The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  I don’t know how bad any of this makes me feel. I have a brain tumor. I have sliding films of headache and sporadic interferences with vision. I suppose I have despised my bosses for a long time now, thought them amateur and self-loving, hardly honest in relation to the work of running a large company. I suppose I have despised—and forgiven—my ex-wife for as long. I don’t think I have been disloyal to any of them, not very much, not very often. But I’m not on the whole a careful man, and I become frantic inwardly—it is a moral uproar—when I am, I suppose, conceitedly convinced that I can see the wastage, the extent of the bad decisions, the crude wrecking of lives and possibilities in others—which they are egoistically, obstinately set on causing … that corporate and suburban selfishness.

  I am said to be lucky, but the work I do—product design, but at the point where such design is redone to become industrially and commercially practicable—and its quality, the things I’m after, are insulting to some people.… Or perhaps it’s just competition. I have been aware of this, told about this since college. And in college. And long before that, in grade school. I have been able to adjust and to protect myself to some extent until now, but last year I began to slip. The tumor. Destiny melting my mind, maybe. Probably.

  Anyway, I am being treated shabbily, filthily by former allies and colleagues. They sweat and tremble, but they say, “We want you to leave.… We don’t think this last idea of yours is any good.” Then they take it back and say, “It’s good, but you’ll have to work with Martin.…” I have never worked with Martin Jones: he’s an ambitious little madman, a cheap thief—of ideas, of office supplies, of money, when he can manage it. He’s the keeper of the little escort book—he’s the upper-echelon pimp. With the bribes he offers and the inside information he gets and his tirelessness and the pity he purposefully arouses—he is always either ill or suffering a domestic tragedy—he is irresistible on a certain level. He is pudgy and pretentious, clever and whiny, repulsive, even loathsome. But he makes even that work in his favor. He himself boasts that he is tirelessly rotten—violent.… That’s his way of saying: Fear me. Everyone in the office does fear him except for the two operating officers at the top. Martin became obsessed with me just before the collapse of profits. He is determined to gain control of my working life—this is the man I have to deal with now. Surely they know this is forcing me out. Does everyone eat shit who earns a salary? Does everyone who eats shit insist that everyone else eat more shit?

  Little Phil Moore, the short one, the coked-up one, at one time a friend—I brought him to these woods—he is working with Martin, the horror Pimp, co-opted or willingly. He came to my office and said, “You worked us over.… You’re putting us through hoops.… You don’t like us: you want to leave.” Claiming innocence for him and Martin. He’s just doing his job. And he’s working out his ego in putting the squeeze on me. Well, he’s partly right. I want to leave. But I didn’t initiate my leaving. They have to give me severance.

  They are half afraid of me—of the stink I might cause. I am half enraged. Tired. But they are not afraid enough of me, and the negotiation over severance pay has been difficult verging on nightmare. Martin, the horror Pimp, has no fear of lying; he lies to any extent. He farts and talks stupidly and calls me at four in the morning to say he has a discarded memo of mine speaking of my resignation. He speaks in a false voice. He uses being disgusting—and silly—to drive someone like me out of a fight. I lose my will to fight Mr. Protozoan Slime. It is not like tussling with Achilles; there is no honor anywhere in the moments of such a struggle. And he is proud of himself.

  He has asked me to give in because we are both Presbyterian. He’s said, “We stick together, don’t we, we white men?” The issue is whether I’ll take less money and vamoose and let him win. Or try to work with him in the time I have left. Or I can sell these woods and hire a severance negotiator. But I don’t want to sell these woods, these moments of light. Ah, Christ.

  I actually feel a little rested, refreshed, prepared physically for the day, for anything that happens, for everything that is existent, including death. I feel I understand the violence of the world. Egos are involved … what a dread phrase … in the procedures of unreason. I’ve lived a long time in relation to the weird unreason of others. But this moment is colored by the softness of the morning air, wilderness air, and mountain light, and the odor of trees and rock. I have the energy to be serious or unserious … savagely indignant or mordant…. The energy, the clearheadedness … In the office, as in any sport, I have to be like them, the opponents, in order to do battle or to deal with them, in order to come up with useful tactics and the requisite language noises.

