Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  I know what hostility is. (It gives me headaches and tortured sleep.) My id suppurates into my ego and makes me aggressive and disagreeable. Seepage is destroying my loved ones. If only one could vent one's hatreds fully, exhaust them, discharge them the way a lobster deposits his sperm with the female and ambles away into opaque darkness alone and unburdened. I've tried. They come back.

  It's all Kagle's fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byootefool instead of beautiful and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him — I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress.

  "Heh-heh," he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes.

  "Heh-heh," I want to mock back. I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I'd like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him.

  "Andy," I tell him, "I'd like to hit you across the face with that lamp."

  "Heh-heh," he says.

  "Heh-heh," I reply.

  I chuckle kindly when I see him, joke with him snidely about Green's vocabulary and well-tailored, showy clothes, help him dutifully in ways he can observe. I weighed one hundred and ninety-eight pounds this morning, down four and a half since Monday (when I decided to begin losing weight), and am nearly a whole foot taller than he'll ever be.

  "Heh-heh," he wants to know. "How you getting along with that kid in the Art Department?"

  "Fine."

  "The one with those small titties."

  "She's young enough to be my daughter."

  "What's wrong with that? Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh. I've got these call reports for you from Johnny Brown."

  "Didn't think I noticed, did you? Going to cut me in?"

  "How would you like a kick in the leg?"

  "My good one or my bad one? Heh-heh."

  "Andy, this time I think you ought to look at them and make some comments before you pass them on."

  "Clamming up? Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh-heh. What good are they? Salesmen lie."

  "Catch 'em. You'll make a good impression on Arthur Baron and Horace White."

  He pays no attention. "Ever go two on one?"

  "Two on one what,"

  "I do that now in Las Vegas. I know the manager of a hotel. Two girls at the same time. I did it again last week. You ought to try it."

  "I don't want to."

  "Two coons?"

  "How about these call reports?"

  "You do that for me. You're better at it. What do you hear about me?"

  "Don't travel."

  "Do I need a haircut?"

  "You need a kick in the ass."

  "You're sure doing a lot of kicking today, aren't you?"

  "Heh-heh."

  "I'll let you in on something. Green is finished. How would you like his job?"

  "Bullshit."

  "I'll recommend you. They're cutting his budget."

  "How much?"

  "You won't get a raise. I will. I made a killing in Xerox last week."

  "That's more bullshit. You're always making a killing in Xerox and always complaining about all the money you owe."

  "Heh-heh."

  All he's got is his home in Long Island and a house in the mountains, to which he sends his wife and two children every summer. He goes there some weekends. I inquire after Kagle's family as periodically as Arthur Baron inquires about mine.

  "All fine, Art," I always reply. "Yours?" (Green never asks. He isn't interested in my family and won't deign to pretend.)

  I have dwelt wistfully more than once on the chances of his being killed in an automobile accident driving back or forth to work one lucky day. Kagle is careless in a car and usually sluggish or drunk when he leaves the city at night. Kagle is one of the very few upper-middle-echelon executives left in the country who still make their homes in Long Island, and this gaucherie too has scored against him, along with the white-tipped hairs growing out of his nostrils and the tufts in his ears. Nobody has hair growing out of nostrils or ears anymore. (He ought to see a barber now just for that.) This is something I've not been able to bring myself to mention to him. (I fear it would hurt him.) It has become difficult for me to look at him. He senses a change. I think that is why he heh-hehs me so much now. I pity him. (He does not know what to do about everything that is happening.)

  "Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh-heh. What's so funny?"

  "Why are you wearing covert cloth, for Christ sakes?" I admonish him instead.

  "What's that?" he asks in alarm.

  "It went out of style thirty years ago."

  "Covert cloth?"

  "Switch to worsted."

  "I've got a blue blazer now," he says proudly.

  "It's double knit."

  "How would I know?"

  "It would look terrific in Erie, Pennsylvania. Have we got any big accounts in Erie, Pennsylvania?"

  "I'm going to L.A. next week. From there I sneak to Las Vegas. Two on one," he explains with a wink.

  "And it doesn't fit. It's loose and lopsided."

