The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  The everything world.

  She is in bed, smoking drowsily. Opulently limitless she seems to me—a figure at a small distance, through light and a doorjamb—and then I am past the doorjamb; and the figure is changing in scale, the aristocratic amusement of flesh which in its breasts and ribs, in their appearance, in their posture, is aristocratic . . . in a tone of victorious amusement, of challenging-you guiltlessness—the secular knowledge of the inward postmortems in you—the slidingness of life. She is the other body there—thighs, lower legs. She has turned on a lamp. She isn’t middle-class. Or working-class. Or Upper-Bohemian . . .

  My sense of her stability—of her timelessness—of her having emerged from the ruck of the sublunary rush and boiling outward and inwardly toward some purpose—is strong and childlike. Perhaps I am enclosed in her presence.

  I am as if at a crossroads—of worshipping her, or it—the grace or blessing perhaps—or some improvement on life—or of—and this is stronger in me—a sense of going back to work, under the moon, and in the middle of the night, because she is enclosed in time, too, and encloses it, and because her emotions bubble and foam, and because we are alike and individuated, both: we are both those things.

  And the bed is our raft; and so are our wills our rafts.

  The brushwork, the carving, the sewing, the hewing, the captaincies, the crewing, the hoeing and hemming and hawing—I clear my throat a lot—it doesn’t matter how I long to be still and to feel the lion of God in the room and the breath of God mysteriously in me—the trembling and frightened audacity of the chorale of more than molecules in this sense—I chose the human long ago: I want her to live. Her form of masturbating afterward is to disapprove of me and then to forgive me—the fuckee fucks back—or Ora does, anyway—but so have the others I have known—one struggles with this knowledge, which is not an omniscience and is not tied to an omnipotence or to an absolute rightness of any sort. To see her is to see time embodied in a certain way—that is all. She will attack me not sexually as I do her—the parallelisms, the parallel arms, never quite match but they have some eerie equivalency which I adopt as ‘love’—she will attack me as a pretentiously male soul and liar—as someone who lies to himself. She said across the intervening space, in the dark—she is in the light and naked and smoking—and I am in the dark and naked and approaching the bed—“If I could be an artist, I would be a good one, not a moralist.” She would be it better than I am it. But she is afraid of me lately, and she says quickly—and a quick, drowsy voice is obviously dishonest, you know—“You are my life.”

  “Love talk in the middle of the night,” I said, now near the bed and looking down at her—navel and belly, breasts and fingers—the site of the naval battle—or Jericho, where the walls fell. The winds and trumpets of God—of time—of madness—of sanity, which is an unholy and shrewd thing—blow and whistle and hum around us, shocking now her, now me. “Time to get to work? Build bridges. Sleep.” What do I say when I say sleep? She partly knows what I am saying, but this speech is like sexual event in that it is comprehensible only as it occurs, and then it goads and shocks you in memory. I am at work; it is love talk of a kind. I am getting in bed, under the sheet—then I throw the sheet off me—I am not yet ready to give in to fear or sorrow or restlessness or despair.

  But I am not quite ready to go on either: and I loathe memory: how odd that the two things exist in the same moment—TOWARD AFFECTION AGAIN and toward one’s knowledge of things, if I will now, or ever will again, feel in a way to be thought of as precoital.

  Naked, reaching for another cigarette, I say, “Who knows, Ora? Who knows?”

  “You have a handsome behind,” she says treacherously. I.e., I am a human sacrifice—treasure—a child—sexually persuasive (to a degree).

  We have betrayed the stuff before, both of us; what went on before now has been double-crossed so often it has been a thousand-and-million-times-doubly-crossed: this, too, is an uneasy seesawing balance thing. I say, in a cold way, “Ora in love . . . Ora has known love . . .” In a way, I’d like to goad her into an absolute statement that just blasted me into rock-solid surefootedness.

  Perhaps absolute nihilism would do.

  She said in a suddenly anguished voice—too loudly, in a way, for sincerity: I mean, the sincere way to say it would have been different from the way she did say it—she shouted like a rich girl, showing how lively she was in a tantrum of power, a tantrum of a leader who loved me: “DON’T INSULT ME!” Then, with a kind of acid anger, “Don’t insult what we have! God, you are the only person I would ever murder. You are the occasion for the worst sin.” Then: “I forgot: Jews don’t sin—do they?”

