The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  The mute child, a field of attention unwincingly in an increasingly imperial wish to live, has the noticeable heat of childhood, therefore guided, as if formally, focussed, restrained, mannerly—perhaps brilliantly so.

  The facts of spectacle include the frail facial shadowing of S.L. in the window glass near us. A multitude of grown-ups are shadow-tumults vaguely near us. Three smaller tumults, girls, more visible to me, sit cross-legged on the floor: a separate sect. Outside the window, occupying a damp niche of dripping leaves in the implicit roll call of the rain, is a colored cloud, small, ticking. The child shakes his head so that distractions run out. The child cannot see any real thing but only the attributes of the moment—of a moment—I say it; he didn’t know it was true.

  I don’t know how to see. S.L. extends above me as if he were in leaf. I am on his lap.

  The man near me—I have momentarily forgotten it is S.L.—he says to me, “You like looking out the window?” His voice pours and splashes over me inundatingly. “You don’t want to talk yet? What are you looking at? You looking at a robin? That’s a robin come to see you.”

  A woman I do not know is a tall ghost with a tall-ghost voice: “I think it’s a cardinal, S.L. It’s an all-red bird.”

  S.L.—I remember him now—said, “I’m not that crazy about birds, Katherine—to tell you the truth. Here’s the way I feel about birds; what I feel about birds is little ones are sparrows—unless they’re robins. What my system is, pleasure calls, it’s a matter of opinion so long as you have a good American attitude, isn’t that right? Of course, if I said that bird was a red eagle, I could understand your feelings . . . I’m not a man cares a lot about large birds—” Mockery, friendly-dangerous—scandalous translation of flirtation . . . “If a little bird has color in it, it’s a robin—that there’s MY system: Let Littlekins here go to college, he’ll get it all straightened out.”

  Ghosts are present in the rainy air. Fear is present—and people who are lost to me—and memories, and nightmare with its immense plausibility. An abundance of moments of failed vision, failed one way or another, as I stare now, becomes a single smudged anatomy of inability, of a generalized and uncomprehending stare. I remember. I remember not seeing very well. I’m a pressured rationalist. I consider the smudged sight as me nuzzling and sniffing ocularly around the boundaries of myself: those are the living and smelly powers of sight I had. I no longer knew that my blindness, my inability, was, in part, from the confusion of my names and lives. But perhaps it was real ignorance, not the result of that story. I mean I am always somewhat ignorant about cause in a real moment as I go along. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. In those days, that day, no explanations at all of the world around me worked for a while. One way and another, I was blinded; I was unsighted.

  The bounteously upward-bounding bunch of shapes—the woman—has a thing, a sack, a purse: “S.L., honey, it was ALL red, the bird outside.”

  “Spare me, Katherine: I say a robin a day keeps the doctor away.”

  His jocularity somewhat meanly, somewhat generously announces what he does is a provision of charity toward a woman like her. She has a giant set of everything: she is not BONY, she is not STARK. It’s enough to make you polite—someone not stark. She has a kind of triumphantly endured ready enmity—a sense of her being disliked and of her self fighting back.

  A dictionary was fetched. Or a volume of a picture encyclopedia opened to Birds—a party moment (People don’t know what else to do with themselves).

  I knew very little about pictures except in the nervous kingdoms of my dreams. Picture books, in their deathly stillness, did not yet entertain me. They were, indeed, often unrecognizable, such books, the volume itself and what was in it divorced from movement, unless the movements of someone’s hands and voice are present; then it is the hands and not the book that I recognize; but the book itself is dead or strange to me in its inertness. Images have to do with absence, and I do not have a happy connection to absence. Absence does not always turn out well, you know? One sees pictures in dreams and I do not have a happy connection to my dreams. I am afraid of unedited knowledge. I was completely wakeful, limited in that way, rational entirely in a sense.

