Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  Dirty movies have gotten better, I'm told. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we've improved. Everything else has gotten worse. The world is winding down. You can't get good bread anymore even in good restaurants (you get commercial rolls), and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don't ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it's wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and isn't whipped and isn't cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference. (I wish I could get my hands on a good charlotte russe again.) That's what Paradise is — never knowing the difference. Even fancy bakeries now use a substitute for whipped cream that looks more like whipped cream than whipped cream does, keeps its color and texture longer, doesn't spoil, and costs much less, yielding larger profits.

  "It tastes like shit."

  It tastes like shit. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horseshit is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don't find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. "America the Beautiful" isn't: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live. The Fuggers were all right as long as they stayed in Germany: then they sent their mothers here. Depreciating motels, junked automobiles, and quick-food joints grow like amber waves of grain. The faces of the rich and the poor age from nativity into the same cramped, desiccated lines of meanness and discontent. Women look like their husbands. God had no computer. He had to use clay, which was hard to work with, and a human rib, which was a little easier. God was just and fairly ambitious, but in a rudimentary way. He had to use the flood once (He couldn't think of smog or nerve gas) and fire and brimstone. People between rich and poor radiate uneasiness. They don't know where they belong. I hear America singing fuck off.

  The peregrine falcon is just about gone (done in by DDT. The shells of the eggs laid by the female, of course, grew too thin to survive incubation without cracking). The hot dog is going too. Soon there'll be no more whales; my wife and I will just have to make do without them. The good old American hot dog is filled with water, chicken innards, and cereal (the same cereal they divert from bread and rolls and replace with synthetics and additives). Mom's apple pie is frozen. Mom went public several years ago. There is no Pa. She did it with gas.

  "He did it with gas," she told me about her father, when I could bring myself to ask. "The rest of us were away in the country for the summer. He did it all alone in the garage in his car. I'll never forget it. I didn't want to go to the funeral. I heard somebody say he turned all red. My mother made me. I've always hated my mother for the way she treated him. 'Look what he did to me, she kept wailing all week long to whoever would listen. I don't like to talk about her."

  She did it with gas also, in the kitchen of her mother's house in New Jersey, which was most inconsiderate of her, since we had better ways of killing ourselves by then. We had plastic bags. (Last night, my wife had another one of her bad dreams. I didn't wake her. Afterward, after all the smothered moaning and spastic shuddering, she began to snore lightly, and I did wake her, to tell her she was snoring and complain she was not letting me sleep. She apologized penitently in a drowsy, cranky voice and turned over on her side while I looked at her ass. I smiled and slept well.) She was no longer at the office when I telephoned on my first furlough home after returning from overseas. Ben Zack told me. She was no longer on the premises. (Neither was I. Ben Zack didn't know who I was. I keep the old codger guessing.) She was no longer on the payroll. Whoever was at the switchboard had never heard of her (has still not, probably, heard of me) and gave me Ben Zack, who was still on the payroll in the Personal Injury Department as an assistant to Len Lewis, who was still there then too.

  "Virginia Markowitz?" Ben Zack repeated in a tone of bemused surprise. "Oh, yeah. Didn't you know?"

  "What?"

  I didn't tell him who I was but felt he could see me anyway. I told him I was an old college friend of hers from Duke University, a football player, and wanted to get in touch with her. That last part was true. I was an officer. I had wings, and I wanted her to see them. I wanted to station myself erect before her in my uniform and suntan and exclaim:

  "Hey, Virginia. Virginia Markowitz — look! I'm all grown up now. I'm twenty-two years old and a real smart aleck, and I get lots of good hard-ons. Let me show you."

  But she wasn't there.

  (She was no longer employed by the company because she was dead, you know.)

  "Oh, no," Ben Zack explained with patient good humor, as though pleased to have someone to talk to about her. "She's not employed here anymore. She's dead, you know, poor kid. She killed herself about a year and a half ago."

  "Was she sick?"

  "Nobody knows why."

  "How?"

  "She did it with gas."

  "Did she turn all red?" I was tempted to ask in an outburst of caustic bitterness the next time I dialed the switchboard and asked to speak to her.

  "I'm afraid I don't know," I could hear him reply in the manner of serious courtesy he was developing. "I wasn't able to attend the funeral. I don't get around too easily, you see."