  “Women after a fuck fuck what they can. Fuck up what they can.” I am showing off. Throwing an idea as if I were a fleet-footed girl with a bunch of golden apples to distract my pursuer with. “I don’t know. Jews are weird. I don’t like smoking . . . It tastes like shit.”

  “I like the veiling,” she said. “I like reaching for the package and pulling one out—of course, you’ve got one . . . Well, I’m not Freudian: I don’t believe any of that . . . I never dreamed that I had horns.”

  “Ora, after a dream, when you wake up, do you feel you abandoned everyone in the dream? They’re obliterated—massacred—and you’re, you know, you sort of go to Washington to rule the world in daylight? Is it a little like that? Do you consider it a massacre to wake up?”

  “I don’t dramatize things the way you do. I’m not a Jew . . . I’m not a Jewish writer.”

  “Thou speakest with, uh, hatred, jealousy, pity—and with a queer allegiance to your father . . . Jack . . .”

  “Thank you, I guess. I don’t really know what you’re saying.” She is fighting in some broad-striding way—as among corpses in front of Ilium—or as if in a surf—and it feels as if she is fighting partly for us and not just against me, not just against me for her own sake—not for the sake of her father’s ego—she has betrayed him—I betray my work and many of the ideas I painstakingly tried to hold in college (in order to try to be distinguished): she is fighting the way things are for us in real time. She says, as if ignoring what I just said and what she just said, “I am, though, actually . . . A Jew. I am your twin, Wiley . . . I am like a pencil in your pocket.”

  “Since when?” I turn real attention on her. It really is in no way true. She barely makes room for my notions: she certainly doesn’t share them—or hold them.

  “Since I stopped being crazier than you are,” she says jocularly, senselessly—really advocating senselessness or illogic, an organic thing of absolutes in abeyance inside a sacrament of convention-cum-incoherence, but not really in abeyance. It’s hard to explain the ripening of wakeful attention after an orgasm in someone else—the second one that she knows about, the third one actually. She may have known what I did in the dark in the bathroom. What she says is not senseless to her: it has whole landscapes of meaning, anyway: “I don’t like dreaming anymore—do you want me to massage your neck?”

  “No more dreaming? You?” Again, it isn’t literally true. It is in some way true. The massage: often I can’t sleep—at all—when we stay awake as late as this. When I am as much alive or try so hard as I tried tonight. No more dreaming and a massage for my sleeplessness is like a sunny and shadow-speckled thing of saying she will allow for a while a thing of me being real to her. That is as intrusive as a fuck, as the prick entering her, or more intrusive even than that. In a curious way—since she doesn’t actually flinch; her eyelids merely go up and down rapidly—it is as if she gives birth to me, to an actuality, to a moment. But it may not be a moment in which she asks anything of me. If I did it, I would be asking her to give me something: herself, probably. She is asking me to stay with her . . . And, more awingly, to be not too unhappy. I.e., she is asking me not to write or feel as my real self. But she is not entirely doing that . . . Of course, it depends now on whether she asks me to pay for something or to do something specific. But even that mig
ht be all right if what she asks for is much less in value than what she is offering. The hugeness of what she is offering is quite clear in life: she is moving beyond ideals and beyond ideal (or shrewd) requirements. She doesn’t want me to be flighty and turn on the fuck. Or on her. She has upped the ante. Maybe. I possibly am filled with an emotional perception that is entirely a misunderstanding, that is merely wishful. I am maybe a fool in the end, and that may be all I am. I say to her, “You are much more ruthless than I am—I am afraid of you, Ora.” This is a step backward from where she is. I tug her along this rocky slope.

  “You should be,” she said. “But you’re the ruthless one.”

  “Christ, Ora, do you know how hard I work to be acceptable to you—to be lovable to you? I work my ass off to make things work.” Then I said, not sulking exactly, but nobly (I thought), “I want my dreams for myself . . .”

  She is not simply heterosexual. She is not simply anything.

