Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  "It's okay," he says, trying to comfort me.

  "You can trust me. I'm not yelling at you now, am I? I'm speaking softly. Ain't I?"

  He nods mistrustfully (and I want to raise my voice and begin yelling at him again to make him believe I never yell at him at all. But I don't. I don't want to scare him again. I don't ever really want to frighten any of them and am always sorry and disgusted with myself afterward when I do. Almost always. But only after I succeed in bullying them; if I try to bully them and fail, I am distraught. And frightened. I am sorry now that I have just intimidated them all; and in speaking to my boy, I am trying to apologize to my wife and daughter as well. I want them to see I am sorry; but I don't want to say so. I want to be forgiven).

  "Why do you look that way?" I ask him, in a troubled, slightly nagging voice (pleading with him to relax and feel free and safe and happy with me). "Why do you look so worried?"

  "It's okay."

  "You can trust me," I promise.

  "It's just the way I look."

  "And I wasn't yelling at you before, either," I continue uncontrollably. "Sometimes when a person raises his voice and speaks loudly, it isn't because he's yelling at you or even angry, but only because he wants you to believe what he's saying. He does it for ... emphasis. He wants to be ... emphatic. That's what the word emphatic means." I pause in annoyance as I see my boy catch my daughter's eyes for an instant and then roll his gaze upward with a dramatic look of tedium (as both my children are apt to do ostentatiously when one of us is lecturing them at length for doing something we deem hazardous, or inundating them with unnecessary directions or repetitious questions. I would rather have him bored with me now and making fun than panic-stricken. So I continue peaceably, persuasively, instead of reprimanding him tartly, although my dignity was offended for a second). "Now that's what I was doing when I raised my voice a bit before," I continue. "I was being ... emphatic. I wanted you to believe that I wasn't going to yell at you and that I wasn't angry with you. And it was exactly the same when I was speaking with them," I lie. "I wasn't yelling at them, either."

  "I know," he says. "I know it now."

  "And I'm not yelling at you now, am I?"

  "No."

  "So I was right, wasn't I?"

  "Yes. It's okay."

  "Good. I'm glad you understand. And that's why ..." I conclude wryly, with a smile--and somehow I know he guesses the joke I'm about to make and that he is going to interrupt and make it for me. I pause, to give him time.

  "... you yelled at me!" he says.

  "Right!" I guffaw.

  (Our minds are very much alike, his and mine, in our humor and our forebodings.)

  "Do I," he ventures ahead boldly on his wave of success, with a sidelong glance at my wife that glitters with impish intent, "give you a pain in the ass, too?"

  "Oh, my!" I exclaim. (My first impulse is to guffaw again; my next is to protect him from any sanctimonious reproof that might come from my wife for his using the word ass. Quickly, clowning, laughing, mugging with grossly burlesqued alarm, before my wife can react at all, I cry:) "Now, she's going to yell at you!"

  "She's not!"

  "No?"

  "Are you?"

  But my wife is glad (not mad) and laughs merrily with relief (because she sees I am glad now, too, and not mad at her or my daughter anymore).

  "No, but you're a devil and a rascal," she upbraids him affectionately. "Because you knew I wouldn't yell at you this time if you said that word."

  "What word?" asks my boy, with a feigned look of innocence. "Ass?"

  "Don't say it again!"

  "Ass?"

  "You're not going to make me say it!"

  "What? Ass?" asks my daughter, joining in friskily.

  "I give up." My wife throws her arms out mirthfully in exasperation. "What am I going to do with them?"

  "Say ass," I advise.

  "Ass!" my wife blares obligingly, extending her face out toward both of them like an elephant's trunk. They roar with gulping laughter. "Ass! Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass!"

  All of them are laughing hysterically now.

  My daughter is unable to keep her balance in the sweeping exhilaration she experiences at finding herself released so unexpectedly, without penalty, from the excoriating conflict she had devised and in which she had so swiftly found herself the tortured victim. She falls against my boy joyously; they hug each other with immense delight and go staggering wildly all about my study, bumping into us and each other and into the superfluous chairs my wife keeps sneaking in when she has no better place to put them. My boy is pleased with himself beyond measure, beside himself with glee and ecstasy at having used his dirty word with impetuous imagination and gotten away with it and at having transported us all to a spirit of warmth and generous good feeling from the savage rancor with which we had been smashing each other. We are close now, intimate, respectful, and informal. The children bump and hug each other and continue to laugh hilariously. I watch them with affection (feeling complacent and benign). I am glad they are mine.

