The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  And so on . . . Is it a big deal?

  2

  He had a certain sort of intellectual hauteur and resignation, an intellectual belief in himself, and an early form of sexual opinionatedness. He was also, as a matter of fact, spiritually and emotionally and sexually haughty. He did, of course, like others, feel his way along in talk and companionship—at least with me. In front of me. The train chugged. He got me to talk about sports stuff; he watched me lightly, with variations of attention; he turned the subject to books. Then we did family gossip, philosophy, and God. I get a glimpse of how different the world is for him from me—it seems as if he is all other people. It seems I come tumbling after. Nonie did this: left home and went out among other people’s feelings. A lot of what I do I can’t consciously control. I shudder, I sweat (I glimmer); I play politics. I automatically say no to things. I am guessing about what to do, even about what I want to do . . . I want to do a lot of different things. Khaki’d Daniel sits in the compartment; he is on compassionate leave from the army—maybe also on business leave—the family company is immersed in the war effort . . . His father is dead, too, like mine.

  Your banjo is between your knees . . . I am going to Carolina . . .

  Daniel says with a certain amount of hope that I will enjoy talking philosophy with him: “Objectivity means not being selfish—about what you know—and feel.”

  Clickety-clack, the train goes.

  I say, “Is it an aspect of attention?”

  He blinks at me.

  “Is it a quality in what certain sorts of attention see as facts?” I said, “It’s not separate from attention—is it?”

  I did not know at what level of speech I would no longer seem to him to be okay and interesting and he would decide not to like me.

  Cousin Daniel said, “Look at it like this: the eye of God is objective, Wiley.”

  “We probably shouldn’t talk about the Eye of God . . .”

  “The eye of Elohim . . .”

  “No. I mean, I mean why should God bother to have eyes? Or gender? Why would God bother with distinctions between objective and subjective?”

  “I don’t follow you. Are you being enlightened? Are you quoting . . . someone?”

  “I doubt it . . . But I can’t remember everything I read.”

  “You shouldn’t try to reason about God . . .”

  “I wasn’t. You were ascribing attributes to God . . . I was talking about what you said.”

  “Well, we Jews do that . . . with God.”

  “Which Jews? All Jews do that?”

  “Well, yes. Wiley, yes. You are being young—very young—your feelings aren’t hurt if I say that? Are they hurt? We are allowed to address God.”

  “Allowed? I really don’t understand—unless God isn’t very much but is only sort of an idea of an Idea you don’t really intend to have—why would God allow something—do you know what I am trying to say?” Once I press the switch of not lying, I can’t help myself for a while. I can’t turn on a dime. Maybe he’ll like me anyway. Maybe the way he is what he is means he likes someone who argues the way I argue. “Objectivity your way seems to mean you think you stop all real connection to ordinary purpose and that you separate yourself from everything in life and attach yourself to God and religion, and you say that is in order to see clearly . . . objectively. But it just means you have a towering absolute that no one can examine—it’s a very, very big mental stick you carry.”

  “Do you think you are smart nationally?” Daniel asks.

  “No pillar of fire has sprung up near me,” I say wryly. People have asked me stuff like this. I am semi-rehearsed.

  “I am thinking,” Cousin Daniel told me, “of becoming a big-schmear scientist or else a modern Orthodox rabbi.”

  This odd lanky-handsome, rich Carolinian, superbly well kempt and smart, didn’t hear my ideas. Big deal. But cross-pollination, cross-breeding of ideas, of lives, he resisted that. His was a final faith and an addicted need for absolute statements, absolute truths, in the end, a single truth which encompassed everyone and everything so that his sense of a single truth defined me as a figure in his landscape. Nonie had said he was a bully. She had gotten along with Benjie, not with Daniel.

