The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Moses calmly oversaw the slaughter of many. The walls of Jericho came down. The profundity of Wiley’s moment has to do with charity and self-love on one side of the equation and with an unreasonable degree of meaning on the other. I mean, it is one order of profound meaning if it is the same woman, and it is another phylum of meaning if it is not the same woman because the two different parts of the mind, two different parts of waking consciousness, the self and the judge, or conscience if you like, or immediacy and thought are differently arranged: the interpretation becomes the basis of faith in the livability of the flow of actual continuous time. Memory and truth have changed and become ghost things—it is a particular thing that happened. It cannot be diagnosed. It is me. To the extent I matter to Lila, it is us.

  But in me the terms are general and have to be. The child’s feelings curve in a singular universe of pain and comfort-of-a-kind, and his feelings are far and near, are both roof and floor, are truth with this vast, central error in it. He must be intelligent in order to live. And the child is in ambush, hiding everything, like an explorer on a Strange planet looking at the inhabitants from his hiding place, trying to learn. The awful, seriously unblessed, but perhaps meaning-ridden clown in his life, the child, his life just was there in these ways. Silence was inevitable. Lila said, “It’s pretty that you don’t speak.”

  The nature of truth is extraordinary and unresting. I managed to be mentally amazed and ill. The child managed the discipline of accepting her gaze. And of hiding my reason and unreason. That woman and I will never have the same reasons for anything. How unreasonable my life seemed moment by moment as I lived it: it was just one puzzle after another. I stare at each moment and wonder what it can mean. It is exhilarating and intoxicating to be the ill child, to be cruelly blasé, cruelly deadened, greatly punishing, while accepting her gaze as only a dead and logically unsatisfied child can accept being gazed at by the hunting wit in a clever woman’s eyes.

  Her sight softens and moves like water and sharpens and tickles. The child stirs. He almost writhes. The giant woman says, “Just hold your horses—do you know what I’m saying?” She says, “You know what? You and I are a pretty pair—you know that? You can have a good time with that puss of yours if you get well. So you get well and make a lot of people suffer is what I’m telling you. Does that sound all right to you? Does that sound good to you, pupik?”

  She is a theater of prediction, but she will shape the chronicle plays along the lines she lays out here. In her stare is the weight and penetration of her mind—it is her intelligence about me that distends me with breathlessness. And amusement. And that is, in part, an ignorance of me. I remember no ignorance of me in her before. But this is real; she does not know me. Poor woman. Truths and lies, monuments of loss and actualities of the recurrence of love, proofs beyond doubting of disloyalty which indicate loyalty, it is happening again, it is hard, it is slippery, but I move in this medium of the politics, the policies of love and wakefulness with an ease of fins and tail (or of wings or of sturdy legs). “I will say this: You had the right mother, in some ways. I can see you struggling to live. Me, my mother is death itself. I wake up every morning wondering why I bother.” Everything means something here. I have to learn what it is.

  I broadcast a version of what was inexplicable, a smudged, half-incomprehensible portrait, unendurable and exciting, onto the extreme and mysterious and loosened beauty of Lila Silenowicz. Her beauty, archangelic and ghostly, is of the order of a body—nothing as real and human as a familiar face.

  Lila and I are villainously deformed in our predicaments. Ha-ha. We like that. The woman’s gloomy odor, her manner, tense and flirtatious, the reality of her will—of Lila’s daydreams made real: she dreams while she’s awake—the child feels it as he used to feel the onset of variations of voice at twilight when the other stopped working. Mothering me is a thought this one has: she wakes from it, and her breathing, her atmosphere change; and she returns to it—see: this woman’s mind is motherhood. I exist because of her mind, not her body. I live and breathe in this tumultuous and shattering noise because of her mind.

  This false-and-true interpretation of things is how my life was given to me the second time.

  She says, “Now is everything apologized for? Do you think we can get on with our business now?”

  My heartbeat is such that I am in a burrow of thuds. The wing-beats of the mother-violence—of her freedom—in part, they are the motions my history makes bearing me rapidly aloft, along. The child’s stomach zigzags abruptly into spasms; and I vomited.