  But some pictures, without inhabitants or a center, without real light, or a pretense at real light, were yet nervous and trembling explanations, representations—among other things—of affection toward me. Toward my mind. Looking at the room, then at the pictures, my consciousness glided among the radiant logics of the diagrams. I felt their meaning as presence—ghost breath among the indecipherable lines of a drawing. I was a child overly awake with the ghost presence of meaning whispering to him as if I were asleep somehow in the same moment. That promise, or hint, of answers was a stillness to be entered; it invited me to approach it, to enter, to become familiar with it. Then an answer begins and is like a dream but it is undreamed and real; it is ordinary perception, unsure and, so, perhaps only dreamed after all. But it is a clarity and if it seems to work, it seems to be made of lucky, mad guesses at a dreamed-of law, a law of recurrence—a useful surrealism of intellect. It is quotable and lasting (sometimes), and private and docile. My periods of madness after my mother’s death continue to instruct me. Perhaps they forbid me certain things—faithlessness, easy faith, too easy mistakenness. Back then, mine was a perverse sanity, skeptical, aware that it was singular and inept—who here knows as little as I do? Or is as uncertain? I had thought the house I lived in was different from this one. I had thought my father had a different face from this one. My errors are the shape of my name, are how I know things. My name is Wiley now and not Aaron. I have been wrong. I am often wrong. I am uncertain with each step my mind or my body takes. But I am here now.

  And then to speak of the old pain and its fearsomeness, the dissolution of the self in grief, in the unanswerability of grief, that echoes in my being unable to answer anyone at all. I was shaped in the weeks and months when no one answered my cries. I cannot answer to myself now. The merest touch of language burns my lips. At bottom my memory is the memory of failure and absence. The pain was so great it was, boringly, like a stone on the chest crushing my breath. In the return of well-being, I found that some errors hardly mattered if I avoided words such as ‘mother’ and ‘house’ or, after a while, any words, all words, since syllables echo with doubleness, tripleness, example, and the specific now and with their being specific as a gesture of a particular voice; comprehension of them in any direction echoes with an entirety of the partly buried but always-ready grief. So, I am mute.

  The matter of my identity includes my having no memories of any mother but Lila and of no house but this one and of no father but S.L. And of no sadness. Everything from before is folded into what is here.

  When everything or anything of mind and body—my mind, my body—moved at all, when it stirred from motionlessness, what it did was leap through a doubled medium of wakefulness and sleep-in-the-moment, a medium doubled further by the fires of loss and despair that I must avoid. Infant’s madness, death of a kind—the death of everything for a while. The wakefulness and then the false explanation of the true explanation and the confusions and oversimplifications of the senses (as in dreams) frankly have a faintly heroic aspect—childish-Promethean—a bit timid, appealing. But a peculiar and doubtful and doubted sense that things worked, prayers worked, pain was eased, after all, was here. And no memory of an actual moment in childhood escapes that sense, that tone.

  Meanwhile, from the time my memory starts up again, I remember people talking about it, my sleep, the way I slept. I never actually slept as other children did. I was locked up, smothered, clubbed with sleep: “Nothing can wake you—maybe you’re too polite to your dreams . . .” Sometimes I woke and was nowhere and it took the efforts of the entire household to persuade me I was somewhere; sleep then for me was so thick-walled, so odd, so convincing to me as a place and as a separate existence with no clear, reliable path back to the world I had left when I had fallen asleep in a mysterious
longing for that other place of the solitary mind, even at that age, mind containing all-there-was, so far as I knew.

  The way things were named in dreams was very odd for me, since I didn’t speak in waking life. Tree and corn and flowers and talk—I had no sense of language being fixed. Language was as riotous a matter of presence and surprise as people and their faces and their odors were.

  And as time itself was, days arriving and departing; and it, language—what the people around me said—depended on the household and on the hour of the day and who was there: the number of men in the room. I never mistook the people who woke me for the selves they’d had before I slept. I knew it was someone new who came to release me. I hoped they would be somewhat as they had been. I knew that I saw them newly—educatedly. They were new and different for the child who was himself newly another person after his sleep and now in this different order of life, in waking. The moving, wobbly air, how time trembles and breathes there. And in what I do, in what I know. Someone new woke me who was as new as I was. And this was to begin what was called a new day. This was a return to my waking senses: Are you back? Are you yourself yet? Hi, Little Pisher . . .

