The changeable day, clear early, became cloudy in mid-morning. The clouds came in from the west. The air turned humid and close. It was greenish-lurid under the clouds, then greenish-dark, then occasional low clouds spat and sprinkled rain. Thinly, then heavily. I left the road and stood with my bike under a tree lower than the ones beside it until the rain thinned. The day lightened but clouds remained in the sky; some were partly dark, some were very white. Part of the sky was blue . . . The clouds in their motion darkened again. The temperature shifted and shifted again; it was hotter; and clear sky appeared again among questionable clouds. I did wind sprints. Because my father had had heart trouble, I was uneasy about the possibility of my having a stroke at an early age. My father had had his first stroke when he was thirty-nine. I had no sense of what the odds were physically for me as his son-sort-of—no sense of what was normal in the (male) physical world, anyway: health stuff in newspapers and magazines wasn’t all that common back then. It was all talk instead. Health gossip. I wasn’t S.L.’s son genetically, but how many of his moods had affected me? How many of his tastes? So, I did wind sprints, a little soldierlike, in a weird military spirit (in wartime); but I was also some sort of madman giddy freak who came to his senses now and then and stared, worriedly, out the jumbled doorways of his senses, at the alluvial fields and woods, the cars, the people in them. The sensations of pseudo-athletic breathlessness and the dizziness of too much exercise, and the projection of an imagined purity of grief, of the feeling of belonging to a family . . . various ideals, simplified, glory-riddled . . . came and went. A mean-looking sergeant passed by too close in a 1938 Ford, his meaty features masked by shadow behind his windshield. I wanted to think about death—and life, my dad and me . . . Well, I didn’t know how to think . . . Life around me did a lot of my thinking for me. If I tried to think, it was like I was standing somewhere, to one side, above the subject, the schooled sense of it as a topic, with worry as my chief personal sense of the subject. Then it was sort of as if I was suspended in blue air—trying to dive into the subject but not getting there. It was a little like diving dumbly through blue air in a dream but nothing happens.
Or you do get somewhere, into a green sub-sky radiance, the substrata of the nearest part of the subject. One is surrounded, immersed, in a cold shock of another medium foreign to the self and where one could not stay. The air ran out; my courage gave out; and a kind of mental flailing took over; and I went back to real air—the alternately okay and then humid air—not sure where I’d been. But I knew the subject wasn’t virgin for me now, since I’d gotten into it, so to speak.
Sometimes, as I rode, I dove in again—into, so to speak, what I had thought before. Nothing of this was lastingly clear. There was a sense of drowning. Of Come on, it’s a joke . . . Coming back to the surface, seeing the road, feeling the sprinklings of rain, dodging the Fords and Chevies, smelling the dried-recently or moist air—I would ask myself, What do you think about death, Wiley? to encourage myself to THINK. THINKING meant to me to put something into words. And sometimes something in me would, as it were, put up its hands, or blurt out something—Ugh, it’s dirty (death was)—not sensibly, so far as I knew, more like a fool in a classroom than sensibly.
Still, I tried. I have a kind of harsh courage that I can call up by being not good or sensible but careless—like a naked soldier in a machine-gun fusillade: or ALL WET, with thought, with dreaming, a surprised bather. Twistedly wretched and obstinate. A hick-rube, a local yokel—in regard to death. To grief. This isn’t a bad way to be. As far as other kids are concerned—in the eyes of other kids—this doesn’t make you obscene. But it had made my dad sad.
He’d said, You don’t have good judgment: you’re not smarter than me . . . You’re not smarter than ANYONE I know.
Thinking is a shadow fruit, shadows and weirdness in an electric orchard, blossoming with mirage after mirage, crumblingly real, then shadow paintings, mock photographs in black-and-white, then a mere sickly sense, an exposed underpainting, the overlay lost.
You have no common sense . . . What’s the point of the way you are? . . . you’ll lose what little common sense you have. You like being the way you are? It’s you against the world—you like it like that?
Looniness and INTELLIGENT REFLECTION and sensible scale and discipline: but in stuff unusable for school, the terrible pain of the nerves, in sliding from the subject: the awful abrasiveness of failure. I breathe hard. A half-loony whicker of nerves. An image from baseball: You’re OUT, you’re OUT, you’re OUT . . .
