Something Happened

by Joseph Heller

  "I wish I had a career at something exciting."

  "It isn't too late."

  She lifts her eyes to study me in steadfast gaze. "It is too late."

  "Of course it is."

  She accepts the fact that Kagle was fated to go no matter what I did, and that if I had not gone in to replace him, I would never have been allowed to go anywhere else.

  "You'd get a housekeeper, wouldn't you?" she says dreamily. "And put Derek in a home. Or you'd send the children away to boarding school and move into the city."

  "If what?"

  "If I committed suicide or died of cancer or just moved away alone or with some other man."

  "Are you thinking of any of those?" I ask with healing indulgence.

  "And I wouldn't blame you. I just don't make a difference to anyone."

  "Neither do I," I have to confess intimately. "Except to you and the children. Not even Derek."

  "I'd be satisfied with that. No, don't lie to me about it," she adds with dignity and a very small, regretful smile. "I wouldn't believe you."

  My wife feels she makes no difference to anyone anymore and she is probably right.

  There is so much torment around, even for her. I have to make a speech. My boy will probably perish without me (or I without him. I think I may always have felt that way about him). Oh, my God--we go into torment long before we even know what suffering is. We are saddled with it before we can even see. There is so much inner fright. I was born, I was told, with a mashed face and red and blue forcep bruises on my shoulders and arms but felt not one message of pain because I had no nervous system yet that could register any. But I knew what loneliness was. I was already afraid of the dark. Or the light. If I knew what cold and sleet were I would have been afraid of those too. (Are we afraid of what we can't see or of what we will see when we do?) I was afraid I would open my eyes and it would still be dark. (It was that way in that hospital the night they took my tonsils out.) I am afraid of that happening now. And no one would come. Fear. Loss of love, loss of the loved one, loss of love of the loved one. Separation. We don't want to go, we don't want them to go, we can't wait for them to leave, we wish they'd return. There seem to be conflicts. I was in need of whatever nipple succored me and whatever arms lifted me. I didn't know names. I loved the food that fed me--that's all I knew--and the arms that held and hugged and turned me and gave me to understand, at least for those periods, that I was not alone and someone else knew I was there. Without them, I would have been alone. I am afraid of the dark now. I have nightmares in strange beds, and in my own. I have apparitions underneath my bed waiting to stream out. I have spirits in my bedroom closets. I am anxious as a four-year-old child. I am afraid of the light. I am afraid I will open my eyes someday and it will still be dark. And no one will come. (I woke up without tonsils and adenoids in the hospital one thousand times that night and it was always dark, and I thought there would never be light again. And no one came.) What will I have to look forward to if morning comes one day and there is no light? What will I be like when I am senile? Will I molest children, break wind, defecate on living room floors, say nigger, bait Jews? I say nigger now occasionally; it slips out. I could bait Green. I think I know expressly how to cope with Green.

  "Jack," I could begin, with an air of disarming joviality, "I think I'd like to hire a Jew. Do you know of any? I'd want a smart one."

  "I'm afraid that would be impossible," he might reply, with the same pretense of amiability.

  "Aren't there any smart ones left?" I could follow up, tauntingly.

  "Oh, yes," he would answer. "But a smart one wouldn't work for you. And if you're going to hire the other kind, you'd might as well stick with a Protestant. They'd make a better appearance, for you."

  And I'd discover once more that I'd still not been able to cope with him at all. I'll bet I'm probably one of the very few people in the entire world who know (not knows) that livid means blue and lurid means pale. A lot of good that knowledge has done me. (Green may be one of the others who know, and it's done him even less.) My boy's complexion is pale again, and his eyes are blue and deep. I wish I could look all the way inside them to see what is going on in his mind.

  "Why are you staring at me?" he asks uncomfortably.

  "I'm not staring."

  "You were."

  "I'm sorry. I was thinking." He intends to remain silent. "And if you asked me what I was thinking about, do you know what I'd say?"

  "What?" he asks, to oblige me.

  "I was thinking about when you were going to ask me why I was staring at you."

  He grins with a small noise of appreciation as a token of acknowledgment, and goes into his room, closing the door.

  I don't want him to go. My memory's failing, my bladder is weak, my arches are falling, my tonsils and adenoids are gone, and my jawbone is rotting, and now my little boy wants to cast me away and leave me behind for reasons he won't give me. What else will I have? My job? When I am fifty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than Arthur Baron's job and reaching sixty-five. When I am sixty-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than reaching seventy-five, or dying before then. And when I am seventy-five, I will have nothing more to look forward to than dying before eighty-five, or geriatric care in a nursing home. I will have to take enemas. (Will I have to be dressed in double-layer, waterproof undershorts designed especially for incontinent gentlemen?) I will be incontinent. I don't want to live longer than eighty-five, and I don't want to die sooner than a hundred and eighty-six.

