The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  I cannot possibly be original. The universe, the universes, shadows in the water, me and love and war, death and murder, me and days, me and holy and unholy things. Me and facts. A tickling eddy (like a girl’s cunt and clitoris and legs maybe) pressed with no tact against my wet waist . . . My father, who had his own ideas, said once when he was drugged that it was all a lot of trash—everything wants to own you. And I am as if in the open mouth of a moment and its huge and thrashing flight. I am scared of the consequences of things . . .

  OH YOU—YOU’RE a phenomenon—you’re A GENIUS . . . I DON’T THINK SO . . . Somebody’s making a fool of himself here. Daddy said it . . . Daddy said I was too consistent to be interesting. He said, Don’t be boring . . . Don’t hang yourself on your own petard—spit it out . . . Spit out what you can’t chew. Don’t talk to hear the sound of your voice . . . Learn to be happy: be a happy gentleman. Daddy said it.

  In the present tense, in the great drafty corridors of the real, in the actuality of the wet timeyness of the unsteady river and of me, and the dry but vaporous-cloud-occupied sky overhead, I feel myself to be truly, guiltily, a boy burning with stupid consciousness and error—in persistent metamorphosis—numbly amnesiac.

  What did I just think? Repeat it . . . I can’t . . .

  Thinking has in it a lot of the faithless fascism of dreams.

  Someday I will reproduce what I thought on the river, I thought then. Meanwhile, I last dutifully into the next flying noticeability of a flutteringly present moment, aware that this is at the beginning of an arc of giving up the argument for now.

  I go from moment to moment, I do that for the sake of love—of people and of this world—and out of fear of the terrible sense of singularity I bet people have and that I will have when I die. When I leave this world. Sure, death is attractive: want to be a genius—go die . . . I go to the NEXT and THE NEXT in the blink-scarred continuum of my life.

  Daddy said he wanted to die . . . He said it was time for him to get off the shitter and give someone else a turn at drenching the world in shit. I.e., time for others to have thoughts of how much of life was shit—and of how a person was like a threshing machine making acres and acres of corn and orchards full of apples into turds . . . Into shit. He believed intelligent, good people had all the same thoughts—and should have the same thoughts. But I am afraid to have his thoughts in me . . .

  A fading of the light draws my eyes to an oval patch of darkness on the water and a floating ovoid of darkness in the air, an interrupted shadowiness—to the west—and it comes nearer—and then is here, a spotty, brief rain, airy pitter-patter on the water in a diffusedly almost lightless air. Discontinuous chains of drops going slantedly up and down and moving along on the water like a float in a parade, going on also in that other direction, which is to say, toward my death . . . thinly bouncing, travelling rain—thinly-welling-so-many-ways rain.

  Help me . . .

  I’m more deeply scared, emptier, too, in the immediate air of that rain than even when I swam a moment ago. And it’s even worse in the drying air when the smell and sight of the lines of rain is hardly more than a thousand yards off, if that. And beads of scalding light on some of the eddies where the rain has stopped rack me with warnings of the approach of a seizure of the opposite of despair. I have a sweaty sense of truth . . . I have a sweaty flesh and a flesh of light. I stood in the light of right-after-a-rain. In the afterwards here. The parts of me I am aware of are motion fill clouds of matter, brothers and cousins of one another and of light and of the water. This is just for now that I feel this . . . I promise not to believe myself . . . I swear, cross my heart and hope to die—in the singularity of my own death—that I do not believe I know the truth. I sweat with nervous grief in fear that I might know a little bit of truth, enough to fuck up my life, let alone the next step IN THE BEAUTY of the inexplicable one-way flow in the direction of my death, of the death of everything, and which is my fate, my territory, my garden, my frontier. I feel nerves at the bottom of my belly and in my now shaking thighs, and in my nose chokingly, and in my lips.

  BE TOUCH, SHITHEAD. BELIEVE SOMETHING ELSE . . .

  My angled head . . . My father said, I know who you are, Charlie, by what you look like: you’re a real cutie, you are, Wileykins.

  I have no idea of what he really saw when he looked at me, when I was little, or in the middle part, or lately. Cutie here. Daddy said, Tell me, are there any more at home like you . . . You’re enough and you’re too much . . . You’re enough and a little over for any one household to manage.