  “Pish-tosh,” she said in a social voice. “You’re just afraid of what we have.” Then she said, going further yet—through curtains and over mountains into a kind of madness that what-is-male in me hates: “I want you to dream me.” Hates and is awed by. Is orbitally affected by. I don’t know what my face and breath and neck are doing. She knows, assumes, adjusts her thoughts, measures, and says then, “You don’t understand people, Wiley. Wisdom isn’t the point.”

  “I know that.” I have said to her other nights that it isn’t wise to talk about love: That isn’t wise . . . Ora.

  Now she says, “You don’t understand love . . . I told you: I’m strong.”

  “That’s the bloody fucking truth . . . Well, fuck all that.”

  “You don’t have to work so hard . . . I’m here. I wish you wouldn’t say fuck in that way . . . I’m not that Anglo-Saxon.” Then: “Speak for yourself . . .”

  “I am. I do. You’re not Anglo-Saxon?” I said under her clumsy massage. “God, it is impossible to trust you.”

  “Wiley, that hurts . . . That’s a brutal thing to say.”

  “What a bully you are! What bullies women are . . . You see to it that I can’t trust you past a certain point.”

  “It’s not good to take anybody for granted, Wiley. It doesn’t suit you to be petty.” She wasn’t sure whether I was laughing at her or not.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I said. Then: “Fuck with its diminishing-everyone sections and with its transcendent sections.”

  That aroused her curiosity and her envy—or rivalry. She wasn’t sure she’d noticed those things. “You want to fuck again, Wiley?” she said.

  “No. Don’t make me feel small, Ora. I’m pooped.”

  She said, “I don’t know how you stand yourself—the way you see things . . .”

  I said, “I see what I see—I am what I am—It does suit me to be petty.”

  “You ought to listen to me more than you do, Wiley. I know a lot . . . I love you—a woman of my caliber doesn’t get to say that all that often—not in this life, Wiley.”

  “I listen to you a lot,” I said. Then: “We’re two dirty kids,” I said.

  “We’re not dirty—I’ve been around a lot and I know,” she said.

  After a while, I got past the blow of jealousy and guessed a little of what she meant; and hating and distrusting her strength—in the ripening of attention and deciding not to fight with her or to leave her—it was that tricky, that tightropeish. I said, “Good night, Ora,” meaning she’d been dumb. A radio program involving a woman acting dumb had ended with the guy saying, “Good night, Gracie,” to the woman.

  She said in the dark, “You’ve never been unloved . . . Don’t be ruthless . . . Admit you’re spoiled.”

  “No.”

  “I have been destroyed by you, Wiley.”

  “Good night, Ora.” Then: “Thanks.” Then: “Are we going to talk about your destiny now or are we going to go to sleep?”

  In the dark came her voice: “You are real to me—God, are you ever; yes, you’re real to me.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  She said, “You’re fortunate.”

  “I am a fortunate man . . . You’re a beautiful and intelligent woman—sometimes.” She gasped with hurt. “Not all that fortunate but fortunate . . .”

  But she breathed for a second or two, and when she spoke, she didn’t discuss her hurt: “I want you to be happy . . . That was a good fuck, Wiley, and you know it . . . Please be happy: life is very short: I want you to be very happy now at least for a little while.” Then she said, as if she were doing a college paper—this kind of talk sometimes held my attention more steadily, more comprehensively than emotional talk—“I love talking during sex . . . That was quite a coup de theatre.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “You, too. Geh Schlafen. I’m not selfish with you, Wiley.”

  We held hands in the dark. The throb of blood in us was a throb of mutual but not equal amusement—an unbalanced humor in the dark: that is what we had.

  Then, in this fashion, next, she fell asleep. She falls asleep in bed with me. Her soul blows away like smoke; her breath has the sound of a dry leaf on a marble floor . . . A faint echoing tiny noise marks where she is and is not.

