Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  "Me neither," I confessed.

  The only good days I had that summer were the days I spent in the city at my office. It broke my heart too. He wouldn't roller skate or ride his bike. I began to lose my temper more easily. (I was ugly.)

  "Go play," I ordered him curtly at the beach one day when I could control my temper no longer.

  He blinked.

  "Bob," my wife cautioned.

  "Huh?" he asked.

  "Are you deaf?"

  "I didn't hear."

  "Yes, you did. Go play."

  "With who?"

  "There's a kid sitting there near that fat lady."

  "Daddy. Please."

  "He looks your own age. He looks like he wants to meet somebody to play with."

  "I'm playing here."

  "With what?"

  "Sand."

  "Sand," I mimicked nastily, and pointed toward the shore. "Or I'll drag you over there by the arm and ask him for you." (Having made that threat, I had to mean it. There was an article in a women's magazine that month advising parents to be firm with balky children. There was an article in another women's magazine advising us to be sympathetic and indulgent. I didn't care about either magazine. I was mad. My wife was trying to warn me off with a look. I paid no attention. It was a matter of face now between myself and this poor, bewildered little boy.) "Would you like that?" I threatened.

  His face was chalky. "I won't be able to speak."

  "You're speaking now."

  "I've got a lump in my throat. I want to vomit."

  "You'll have a lump on your head," I could not restrain myself from wisecracking. "Get going. You can vomit later."

  He rose reluctantly and went with slow, wobbling steps to do as I had forced him.

  "You see?" I whispered to my wife, fearfully and penitently, craving immediate absolution. "He's going."

  "I think it's horrible."

  "He's doing it."

  He was speaking to the other boy, a wan, yellow-haired kid who shook his head without looking up and gave a labored, long reply. His mouth moved funny. I was sickened. The fat woman glared. My boy walked back to us with knees that seemed to bend with pain and he was almost in tears as he told us in a blocked, stammering voice that the other boy stuttered badly and had said no, he did not want to play.

  "Well, I did what you wanted!" my boy spat out at me bitterly, giving me a quick, stabbing glance, and sat down in the sand again a good distance away. His eyes were steaming at me with anger.

  I felt frustrated and enraged.

  Everything was going wrong for me, one thing after another, even my wife's snatch (God dammit).

  That summer my wife had a sensitive snatch, a recurring vaginal inflammation, and I (even she, until I tried) didn't even know if I would be able to get laid properly when I came out for those dragging, intolerable weekends. (I could have done much better staying in the city. I was doing better. I was getting all I wanted.) I did not have much else to do out there at the beach that I enjoyed, except make eyes at other wives and josh suggestively with very young girls. So I kept losing my temper with him and trying to help him. (I'd lose my temper when I'd see myself fail. I was filled with such depressing feelings of rejection and impotence at my inability to cheer him up, to alleviate his wretched agony and isolation, to have him succeed at doing something new.) I kept commanding him gruffly to attempt doing things that he did not want to do and was probably physically unable to do because of the rigid tension impairing his balance and coordination and because of the lump in his throat.

  Because I felt he was afraid of the ocean, I made him go wading with me, and he almost drowned when a large wave broke suddenly and knocked us both down, tore him from my grasp, and sent him rolling and tumbling helplessly toward shore in the deep, swirling, tumultuous surf. When he stumbled to his feet finally (as I struggled feebly against the backwash in an effort to reach him and save him), he was holding his breath, and his eyes were clamped shut so tightly that both knuckled halves of his flushed face looked like clenched and crimson fists. He would not open them until I had taken his hand again and led him to shore. I have visions of that episode still.

  "You know, Daddy," he said to me, "I was afraid to open my eyes. I didn't know where I was and I was afraid to open my eyes and look. I was afraid that when I opened my eyes I would be all the way out there, and I didn't want to look."