  Madness blows and whistles, sunlight rains every which way among the lazy and more or less corkscrewingly erect vapors here after the rain, and the rain itself is visible downriver. Help me . . . Vapors rise from the river and the clouds move and the rearoused birds skim in the sunlight over the water, and I see them as so many dimensions of ‘duration’ that I am afraid I am truly lost and will maybe never escape again back to certainty. I slide from madness to madness . . . I want to be ordinary . . . I want my father back . . . Do you hear me?

  I don’t want him back, but I don’t want to carry the weight all my life of agreeing it’s time for him to die.

  Yes, I do want that weight.

  Madness partly ends with the lesser madness of announcing it is time to stop and you take steps to stop, not really knowing if you can or not. The snail house and bunches of twig shadows and the nest of flying paths—my head, if I might say this—the boy shuts down his head, my head, with dramatically only partial SUCCESS. Get back to the boat . . . Get back to the SHORE . . .

  But it is, truly, partly over anyway. He scrambles splashingly in the water, a haunted and falling boy, feeling, in terms of perception, that he is made of an infinite regression of eyelids and of eyes—of quanta—only some of which ever obey his will at any one time; and he jokingly calls himself COWARD, COWARD, MOO-COW COWARD. He says to himself, jokingly, The GREAT EYELID is not subject to me. The principles of The Great Eyelid are beyond me.

  But he hears GOD delusionally as The-Breath-and-Motors-of-Time stalking him along his path in the reeds, and storming along as A GREAT HA-HA of final force in him and everywhere, both wildly and peacefully.

  The boy blinkingly hurries through the reeds, strangely accurate about the direction of escape. Jesus, God—and Moses, he says—the reality of matter sailing along is truth—that is, reality is true or it stops being real. But truth gets to waver. Matter in its courses in time is so true, that is, the world is so real, that even breath and death are not more final than real truth is. But one is helpless in this mess. In a scramble of breath, death, and truth—and of the river-wide, gray-tinged flutter of the present tense—the boy climbs scaredly into the dinghy.

  Dad says, It’s all a lot of crap . . .

  And: Whatever you do, don’t be a prophet: that’s a real can of worms . . . That’s really a terrible thing to do with yourself.

  Worms of light flying in the membrane-wrapped, blood-tinged direction. In one’s consciousness—When you’re dead, real worms feed in your brain.

  S.L. said, Do you think of heaven when you’re on the crapper?

  I don’t know. I haven’t noticed yet . . . Do you?

  Sure. You know my heart may give out in a crap—the sphincter is a real sphinx—I think about heaven, sure.

  (Lila said, Don’t take it wrong, Wiley, but S.L. was a more interesting person than you are.)

  I thought when I heard him say that, that that was a fine thing to say, elegiac, lyrical, accusing, funny . . . I thought it was majestic.

  (Me, I am a mess of changes of subject, but he, he had a lot of real experiences.)

  What are the mind’s motions when the brain changes the subject? What is the point of decision? How does the attention turn aside? What is its neck, its pivot? What is the mind’s neck? What is a motion of the mind? Attention is the most racingly swift part of me—is it faster than light? Maybe my thing like light is the queer, inhuman, swift shuffle—the
glides and swoops—of attention: maybe they’re rivalries and mirrorings of light . . . mysteries . . . I-see-you . . . I-am-seen . . . The mind is fretfully unstoppable, having been stirred up. The boy poling in the muck, standing up in the dinghy, half falls three times, twice inside the boat and once nearly toppling over the side: this emergency ends the prayer, already hardly remembered, ends it with a sense of failure. Chagrin—derisory and gnawing—and chomping—a sense of loss in the peculiar air and light, raw with time—says I am wrong in whatever I do. I have an ancestry of people who died . . . I have a flesh of light and I have sweaty flesh and I’m always in error . . . Big deal . . .

  A slopping pitcher of darkness is in my breast now.

  Now this stuff is over, too.

  THE

  INHABITED

  UNIVERSE

  My (New) Mothers Voice: The Other Narrator:

  1932

  (Chapter 1:) Water flows and knocks and bubbles on the walls of the house. And watery rivulets and glassy and engraved and noisy curtains of water fall from the eaves. Along with the loud, wet rubble of general splashing goes a sense of the immense motions of the world—really, though, it is the railroad and the Mississippi, locomotives and the weight of a river a mile and a half wide. They shake the limestone bluff on which this neighborhood is set.

