Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  "If you'd give me my own car, I wouldn't have to steal it," she'll argue when we catch her, and believe she's right.

  I'm in the dark:

  (My lucid visions bleed together.)

  Something terribly tragic is going to happen to my little boy (because I don't want it to) and nothing at all will happen to Derek. Police and ambulances will never come for him. I see no future for my boy (the veil won't lift, I don't get a glimmer, I see no future for him at aH) and this is always a heart-stopping omen. When I look ahead, he isn't there. I can picture him easily the way he is today, perhaps tomorrow, but not much further. He is never older, never at work or study as a doctor, writer, or businessman, never married (the poor kid never even goes with a girl), never in college or even in high school; he is never even an adolescent with a changing voice, erupting skin, and sprouts of sweating hair discoloring his upper lip and jaws. I mourn for him (my spirit weeps. Where does he go?). He doesn't pass nine. He stops here. (This is where he must get off. Every day may be his last.) Either he has no future or my ability to imagine him present in mine is blunted. I view the empty space ahead without him dolorously. Silence hangs heavily. I miss him. I smell flowers. There are family dinners, and he is not present. What will I have to look forward to if I can't look forward to him? Golf. My wife's cancer? A hole in one. And after that? Another hole in one.

  "I made a hole in one," I can repeat endlessly to people for years to come.

  When obscurity and old age descend upon me like thickest night and shrivel me further into something small and unnoticeable, I can always remember: "I made a hole in one."

  On my deathbed in my nursing home, when visitors I don't recognize arrive to pay their respects with gifts of very sweet candy and aromatic slices of smoked, oily fish, I may still have it in my power to recall I made a hole in one when I was in my prime--I'm in my prime now and I haven't made one yet. It's something new to start working toward--and it may cause me to smile. A hole in one is a very good thing to have.

  "Will you believe it?" I can say. "I once made a hole in one."

  "Have another piece of smoked fish."

  "A hole in one."

  I don't know what else one can do with a hole in one except talk about it.

  "I made a hole in one."

  "Eat your fish."

  "Hello, girls."

  "Did you ever hear the one about the amputee without arms and legs outside the whorehouse door?"

  "I rang the bell, didn't I?"

  I can picture such scenes of myself in a nursing home easily enough. I can picture Derek out front easily too. slobbering, a thickset, clumsy, balding, dark-haired retarded adult male with an incriminating resemblance to a secret me I know I have inside me and want nobody else ever to discover, an inner visage. (I think I sometimes see him in my dreams.) I bet Arthur Baron doesn't suspect he's there (that I have the potential for turning myself inside out into a barbarous idiot) or that I am stricken chronically with a horror--a horror so acute it's almost an exquisite appetite--of stuttering (or experiencing a homosexual want. Perhaps I already have) or having my tongue swell and stick to the roof of my mouth and be unable to talk at all. (No wonder I am terrified of being condemned behind closed doors, without my even knowing sentence has been passed. Perhaps it's already happened.) But not one day more of life can this fertile imagination of mine provide for my poor little boy.

  (What work will he do? What clothes will he wear? Oh, God, I don't want to have to live without him.) And Kagle's job will be proffered to me and I will accept it. By now, I want it. (By now, I no longer misrepresent to myself that I don't.) Kagle is an enemy: he is blocking my path, and I want him out of my way. I hate him. The need to kick him grows stronger every day, to yawp with contempt right in his hollowing, astounded face. (It would turn to a human skull. I would steam the flesh away in a second.) I'll never be able to do that. Civilization won't allow me to. But I might kick him in the leg if the temptation persists and my self-control flags. I will kick him before I can stop myself. I will be at an utter loss afterward to explain. I might want to die of embarrassment (and I'll feel like a caught little boy).

  "Why did you do it?" people will demand.

  I'll have to shrug and hang my head. I'll weigh eighty-four pounds.

  "He kicked me in the leg," Kagle will protest to everybody.

  "He kicked Kagle's leg."

  "Did you see that?"

  "He kicked Kagle in the leg."

  There's nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter's ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He's a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I must not think about him as much as I could if I let myself, and I hate his nurse, whom I propel over the threshold--throw her out of my house--bracing her below with one arm to prevent her from falling to the ground and suing me. She falls anyway and sues me. The repulsive woman exudes an unpleasant odor of rancid grease mixed with dust and perfumed bath powder. She bathes mornings and evenings. Her hair is ghastly white. Her cleanliness is reproachful. I can't bear her intrusive familiarity. She treats me with no more solicitude than I get from my family, and she's a salaried employee.

