The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  The “truths” I see I have to gamble on. If even a few people saw correctly, the history of the world wouldn’t be what it is. You have to assume a universal degree of error and of I don’t give a fuck. This leaves room for the other person, leaves you room if-you-see-it-well-enough.

  Daddy is a man and is suffering. I’m a kid and I want to live.

  We’re father-and-son (sort of). We’re not The Same Person. If you love him, he thinks you’re a good sort, and that that means you are the same person he is, and that means that his mind and will are the same as yours—which is stupid but worldly.

  “You’re a smart kid, no two ways about it,” Dad said sarcastically in a voice that meant he intended the opposite of the words, that I was dumb, and if I was smart in some ways, it was in ways that didn’t matter. My dad is still carrying on with me; so it isn’t certain he despises my mind.

  Dad says, “A man can always hire someone to remember things for him.” He has more systems for being in a present moment than

  I do: those are the marks of age and of limited mind. it’s part of the way he is someone-with-power. Of course, he’s lost most of his power.

  Dad says sarcastically, “Are you made of diamond?” But it’s changed, the pitch or tone of intention, the meaning that’s being thrown at me; now it’s virulent love stuff—that sort of righteousness. He says, “Are you true blue and sharp as a diamond?” He’s said that in ironic speech to me often, but, of course, the tone of irony changes and I am supposed to notice even if he uses the same words. He’s calming down. Maybe. The nervous squinting and clenched eyes of my mind watch him and listen with blobs and jerks of comprehension, little detonations of which show—the guesswork and wildness, and the evasive pallors of temporizing in a young person, birdy flickings, flinchings, conceit and wrenching pain in the absence of personal favoritism in the other at the moment. Us and our nerves: a faint perspiration on him; I am cooler and want to be really cool: I have a sweaty, nerve-slimed coolness.

  The hope of grace—a mood-wrecked strain—tough, blank faces. You breathe in the tremendous restless weight of time—my mind is a dancing cemetery with a sort of waking order of revenant moments glimpsed; I don’t have to love this bastard but I do in a way.… Ah, Christ, the fluidities of event. Do you want to be A Great Rememberer? S.L., being ill and with a lot of time, perhaps, had become A Half-Great Rememberer.

  He said, “Are you holding a grudge, Wileykins? You want to use your head and look around you and not use your heart? Well, listen, there’s a catch; there’s always a catch—fee-fi-fo-fum: I smell the blood of an Englishman: there’s always a string attached—you want to be a whippersnapper? Do me a favor: don’t be sensitive … is that O.K. with you, pooperkins?”

  I think it takes serious bravery to talk to anyone.

  He says, “Don’t look so sour. Mr. Sour-grim.… The scene is over … I had my say.… Remember what I said—I meant every word of it.”

  It’s likely you haven’t the words for what you’re feeling. I try to hold it uncaptioned, and time tugs it from the closed, imprisoning hands of my mind like a hawk pulling at and dismantling what the madman-hero—thrill-mad, resentful—has captured. Memory never shows things in sequence although you can ask it about the sequence.

  Memory can’t reproduce the real flavor of waiting in a real light or the reality of the pain then. I am sitting on the windowsill, my arms folded, my pajamas still falling off me, waiting for his peacemaking to finish. I think memory tends to romance, omitting the details and the suspense and the tired fear and anxiety and defiance, and a lot of the uncaringness. It omits the ordinariness and the scandal.

  Sometimes conscious memory is so much sweeter than reality that compared to living I feel remembering like being gripped by an angel, the blinding brevity and the guidance.

  I said to Dad, “I want to get dressed now …”

  He said correctingly, “Go ahead-—shower and shit and shampoo …” showing me how we talk, how men talk, how I should talk.

  You can’t remember the waiting or the mental oddity of thought while you shit. The cold water when I reach over to the sink and get some drops on my fingers from the leaky faucet and rub my eyes with the spottily, coldly wetted fingers and then palms while I’m sitting on the toilet, I remember some of the recent moments of the talk, in a dried out puzzled way.