  I was determined to like him, Inspired and newly reinspired by thinking Nonie hadn’t liked him, I looked at him: he was truly neat, faintly exotic: not a jumble: amazingly self-concerned—more a man of charity than a man of thought or of awareness. He was omnigendered, commanding, a breeder of exotically and erotically charged situations of an intelligent nature. He was almost certainly not a lover . . . I mean, taking that as a category. Not of real people. He was not a thinking scientist. He was not entirely self-concerned: he was in possession of the traits of others as their employer and as a donor or patron. Perhaps the possession, through love and hate, of an intensity of focus was narcissistic in him in that it did not involve him in any honest sense of the relative merits of someone else going off into any doctrines other than those set up, predicated, inflecting his rather absolutist daydreaming. So that even if I was convenient in some ways for his fantasies, I mean the boy I was those few months, the fact was that his sense of absolute things said I was the best person, the ideal kid, the highest form of what was to be admired or felt this way about. They said that that day.

  And there was no qualification, nothing of the ideal-for-him in any intellectual limit to his variety of absolutism. There was no way I could “romantically” accept his attentions except by being a conduit for aphorisms and laws and psalms almost about the ideal thing, the boy-I-was; a truly grand angelic flutter accompanied the image of me in him . . . maybe. I did not disbelieve his feelings so much as I added onto my clouded sense of his feelings, my sense of other men, supplying that default rendition of a male self to him and to me. I was dodge-y. The extent to which he was ironic about himself and the extent to which he was gentle with himself and then the extent to which he was serious in his admiration of the loon kid formed a sort of fingerprint to which I attached the general stuff about flirtations that wouldn’t lead to marriage and kids, you know? Mom had flirted with women. Again, one had noticed stuff in school. One now half believes his mother and my sister had flirted in some way or other. I laughed out loud for no reason—not so loudly he had to ask me what I was doing or be surprised or stare.

  Of course, years of reading—years of peering at reality through the wrought-iron fence of the alphabet—well-known prose and famous stories (famous at least among most of the English teachers at school)—meant I saw him in a changeably blurred pattern-y way having to do with this stuff as shown in books, those opinions; but the reality of those interpretations, not a story but a person, pretty much amazed me.

  As a matter of policy, I disbelieved my teachers. I disbelieved myself whatever I thought. I thought it contingently.

  Time will tell. My sense of fact includes time. What factually occurs will show in some way what “the truth” is, truth perhaps semi-childishly measured. Perhaps eventually, at the moment of death maybe, I will see factually what really went on, see finally, a little anyway, see a little.

  A certain fineness in him, a practical narrowness had become a sense of willed limitation that helped limit his pietistic absolutism—he was almost liberal. But the thing of him being a “desirable” older man in the compartment on a train rescuing me, and my being the-most-desirable-boy-in-the-world, the shoving and bumping of that, the inequality of those terms, desirable and the-most-desirable-in-the-world representing “romance” kind of as a-thing-that-was-in-his-favor was not so liberal. Or generous. Him believing, essentially, that there was only one of each good thing, only one form of high example, and everything else was shit or else was an aspect of the high example, of the standard normal high-up great thing, meant that each thing was judged as being close or not to the final point or meaning, or else it was held to be dirt and a dead subject and so on. Ignorant or not ignorant, one has ways of knowing stuff like the above that
predict what someone’s hands will feel like on you if they touch you, when they touch you.

  I don’t know of what elements my heterosexuality consists. Or my androgyny.

  My opinions of him? A few things my senses register include this: that he did not abandon his awareness of his own superbly physically (and socially) well-tended self, at least as far as I could see, for a single second during the hours of his wakefulness. He did not stir beyond that, bulge out and dematerialize or become purely staring or some such thing. Or fly into a sense of the air. I reminded him of himself. Whatever it was that I was, it was reflected back tinglingly, ticklingly, so that you could see stuff about yourself in how he sat. He stared intelligently, though . . .

