The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Jass holds his arms out in the attitude of the crucifixion. He says, “Do you dislike Jesus?”

  I start to count out loud, “Wuhin, tooo(eee), three-uh, foerrrr, fi-i-i(ve)—”

  “Whu-it ehr-are yuh-oo dooooinbn Wo/ih/hileeee?” Wiley, my name. It is odd, what actual voices, unidealized, are like in the real air of a real day.

  “I’m counting—if I count to seventeen, I get to see God.”

  “No shit? Honest to-ooo Gohw-idd—aw-er yew gointa see Gawh-dddd(uh) now?”

  “It’s not a swindle, asshole. I’m not asking you for anything.”

  Jass believes the world is tricky. “Are you going to see God here—right now—in University City? On Melbourne?” The name of the street.

  “Nahuhhhhhhh. I won’t see God if you’re here. Wait: now, there He is …”

  “You masturbate too much,” Jass says, and hits me on the arm, the side of the shoulder, hard. This is a very quiet neighborhood. The intersection is silent, is empty. He looks at me from a distance. “Admit it,” he says.

  He is notorious for talking dirty in the locker room and for doing dirty things and getting everyone else to do them. I shake my head.

  He says abruptly, addressing my (comparative) purity: “You—and Winston Churchill …” Noble and unnecessarily ambitiously disciplined.

  Then he jumps me and we are wrestling. He is further into exerting himself to win than I expected—the strained, wrestlingly moving, tensed-and-taut physical weight and will are a shock, are dismaying—he is right on me, right on top, like an animal, his braced haunches and physical mass, the fleshiness, wriggling tautly with wild, would-be-victorious purpose.

  I hammer him in the face, saying, “Don’t you ever think about ideals?”

  He is forcing my arms down. He looms over me. He demands with a surprising amount of breath and only a little breathlessness, “What are you thinking about now? Are you looking for God?”

  I frighteningly turn and twist. We’re leery of the ways we each think the other is a nut. We’re as if dressed in spikes to keep feelings off us. They leap bodilessly on us all the time anyway, feelings that seem like cat-family moods, dog moods, horse moods.

  “I have Christian ideals,” he says, still breathless, sitting on me, suffocating me.

  I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

  I find fighting with someone shocking, dispurifying: it dirties the very air, the very envelope of the world. I half expect birds to fall from the sky, poisoned.

  “Shit, get off me,” I said, close to madness. He and I both know I am dangerous despite all my precautions.

  He had me pinioned. He watched me in a peculiar way—with a haughtiness-of-a-sort. “It’s all bullshit,” he says. And he gets up.

  I see as if down a hallway and through a partway-open door; I see something-or-other in him and me: some of what I see becomes words, although not entirely or clearly. We used to wonder if we would find it easy to kill, to lead others, to be commanders. He said that that was bullshit but he asked, too, if it was bullshit, but he wasn’t asking me.

  He was willing to accept the distance between souls. I don’t think he knew yet if such isolation as he felt was incurable. He’s asking for company—companionship—something. But he doesn’t trust me, and he wants to be the winner. Having released me, he stands, and I see the sunlight on his forehead and nose, a subtle armor protecting him from nothing.

  “Maybe it is all bullshit, cocksucker” I say.

  I admired Jass. I was pretty sure he would be admired anywhere in the world he went—admired and pitied … the beautiful sand-colored one.

  I drew on my studies and I said, in order to be nice—a degree of clement attention: “If I combine original and primary … I get originar?. Do you know, does the originary real world matter?”

  He shrugged. No one at school ever gave away what he or she really felt (truly thought) to anyone, not really. Or the details of what he or she knew. Jass maybe wanted to play at serious talk or intelligent talk (the latter was the term used by somewhat better-bred kids).

  The sport, the actual dimensions of the game here, has to do with power, real power in real sunlight. He wants to know which levers control fear and death and being amused in the world. He wanted to be like me but not completely like me, not a Jew—not haunted. This is a moment of my education that mattered, this knowing myself head-on from him and also from inside me, two ways at the same time, glaringly and with a blur so that I squinted.

