Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  The peculiar stagnation of the air beneath the bed, the dim dustiness, the faint sweatiness of the game were acceptable, the whole thing was something that wasn’t a hole in life (as sitting still at a dinner table might be, or playing checkers often was) but it was just barely not a totally useless game; and then a very brief, faint sensation I’d never had before happened to me, and I was, after a brief passage of time, a half second or so of that childish gaping at something strange, considerably interested. It had been fairly faint; and it was as if maybe if I could find enough of it, I might be addicted to it someday—as I was to bicycle riding.

  I did not have any idea what had caused the sensation, and I continued to do what Randolph and I had been doing, but I was much more inwardly alert, and the sensation recurred, faintly the second time. It more or less struck me (as logical) that this feeling was maybe a simple concomitant of exercise, of building up your muscles, and it was why older boys could exercise for so long and with such concentration and so without complaint; and also maybe this was why muscular boys had that look of comfort about them, of having been comforted. But when I climbed along the underside of the bed more energetically, when I exercised harder, so to speak, so that Randolph bounced on my stomach and drove the breath out of me, the sensation did not come back until, tired by that effort, I lowered my behind to the floor and caught my breath, and shifted my abdomen to support Randolph’s weight, and Randolph, cooperatively, gathered himself to balance more adroitly along the central axis of my body. As he stirred and reangled his arms around my neck, in that comparative stillness, the sensation returned. So it could not be part of exercise.

  At the time it seemed perfectly sensible and like the rest of life that such an interesting sensation should be mysterious and not straightforwardly available. And it was O.K. that I should set out on the hunt for the sensation. All that was typical, not strange at all. It was an almost triangular sensation, mostly blue and white, and very small but sort of hot, almost like a flame, and around it the mind darkened. That is, the sensation appeared, blue-and-white, triangular, sail-like, pennon-like (like a pennon on its end), and very interesting and seemingly worthwhile in the darkness. Part of the good thing about the sensation was the heaviness and soft drama and novel sweetness of that darkness, which was just there, so to speak, but which was maybe part of what happened, and a large part of what was felt. The little triangle was more like a guess that an inward eye made about the shape of something that had no shape. Which had only duration and amazement. An amazement of the nerves, of the body, of the semiastonished mind, this surprising part of playing Tarzan.

  If I lay still, it did not come back, although it would seem to be there but would not quite form, like a ghost refusing to materialize. If I moved very, very slowly the sensation would form but sometimes so dimly that it made me irritable. If I threw myself around violently from side to side, the sensation appeared, but it was crowded, crowded in among other sensations, those of bumping around and of breathlessness, and was not so satisfactory. I did not know Randolph was necessary, or suspect it. In a way the hunt was a curtain between him and me, but in a way it joined us since as the moments passed there began to be a glory in the game and in the now greatly warmed up, sweaty anguish of the plot of the child’s version of Tarzan that we were playing, that I was still to some extent playing, thinking that the game held the pleasure as a cup did tea. The actions of Tarzan and of the African chief that he carried on his stomach gave birth to the glory; it sprang from the adhesion, more and more exaggerated, satisfying, and continuous, of our chests and bellies. We were sewn together by the game, although we played it in different ways, and experienced it in widely differing ways, and by an increasing impatience in me, an abrupt liking for playing with him. And an increasing, odd, and oddly agreeable languor in him: he grew sleepy, quieter, heavy, floppy. Passive.

  I climbed up and down the underside of the bed.

  The more of those sensations I had, the more likable Randolph seemed. But those sensations were likable, too, except that they were so unnamed and so elusive that my liking them was like my being drawn to a boy whose house was miles away from mine and who I could not see much of or count on seeing at all: I partly held back; I felt a sort of trickery-ridden calm interest in what I was doing in order that I would not feel the wounded, the victimized, bitter liking and shy, half-determined, half-careless obsession that sometimes drove friends away. And that sometimes attached them to you with hoops of steel, with sudden passionate connivance. When the sensation did appear, I couldn’t always remember what I had just done. And even when I did remember and repeated a movement, the sensation did not always recur. I was really struck, in a half-minded way—I seemed to have only half a mind—by the discovery that if a sensation came soon after another one, it was doubled or even quadrupled in interest to me. Sometimes then the sensation was startling, it was so strong, and it made me shiver and set up what seemed like a clatter in me.