You ride on . . .
A quick glimpse through a band of dark-trunked trees of the river. Then a clear view of it across a flat, muddy field lower than the road, a field of weedy riverside corn planted in wandering, careless rows. A mighty but dowdy river back then, undammed, with visible shoals, sandbars, mud islands.
Off to the right, below the highway but higher than the field of corn, is a falling-down house, a fancy house on a knoll with a two-story side porch set between two columns, and not far from the house, under some small trees, a collapsing pergola.
Also visible (your eyes move around) is a brown unpainted barn, and then an unpainted wooden tavern with a number of neon signs already turned on, one saying FISH and another saying BEER and one announcing a local brand called OILYCOCK LAGER. In front of the tavern is a stretch of dried mud—the parking lot. Behind it is a short jetty in an inlet. Overall the place didn’t have an honest look now. When we had owned this place, there had been a different barn, one painted white, with a green roof: it had been down near the river—I’d heard it had been washed away in a Hood—and we’d had no tavern, no signs, no parking lot, just trees and grass and farm fields. We’d often parked on grass.
I hid my bike in a copse near the road, in the muck under a fallen locust; I covered it with fallen branches. I took off my jeans so I was in the cut-off jeans I’d put on underneath at home. I left the long jeans with the bike under the branches and I made my way through the woods walking in a stream in my sneakers—the stream which wound down (through often tall banks) to the inlet. Ignoring the flies and mosquitoes—the bugs—I walked along, stung-legged, wet-legged, odd-mooded, now with the sky visible, now with it hidden. At the mouth of the stream, where it emptied into the inlet, under willows, lay a very large, ungainly river dinghy. It was greenish and heavy, made of thick and heavy pieces of wood, scarred and scratched, peeling, and warped, moored to a ring in the trunk of a willow. Dilapidated and poor. I step into the sloshing water in the boat. In that water are warped, unpainted oars; I lift one and figure, sadly, they are too big for me to row with but I can use one as a pole in the muddy bottom of the shallows. We’d owned this boat once. I untied it. The boat moves slowly in smelly water. I was uneasy, then afraid. Then the fear was tremendous in me and only laziness and self-doubt kept me from giving up . . . I could see how some men wore out young. As S.L. had.
The clay of the banks, the yellow marl, had dirty red and loose-edged brown stripes and ovals in it. Past decrepit and mournful willows, I poled, tense with adventure. At the spreading mouth of the inlet, only a little current is present, guarded by a sandbank, shoals, and an island of reeds a hundred and fifty yards off shore. The ripples of the currents of a sensible river move here—it is not as it is in my head later in New York, years later, ostensibly present in the dry mind, a slop of fluids and electric traces. A real river is not uncertainly mounted in space but is actually there.
I poled out into the shoaled water where real current was possible, but it was possible the water would be calm. It looked calm. At the edge of the reeds, which rose maybe sixteen feet into the air, I tied the dinghy to a log, half buried in the mud. And I climbed out of the boat into the muddy water; I feel my lower legs moistly muddied in the water . . . my bare feet are in the gooey mud of the bottom . . .river molluscs cut my feet and river shrimp tickle my ankles. My feet and lower legs are as if murmuring with sensation. My gym shoes, their laces tied, are around my neck. T
he quick pulsations of fear and the alternating and, maybe, ruling bravery, or recklessness, and the thing of how it felt to be really alone for a change, the expansion of the mind then—as if your own mind became a mother or a brother there with you for the day, going along with you for the day’s stuff—and to be alone in this wobbly state of bravery with no audience, I had come here for this but hadn’t remembered from before what it was really like . . . The reeds towered over my head, and the mud flats and the muck of shallow river water smelled. To be frank, it was really creepy. As I said, the Missouri was undammed then, was a loosened and natural river, a naturally occurring, shoally, sloppy, weird thing, wet and wide, flat-surfaced, twisty with currents, big, unsafe.