  The house is on a pale rumbling footing as Daddy gently washes my face with a cold washrag and I turn my head from side to side—the blurring of that motion being part of an orchestral piece of guest voices and rain and a wooden house . . . It is daytime but it sounds like a night orchestra—sometimes the beauty of confusion is as strange and obvious as water.

  We saw about adoption in the movies . . .Still, it’s a big thing to do nowadays—Momma talking biographically. I’ve always lived well. I have my own teeth. You have to know the kind of woman I am. The people that take care ‘a our house at the river? The farm woman? We bought her her teeth. She’s younger than I am. One of her sons has TB—it isn’t worth her while to get out of bed in the morning if you ask me. I don’t want that kind of life for myself and mine—that’s the first thing to take in consideration . . . I started out sweet but, I don’t know, one day I turned the other cheek for the last time, and lo and behold, I turned into the other sort of girl that you see before you. I don’t know; why do you suppose it is people do what they do? If I had time I could think about it but if you want to know what my life is like, it’s first one thing, then another, and, to be frank, I’m busy, I’m so busy I’m rushed right off my feet—where am I going to get the time to think? I have to think on the fly. Rush, rush, rush. I wouldn’t know where my head was if it wasn’t fastened to my shoulders. I don’t know. I make my bed, and it’s like a dream; I lie on it; I’m a serious person but sometimes it feels like a game. Maybe it’s whatchamacallit—psychology. You like Eugene O’Neill? A little excitement is good for what ails you . . . You know what I remember? The horses. The horses outside all day long and in the middle of the night—it was strange late at night—a horse outside making those loud steps and then doing that thing, that braying, not braying, one of the horse cries, I don’t know what you call it, a whistle and a little shriek and a hunh-hunh-hunh in the nose, a snuff-snuff . . . And the smell. They ran away sometimes—what a noise that was, the banging, people screaming; people got hurt; we had a lot of cripples. I sound like an old fogey . . . I remember running downstairs and along the walk and inside next door because they had the telephone already, they were on the line, and we weren’t, and there was a telephone call for me, a boy. He was in love with me . . . He wasn’t the only one; I was a devil. People were nice about sharing their telephones if you had a nice smile . . .well, that’s water under the bridge. I was fifteen; I’m thirty now. [She was thirty-five.] The world was nicer then, boom-boom. It’s funny, all the’things that are gone: the old trees and the noise—and the smells . . . Before you could say Jack Robinson: gone . . . Don’t spread it around how old I am. I’ll tell you how spoiled I was: in the War, my mother and my father gave me a Cadillac convertible and a fur coat and pearls to scare off the poor boys. Well, war is hell. [She was joking; she grew serious.] The suffering takes the heart out of you. So I was off and running with a bang . . . ha-ha . . . and a heavy heart . . . But you know how it is, once you’re off to the races, you don’t turn back. Who wants to die of boredom? I was the cutest thing around—you know how it is—you know what They say: Too soon old, too late smart? My father was a nice man. I was his pet. Marie Dressier came to town to sell war bonds. I was introduced to her but she didn’t say I should be in the movies. She said, Watch out for this one . . . This one is trouble . . . Ha-ha. I just loved her; I always loved funny-looking women who could make you laugh. I was some looker. Well, what can you do. I got married. I married a good-looking man; I don’t like winters. The twenties were good; a good time was had by all. It was a different world from before the War but even so, it was a scandal to be in the forefront—I’ll be frank: I was a flapper . . . I was something, let me tell you, me and my big dark eyes, I had pearls down to my knees and the shortest skirts in Illinois. I had the figure of many men’s dreams—a nice Jewish girl gone native . . . Ha-ha. I had the kind of bust that was popular then—twenty-three skiddoo . . .It was only a few years ago. I will say for myself, I knew my way around. I’m no What’s-her-name, Madame Curie, but I’m a fish people take into consideration in a little pond. You don’t think I’m conceited, do you? I wouldn’t mind being conceited: who’s going to stop me in the middle of the Depression? I look like something the cat dragged in today. Well, it’s a short life but a merry one. I have opinions; I’m not a dumb bunny—using your head is the shortest distance between two points I always say: ha-ha. I listen to no one; I’m an independent. And I don’t want anyone—and his brother—telling me what to do . . .