  It was unbearably strange … but it was bearable. It was as excruciating as if one had found a new woods and was exploring them and might be killed or be run off by a frightening man with a shotgun or might find who knew what. One moved in places—it seemed like places—shadowy, then sunlit, where one had never been before. There had been nothing so new in my life since I’d learned to read. It was a little like making one’s way in the dark to spy on a lit-up large house, a mansion, to see what very rich people did. Or like landing on an island. It was like being in a strange place, too, in that all your physical stances were strange and you couldn’t move in a familiar way; you didn’t know if eyes spied on you, or what the footing was like, or what the odds were on stumbling; your balance, your crouch were necessarily unlike what they were at any other time; or it was like building a treehouse: you perched on a branch, gripped it with your legs, gripped another with one hand, and hammered without getting a full swing with your remaining hand. It was like that.

  The strangeness was very great, but almost everything in life then was strange to me, and strangeness was more or less a familiar thing, and that was why I was so calm in a way, and why I acted as I did and went ahead.

  I began to sweat in a peculiar way, or rather the sweat on me and on Randolph seemed strangely heavy and oily; it seemed to register with a really unlikely sensitivity the pressure and direction of Randolph’s torso when it was sliding on mine. Or when his elbows dug into me: it was very strange and echoing.

  After a while my ignorant attention was fixed so firmly on what was going on inside me that the outside world became nearly dark. I kept track of my arms and legs and I moved sensibly enough in the now silent mimicry and oddly tempoed game; but Randolph was no longer real to me; my own movements in the game were not entirely real—part of each movement splintered into a kind of shattered edge of brief trembling or twisting (like a thin piece of wood warping and then being struck, and vibrating, and then breaking into thin slivers), into movement unreal to me, indecipherable, that I could not keep track of, and that I ignored. What was real was this search by some feeling self in me for something increasingly required but unknown and increasingly anguishing but increasingly, almost infinitely desirable. In one sense, I fainted to the world, as a Christian does in an access of faith. My consciousness moved in catacombs, in tunnels.

  I did not in any way caress Randolph—it did not even occur to me. I did not associate the sensation with any part of my body. It was simply a sensation in me. My mind moved in tunnels that were dark and sometimes cool and sometimes hot, and that would, as I continued to move my body, suddenly open into large, airy chambers that would lose their air abruptly and resound with sensations: chapels almost, they were such special places, places of such special feeling. Sometimes they were filled with a spattering of gleams accompanied by a thunder or succeeded by an aftereffect having a throbbing or pulsing quality as of echoes and of reechoes, on and on. Sometimes there was only a whisper, or such a minor pulse of feeling that the sensation was th
e merest imaginable dot of something found in a place which seemed to have as its chief distinction that it was a place where one was lost, and disappointed, but even the faintest sensation seemed to leave a trace, a thin bit of something, a residue that had weight in a strange way; and a number of these whisperings would pile up until their weight seemed immense: there would be a sudden rush, a long, heavy, peculiarly white-veined spill of something, of feeling, very strange and infinitely welcome. Even as I realized while it was happening that it was a desirable sensation, it would already be passing; and inwardly and outwardly—inwardly and outwardly childish—I would tighten myself, like a fist, make myself into a fist, a knot of will and muscle to hold it; but it was not of the order of things that could be held; it was not breath or willpower. It was strange how ignorant the body could be. The sensation was in its essence independent of me and yet it was mine; it was maddening in its paradox but O.K. in spite of being maddening. It was like a mother-feeling, it aroused feelings as one’s mother did, similar feelings. And yet not quite. It was almost a matter of tears when one of the heavy throbs occurred and faded away, and it was almost a matter of tears when after I’d failed to find the sensation for several seconds it returned.