  And I know this because I am awake in a burned state of exhausted hope and of half-exhausted half-terror—nervousness. I am almost placidly bitter, as steady as an old scar—as frail in the odd light as the shadow I cast as moonlight. The hallucinations in sleep, splendid, splenetic, monarchical-fascist—my dreams, the ones now approaching me, the ones in me as I lie here awake and long for simplicity—for a finality of conclusion about emotions—scare me. In my somewhat amused tiredness, I start to concentrate—a little—the observatory that I am, hissing, dimly rustling, oddly sighted, on what are partly involuntary flashes of sexual memory—bits, inconsecutive, goading—advertisinglike really. A reason to live on—for the next time. To remember sexual stuff in real life, in the actuality of fragmentary recall, is to be distracted and convinced, persuaded, lured, lured again by bits of heat. The cruelty of being stung by the bitterly acid-sweet, semi-frenziedly hot dart and glide of recent sensation, remembered bits of it, once more, silver-and-dark reciprocal responses, reciprocal motions, greasy, slick-sweaty, light-infested . . . the in-and-out—the whole vast terrible weight of unwitting and goading pornographic recall as soon as Ora was asleep is like being pinched or pushed harshly (in wrestling or semi-horror) into desire—into offering oneself or into trying for triumph that way. It is not nice. The sense of the sexual stuff as a journey and the work and good sense (and wicked sense) that go into it, the labor and repetition are omitted in these flashes of mind but do exist as an intellectual sense around and about the recalled and as-if-spied-on reality that they had been omitted.

  And the dark-woods aspect, the forest thing of the electric foliage, the terror and all the choices, those are omitted: the lure, in its brevities, in its fantastic and witty brevities and omissions, is semi-absolute, breathes and hints of the absolute, or of an absolute thing. The thing that will happen is not like the thought now—not like the memory . . . Not like sensations, foreshortened, intense, pointless-seeming, omitted, or oddly and editedly recurrent.

  Her leg crawls over mine. As I said, I hated her nighttime relentlessness. Her arm is flung over my neck. I move it down to my reputedly handsome chest. It is work to have a human tie—it is like a horse or dog I keep, this thing with her. Or a lawn I mow. The way she slept, the dream aspects of her perfect rule over sleep, she breathed then with great satisfaction. I began to cry inwardly . . . It was not consciously willed . . . it is something that happens to me: a return of something in the past—as if all strong feelings, once I am tired (and nearly ill), are linked. I didn’t mean much by it—the part of me that returned then—the ghostly other self now embodied in me and now so ghostly—that inward grief, that tiresome, tireless, infantile weeping is more comment and music and accompaniment, is more an aspect of helplessness-in-a-sense than it is a
summons to action.

  I can turn it into a ruling code. What, oh what, is the right thing to do? I need a sign. What are my rights in terms of being mistaken in this matter? What error, how much error am I allowed? Explain this to me. Make a heaven. Make a hell. Set up laws. Govern me. Only do not say, Do as I tell you. No. Don’t do that.

  Villains—such as Ora, Jack’s daughter—and Nonie’s brother, me—like the innocent (if innocence is understood, always, as comparative)—exercise their sense of happiness—of less pain, which is what one sees and feels as the stirring of others around me. I need comfort. There is only truth. I light a cigarette. It is shaped like an image of one truth. A foolish image. There is one truth, but I will never know it.

  Soon I will deny that anyone can know it.

  I smoke and, mildly hallucinated from the tobacco, I see a gendered and splendidly psychological sun rise over a palace. Then this widens and widens until gender is lost and my complaints of vertigo at the omnipresence of time, of motion, that, too, goes, and the blowsy women of my sleepiness begin to welcome me. And I put out my cigarette . . . And the peculiar and often wrongheaded nourishment there is in night—the fatality of gender and a fascist conquest of time begin again, memories, and quests, sleep masked as sleeplessness . . . feelings, thoughts, hypotheses . . . the past and the future . . . and the meaning of it all, for the time being, pending further life, further knowledge of the truth.

  UNNATURAL

  HISTORY

  David Coppermeadow

  S.L. FELL ILL IN THE SUMMER OF 1939.

  If I look into that sentence (or behind that sentence, so to speak) I find I might say at some length that S.L. fell ill in the summer of 1939 not in the sense of a fever, but he had a stroke while he was driving to Chicago in a year-old tan Chevrolet two-door coach—that was the name of the body style back then: it was cheaper than a coupe; it was the cheapest car he had ever owned.