  "I'm lopsided too, you know," he reminds me gravely, with the shade of a crafty and hypocritical smile I've seen on him before. "I was born this way, you know. It didn't just happen, you know. It was God's will. Don't laugh. It isn't funny. It isn't so funny, you know, being born with this deformed hip and leg."

  "I know, Andy."

  "It's nothing to laugh about."

  "I wasn't laughing."

  "This is the way He wanted me."

  "Hallelujah," I think of replying cynically. "I wish He'd given as much thought to me as you feel He gave to you."

  When Kagle draws upon his leg or God for deference and sympathy, he becomes those odious strands and bushy tufts of hair in his nose and ears — intimate, obscene, and revolting — and I have wished the poor man dead many times lately just for filling me with ire, shame, and disgust. Worsteds won't help him. Everything is going wrong. I have wished other unsuspecting human beings I know and like dead also for most-trivial slights and inconveniences. Let them all die. (I'm liberal: I really don't care how.) I visit fatal curses on slow salesgirls and on strangers who get in my way and delay me when I'm walking hurriedly.

  "Die," I think. "Pass away. Let me step over you." I can find many men — they are always men — in public life I'd like to see assassinated (and I can't stand bums anymore. I don't feel sorry for them), although I'd never think (I haven't yet) of doing that kind of work myself. I feel I understand why other people beat, kick, and set fire to bums and panhandlers. (We have too many of them.) I do not grieve at the death of Presidents: (usually, I'm glad): they're finally getting what they deserve. Not since F.D.R., I think, which was the last time in my life, if memory is correct, I was able to raise a tear. I have to choke back sobs now and then (usually at bad movies), but my tears are bottled away somewhere deep inside me. Nobody can tap them. That was a man, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last time I had a President I could look up to (the rest have not been mine), or maybe I only thought so because I was gullible. No — the whole country wept when he died. My mother wept.

  "One third of the nation," said he, "is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed."

  By now, with our improved technology and humane social and political reforms, it mu
st be more than half. When it hits a hundred percent (the millionaires will have Swiss nationality by then and live in France), trumpets will play, the heavens will open, and everybody will hear Handel's music free. Last night I dreamed again my mother was alive, thin with age but in perfect health, clothed attractively in a cool print dress and thin white sweater, chatting naturally with me without a grudge at some cordial holiday festival in the nursing home. It was Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving. She beamed at me often, as she used to do when I was little. I was forgiven everything. I missed her like a forsaken child when I awoke in the morning — I had a sticky, crusted sensation of tears drying on my cheeks — emerging gratefully from sleep once more in my entirety, bringing my memory and all of my physical parts back with me successfully one more time from wherever it was I had been when I was not here.

  "What were you dreaming about?" my wife always wonders.

  "Me."

  "You were groaning."

  "My mother."

  "Still?"

  "You will too."

  "I do already. Ever since she got arthritis. Her fingers curled. Won't it ever stop? The dreams?"

  "It hasn't for me."

  "Will I get arthritis too?"

  "I will too."

  "I hope I don't get it in the spine. I wouldn't want to curl up there."

  "Fuck me."

  "I'm not in the mood. The children are up."

  I miss my mother again when I remember how poignantly I missed her when I woke this morning. I miss the forsaken child. He's me. But I'm not he. I think he may be hiding inside my head with all the others I know are there and cannot find, playing evil tricks on my moods and heartbeat also. I have a universe in my head. Families huddle there in secret, sheltered places. Civilizations reside. The laws of physics hold it together. The laws of chemistry keep it going. I have nothing to do with it. No one governs it. Foxy emissaries glide from alleys to archways on immoral, mysterious missions. No one's in charge. I am infiltrated and besieged, the unprotected target of sneaky attacks from within. Things stir, roll over slowly in my mind like black eels, and drop from consciousness into inky depths. Everything is smaller. It's neither warm nor cold. There is no moisture. Smirking faces go about their nasty deeds and pleasures surreptitiously without confiding in me. It gives me a pain. Victims weep. No one dies. There is noiseless wailing. I take aspirins and tranquilizers. I am infested with ghostlike figurines (now you see them, now you don't), with imps and little demons. They scratch and stick me. I'd like to be able to flush the whole lot of them out of my mind into the open once and for all and try to identify them, line them up against a wall in the milky glare of a blinding flashlight and demand:

  "All right, who are you? What were you doing in there? What do you all want from me?"