Among the reeds, the water was combed and rendered into glass, stilled. I waded into the reeds, which walled in the eye. They themselves had tickling odors as the water did, the stifling air, and the muck did, too. So did I, I smelled, too, by now, the motionful wader in the stilled water, smelled with nerves, and heat, with grief, and of the river. One’s mind moves in the endowment of silence—and in that quietness feels how hot it was in that odd grove and how it really stank there. The thin shimmer of dankness that rose gassily among the reeds in the shadow-strips and light and the odor—and bars and blobs of light and the thin shadows and the smell; it was sticky . . . the bugs bit. In a way, it was like being indoors, in the reed-columned roofless room—or in reed-walled, wet corridors. I walked testingly observant for sinkholes and snapping turtles. In the striped brightness, the stippling on my arms of brightly lit tiny blond hairs and the precise shadows they cast were ordinary nature which meant me: a hunh of loud breathing: a raw madness . . . different from home: not a domestic madness: my breath moves differently; I feel my ribs inside my skin; my degree of strength—physical strength—is a constant issue here of life and death, or life and injury, and not of politeness and murder, as at home, or whatever it is there. The rawness of being a self is kind of raucous here. A nervous, crowlike cawing, an intruder thing is what my identity feels like. I don’t know. I turned over in my head (and partly in my chest and throat) the idea of swimming out into the river—a fifty-fifty chance of drowning—“fifty-fifty” was rhetorical: I didn’t know what the odds were. After a few minutes, I felt myself running out of courage—I had minded my dad’s not being entirely courageous about his own dying. I had forgotten that that was so about courage, that it ran out, that it was subject to being used up: it burned in the friction of the moments and went out. I maybe partly understood a little about the ways my father had gotten tired of life, of courage. What he had meant when he said he was tired, what he’d meant when he’d said my mother—or I or my sister, Nonie (his real daughter, not adopted)—had ground him down, worn him out, had used up his courage. He said those things; those were his phrases. The reeds rustled in a passing wind. He sometimes used words like guts, courage, class, a fighting heart, a Fighter’s Heart (like Man o’ War’s or Jack Dempsey’s). He said that pushing yourself to your limit, and so on, destroyed your heart; don’t do it, he said. I didn’t want to commit suicide, but I was accustomed to turning things over to chance, to my darker self—selves—and seeing what the vote was, seeing what happened. I did want to die . . . but maybe not entirely.
I made myself be brave again. I knew from the odor kind of freshening itself and becoming a kind of sweet stink and then not so much a stink at all but merely clinging and wet and riverine, and from a difference in the heat, a lessening of it, and a sound like a rumble growing louder, that I was approaching, in the bed of reeds, a limit of the privacy and that I was coming to the unobstructed river. I wasn’t sure what I was coming to. I should have said I had some warning before I came out of the rustling discontinuum of reeds at the rim of a great, immediate circle of wide, hurrying, gray-colored water. And sky. A scene of peculiar radiance, that immense showy grayness: a brute enormity, an enormous scene of water, an everywhere of hurrying water and of reflections . . . giant reflections: in places, a gigantic expanse of river that rippled and that was inset with vast reflections of clouds moving on the hurrying water. The reflections shifted curlingly.
Impressed and dubious toward the natural glory and its plainness and its dangerousness, I trailed a hand in the light-struck, unstable, hurrying surface as if to restore a sensory narrowness of perception, but I felt the water moving and wrapping itself around me, my fingers, and the palms and backs of my hands and my wrists; and the merciless transience, insatiable-throated and sulphurous-muddy, on my hands or in them, my wrists were half-clasped by it; the stench-ridden, flowing and unobliging, gliding pliability and wet suffocation of the water. The reality held me and then dragged me out into the middle of the river and then, oh, two hundred feet into the air. Aerially, I felt the, uh, goddamned, remorseless replacement of everything, the air, the water, every moment, by itself, itself a moment later; so that everything is in a different moment but it’s not the same everything, it’s only the same everything in an unfocussed way, somehow, because it’s a moment later. Have you noticed it’s a different moment all the time? The marvelously undulant atoms and electrons and this mysterious other motion—or the same one—but it’s like blinks and flights of attention . . . in gallopingly fluid cantos, stanzas: the motions of things. You FEEL the air on your lips rhyme itself from a few seconds ago. The earlier state has skedaddled away. And this moment, this n-o-w, is not clearly formed, it’s not still; hardly alit; it hasn’t alit; it’s fluttering; but it’s still n-o-w, but it’s a different now, loosely or wildly different.
