The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  “Phew, you stink, pretty baby,” she says.

  Her voice is troubled, vaguely storm-lit, spotted with lurid light: she has an innate melodrama.

  She ferries us past the obstreperous transparency of the windows—mostly a curious shine but still knowable as part of the outer, widening morning.

  “Well, another day, and you’re still sick, don’t you know it? Don’t you always know it?”

  She is sad; she is out of breath; charmingly, conceitedly, she is drudgery-minded. She picks on me: “Hold your head up; don’t let your head do that; straighten it; stop looking like an idiot: I warn you, I’m not good with idiots—once you lose my sympathy, you lose me.… Listen, I’ll tell the world: I’m not a nursemaid; that’s not what I’m good at.” Heavy-fleshed, small-town Lila walks, and I shake with the rhythms of her body. Her movements are interfered with by me—my weight and looseness and indiscipline of posture.

  In the bathroom, she sits me lankly on the sink. My feet are in the white basin; she props me with her shoulder and unwraps the outer towel, shifting me, and slipping it out and throwing it on the floor. And then she unpins the other towel, the one that I slept in, the diaper towel: “What a mess: don’t look innocent; you do it, you’re the mess: you’re worse than a horse. You’re lucky you don’t get thrown out with the diaper. You could learn to handle your bowels: it wouldn’t kill you. I hope you’re listening. Cooperation, they say, is the mark of a leader. Don’t make me wear myself out.” Her fingers are clumsy but neat, shy then bold—she has a glidy, pinchy, nervous touch. It is a touch that seemingly can easily be frightened off, like a fly. My eyes have grown flimsy with nerves—an obscure physical crowdedness of sensation in skin and mind.

  “Are you looking at me? I can’t tell what you’re up to; you’re one of the crazy ones; you’re a crazy little meshuggener, a meshuggener sheikh. Are you getting better? I think you’re improving. My guess is you’re sitting there and you know what I’m saying: tell me if I’m right.”

  She’s bluffing, partly bluffing, mostly bluffing. As she speaks, she stops believing herself, because my eyelids are so unblinkingly dulled—I am masked in lostness in the vividly glaring bathroom light. She has turned on the lights, a bulb overhead, and bulbs alongside the mirror so that reflected everywhere on the white walls are melted foil, blurred gilding, moonish flares. The mirror shines outward, and morning light bulges in at the window. Against my back are her breasts, sleeping, stirring animals, slick lambs vaguely furry with sensations; and, as in a dream, like masses of very pale pigeons or piles of silent whitish leaves.

  Her large, moonish female face, with lines and vistas focused with her curiosity about my illness, about me, has a foreign meaning, like paths in a strange garden. She unpins and strips me down below.

  I am a half-lifeless drowsiness and limp and boneless, but I am an inward mass of tense amazement. Moving my head, my chin into my chest, I cannot understand what I see down below—myself or her hands.

  I am too ignorant, too embarrassed. Sightless with embarrassment, perhaps with rage among unreadable meanings. Although I don’t move, the woman says, “Hold still …” Life and consciousness are hard to bear.

  The terrible preliminary sensations of nakedness, tickling birdlike glitter of the nerves, cut the moment into strange shapes and spaces; Momma’s eyes are as large as a sparrow, the sparrow being at an unreadable distance from me in meaning if not in real inches. Fluttering bird breath. Eyelid-bird-wings. A thin fabric shimmer-noose followed by a tube rises over my face and wraps my head—it is smelly; and light pierces the web that, as it ascends, hauls at my eyelids, blocks my nose, and opens my mouth so that I breathe a forced indraft of air—silvery, silent, shiny, bathroom air.

  Naked. My amazement and dullness are aflame. I am all hurting pleasure and nauseating pain. My no-longer puritan mother, a lawless sensibility, neat-handed and oppressively new, says, “Are you playing tricks? You’re hiding something from me—believe me, boys playing tricks are not news to me.” This one has a dark-and-light face, a fanatic’s fervor: a form of nervousness: she quivers with distinct but distant shamelessness—like a bird. This is especially distant from me, and is as if holy and wrapped in light, in speculative mercy, this thing of sharing a moment of life.… The only meaning one knows lies in the distinctions between mercy and the limitlessness of mad, veering pain. She is electric and unbridled and she is acuity and an impatient will-toward-mercy, a fanatic of uncertain persuasion.