  They wouldn't reply. They'd be numberless. I'd find 1,000 me's. (I like to fuck my wife when she's not in the mood. I like to make her do it when she doesn't want to.) I'd like to be able to photograph all my dreams with a motion picture camera and nail the guilty bastards in them dead to rights. I'd have the evidence. I'd like to wiretap their thoughts. I'd like to photograph their dreams to find out what's going on in their minds while they are going around at liberty in mine. (A man's head is his castle.) I don't hear voices. (I sometimes wish I did.) I'm not crazy. I know people do talk about me behind closed doors but I don't imagine I hear what they are saying. Yesterday, a little boy was found dead in the cellar of an apartment building, sexually mutilated. The murderer is still at large. Another child was found dead in the airshaft of a different apartment house, thrown from the top. Nobody knows why. (A girl. The police have not yet determined if she was sexually abused.) Another child is missing from home after several days, and no one knows why. Family and neighbors wait for word in pessimistic suspense, lighting religious candles for the soul already in solemn expectation of the worst. I too believe she's been murdered (and I wonder why she has been. In Oklahoma today farmers decided not to deliver cotton at the price agreed to, because the price of cotton had doubled between the time the sales were made and the time the contract forms were prepared. Buyers will take them to court. Bodies of other people's children are found in airshafts and stairwells all the time, and I'm not even sure what an airshaft or stairwell is). I wonder also what narrow, reedlike Horace White really feels about me. He's such an influential prick. (I hate that influential prick, and he means so much to me.)

  "Well, well, well — here comes our company nail biter now," he'll say when I enter his office, and think it's funny. "How are you today?"

  He's usually clipping, filing, or buffing his own translucent fingernails behind his enormous walnut desk whenever he summons me to request some kind of new work from me or discuss corrections. (He calls the changes he wants me to make corrections.)

  "If you ever write a book," he has repeated to me, "put me in. I'll buy a lot of copies."

  I'd like to wiretap his head too. I'd like to know if I range about impertinently in his dreams the way he roams about in mine (as though he owns them). I doubt I symbolize enough. Horace White strolls into my dreams often with his nearly featureless face, hangs around awhile, and turns into florid, fleshier Green, who fumes and glares scathingly at me as he starts to make a cutting remark and then clears out as rapidly as I'd like to as soon as the menacing, dark stranger enters and draws near with his knife I never see, either waking me up moaning in primordial fright or quitting the scene graciously to make way for someone like my wife's mother or sister, Forgione, or Mrs. Yerger. Or my daughter, boy, and/or Derek. Or someone else I haven't invited. What a pleasant interval it is when I can hump my wife or Penny in my dreams. I come a lot with Penny and wake up just in time. I come a lot with my wife. I'll fondle my wife sometimes after I awake until she turns over amorously and do it to her for real. (It was usually better in the dream.) Dreams of Virginia never move toward climax. I fiddle with her blouse and fumble with her thumb-smeared garter snaps. I have so many people to cope with at night. Many are made of varnished glass wax. There's no such thing. Ghouls are there, and midgets. Carcasses. I have my wife, mother, children, sister, dead brother, and even my dead father to bother about in my dreams (even though I don't know what he looks like. The photographs he left behind don't convince), all of them but my dead father petitioning me for some kind of relief that I cannot give them because I am in such helpless need myself. No wonder my dreams all seem to unreel in the same stuffy, choking atmosphere of a chapel in a funeral home. Only Arthur Baron provides some solace, but he is busy and never stays for long, and I'm not even sure it is my father or able to understand why he is so displeased. (I haven't done anything.) My staring, waiting nine-year-old boy becomes staring, speechless Derek. Both are motionless. I was speechless once. I did not know what would become of me. Now I've derived some idea. I have only to sit down to holiday dinner with the full family and have something arise that recalls my dead father or older brother and my dying, wordless mother and I can see myself all mapped out inanimately in stages around that dining room table, from mute beginning (Derek) to mute, fatal, bovine end (Mother), passive and submissive as a cow, and even beyond through my missing father (Dad). I am an illustrated flow chart. I have my wife, my daughter, and my son for reference: I am all their ages. They are me. (But I'm not them. They'll run through sequences obligingly for me as many times as I want to view them.) The tableau is a dream. The scene is a frieze.