  God, office politics. They have eaten up my life. My chief strength in the world (such as it has been until now) is to be snotty and airy toward ugliness, is to skate right by it. It is treacherous toward democracy for me to be snotty and airy about it in relation to my colleagues, although it is patriotic to find America beautiful after all, or before all. Treacherous to my colleagues, whom I despise. I don’t give a fuck about anything they give a fuck about. Except perhaps money.

  I am between marriages. I suppose I should think about my two children. I come to the woods in order not to think about them. I don’t know how much of my death I want to share with my children. I don’t like to hide things from them. But I do cold-bloodedly think of and warm-bloodedly feel the massive, tantrum-y selfishness my ex-wife has encouraged in them. Actually, she told me she would do that if I did not return to her. What do I care about them? You know how selfish I am, Hank, she said. Do you suppose she would want me now, on the skids and tumorous? I don’t want to die with her. I can teach charitably or I can charitably empty bedpans for the short rest of my life, if I get enough money from the firm. The life I have left will be better if I accept the need to be sly steadily, with daily regularity: Dearest, tell me, do I look blankly friendly? Can you tell me if I give off a hint of menacing slyness? Do I appear to be a good citizen? My life would go better, but I would sicken and die even faster than I am sickening and dying now, and doesn’t dying free you from the need to accept the world any longer?

  I went to a country wedding once—a Methodist minister’s son married a pretty girl in an agonizingly pretentious stone chapel upstate. Built on the shore of a lake in a grove of birches, the chapel was pretty in a horrendously striving, American way—self-consciously Christian, trying for tradition. It had some architectural quality but not a quality of spiritual exercise and no aura from generations of belief. It was not pure with the hope of God, like the wooden churches visible across the lake from it. The morning had been rainy. The rain stopped just as we settled ourselves in church; the sun came out; the turn-of-the-century stained-glass windows began to glow effulgently in a kind of harsh American glory of light.

  The first bridesmaid down the aisle had a two-year-old child who would not leave her or let her march without him, and so the woman marched carrying a bouquet in one hand with a child balanced on her hip and held by her other hand—a different bouquet. She marched with a curiously mild, unassertive, consciously lovely, almost sated-but-frantic air down the aisle in the overwhelming light.

  Is it a fate to have been happy?

  Here is another definition of a life I have not lived. At a night club upstate that wedding weekend, an oldish and overweight, gray-haired woman with an obvious paunch and a white violin and a back-up band sang and fiddled a song that she had written. She sang and chanted that she could get everyone to dance: “I’ll make you wild.…” She sang and chanted it. She had set her amplifiers at some high register and everything she did was loudly amplified, a bit thunderous and a bit shrill with electronic treble, electronic tremble. She was loud, hypnotic, gifted, and her insistence was inspired in its way, that she could make us wild.… Dionysiac. And people did begin to dance. The woman became more and more suggestive, dirty, and commanding, in a somehow Scotch-Irish way that was gypsylike and irresistible. It was also part of the
American backwoods, the camp meetings, the harvest festivals.

  Everyone in the audience, in the crowd, who was not crippled or arthritic—the drunken midlifers and the eighty-year-olds and the stoned younger ones, countryside working class—danced stiffly wildly. We were whitely and self-consciously orgiastic. In a somewhat consciously traditional way and as rebels as well. The sexual self-revelations, such as they were, suited the room and the lake. And explained the privacy of clubs and summer places. Explained my parents’ summertime snobbery, explained night clubs and lakeside resorts in a new and somewhat comic way, a touching way, with a sense of kinship. All the things I have not lived were present. I never was Dionysian.

  Bad news, broken heart, absurd tension. Still, the light among the trees and the fragments of sky, pale, glowing blue like the nylon over my head with the light in it, say it will be a pretty day. Je m’en foutisme—I-don’t-give-a-damn-ism: is that the note I whistle? From the time I was old enough and strong enough to have my own way at least partly, even as a boy, I have insisted on living part of each day, a moment or two, without suffering. And without cold willfulness. A civilized moment or two of freedom and of emotion.

