The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Well, this is what it was like at home. There was no one I wanted to talk to about it.

  Time Poems

  I was a snotty kid as a ten-year-old, grim and a little joyless as a competitor. It sure was different when I got bigger—and better—at sports: You’re getting a little bit of a sense of humor, Momma said. That’s interesting to people, you know.

  When I laughed, it was always a little crazily . . . a little like trying to sing. I was lost to myself, I couldn’t locate reality too well for a while—then as I got better, I didn’t really get much better; I dragged around; the sky seemed darker than before; dusk seemed grimmer and grayer; sunlight had no power to dispel vagueness or to warm me. My legs and arms—perhaps my temper—got wooden. Clumsy. I suffered from one undiagnosable ailment after another—serious ones that doctors couldn’t treat. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I can’t seem to catch my breath . . .” Sickly and odd and in a zone of silence—a human giraffe, so openly a freak with pain—someone half dead and thinking all the time—I was in bed one evening, lying there hopelessly, and my dad said, “Don’t do this to me.” Mom had already said that—she’d shouted it really.

  But she and I didn’t have that kind of life-and-death alliance.

  I thought for a bit. I had one arm behind my head and the other was lying across my stomach.

  I said, “All right, I won’t.”

  And I blinked.

  And I came out of it then and there.

  But that was when I was twelve. Earlier I hadn’t done that. Dad said I did it for love, that I was okay, I knew how to be a friend . . . He said I was a Cupid of a guy.

  In a sense, after that, everything scary became kind of hopeful, or at least turned into a devil-may-care-ishness—a humor. I thought it was that the three of us—and death made four—that we were all four of us in on this; but on sleepless nights I would feel that with my parents, their deaths were not congruent, were not the same thing, were not the products of the same force; and mine was present and was different from theirs as well: the three deaths in the same house were separate things and were not one thing or in one category even rhetorically. “Us and our shadows,” Lila had said once, daringly. Daddy has said, “I’m the daring young man on the flying trapeze—didn’t you know?” But he also had said, “The scared old Jew on the dying trapeze . . .”

  Nearly everything outside this subject stopped dead—among the six of us. Three people; three deaths. Our deaths preoccupied us and ate our pretensions, ate our jokes, ate the idler aspects of love, the games in our attachments, the cultivated reaches of evasion and of true and false offers to one another; ate us, perhaps, and the love as well. It was not, for me, the failure of eternity in these things and not a fear of nothingness and of the absence of meaning, but, simply, a sense of time having taken this form in my case; and in theirs; and a further sense that too many meanings I had been offered or taught were empty of a sense of time—that one waited for time to correct them but that that was enough. We could only be felt in terms of moments and differences.

  One had to understand in a new way—and patiently—that these things did not stop except in death. Or in mad made-up dreamer’s obstinacy (as a way of being respectable). Or as trauma.

  They existed in a for-a-while-perpetual and flowingishly renewed way, barely renewed, in an animal chamber of complex and motion-filled feeling, a reality of time and of blood—blood-relationship even if we were not related by blood—but blood was a kind of forbidden, private reality of time—and the thing of bad luck was a sense of safety having gone away in the general rainstorm of a massacre. We were, of course, being massacred.

  But as Mom pointed out, “Other people have it worse.” The massacre was quicker, harsher, more obdurate.

  But the reality of momentary escape—or change—flowed in me and in the moments around me at home and in my dreams and would flow still more clearly if I went away to school. The project which made a kind of very shaky blessing of time was to go on without despair . . . I think that’s what the project was. Maybe it was to stay sane. Or to be afraid of Dad and Mom. How do you know? Our neighbors and teachers—and Nonie’s jealousy—voted to approve of what I did as a decency—not the only decency, and not common; but the only one of its kind that was in my power then. It was in what I did; it was my education; it was responsible for what I became.

  What I could bring myself to do, what I could bear to do was always physically limited. I did what I did for the sake of the future. But my faith was limited. I never once cleaned Dad when he stained himself. I never once kissed him nobly—I mean, forgetting all proper limits. What I did was faulty and a little sad and egoish and stubborn; what I did was widely admired, though. So, what Lila meant when she talked about it the way she did was: if people commented on our not being sad all the time or on my being an unusually good or generous son or smart kid who was not entirely self-absorbed, she would say, “I keep you honest.” She was a little like the voice of death always at my back. Not metaphorically. Actually.

