Something Happened

by Джозеф Хеллер

  "I'm sure she must be counting," my wife has repeated worriedly. "They've had us there twice since we had them here. Three times, if you count that cocktail party they gave for Horace White. I never expected to be invited to that."

  "He doesn't."

  "I'd be so embarrassed if I ran into them."

  "I'm sure."

  "I'm glad. I would like to give another nice dinner party soon. I'm glad I don't have to."

  Arthur Baron lives not far away in a much better house in a much richer part of Connecticut than I do, although the part of Connecticut we do live in is far from bad. He has more land. (I own one acre, he owns four.) Most of the people around me seem to make more money than I do. Where I live now is perfectly adequate: and when I get my raise and move, it will again be among people who make more money than I do. This is known as upward mobility, a momentous force in contemporary American urban life, along with downward mobility, which is another momentous force in contemporary American urban life. They keep things stirring. We rise and fall like Frisbees, if we get off the ground at all, or pop flies, except we rise slower, drop faster. I am on the way up, Kagle's on the way down. He moves faster. Only in America is it possible to do both at the same time. Look at me. I ascend like a condor, while falling to pieces. Maybe the same thing happens in Russia, but I don't live there. Every river in the world, without exception, flows from north to south as it empties into the sea. Except those that don't, and the laws of the conservation of energy and matter stipulate harshly and impartially that energy and matter can either (sic) be created nor (sic) destroyed.

  A lot that has to do with me. My dentist scraping at one tooth in my socket is more painful to me than my wife's cancer will be if she ever gets one. I get corns in the same spot on the little toe of my right foot, no matter what shoes I wear.

  Arthur Baron has had us to his home for dinner half a dozen times the past two and a half years (and never serves enough food. We are hungry when we reach home). And we have had him to our house once. We have a good time. He usually will have just one other person from the company, whom I may or may not have met before, and three other amiable couples with occupations unrelated to our own. There is room for just twelve at his dining room table. The evenings are quiet and end before midnight. The subject of Derek has never come up at his house and we tend to feel we could gloss by it without discomfort there if it did. Nothing unpleasant ever comes up; no one's misfortunes are ever mentioned. The fact that they do not serve enough is a prickly trait for us to absorb, for we like both Arthur Baron and his wife and enjoy going there, even though we are uncomfortable. His wife is an unassuming woman with whom we almost feel at ease.

  We had Arthur Baron and his wife to our house for dinner just about a year ago (time does fly). And we served too much food. People tend to eat more than they want to at our house. We like to offer guests a choice of meats and desserts. We also like to show we are people of lusty appetite who know how to entertain generously. My wife was troubled awhile that they might take it as a criticism.

  "Do it your way, honey," I encouraged her. "Not the way someone else would."

  The evening went marvelously. Intuition told me it was the proper time to invite him. (Once we invited Green. He told me he didn't want to come to my house for dinner, and we were relieved. There is an insulting honesty about Green that is refreshing afterward.) Wisely, I did not organize the evening around Arthur Baron. (We would have had the dinner anyway.)

  "Yes, Bob?"

  "Hello, Art. We're going to have some people over to dinner the third or fourth Saturday from now. We thought it would be nice if you and Lucille could come."

  "Love to, Bob. I'll have to check."

  "Fine, Art."

  Before noon that same day his wife phoned mine to say they were free either weekend and were pleased we had thought of asking them.

  They stayed late, and ate and drank more than we would have supposed. (I still wonder with some perplexity about the small amounts of food they prepare when they entertain. I guess they must be hungry too by the time we reach home.) I mixed tangy martinis that everyone drank, and the mood was lightened from the start. I thought of myself as courtly as I stirred and poured. I caught glimpses of myself in the mirror: I was utterly courtly. I wore a courtly smile. (I am vain as a peacock.) I had no one there from the company. I had a copyright lawyer, a television writer, an associate professor of marketing, a computer expert, the owner of a small public relations firm, and an engaging specialist in arbitrage with a leading brokerage, about whose work none of us knew much and all of us were curious (for a while). The wives were all pretty and vivacious. The conversation was lively. There was boisterous laughter. My wife gave recipe tips when asked. The Barons were nearly the last to leave.

  "Thanks, Bob. We really enjoyed it."

  "Thanks, Art, I'm glad you could come."

  My wife and I were aglow and enchanted with our success and made love. The evening went marvelously indeed, but it was written in the atmosphere — and my wily sixth-sense tells me it is still there — that we were not to invite him again for a long time, although it was much more than just okay to have done so then. My wife, a churchgoing Congregationalist, doesn't understand; she is instructed by a minister of God in matters of duty and hospitality. As a registered Republican, though, I know more about protocol.

  "Why not?" she wants to know, and there is a tinge of eagerness in her perseverance. "Aren't you getting along with him?"

  "We're getting along fine."

  "Don't you think they'll want to come?"

  "It isn't time."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "It's written in the atmosphere. Give a dinner party without them if you want to give one."