  Oh, my father--why have you done this to me?

  I want him back.

  I want my little boy back too.

  I don't want to lose him.

  I do.

  "Something happened!" a youth in his early teens calls excitedly to a friend and goes running ahead to look.

  A crowd is collecting at the shopping center. A car has gone out of control and mounted the sidewalk. A plate glass window has been smashed. My boy is lying on the ground. (He has not been decapitated.) He is screaming in agony and horror, with legs and arms twisted brokenly and streams of blood spurting from holes in his face and head and pouring down over one hand from inside a sleeve. He spies me with a start and extends an arm. He is panic-stricken. So am I.

  "Daddy!"

  He is dying. A terror, a pallid, pathetic shock more dreadful than any I have ever been able to imagine, has leaped into his face I can't stand it. He can't stand it. He hugs me. He looks beggingly at me for help. His screams are piercing. I can't bear to see him suffering such agony and fright. I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze.

  "Death," says the doctor, "was due to asphyxiation. The boy was smothered. He had superficial lacerations of the scalp and face, a bruised hip, a deep cut on his arm. That was all. Even his spleen was intact."

  The nurses and policemen are all very considerate to me as I weep. They wait in respectful silence.

  "Would you like to be alone?" one murmurs.

  I'm afraid to be alone. I would rather have them all there with me now, to see me weeping in such crushing grief and shame. I cry a long time. When I feel I am able to speak, finally, I lift my eyes slowly a little bit and say: "Don't tell my wife."

  Nobody knows what I've done

  Nobody knows what I've done. Everybody is impressed with how bravely I've been able to move into Kagle's position and carry on with the work of organizing the convention. No one understands that carrying on bravely was the easiest thing to do.

  I get to make my speech, finally. It is a solid success (and nobody cares. Nobody, I learn, remembers shortly afterward what it was even about. I had entertained the hope that one of the officials, in commending me, would suggest that mimeographed copies be made and distributed by Public Relations to executives in other divisions of the company, trade publications, and Chambers of Commerce. None do). My speech, at Arthur Baron's suggestion, was kept s
hort. I spoke for exactly three minutes. Kagle, who opened the convention, introduced me lavishly in a speech lasting fifteen. Green spoke for twenty-seven minutes, arrogating to himself the entire time I had budgeted for his department, and was glittering and boring.

  "I enjoyed your speech, Jack," I complimented him.

  "Would you like a copy?" he responded. "I've had it mimeographed."

  "I was going to ask."

  "Be sure you credit me if you ever quote any of it. I'm thinking of having it published."

  His eyes are hunting behind me already for bigger game. (I am still not important enough for him--this year.) He deserts me for Horace White, who jettisons him by moving to Lester Black, who is listening attentively to baleful mutterings about me from Johnny Brown, with whom I am going to have to talk strongly soon, and of whom I am afraid. People seem dazzled by the swift competence with which I appear to be taking things under control.

  Systematically, I am putting my affairs in order. I tick them off my list.

  I have told my wife I love her.

  We have decided to keep Derek longer (he may get better. They may be wrong. They're finding new things out every day) and have found a nurse for him who may work out (the first two replacements wouldn't stay, and this one has body odor).

  I have given my daughter a car of her own. Her spirits seem to be picking up. (I bought my wife a new convertible she likes, sent her shopping for the new house we need. It's not a career, but it will have to be furnished. My wife won't take a vacation without me. We are now a three-car family.) My daughter promises she will pass her high school courses this year and tells us she wants to go to college. She says she's stopped telling lies. (She may be telling the truth.) I have retired Ed Phelps and fired Red Parker. (Red Parker doesn't know that yet. He mails warmest greetings from St. Thomas every time he flies down there with some other female whack.) I get call reports every Friday now, and they are accurate.

  "Well, at least there's one good thing," Brown conceded to me grudgingly when we got back to the office. "We can stop wasting time on these stupid call reports."

  I made myself ready for the worst, stood up, and confronted him squarely. "No, you can't. I'll want them all on my desk by the close of business every Friday."

  "You're a pisser."

  "And I don't want you to say I'm a pisser."