  She’d get sad, though, and she would say, “It’s all too much . . . We’ve gotten too peculiar, you and I . . . and that one in the other room. . . .” S.L. “Aren’t you embarrassed anymore?” she asked me.

  “Naw,” I said. “It’s a real mess.”

  She stared at me—finally, she laughed, I’d been trying to be comic in a movie-star way. I laughed stupidly, almost happily—perhaps photogenically.

  “You’re the real mess,” she said as she sobered up. “Speak up when you talk . . . If you’re saying something, say it so people can hear you. I can’t always hear you: I took a pill tonight. I don’t blame you for what’s happened even if some people think you are a jinx. You think I want YOU to save me? The skeletons are, none of them, in the closet—you think we have a curse on us? I don’t want to blame anyone. But, tell me, why are you smiling?”

  I intoned, “And you have a hangnail and you need to have your hair washed . . . And you loathe the woe there is in being human.”

  “I’m human—I was always too human, if you ask me,” she said, thinking about it. She became a wearily sincere self—a the-lies-are-done self. “Don’t stare at me,” she said. “I can do without young eyes looking at me at this time of night.”

  But, often, truth is loose and is slinking in our house and in the air of a real moment, it might, if you’re not being hysterical, strike you as being a form of beauty.

  Beauty

  Beauty comes in at the window in the breeze and moves among the pieces of our furniture—and not in a simple way stirs Daddy’s hair.

  “We keep on trying,” Lila said. “But maybe it would be better to give up.” And she laughed.

  “We only more or less keep trying,” I said.

  “You have an interesting face,” she said. I.e., that was an interesting point in her view.

  “Visible thought is interesting.” Perhaps thoughtlight fills the eyes and rearranges the lips and determines the postures of the neck.

  “People, how do you judge them?”

  “Me?”

  “Well, you’re getting older—it’s not so hard to talk to you.”

  What has lured us here? Why do we say yes to going on?

  I had a Cousin Trish who was one of the people who loved Nonie back then. Cousin Trish with her terrific legs and her horsy but affecting face, and her extraordinary body—I saw her mostly naked once when she was asleep and all her clothes had become twisted on her long body—she kind of represented health to me.

  The truth slinks into me and blows in and out of my breath—and of hers.

  “You’re not to blame yourself . . .” Trish said.

  “But things are REALLY BAD . . .”

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t show on your face.”

  “Yes it does,” I said.

  “You’re brave,” she said.

  “Fuck it: I don’t know what else to be,” I said.

  “Do you blame anyone? Do you blame God�
��the way Dostoyevsky does?” she asked.

  She was really good-looking . . . in a literary way.

  “Sure,” I said. “I have nothing to do with God anymore. It’s just us now . . . you, me, Mom, Dad, the neighbors, U. City—you know?”

  “No . . . You’re really a strange person . . . But sometimes you’re A-one, right? Right.” Then she kissed me and walked off her body sort of suddenly and sexually moored, anchored to sexuality; she walked off, ending the conversation. Maybe too impressed . . . Maybe too sickened . . . What’s the difference? I’d done it wrong, though, if what I’d wanted was to have her stick around longer and talk to me. But I wasn’t real to her. I was out-of-bounds.

  Lila, ill with cancer—it started the year S.L. died—said to me, “Listen, Wiley, don’t tell me if you’re upset, okay—is it all right with you? Pretend I did the right thing, all the time, all right? Will you do that for me?”

  “Sure. All right.” I was thirteen-going-on-fourteen then.

  The months and hours . . . the thing of life down the drain . . . the sense that other people are better off . . . are better at living . . . are better . . . and this as a grounds of ambition, of lying really, when the defeat and the terms of the defeat are okay to live with, to build on. I am a shattered guy, a shallow boy, a battered person—and furthermore, I am someone who has not been the center of everything that happened. Big deal. Perhaps I might begin to escape now. Maybe I won’t make it. Maybe I will always be sad and mostly silent. It is likely I won’t live too long. I gave my childhood and youth away. Still, the main thing is not to show how hurt you are and how hard it is for you to go on at this moment. You don’t want to be mainly a structure of blame, of accusation—of exhaustion.