  I try to rise above it—a milk drinker. I have an idea of my innocence: it’s very iffy and partial. Those who claim to be totally innocent are punished by stupidity. You can be moderately, limitedly innocent. You have to understand contemporary male innocence as it’s practiced around you. And whatever else.

  To be “moral"—which is to say kind to your dad and not horrified and not broken by him in his illness—is thrilling and dirty.

  Dad comes walking into the bathroom—he often follows me in here—S.L. says, “You’re like a monkey with a load of coconuts—be a good monkey, do me a favor, see no evil, do no evil, say no evil.… Be a little white-bottomed monkey—with a monkey face …”

  I don’t have a monkey face. He is seeing something else, the new-boned quality.

  He pays no attention. “Not so little a monkey—do us all a big favor: see no evil, do no evil, say no evil …” He can’t think of what else to say.

  In the John

  The opinions of a dreamer are set oddly in time. A daydream is a lying correction of waking life, of otherness and multiplicity and of the moment, in favor of one’s dreams, of what one’s head can picture. In real life you can prove you’re O.K. and sane masculinely by hitting someone. Daddy patted me, my hair. One, I said to myself, two. Actuality is unconstrained by my ideas of it. But I am often constrained by ideas. Daddy is running the cold water. I think, approximately, Oh whoop-de-doo, goddamn fucking MESS, snafu: it’s all fucked up good—and proper—PERIOD.

  My hands remember things, my back does too; my feet remember this tile floor. My mind peers at nothingness: I am moving a turd out of me. Daddy is standing at the sink and I am on the toilet seat, hunched over my arms; my elbows on my knees, a yelled-at boy taking a shit—maybe patient, maybe loving, maybe malicious as hell: I don’t know for sure. The familiarity of hiding my rage (and my boyish power) and shitting itself produce a gooey and oozy sensation, partly calcified, like my own tissues and bones and effluvia being squeezed in a football tackle or an embrace.

  For a moment, I am blind-souled. Part of the drama of the legibility of my breathing is the drama of breath itself, a biological universal.

  “Are you sent us from heaven? Don’t make me laugh,” Dad says. It’s an old joke. I listen skimpily, with a pulsing heart, with no privacy except in lying and in deceiving him. Kinship, kiddyship … a clement attention toward him, as if he weren’t in the room, me among the stuttering waves of sensation: is this an emotion? Is the immediate wish to leave, is the impetus to get out—is that choking and private impetus an emotion? Feelings run off like the sensibility, like images from a mirror into the air.… We were happy; I was happy; make me happy some more.

  “Do you love me or not?” I mutter and ask. My mouth is in the crook of my elbow, and my head is down. I say it but really I am thinking it.

  He says in a weird tone, “Now and then: it depends …” Then he says in a different tone, insiderly, perhaps also partly true and sad and cruel: “I can’t love someone like you.” It’s all true, all of it, whatever he says, ha-ha. It’s true if it’s properly understood, but I am only the person who makes an effort to understand him now.

  I would like him to apologize for the tirade. I don’t want to be so quick to do it next time; he’s not supposed to do tirade stuff at all because it strains his heart and sets off a climb in his blood pressure. But Dad hates shit that turns him into an obedient citizen; he controls his own uncontrol.

  Time-riddled, lovely, slippery Dad. I would like real life to be as I dream it and as I plot it in my head, with rational clear meanings, ones that I know. Like I expect to hear the universe sc
ream when I get an erection on the street in a dream. Or in real light. Or where my dad can see it. But real life is different from that stuff. An erection of mine amuses S.L. It’s keepaway time. Ideals and dreams can be anything anyone says they are; they can’t be measured … they laugh at real stuff—that’s what they’re for.

  “Are you dead-to-the-world while you’re wide awake?” he asks—he means am I daydreaming. He uses a kind of chivvying, half-baby-talk as in the past.

  My posture hides my midsection as I sit on the john. But he knows what is going on … the longish, fluffed out thing. And I am dead-to-the-world while wide awake and close to sexual illusion. He was deep inside my privacy in the insobriety of the superminute which means all the minutes so far—in the really tippy thing of two people, the thing of not chickening out and leaving the refracted heat of the presenee of the other soul for the comfort of one’s own daydreams. A clement attention can feel hot in you—aroused, arousal is a lighted thing like an orange heat, the dance of it, in my pallor.