  "They're really such good kids," my wife murmurs pensively in my ear, so that only I will hear.

  I nod in agreement, feeling wistful and pleased (with myself, too, and with her). I slip my arm around her waist and draw her to my side. She moves willingly, her body limber, and fits herself against me compliantly. I get an erection. (I would lay her now if we were alone. We would lay each other.) I slide my hand down over her ass and follow the curve in at the bottom toward her box. She stretches away.

  "Later," she cautions guardedly.

  "No, now," I demand, teasingly.

  "You're crazy."

  "I might not have it later."

  "You will. You'd better," she laughs. "I'll see that you do."

  I laugh too.

  And that is the needful service performed for us so regularly and artlessly by this angelic little boy of mine ("He isn't real," my daughter has complained about him enviously. "He's never mean. He never gets mad."), who is no better off than the rest of us (who may be considerably worse off, in fact, because he is only nine and has already been frightened of just about everything, heights and kidnapping, sharks, crabs, drunks, adults who stare, sheriffs, unkempt handymen, wars, Italians, and me. He isn't afraid of monsters or ghosts so much, because monsters and ghosts are silly. He is afraid of human beings. He veers away from cripples. He welcomes the phenomenon of cops, because he has the dim hope they will safeguard him from all the rest, even from me), to draw us together again by reminding us who we are and what we know of each other, to stop the three of us just in time and make us step back--by evoking and recalling to us the great need and capacity for affection each of us has hidden away very deep inside, like a yawning wound, affection for him, and perhaps for each other--from mangling each other willfully, brutally, and irreparably, with much malice and happiness aforethought, if we have not maimed each other permanently already. I believe he pulls us together as a family and keeps us together. (I often think of leaving and always have. My daughter can't wait to get away, or says she can't.) I think we will fall apart as a family when he grows up and moves away. (I love him so much I just know he is going to die.) "You like him more than me," my daughter has said.

  "No," I answer, lying, because I do not always wish to outfox her, and because she sometimes seems so barren of hope that I find myself grieving silently alongside her, as though at an open coffin or grave in which her future is lying dead already. (She is not yet sweet sixteen, but it sometimes seems to both of us that she has already missed all boats. When?) "But you must admit, darling, that in many ways, he is much more likable."

  "I know."

  They are not so funny to us while they are taking place, these corrosive family arguments that my daughter provokes so malignantly, and they do not always end in bedroom trysts for me and my wife and gales of gleeful laughter for the children. They are excruciating, especially for her. I wish she would write book reports instead, or do
complicated jigsaw puzzles with one thousand pieces when she finds herself with lots of time and no exciting way to spend it. (I wish she would fall in love or something.) But she can't stop.

  (It's her compulsion.)

  She must continue to agitate, like some dark and moody burrowing creature with a drive to undermine and destroy. I (we) do not know what it is she wants that she feels we can give her (she wants to be beautiful, willowy, brilliant, famous, rich, and talented--and who can blame her? We would like her to be all that too. Perhaps she knows it. But we don't insist), and she does not tell us. She does not know. Sometimes she confides in us without belligerence or guile. She confesses. She stands before us listlessly, her head bowed in disgrace, and, in words that force their way out from her soul and flow from her lips in a low, pining, abject monotone, she says: "I have nothing to do."

  It breaks my wife's heart when my daughter has nothing to do.

  I will not let it break mine.