  "Freeze."

  None of them moves. All of them sit like stuffed dolls. And I can perceive:

  "This is how I am when I was then."

  And:

  "That was how I will feel when."

  Now they can move.

  I think I know how it must feel for my wife to be married to a philandering executive like me to whom she can no longer make much difference unless she gets cancer or commits adultery. (Suicide won't do.) It must feel cold. Shifting my eyes left or right, I can transfer myself into my mother's, brother's, sister's past to see my
present and my future. I shift my glance into the future of my children and can see my past. I am what I have been. I incorporate already what I am going to become. They inform me like highway markers. And here is another dream I imagine as I see myself hunched over the smoking, roasted turkey with my bone-handled carving knife, poised for severing, after separating the second joints, that first dramatic slice of white meat from the breast while they all watch and wait silently in high-backed chairs like skeptical shadows, unbreathing: they're mine. I own them. They belong to me. I'm in command (and hope the white meat will be toothsome and the dark meat juicy). Now we are frozen again and do not move. (Get the picture?) We cannot move. I stand over my turkey; they sit rigid. And I feel weirdly in that arrested dumb show in which we are all momentarily statues that even if I'd never had them, had never married, sired children, had parents, I would have had them with me anyway. Given this circle, no part could be different. Given these parts, the circle was inevitable. Only Derek deviated, and that was an accident, somebody else's. (We played our parts.) Now he is fixed in place with the rest of us. They have been in my head for as long as I've had one (the stork didn't bring them) and I cannot remember myself without them. (So much of me would be missing.) They bump against brain and give me headaches. Occasionally, they make me laugh. They're in my plasm. Now we can move. They don't. They wait like stumps. They sit like ruins in a coffin in their high-backed chairs. The turkey's carved; white meat, dark meat, second joints, wings, and legs lie laid out neatly like tools on a dentist's tray or surgical instruments of an ear-nose-and-throat man about to remove tonsils. But the platter's not been passed. There are spiced apples, chilled cranberry molds, and imported currant jams. It's a gelid feast, a scene of domesticity chiseled on cold and rotting stone. I'm in control, but there's not much I can do. (I can pass the platter of meat to my wife.) My mother's there with hair that's white as soap. My father's elsewhere. She'll die. I know she will because she already has. (I was so offended by my father when he died that I did not want to go to his funeral. I wanted to teach him a lesson. I taught him a lesson.) My wife is the only wife I could have had till now (I had no choice) till death, divorce, or adultery do us part. My children were the only ones permissible. (Other people's belong to them.) No dimpled, freckle-faced smiles, no cheerleaders, gladhanders, backslappers, or starlike overachievers were ever in the cards, for them or for me. They became what they were; if I had to imagine them better they would be no different. It was not within my scrotum to father a child who would ever be invited to the White House to pose for a picture with the President exemplifying all that's shimmering and wholesome in national life. Soon they will have to invite a porcelain bowl of strawberries and cream. The people have started to look accursed. (The strawberries will be tinted redder with synthetic coloring. The cream will be adulterated with something whiter. The porcelain bowl will be made of painted rubber.) All but Derek, who sits with us — we give his nurses family holidays off and hope to God they take them. I can imagine him otherwise. I could not conceive of him this way. Now we can move. I can pass the platter of turkey meat to my wife and offer the others some sweet potato pie, which is made of yams. There are no sweet potatoes anymore. (They're gone too. I don't know what became of them.) I don't know why my father comes into these dreams of mine in which I cannot speak or move but only stay and hear, since I hardly know the man, except to turn into someone fearsome as a nigger or Horace White, who, in my dreams, uncovers a scarlet underside of erotic cruelty to the insipid outerface I know. Horace White owns stock. I wonder if I miss a memory of having been spanked at least once on the bottom by a father. I don't own one. There is a closeness in that, a stable understanding, a promise for the past and assurance for the future. Perhaps I ought to start spanking both my sons every fortnight for their own good. My daughter is too old. My wife isn't, and I do. She likes to scratch with her fingers and toes or bite mildly. We let each other.