  How much nerve do I have? A reluctance to see and judge veils my worded opinions as well as my sight of the slightly flabbed skin of my dad’s neck and the gray beard stubble there. Dad is forty-four. How much am I willing to see? The opacities of bodies in real light is incomplete, the mooded dimensions which become calculation, a placement of the I in the steadying curve of the ribs. My visual registry of my dad includes my estimate of his health. It seduces him to be noticed. He’s worn me out. I clean myself of shit carelessly: He’ll live to the afternoon.…

  I have special organs for intimately familiar registry—in a hug, for instance. I prefer the distances of speech: “Everything O.K. with you today?” I ask.

  I hate asking this stuff. I hate my life. But to stay sane, about this stuff, and cool, and to have stamina, is male character. I used to regulate my own breathing toward a more masculine, a weightier effect by imitating the fashions of his breath, his style in the local light of the mad void of the arrival of each new moment.… The racing but tired sense of unadvisable risk and of beauty-of-a-familiar sort, the bathroom, the early morning, the tonality of things here (us with each other), afflicts me so that I dislike the two moles on Dad’s wide, onetime muscular, now flaccid neck midway down the side of his throat and the stipplings of shadows on his strongly bearded chin. I am caught in the dimensionality of continuance.… This is different from mere time, everything unstatuelike, everything without stillness; it seems as ornate and striking as girls’ breasts, the rhythm-beset continuance, the logical progression of what-next in the unstill, toppling moment, on top of the what-has-happened-so-far. Acts arise and fall: the axe: I find life too full of suspense.

  Bones of skeletal light obliquely lie in odd reality on tiles and towel racks—shadows stretch from behind the towels at a slant toward thetile floor and the white rug. Some future or other will not happen. Some future will—incest and death. In me is a motionless and radiant air with breath unrepresented: it is a dream of an eternity of attention even while moments come without sound, without an ideological whoosh. What do things mean if life keeps happening? Meaning becomes a special project of ignorance, the soul’s as-if-sacred-seriousness.

  My prick bears a sporadic weight of hallucination. I am aware of a dirty comic thing of cunt—real and fuzzy cunt, pinkish, reddish: its grin of otherness. The sense of real cunt is obliterating. I remember Daddy in his tirade hurting me in scattered fingertip-and-toe-itchy ways. This comes back to a sense of cunt.

  “Are you daydreaming, pooper?”

  I nod.

  He says, “You’re young.…” Then he says, “You know enough, you know too much, I’m just a big noise from Winnetka: you got enough sense to hee-year a man with good sense?”

  “What do you mean, Dad?” Pause. “Tell me what you meant?”

  “I can’t tell you everything, I can’t give you every little thing on a plate, I can’t say it all—you have to know some things by your lonesome. Don’t be fresh—be fresh like a daisy, but don’t be fresh.”

  It’s hard to talk to grownups.

  “Be like the thief of Baghdad …” he says. “He has a nice smile.” A movie, The Thief of Baghdad, had a star, Sabu, the elephant boy who wore only a white thing over his dong and who had a thin, brown chest and a funny friendly servile-mischievous, deep-spirited smile.

  I say as if to his ghost while he’s alive: “I’m fourteen: you’re forty-four … Be careful of me …”

  “What are you talking about now? I’m old. I’m ill. I get some advantages …” He says, “David and Saul … David and Goliath …”

  I don’t get it.

  He said dimly, nobly, distantly—like some old tall movie star—“How many boys have that with their fathers?”

  “What? David and Goliath?” I don’t try to pretend he’s my friend—he’s a failed father who is ill and has some sort of fantasy about us being wartime friends.

  Life is not entirely without its mercies; it is not entirely demonic or without limit. To notice the shape of Dad’s breathing is like trying to hear a sentence; to hear a sentence is like following directions to find a gas station in a strange town. My awareness of his breath, partly medical, partly embarrassed is, in the end, as if I were in the presence of a male Medusa’s face, a merde-oozer. He’s not going to try to grab me when I stand up. I tend to try to be stonily male in Dad’s presence, showing off.