  I know what hostility is. (It gives me headaches and tortured sleep.) My id suppurates into my ego and makes me aggressive and disagreeable. Seepage is destroying my loved ones. If only one could vent one's hatreds fully, exhaust them, discharge them the way a lobster deposits his sperm with the female and ambles away into opaque darkness alone and unburdened. I've tried. They come back.

  It's all Kagle's fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byoote fool instead of byoot@ f@l and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him--I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress.

  "Heh-heh," he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes.

  "Heh-heh," I want to mock back.

  I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I'd like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him.

  "Andy," I tell him, "I'd like to hit you across the face with that lamp."

  "Heh-heh," he says.

  "Heh-heh," I reply.

  I chuckle kindly when I see him, joke with him snidely about Green's vocabulary and well-tailored, showy clothes, help him dutifully in ways he can observe. I weighed one hundred and ninety-eight pounds this morning, down four and a half since Monday (when I decided to begin losing weight), and am nearly a whole foot taller than he'll ever be.

  "Heh-heh," he wants to know. "How you getting along with that kid in the Art Department?"

  "Fine."

  "The one with those small titties."

  "She's young enough to be my daughter."

  "What's wrong with that? Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh. I've got these call reports for you from Johnny Brown."

  "Did
n't think I noticed, did you? Going to cut me in?"

  "How would you like a kick in the leg?"

  "My good one or my bad one? Heh-heh."

  "Andy, this time I think you ought to look at them and make some comments before you pass them on."

  "Clamming up? Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh-heh. What good are they? Salesmen lie."

  "Catch 'em. You'll make a good impression on Arthur Baron and Horace White."

  He pays no attention. "Ever go two on one?"

  "Two on one what,"

  "I do that now in Las Vegas. I know the manager of a hotel. Two girls at the same time. I did it again last week. You ought to try it."

  "I don't want to."

  "Two coons?"

  "How about these call reports?"

  "You do that for me. You're better at it. What do you hear about me?"

  "Don't travel."

  "Do I need a haircut?"

  "You need a kick in the ass."

  "You're sure doing a lot of kicking today, aren't you?"

  "Heh-heh."

  "I'll let you in on something. Green is finished. How would you like his job?"

  "Bullshit."

  "I'll recommend you. They're cutting his budget."

  "How much?"

  "You won't get a raise. I will. I made a killing in Xerox last week."

  "That's more bullshit. You're always making a killing in Xerox and always complaining about all the money you owe."

  "Heh-heh."

  All he's got is his home in Long Island and a house in the mountains, to which he sends his wife and two children every summer. He goes there some weekends. I inquire after Kagle's family as periodically as Arthur Baron inquires about mine.

  "All fine, Art," I always reply. "Yours?"

  (Green never asks. He isn't interested in my family and won't deign to pretend.)

  I have dwelt wistfully more than once on the chances of his being killed in an automobile accident driving back or forth to work one lucky day. Kagle is careless in a car and usually sluggish or drunk when he leaves the city at night. Kagle is one of the very few upper-middle-echelon executives left in the country who still make their homes in Long Island, and this gaucherie too has scored against him, along with the white-tipped hairs growing out of his nostrils and the tufts in his ears. Nobody has hair growing out of nostrils or ears anymore. (He ought to see a barber now just for that.) This is something I've not been able to bring myself to mention to him. (I fear it would hurt him.) It has become difficult for me to look at him. He senses a change. I think that is why he heh-hehs me so much now. I pity him. (He does not know what to do about everything that is happening.) "Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh."

  "Heh-heh-heh. What's so funny?"

  "Why are you wearing covert cloth, for Christ sakes?" I admonish him instead.

  "What's that?" he asks in alarm.

  "It went out of style thirty years ago."

  "Covert cloth?"

  "Switch to worsted."

  "I've got a blue blazer now," he says proudly.

  "It's double knit."

  "How would I know?"

  "It would look terrific in Erie, Pennsylvania. Have we got any big accounts in Erie, Pennsylvania?"

  "I'm going to L.A. next week. From there I sneak into Las Vegas. Two on one," he explains with a wink.

  "And it doesn't fit. It's loose and lopsided."

