It's more fun for both of us now if we sting at least a little. I wonder if I'm the only middle-aged man in the whole world who still contains within himself his distant childhood fear of homosexual rape? Is that why that man invades my dreams?
"Get out!" I order clearly.
But what comes out are croaking grunts of pain that alarm my wife.
"What's the matter?"
"It's okay."
"You were screaming."
"What?"
"I don't know. Sounds."
"I was only groaning. I'm all right now."
My wife and children are never in danger then. They aren't even home. There's only me. He's coming after me. I've got no one I can ask about this but my family religious adviser or my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist enlightens me on this question by replying:
"Why do you ask that?"
"Because —»
"You bite your fingernails," he guesses.
"— I'm afraid. I have dreams and thoughts that trouble me, even when they're pleasant. I get headaches. I'm dissatisfied. I believe I suffer from thought disorders. I don't hear voices —»
"Ah," he observes in a long sigh.
"— and I never have hallucinations."
"What would you call this?"
"I smell excrement often."
"Ah?"
"But there is always dog shit on my shoe."
"You will have to learn," he says, "to walk more carefully."
I don't have a psychiatrist (the company takes a disapproving view of executives who are not happy) and my family religious adviser belongs to my wife. (He takes a disapproving view of people who are.)
I know I will have to stop biting my fingernails soon if I ever want to go much higher in the company than Kagle's job or grow up to be President of the United States of America someday when the job falls vacant and no one else wants it. I know I was sorry when John F. Kennedy was killed because he was shot in the head when neither he nor I expected him to be and because of the magazine and newspaper photos. They were gruesome. (They could have sold a million of them as souvenirs if they had thought of it.) Poor man. I hope that I am never shot in the head. He's scaled much smaller now in my imagination (but he's there. It's him. I'll take care of him for as long as I can); it's necessary he be reduced to miniature to fit inside my thoughts and move about in memories, whimsies, and night dreams and do unnoticed things on his own when I'm too busy with other duplicates and shades to bring him out and play with him. Other people might have him on half dollars; I've got him saved in my head. He's clean, glazed, handsome, grinning. His hair is glossy. I like him now. My wife's sister doesn't. His kid brother didn't live as long as he did. It isn't generally appreciated that Lyndon Baines Johnson was only forty-six and still a U.S. senator when he had the first of his heart attacks. It was all over for him right then. He never amounted to much after that. Eisenhower got better after his. His golf game improved. (So will mine.) Harry Truman died too. I knew he would. My own head hurts a good deal these days, and I haven't even been shot there. I get pains in the back of my neck too, very close to the top of my spine. Aspirins help. My wife's tranquilizers help me sleep. Three layers of tissue envelop my brain and spinal cord and are called, collectively, meninges. I was delighted to find out I had three. I didn't know I had any. Meningitis, then, is an inflammation of the head. Infectious meningitis is an infectious inflammation of the head. Meningitis appears frequently on military installations. Civilians get encephalitis, which is an inflammation of the substance of the brain and is often mistaken for sleeping sickness. People doze off into paralysis. It is another good cure for insomnia. I have grown too old now to worry foolishly about something like meningitis. I don't have chest pains yet. I have exchanged my infantile fears of meningitis for more adult infantile fears. I never give meningitis a thought anymore. (Ha, ha.) Meningitis kills. So do bullets in the head. Martin Luther King got one: several months after he died, our alert FBI stopped tapping his telephone (and started tapping mine). Meningitis ravages the nervous system, leaves one deaf, dumb, blind, paralyzed, and dead. I was even sorrier when Bobby Kennedy was killed because he was younger than John and the photos of him on the floor of that hotel kitchen were worse. He looked so weak and confused with his immense eyeballs adrift in their sockets and his outflung arms and legs lying angular and spindly. His shoes were still on. He was dressed in black for the occasion. He is covered with glaze now too. He will never sneeze. He is in my head now also. I have him tucked away. I will keep him warm. And there he will lie, until I die — or the day comes when I forget to remember him again. I don't know what will happen to him after that. He'll have to fend for himself. I don't know how he'll survive when I'm no longer able to take care of him. Or where. It used to be when I was hot for a girl there was torrid heat. Now I'm only horny. There's just an erection. My wife's sister does not approve of violence, she says, but was pleased when the Kennedys were killed, seeing grim justice prevail,
"They only got what they deserved," she said. "In a way, they'd really been asking for it."
My wife was sorry for the children.