  Lila swept him up toward the basin. “Not in your bathwater: that’s the limit, I don’t want to draw the water again!”

  The clutch of illness, volcanic with spasmodic, bilious force: a wracked and scalded mouth.

  “Well, get it over; it won’t kill you; you’re the type nothing can kill. You’ll be there at the end—do you hear me, pupik ? It’s only vomit. It’s not the end of the world.”

  As he finishes, he chokes.

  Lila wipes his face. “Hold still; I’ll clean this up; I’ll clean this up, too. I don’t think you’re better. But I don’t know. This isn’t a lot of vomit.” She is working hastily. “Are you better? I can’t tell. You know what? I’m not good at this, pupik: I’m thirty-three years old—that’s not for publication. I can’t afford to jump to conclusions. My God, my God, S.L. blames me for everything. I’d never hear the end of it about you. People like me don’t get a chance to be wrong. I’m not a sweet little stay-at-home do-nothing. Everybody knows that about me, but a lot of people like me anyway. A lot of people don’t like me—I’m an outstanding person and I have rivals; I have rivals coming and going; they’re coming out of my ears, pupik. You don’t know what that’s like. You make me look ignorant, and I’ll have to pay through the nose and I’ll have to keep on paying. They all suspect me where you’re concerned, as it is. So my advice to you is to pitch right in. All this vomiting you do is not going to win you friends and influence people.”

  Her dead children and my dead mother haunt her. It is hard to think of her as real in that way, as maybe a fantastically hurt woman, fantastically willful.

  She tossed the smelly washcloth she had used on me onto the floor near the dirty towels. She groaned. She didn’t call out for my nurse or for S.L. to come and give an opinion whether I was awake and “sane.” She straightened her large breasts with shy touches of her quick, slender hands.

  Willful, moody, and charitable for the moment, sighing and clever, she lifts me and turns toward the tub. She stands a moment: “That’s too much water—well, maybe you won’t drown. And maybe you will.” And, holding me under one arm and pushing my knees onto the rim of the tub as she stoops, she turns off the water, an effort that makes her grunt and which takes a hundred years, the struggle with the faucet.

  Then, eyeing herself in the dulled, filmy reflection on the white wall, or my reflection, she says, “Let me catch my breath.” She catches her breath inside her mouth, and she tucks it into the sacks inside her breasts, I think. “Don’t vomit in the bathwater,” she says.

  I cannot talk; speech is too explosive a matter. I am too wounded.

  “Peekaboo,” she says.

  But she says it with finality to someone she knows is crippled and ordinary, is less than ordinary.

  I heard the metal sounds of the water echoing in memory. I looked at Lila. My eyes catch at the bluish dust the shadows are, and then the irregular stippling of ashen shadow of her face. It is hers, not secretly mine. She said, “Will you vomit or not? No one’s looking—you can tell me. We’re two of a kind; trust me; I’m not a snitch.” A locally notable woman, she is wrapped in a manner that is startled and rich with references to conspiracies. “Do you love me? I’m a charmer. I’ve ruined one or two nights’ sleep in my time.”

  Her large face gleams in the driftingly warm bathroom air; her face is heart-shaped and pale.

  I twitched. It was as if flies strutted on my fore
head.

  She turned away from me, bent, and tested the water. She stirred it, the water. Noises tinkled then, and the water circled, thin and tinlike, rippling, planeless.

  She is in some odd posture, half squatting by the tub, one knee up near her shoulder, the other down on a blue bathroom rug. I’m forcedly kneeling on the rim, held. Shifting her hands, she holds me tight and moves me out over the water. She swings me out; her hands cup my ribs; the water shivers beneath me, close to me: my feet are still back at the rim. I look down into a seesawing dim mirror that vaguely reflects her and me. She lifts me higher, until my feet are drawn from their loose white anchorage. Vague heat curlingly half tickles the sole of my spindly feet. I draw my feet up, only a little. I am not capable of much movement. My mother’s hands are fragilely intelligent now, rather than strong, as they were. They are just barely firm enough. They are large in relation to me. The hair on her head touches my hair: our heads are near to each other; her hair lies on my hair as if it grew from my skull. She lowers me, and pale steam, lazy arcs of vapor, rise to touch me in private places. Warm, grainy water closes its lips around my anguishedly tickled feet. That sensation echoingly ran in me, destroying me as if it were a wheeled, rattling thing and I was glass and waxed paper.