  Daddy, blond-haired, large-muscled, softening, partly rotted, laughs at something: “Ha-ha. Ha-ha …”

  Part of the boy’s somewhat meager collection of intimate facts is this brief, risky stage of a tie to S. L. Silenowicz. His arms, his neck, his voice among the tiles (a stately baritone, jaded), the heat of his presence are part of the maybe after all truly half-sacred dirty vocabularies of The Real.

  My father’s breath has become in these minutes a frightened snoring, a grossly skimming and scraping along sound: frightened spurts of uneven breath. He is faking it. He is awake to his power to affect me.

  “You sound O.K. today …” I say and stand up.

  He says, “Spare the bullshit and spoil me.” I stick out my arm to keep him at a distance and move, in my pajamas to the shower. I will undress behind the purple shower curtain.

  He says, “Wiley, I’m a young man and I’m sick and I have to die. How do you think that makes me feel? I’m done for. Well, you can kiss my ass, all of you.… Christ. Hell—I’m scared—I’m not ashamed of it,” he says to the curtain which I am now behind. “I can’t take care of anyone, I can’t take care of you, I’m sick. I’m sick of being sick. I wouldn’t apologize to God Himself, do you hear me. Make God apologize to me—that’s the ticket. What do you think of that? He would if he was a gentleman and not a devil. You ever been scared? Well, what I want to tell you, my advice to you is, you want to be a goodguy, take me as I am. I don’t want to be a hero no more, no more, no more …” No more, no more, no more was from a jazz song. “You don’t know what it’s like to be sick …”

  “I’ve been sick …”

  “You’ve never been sick.… You’ve never been sick like this.… No one knows. It hurts all the time. I’m scared all the goddamned time.”

  I know, you told me, I say silently.

  “IT’S TERRIBLE EVERY SINGLE MINUTE EVERY SINGLE DAY, IT’S TERRIBLE DAY AND NIGHT—YOU WANT TO SEE THE SHOW? YOU WANT TO SEE ME DIE IN LITTLE PIECES? I’m dying, you think that’s funny? You want to see the elephant die? I’m not playing anyone’s game anymore, do you hear me?” I’d turned the water on in the shower. “You can go to hell—everyone can go to hell. It can all go to hell. I don’t want any of this.… It’s not living. My heart is no good. And the goddamned doctors’re stupid—stupid and mean—they’re killers. What do they know? They know how to send a bill. They don’t feel anything. They don’t feel any of it.… I am dying like a dog.… Every son-of-a-bitch and his cousin want me to go easy on them.… They tell me to act like a man. I’m not gonna do it. I live on charity. I hope every l
ast one of those sons-of-bitches has to go through what I’m going through. They can kiss my ass. I got no time for their stupid filth.”

  For a moment, my mind’s defenses are peeled back like a foreskin. I don’t know what it means, the brutal excitement of being close to a man like him, to a guy who says that stuff. My eyes and mouth harden as in school when I stop listening, harden with darkness, with blindness, with sophisticated stupidity.

  But then I change my mind and listen partly in retrospect: I figure Dad’s speech is man stuff. I assume S.L. is realer even than my sense of him which is real too. My real, present-tense sensibility now today is closer to hearing him than when I was young; the veils over sounds, over intentions are torn … I see that he has secret shames—and conceit. Decorums, grammars, school correctness … of the sort there is among boys not in a classroom.

  I remember when my body started to get sexual in the real way, balls dropping, the first unchildish hair, the first sizable boniness here and there. Then came the change in dreams and then my face changed, my skin and the size of my lips, and then my voice altering—and my new humors, et cetera … I remember how unspeakable in school that change was. I am interested in a know-it-all apprentice way: I’m one of those kids who sort of personally exist.

  Childhood had seemed fantastic to me even when I was a child, the sweetness of things, the size—sometimes fantastic with disaster. Behind the curtain I have three-quarters of an erection; it is painful to me, the weird uncertainty of susceptible potency. I am a boy, an apprentice-man. Daddy said to me once, The carrot, the carrot-dick stuff, that can k-k-kill you.… He says now with a certain friendliness: “You have to jack off for both of us, that stuff can kill me.”