I must remember not to smile too much. I must maintain a faзade. I must remember to continue acting correctly subservient and clearly grateful to people in the company and at the university and country clubs I'm invited to who expect to find me feeling humble, eager, lucky, and afraid. I travel less, come home more. (I'm keeping myself close to home base, which isn't home, of course, but the company.) My wife is pleased to have me around, even though we quarrel. My daughter suspects I'm checking on her. We suspect she's been using one of the cars when we're out — she has older friends with junior driving licenses — and that she's been threatening my boy with disfigurement and blindness if he tells. (I think I might kill her if I found out she's been threatening him with death or mutilation.) Derek can't say anything. I wonder what impressions flow through his mind (he does have one, I must force myself to remember, and ears and eyes that see and hear) and what sense he is able to make of any of them. I would not care to wiretap his head. I would hear much crackling, I think. I think of him as receiving stimuli linearly in unregulated currents of sights and sounds streaming into one side of his head and going out the other into the air as though like radio signals through a turnip or through some finely tuned, capstan-shaped, intricate, and highly sensitive instrument of ceramic, tungsten, and glass that does everything but work. I can't call it a terminal, because nothing ends there. I think of my own thoughts as circular, spherical, orbicular, a wheel turning like the world in a basin of sediment into which so much of what I forget to think about separates and drops away into the bottom layers of murk and sludge. (I even forget the things I want to try to remember.) Like a vacuum tube, he can peak suddenly into fiery heat. Like a transistor, he is affected invisibly by jarring and by variations in humidity and temperature. I have a son with a turnip in his head. I think there must be static and other kinds of interference there, and possibly then is when he has his tantrums. (I have static in my own that leads to cranky outbursts at home and wish my head would break open and let the crackling pressure escape.) He does have a sweet face. All my children do, and my wife is more attractive for her age than any other woman her age I know. I wonder what architectural connections stand unfinished in his brain. Is he too ignorant to apprehend yet that he is an idiot and will grow up to be an imbecile? Does he know he's supposed to be wishing me dead and reacting with fear I'll murder or castrate him for experiencing that hope? He'd better learn to keep his filthy designs on my wife to himself. He is blameless. I dream he's dead also and am inconsolable when I awake because I'm sorry for him and know I'm dreaming of me and don't entirely want him gone.
"What were you dreaming about last night?" my wife wants to know as she fixes breakfast.
"Derek."
"You were laughing."
"You. I dreamed you were fucking another man."
"You were laughing."
"You were fun
ny. A big black spade. You grabbed me by the prick. I like girls who grab my prick."
"Should I grab it now?"
"I have to get to work. Make dinner tonight."
"I had a horrible dream."
"You were crying."
"In your dream?"
"In yours."
"Why didn't you wake me up? I dreamt I was crying and couldn't stop."
"I was busy in my dream. Maybe it was the same dream. Did you dream you were fucking a big black nigger last night?"
"I don't have to. I get all I want from you."
"I think the bitch is stealing one of our cars. He started to say something at dinner last night and she gave him a look."
"I'll ask her."
"I'll trap her. Make dinner tonight. I like trapping her."
"You're sure coming home a lot these days."
"So what?"
"I didn't mean anything. I'm glad."
"Neither did I."
"And you don't have to yell."
"And I'm not yelling. I don't see why I can't raise my voice around here once in a while without being accused of yelling. Everyone else does. You do. I don't know what you're so edgy about."
"You're the one who's edgy this morning. I'm glad when you come home. You even whistle. Maybe you're starting to enjoy being here with us."
"Of course I do."
"Is everything all right?"
"Everything's fine. And would be even better if you stopped asking me if everything's all right."
"I knew it wouldn't last until you got out of the kitchen."
"No wonder I can't wait to get to work."
"If anything's wrong at the office I wish you'd tell me."
"Everything is fine."
"What's wrong?" Green demands of me bluntly as soon as I get to work.
"Wrong?"
"I said it loudly enough." (Oh, Christ — he's in a mood also, and he's taken me unawares.)
"Nothing."
"Don't lie to me."
His exophthalmic eyes are glaring at me with moist and sadistic petulance, and his sensual face is hot and beady around the brows and mouth. Green will normally not allow himself to perspire where other people can see him. (I wonder if he is bothered more this morning by his thyroid deficiency or his enlarged prostate.) He is wearing a large, soft, box-plaid camel suit with notched, wide lapels and a gray vertical weave and fine violet lines, and can get away with it. The rest of us have to wait for festivals and expositions, although box-plaid slacks are okay on weekends at barbecues, marinas, and country clubs. Green is a flamboyant presence with an overwhelming vocabulary that keeps most of his superiors in the company aloof and ill at ease. Horace White shuns him like the plague. Green courts Horace White; White flees from him toward Black, who despises Green and vilifies him openly; Green retreats, nursing his wounds.
