The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Momma has said she doesn’t like blind men—blindness in men—but she has also said that she likes a man she can depend on, one who is blind to my faults. And, I think, blind to the world for the sake of loving her. She said once—she was drunk—I would have put Samson’s eyes out: I’m that type; when he was blind, if you ask me, he was a real man. If Daddy is saying stuff about old women and young women and me, he is taking many, many, many things into account; he is trying to hold his own with a growing boy.

  He is living up to the situation. But, also, I saw he was saying stuff about his philosophical powers of penetration: Look-how-I-have-managed-to-show-MEANING—see-what-an-artist-I-am . . . I-am-an-artist-of-real-life.

  He is being a dream of a father (when he says that stuff, nice stuff to me). He is challenging me to have grown-up (complex) values about masculine performance in real life—and in my family existence with him. He is telling me to be careful (with women) without really expecting I will be . . . I might kill him with my carryings-on, my carelessness. I might ruin my life . . . I might kill myself . . . I might kill some girl (of the neighborhood) or an old woman (he said that). He also said, Daddy did, of one old woman: To flirt with someone like that, you might as well take an ax to her and hit her in the head, Wiley: it’s not good for her now that you’re a big guy. He was lying . . . It was an intelligent woman he was talking about and not one who was sexually fond of men. I don’t think he was merely wrong.

  He sang part of a song called “Only a Gigolo.” He said, Don’t be a fool and Don’t be a gigolo; don’t be someone people can wrap around their little fingers. He says stuff in ways that please him because what he is saying is and is not quite true and is attractive in his eyes in that mixed-truth-and-whatnot form. It is dreamlike to speak anyway, with anyone, but it is especially dreamlike for two men to talk to one another, I think, and even more so if it is your father you are talking to.

  It is a myth, a dream to speak to your adoptive father . . .

  Him on sex: BEHAVE-or-you-will-die . . .

  Yeah but then I think, You die anyway.

  He laughs and laughs, a dying man; he laughs carefully as a matter of fact, and then he says, looking me in the eye: But you don’t want to be someone who dies too soon, Wiseguy . . .

  Daddy likes to soothe people: the power to soothe soothes him. And it soothes me to soothe him by being soothed by how he talks . . . Ping-Pong and yo-yo, all the echoing stuff in the soothing line of intention . . .

  If it is true that he knows what life is like for me, then he speaks to encourage me, to keep me alive and less suicidal—or more cheerfully suicidal—and not too blatantly, patently unhappy, ill, confused, silent. He was famous (locally) for his looks. By real-life standards he has a good sense of humor. Daddy, when he says, Don’t stand near the window: you’ll drive the young girls mad, he is using his sense of humor. He is of various sizes; it is in different periods and styles: pudgy-waisted or thin-waisted, almost wasp-waisted. And he isn’t always only talking ordinarily—he is talking as a great philosopher—a visionary lecher. With a sense of humor. A girl across the courtyard, who is older than seventeen—and strictly brought up—she’s a strict Catholic, Daddy has said ruminatively—she’s a girl I lied to about my age for a while . . . She undresses and dresses in front of windows that face those of my bedroom. Sometimes, half-dressed, she stands near the window. I have wakened from naps and seen her across the courtyard in her window looking toward me in my clothes twisted in my sleep, at me motionless on my bed. One time she did that, she was naked . . . I remember the astounded excitement in my LOINS—you know?

  Is she after me or you? Or do you think she just likes windows? Daddy asked.

  Across the street lives a publicly lesbian teacher who is much admired locally . . . seriously admired . . . a woman with white hair—fine-faced, proud and just—famous locally for being just and for being pretty—she has made speeches about being a lesbian and about women’s needs and about the nature of freedom for a woman. Daddy has a crush on her, on that just and good-looking woman, although I think she has made it clear that he gives her the creeps. I mean he knows that he gives her the creeps. That bothers him, and so he pursues her to try to get a better grade from her. He waves to her. Sometimes she waves back. She remembers me from third grade. She has her ups and downs about me. Now that I am a half-grown male or whatever, she is distant with me, but she was good to me the year I had her as a teacher. Distant? Now she smiles tensely and talks to me weirdly-weirdly—and once she said, Are you driving all the girls mad? Was it from a song they all remembered from the 1920s? I fainted in a way when that happened. I stood there but I went dead inside and was obtuse and was white-minded and didn’t know where I was for a few seconds. Daddy used to say of her that she drove all the young girls and old ladies mad. There is a tradition of him saying that thing: he said it about Nonie and men. He said of Nonie, his daughter by blood, my sister by adoption, that she drove all the boys and old men mad—he did it to comfort her and make her laugh; she would laugh in a lost, contemptuous, confused, kind of bitter way. He meant so many things when he said that to her or me that it made my head spin. But its relation to truth—Nonie did drive some guys mad, a number of them—that part of it was shocking. It shocked me anyway.