  She is tentatively and then recklessly fearless: she has a fearless prettiness. She is being a disciplined other self—other from her usual self—maternal: of course, a challenge. I do not recognize it, but I can hear the ticking of her waiting for me to recognize her. I have never been seduced before.

  My mind moves into and out of thickets of shadow—the changing complexions of liking and not liking are sickly in the motions of the moment: this woman bristled with prettiness; her thin and mobile wrists, the lacquered fingernails, the shaped lines of eyebrows plucked in a very round curve jabbed like love before there was love: I spied on her; I could not look; at moments I did not even spy. I submitted and was angry and mocking and interested, but perhaps only another child would have known that I was interested. I mean, the dictionary had been torn, and while all the words remained, nothing was attached in the same way to anything else, up and down, Momma or me. Meaning was a sharp and even a tearing issue.

  The child starts to tremble. The sudden life in his ears, and in his mind, as well as the crawling and swarming creature-thing—things, sensations—on his skin (the porcelain beneath his feet, the shift, geometrical, not fractured, of glare in the mirror when he shifts his head), makes him pale and shuddery—he is a tense shuddering and a fixed pallor.…

  “I know you’re sick. See, I’m being careful. I know I’m not real careful: you make me nervous, I admit it: I do things too hard. I pulled your shirt too hard, didn’t I? See, I know what I’m doing—you can trust me. I admire good nursing. You don’t know me, but charity is my middle name. I know some very, very good nurses. They say that with some people you have to treat them like being sick is an honor. I know you’re in the right, but I want you to know I’m not a good nurse first thing in the morning. I just want to know on my own hook, Are you lying to me? Listen, I like your looks—you’re a Baby Sheikh. You’re pretty. If you ask me, it’s a shame what happened to you. I’m all ears—I’m sympathy itself, on a monument.… Tell me, are you snapping out of it or not? I know you’re better. I know you’re a little better.”

  The child didn’t know what she meant; he didn’t know her intentions. He sagged immediately; he meant to hide in his illness.

  “Be a nice child—don’t play tricks on me,” she said. “Are you back in the land of the living? Tell me. Let me know if you are. Are you going to throw up? You look like it. You better give me some warning. I’m not good about people throwing up. Listen, I’m starting a fuss with you: don’t throw up.”

  But she says this in a voice of such intense melody, so supple and enticing, that the child is torn open … He has no formal means for knowing anything about her. His mouth opens wide—it is distorted. No ease controls his reactions. He is as if pushed and yet caught—a small madman in a new galaxy.

  “If you throw up, I will, too—” her voice is large and echoey in the bathroom but it curls down into smallness and music, hooks him and then, as an aftereffect, yanks him. His ears hum—his skull shivers. Little packets of skin on his chest vibrate. Bits of his mind explode daintily—he is close to convulsions.

  She stops. Blank-faced, this mother, here, has some fear: a sense of shame, calculations about scandal, the aroma of female apocalypse. The garish light and suffering, in the child, the sheer final violence of his disorder in the white, cubelike room, with its chill and pallors and half heats, are convulsed; only his illness-weakened body’s shyness halts the progress of the convulsions. Shyness saves him.

  “You look like you’re going to
run amok,” she says, getting it wrong. “I’m not good at boys; I hope you’re not too wild.” She used to be, earlier, someone of almost unshadowed strength of opinion. Now she is evasive and blown about, uncertain, subject to fate, playful. Embarrassed.

  “Listen: Be smart. Learn to be nice. I don’t use big words, but I like brains. I like it when people are honest with me. I’m heartless, you know, that’s what they all say. The way to my heart is to look, listen, and be nice to me. I have a nice side. I’m not one of those women who make a big thing out of sugar and spice and everything nice; everything doesn’t have to be nice; I do what I do, take me or leave me. I know something’s going on in you. Tell me what’s on your mind, why don’t you?” She asks this in a melodious voice out of keeping with the words but not as much out of keeping when you heard her as when you remembered and puzzled over what you thought she said. This one likes to fool people.