  It breaks everything and crushes me into silent cries, twitches: the cries do not emerge from me, but stay inside and move restlessly and with obliterating anguish inside my shoulders which hunch as if to shield my head from this sensational catastrophe—my head is the major porch of sensation and it is flooded, too, but perhaps not for very long, not all the way to its top. The water moves mouthlike up my ankles and legs. The mouth closely, claspingly swallows more and more of me. Then my waist is in the water. Water encircles my belly in a collar of ambiguous sensation. The water is not smooth; I am smoother than it is. My sensations burn and scream and tickle, they are themselves a spasm of wild intentness, clenched or locked, unbearable. The water is amazing—formal, formidable, submissive, dangerous. It fits me closely and relentlessly on its inside, but it is full and oval and is itself on its outside. My feet slide uneasily at the end of my straightening legs along the grit-speckled bottom of the tub. I am moistly in the middle of a soft, splashy clanging of the water. I do not understand water, this water, its degree of subservience and of danger-to-me.

  I lean forward, and my chest ruffles and pushes at it, the water; and it, the water, goes down and then pushes up alongside my ribs like a balloon or pillow. It affects me echoingly in each of its shifts. Lila pulls me so that I sit upright; the water returns complacently, sweet liar, trickster, to its earlier shape. Lila starts in on my face with a washcloth. “Let’s get you clean,” she says. My face becomes a fingertip poking up into the washcloth. I am violently aware of the washcloth. Lila, who seems large to me, is, by grown-up measurements, delicately built, so she is inclined to overdo things when she is physical, when she wants to indicate she is as strong and useful as other stronger, hard-working people are—as everyone else, she might say. The sensation of tinily gritty porcelain teases my doubled-up and untrusting and strenuously restless rump. The sensation of air is on my neck and shoulders. The breath of the surface of the water rises around my face and touches my lips. A film of rinsed soapiness, abrasive stuff, is on my face. Damp prickles of steam are in my mouth, on my gums and teeth. The odor of water stifles me. My breathing is comical and repellent to me. The watery echo of it is unpleasing. My breathing is amateurish. I start to gasp; and that worries Momma, who says, “Stop that!”

  I don’t quite stop. Momma breathes to show me how. It seems the water and Momma and I share muted, somber, imitative breaths. She scrubs my hands; she goes between the fingers. What are intrinsically giggles are tarted up into the indignity of being scrubbed, which is like being clawed by a tiger—discomfort that is a tearing pleasure. She and I both avert ourselves from conscious attention to this moment. But we are very attentive to it. Dreamily, the water puffs heat at the underside of my chin. And onto my weakly bowing neck. I feel the pillowy water around my unpracticed hands, the woman’s-breast, dog-stomach water.

  Lila slowed in what she did. I lower my head tentatively to look at gray bits of whatever it is in the water: swirls of film that turn rainbowish in the light.

  This local reality half shared—that is to say, judged and fixed as something other than private hallucination by my mother’s being here—becomes strangely blank, elegant in a way, stripped of particularities, and close to a proud madness of making things into a theater of meaning. Bath-water. You take the reality of cleanliness and foist it on the reality of the water so that dirt and impure water do not exist. Lila as a presence is hardened like a bean, smoothed into firmness like carved soap or tile, so that she becomes a marble portrait set up as my mother. A mixture of purposes have made her into my mother whether I am the sculptor or not.

  But what a peculiar nature it is that the actual felt nature of presence, of love is in the unwise, pagan moment. The future becomes a home. The past is instructively dire. The present is the moment of love but it is only a bath—sensation becomes faith. The delicate and then rude acrobatics of love have an elegantly half-calmed (and still acrobatic) hysteria. I forget that Lila is anyone other than my mother.… I find this difficult to describe but commonplace to remember.

