee or beg for help. (I shuddered and thought thatI might puke.) The other boy rushed forward again and slammed my boy in the chest with his open hands, then stood daringly with his fist poised high in an open challenge to my boy to begin fighting back. Again my boy staggered backward a few steps from the force, recovered his balance, and just waited. He would not fight back; he would not defend himself; but he would not run away, and he would not ask anyone for aid or pity. That much seemed clear; there was defiance in his stillness. For a fleeting instant, I was enthralled by the dignity and courage I sensed he was showing just by holding his ground and waiting for the next battering charge. He would not move to save himself. (I do not move to save myself.) For a second, I could actually make myself feel proud. But that wasn't enough. I wanted him to have more guts. (I wish I had more guts.) I heard myself rooting for him to strike back.

  "Move, you dope!" I pleaded to myself. "Why don't you move, you dope!"

  And then, with a numbing, devastating shock that made my head feel fault, I saw that his eyes were
red and swollen and brimming with tears and that his lips were bloodless as ashes and quivering. And then I understood why he did not move: he could not move. He was paralyzed. He was devoid of all power and ability to act or think. He could not even panic. He did not move because he could not move. He did not speak because he could not speak. He did not hit back because he could not hit back. He did not cry out or cast his gaze about for help because he couldn't: the thought was not there. He had no voice. Here was that bad dream of mine coming to life. Here was onrushing death and degradation bearing down upon him once more in the senseless, stupid action of a little, slightly sturdier boy (looming suddenly in this situation as large as a giant) whom my boy recently tried to give two chocolate cookies to (it was the same one. Or maybe it wasn't) and he could not move (neither could I) to avert it or mouth the words necessary to call attention to it and release himself from that lifelong, terrifying nightmare of mine. (I am there, and someone can get me — I am dead already because I cannot free my feet or yell for help — I am speechless too — although I feel I want to.) He was affixed. He was frozen to his spot too (as I was frozen to mine). He was fossilized, flat, brittle, and destructible. He was already dead if anyone wanted to kill him. One of the play group counselors (in slow motion, it looked to me) intervened just then to save him (two counselors, actually, the second a chunky blond girl with big breasts. Breasts seem to be growing bigger and bouncier on young girls these days. They seem to be growing them bigger on older girls too and middle-aged women. In summer, the beaches hang with them. I like breasts, until I begin to see so much of so many of them. I used to like them more) and get things going again, and I realized I'd been holding my breath just about all the time and that all my muscles were tensed for violence (and arrested by the urge to use them). I realized that if that other little boy, whom I already hated, had charged at my little boy one more time, I might have lost control and stormed into that children's play area like someone roaring and insane and smitten him dead right then and there. (Or else, in a reaction away from that impulse, I would have murdered my boy.) If I found that I was able to move myself at all. (I will never know if I was petrified too.)

  I left when they were all playing again.

  I was very good to my boy the rest of that day. (I was so good to him, and sensitive, that I did not even tell him or my wife what I had seen. He had been afraid to fight.)

  The next day, as I more or less foresaw, he did not want to go to play group again. He didn't say so; he merely said he didn't feel well but would probably be all right if we told him he had to go. He looked wretched and pasty, and my heart went out to him silently because I knew (I thought I knew) what he felt. He went. We told him he did have to go and took him. Leaving with us for play group that morning (our daughter was away at camp that summer, where she was having a difficult time of it too, if we could believe her), he looked as miserable and ill in spirit as he did on that bleak and drizzling, unnatural dawn we rode with him to the hospital to have his tonsils — and his adenoids — taken out (I keep forgetting those adenoids. I don't even know what adenoids are, except that they are there and dangling, somewhere up inside the nose. Maybe nobody knows what adenoids really are. I once felt pretty witty telling a young girl from Ann Arbor that adenoids were undescended testicles), and, numb with gloom ourselves that dark and heavy morning, strove to make casual conversation with him in the taxicab that I wished would speed faster and be there at the hospital already before one of the three of us passed out or passed away from the sheer strain of the approaching event, like that jolly and innocently empty conversation I always used to try to make with my mother in the nursing home during those tedious and sickening visits with her that soon served no purpose at all. I could just as easily have sent my small food parcels into the room by mail or with one of the nurses and departed immediately (and spared myself the gruesome ordeal of watching her fumble with fragments of fish and meat and candy and cake with her deformed and trembling fingers and dabbing the greasy, crumbling pieces into her lips. She did not want me to feed her). But I was her son: I was her dutiful son (ha, ha, and willing to suffer penitentially with her part of every weekend at first, then every other weekend, then every third or fourth weekend, until she began to fail rapidly, when, for some hypocritical reason, to absolve myself, it turned into every weekend again for five or ten or fifteen minutes), but not an especially grateful one. Neither one of us was grateful to the other. I was not grateful to her for having been my mother (it had become by then an unjust imposition. Why could she not have gone away unnoticed, as my father had done, inconveniencing me not at all?); and she was not grateful to me for my visits or the news and things to eat I brought her. What little conversation we had was forced. Angered silence would have been better. She missed her mother.