  In a real moment, I hear oddly. When I lie still and just remember, I forget how in real moments I have purposes, shyness, hopes, pretensions, dogmas, looks, a daily state, an age, a mood, and so on. I know that some of what my Dad says has to do with the local rules about talking to kids—he obeys that . . . He gets perverse toward that and disobeys it. He forgets, too. He is perverse and bad and daring and forgetful at times when he speaks. I want to understand. Is there a normal way for a father and son to talk to each other? Is this a side issue? Is it important? I don’t assume I know which meanings are typical.

  I’m good at schoolwork by local standards. From the point of view of the man in the moon—a luminous owl—they (my momma and poppa) are legitimately—intimately—like figures in a dream I am having even if, in a real moment, they are actually there and are talking to me and I am not daydreaming, which I do a lot, but really am making an effort to listen to them. Perhaps this is what is meant when I am said still to be a baby.

  A baby, if I remember rightly, is a figure of edification and fun; my helplessness supplied a purpose for others; I was an example of innocent consciousness. Daddy: You were someone we took care of night and day—it was fun then, Wiley: don’t misunderstand me: but it was fun, it was nice when you was sick . . . Now (Momma says) I, the one-time baby, tend to look like I have on makeup (healthy and all that). Daddy says, You have GOOD color in your face . . . Momma says, Why waste such coloring on a boy? S.L. said, You look like you’re rouged and powdered like a kid playing dress-up: actually, you look like you were lying down somewhere and some goddamned undertaker slapped makeup on you. I say to him in my head: I saw YOU in your funeral-parlor cosmetics.

  Momma lately has been saying that something or other, whatever she’s just said or quoted is the-final-truth-NOW-the-subject-is-closed. She’s bluffing. There’s longing in the bluff. It’s strange to me how little of what goes on will translate honestly into confession. I am very factual, but I don’t know what my life is like. I didn’t know my life was like this—this stuff I’ve just described. I sing popular songs with really a lot—a whole lot—of feeling—to show how I feel about hard matters such as this one. I use a lot of very, very cool deadness—and I do a lot of joking around—when I sing. Or when I’m with other guys.

  But that stuff doesn’t contain my sense of real reality even a little—not even up to a point. And this hurts—so much I want literally to die. Maybe I’m worthless; maybe I’m half-worthless—who knows? Maybe I have a perverted mentality. Inside me, the foreshortened visual dialects there are trying to hold a whole lawn and its insects and odors and light in place. And a person. School papers are called themes at my school—I write them out longhand in the hall
at school, surrounded by other kids, and I talk as I work . . . The other voices keep my mind quieted, my lies straight . . . I get my classroom pitch from the voices around me. I can steal their voices. Did my parents do that? Is that part of what I should understand when they talk to me?

  S.L. says that I am Mr. Too-Big-for-His-Britches, Little Sir Know-It-All. When I am thoughtful, he says, Gone off somewhere? We’re here; where are you? You’re in never-never land.