  Sometimes the sensation seemed cruel and clumsy, like some event in a comic movie where what was funny was absentmindedness, stupidity, and constantly defeated haste.

  I could not for a long time get a sensation to appear with any regularity right after another sensation. When I did succeed at last, the successive sensations would develop attributes, as of wind (perhaps my expelled breath), of sound, of coolness and heat both, of tactility as if I moved on a slide in a children’s park, a slide made of fur, of close-grained feathers, of silk; and there were attributes of light, silver light mostly, often like a flash of silver foil, or like a series of interrupted flashes beaming at me a mystic or lunatic code, a message I could not read but enjoyed immensely although in no way that I had ever known enjoyment to form itself before. Enjoyment had never been so mixed with pain, so sad, so physical before. Or rather it had, in games of teasing and in other things, but never like this. My body had not been like this before.

  Sleepily, Randolph complained; he stirred; he said he wanted to change the game. It was inconceivable, his complaining. At first, it seemed imaginary, part of the game, his drowsy whining that made me stiffen, with loss, with irritation, with the irritation of authority quibbled with; it made me lose and then sometimes more strongly regain the sensation. But I was wrong: it wasn’t part of the Tarzan game. He said, “Nothing is happening. You’re not talking to me. You’re not paying attention to me—you’re supposed to play with me.”

  He really was not necessary to the hunt except in a peculiar way.

  I did talk to him. My lips were a little thick and hard to move, but I could talk, and outside of a disinclination to speak I saw no reason not to speak. I told him Tarzan and the chief were having a fight to the death. I could not talk and climb; but when I slowed down, Randolph started to climb off. I dropped my legs to the floor and lowered the upper part of us more gently. Mimicking a death fight, I rolled over and over with him to the middle of the floor of his room. I was gloved in sweat; my consciousness was lined with soft grayness, like moleskin. I told him, “I can’t release you—you’d kill me if I let you go.”

  He said, “I don’t want to be the chief.”

  “O.K. You’re Tarzan. I’m the chief. I can’t let you go. If I do, you’ll kill me.” I tightened my legs around Randolph in a scissors lock. “Try to escape,” I told him; he tried; I told him to try harder, to try to wiggle loose mostly in the center. He complained I was holding him too tightly. “Well, then try harder to escape,” I said, innocent of what I was doing and yet not innocent in the sense that I knew I was playing a different game from the one he was playing and that I was using him, sort of; but then he was using me—but he also tried to do what I told him. The sensation seemed to use the inside of the usual senses so that with my eyes closed I saw a light that would not have been visible to my real eyes, and my ears heard a noise that did not come from the outside. I had no idea that this pursuit of a sensation might come to an end other than that Randolph and I would grow tired and I would go home. I knew that when I released Randolph—as I did twice—I felt suddenly bored and hurt and almost nervous; so I seized him between my legs again; and he struggled. It upset me that when the sensation decomposed it left behind no hint how it was to be reconstituted. I had to learn everything. “Try harder,” I said suddenly, with disgust, to Randolph; things had become so tangled in me that it was unendurable; and at the same time, it was more interesting than it ever had been; but it was oppressive. I squeezed Randolph with my legs so that he really did struggle, he wiggled very hard. Suddenly I was entirely interested: I stared but not with my real eyes; I listened; behind a curtain a world began to roll across the wooden floor. Five closely attached ascending sensations disconnected me; the curtains flew apart: I was on the edge of a vast black emptiness; the round thing rolled out, flashing thunder and lightning, but not so noisily as before, not so glaringly, almost nicely. But I was frightened. But the fright was not so bad. And I went over a—a thing, tumbled over the round globe, and off into the darkness, scattering warm, strangely liquescent sparks, uncolored but scorching; something scorched me; I felt something like a wire whip through me; it was drawn through me and then from me, eviscerating me; I was thrown into grief, into astonishment, into a strange nothingness, a blankness of feeling unlike anything I’d ever known. In the posture of a dead man listening to the floor, I rolled over. There was another, fainter brief whistling in me, a feeling of softened light rising and filling something, like a thunderhead, and then a hand, a hand broke through the ceiling of the room, took hold of me, and shook me, and squeezed me, so that I thought I would die. I could not breathe or keep from exuding breath and, I didn’t know what, whatever was in me. It squeezed me until I was dead, and then I was boneless and limp, and without comprehension. I curled up on my side, my hand beneath my cheek, the side of my finger to my lips, while Randolph, as Tarzan, pretended to be choking me. I hardly noticed what he was doing. I was terrified and thought I had broken something in me—I was waiting to see if like my father I would have a heart attack, and die or come close to dying. The terror was there and yet I did not feel it. I did not feel anything. There were veils of anesthesia. There was a small spot on my underpants. I saw it, it was about the size of a dime, I did not know what it was, I thought I’d think about it later. I could not easily think. When my mind did begin to stir at all—Randolph was saying I was dead, he had won, what should Tarzan do next?—Ah, ah, I thought first in a strange dull way: What was that? It was without a name. I did not even make a guess at what it was. I thought, I wonder what it was. The world, my time on it, seemed different; I felt that in a moment I could place the difference. I lay on the floor curled up and Randolph sat on my shoulder, a child I hardly knew and who liked me and who had access to me whether I liked him or not. After a while, with a certain amount of sturdy self-evaluation, I decided I’d liked it whatever it was, and I wasn’t dead. I said to Randolph, “I like to play Tarzan—we’ll have to play Tarzan again.”