  3

  If I say that looking a gift horse in the mouth obliges me to rethink something about me, I mean only that I apparently felt I had quite a lot of choice. I did not, even from time to time, grant to myself any particular beauty except negatively. I knew I did not have a grinding choicelessness. I knew people reacted to me. So I knew I wasn’t someone people didn’t react to. I knew that what I was, all told, when I spoke commanded allegiance in some people and immediate disgust in others—for a while; and disappointment then, too, or often. But I had no orderly sense of this, no workable theory or hypothesis other than a physical socially political sense of the unlikely and politically obtrusive thing of arousing feeling, feelings that were undefined in my inner world but which had temperature and tempo. I swear I had no clear idea, and did not daydream, of any of this—at least not after it became part of my life. I knew I affected people. Not always. Daniel had taken me to an expensive store in St. Louis, and the salesman and manager and the other people had made a fuss and had stared at me—not a great fuss, a discreet but intense enough fuss—one is aware that this-stuff-might-happen. People get mad at you . . . Boy-stuff, meanness, the eerie lyricism, the depth or whatever of teasing, people trying to figure what-you-are-made-of; it happens. I did not think of it as a basic dimension, reliable and unmoving, of my life; or as a given of my adolescent fate; it was sometimes there, often there, and sometimes not: it came and went, goddamn it: it was an unreliable matter. To attempt to reproduce it daily or to know it as a sure thing was to invent a form of it and change it, was to invent something new and to change what was there: what was there was accidental, improvisatory—a source of amusement (sometimes) and of trouble (often). Very few people—perhaps only lesbians—leave me alone as a rule. They sometimes like me, sometimes attack me. Sometimes they like to flirt with and own me and compete with me with my only half-knowing what is going on. There are few or no photographs from that period that show the boy clearly. The ones that exist show little except the movie-ish thing of being visible and odd among others, the-one-looked-at . . . the one teased . . .

  What-I-looked-like was often talked about in my hearing but not my looks. My looks were never discussed; my actual looks did not interest anyone. It wasn’t symmetry and cheekbones and a good hairline. I was a fork-legged and surprising kind of physical reality or presence, a sort of ambulatory metaphor for comparison with other such metaphors of attention, other collections of similes of attention (eyes, manners, postures), objects of comparative attention. Thoughts were what I evoked, sensations . . .

  Mom said, You have no proportions . . . no bones . . . I thought she was wrong. I had seen myself in store windows, a vague, erased image, mostly proportion, a lit shadow, flattened but reflecting dimensionality, revealing the bones of the thing. The effect I made, or that it made—I figured that would last a while . . . Oh, not the same effect. That isn’t what I mean at all. It was a bit like being a bag spilling out packages—wrapped packages. People looked at me suddenly as if they had that sense of me. My friends told me I was ugly—it wasn’t not true. If the police came anywhere near us, my friends at any given time and me, I was pushed forward to speak. Strange policemen reacted to me at sight—to the sight of me. I could expect special treatment . . . most of the time . . . of a highly polite and patient or a highly impolite—and bumptious—sort . . . dangerous. At times, in bars, underage, we’d had to fight because of me. Sometimes a brawl would break out and the brawlers would make an exception of me. Not you, some guy would say, and back off. Some people made a point of sparing me things. Lila said often, It doesn’t matter what you look like . . . You’re a boy . . . You have a future . . . Girls at school wrote me notes, propositioned me—often innocently, not sexually, but offering themselves up to a point. When sometimes they saw I had not daydreamed about them, they hated me. They got even in all sorts of fairly crude or fairly slick ways. For convenience’ sake and in modesty I listened to my mother about this stuff which had entered my life so unexpectedly and which I did not understand. It seemed to me I had not understood her; she did not mean that the surface effect did not matter: she meant that it was not a surface effect but that my life so far, the illness, Dad’s I mean, and me sticking around and my unhappiness, that stuff and biology had created an effect.