  I was surprised he talked to me, surprised he still trusted me enough to confide in me. (He could have drowned or been battered to death or paralysis right then and there. He might have been swept away from me out to sea by a suction of rushing water in a matter of three or four seconds. Once I helped lifeguards save a baby in an inflated tube that had been carried out thirty yards from shore in an instant. I might never have seen him alive again. I have always been afraid of death by drowning. I might never have been able to forgive myself if I had lost him then. My wife might never have allowed me to. I would have had to divorce her, leaving her with a Derek who was destined by birth, we are told, to turn out mentally defective and my daughter, who has been of small aid and comfort, which might not be such a bad thing for me to do even now. I do think about divorce a lot and I always have. Even before I was married I was thinking of getting divorced. I can picture my next wife: she would be younger, prettier, dumb, and submissive. She would be blond, short, chubby, and cheerful and would be very eager to please me in the kitchen and the bedroom. In short order I would find it impossible to be with her for more than an hour or two at a time, and I would have to divorce her too. I'm glad he lived. Getting married was my idea. I enjoy fucking my wife. She lets me do it anyway I want. No Women's Liberation for her. Lots of male chauvinist pig. I couldn't bang her freely even when there was no soreness because he was always hanging around the house in the daytime and was apt to be lying awake at night. I often tried to chase him away from us just for that. If we locked him out of our bedroom we didn't know if he was camping discouragedly just outside the door, where he could hear. I was surly much of the time and did a lot of growling at everyone.)

  I did such monstrous things to him. They seemed so necessary at the time. I did not know what else to do. I couldn't get rid of him, and he knew I wanted to. He did go bike riding one day and he fell against a wooden fence and bruised a knee so badly he had to walk with a limp for a week and got a long black splinter in his forearm that I had to poke at and dislodge with a sewing needle (and felt like vice personified doing so. I debated darkly with myself whether or not to take the two-week summer vacation I had coming to me. My wife made me; she said she would be unable to endure it any longer at the beach without me and that she would come back into the city. So I took it. And there were days on my vacation that I would have paid the company twice what I was getting just to be allowed to come in and work). I couldn't even get drunk anymore. I couldn't get high on martinis at cocktail time because he was always around somewhere listening and watching. (I got weary headaches over my eyes instead.) We couldn't tell dirty jokes, I couldn't be obscene, not even when we had people in. I couldn't flirt. He was there and would see me. (At least my daughter, God bless her benevolent heart, had been considerate enough to pack up her troubles in her old duffel bag and foot-locker and go off to camp to be miserable far away from us for the summer and pester us from afar.) He was right there. He was always right there. (I couldn't say or do anything I wouldn't want him to witness. There were so many ways I might upset him.) When I turned around sometimes, he was underfoot and I would step on him, and we would both feel terrible and blurt clumsy, incoherent apologies. (I wanted to curse. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream: "Get out of here!") I couldn't decide what to say. I didn't know how to handle it. Finally, I figured it out. I said: "Get lost."

  To make him realize he was capable of leaving us and finding his way around without getting lost, I made him go for a long walk alone; and, of course, he got lost.

  "Get lost," I repeated more sharply, when he appeared not to und
erstand.

  "Huh?"

  "I've got nothing to do," he had grumbled a moment before.

  "Go someplace."

  "Where?"

  "Away. Take a walk."

  "With who?"

  "With yourself. Mommy and I want to be here on the beach alone for a while."

  "I won't know how."

  "Yes, you will."

  "I won't get back."

  "Yes, you will."

  "Now?"

  "When then?"

  My wife stared away from him stonily. "You'd better go," she advised unsympathetically.

  "Go down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and come back. Just follow the water down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and follow the water back."

  "I want to stay here."

  "I want you to go."

  "I'll get lost."

  "You'd have to be pretty damned smart to do that."

  I was determined. He stood up, rubbing sand slowly from his palms, and walked off submissively in mute dejection without looking back. He was soon gone from sight behind the heads and torsos of other people jamming the shoreline. The amusement pier looked farther away than ever before, the beach more densely packed. I was afraid he'd get lost. (I was afraid I'd get lost if I had to do what I'd sent him to do.)