  "Ma," she moaned deliriously again and again from her drugged and agitated stupor near the end, her glazed, reddened eyes showing unfocused fright and welling with tears, and that was almost all she had to say, except for what I think she had to say to me at the end.

  I like her more now than I did when she was alive.

  My mother was almost eighty when she died, and her memory had gone almost entirely, but she died crying for her mother, and I suppose that I shall die crying for mine (if the Lord, in his infinite mercy, allows me to live long enough. Ha, ha). So much of misfortune seems a matter of timing. We were late coming for him that day, and we saw him, half a block from the play area, standing alone on the sidewalk in his bare feet and bawling loudly, helplessly, because he thought we were never going to come for him at all. (I was incensed when I saw him. We were simply late. Nothing else had happened.) Other people, children and grown-ups, looked at my boy curiously as they walked past and saw him standing there crying: none of them offered to help, none of them questioned him. (Good God — even I will help a small child who seems to be in trouble, if no one else does.) He did nothing when he saw us, except shriek more piercingly, quail more frantically, in a tortured plea for us to rescue him from whatever odd spell was holding him to that spot in terror. (I was so deeply incensed with him for a moment that I was actually tempted to stop with a sneer and delay going to him.) He was convulsed with grief by the idea that we had abandoned him, just because we were a little bit late, that we had left him there purposely because we were dissatisfied and disgusted with him, and that he was never going to see us again or have anyone to take care of him.

  I was infuriated. He knew the way home. It wasn't far. The walk was uncomplicated. Many mornings we would let him lead us from the house to the boardwalk to the play group just to show him he could get there alone safely and then let him lead us back afterward to demonstrate to himself and us that he also knew how to return. The village was small, there were hardly any cars, it was impossible to get lost — if he did, he could always follow the boardwalk or ask somebody for directions. He knew that too. (We were always pressing him to ask people for directions when he was unsure, but he was afraid of strangers, even children his own age, and reluctant to talk to them. When he did, he mumbled inaudibly with lowered eyes, and whoever he asked always requested him sharply to repeat what he had just said.

  "Do you know how to get there?" my wife and I would ask. "You know how. Are you sure you won't get lost? Which way do you turn from here? Do you see you can't get lost? Even if you turned here instead of there or a block later you would still wind up on the boardwalk or the main avenue. You can just follow the people or ask somebody if you do get lost. Will you get lost?")

  Yet he had gone only far enough to be almost out of sight of the play group area, where the few remaining counselors were languidly cleaning things up, and could go no farther. Even when he recognized us and saw us coming he did not move, as though even to budge one hair's-width from that agonizing place he occupied would be to risk fainting away over some invisible precipice and swoon out of existence. He remained stationary on the pavement in that single spot on his tiny bare feet as though every bone
in his ankles had already been crushed (I noticed then, I think, for the first time, how his feet pronate, how his arches are almost flat, and how large and sharp and close to the ground his ankle bones are) and even to continue standing there was excruciating and unendurable. He couldn't move and he couldn't stay where he was. (He did not rush to us.) He howled. We were salvation, God, his only hope for life, but we had to go all the way to him in order to save him, while his gaping, glistening eyes fastened on us frantically. He would not (could not) take even one step toward us to assist in his own rescue and abbreviate his torment. (It was pitiful, pathetic, heartrending; and I fought back violent surges of anger and impatience and the feeling I might lose control and start berating him right then and there. I wanted to hit him. I felt he deserved it and felt I would have done so if he were older and bigger.) My wife quickened her pace and moved out ahead of me and I plucked at her elbow to hold her back. "Don't run!" I hissed at her. "You'll scare him." But it was me he waited for, my presence and protection he needed, and he did not begin walking again until he had felt my hand and was able to grip it solidly. (I had the impression then, as I have now, that if we had turned away from him and gone back, or if, for some unavoidable reason, we had not come for him that day at all, he would have remained stranded unalterably on that same spot at which by invisible forces he had been brought to a stop, a tiny mark on the surface of the world no greater than the dimensions of his own naked footprints, until he had perished or collapsed from exposure, hunger, thirst, fear, or fatigue, or until some unnaturally concerned and curious lady or man had gone searching for a policeman to notify him that there was a small boy standing in one place on the sidewalk who had been crying there all day and night and was in danger of dying from starvation, fright, or loneliness. I had the feeling then, and I sometimes have it now, that he would have failed to survive without my wife and me, will not be able ever to exist without the two of us to sustain him, and he may have that feeling too. What will he do when we die? What will Derek do?)