  After I left him, on my way home, to my parents, to that house, I found I was not as sad and as frightened as I usually was going home (I never knew if my father was worse or even dead or how my mother would be acting); and on a suburban street, empty except for me, beneath trees whose leaves lightly clashed in a pale spring breeze, I began to suspect that I had found something very special.

  An unfailing hot mitigation.

  A STORY

  IN AN

  ALMOST

  CLASSICAL

  MODE

  MY PROTAGONISTS are my mother’s voice and the mind I had when I was thirteen.

  I was supposed to have a good mind—that supposition was a somewhat mysterious and even unlikely thing. I was physically tough, and active, troublesome to others, in mis
chief or near delinquency at times and conceit and one thing and another (often I was no trouble at all, however); and I composed no symphonies, did not write poetry or perform feats of mathematical wizardry. No one in particular trusted my memory since each person remembered differently, or not at all, events I remembered in a way that even in its listing of facts, of actions, was an interpretation; someone would say, “That’s impossible—it couldn’t have happened like that—I don’t do those things—you must be wrong.”

  But I did well in school and seemed to be peculiarly able to learn what the teacher said—I never mastered a subject, though—and there was the idiotic testimony of those peculiar witnesses, IQ tests: those scores invented me.

  Those scores were a decisive piece of destiny in that they affected the way people treated you and regarded you; they determined your authority; and if you spoke oddly, they argued in favor of your sanity. But it was as easy to say and there was much evidence that I was stupid, in every way or in some ways or, as my mother said in exasperation, “in the ways that count.”

  I am only equivocally Harold Brodkey. I was adopted when I was two in the month following my real mother’s death, and Harold was a name casually chosen by Joseph Brodkey because it sounded like Aaron, the name I’d had with my real mother. I was told in various ways over a number of years, and I suppose it’s true, that my real father blamed me because I became ill at my mother’s death and cried and didn’t trust him: I had been my mother’s favorite; he kept my brother, who was older than me, and more or less sold me to the Brodkeys for three hundred and fifty dollars and the promise of a job in another town. I saw my brother once a year, and he told me I was lucky to be adopted. I never told him or anyone else what went on at the Brodkeys’.