  "Why did you do it?" my wife asked critically, already repenting her own passive cooperation.

  "You wanted me to do it, didn't you?"

  I kept craning my neck to keep slim flashes of him in view for as long as I could and grew worried and sorry also as soon as he was gone.

  "I know," my wife admitted. She nodded absently. "I couldn't stand him hanging around here anymore."

  "Me neither."

  "He's always here. It breaks my heart."

  "Mine too."

  "He always looks so unhappy."

  "That's one of the things I can't stand."

  "Do you think he'll get lost?"

  "He can't get lost. It's that damned play group, damn them. None of this would have happened if they'd kept closer watch of things. I want him to see that he can go from place to place alone without having something terrible happen to him."

  "The beach is so crowded."

  "He won't get lost."

  He got lost.

  (At least we thought he was lost.)

  When twenty-five minutes passed and he did not return, we went surging after him in panic, my wife scurrying along the shore, myself trudging through deeper sand in the middle of the beach in the direction of the amusement pier. (I thought of homosexual perverts or of other kids from the play group spotting him, mocking him, ganging up on him.

  "The sky is falling!" I wanted to shout in horror at groups of adults I hurried past with a thundering heart. "Have you seen a little kid? He's lost. He'll look worried.")

  We found him standing by himself along the shore about two hundred yards away, floundering in one spot as though lost: he was not certain if he had overshot us already, and he did not know, therefore, in which direction to proceed. His cheeks were white, his eyes were distant, and his jaws were clamped shut. The tendons in his neck were taut, and he had a lump in his throat. The landmarks along the boardwalk — all those familiar signs and structures — meant nothing to him.

  My first impulse was to kill him. "Were you lost?" I shouted to him.

  "I don't know." He shrugged. I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as though all the bones in his ankles were broken. I was ashamed of him and wanted to disown him. I was sorry he was mine), then I wanted to clasp him to me lovingly and protectively and shed tears of misery and deepest compassion over him (because I had wanted to kill him. Imagine having a father that wanted to kill you. That's the part they all leave out of the Oedipus story. Poor Oedipus has been much maligned. He didn't want to kill his father. His father wanted to kill him). I don't know what I felt when I found him standing there like that, immense gratitude that he was unharmed and intense, depressing disappointment over everything else, a terrible rush of ungovernable, dissonant emotions in which landmarks made no sense to me, either. (I don't always know what I feel now.) (I wish I were a chimpanzee.) The next day my wife and I had a scathing quarrel in the house over money and sex that had nothing at all to do with him (although he could not know that). We snarled and snapped and sneered at each other like barking jackals. She yelled at me and I yelled back (we called each other bastard and bitch and told each other to go fuck ourselves), and when I stormed away into the kitchen to fling some ice cubes into my glass of whiskey, nearly shattering it in my hand with my violent force, I heard my boy move into the living room timidly and say, softly, to my wife:

  "Should I go for a walk again? To the amusement pier?"

  I heard myself sigh. I wanted to weep.

  "Is that why Daddy's unhappy?"

  I felt myself feel so utterly awful.

  My wife came into the kitchen quietly.

  "Did you hear him?" she murmured, her anger against me gone. (I said nothing.) "He wants to know if he should go for a walk again. He thinks that's why you're unhappy now."

  "He did not," I denied finally, without spirit.

  "You must have heard him. Go ask him."

  "I don't believe you."

  "You get crazy when you're this way," my wife lamented. "I can't talk to you. None of us can. You won't listen and you won't see. Go ask him. Go see what he looks like if you don't believe me."