  To make my mother laugh—an absurd and probably mean ambition (she said this to me)—I said, “Your having cancer is another down among my ups and downs. Boy, is it ever that we’re not lucky right now.”

  She stares at me angrily for a long second or two, my mother-by-adoption; and then she laughs—a little—for starters—and she partly accepts it that her cancer eats me, too, and then between breath noises of repressed laughter, she says, “To tell you the truth, I’m ashamed of being sick.”

  “Oh no . . . That’s a good one,” I said, laughing helplessly. “You’re a sinner, right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  That time, too, no one died. The family, in its ashes, stirred itself and rose and was reconstituted as itself yet one more time for another year. The filthy sweetness of an aging face beginning to give up—making ready to die, Jesus, shit, Christ on a crutch—my mother, by adoption, in a nightmare of caring, said, “Family sickness aside, Wiley, on the whole, do all your dreams come true?”

  She thought I was an able person, you see. She thought so by then because I’d lived “and stayed out of the loony bin. How do you do it?” Momma asked in scandalous intimacy. She was on morphine and she was pretty strange.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I think the ghost of your real mother takes care of you . . . God knows you’re not smart enough to come in out of the rain on your own.”

  The Germans Invade Poland:

  1939

  The sounds of city noises, trolleys and trucks, became wartime noises. By the time Nonie went to Carolina, I had a head filled with images of horsemen charging tanks in mist-flecked, raw-earthed farmfields and dive-bombers coming out of daytime glare—images of parachutists and spies and of the pinkish-red firing of guns (this was before smokeless powder). Life and death is unchambered, and there is a steady bleating, bleeding, a reality of emergency and of ultimate danger at the point of battle and then everywhere. The ultimate overthrow of everything, an ultimacy loose, brutal, and seemingly final—the sole certainty was of new meaning.

  Momma said all the deaths made one death seem silly—even if it was your own.

  She said as the country started to mobilize, You have to be selfish if you’re a civilian and you want to die with a little decency . . .

  It was all the death that changed everything, that made a heat like summer heat, a climate, a form of fire, a summer, a bonfire of murder, a furnace—butcheries and terror, willful terrorization, grimly exultant victories . . .

  The infliction of deaths, exultantly, and exultant speeches of threat every day, even in daylight. A black-and-white world was tangibly near us, everything stained by headlines and photographs and newsprint: the rain of events, the reign of war.

  Sometimes it seems in the inglorious holiday of this that one has black-and-white blood. And it is the heroes versus The-Stay-at-Homes. One’s heretofore familiar world erupted into urgent unfamiliarity, partly that of a democratic mobilization and the onset through that of undemocratic procedures in the creeping autocracy of emergency.

  The permitted deaths of soldiers and the universe of sorrow and the mobilization of ordinary life emptied the world and set women and children free in an odd way, almost impermissibly . . . even so . . . odd wartime world. The astounding destruction.

  In the Middle West, where we were, a sort of rubble of parenthetically local wartime hours was created in which women and old men and the young wandered alone and unwatched like so many Tarzans in the story. We lived in a different scale of things, so many men were absent. We lived in a hideous-lovely and immoral safety, a parenthesis as I said, unclean, reckless, walled in real time in some obviously dreadful way. It seemed all right as such things went, as nightmares went (at that time)—but what choice did one have? Exalted and practical local immorality and thoughts of a universe of carnage (and of grief) and a reckless and clumsy and very clearly imperfect good were ranged against wickedness of an unknown dimension and the obvious overturning of everything: a very widespread clear-sightedness was in evidence in everyone in relation to these matters—it was a smoky and collapsing landscape of a widespread realism of attitudes, the reign of an imprisoning and strange freedom based on the absence of men and the consequent skewing of things. The styles and fates of the grown-ups involved reckless and indulgent and often fatal disciplines: death in wartime is a species matter, coarse and constant and a generally recognized presence of awful glory, the pulse of genius—it was as if nearly everyone everywhere was in one army or another of those who were dying, artists in that sense—would-be artists, counterfeit artists—geniuses . . .