  "Then she's really out of a job now, isn't she?" I thought of observing irreverently.

  (And am not positive if I did. I sometimes think of saying something and am not certain afterward if I did. Even in conversations I know are imaginary, I'm not always sure I remember what I've imagined.)

  "She doesn't work here anymore, if that's what you mean," he might have replied tartly. "I'm not sure I understand."

  She was out of a job, one of the unemployed; she had been let go for committing suicide and would probably have difficulty finding a suitable position anywhere (in her new condition and without favorable references) else but in one of the file cabinets downstairs where I would have laid her if I could while she was still alive and kicking (I bet she would kick, until she got cramps) and should have done it to her right there on the desk if I only knew how. If there was room enough on that desk for titanic Marie Jencks and Tom, there was room enough for tiny us.

  That was the time to have done it (if I'd wanted to). We signaled salacious caresses to each other all day long with coded phrases and patches of melody from ribald songs we shared.

  "I asked for number one. She said let's have some fun. Ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba."

  I would color a lot and feel my happiness bubble up into tingling ripples of joy and warmth. I have never been so pleased by intimacy with anyone since. She would smile and color a lot with merriment too, dimpling. She was always pleasant with me, even when she was having her period (I wish my wife was) and imagining that her face was breaking out into ugly boils and craters. (It wasn't.)

  "Look what she did to me."

  She killed herself before she was twenty-five, doing it with gas, as her father had done before her (and maybe his father before him — she didn't say — deserting me without two weeks' notice) and leaving me feeling destitute again in a phone booth in a train terminal. After a moment of utter shock, I found myself feeling like a foundling again, abandoned heartlessly in a soiled telephone booth in Grand Central Station (through tears, I saw banner headlines and front-page photographs in the next day's editions of the New York Daily News and Mirror, which is gone now too. O, weep for the peregrine falcon and the New York Mirror: ARMY OFFICER FOUND ABANDONED IN TERMINAL PHONE BOOTH. No Clue to Identity) in my Mediterranean, bronze suntan (which was turning yellow) and natty military officer's uniform (spotless dry-cleaned pink gabardine trousers and forest-green regulation tunic with ribbons above the breast pocket, or both pockets — I forget things like that. I had done well in the service. I was
a twenty-two-year-old success) with a malodorous, black telephone instrument in my hand announcing her death. Things stank. I thought I smelled my armpits, neck, and feet stinking.

  And then the air cleared (a breeze, a breath of fresh air) and I was glad — glad, God dammit — glad she was gone and dead and that I would never have to see her again. (I would not have to screw her.) And glad that I was the one who was still alive.

  I had not realized how much hidden tension I was under (I had jokes massed on my lips to conceal and ameliorate it) until I watched the sweat flowing in torrents from the hand holding the telephone. I was released from my obligations. I did not have to say hello, make a sociable wisecrack (and hope she'd remember and want to see me. She could have been married, engaged, going steady, and I would have believed none of it. I would have believed she had lost interest in a seventeen-year-old file clerk like me and was going with older married men and gangsters). She was a challenge, and I did not have to meet it. I did not have to make a date, show up early, sip whiskey, look her over (while she looked me over), sound her out to see if she was still the same, move her into some kind of bedroom, undress with her (until we were both naked), and then get right down to the sheets with her and look it squarely in the eye once and for all. I had no idea what I would find, what she would look like. (And I was still afraid.) I still didn't want it from her. (And I didn't want to see. All I still wanted, I think, was to lay it in her hand and have her lead me around with it like a domesticated pet.) I would have preferred malted milk. I have cravings for food. I have a weakness for dairy products and never liked baseball. I could have handled it all with a dashing display of confidence and technique, but I was so glad I didn't have to (she was dead, God dammit. And she was also nearly twenty-six). I had a rich chocolate malted milk in a tall, cold glass at a lunch counter in the train station and called another girl who'd been crazy about me the last time I was in, but she had moved out west to marry a sheet-metal worker in an airplane factory who was making a big salary. I called another girl I'd laid once a year and a half before who didn't remember me by name and sounded so absurd in her tinny and stand-offish mistrust that I laughed and made no effort to remind her. (She was putting on airs.) I had no one else to call. I had no close friends around. Before the week was out, I went back to the air base a few days earlier than I had to. I felt more at home in the army than I did in my house. (I feel more at home in my office now than I do at home, and I don't feel at home there. I get along better with the people there.) I don't think I ever had a good time at home on a furlough. I don't think I've ever had a good time on a vacation (I'm not sure I've ever had a good time anywhere); I find myself waiting for them to end. We have too many holidays. Birthdays and anniversaries come around too often. I'm always buying presents or writing out checks. The years are too short, the days are too long. I called Ben Zack again before I went back and pretended to be somebody else. (I did that twice. I couldn't help it.)