  Here, at one end of this moment, is the curious wavering and gravid faith that has to do with truth and with puzzles or lies—lies and threats: it is hard to say. The distances in the mind are almost other realms of actuality, but in all of them I am lost in contexts of intellectual urgency about what my life means. Or what this and that in my life mean. This is new water; I have seen water before but not like this. How many rules have been changed! I lower my face through actualities, through visible and tangible plumes of steam, motionful but nearly bodiless, but visible to the child, just as the rumblings of the house, the furnace, the wind outside, the house keeping its footing on an earth rushing through the oddly white reeds and weedy edges of morning are audible to the child. And Lila’s feelings are present like dark space itself. Certain distortions are squeezed from night’s existence and from nightmares’ melodramas and become water in the damp center of my eyeblinks. My face is in the water; the water cups, masks, fits itself to the porchlike face; I choke in a pink hall; I swallow, I cough; I nakedly surrender to the death, almost jolly, that chokingly waits, unhallowed, impious, in coughed suffocation here. I return to some of the distances of before when my real mother was alive; I want to be saved. Here in the flamingly clenched garden of suffocation I find the eternal return of rescue—everything rushes forward, and is wrenched and knotted, clenched in a cough. The whitely echoing tile, the room, the steam and breath and the presence of Lila. She slaps my back, after a pause. Lila has, in her, great hounds that tear her. She says, “Come on.… Be well. Do me proud and I will keep the murderers away from you.…” She has had two sons that died as infants from suffocation, or something like it. She was blamed as heartless. Why does her heart not stop at this moment? She does not like to be near children, but she is here, near me. She wants to be perhaps only the mother-of-record. Lila can open the present moment in a romantic sense as in giving a party. She cannot ever save me—except in this way—not when her children are dead. It is a code of honor, of what comes first, and what comes second. I did not ever really trust her. Her sense of things is of present moments, chances, in which nothing is fixed, nothing is predestined; and if it is she does not care, she is free, even if only for a moment.

  In her freedom, she saves me, although she cannot ever save me.… She says so, “I can’t save anyone.… God helps those who help themselves.…” Her pride, her blasphemies, her sultriness of temper are those of the first free person—that is how she acts. But that freedom hardens year by year with the statistics of event. In an insistent uneducatedness, in her insistence on not having to study anything as she goes along, she advances like a river—and like a river scow—in a tormenting roiling of crosscurr
ents. The bow wave is a whitening of her face, a hysteria. The toughness that carries her is not any ordinary faith or soft maternity, it is just a hard refusal to be shamed. She pulls the child up largely by his neck. She pounds on his back. She says in a tensely musical voice, “Don’t do that. Don’t be a fool. Don’t do that to yourself.”

  Then she says in a heartless tone—but it is partly a joke, a tactic—"You’ll live.” She says it again, in a different tone, more musically, with a thread of ridicule in it—she is ridiculing me—or herself: “You’ll live.” Then a third time, thoughtfully, with her hand on my head, “You’ll live,” while she stares into space.

  Then a fourth time, having removed her hand, she says it as poetry, ironic and pessimistic, acknowledging that I am laughing at her (I breathed before she rescued me), she says in a melancholy tone: “You’ll live.”

  She moves me so that I ache for her: I don’t want her humiliated. Embedded in water, I feel my heart race bumpily at the vital sweetness of my being a dishonest trademark for her view of herself.

  Lila says, “Don’t give me a scare like that: my heart! My God, you want to kill me? I don’t like that kind of thing. Are you listening to me? I don’t want it; don’t do it to me.”

  The distant term my mother proceeds among the summarizing sense of other women’s faults and virtues. Echoes throb and tinkle among the tile walls and the glass of the mirror and of the window. Her hair has grown lank, partly disarranged in the damp; I remember that from before. Her eyes are intent, emotional, deranged and passionate, deranged with passion, with flickers of lawfulness. Her eyelids flutter; they are shiny in the steamy bathroom. Her shoulders are a curious brown, almost a twig color—probably a shadow caused by the way she is sitting. The true potency, though, is the infinite white seduction, the persuasiveness, of her smell of fear and hurt and anger, softened for me, laid aside for me. The gentleness such as it was seemed to be focused in her soft breasts, the facelike nipples peering through her nightgown.