The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  “Are you looking at yourself?” She moves her head forward, and she is looking directly into my eyes from halfway to one side, and I explode again inside myself: my mouth opens as if to vomit, and I gag and shudder. My eyes, at first all right, go blank, and perhaps they roll.

  She is gone. Her breath, her nearness have pulled away. Her hands still hold me. She has no tenderness of a nurse’s sort: she is sexual and intelligent and cold. She is my fate.

  When I don’t throw up, when I calm down, she becomes suddenly gasping-breathed and intent, and she uses handful after handful of toilet paper on my skimpy buttocks and my thighs. She rinses me off with her wet hand first, and that isolates me in a blind state of screechlike response. Then she uses a washcloth—she wants to keep the washrag clean.

  As she does these things, she talks: “You’re worse than a dog. Of course, I wouldn’t know. I’m allergic to dogs; they don’t like me.” Bubbles of breath move in me. What she’s doing is physically interesting to me—comfort is a word that is part of being sane. Sanity seems riskier, colder, harsher, a more excited state than madness. It resembles her.…

  “This isn’t comfortable for me, either, kiddo-kiddoo, but we have to get a few things accomplished. You’re filthy, believe me. And I get things done. I’m a doer—”

  My life is now a dream about meanings even when I am awake.

  She says, “This is making me sick, pupik. I’m not a softy, but sometimes I’m not at my best. I can do it. Just watch my smoke, boop-boop-a-doop. My God, my God, I bet you think I don’t have a mind—well, I’m not a little woman; I’m not a stay-at-home. A word to the wise. I’m the I-Don’t-Care Girl. When I get going, I’m a house afire.” Then: “I set the house afire …”

  Generally, it was like madness having my mother speak with another voice, in another vocabulary. In some form, it happens to everyone; a woman’s life changes, and so does her voice and vocabulary; or you hear her differently. But probably not as completely as this. The word Momma is now shorter and paler than it was, and it does not utter any of the old words of endearment—Liebe, bubeleh, Aaron.… Where have my earlier names gone to, the first ones?

  Puzzles and something tentative, and a tinge of mutual animosity form a large-scale abstract error. Mother is murderous and adorable. Momma’s infinite unlawfulness is what killed me. The vastness of her absence had its own absolute character, erasing all law. You might find your missing mother in a drawer, or the sky might release her from a haze of blue light—that has happened; she has appeared in that way before: in two places at once—in the odors of a drawer and from inside a closet where she was placing things.

  The ill body is formal, taut and wary with etiquette, with limitations. The worst parts of the past are forgiven if I am soothed. She talked to be nice—a form of illicit intention. “A short life but a busy one. What do you think? Tell me honestly—ha, ha; that will be the day.…”

  I stared and stared at the illustrations and definitions of my mother now.

  “Did you have bad dreams? I had bad dreams last night, I’m a poor sleeper: that’s bad for the skin.”

  The pain of trusting her threatens me and then becomes a fall, a collapsing floor, a shrieking matter—that short-lived—comic—in a lyric vein. At any rate, it ends that way. “Here’s to you; mud in your eye; up we go, a short life and a happy one,” she says. She gasps: she lifts me. Of the people I heard speak after my mother died, Lila was the easiest for me to hear.

  One can love a woman for the terrific clarity of purpose in her talk. The lies are life. My degree of error was painful for me. Old knowledges that I have now grew from her presence, but she never believed that—she believed she seduced me with the reality of her breasts. That was all. But my consciousness is alight with her. The light in the grained, opaque window, frosted in a pattern like overlapping gingko leaves, means that morning is within reach, that I might be able to walk as far as its milk edge. A lurking boy inside his consciousness, I feel I am actually inside the sleep-ship, in its hold, where the cargoes are, its freight of replicas, real, but I am awake even though my real mother is dead … She says, “You’re dirtier than dirt. You’re going to stain the water. You’re worse than Lady Macbeth.”