  The more successful (more assiduous) death-givers, the blasting, body-tearing, teeth-exploding joke of it, Momma said, “I can’t think about this war . . . Well, I don’t want to be turned into a crazy woman . . . Still, I am so anti-Nazi I can’t see straight . . . But I’ll tell you, I’d be a pacifist if I knew how.” Daddy said he hated the war and was in favor of the Nazis killing us all.

  Lila said, “That’s a very hard joke to take, S.L.”

  “I can’t help that,” Dad said.

  The War Further Considered: 1940 The Fall of France, 1941 Pearl Harbor

  Even in 1942, the public-opinion polls (they were called that then) said that most people did not want an active war. The vast movielike cancellation and rearrangement of everything and the sort of crudely farcical and yet earnest and expensive hurtling into purpose—and, lo, all the speeches, so rhetorically resonant—at least they sounded that way to me when I was ten and eleven years old—led to no unanimity. Nothing was simple then, either. Things are simple because of short sentences, not because of anything in life. The, oh, call it human nature, prostitution, drugs, theft, drunkenness—the wildness of wartime: No one wants an army camp next door to them . . . not if it’s a nice place you live in, Wiley—that was only a widespread sentiment (it was thought), of ruthlessness, when it first came into existence, came into existence mostly journalistically, some reporters said, mostly among slackers and officers of back-up operations. The real fighting was different from that, they said, had more blundering and accident in it than ruthlessness.

  That wasn’t quite true either, though. Some sort of wartime spirit came into existence in a variety of t
ones and manifestations, a strange nudity of human purpose—nationwide—without unanimity.

  To govern: to exhort, to tease and allure and bully and persuade: and to lie: one lived in this infinite rearrangement, in the propagandized steeliness of purpose which splintered into individual purposes. One lived at the edge of that steeliness of purpose in action—mistaken generals and Glory, wartime money, and various kinds of confusion, Democracy is on the march, and the odd true thing of death-and-freedom. The lies were clearly lies, and yet everything WAS part of an issue of individual, and national, life-and-death. Everything was changed and serious—serious in the way of life and death—and swallowed up in the thing of it being true that such issues of cultural survival were everywhere and that one’s hours were fields of such issues in whatever direction you looked. This was an awful lot of meaning to endure. Not everyone endured it. A lot of wartime was unendurably moving. A lot was endurably moving. A lot was awful and made you hysterical. I was an adolescent then.

  One’s illicit uncensored private responses to war stuff was maybe a wistful and vicarious viciousness or a heroic unvicarious viciousness. Or one had a wistful steeliness of vicious purpose. Or was a secret peace-monger. Or doubted The Allies would win. Or one had an innocence, after all, of a steeliness of vicious purpose, mostly, or off and on, between periods of personal collapse, as part of the curiously enlarged and far-from-unanimous communal consciousness of the community’s patriotic aims of a-blatantly-criminal-order-nobly-spoken-of—in a way—and devoted to death and mayhem hardly ever realistically sought with any precision; and this included your own death . . . in a training accident, say, or in combat under a battlefield commander of little merit, or from a bombing run by the others who did not even see you, or a child unregarded in the uproar while you were still a child, or as a Jew later if The Others won . . . Well, this far-from-single-souled public consciousness was at times a mass staring at outcomes—at meanings considered in the way of outcomes—and this drafted or coopted one in strange ways, as if in a strange dance to a music inside people’s heads and drawn from the more than slightly mad words of wartime urgings and wartime reportings and wartime pathos—an infinity of pathetic bits—until one’s spiritual and physical enlistment in the mighty consciousness, such as it was, was part of one’s life, of one’s very appearance—a wartime adolescent . . . Maybe it was merely a mass membership and loss of self in the meaning available in the mighty conflagration which involved so many people, so many bodies, so many souls. But one’s private stuff, knowledges and third-and-first-person sense of things, the meat and the shadow, the hallucinations and the gifts of brotherhood (if one had them) had a curiously clear reality as part of their unusual and not entirely changed unclear reality in the main—one has a mathematical nature now; one is a recruit, a member of a faction; the numbers line up for democracy; one votes and votes cipherously and individually.