  To the child the sweetness of her voice is like a bunch of robins pulling worms from him as from a lawn after a rain. She poisons my ears with sweetness. The wind inside and under my hands lifts and moves them; they shift like leaves—it is an odd, manual half-smile. And the skin on his tiny, rash-fiery chest stirs and wrinkles … He guesses that her intention is to amuse and to stir hopes and half-hopes, and the child half blindly looks at her. Her voice when it is being particularly pretty is like an odd kiss on the mind under the bone under the hair of my head and on what is in my chest.

  “Look at you—you’re shaking—what’s the big idea, will you tell me, please?” She is looking at my body more than at my face, perhaps at the way the bones show. If she sees in his face the loony shifts of lit and slopping and breaking and melting and burning lights which are his mind holding for the moment his sense of her, she avoids it as too difficult to know about and to answer to. She is someone who hates to be mistaken. By looking at my body, she makes us into two people: one is an odd citizen and the other is a liar. “You want me to go ‘Rock-a-bye-baby in the tree-top’! Will you come down? I don’t know what you’re doing and I can’t tell if you’re crazy or not.”

  This making a deal is new to me; it is not like before at all. It is racking. Meaninglessness and trickery seem sweet—honeyed.

  I wanted to tear her open, I wanted to dive into her and scatter her as one does leaves from a pile of leaves. As one breaks a toy. This came and went in blinks.

  “I’ve read that baths are calming, hot baths—they do it a lot in Hollywood. And,” she said half under her breath, “in loony bins. I’ll give you a bath; you’ll like that. Maybe I should give you a bath.

  You’ll have to cooperate.” She cheated when she negotiated; it was not a joke. Propping the child with one hand, she went ahead. She says, “Hold still,” and she moves toward the tub, an arm’s distance, and finds her arm is not long enough; and she glances at the trembling child, maybe incurably deranged, and she remarks, “You have a speaking face. Hold still.” And she takes her hand, her face, her eyes, the gorgeous bird consciousness in each of them, away—I am a mass of audiences, distant and near audiences. “I think you know what I’m saying. Now stay still; don’t fall. I’m turning on the water.”

  I predicted to myself the sound of water coming from a faucet—part of the continuous sequences, now perhaps partially restored, of the world. An incomplete and strange restoration. My home for a long time now has been—madness. Catatonia. Autism. The movement is open at one end—inconceivably open. Memory hides it that the three walls of consciousness in a present moment have a fourth side open: perhaps I will die now. In memory, I am a child at the door of that room, with the figures in the room mostly stilled.

  But in the real moment the child was sitting on the sink and staring unfocusedly at the ghostly distance between the back of her head and my eyes. The pain (of madness) was close and granular; a suffocating delirium. It compressed part of my consciousness so that the distance between sleeping and waking was no distance at all. My mother does not smell of the real belonging of before. Her breath is not one of the decisive terms of companionship in my language. I breathe in a rhythm that I share with no one. Any gamble I made may end in my return to madness: it is part of what gambling is, it is part of the stakes. Madness is at the open edge of the moment. My childhood sense of farce was not a joke but rested on the utter faithlessness of spirit in the flatness of madness and farce: a happy ending of a terrible kind. Vile. But to accept this woman means the absolute has rejected me. I have two mothers.…

  Now I suddenly focus and see her, the softened volumes of Lila’s body busying itself with the tub.

  I remembered the smell of linoleum and words such as “hot wasser.” This present version of my mother in a white room did not smell like the other one in a brown room. These walls did not smell like the walls in a country house at the edge of fields of mud and snow. The woman’s hair and arms—the softness behind the shoulders (where my hands rest when I am bathed in a sink in some kind of cloth-lined basin: this is from long before) are not the same.

  The rhythm of illness and shock and the truth of death are the original terms of my life, and they make a faery music. The glamour and finely made tunefulness of so much oddity line the inside of my eyelids and the inside of my ears and the inside of my mouth with an unfamiliar sensation of newness as home, as the familiar thing now. The sound of water in the tub has, then, its own infinity for me which this woman notices.

