Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  I called Ben Zack again yesterday.

  She was still not there.

  "I asked for number four.

  She said she wanted more."

  "Although I remember her very well, of course, of course. Then you don't know what happened to her, do you?"

  I told Ben Zack my name was Horace White. He didn't think he remembered me.

  "I asked for number five."

  I asked for Mrs. Yerger and was so glad when he said he didn't think he remembered her either.

  "I felt it come alive."

  "She was that very big, broad woman who was put in charge of the file room from someplace else and said she was going to fire all of us if we didn't shape up soon."

  "Perhaps she didn't stay long, Horace," Ben Zack apologized. "It was all so long ago. Somebody else called up a few weeks ago to ask about Virginia Markowitz also. Isn't it odd? Isn't it odd that there are still people who call up for her after so many years?"

  I asked for Tom.

  "Tom who?"

  "Thumb."

  "Thumb?"

  "Johnson. He worked in the file room too when Virginia and Mr. Lewis and you were there. He left to go into the army."

  "He isn't here now. There's hardly anybody here now."

  Tom Terrific, of course, who had given me the handwriting I use and who was able to stick it to Marie Jencks whenever she wanted him to in a way I wished I could and knew I could not. I couldn't even do it to Virginia, and I wasn't really afraid of her.

  I asked for me.

  I was not there either. (I had never done that before.)

  It made me mad to hear that.

  "But I'm pretty sure I remember who you mean, Horace," he said. "He was that nice-looking, polite boy with a good sense of humor, wasn't he? No, I don't know what ever became of him."

  Neither do I. (I don't feel even distantly connected to him.)

  It would have made me glad to hear I was still working there in the file room as a nice-looking, polite, seventeen-year-old boy with a good sense of humor (at least I'd know where that part of me was while I scrounge around looking for the others), cracking jokes as I carried my incident folders back and forth past Virginia's desk, humming "Take it in your hand, Mrs. Murphy," or whistling:

  "Johnny, come tickle me.

  You know just where.

  Under my petticoat,

  You'll find a bush of hair.

  If you don't tickle me.

  In the right place,

  I'll lift up my petticoat.

  And pee right in your face."

  We had other dirty songs we loved too.

  I could find that right place now and wish I had a chance to prove it. I wish I had her on her back right now (and that I was the one who was older. She is twenty-one. I am twenty-eight). There'd be more than just bone with her. I wouldn't be afraid. (I don't think I'd be afraid.) There is just bone with so many of them now. (I get black and blue marks instead of ecstasy. I might still be afraid of Marie Jencks. I was enamored of her size and flashy good looks. After I found out about her and Tom, I was afraid. Her yellow hair seemed cold and crackly, her skin looked rough, and I often dreamed of the things growing in the cluttered junctures of her thighs as mossy crustacean claws, dark and barnacled as uncooked lobsters, if indeed they were hers. The smeared rectangular smile of vivid lipstick on the face they bore along beyond them was hers as the pincers advanced to seize, engulf, and consume me. Poor Tom. I often feared for him in that cavernous burlap wilderness that fascinated and repelled me. Maybe that's what happened to him. I envied him.) Virginia, at least, was soft and kind. More and more often lately I find myself wishing I had remained on closer terms with my sister and her family, and with my brother's wife and her children and even with her second husband. She married again and had at least one more child. She sent a card. They are nieces and nephews and might even enjoy a visit from me for a few minutes. Some people don't mind their uncles. I wish I were part of a large family circle and enjoyed it. I would like to fit in. I wish I believed in God. I liked shelled walnuts and raisins at home when I was a child and cracked the walnuts and mixed them all up with the raisins in a dish before I began eating. My mother sent out for ice cream often in the spring and summer. In the fall we had good charlotte russes. I would spin tops. I remember the faces of street cleaners.

  I was so distracted to hear from Ben Zack that I was not in the file room anymore that I left work early to drink alone in Red Parker's apartment. I began making phone calls.

  I called an airline stewardess I'd met who was out of town. Her roommate had a date. I tried a model I met at a photographer's party last week who said she was desperate for help in finding some kind of temporary work, but I wasn't sure of her last name or even that she was really a model, and I was unable to locate her in the phone book or obtain a number on what I thought was her street from directory assistance. (Telephone companies are putting more and more announcements on records that are no more efficient than people.) I called an actress I've known for several years and got her answering service. I called a woman I know who's divorced from a man I knew; her son told me she had driven to the shore that day to try to sell their summer house. I called a soft hooker I know who's always glad of the chance to pick up a dinner and fifty dollars, but she was already busy for dinner (or said she was) and was leaving the next morning for a week in Barbados with a man who was older than I was and had much more money. (By then I should have gone home and fucked my wife — I thought of that. She would have been a pushover, unless she hadn't sobered up graciously from the day's imbibing. Wine gives her headaches. Whiskey makes her sick. I have my problems.