  His actual face in sunlight—and then the air and light at yet another intersection, at the high point of this enclave of houses, yet another perspectival drooping and curving crucifix lined with well-tended palaces—are part of a moment raw with limited and eccentric friendliness. It wasn’t perfect.

  He said, “Do you believe in Heaven?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?” Silence. He said, “I think Heaven is a great thought.”

  “Are you serious?” It was good to be tactful if someone was serious about some pious matter or other.

  “I’m serious,” he said with his eyelids half shut—that meant he was lying, but not entirely. So did him having his eyes wide, wide open and fixed directly on you, which he did next.

  I asked, “Are you being sarcastic?”

  “You’re the one who’s sarcastic.”

  “You are! You’re being sarcastic!”

  “You’re looking at yourself.”

  “No, I’m not.” I started to laugh exasperatedly. He didn’t really know how to talk about a subject.

  “What’s so funny?” he said.

  “Your Adam’s apple is funny,” I said.

  The present-tense eyes of the Protestant boy have a quality of well-practiced, frigidly hot attentiveness. His is the best attention I know at this point in school. He takes athletic, picayune, little breaths; he listens with no real movements of his eyes. They have a quality of male will—sort of. Focused, his eyes have, when they look at you, a mocking, American love letter thing—upper middle class, suburban Protestant, deadpan and intelligent.

  In the hovering fatedness of any exchange, he says, “Kiss my ass.”

  I say to him, “Boy, what crap you hand out.”

  Did you ever feel betrothed in your youth to the heat of your present-tense reality, to the slippery and sliding focus on trying to talk—something like that? At yet another intersection, I had a sense of falling, of losing mental control, and my eyes blurred in the all-ways-dimensional now, the mind’s and the world’s great sea, the afternoon light. Real eyes are really real. It is impossible to think your way through moments spent with someone else.

  In eight years, Jass will be killed in aerial combat in Korea, because his Sabre jet hadn’t yet been fitted with an afterburner—it was something of a scandal. He had sent me a postcard a month or so before: Dear Smart Guy: Guess what? Now I’m as smart as you …

  What do you feel and think when you lose out in an aerial combat for real, when it is going to kill you—is it chagrin you feel? Do you have a sudden knowledge of yourself?

  Jass breathes with athletic artfulness. His powers of physical improvisation were really considerable. “Shit,” he says. Then: “Shut up.”

  “Sure,” I said, uncertain-eyed, but haughty. I know he likes to hurt people. He likes to play around.

  He says, “The way you talk is stupid. Are you an honest person?” I can’t untangle the mockery, or figure out the seriousness.

  Syllables in their purposes alight—like geese in a dimly lit yard with a masked whisper and rush, caught air, materialized, aerial—what-he-says—what he said never amounted to much. Interplay blows you this way and that. Meanings, obscene, nonsensical. Incomplete. I can’t handle him.

  His rough, mocking gaze drags across my cheeks and eyes. He jumps on me again. We are arguing this way—about beliefs. We are studying affection. This was not particul
arly intelligent. “Let’s have a truce,” I say. The moment, the smells when he throws me down, the smells of dirt and of grass, have a hotly defeated, presence-of-another-will quality of defeat. Warm, rough, dirty …

  He moves off me. And we stand up, and arrange our clothes, and he says: “You’re so fancy. Jews are always so fancy.”

  “Cut it out,” I say.

  “Scissors, scissors,” he says, nonsensically.

  It is all nonsensical. No part of it was ever final enough to make sense.

  WAKING

  When I was a child, at a certain moment, I woke in a different house made of wood. The slow movement of my eyelids, whispering and scraping, in tiny lurchings, tickled me. A sense of the disorder of the wicked vaudeville, the foul inventiveness of pain kept me uneasy, so that I was as if crouched. I have been ill.