  My wife falters. Derek's a heavy presence in the home now and changes things. (Enthusiasm dwindles rapidly into lassitude and stillborn wishes. Long-range plans for joy turn dreary in contemplation of their fulfillment. Then she has nothing to do.) Then we have my daughter to cope with as well if she doesn't have a date of her own for that evening and decides to stay home to watch. Either she mingles with our guests more intimately than we want her to or passes through in silence with a countenance of rude displeasure that everyone can see, responding with the barest cold nod to the salutations of anyone there who knows her (and passes through again like that an hour later, every hour on the hour, until my wife mutters, "I'll kill her if she does that again" and goes to tell her off). The time may soon come when I'll have to order her acidly to keep out of sight completely whenever we have company, like Derek. (I don't like children hanging around when I visit other people, either.) Derek creates disturbing problems also in our relationship with our other children because of the attention we have had to concentrate on him and the large amount of money he costs. (Soon, I will have to start putting money aside for his future.)

  "How are the kids?" people feel obliged to inquire whenever they come to our house, or we go to theirs.

  It's a question I've learned to fear.

  "Fine, all fine," I feel obliged to reply with too much alacrity (in order to get off that subject as speedily as possible). "And yours?"

  Derek is a heavy presence outside the home as well, for my wife and I still nurture that special terror of walking into a frolicsome party at somebody else's house one evening and meeting socially one of the score of doctors and psychologists we've gone to in the past who know all about him, and all about us. It hasn't happened yet. We prefer large, noisy gatherings, at which public conversation is impossible; we are on guard at smaller, formal groups in which the discussion at any time might take an unpredictable turn to zero in on us. Then we must react hastily to divert it or sacrifice ourselves for a minute or so to talk evasively about something we don't want to talk about at all. (We have to admit it quickly. Admitting it may be good for other families. It isn't good for us. Everybody in the room turns uncomfortable suddenly.) Even at large parties, I have been taken aside often
by someone who feels closer to me than I do to him and asked confidentially in a hawking undertone:

  "That youngest boy of yours. How is he?"

  "Fine, fine," I respond. "Much better than we would have hoped."

  By now, my wife and I have had our fill — are sick and glutted to the teeth — of psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, speech therapists, psychiatric social workers, and any of all the others we've been to that I may have left out, with their inability to help and their lofty, patronizing platitudes that we are not to blame, ought not to let ourselves feel guilty, and have nothing to be ashamed of. All young doctors, I'm convinced, strive to be beetle-browed, and all older ones have succeeded.

  "Prick!" I have wanted to scream at them like an animal. "Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick!" I have wanted to shriek at all of them like a screech owl (whatever that is, including the two I went to see briefly in secret about myself). Why can't the simpleminded fools understand that we want to feel guilty, must feel guilty if we're to do the things we have to?

  Unperturbed, they would answer equably that my screaming at them was a way of trying to relieve myself of blame and call the repetition perseveration.

  And they would be right. And they would be wrong.

  I could tell stories. An outsider wouldn't believe the number of conflicting opinions the different doctors gave us and the backbiting judgments they made of each other, but we did. We believed them all, the good and the bad. And disbelieved as well (we had no choice) and had no choice but to search for others, like wandering supplicants.

  "It's organic."

  "It's functional."

  "It's largely organic with functional complications now."

  "He isn't deaf but may not be able to hear."

  "At least he's alive."

  "The prognosis is good."

  "For what?"

  "The prognosis is bad."

  "It would not be possible to offer a prognosis at this time."

  Not one of them ever had the candor, the courage, the common sense, the character to say:

  "Jesus — I really don't know."

  It began with:

  "You're making too much of it."

  And moved to:

  "He will never speak."

  "He probably will not surpass a mental age of five, if he attains that. His coordination and muscular control will never be good. It will require tremendous patience."

  We hate them all, the ones who were wrong and the ones who were right. After awhile, that made no difference. The cause didn't matter. The prognosis was absolute. The cause did matter. It was organic (ceramic. The transistors are there). It just doesn't work the way others do. (A radio will not work like a television set.) There was no malfunction. It worked the way it was built to (worked perfectly, if looked at their way). The architecture's finished. The circuits can't be changed. Nothing is broken; there's nothing they can find to be fixed.

  "Why can't they do it with surgery?" my wife's asked me.

  "They wouldn't know where to cut and stitch."

  He's a simulacrum.

  "If only we hadn't had him," my wife used to lament. "He'd be so much better off if he'd never been born."

  "Let's kill the kid," I used to joke jauntily when I thought he was just innately fractious (I used to carry color snapshots of all three of my children in my wallet. Now I carry none), before I began to guess there might be something drastically wrong.

  I don't say that anymore.

  (Poor damaged little tyke. No one's on your side.)

  He is a product of my imagination. I swear to Christ I imagined him into existence.

  We do feel guilty. We do blame ourselves. We're sorry we have him. We're sorry people know we do. We feel we have plenty to be ashamed of. We have him.

  My head is a cauldron.