  "I asked for number two.

  She showed me what to do."

  "How odd," he said.

  I inquired innocently about Virginia as though I had not done so before. I told him I was a former eastern intercollegiate boxing champion from Duke University.

  "It's really very strange," he said.

  Calling Ben Zack again like that was a malicious trick, a practical joke. It did not feel like a joke. It felt like a willful, destructive crime, a despicable act of obscene perversion. It felt thrilling and debasing. It felt like it used to feel that time I was telephoning hospitals for a while to inquire about the condition, my very words: "I am calling to inquire about the condition. " of people I knew who had just died. "I'm sorry. Mr. is no longer listed as a patient," they'd say.

  I was always in fear of being discovered (have always felt myself on the very brink of imminent public exposure.

  "Look, there he is! That's the one. That's who he really is," someone, a woman, will shout, pointing at me from a crowd in an open place, and all the rest will nod in accord, and everything will be over for me.

  It surprises me still that they could not read my mind over the telephone, could not see my clammy sweat).

  You have to call quick. Once the autopsy's over and the funeral parlor's got them they give you nothing; they say:

  "We have no record of any such patient."

  I could write a manual. (I think I know what a morbid compulsion is.) I had to gird myself to speak to Ben Zack, even when I did not identify myself to him the first time. (I did not want him to know who I was.) I had to disguise my voice. I was certain Ben Zack would uncover my deception, snap angrily at me from his wheelchair, demand to know what type of demented prank I thought I was playing (I've never been wholly comfortable with telephones or banks. All my life I've had this fundamental fear of being chastised over the telephone by someone who does not know who I am.)

  "How odd," Ben Zack said. "I can't get over it. Somebody else called to ask about her just last week. Then somebody else yesterday. And now you. I guess all the boys must be coming home from the war."

  "Could you tell me how I can reach her?"

  "I'm afraid that will be impossible," he reported to me again in that same dropped octave of ceremonial awkwardness and lament. "She doesn't work here anymore, you know. She's dead, you see. She committed suicide some time ago."

  "How?"

  "She did it with gas."

  "Her father did it that way too. Didn't he?"

  "Did he?"

  "Did she turn all red?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know. I wasn't able to attend the funeral. I'm afraid I'm not able to get around too easily. I have to drive a special car."

  "Then she's really out of a job now, isn't she?"

  "She doesn't work here anymore, if that's what you mean," he snapped in a troubled voice. "Everybody keeps asking that, and I'm afraid I don't understand."

  He thought I was somebody else. (I think he was probably right.) I told him I was a former wrestling champion from Duke University. (But somebody else than whom? Nameless I came and nameless I go. I am not Bob Slocum just because my parents decided to call me that. If there is such a person, I don't know who he is. I don't even feel my name is mine, let alone my handwriting. I don't even know who I'm not. Maybe I'll ask Ben Zack the next time I call.)

  I have called Ben Zack since.

  "I asked for number three.

  She told me it was free."

  "Who is this? I don't understand."

  "Don't you know?"

  "No."

  "Then I must be somebody else," I said and hung right up.

  He keeps thinking I am somebody else. (And I keep thinking he's right. I get the wheelchair and metal canes and crutches I give to Horace White from him.) He is the only one left now. Len Lewis retired years ago. (He is my personal dead record file. He had infantile paralysis in his teens and came and went in a wheelchair even then. He drove a special car and had a special permit from the police department that allowed him to park anywhere. He was a handicapped person. He had an animal's sex drive and went to whorehouses.) Sometimes I tell him I was a national intercollegiate weightlifting champion at Duke University who was once engaged to her. Sometimes I tell him I am somebody else. He is easy to lure into conversation. (I have the feeling that when I am not talking to him, no one else is. He has grown garrulous with the years. He has been grotesquely fitted all his life for work in the Personal Injury Department and will remain in that opening until his wheelchair stops rolling or until the police department takes away his special parking permit. Then he will have to park himself elsewhere. Without permission to park, you are not allowed to park.) Len Lewis left a long time ago after a serious case of influenza from which he never bounced back.