  Waking life each morning seemed to occur on a fresh layer of moral sediment, a silt of new history deposited in the night and obscuring what had been in existence before. The day offered a new flooring for the senses—and for the intellect (such as it was).

  So, I am all eye blinks and rattling ears in a particular way. “He’s not like everyone.” In how light exists in me in this real moment, I am, all unknowingly, as in everything I do, an example of a skeptic consoled—this is visible to some members of my audience back then; I have that beauty, at least at times—the beauty of an example of a consolation that succeeded.

  I sometimes experience an actual moment as if it were a brief interruption of actual sleep and is so tinged by sleep that all the consolations and knittings-up of sleep are somehow mixed into the waking moment no matter how skeptically and with what widened, staring eyes I regard it—perhaps in a comic way to an adult, a cheering and comic way—I am partly guessing, partly remembering.

  “Look he’s daydreaming—he’s such a dreamer,” S.L. says further. And he says further yet: “This is a dream of a child.”

  With especial attentiveness and fear (in tonalities particular to me in form and mixture) the day’s child watches the woman’s hands push, shuffle, catch at pages, and straighten one particular one. I can say now that she must have been quite irritatedly interested in correcting S.L. Such feelings as I had were wrapped in the suggestions, the suggestiveness of intimacy of attention that includes in its hot focus a knowledgeable sense of moods and of intention. Suggestion, suggestiveness: and the postures of her hands: the rustling pages and the motions of her fingers had a dreamlike authority: that suggestiveness was as real to me as bread. And on the pages, the myriad strange colors and the black-and-whites of diagrams, not much like nature, seemed more accurately to be real in terms of thought, in being color and a little blurred and light and dark black-and-white, than real things were in themselves as they appeared to me off in a corner of the room or nearby or out the window. The drawings were gifted with Lovering and moving presences, as I was, as certain words were for me, or as people were when I silently looked at them in that room. That is to say that the pictures began to address me with the actuality of dimensional real creatures—like dogs or a cat awake and stalking in and compelling attention because it can spill surprises, worry and pleasure, jealousy, merriment, or astonishment on you, as the voice of your mother can.

  Animals are not common even in my unremembered dreams—I would bet on that—even of my dreams back then; but perhaps I would lose. I never had a sense of the unreality of animals. I think I expected or wondered whether the few animals in my dreams would appear on those pages, these pages, and then emerge, furry-footed, feather-winged, actually here in the presence of Daddy’s breath, the ghost-woman’s, my own. My absurd safety at this time, at this very moment, inflects my eyes, strengthens my sight, enables me to bear this reality—some of it. My safety? I am safer from unwanted surprises than I am even in the, after all, awkward passages of my dreams at their most flattering. I am awake and extraordinarily safe from suffering and intrusion, more than if I were in hiding. I can afford to risk seeing. Then one sees suddenly . . . One sees that there is a step, from the less true—the falsified, a model—to the real. The real is a skiing and rainy blur. In dreams, mine, the creatures are sometimes plausible shadows, not fully sensed, but as if fully sensed in laboring wakefulness—isn’t that confusing? But that was lied about: they were not dimensional examples of purpose toward me, full of their own purposes and tones; they were dreamed about and named in the dream by the mood, by my sense of the mood: a mood is everything I know about this, whatever this is.

  The drawings in the book and the names the adults speak hold other information, hold things I might know if I thought to ask someone, but I don’t speak. In a single moment, a name is an obligation to have an identity in terms of someone else’s sense of language and reality in a room. The creatures in the book, dimly seen, known to be charts or pictures, have the character of explanation and then of animals-and-birds. My name, as I watched the pages in the book, is precipitously, alternately, an untrue and then a real thing, a focus of moral indignation—a human child’s truth. I think the pictures should move more slowly and should be clearly of what they are of. That is my name when it is real: my name has to do with information about the world that I want given to me and with my being balked in that regard. My name contains a right to comfort so far as I knew then. It contains a need for others to be gentle toward my mind.