  I knew what I would see (and did not want to). I stepped around my wife without looking at her or touching her and walked into the living room. He was standing docile and repentant (as though he were to blame) near the door leading out to the porch, awaiting my directions. His skin was shaded blue. (He would do whatever I asked. He did not want me to be angry or unhappy because of him. His eyes were wide and serious. I have never before or since in all my life felt so totally cruel, so rotten, depraved, and inhuman. He was prepared to yield himself to any sacrifice I requested of him. I did not want him that way.) His look was expectant, grave, and resigned. I did not speak for a second. (I couldn't.) I had a lump in my throat.

  "From now on," I told him gently, "at least until the end of the summer, you won't have to do anything you don't want to do. And you'll be allowed to do everything you do want to do. Will that be okay?" My tone was tender, apologetic.

  His gaze was skeptical. "You mean it?"

  "I promise."

  "I love you, Daddy," he said, and rested his head against my belly to hug me peacefully. "You're the best daddy in the whole world."

  I am the worst daddy in the whole world. Yesterday, I helped a blind man across the street and was surprised that I did not feel revolted when I took his arm. (Actually, he took my arm. I started to grip his, but he told me:

  "No, let me hold on to yours.")

  I think I will do things like that more often (now that I see I can).

  I broke my promise to him many times. He continued to love me anyway.

  I identify with him too closely, I think, and remember that once, when he was still an infant in diapers, kicking his legs away as he lay on the Bathinette, rocking it perilously and raising a violent clatter and spray of powder cans and safety pins, my wife yelled to me urgently to come into the room and showed me a fiery red blotch on the side of the head of his penis. (It must have been minuscule, had to be, but appeared a gigantic blister at the time.) And I doubled over with a keen, slicing pain in my own penis the instant I saw the rough (small), flaming-red patch and cupped my hands over all my genitals reflexively to preserve and soothe them. It hurt then. It hurts now when I remember. I don't have to look to make certain nothing's there. Once when I was small I felt a stinging itch at the tip and saw a brown ant come crawling out, but I no longer tell this to anyone because nobody believes me. I guess I really do love this little thing of mine still, although I'm not sure why. Where wo
uld I be without it? Neuter. It had led me into strange places. I have led it. Through these thrilled and limp, leaking tissues have come decades of exquisite and often intolerable pleasures and three big, fully formed children who were mammoth in camparison to it, from the day they were born, one of them defective. In a factory he would be a reject. He suffers less than normal. We make up the difference. By and large, I believe I really don't get all that much pleasure out of it anymore, although I think I'd like to hold on to it a little longer, ha, ha. I don't always like putting it in, and I don't like taking it out. I wish there was something more to do with it than there is. Once in my early teens, I paid a younger cousin of mine, a girl, a dime to pull it for me and was terrified afterward that she would tell my mother or my brother or someone in her own family. I wonder if it warped her. It might have helped. She made me happy. For only a dime. I see her still as a dubious little girl, without a gleam of mischief or curiosity or sensuality of her own to enrich the experience for her. She was bored, and a little puzzled. I touched her gingerly. I molested a child. I was molested as a child. Everyone is molested. Maybe that's why I worry about my boy so much. I used to worry that way about my daughter. Now she is old enough to molest children on her own. I have paid much more than a dime many times since.

  In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse. When I go to sleep now, it is no longer on my side with my knees tucked up securely against my abdomen, and my thumb near my mouth. I lie on my back with my hands clasped across my chest decorously like a cadaver and my face pointed straight up toward the ceiling. I hear and feel myself start to snore, on nights when I am lucky; a loose, membranous thing vibrates tantalizingly in back of my throat with a deep, delicious, tickling sensation, and I am assuaged also by the satisfying possibility that my snoring will annoy my wife and interfere with her sleep. I can't stand it when I am unable to sleep and my wife does; I sometimes want to begin beating her with the side of my fists. I like it when I am able to sleep and she can't. When I awake, though, it is usually on my side, and one of my hands is still always between my thighs, near my genitals. I guess I do want to hold on to them all for as long as I can. I knew I was getting old when I started to have dreams about peeing. I awake with a full bladder and the momentary, shame-filled horror that I have already wet the bed. And that everyone will soon find out.