  It is almost light. The child is in pain; he lies half in, half out of an abominable breath-bag. The ill child watches in a feverishly illiterate way the slow oozing of the increase in light. Inside the delicacy of the uneducated stare, soft, opened, lightly fluttering, the pallor of consciousness, tampered with by pain, observes, anyway, the shimmer of the advance of the light.

  After a while, cool and flighty, mindless cousinhood to sense breaks out—the first time in weeks, but then after a while it passes into spasms of sweaty apprehension, of waiting for the pain—of madness—in its criminal mysteriousness to return and blind me. This continues and doesn’t worsen: that it doesn’t worsen puts a weird and private jollity on his face. The recognized thump and rattle of a window frame, a dull, tremulous bass, and the rapid soprano twitterings of the glass panes in the mullions make the child twitch; then the noise takes on a weight of the familiar; it is beautiful with monotony; it persists.

  Then pale-gray and yellow and pink fragments of light appear and slowly unbud, until I am embiered by rose after rose of unlikely light in a room filled with morning. The light is palpably warm. It warms and regulates my soul ungeometric with madness. The child gags and stutters in his breathing. My hand, a childish hand, burns and aches; it has a wind inside it, under it; it moves; it unfurls. The child stiffens in uneasy dominion over this phenomenon of his unfamiliar body. See, he has been ill a long while. The hesitations of thin, unstable, brown-papery, rustling minutes are a matter of steep consciousness for him. Mother-shoulders of air hold pinkish and silvery dabs of light aloft—prismatic dust—and the child persists in his truancy from grief. In the blurred flourish of mind in naming this light as light, as if it were the light in the other house, the child unmovingly romps, dizzied with illness, in a marvelous fluster of intellectual will. Consciousness does not dare call the roll of who is living and who is dead, because the disorganized child-life behind the blindly seeing spy holes of my face is so shaky.

  My dead mother was fond of me. Which one of us is lost now? Lila, my adoptive mother, will someday say to me, I used to wonder what was wrong with you; you didn’t die when she did. The penalties are in place whether I die or not. Exhaustion in any act of extended will becomes panic and grief: Many, many times, I’ve thought something was wrong with you, you lived when you shouldn’t. No one thought you would live after she died. When she was alive, she kept you with her every minute; she said, “Why should he be sad? He likes to be with me. I’m strong, I can do two things at once. “ You wouldn’t let anyone touch you but her. No one could see her without seeing you hanging on her like a monkey. You was a pair, let me tell you: anything in you that’s good, it comes from her. If there’s a mind in you, you got it from her. It’s sad she died, but that’s how things are. What can you do about it, I ask you.

  The lion breath of grief stinks. The infant is a co-traveler of the light, mad and swift, glancing and unrooted. Is your life grotesque? Are you a grotesque creature, Aaron?

  Wiley?

  I can’t insist that I am human, that I am licensed. The stale and cruel stench of vomit. I lay stinking and half mad in excrement, in vomit and in tired, perhaps secretly tireless grief and rage … peeking at life but still lost in vileness.

  The room, my room, my shell, my outer identity (I did not name it “room”), it ticked and creaked, hummed and tinkled in the wind.

  In the bed, constrained by taut sheets and tucked blankets and by chairs set around the bed, I wait. The people here have not yet invested in a crib. Somber conceit: the nearly silent sweeps of sight, the slower blotting up, the sending out on expeditions of sight, the brushing past the sides of sight by things, things in their rays, things brush against or flutter or scurry tickingly by the sides of sight, sight is an imaginary finger or nose: palpings, hesitations: a set of physical hypotheses ranging through the room; things press back, insectlike, itchy, ghostly, real. For a while, any shadow is a wall. That it is my bed …

  The woman came to the door of the room, to the edge of the shallows of breath and stink and harsh light and sickness where I am. The confusion of light and the window sounds and wind noises held her and me in the invalid’s observation. The Lost Woman now was shorter and had different eyes. I assumed her prettiness was kindness. I felt the clenching and the whirring of the possibility of the return of madness, because this woman (I thought) had let me suffer and go mad, a single second’s flicker of (mistaken) fact on a tiny fulcrum of a lunatic child’s absurdly clear reasoning. The child was not careful. He said inwardly, Momma. The small boy was rigid and racked with the pulse of diarrhea then.