A river-borne tree trunk, dipping and twirling, sodden, with some roots and leafy branches on it still, went by thirty feet away from me. It would have broken my back if it had hit me. So I thought of the drowning of everything in being newly everything all the time and still, continuingly, drowning in being attached somehow—a mysterious spine of twirling, bodiless vertebrae . . . I saw stuff arrive at the surface of the river near the hurrying water around my thin legs, real stuff, but I felt the moment doing stuff, and I felt the stuff of moments doing stuff in me as well, becoming everything or taking it’s place eerily, coming and going; and I became recalcitrant; I became slowed pools of watchfulness in motion and watching everything be in motion, eddying without surface or bottom or banks. And the reflections, the thoughts were like clocks, and had tides and were slowed and recalcitrant pools as well . . . And what was watching ticked, too, and moved and swept along and was swept or stood still and flowered and died and kept going in some way or other.
But it was too hard—and too immodest—to do this. Instead, I felt time to be held in my silently blowing-bellows-like taut lungs—and in my hair and in the belly wall and in my toes in the mud underwater, but I was separate, too, so that I was a committee of times and hours and of timelessness anchored and unanchored chronographically in ways taught in school, a ribbed and breathing steeple made of whirring clocks, whirring clocks for eyes and stiller ones for the inner eyes, and clocks, also, of my breathing and, differently, of my memory of breathing if I looked at myself breathing a moment ago . . . And then I gave up the timelessness; and life seemed an AMBITION—oh, something like the nature of time itself with its direction fixed—to be known in-my-blood now as a spirit of individual chaos humming or whistling along ambitiously in a universal tick-tock and bustle. So that I was, oh, sort of, time in a bag and forked at the crotch—the bag was time, too, and was blowing along and the mind was rolling along, one member of a congress of sightednesses, all of them awhistle with time.
I felt, maybe stupidly, the humming and whistling inside my lips and of my lips—breaths, atoms—atoms?—and the molecules of my breath, oxygen-drained and monoxide-ridden or whatever—but all of us, me, and all of me, and the river, flying along mysteriously, ticking and breathing, into being and being in this flowering surf and eerie tide.
The wish to continue the world, to have it continue as an I-am-alive reality in itself, in no degree or jot or iota separate from what couldn’t
be named as me (there was no place apart from it for me to name it from), was crudely different now—everything in its reality, bustling, hurtling, ticking, hymning and humming along . . . in fraught ambition—like my own breathing throat and its ambition to continue to breathe . . . Or a molecule or atom or electron existing . . . But more pervasive and single and not exactly different as muscle and blood and tendons were from each other—and trachea and neck bones and hair on the nape from hair on my crotch. I didn’t think I was a prophet or that I had been given a message, or, rather, I did wonder about that, but I doubted that it would matter to a lot of people, what I’d thought or what had happened here—I doubted that I was a big-time prophet . . . I couldn’t think this was a historical moment.
I did think, pretentiously, Well, try to be important, Wiley. I thought that what was weirdest about time being everywhere was that if it was everywhere, if it was universal, then God was biographical and had a history, whether I could understand it or not.
I felt a radiance spread in me equal, in minor terms, of a maybe only mildly successful orgasm during masturbation, but not from trying to think about that last thing, but from the kind of meaning earlier, more a sense of meaning than a meaning formulated. Then, this sense of meaning in the bustling and hurried universe, this sense of a sense available to ME, I located (a certain actual image of it) in my mildly convulsed throat with its various labors of supporting the skull and of angling and twisting to aim the eyes and ears while it worked away at carrying blood and air in this heat. A throat. A throat. Then that faded into a mob of clocks that stare at each other and overlap and tug and flower in a great brouhaha. It is very like music. I have an inward shout of GOD WHAT AM I TO DO ABOUT THIS? I wasn’t told what to do about it. I thought, Well, shove it up your ass, Wiley . . . I waited, not with a lot of hope; but I wasn’t told anything. Shyly prophetic—since no project was given me—I told myself to back off, quiet down, button up: it would mean too much trouble, it would cause too much trouble to argue or believe what I myself thought—to lay claim to meaning. But it seemed to me that I saw in the shadows on the water, and in the ones in the depths and those cast by the ripples, a dot or an egg, sort of a mirroring thing, that I did believe and would hold onto as belief. People had said to me, Don’t ever believe yourself, Wiley.
The Runaway Soul Page 6