  My daughter bites her fingernails, and I suppose that is my fault too. (At least it's something to do. My boy has poor posture, and so do I.) She began biting her nails around the age of five. My boy used to suck his thumb in his sleep and raised a swollen white lump (it was the color of fungus or peeling, dead skin) on the joint of his finger that handicapped him at play and stigmatized him in the daytime by reminding him of its cause. We couldn't make him stop. We put casings of evil-odored bandages on his thumb at bedtime, but he sucked at it anyway. We even tried the vile-tasting liquid we had used without avail years before to discourage my daughter from biting her fingernails. That didn't work, either, so she still bites them. I don't know how he finally stopped: I don't know how he ever made himself stop doing things in his sleep. (Often, I can stop unpleasant dreams from developing by bounding wide awake alertly at their first portentous overtures as though in response to some well-recognized primal alarm--like a good censor or movie director I can yell "Cut!" at the first specter of something askew in my dream scripts and make them start all over again in another direction. The words I actually speak to myself are "Oh, no! None of that again"--and keeping guard vigilantly over my slumbering intelligence until my dreams rewrite themselves into scenes and themes that are more to my taste. Then I can relax securely, fall back into sleep, and give them free rein. I can stop these unwelcome dreams from proceeding only if they start as I am sifting down into sleep and am still in touch with myself. Often, I cannot; and I lie in darkness like a limbless baby while they run their ruthless course through me rampantly as though I were a helpless and disembodied mind, or this tiny, armless, legless baby still imprisoned motionlessly in a cradle or womb. I can't bear them. I forget them. They leave traces. I have them often. I have them whenever I want them.) (I know so many things I'm afraid to find out.)

  She is a poor sleeper, my daughter, and, except for short-lived, unfounded spells of euphoric gaiety and plan-making (which flare so suddenly and extravagantly as to seem almost feverish), prefers to cling to the tragic view she takes of her own possibilities. She is easily alarmed and often jittery. She is probably a virgin. (If she weren't, she would tell me. When she isn't, she will--I visualize that approaching occasion reluctantly more and more frequently--and I look ahead grimly to the day or evening she marches into my study to mock me with that. What am I supposed to say? I will laugh it off, of course, minimize its importance, so as not to send her into promiscuity and perversion on one side or frigidity and abstinence on the other. What a dilemma.

  "Well, I'm sure other girls your age do it too, my dear," I can hear myself saying with suave insouciance, flicking the white ash off a cigar I do not smoke. "I imagine you're not the first. Don't they?"

  What will I really feel?) She lacks confidence in herself and, like my boy (and me), is wary of strangers and ill at ease with people to whom she has just been introduced. (I, on the other hand, am a good sleeper at times--although I like to pretend I'm not--especially when I am sleeping at home with my wife, although I usually wait until I can no longer keep awake before I go to sleep. Ha, ha. When I sleep away from home with my wife, I will have a nightmare the first or second night, usually the same one: a strange man is entering illegally through the door, which I have locked, and drawing near, a burglar, rapist, kidnapper, or assassin; he seems to be Black but changes; I think he is carrying a knife; I try to scream but can make no sound. I have this same bad dream at home often, even though I carefully lock all my doors before going to sleep. I have had it dozens and dozens of times. I have always had it. I must make some sound, though, while I am having the dream and trying in vain to scream, for my wife awakens with the noise of my struggles and rouses me by calling my name and tells me, as though I didn't know, that I was having a nightmare. Sometimes, even when I am trapped deep in my agony and whatever menaces me is moving right up to my bedside, some different section of me is tuned in omnisciently to the nature of the experience, knows and reassures me it is all just a very bad dream and watches from outside it tranquilly and smugly and waits expectantly, with enjoyment, for my wife to be disturbed by my noises and motions and to call to me by my name and shake me awake by the shoulder to tell me I was having a nightmare. I think people have more than one brain. I like the idea of scaring my wife with my nightmares. Sometimes, when she is having a nightmare, I revenge myself on her by not waking her up and allowing it to torture her for as long as it wants to, while I watch her from outside, idly and smugly, leaning on my elbow. I have piss dreams too, but they are funny. I think they are. When I am sleeping away from home without my wife, I am often worried I will have this same bad dream, or a different one just as horrifying. Who will wake me? Will I survive it if no one does? I don't have this dream when I'm alone. Will I be embarrassed and apologetic with whoever wakes me in the next room or same bed? There are many nights now when I am grabbed wildly by insomnia the instant my head touches the pillow and am then tumbled about violently all night long. My body--particularly my legs, shoulders, and elbows--is heavy and unmanageable; I have no place to put them; my soul is fragile; my mind is tissue thin and easily pierced by emotions and images. I can do nothing at all. My head fills and races with disconnected thoughts. By now, I can identify this tumultuous insomnia in the first second or two; I no longer try to overcome it. It is useless. I give in to it with a sinking feeling. I lie and wait resignedly, submitting, keeping my eyes closed because that's easier, and depend on morning to come and rescue me or for sleep to steal upon me unawares after several hours and snatch me away from those buffeting cataracts of fantasy, fury, reminiscence, and speculation--all of it inconsequential--that race through my head in such torrential splashes. Poor me. I'm not sure I'm such a good sleeper after all, although I can generally doze off easily after lunch and sexual intercourse. I am surprised when I awake in the morning after a seizure of insomnia to realize I have been asleep; I am often aghast upon awakening from a sound, dreamless sleep to realize how far away from life I have been, and how defenseless I was while I was there. It is almost as though I truly am afraid of the dark. Like my daughter. And my boy.