  It’s true it is like leaving him alone somewhere when I sort of go off somewhere into my head to think . . . When I write for a teacher, it is as if my sense of things (and my senses) and my sense of the world were held in common with her (or him) and not with S.L. anymore. I write for the school paper which is run by a young English teacher who genuinely hates the English teacher I think is the smartest English teacher and is the person in the school system who knows the most about worldly things. The politics about good language and what it is and who speaks it and who doesn’t leaves out my parents. And there are more politics, further politics, with my parents about this. When I write for the school paper and claim I have written what someone said, that boastfully kills my memory of what really went on. I mean the piece becomes what I think really went on. It becomes the chief or guiding memory—authoritative. When my parents talk they believe themselves that way for a while. And the real scene waits behind . . . If I keep a real memory alive the whole time I’m thinking about what I’m writing, I can’t write or talk at all, and then I am truly miserable . . . Lost. And the stuff I write then sickens me. It doesn’t sound at all like what is real around here. It seems to me I have to give up waking life and the real stuff that goes on between me and my friends and my parents, and that I have to give up my mind if I write stuff that is acceptable to any of my teachers . . . To a sponsor of truth plus or minus a few doubts. My inner speech, which seems honest to me some of the time, well, when I look at it, it seems like an intense and compressed jumble, really . . . a jumbled lunatic Allness, echo-y, knotted, private, snotty. It maybe dimly has a real sense of bodies and of an actual schoolday and of my parents in real moments . . . But that is a source of grief. It is like I’m talking in a hot, closed closet, no one knows we’re there, me and whoever I’m with, the part of myself, or myself as The Reporter, it’s nearly complete darkness in there behind the closed door. And your sense of your body and hers or his isn’t all that clear—Is this your leg or is it my leg, ha-ha? Stifled in that airlessness, you can’t see lips moving or eyes or the rest of it. Sometimes I hardly know which of several things I’m saying I am really saying—I lose track. It’s really unclear—maybe it’s just unusually freed talk. Talking to you is like reading a book, I said to myself once—the rank communicativeness head-to-head but in only one head in the dark was no metronome tick-tick of noticed time—only words.

  The mind-become-a-boy is islanded in stillness—but it is as if in a library—he waits: half waits: half lives. Christ, that lousy waiting—do you remember all the waiting in childhood? The world a savage and loony waiting room? And you wait. But not for older kids. Not grown-ups.

  The boy—draped by reality willy-nilly in veins, muscle, heart; colon, knees, uncertain voice; date of birth and perverse will foreign to whoever speaks; draped in blinking and in mood—is a real boy, (pardon me) meaty, autonomous, caught in an attendant mass of realities.

  A meaty boy dressed in Polite Fictions—shared conventions, manners from a fictional sense of childhood and of life—draped in ghostliness and flesh—would such a boy resemble the androgynous nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Ah, I don’t know . . . I’ve never seen my life in any of its phases as a single image—like one in a picture.

  Sometimes in silences and wordless shouts of emergency and wordless sinkings of the belly, I feel my whole life . . . suddenly . . . I feel it as fault-ridden from the inside out . . . I feel my soul then as a kind of flayed creature . . . Ah, is it too involved to go on about it this way? The question is whether I am to be believed, and if I am like my father and my mother when I talk, when I speak on the page. One must estimate whether the music of what I say is essentially honest. See, Daddy was not entirely to be believed or listened to literally, ever.

  I Move Toward the Bathroom . . .

  I move toward the bathroom, barefootedly. Quietly, I carry my clothes. It is genetically weird to be adopted. From deep inside yourself, what you are is stuff that is visiting, not entirely, not even all-in-all, but enough that you feel like an intruder even in grief, even when it’s your own grief . . . He’s not my real father . . . The grief is like a barely moving but very strong wind—an enveloping force generated by absence—S.L.’s a whirlwind that is also a hole—I make my way along, anxious to be out of the house: I want to avoid my mother and sister . . . I don’t want to be part of their dealing with their father’s and their husband’s death . . . S.L.’s death.

  In the john—white tile, white walls, white towels—in the mirror is the boy: skinny . . . an odd, sudden, temporary thing, me-this-month, my share of the physical world at the present time: a partly moneyless boy—in the moments—shoulders like lathes . . . broken lathes, wooden, youthful . . . youthfully girlish . . . a fitful sweetness of semi-acceptability (of appearance) . . . a scowl in the eyebrows in a deadened looking-in-the-mirror face.

  Getting dressed: it took three minutes, jeans, T-shirt, cut-off jeans underneath the outer jeans—shorts; you take off the jeans and you’re in shorts—no socks, sneakers. The child-boy is six feet two. Facts are intimacies . . . The way I look . . . The universe reeks and spins . . .