  I bought this land last year, five acres; four are wooded and steep and set among gray, lichenous rocks and closed in by a forty-foot rock face and a lower, sloping meadow—small, less than an acre, and ringed with hemlocks—and in the woods between the meadow and these rocks a small, green, wooden, three-room house with three porches and a steep, wood-shingled roof and summer-camp shutters.

  I would like to do a tree census—find out how many trees I own, how many branches, how many twigs and leaves. And bugs. A quarter of a million leaves. A million leaves … I am a millionaire of rustling leaves … of grass blades. Of molecules of air … I own the air I breathe at this minute. Cubic yards of air, invisible stones of a luminous temple.

  What are the statistics? Seventy-five maples, eighty beeches, seventeen oaks, seven junior oaks, seven hemlocks including one, uh, picturesque giant. And so on. But I am inventing that. Sitting now on a log, drinking coffee, having a death-time cigarette, sitting on my red-and-blue air mattress, I look around at the uneven ground and nearby cliff, the trees that grew against the rock and that are fastened to the rock, leafy pilasters. The scattered and decaying leaves on the ground. The trees I own are not quite singular for me; they are trees, a generalized mass: my trees. Do you suppose God is this way about souls? I haven’t named any of my trees. In the morning light, I look around—the leaner, the life-is-a-beech, the straight-up maple near the boundary line to the east, the birch society, a crooked copse.… Those aren’t names of long-term affection. The feelings I have toward them are half-baked, inchoate, are unlike any feeling I have had toward animals or people or things … the patient, fluttering trees … A wind is springing up, stirs my semi-named, half-nameless trees.… A blur of vegetation, branches thickened to the eye by their motion, the cinder roses of shadow move on the ground.… The terms come from a Spanish poem: the smear of vegetation … cinder roses.… Thought stops. The great invisible chain links of mountain wind lash at my woods. I listen with abrupt, incredible simplicity to the sound of that wind, the forceful and shifting exercise of the morning wind. All around me spread shivering whorls of tethered shadows, an infinity of motions of a million twigs. The world is active and stirs eccentrically and rustlingly, stirs differently in the blond, sunlit upper air and in the more constrained greenish lower air. Nature has said, I will make the tethered trees wild.

  Dionysiac release? I suppose so. A rehearsal for the release of seeds. An invisible embrace. The motion of the mountainside.

  Clouds, too, are a smear, they move so rapidly in the wind. Capitalism has a spiritual side—a pagan spiritual side and a Christian one, one of self-examination and of values, of truths beyond truths. And it has a civilly spiritual side: a keep-your-house-pretty side, a wear-the-right-clothes side. The responsibility for the condition of the immediate world is clearly placed, whether the community uses its knowledge of such identifiable responsibility with intelligence or not. These trees will outlive me unless I become thoroughly a capitalist or a destructive dying man, rampantly assertive, and have them lumbered.

  I control the fate of the trees rustling in a morning wind, in the shudder of the air. The cinder roses of the skidding and fluttering and whirling shadows are sometimes like the splashed gray letters of a restless alphabet slipping over rocks and dead branches on the ground, over wild grass in the meadow, grass stained reddish here and there by reddish seed heads, with yellow and white wildflowers visible among the grasses. A dry stream, over moss, sedum, tansy, goutweed, bluets, wild mustard, and wild phlox, rockets in openings among the trees. Shadows and leaves in their vegetable and aerial life move over me in a profound sweetening of the moment.

  My life is a mess; yet I am fairly happy. Perhaps unfairly. I can’t say I understand happiness. In my case it always has an uncaring, what-the-hell element and is a form of dizzied satisfaction that is unfeeling at its center, freed from feeling, almost a cry of enough. The sense of completion is like a satisfaction with its spine of shameful triumph … of peace and escape. It is shallow of me and in my blood—an old traditional thing—and it is the deepest and most savage emotion I ever have, it is the deepest part of me, to be happy. It is based on my ignoring an important number of things, but I have a rebellious nature of this sort. In a pagan sense it is a serious business to be happy.

  This is absurd, this sequence of thoughts. How far would I go morally, toward death, how far did I go, to own my so far unnamed, not deeply known trees? If I want money now, I have to think harder about how to negotiate, how to handle cleverly the situations that will establish the amount of money I will have while I die. I have to figure out how to put the fear of God into the pimp-Jones and the rat-Moore.