  "I don't feel well," I could hear her bleat. "Can't you understand?")

  So I called a widow with two children in private school instead who sounded doomed: she told me in a flat, barren voice that she was going to try getting by alone from now on rather than waste any more time going out with men like me who had no intention of ever marrying her. (She didn't enjoy sex anyway.) It was getting her nowhere. I called Jane. She was out (I was relieved). Her roommate sounded younger than my daughter and dumber than my secretary and seemed squeaky and disappointed, as though I had interrupted her timetable for putting her hair up in large pink rollers. I didn't leave my name. (I would have been ashamed to.)

  "Did I interrupt you? I'm sorry."

  "I thought you were somebody else."

  "Were you very busy?"

  "I was doing something."

  "Were you putting your hair up in pink rollers?"

  "That's for me to know and you to find out."

  I called Penny, who had just come in from another one of her singing lessons and exercise classes and begged me to give her an hour and a half to wash up and straighten the apartment. I was there in fifty minutes. She was still damp and fragrant from her bath.

  "Please, baby," she requested gently. I had opened her robe. "Go a little slow. I still get scared when I see you start so fast."

  Penny has an alabaster body that never fails to astonish me with its sturdy beauty every time I see it again. I think I must gasp loudly and glare voraciously. Her white neck flushes. I came three times with her (and think I could have gone four. It was just like the army again) and was back in Red Parker's apartment with the newspapers before midnight. (It was an unqualified success.)

  I really don't like spending the whole night with anybody but my wife, not even Penny. (That's one reason I never take girls with me on overnight business trips and am surprised by men that do.) I guess I'm used to my wife. I like waking up with her. I like it better than waking alone. I had to use Red Parker's apartment again because I had nowhere else to go. I did not want to go home. I may have to get a small apartment of my own. I will have to lie to my wife about it. I lied to Penny, who thought I was on the last train back to Connecticut. I made her come once, the second time (when I could take my time and work on her as scientifically as she likes — it is work), and that is all she wants.
Her neck and pale face flushed. The third one was all for me. She made me coffee afterward and hinted I could stay the night. (I felt so much at home I didn't want to.) Someone like Amazonian Marie Jencks would have suctioned me right back up into the womb with a single siphoning contraction, and then puffed me out on a flat trajectory into the spongy, red catacombs of a testicle belonging to a man riding the subway trains in search of a curvy backside to splash me back out against. That's what I call dismemberment. That's regression. (It wasn't so bad living in my old man's scrotum, as far as I can recall. It was warm and humid, and there was lots of companionship. I had a ball.)

  (That was a good one.)

  Maybe I do love my wife. I think I would have been stricken sightless and mute and turned into a dangling form of dingy cement or sodden papier-mвchй from the top of my head down if I'd ever been forced to mate with Marie's. (She was so large and domineering.)

  "I asked for number six."

  I asked for Marie Jencks.

  "Oh, yes," Ben Zack remembered immediately. "I'll always remember Marie."

  "The sperm began to mix."

  "Her husband passed away from heart trouble at a very early age. They didn't have heart surgery in those days. She married again soon after and moved with her husband to Florida to cash in on the land boom."

  I was not ready for Marie Jencks then. I was not ready for Virginia. My wife has brown nipples as lovely as any I've ever seen in the movies or still photographs and a nest of curly black hair I can rest my head on snugly. I feel safe with her. I feel safe with Penny. (I wonder why I always think of Penny last.) I don't think a human twat has teeth and don't believe I ever did. I've got this idiot child of mine I don't want and don't know what to do with. He belongs to me. Little Derek. (He doesn't even know what he is.) He is small, heartrending. He is unbearable. (He cannot be borne.) What threats he will pose for me later. What hazards he poses for me now. What will they do to him? Who will take care of him if I don't? How will he survive? What will become of the poor little thing if he doesn't die soon?

  There's no getting away from it. I've got to get rid of him. There's no getting away from it. (He is so sweet. People who meet him tell us how sweet he is. They are being sweet when they say so.)

  I've got to get rid of him and don't know how. And there's no one I can ask. There's no one I can tell I even want to, not even my wife, who wants to get rid of him also (but doesn't dare say so to me). Especially not my wife. We blame each other for him, when we aren't blaming ourselves, and that's another thing we haven't been able to say to each other yet.