  "He never really bounced back."

  I knew he was dead before he told me. I can add: Len Lewis was fifty-five when I was there and that was thirty years ago.

  "Then his wife passed away about a month after he did. It's odd, really od
d, the way people remember and keep calling up after so many years. I'm sorry I don't remember you, but you say you only worked here a very short time, didn't you?"

  Len Lewis never left his wife. He didn't really want to. Virginia didn't want him to. He was too old. She was too young. Then she was dead. And I was alive in a phone booth. I called Len Lewis once shortly after I was married when I was feeling terribly lonely and despondent (and didn't know why. Oh, that abominable cafard. I was over thirty years old before I even knew what to call that permeating, uninvited sorrow dwelling inside me somewhere like an elusive burglar that will not be cornered and exorcised).

  "Won't you come up and say hello?" he invited in his reticent, soft-spoken way. "There are still a few of us left."

  "I want to get in touch with Virginia," I said. "I think I'd like to keep in touch with Virginia Markowitz if I can."

  "She did it with gas.»

  "How terrible."

  ". in the kitchen of her mother's home. I was very fond of her. She was always very fond of you."

  (A woman's place is in the kitchen. A man's is in the garage. If I catch my wife and leave her, it won't be out of jealousy. It will be out of spite. If she leaves me, it would be shattering. I will turn into someone nervous. I might never be able to meet anyone's eyes. I would lack confidence and lose my job.)

  I called Ben Zack a month ago late one afternoon when I felt I could not make myself go home one more time to my wife and children on my country acre in Connecticut if my very existence depended on it. I do indeed know what morbid compulsion feels like. Fungus, erosion, disease. The taste of flannel in your mouth. The smell of asbestos in your brain. A rock. A sinking heart, silence, taut limbs, a festering invasion from within, seeping subversion, and a dull pressure on the brow, and in the back regions of the skull. It starts like a fleeting whim, an airy, frivolous notion, but it doesn't go; it stays; it sticks; it enlarges in space and force like a somber, inhuman form from whatever lightless pit inside you it abides in; it fills you up, spreading steadily throughout you like lava or a persistent cosmic shroud, an obscure, untouchable, implacable, domineering, vile presence disguising itself treacherously in your own identity, a double agent — it is debilitating and sickening. It foreshadows no joy — and takes charge, and you might just as well hang your head and drop your eyes and give right in. You might just as well surrender at the start and steal that money, strike that match, (masturbate), eat that whole quart of ice cream, grovel, dial that number, or search that forbidden drawer or closet once again to handle the things you're not supposed to know are there. You might just as well go right off in whatever direction your madness lies and do that unwise, unpleasant, immoral thing you don't want to that you know beforehand will leave you dejected and demoralized afterward. Go along glumly like an exhausted prisoner of war and get the melancholy deed over with. I have spells in spare time when it turns physically impossible for me to remain standing erect one second longer or to sit without slumping. They pass. I used to steal coins from my sister and my mother — I couldn't stop. I didn't even want the money. I think I just wanted to take something from them. I was mesmerized. I was haunted. I wanted to scream for help. I had only to consider for an instant the possibility of taking a penny or a nickel again from a satin purse in a pocketbook belonging to my mother or sister and it was all over: I would have to do it. I was possessed by the need to do it. I would plod home through snow a mile if necessary in order to get it then. I had to have it then. I took dimes and quarters too. I didn't enjoy it, before or afterward. I felt lousy. I didn't even enjoy the things I bought or did. I gambled much of it away on pinball machines at the corner candy store (and felt a bit easier in my mind after it was lost). I didn't feel good about a single part of it, except getting it over with — it was an ordeal — and recovering. After a while the seizures ended and I stopped. (The same thing happened with masturbation, and I gave that up also after fifteen or twenty years.)