  In the river sunlight, in the front room, Momma laughs—is she doing it for company? When I am near her, I can tell from her breathing, her nervous momentum, the color of her skin, the lines of her neck, what her mood is, her degree of social lackadaisicalness-cum-tension-and-whatnot. I can see the launched-arrows-the-battle-is-joined-smiles of hers as they go flying into the air. I feel, in a childish way, the angles of intensity in her, the sulky life-is-without-meaning effort she is making; whew, it is powerful for me, what she is doing . . .

  (Chapter 2:) You ask me what’s fun: I enjoy myself now and then. I’ve been known to flirt with one or two people in my time. But charity work is my be-all and my end-all. You know the song, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”? I’m the sweetheart of Sigma Chi: the world is my sweetheart. I try to do good. It isn’t fun to try to help a poor family: people go crazy; people get beaten to death—I don’t mean only at home. You go with a little girl who’s along to buy a tombstone for her drunkard father who was killed by the bootleggers and see how you feel. Believe me, you learn a thing or two. I helped get a boy who was raped to the hospital . . .His embarrassment could give him gangrene. I don’t faint easily; I’m practical. Still, you have to ask yourself, with the world going to hell in a handbasket, what do you want to do with your life . . . I think things were better before the war; life is a lot simpler in a town where people don’t go to the movies. Here, I’ll tell you a secret: I’m not a snob—but I am a cynic . . .

  Youngish, superior, thin-legged, neat-footed Momma in white stockings, in a white linen dress, with her arms bare and a lot of ivory bracelets, Momma shakes her dark hair: I get it styled and set in St. Louis; I’ll be damned before I let myself look like a farm woman . . . You like my little ring? I call it a go-to-a-St.-Louis-store-wait-on-me-and-keep-a-civil-tongue-in-your-head-ring . . . You have to have the soul of a slave driver if you want to get anything done in this world. I like to put on the dog now and then—I do it for Visiting Firemen; it’s a duty; you know how it is. You want to take a look at us? It’s better than a movie—so, take a look at us while the looking is good. We’re the official sight for sore eyes in this burg. People pack lunches
and drive miles these days to have a good laugh: no one’s got any money: we’re on the lists of things to see; we’re good for a laugh now and then. I’m a high-stepper in a little town—oh my, I really have to laugh. Well, I don’t like postmortems but I’m Lila-she’s-modern-she-wants-her-own-way-she’s-a-born-troublemaker-so-go-run-and-hide-maybe-[a whisper here]she’s-a-bitch. Well, I was always the fiery type. I’ve been called a spitfire more than once. But give me credit—I’m a sport . . . I take too many aspirin, I smoke too much than is good for me but I give other people their due; I take my turn; I don’t take more than my share. S.L. says if you stay up past your time, the cows will come home to roost . . . I know what he means: we had a good party last year; we had a dance in the backyard with black men playing jazz: the Japanese lanterns caught fire, the heel broke on my shoe, my brother Mose stole my pearls and wore them around his head—he isn’t good-looking at the best of times: he has a real potato face—I have to admit a good time was had by all. A little screaming, a little running around helps a party. In Alton, you can work up a real sweat if you want to give people a good time. And have one yourself. So, wave your arms and shake your boobies—pardon me—and spill things right and left on your dress—people loosened up; I practically ran from house to house telling people, Come at once, it’s a good party . . . It makes a good story but don’t believe me . . . Believe me, it was uphill work. Try and see if you can get small-town people to have a good time. People are stubborn. I could have shot everyone there, I realized the next day I could shoot everyone I knew and the world would never notice the difference . . . I’ve forgotten my point . . . But it’s a bad bad feeling to feel your life doesn’t matter: my life didn’t mean anything, Moira. I’m not a scenery lover. A muddy river to look at isn’t my idea of heaven either. I’m not a woman who can feel something and then do nothing about it. Ask me no questions; tell me no lies. I have my ambitions; I aim to be the wildest thing around; but when all is said and done, I lack confidence. I have to go step by step. I know my limitations.