  "I'm lopsided too, you know," he reminds me gravely, with the shade of a crafty and hypocritical smile I've seen on him before. "I was born this way, you know. It didn't just happen, you know. It was God's will. Don't laugh. It isn't funny. It isn't so funny, you know, being born with this deformed hip and leg."

  "I know, Andy."

  "It's nothing to laugh about."

  "I wasn't laughing."

  "This is the way He wanted me."

  "Hallelujah," I think of replying cynically. "I wish He'd given as much thought to me as you feel He gave to you."

  When Kagle draws upon his leg or God for deference and sympathy, he becomes those odious strands and bushy tufts of hair in his nose and ears--intimate, obscene, and revolting--and I have wished the poor man dead many times lately just for filling me with ire, shame, and disgust. Worsteds won't help him. Everything is going wrong. I have wished other unsuspecting human beings I know and like dead also for most-trivial slights and inconveniences. Let them all die. (I'm liberal: I really don't care how.) I visit fatal curses on slow salesgirls and on strangers who get in my way and delay me when I'm walking hurriedly.

  "Die," I think. "Pass away. Let me step over you."

  I can find many men--they are always men--in public life I'd like to see assassinated (and I can't stand bums anymore. I don't feel sorry for them), although I'd never think (I haven't yet) of doing that kind of work myself. I feel I understand why other people beat, kick, and set fire to bums and panhandlers. (We have too many of them.) I do not grieve at the death of Presidents: (usually, I'm glad): they're finally getting what they deserve. Not since F.D.R., I think, which was the last time in my life, if memory is correct, I was able to raise a tear. I have to choke back sobs now and then (usually at bad movies), but my tears are bottled away somewhere deep inside me. Nobody can tap them. That was a man, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last time I had a President I could look up to (the rest have not been mine), or maybe I only thought so because I was gullible. No--the whole country wept when he died. My mother wept.

  "One third of the nation," said he, "is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed."

  By now, with our improved technology and humane social and political reforms, it must be more than half. When it hits a hundred percent (the millionaires will have Swiss nationality by then and live in France), trumpets will play, the heavens will open, and everybody will hear Handel's music free. Last night I dreamed again my mother was alive, thin with age but in perfect health, clothed attractively in a cool print dress and thin white sweater, chatting naturally with me without a grudge at some cordial holiday festival in the nursing home. It was Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving. She beamed at me often, as she used to do when I was little. I was forgiven everything. I missed her like a forsaken child when I awoke in the morning--I had a sticky, crusted sensation of tears drying on my cheeks--emerging gratefully from sleep once more in my entirety, bringing my memory and all of my physical parts back with me successfully one more time from wherever it was I had been when I was not here.

  "What were you dreaming about?" my wife always wonders.

  "Me."

  "You were groaning."

  "My mother."

  "Still?"

  "You will too."

  "I do already. Ever since she got arthritis. Her fingers curled. Won't it ever stop? The dreams?"

  "It hasn't for me."

  "Will I get arthritis too?"

  "I will too."

  "I hope I don't get it in the spine. I wouldn't want to curl up there."

  "Fuck me."

  "I'm not in the mood. The children are up."

  I miss my mother again when I remember how poignantly I missed her when I woke this morning. I miss the forsaken child. He's me. But I'm not he. I think he may be hiding inside my head with all the others I know are there and cannot find, playing evil tricks on my moods and heartbeat also. I have a universe in my head. Families huddle there in secret, sheltered places. Civilizations reside. The laws of physics hold it together. The laws of chemistry keep it going. I have nothing to do with it. No one governs it. Foxy emissaries glide from alleys to archways on immoral, mysterious missions. No one's in charge. I am infiltrated and besieged, the unprotected target of sneaky attacks from within. Things stir, roll over slowly in my mind like black eels, and drop from consciousness into inky depths. Everything is smaller. It's neither warm nor cold. There is no moisture. Smirking faces go about their nasty deeds and pleasures surreptitiously without confiding in me. It gives me a pain. Victims weep. No one dies. Ther
e is noiseless wailing. I take aspirins and tranquilizers. I am infested with ghostlike figurines (now you see them, now you don't), with imps and little demons. They scratch and stick me. I'd like to be able to flush the whole lot of them out of my mind into the open once and for all and try to identify them, line them up against a wall in the milky glare of a blinding flashlight and demand: "All right, who are you? What were you doing in there? What do you all want from me?"