  She stands erect; and she pants … I feel the ends of her hair as tingling sharpnesses that poke and move tinglingly on my shocked skin. Her weighty real self makes my reality that of a leafless twig. My vulnerability becomes a high whisper, obscene and continuous, not happiness but good enough.

  The slumped, bare-buttocked, emotionally palsied, and intent kid and Lila are not much like a Madonna and Child. She holds me while water noisily and mistily pours into the tub. She’s no athlete; she mutters under her breath at my weight and smell. “I’m going to pull my back if I’m not careful.”

  She lowers me; she holds me by the shoulders and turns me and lowers me—she is going to stand me and prop me on the edge of the tub—and it is as if her arms were slow, straining wings, my wings. And her breath stiffens into a caw. I descend at the end of my featherless wings; the obscene high whisper extends. My feet slide on the curved white porcelain rim of the tub; she stoops and folds me into her side, me facing outward; and she leans over and reaches toward the splashing water; and as she does this the child’s eyes pinch the volumes of Lila’s back into morsels of reality; the ghostly and ambitious fingers of a child’s sight do this.

  I have to half dream things if I am to see them. I blink and half know—or half remember—what they are but nothing is dated or fixed; it is felt and arranged freshly, confusingly. Her flow of movements is preeny and gentle, artificial, true. She says, “Is there someone at home in you now? Do you know what’s going on, pupik?”

  Her emanations of heat and breath, the life in her, are sudden and nutty and shrewd, and oblique and practical and distant and so swift I would love her for that alone, for no other reason. But I have other reasons. The side of her neck and her mouth have each a different accomplice-fleshiness—and dimension. We were, she and I, astounded by each other off and on. The heat, the hardly comprehended shapes of us, to my eye the flight of her back and arm are an unrolled, unrolling, unstill, stilled Truth, hot, thunderous, and portentous with the water, liquid and noisy in the hollow of the tub. Comprehension, incomprehension have a cackling, trees-full-of-birds cast to them. The cold and the heat and the steam, the tile—and heat from Momma’s ribs—I am groggy and agog in the moist air. The comprehensions and curiosity and ignorance cackle and stir: the flier’s perch: small, frail bones and some foreign kind of flesh: but they are ideas of things: and they fly away again and they disappear in the glare of the whiteness of the room, whiteness: as ominous and tempting as paper, an omen. And all the twitters and flutters of childhood shrink into an intensity of the wish to bear the pain of sensation and of emotion. I cannot tell you how the child yearned for such—carpentries.

  My hiccupping and gagging and throbbing diaphragm reflect my painfully stretched and enlarged childish consciousness. Suffering the pressure of generality, of naming this woman as the same mother, I take the bathroom light as the light of consciousness itself. At the distance of mind at which I move from the broken early root and specific love into being awake now, I become a swollen, a painfully distended, and contingent theater, subdued toward its own body and excited toward the imposture that is meant to occur from here on in. The present reality is a form of possession by spirits of strained logic.… My mother is real, she is alive, her presence is real. But the dead might return and upend everything. Mostly, pain and absence are upended here now.

  She lets the water run a moment longer. She sits up and I stare at her, but as if at nothing. She says, “What’s the matter? Have you seen a ghost? I look terrible; I slept badly; I look like a ghost.”

  Her voice and the earth and its movements, and the ideas in my head, and the realities of things, my history cause me to swoon. And surely the total of strangeness might be expected to lead to disorder. In my swoon, I organize th
e odors of her presence and the hollow volumes of memory and doubt in me, and delight and absence then and in this instant. Movements of souls flirt their way in me toward the white light in the room, a startled and batlike or owl-like acute childhood watchfulness, love or infatuation, a posture of optimistic attention, childish, provisional, passionate, gigantically peaceful provisionally—it is perhaps the same for everyone. I remember the bill-like clicks and hisses in my breath as a child, the outward sound of the muffled cackles inside me of ideas roosting in regard to this particular woman despite insistently recurring nausea and profound inanition and the rooted habits of despair.… A form of consciousness.