  “You like water, do you? Are you an Arab in the desert, are you a little sheikh?” The faithless and farcical little gambler stares—and listens.

  I did not speak, because speech refers to absent things, and I could not tolerate absence: whatever is real is here, near me. Words are a category of extreme failure in these kidnaper-rooms, chambers of time unexpectedly askew. I was astounded to feel that any pardon extended by me toward the wrong woman caused a certain amount of cure. A state of pardon is unlike a state of illness. But I knew it was blasphemy … I knew it was violently wrong.

  The paradoxes of observation heartbreakingly start with dissimilarities. I am wrenched into observing things; this woman is not the same as before. Something has killed me but I am not entirely dead: I have a seed of life in me. The mind’s limits are very clear in childhood. Madness and my mother are perched and gorgeous; one is a horrible bird outside the window and in the mirror about to fly redly in the room. And the other is a strange woman pretending to be the most familiar part of the world for me—this is farce, this is the farcical underpinning of my reality—my reality, such as it is.

  Splashingly enormous, the water noise transports me. The sound in the earlier house was never like this. I begin to topple from the sink.

  She is not looking at me; she is saying, “See how calm I’m being; some people would say that’s a miracle.” Then she looks and she cries out, “Whoa! Hold your horses!” She half rises and reaches; she restores my balance; when her hand touches me, the mood of prettiness from before makes her touch incandescent. The complications of her identity unlock me, and my openly thumping heartbeat authenticates the circumstance as interesting to me.

  She glances at me, and she shoves me—settling a doll in place on a couch. “Now, let’s have a little hot water on the subject. Watch my dust … as they say. Listen, I think you’re just too cunning for words; now it’s your turn to flatter me and be nice and just keep your balance, Mr. Rag Doll,” she says as she tests and alters the proportions of hot to cold in the water.

  The noise of the water is louder and steadier than anything I had ever heard; it makes me heave with excited vomit. “You don’t have to throw up; count to ten; put your head down.” But I don’t know what she means.

  Still, her voice has ten thousand times the power of my sleep and of my blinking and of my thoughts to think and see and to change things. I listen to her before I think, if you know what I mean. “I have no talent as a nurse, I’m no good with plants, either.” I simply stare at her. And the heaves stop. Her voice is a mixture of brilliant little t
ones; it is bruisedly soft. “But I’m a real lifesaver, many have said so, and I tend to agree; I don’t mind tooting my own horn: I’m not the worst person to have in your corner.”

  I’m a child: I don’t know very much. I can have very odd forms of truth.

  No will in her exists to lift me into any abrupt buoyancy of childhood based on knowledge. I am a foreign lump in her life. But her will does draw me into contemplation of her shameless incandescence like the bathroom light, and which I imagine as being in her and as being passed into me, like milk. In her will is some intention toward my being a living child, but not a childish or a moody one. Her will is meant by her, consciously, to illuminate the world. She thinks herself a genius— a wicked genius …

  “I think you’re watching me,” she says. “Believe me, first thing in the morning is not my best time. I’m not eighteen. They tell me I’m not bad to look at. You think I’m O.K. to look at? Maybe I should have put on my diamonds for you. That usually gets the men going, I don’t know why. Maybe it means I know a thing or two. Now, sit up. I get tired of having to hold you up every two minutes. Smile and be pretty. You look like something the cat dragged in. I guess you don’t smile. Well, I can’t do it alone. You have to help me … pupik.”

  Pupik!

  “If you’re too cute for me, I can get rough; I’m not a sweetheart in those ways: listen to me. A word to the wis ?, pupik.”

  Pupik?

  “I had two sons.” They died as infants. “They’re gone: it ruined my life, pupik.… I don’t know if I like you.… When they died it ruined my life, but I don’t give up easily.”

  I was fascinated by her strong-willed cleverness, her harsh dreams, her purposes, her self’s mix of charity, deathliness, and shameless calculation.

  On my skin is partly wiped-off salve. I have a rash that burns. She stands up and takes a handful of toilet paper, and she energetically but haphazardly sets to work, wiping me here and there. The rash, when I look down, resembles the heads of kitchen matches.