"Black is an animal," Green has complained to me. "An ape. There's no point talking to him."
Black is an anti-Semite. Green waits and regards me truculently from behind his desk as though I were to blame for his thyroid, prostate, colitis, or Black.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't lie to me unconvincingly," he begins almost before I finish, as though he can anticipate my replies. "It's all right to lie if I don't suspect you. I'm your boss. Don't lie to anyone around here unconvincingly if you want to keep working for me. I don't want anyone working for me to be held in contempt by anyone but me."
"My fucking wife."
"Don't use that word with me."
"You asked me, didn't you?"
"I'm not Andy Kagle."
"I wouldn't tell that to Andy Kagle."
"I like your wife."
"No, you don't, Jack. So do I. What's wrong?"
"I've had four wives and you've never heard me say anything uncomplimentary about any one of them, even though I've hated them all."
"She's not so crazy about you."
"Don't tattle."
"She thinks you're a bastard because you wouldn't let me speak at the convention."
"Stop using her."
"Oh, come on, Jack. You don't like her that much."
"I don't like her at all, if you want to stay on that subject. Would you like me to tell you why?"
"No."
"She drinks too much at some parties and not enough at others. She's stiff and uncomfortable and makes other people that way. She gives off clouds of social uneasiness at company affairs the way other people give off smells."
"I said I didn't want you to."
"She isn't much. She isn't rich and she isn't famous or social and she won't help you and she won't help me."
"You asked me what was wrong, didn't you?"
"And you're using your wife to avoid telling me."
"I'm not. What are you in such a bad mood about?"
"Why are you in a good mood?"
"I'm not, now."
"You're sulking, now," he retorts, grimacing, in a cadence of echoing ridicule, and I surmise that he too may be vulnerable to that squirting impulse to mimic hatefully someone who is vexing him unbearably.
It's called echolalia.
It's called echolalia (the uncontrollable and immediate repetition of words spoken by another person. I looked it up. Ha, ha).
Ha, ha.
Ha, ha.
(It can go on forever.)
It can go on forever.
"Shouldn't I be?" I ask.
"Shouldn't you be?" he asks.
"What's up, Jack?"
"What's up, Jack?" I expect to hear him reply to me in my own voice, as in a nightmare (as I often hear myself lashing back at my wife or daughter in their own voices when I am too riled up and discombobulated to think of a more mature way of hurting).
"Have you been out somewhere sniffing around after a better job?" I hear him inquire instead.
"Better job?"
"You won't find one without my help."
"Should I be?"
"You wouldn't even know where to look."
"What's wrong with my position here?" I feel myself beginning to perspire.
"You're starting to sweat," he says.
"I'm not."
"It's on your face and coming through your shirt. Why do you give me asinine denials? You know I wasn't asking you what was wrong before when I asked you what was wrong. I didn't mean wrong. I was asking you what was right. I was being sarcastic. You've been acting funny. And I don't mean funny when I say funny. I mean strange. And I don't mean strange, either. I mean buoyant. You've been doing a lot of whistling around here lately."
"I didn't realize."
"And you don't stay on key. You must think you're the only one in the company who ever heard of Mozart. You've been making yourself pleasant to a lot of people here I don't like. Kagle, Horace White, Arthur Baron. Lester Black. Even Johnny Brown, and you make more money than he does."
"It's my job. I do work for them."
"Fawning? Let me handle all the fawning for the department. I'm better at it than you. They enjoy watching me fawn. Nobody cares about you."
"Kagle?"
"Kagle's through," he snaps impatiently with a glow of satisfaction. "He spits when he talks and walks with a limp. I could have his job. I probably could. I wouldn't take it. I don't want to sell. Peddling is demeaning. Peddling yourself is most demeaning. I know. I've been trying to peddle myself into a vice-presidency and haven't been able to, and that's most demeaning of all, when you peddle yourself and fail. If you tell anyone I said that, I'll deny it and fire you. The company won't fire you, but I will. I will, you know. Red Parker."
"What about him?"
"Steer clear of him. He's been going downhill ever since his wife was killed in that automobile crash."
"I feel sorry for him."
"I don't. He wasn't that fond of her when she was alive. He drinks too much and does no work. Steer clear of people going downhill. The company values that. The company values rats that know when to deser
t a sinking ship. You've been using his apartment."
"I wash up. I bring my wife there too."
"You've been acting like a simpering college fool with that young girl in the Art Department."
"No, I haven't," I reply defensively. (Now my pride is stung.) "Jack, that's only kidding." (I can feel my eyes welling with tears. They must be moist as his own.)
"She isn't pretty enough. Her salary's small."
Something Happened Page 40