  Lila Silenowicz said, “Oh, my God, you’re worse than a pigeon.” She made a joke for her own amusement.

  The woman does not look at the child closely. Around her is a space, a blankness, of coolness, the border where the too difficult heat of shape and identity in someone stops and outline takes over.

  Lila has an air of submission to tragedy—this has a domestic tone, scary and alert. I am not exactly visible. I am a sick child. Lila’s tragic and clear-eyed air has a blustery, softish heat, and an immeasurable quality—an absence of boundaries except for her outline—this is part of what identifies her to me as my mother.

  My body’s feelings of recall, my body’s interpretations of people are shudderings that seem like magical nonsense to the mind, but they have a profound quality of unarguable sense. Her presence is heavy with heat like real sunlight; my mind manages my body’s uproar by narrowing itself—it is the mind squinting.

  Lila sniffed at the shit-odor, pursed her lips, and, holding her breath, came near and looked at me from the other side of the chairs—over the wall of chairs—a sultry and yet airy scrutiny, flirtatious, self-conscious, proddingly clever.… She is sadder than anyone else who tends me. She leans forward, one hand on a chair arm, and she pulls the sheet that’s over me away from me and takes a towel, one of several, set out on one of the chairs around the bed, “I’m not good at this,” she says.

  That remark silences me with its absolute strangeness. She earlier (the other woman) and other women—my nurse now (a fat woman), and Lila’s twelve-year-old daughter—were (are) proud: they boast and dance-in-a-way (when they hold me, when they touch me). Lila’s apology startles the child with its illegality: it is illicit and part of her heartless awareness. I might be incurable. There had been no limit to her absence and none to my dying—well, some suspicion had slowed the process of my dying. Being placed openly first by someone, being close to someone in certain ways, and being lawless when you are alone with someone—these are roughly equivalent for the child as life-giving.

  The child: there are no words for how blackly thorny he is.

  Lila has a quality of being indomitably obscene, guilty, blameworthy, unrepentant. She stares at you and does what she likes.

  I could not successfully blackmail either of my mothers. Neither was merciful. All that worked with either of them was me being secretive.

  Lila, cleaning up some of the mess with the towel, watches her own clumsiness. I play to myself in the balcony is a remark of hers. She is nosy and yet, this morning, she is dream-stained, quilted or padde
d or tufted with night heats. Her odor, her dark eyes, the rhythms and manner of movements of her hands gave the child the un-Euclidean turmoil of doubt. Nothing matches from before. She ostentatiously holds her breath, she disgustedly mops at the bed, she throws the towel into an open hamper—its lid is off; it is a woven, basketlike thing—and she takes another towel from the chair seat and wraps me in it. She plays her eyes on me, self-reflexively; she is contemplating the dangers before she lifts me: “Don’t throw up now,” she says.

  Her eyelids blink rapidly. This softens her stare, makes her very pretty—greatly pretty. Lila says, getting ready—she is very hesitant—“I can’t let it simmer on my back burners all day. I’m the last of the red-hot mommas. My motto is ‘strike while the iron is hot and get things done.’ I’m the executive type.” She moistens her lips, squints blindly, pushes her hair behind her ears. She stands flat-footed. She sets her breasts with her left hand. Her breasts have a powdery largeness. A constant nervousness is worsened if she has to touch someone. She bends near; her shadow is an imported dusk; her arms are around me; she lifts me, the giant woman, owl-fluffy Momma and her large, owl-soft breasts. And then, over that, the nearness to her is a moonish glare that tugs tidally at my breath and at my mind.