  A rush of feeling, then a silence of feeling, announce the clarification of the intentions of the large bodies around me. An explanation—a guess—a doorway, dreamed, undreamed—appears. In a second, it is known. The picture holds the hand of an expectation in me that my seeing something in real air in a way now will be aimed and guided by the picture. Love and fear say the picture is a more ideal presence than the thing is. I press one hand on a picture of a cardinal. More ideal? It depends on where one is in one’s wakefulness. Stilled. Safe. I want to see the real bird again but it is gone. The light on the pages of the book makes a glare, through which, at last, I see a representation, half-drowned, almost as in recollection of the bird I saw; but it is drowned in my surprised discovery of how it works. This drowned discovery is like when one’s fingers find a pebble in the crooked marvel of refraction of clear water—the refraction of the light being puzzling but regular in the clarity of that other mostly transparent medium.

  Daddy says, “Look at the little shikker [drunk]; look at the scholarly little pisher; he’s a scholar and a gentleman and a cabalist right off the bat: he has a real Yiddisher Kopf: look at him.”

  Daddy and the others thought I was slow-witted, damaged by my mother’s death, perhaps even deranged. And Daddy used Yiddish as another, wittier, sourer form of country-and-Western, as another rural American dialect, poetic, a medium of sentiment and irony about life around here and about such topics as children damaged in passing by the deaths of others.

  The pisser is peering around in the clarity which is the distillate of his immediate education. I am peering in a leopard light where rain-shadows run and glide and jerk on the wall and on the curved page, on the curved picture on it, and on my leg where no birds are. Nothing here is like the thing pictured. The quick shadows of raindrops fly and prowl and leap around me, and shadows weight the bottoms of the raindrops on the windows. The narrowing—and stabbing—of the excitement of explanations organizes the body in a way that is rigidly voluptuous. Shadows and raindrops, pictures and representations, the casting and catching of comprehensions of a sort, I slap gently, I swat or pat the picture, the shadows on my leg, the sounds of the slapping forming imperfect rhymes in the noise of the party and continuingly novel, this rhyming accompanies me as I breathe and look. The shapely blot, the logi
cal presence of my recognition of things, is ecstatically new now—is real, in me. Life is summoned, embodied oddly—a onetime, post facto, huddle-bird, a creaturally red thing, is now a handsome and flashy armada of photographically crimson birds astreak and afloat in a shivering trickle of greater and lesser existence in the kid.

  S.L. Takes the Baby Aside

  And outside the window, in the air, gray, slanting strings of rain belly here and there, pushed by the wind. The window is open. Damp air touches me. A gray bird perches, preens, walks, and coos on the windowsill. I see it as red. My transactions with the visible dream me. Here, for a moment, all things and all people sleep and they dream me. And I am free and I move among the qualities of the room as in a dream in the semi-dark of today’s rain, in the foreign light. I cannot list all the constant mercies and subtle courtesies that underlie the foundations of my sight. Rain-ribbons, shadows lie and wriggle on the shadow-striped glare-porcelain of S L.’s face. I stare. Below the everted basins of his cheeks lie the tumbled, partly shadowed, further ribbons of his lips. I ride inside my face as in a car, and I study him in a rush of childish attention. Affection. Did he save me? The party of travellers in the room share the shelter here with me. Fear, temper, adversity, bankruptcy, and death are here, but diminished, so in a sense they are not here, although they are. No one dies at a party. Some things are not likely or suitable in given moments. Now you know me, the picture says. Now you are reasonably safe and you know me . . . I lean against S.L.’s shapely ribs. The powers gathered at the transparent passage of the window beat at my face, and thump, and they aureole the window frame and people in front of it.

  “Look at Cutie Pie here; he’s got eyes like gymnasiums.” Large, hollowed, echoing? “Hey, you playing basketball in there?” Looking up—some nearby grown-ups are talking to him, to us; I don’t understand: Daddy is talking for all of them perhaps: “He may be a little slow but he’s ours—that’s enough for us—”