  "It's your fault, not mine."

  We have to try to make believe he was nobody's fault, that he was a circumstantial twist of nature, a fluke. (A fluke is a fish.) All of us want to get rid of him, but only my daughter is honest enough to say so (and is set upon like a pariah by one or the other of us).

  "Is he going to have to be with us forever?" she'll complain in a temper.

  "What do you care?" I'll lash back at her, as though she had said that just to wound me. "You'll be away at college."

  (She might stay home, just to torture me. I sometimes feel that if not for Derek we would never quarrel with each other. I know it's a lie.)

  He does not seem to be mine. He may be my wife's.

  There is no idiocy in my family that I know of (or in hers). My wife has begged me not to use that word (which may be why I do. She winces every time).

  "How would you like me to describe it?" I inquire, with a lordly air of inexhaustible tolerance. "Do you think it would help him much if I called it genius?"

  "It's heartless." She shudders, pale and close to tears. "Mean. I get so frightened when I see you so cold."

  It is ungodly the way I am able to forget about him for long periods of time, even when he is close by. (I blot him out and try to keep him out.) I think of myself as having just two children. One says:

  "What would you do if I came home with a Black boyfriend? And wanted to marry him."

  The other asks:

  "What would you do with me if I couldn't speak?"

  "But you can," I've answered.

  "If I fell down the ropes one day in the gymnasium when I was trying to climb them and hurt my head and Mr. Forgione had to carry me home and I couldn't speak anymore, either?"

  "I used to be afraid of rope climbing and falling down too," I try to explain encouragingly. "And of swimming naked in the pool in the high school also."

  "I never said anything about swimming naked in a pool," he protests firmly (as though that fear had not yet taken root in him, and I had just implanted it). "Did I?" he demands.

  I am embarrassed.

  "Suppose I had an extra set of car keys made after I got my license," says my daughter, "and used the car when you were away. You couldn't stop me, could you? What would you do, have me arrested?"

  The third one doesn't speak to me at all.

  I have conversations that do not seem to be mine.

  I feel afloat (legless). Legless, I walk around with headaches that do not seem to be mine (on feet that do. Arches ache and seem to be crumbling, I have a spur on one heel, middle toes are hammered, others are gnarled and require Band-Aids or corn plasters frequently, the tender pads of flesh on the bottom of my toes chafe and inflame if I do not switch pairs of socks and shoes, the soles itch dryly in cold weather, the tissue between the gnarled end toes splits and peels and I have to pour talcum powder in. There is no limit to the ills I could describe). I do not always feel securely connected to my legs or to my own past. The cable of continuity is not unbroken; it is not thick and strong; it wavers and fades, wears away in places to slender, frayed strands, breaks. Much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine. Mountainous segments of my history appear to be missing. There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me may have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present. I sit in my office and think I am at home. I sit in my study and think I am at my office firing Johnny Brown or retiring Ed Phelps, in Penny's or some other girl's underthings, rolling them off, or in a bank, hotel lobby, or police station searching my pockets for some form of evidence or identification required of me. It may be that I talk to myself already without being aware of it. How debasing. No one has said so, but I don't think I do it when I'm with someone who might. I think I do it only when I think I'm alone. Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember. Ha, ha.)

  "What? Did you say something?" one or the other of the members of my family has shot at me when I assumed I was alone and unobserved in my study or in some other room in my house, deep in thought.

  "What? Nothing," I reply, startled and shamefaced. "I was just thinking."

  Or:

  "I was just reading the paper."

  (Probably I was deep in thought imagining myself orchestrating rhythmic, polysyllabic replies to Green's thrusts without tripping over a single vowel or consonant.)

  "You were laughing in your sleep again last night," my wife will say.

  And I won't know if she's toying with me or not. It's the sort of lie I might make up for her, if I had thought of it first. I can never remember what it was I was laughing about when she tells me I laugh in my sleep. I wish I could. I could use a big laugh on days when I have these headaches that do not seem to be mine.

  I get the willies in my spare time; I don't normally sleep well (although my wife tells me I do); I get the blues I can't lose; they decide when to leave (I either talk to myself or believe I might); I get depressed and don't know why; I mourn for something and don't know what; (legless) I walk around with jitters, headaches, and sadnesses ballooning and squiggling about inside me that seem to belong to somebody else. Is this schizophrenia, or merely a normal, natural, typical, wholesome, logical, universal schizoid formation? (I could plead temporary insanity. They would call it a mercy killing. There would be testimony under oath that it was do
ne to put him out of his misery. He isn't miserable.)