  I will probably do what is necessary—what part of my soul do I want to save at this point? What do I care about? When I was a child, no one told me what life was actually like.… I wish I had been told. Now I am waiting while the wind mumbles and stammers, twitches, as if it were alive and standing still, an immense, transparent ruminant-acrobat, a glass creature resting from its stampede of a moment ago. I wait for it to return, the large, invisible, active, somersaulting mountain wind among the trees in my wood. The brief, embracing wind.

  Death? Ugliness? Who gives a goddamn fuck? Who gives a good goddamn fuck? Here it comes, the first transparent steps—and leaps—of the wind among the trees.

  RELIGION

  In the end I guess at him. I use a-sense-of-things. In a kind of clouded gray space inside my head, I guess at him. I probably can’t do this, guess at him and be right.

  We are silent, one day, Jass and I, after doing dares—daring each other to shinny up the pipe-frame of the row of swings in Jackson Park, riding the swing up and over the bar. Then I stood on the ground and held Jass on my shoulders while he threw the swings back over the bars. He was agreeable to us covering our tracks.

  We lay sprawled on the itchy grass in that park. It seems too intense to mention the odors of the ground, of the season. Such sensory reality was part of being that age, being boys. Jass’s unreliable comradeship, today’s fate of the world, the fate of the world so far, and us, him and me, lying on the grass and the odors of the grass are mixed together, unalterably.

  Intense rivalry is infatuation of a kind, a sensitivity to the whole shebang of the other person because you want to win. I never started conversations or said things without being asked. He seems more bold. He as if moves in a field or meadow or big schoolyard of such holding back in me. He asks, “Are you scared to think about being dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. Imagine yourself buried.”

  After a moment: “Naw. I don’t want to.”

  I’m not always aware of color. If I relax, I feel a creeping suffusion of color into the day: blue sky, white clouds, oddly various, changeable greens—as if color itself
were nervous and changeable—and greenish shadows on largely pinkish-white-beige-ocher Jass, the topography of the boy’s face. I like the existence of language, but aural color is different from visual color. It smacks of magic, and real color is just the world.

  I asked Jass, “Are you frightened of being hurt—in the body?”

  I had an adolescent voice: an infatuation and uncertainty toward issues of courage.

  Then I hear him. First, the sound. Then the hidden mathematician-thinker-spy called memory deals with what he says and makes it orderly.

  He said, “I don’t know. I don’t mind it.”

  “You don’t get frightened?”

  “I’m not afraid of being hurt.”

  I recognized that he had a manner of insensitivity and dry boldness, but it was only a manner, and it seemed sensitive and cagey in its way.

  It frightened me back then, that he—and other kids—knew what they thought. I had to think a long time to know what I thought.

  I said, shielding my eyes, “I’m not frightened about dying.”

  I get up. I stand on the sloping and somewhat faintly spinning disklike floor of park grass, tree roots.

  “I have to go home.”

  In a more clearly sequential movement than mine, he got up. He has a tensed, wry, small smile—nice—friendly-for-the-moment. In real life, if someone wants to talk or walk or whatever with you, it can be very moving.

  We walk maybe twenty yards, and then he starts taking giant steps as in Simple Simon. I start to walk with large Boy Scout hiking strides. Then, after a little while, he starts to hop; he hops up a slope in the small park and onto a six-lane boulevard, Delmar. I speed up and push him into the rear of a passing bus, and I hurry on, not worrying if he is hurt or not. I am deep inside my innocence. I hop past stone walls and up a steeply sloping macadam-and-pebble street in front of a stone church in a neighborhood of large houses. Then he passes me. Then we’re running, racing. He’s the faster sprinter. He sprints and slows, sprints and slows. I can outlast him in a mile, but he suddenly sprints far ahead, and I give up and start to walk. He’s ten, fifteen yards ahead of me. He waits for me to draw near him. He’s not breathing hard. I am. We’re near the intersection of two winding, tree-lined, lawn-skirted, large-house-lined suburban streets, a perspectival crucifix, empty of movement. When we cross the street, the scene assumes a faintly wheeling spoked motion. I am partly still out of breath.