  It is a stupendously ill-defined moment. I cannot hold each moment accountable for every other of my life but I do just that. I put my useless hand on top of her hand, which is clenched in a curve on my curved ribs; and she freezes. How clever she must be not to cry out at the strangeness of us. Perhaps she has different senses and does not come to her senses as if to doors—various doors—as I do, but fluffs up like pillows and wet pigeons instead. It is possible that she is very stupid about me and that she knows it and is clever in the lesser way of the admitted darkness of her being who she is. And it is possible that she suspects that this moment might become too special for me and that I will splinter all up and down myself and be unable to enter the next moment except in insane uncontrol, not so uncommon a childhood thing, but I might become too uncontrolled ever to be capable of control again. She knows of people, she has known people who have become mad, who were destroyed, she has known people who became tubercular, and some who were suicidal directly, she has known many who died. She knew my earlier mother. A willingness to live is an uncertain thing; she will talk about this later to me, when I am older; it is her central premise: you do it for people, give them a reason to live, or you remove it; she called it killing someone. “Doctors and nurses are too expensive.… Come to me: I’ll get things fixed. Trust me.” It is an idea she and my adoptive father, S.L., shared. When either of them says of something, It bored me to death, they mean it. S.L. says often, People who bore you are killing you, and Lila says, S.L., don’t exaggerate: there’s something to it, but that’s not the whole story. I know many, many interesting people who would just as soon see someone dead as not. She cannot know everything, she is imperfect and real, but she knows things about excitement and crazedness, the willingness to live, and she knows about boredom. She is efficacy itself, up to a point.… Ah, Momma, I want to live …

  I make my way into the next moment through a hedge of being battered inside, outside by feelings—and the hedge is on fire. Lila moves her arm; I am in its crook; she looks at me. The inverted bone-saucer of her forehead, pored and tinted, and the widow’s-peaked dark hair in profusion around it, my presumed mother’s hair, is a kind of toy black bonfire. It really burns me, as if I were tied to a stake and set on fire, or as if I had been pushed into the oven of a lit stove. I feel the passage of seconds as like being in a burning thing on wheels.

  She refits me in her arms, so that I face inward and am pressed against her breast, the front of me. I recognize this woman to be a fierce clown and soldier and fireman in the forces and blazing electricities, the slapsticks and complex comedies of being-at-home-in-the-world among corrections and lies, feathered and metaled, stabbing and comically wounding and always in the shadow of death.

  “You’re a liar, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re a real liar. You’re like me. Well, that’s one for the books, isn’t it?”

  She looked at me some more.

  Far from continuous time, and beside it in my mind, pleatedly adjacent, if I might say that, is a fountain, a collection of lost moments—one, two, seven, a million of them. And they all felt as one thing, a possibly dreamed and super-real thing of knowing something: this woman before was like the huge halls of some giant structure that seems to define what is rational in the mad way of the colossal; and some of that remains with me even today. I suppose it is a poetry, the ruins of what was giant in one moment, small and yet powerful in a razed way inside another moment: and she is intimate on another scale, the scale of tragedy and hurt, or woundedness—without quite meaning it; she cheats on it. I am somehow a far-off example of the immediate and tragic for her; I am pathetic and dispensable, a child who can be seen as a ruse or lie, and as a religion, and then as a fraud or scheme of jealousy and love. Who knows? For a child, judging her then among his physical responses to her, her tones broke the child’s heart over and over again. But it is almost happiness, such broken-heartedness. The suffering is immense at the difference in the maternal love now, but so many disparate factors enter into real-life kindness that one’s childish sense of it, masculine and hurt, comes to a familiarity of being at home in it in a certain suspicious and ill-intentioned manner. I was amused by her more than I was by death. I was also easily attached to love, but not so easily either. I think she fell in love with me, not completely, perhaps only temporarily, but enough. Boredom and amusement, life and death, these are the two separate aspects of consciousness of my mind.