  Like I used to be as a child. And later. I might be unable to return. I don't like to lose touch with consciousness entirely. Dreams, even very bad, weird dreams, are my only contact with reality when I sleep; I want them; I even welcome headaches at night; I am out of existence. Where am I, then, when I am not? Filed away? I worry about things like that lately and did when I was small. All the things I worry about now I worried about more when I was small. I worry about the need for surgery someday for just that reason; the cutting, hammering, sawing, and stitching are all obnoxious enough; but the thought of anesthesia that benumbs the mind totally is even more repelling. Where will I be in that bottomless, measureless time between the moment they lower the cone over my nose and mouth and instruct me to breathe deeply, as they did when I was a kid and had my tonsils out, and again when I was married already and had two impacted wisdom teeth pulled, and the moment the first thought stirs in my brain again and
I, like Jesus from the cave or Lazarus from the grave, am miraculously resurrected? I think an authentic miracle takes place in the universe every time I come awake again after going to sleep. What is happening to me when I am not conscious of myself? Where do I go? Where have I been? Who watches over me when I am gone to make sure I do get back? If I die under anesthesia, I will certainly be the last one to find out I have departed. I try my wife's tranquilizers when I feel it might be impossible for me to sleep and think they might help. I don't want sleeping pills; they bring to mind visions and aromas of old-fashioned funeral parlors, dentists' offices, and wax fruit. Years back when my daughter was small, she would materialize in our bedroom in the black hours of night, or in the doorway of the living room if one or the other of us was up late, all at once she would just be there; and make faint, odd, rustling noises that were barely audible--we would feel them somehow rather than hear them--until she forced us to look up and take notice of her. She could not speak; her mouth seemed numb; she could only reply with a grunting and drowsy incoherence to the sharp questions we fired at her and she did not remember when we questioned her again in the morning about it after we had made her return to her own room. Or claimed she didn't. We tried gropingly to relate these episodes to her tonsillectomy; but they had started earlier, and there had been no complication over the operation, at the hospital or at home, before or afterward. Just disillusionment. She had expected something different. It soon stopped. And we soon stopped thinking about it, since she seemed to have gotten over it. When my boy's tonsils were taken out, he didn't want to stay in his room, either. There were no complications, they told us. But for a little while afterward, he would sneak into our room in the dead of night and curl up to sleep on the carpet at the foot of our bed. He did not want to be alone. If he came in too soon, when we were still awake, we would make him go back to his own room and tell him he could leave a lamp on; sometimes we would yell; but he would always return, or try to, no matter how many times we yelled, stealing back into our room over and over again as quietly and slyly as he could, like some yearning creature newly born, and curl up on the floor against the foot of the bed. We would find him there when we awoke, lying on his side like a well-formed fetus, sucking his thumb. It was a chilling, heart-sickening experience for us to clamber out of sleep each day and receive as our first blow of the new morning the shocking sensation that there was another living being in the room with us. When we closed the lock of our bedroom door to keep him away, he would sleep curled up on the floor just outside. If one of us had to leave our bedroom for something in the middle of the night, we would strike his body unexpectedly as it lay there when we opened the door and almost scream with fright. If we got out of bed in the darkness, we were afraid we might step on him. We could have let him come into bed with us, of course; we wanted to. But a doctor told us no. We didn't like to see him that way. We did not want to shut him out. I'm sorry now we did. I think the doctor was wrong. I don't know what else we should have done.) She is very touchy and defensive and will interpret even the mildest suggestions about herself as ferocious personal attacks. She is prone to disparaging herself unfairly, and she takes issue with us intensely when we defend or praise her. She will occasionally start to cry, as though we were doing the belittling. She has a definite gift for placing me in predicaments like that. She is not as tall and stout as she thinks she is, her skin is not as oily as she fears it is, and her face is much, much prettier than she is willing to believe. She is actually quite attractive. But she doesn't believe her eyes; and she cannot believe our assurances.