  My mind is an independent metropolis teeming with flashes, shadows, and figures, with tiny playlets and dapper gnomes, day and night. My days are more lucid. I never think of Derek in danger; I only think of my boy or myself.

  I have melodrama in my noodle, soap operas, recurring legends of lost little children trying wretchedly to catch up with themselves, or someone else, the day before. They stare. They are too sad to move. They are too motionless to cry. There are blurred histories of myself inside requiring translation and legibility. There is pain — there is so much liquid pain. It never grows less. It stores itself up. Unlike heat or energy, it does not dissipate. It all always remains. There's always more than before. There's always enough near the surface to fuel a tantrum or saturate a recollection. Tiny, barely noted things — a sound, a smell, a taste, a crumpled candy wrapper — can mysteriously set off thrumming vibrations deep within. It's mine. I have more than enough to share with everyone I know. I have enough for a lifetime, and someday soon when I am fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety, I will overhear someone speak the word birthday, brother, father, mother, sister, son, little boy, doggie, frankfurter, or lollipop and my eyes will dissolve into tears and I will throb inside with evocations of ancient, unresolved tragedies in which I took part replayed in darkness behind curtains that have come down. That will happen. It happens to me now. Frankfurter. A poignant nostalgia befalls me. Merry-go-round. I want to cry. Cotton candy. My heart breaks. I feel I can't go on.

  I want to keep my dreams.

  Ball-bearing roller skates. I melt.

  I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

  I miss my father, they told me. As if I didn't know. (I miss my boy now too. He is pulling away from me. He does his homework in his room without my help and doesn't talk to me anymore about what is happening to him at school. I don't know if he's more unhappy or less.) They didn't tell me anything I didn't know. They couldn't help. They said I was perfectly normal — which was the most deplorable thing I have ever been told! With time and much treatment, that condition might be remedied. They envied my sex life. (So do I.) The pity, we agreed, is that I don't enjoy it more.

  (The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.)

  I have acrimony, they told me (which is also normal. I have more pain than acrimony. My mind is a storehouse of pain, a vast, invisible reservoir of sorrows as deep as I am old, waiting always to be tapped and set flowing by memory. I can discharge acrimony. I can only experience pain).

  There are times when I am attacked from within by such acrimonious enmity toward people I like who have suffered serious personal tragedies or business failure that if something (or someone else) inside me were to give voice to the infamous words that leap to mind, I would be put away and reviled, with no possibility ever of absolution or apology. (The tragedies of people who are not close to me move me distantly, if at all.)

  "Good for you! It serves you right!" I want to sneer.

  (I want to spit.)

  I'm afraid sometimes I might. (I have sat at tables with men I've known a long time and have wanted to touch their hand.)

  It's not I who wants to kick Kagle in the leg. New people are hatching inside my head always, whether I want them to or not, and become permanent residents the moment I take note of them. We are often at cross purposes. They have time. They have time to work without interruption at whatever it is they came there to do, and they saunter away with great self-possession into darknesses I've no
t been able to penetrate. They weave back and forth in droves through a labyrinth whose tunnels I've never seen. I have a small cemetery there lying on a diagonal with orderly rows of identical headstones, an image left by a photograph, perhaps, or the reduction of one actually seen long ago. People may be buried there. Every once in a while startled three-dimensional thoughts, fancies, or series of new old recollections go flying across my mind like flocks of sparrows and disappear in unlit underground holes. I can summon them back when I want to if I can remember to make the effort, but only one at a time. The man who wants to make me kick Kagle in the leg is a worldly, relaxed fellow with black silk socks and a gray pinstripe suit. He's a man about my own age with neatly trimmed white hair. He is little, of course; he has to be to fit inside. (Even all those sinister and gigantic ogres who've been menacing me in my nightmares all my life have been small; it's just that I am so much smaller.) He seems to know his way about the stone passageways of my brain much better than I do, for he reappears in different settings, often reading a newspaper with one ankle crossed comfortably over his knee, biding his time. He thinks he's got more time than I have. (He hasn't.) I think there's a sauna, for many of the more affluent, better-bred occupants of my thoughts seem the type that likes to scorch itself leisurely after playing squash. I suspect there's a homosexual haunt located somewhere secret. Tiny shops are all about at which wicked contraband is exchanged by grimy, unshaven men who know how. Grimy, unshaven men expose themselves to me and to children of both sexes and go unpunished. All crimes go unpunished.

  Vile these evil, sordid, miniature human beings who populate my brain, like living fingers with faces and souls. Some wear hats. People suffer. I suffer. Children wander. Women weep. Mothers lie on deathbeds. I am afraid — I have been afraid — a screaming, wailing, or sobbing might start at any instant inside my ears, be taken up by other tortured voices from within, and never stop. I would not know if I was imagining it. It would not matter. I would hear it. Minikins move, and I can feel them, and dirty, cynical old men with sharp crutches and pointy beards pass with insinuating glints in their cruel, unscrupulous eyes. They hurt. Ugolino eats a head: mine (that son of a bitch).