  In the continuous reality of the moments, my future, the consequences here, her future, her life under the burden of my company, lie within a frame of music, the music of that woman’s character and my own: “No one around here is good at love … except your mother. No point in your looking at me like that: my mother is what you’d call a real bitch; and I’m not the sweetest girl in town, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the truth: you look to me like a fool: you look like a cupid, all ready to love, all set up and raring to go; it’s no good doing this to me with these goo-goo-googly eyes of yours—you have to do it to S.L. and Momma: they have the money. And they’re not used to anything good. S.L. is stuck up, and Momma thinks she’s the only real Jew who ever lived. They can’t live without me, and I can’t stand them.… I hope you’re good at liking people, pupik—it would help out around a lot. And you have to be sweet to Nonie.” Nonie was her nearly thirteen-year-old daughter. “I like you; you won me over; I liked you when your mother was alive—I offered good money for you; she thought I was joking; but I knew what I was doing. Let me tell you what kind of world it is: you don’t want to know—that’s what kind of world it is. You think my eyes are pretty? You think I have a nice mouth? Let that be what kind of world it is. O.K., pupik, is that a bargain? My God, if your mother—if Ceil—saw you now, she’d kill a few people, let me tell you, but God knows I’m doing my best.”

  An inherent unsteadiness of the physical basis of love afflicts her. And me. Nothing, nothing now in the real moment is physically true in a lasting way, although it quite clearly is true now, odors and love, orders and categories, phyla and genera of flirtation.… The child—inwardly—smiles as at a manifestation of art—at any play with logic and continuous time, at truth in spite of everything—as in this woman’s touch. He smiles inwardly a grin of explanation that is only half explanation and which is also a childish acceptance of the joke. Reality, polyphonic, polychromatic, radiant, is very funny as error. I can’t help it. The pressure of the puzzle, of the reality of the woman’s presence, becomes that inner, maybe languorous smile of brotherhood and sisterhood in all the jokes and with the outwardly hooded eyes of the suspicion necessary for childish self-government in regard to what he knows.

  His distrust of this woman becomes a form of obsessive amusement attached to her, so easily that it is a form of love as well as a convalescent surrender to the majesty of what is here—it is not logical; it is logical-anyway. So he laughs—glumly or gloomily or stupidly—but silently. His no-doubt thin face and loony eyes, his small, nervous mouth show some dreadful kind of lunatic ridicule of her and shocked amusement of a puny kind. The identities of everyone here are wicked mixtures of histories and energies appreciably hungry for an affection that, to be blunt, was attached to, and meant for, someone else. But what are we to do?

  She says, “That’s some sad smile, let me tell you. Well, it’s nice to have a little love, a ni
ce lover like you. What’s wrong with a little yes before breakfast … ?

  That is just something she says … She knows how to say it … She doesn’t mean it every moment—look, the mind and the real climb in darkness here. Grief is a pulsation of one’s breath. The mind’s power to reconstitute itself in another mood is among physical responses which overturn and darken and ignite and illuminate and excite the self which clings to its ennui as a bed of rest and of thought, as the other scientific, skeptical, unloved, self-bound consciousness. The mind persists in its faiths and its ennui as a form of wit. The still hurtling and seething waters of the tub are not credible, either. Nothing real has immediate reason. Only bits of reason itself have immediate reason. One waits years for the elements of reason to gather and to elect one another to good sense. It is both sweet and strong to have a sense of reason in one’s mind toward one’s life.

  Childhood, in its farcical intellectuality, and its promiscuity of attachments, is part awe, part an about-to-ignore-the-awe pride—or conceit. If this woman had been the Empress of Egypt (if there had been an Empress of Egypt), everything then, like everything in the bathroom would have been intense and real and foreign in a general way; one has to see that the general is real, one has to have a strong grasp of the nature of abstraction and of the nature of law and of the laws of things in this other way, this other house—this happened to Moses, didn’t it?

  It is a logical and curative dream and a test of the soul, it is abstract and physical, and it is real. I am a child lunatic, but I am not a discarded child lunatic. And this is ordinary childish sanity, I think. The child is more silent than Moses stuttering as an Egyptian. The child will stutter when he does speak. It is really no wonder that ancient Moses stuttered: he stumbled over what his words meant in his experience, in his mind, over the unshareability of it.