  Dressed, I sit, I dump: Baby, baby . . . I’m here shitting and you’re dead . . . The boy’s tensely biological breathing in the tiled room—I never imagined myself the hero of anything—that’s the hot truth. Hot scoop, hot poppalopping poop . . . YOU’RE ASKING FOR DEATH, SHITFACE . . . Wipe, ee-yi, ee-yi, oh . . . Cold water on the fizz-face. Teeth silently (almost dryly) brushed: Get your teeth into that one . . . Uncombed, on tiptoe . . . What’s real is not a school subject . . . Reality is not a school subject . . . Which is why people don’t like school. I hate bathroom taps . . . I can’t identify my own feelings: they don’t have labels on them: this seething whatever . . . love for the dead man? The film of sweat, means bad news or what? I touch my cooling skin. The drip of the tap: plumbers don’t come in wartime . . . the hurried and blurred noise of a dripping tap as I sneak out of the john.

  Jass: Do you like being a few? Do you go to a special school and learn how to be a few?

  No. I’m allergic . . . I go into convulsions, I explained. A dead mother . . . She was religious. She disappeared one day and she never came back . . . I was little and I couldn’t believe it . . . I thought she would return. Now, sometimes, it seems she returns . . . Or is on the way; then it’s a nightmare: then nothing is real. It’s all a dream. If I get too strong a sense of her. So I don’t study Jewish things. So far as I know, I really don’t care about her but it’s a thing in me whether I like it or not, this thing about her . . . So I can’t go near certain feelings . . . I kind of have to go around so that I don’t trigger that other stuff. So I’m not a real Jew as she was . . . I’m a real Jew the way I am.

  The kitchen is dark. The drawn-back spring of the thumb—(this is a memory when grief is partly impossible for you)—the click and click and then the hiss of the angling and rebounding marbles rolling on the powdered dirt . . . astronomical revision: striped, clear, or bubble-dotted crystalline glass spheres rolling . . . In front of my playmates . . .

  Then: Come home with me now . . . And he grabbed me, Daddy in suit and vest, watch chain, spats . . . Gold-rimmed glasses. I’m winning: it’s bad if I leave. He says, Be kind to me now, don’t play games. I come home at night—I want a little peace and quiet; I want you . . . you could give me a little happiness, it wouldn’t ruin your life, it wouldn’t break your heart. The other children are at an increasing distance, he has abducted me so ruthlessly . . . so relentlessly . . . I go t
hrough a lot so you can have a home—so you can play marbles. Shut up, shut up . . . Don’t embarrass me—I want to see you, you should be flattered I like you. Come home—play with ME . . . Leave the white trash alone. He likes to repeat things: Leave the white trash alone. Can’t you enjoy yourself with me—do you mind making that little effort? Don’t give me any back talk: be nice: you argue too much—over every little thing. Give your head a break: save your eyes—you want to have ugly eyes: you’re getting ugly eyes. You answer back too much. Christ.

  Now I go out the kitchen door . . . He’s dead . . . The outdoor air sighs and seems to tick, swelling around me, and then it curls into the soft yah of a wind . . . The binding order of difficult logic has to do only with what is real . . . A friend told me, I know how much you loved your father . . . Did I? I remember being punished by confinement in my room for not hugging S.L.—I want to be with my friends, I like them better than I like you. I see the dancing motes of dust in sunlit air at twilight in the room I was imprisoned in—family-given cubicle. The electric hush, the unsteady hush of my mind running there . . . The world is realer than consciousness . . . which is like a little brother, smaller than the world, consciousness is. The nearly horizontal sunlight is extraordinarily white, is wobbly. But near me on the brick is an unexpected yellow patch, the yellow of the interior of a peach. Or yellow silk. Bright yellow, partly hardened and glinty, partly soft and powdery.

  I am on the third floor, on a metal porch with a concrete floor; the back porches are a single unit of girders and pipes painted black. The steps are metal and they echo; they have raised places on them to prevent slipping. I climb out into the gray air of twilight-like grayness of just-at-dawn in full view of the dimly lit sky, pale. The sky sees me and my disobedience. The air. I swing out on one of the posts—that is, I grab the post—Jass Nolloquot, a friend (of sorts), sometimes says, Let’s play let’s-die games, Wiley, and I step out into the air, I wade out into space, three floors up—Jass taught me this—and, legs pumping, I swing around the pole, out, out—I am in bitter, brilliant, charcoal-diluted-milky lightless light and then I am back in the truer grayness again.