  Our eyes locked. There was hatred between us. I saw his large fists clench and was trembling inside. I thought he was going to give me my punch in the jaw right then--until I suddenly realized the blood was draining from his face too, faster, probably, than from mine. He was afraid also. He was dissolving: sick little tremors were playing like maggots around his mouth and sinewy jaw. All his truculent bravery was vanishing, and I saw him slipping away from me someplace from which I knew I would never see him return.

  "Johnny!" I wanted to cry. "Johnny Brown! Where are you going?"

  "Okay," he mumbled, looking down.

  But he was already gone, transubstantiating himself like witchcraft into someone obsequious, cringing to hold on to a job he would no longer be able to do. I have had him transferred to another division of the company and replaced by an Italian graduate from a business school who wants to make good, and who is afraid of me.

  I play more golf. (Swish!) And am getting quite good.

  Kagle's off the payroll with his pension and profit-sharing benefits and has a two-year contract with the company as a part-time consultant whom no one will ever use.

  But I've still not been able to hire a Jew. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and Advertiser and I don't know where to find one. (Green found one to replace me and is paying him more money than he was paying me. I hope he's not pushy.) Martha the typist is gone. (In every office in which I've ever worked, though, there was always at least one person who was going crazy slowly, and I am waiting to see how long it will take Personnel and Providence to send along the next one.) A man named Gray has joined the company from a high government post and will fit right in between Black and White. We have no primary colors left, I believe, although we probably have some reds, ha, ha, most of us feel blue, ha, ha, and all of us are yellow.

  Whenever I have a really good bowel movement, my lonely hemorrhoid begins to bleed. Maybe I ought to get it a friend.

  Now that I have taken charge of my responsibilities, I do hear voices. I hear: "You're a good administrator, Slocum."

  "You've done a good job, Slocum."

  "I liked the way you stepped right in and took over."

  "You've got the department really humming, Slocum."

  "You got Kagle out pretty smoothly, didn't you, Slocum? Ha, ha."

  "I've never seen them working so hard, Slocum."

  "I like the way you've taken control."

  "I'm glad to see you're fitting in."

  (I am fitting in.)

  "Who's that?"

  "Slocum."

  "I'd like you to meet Bob Slocum," Arthur Baron and Horace White introduce me now. "He's one of our best men."

  I meet a much higher class of executive at Arthur Baron's now when he has us to dinner. I play golf with a much better class of people. (Swish.) I have played golf at Round Hill twice already as a guest of Horace White, once with his undistinguished sister and her husband. She made eyes at me. (Swish.) I have a hitch in my swing. I have played at Burning Tree in Washington as the guest of a buyer and heard a deputy cabinet official tell an old joke poorly. I laughed. (Swish.) I laughed rambunctiously.

  "Slocum's the name. Bob Slocum."

  "Look me up the next time you're in town."

  I have played at White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia as the company's representative to a national business conference. Maybe someday, if my game and my job continue to improve, I might even play St. Andrews in Scotland. (Swish.) I miss my boy. Martha the typist went crazy for me finally at just the right time in a way I was able to handle suavely. I took charge like a ballet master.

  "Call Medical," I directed with an authority that was almost musical. "Call Personnel. Get Security. Call Travel and tell them to hire a chauffeured limousine immediately."

  Martha sits in her typist's chair like an obdurate statue and will not move or speak. She is deaf to entreaty, shakes helping hands off violently, gives signs she might shriek. I wait nearby with an expression of aplomb. Her look turns dazed and panicky when anyone comes close. The nurses from Medical are quickly there.

  "How are you, dear?" the eldest asks soothingly.

  We have a good-sized audience now, and I am the supervisor. Martha rises compliantly, smiling, with a hint of diabolical satisfaction, I see, at the wary attention she has succeeded in extorting from so many people who are solicitous and alarmed.

  "There, there, dear."

  "Come along, dear."

  "That's nice, dear."

  "Take your purse, dear. And your book."

  "Do you want to rest, dear?"

  "Do you have a roommate, dear? Someone we can call?"

  "Would you like to lie down, dear? While we're waiting for the car?"

  "That's fine, dear."

  "Good-bye, Martha."

  "Good-bye, Martha dear."

  "Bye, bye, dear."

  "Did you leave anything behind?"

  "Don't worry, dear. We'll send it along."

  "Be gentle with her," I adjure. "She's a wonderful girl."

  I hear applause when she's gone for the way I handled it.

  No one was embarrassed.

  Everyone seems pleased with the way I've taken command.

  ALSO BY

  JOSEPH HELLER

  Catch-22

  We Bombed in New Haven (a play)

  Something Happened

  Good as Gold

  God Knows

 

 

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