  It may be hard to listen to anyone say such things as this but it is really hard to bear having it happen to you, the adopted child, the adopted-father-lover, the penniless and intelligent anarchist-moralist, the mind, prick—eyes—mouth . . . One ought to try to be simple. One had a skull shaped in a certain way, inherited features, eyes of a certain cast and outline, height and sadness, a proportion of cheerfulness, a degree of self-willed freshness. One had facial expressions. One looks out the window of the compartment, looks down at the upholstery of the seat, looks at the wall, looks into Daniel’s eyes, and sees there, as so often in those weeks in the eyes of people, a response, immediate, fairly intense, not really obscure. Not completely obscure.

  It is an interest in life . . . because I—because someone who looks like me, someone I am inside of, is there: it is something like that.

  4

  In the weird world of slithering and suddenly present perceptions, in the interpretation and amendment of interpretations, hypotheses, in having an idea (or ideas) of or about what-happened-before and in the immediate and near and far-off comparisons of these to now and then one’s gamblings in regard to the future, a moralist is someone with hope of meaning.

  A moralist, Daniel had that moralistic whorishness that supplies at moments a realistic domination of the world through thoughts already set up, thoughts already there to be verified by existence now; one’s will pushes to see that that happens, that one’s thoughts are verified—thoughts in their gray-robed immortality, seemingly. And, actually, since thoughts cannot be the same in different minds day after day or in the same mind when they recur, his were thoughts that had a quality of his notions of immortality, finality, and moral excellence. They were personal to him but they had elements of a claim to being universal. Their only modification lay in his sense of tactics and his sense of payments, of money, and of actual allure, all of which he saw as absolutes and as moral things, one by one, incoherently; but because of his strength of character and force of personality, he thought he was deeply and even violently coherent. I am trying to convey the sense of him one had—the faintly sweaty sense of him.

  My wrists in the cuffs of my new shirt and the new veins on my new arms and the curious vein down the center of my forehead . . . I felt him with these newly.

  Daniel wasn’t essentially a whore. Good-looking and presentable, he wasn’t someone people longed after. He was noted and admired and avoided: a somewhat angular, self-spellbound-and-impatient-with-that, handsome and intelligent man . . . Narcissistic—convinced one could know the whole truth from knowing him. Some kids used the term sadistic for such dispositions, meaning the overall effect of the plunge of the self in real air was cruelly afflicted in the influence of a-burning-meteor-as-a-single thing every hour and in every mood. The terms of a specific encounter, the thing of naming that specific encounter as it is going on, that goes on minute by minute, becomes oppressive near him, the Oh, what a surprise and the twists and turns and naming things in
people as you go—there were wartime programs, lend-lease and pay-as-you-go, and there was a daily sense of the war, always different a bit—it was like riding a horse, but really, in real time, in the war, people even rewrote the immortal war aims of the democracies all the time—there was a meanness of The Single Truth about him.

  He was rich—and autocratic . . . good at things . . . These are bits-and-pieces on the way to a theory, a hypothesis . . . one’s traits, one’s looks, one’s haircut, one’s smiles, these when one is in his presence—well, this was so on that trip—these were judged by him steadily in remarks or in glances, were judged in the light of what he knows from the larger world—feels, has decided is the truth. He knows about fashions in men’s stuff. One was aware—from one’s experience—one was aware at moments—one is aware that one is among conscious and unconscious judgments of oneself—not as breeding stock perhaps, but as a sport—a special case . . . an oddity . . . a beauty . . . And you kind of have to decide to what extent he knows what he’s talking about, or if he’s a child still (despite appearances), or a neuroid—crazy and self-loving and with bad judgment about the world—or if he’s been-left-out-of-it (provincial, stubborn), or if he is loony-with-love—gaga (Lila’s term; Nonie’s term, too—Nonie had categories for guys who liked her: one such was “Momma’s-boy-fool” . . . Well, you have to be the spine for a boy like that—that’s not such a bad life—there’s money in that family . . . and so on . . . ), or you can make up your mind to be simple. You can consider things to be settled. You can be drunk or just mindless. Or driven by despair. You can adopt the velocity of the visual, the speed of eyesight with no time to think. Or you can hold back. Holding back or holding off is, willy-nilly, a form of thought in real life.