The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  The soldiers in the corridor, guys, their eerie cuteness—in being young and uprooted—by war—and their strength and niceness (often), their degrees of training, the kind of training depending on the service and their particular assigned role in it, their gentlemanliness—as the mask of death and as the sharpened or honed and polished face of the real self separate from domestic reality . . . it is a wartime matter, not an aesthetic matter in a usual sense; a moral aesthetics is involved in service, but it is a separate aesthetics, the aesthetics of battle, of conflict—a male moral aesthetics shared by a great many women. In my case, my merely adolescent version of that, my version of their manner, is a matter of ambition oddly reproducing the circumstances of my first abduction, my being adopted. It isn’t entirely separate from domestic reality but it mostly is. And it is, to an odd degree, an aesthetic matter; a moral aesthetics is involved—not in a simple form. I am aware I have a secular (and sexual) right to escape my circumstances.

  But it seemed to me a misuse of the term soldier to be a soldier in one’s own service. Of course, one might be an officer: an Alexander the Great or an Antinous in service to the gods of escape, of rising in the world—the gods of one’s rumored beauty, of personal beauty in terms of arousing feeling, a destiny; one can do this in service to the romance of events and the gaiety of nations—so to speak.

  I had been courted at school by a girl who was an educated socialist who already knew Greek and was studying Latin and Roman history—our high school was a good school in a lot of ways, really—and then I was courted by two queer guys whom I liked but had no sympathy toward. I learned intellectual things from them. A sensitivity, a self-absorption which I’d learned to see in them, I saw in Daniel now: I imitated it to a slight degree so that Dan would understand me as we talked—one did this theoretically. It included a sense of Daniel, a sense of being scissored out and distinct now in outline from anyone else on the train—even from Daniel—I got this from him, from his absolutist mind, in which an ALL was the major thing; I got this vacation aspect. The All was the only thing—but with a lot of parts, I guess. I never quite knew what was going on except I felt the images involved as, oddly, passed on to me from my life with my adoptive parents. I mean the images and patterns from real things moved on to something internal and not easily or readily glimpsed in regular time. Lila has said that the ghost of my dead mother whisperingly summons angels and kinds of help for me. Or I am merely my real mother’s son and that “saves” me and things I do work out on their own. And this maternal inheritance like a thread in a labyrinth (this is what I think Lila meant; I mean the Greek tale was like the thing Lila meant with her ghost of my mother) led me back through the darkness from the evil places where I fought and won (I guess), led me away from the stench of defeat and domination, maiming, and I don’t know what. Now a heroism through genetic and ghostly intervention perhaps whispered to you by a long-dead real mother you haven’t seen in actual presence since you were two years old is pretty damn strange. But reality is such that I felt it in ways. Well, as being hunted by an albatross-octopus—this stuff flew after me along the railroad tracks and then crowded itself into the compartment. It landed on my head; and its tentacles and beak engulfed me; I had a mad Achillean and space traveller’s helmet of invisibility and self-loss. Thought of a kind entered me through my eyes, pierced my brain, and in some ways ate my usual sense of things. Part of the reason reality can be complicated is that it has so many moments. But a moment of emotional attraction isn’t simple anyway. And isn’t just a moment. The hollow resonance, the auditorium thing inside me, was perhaps stirred merely by restless motions of the mind patterned by the past. I feel her: the ghost. I feel her moods. The moods of someone else, not me. I feel the true history of love of a kind. And of a kind of mathematical destiny in these matters. A depth of love. A pattern of what is emotionally compelling in the most complete way.

  13

  Alongside the house where I was born and running at a diagonal to it is a single-track railroad set on a causeway six feet high. When a train was approaching, the house would begin to shake; it would shake with an amazing faint steadiness until, as if in an arithmetical theater, the house begins to slide and shimmy in a quickening rhythm that is not human. It is as if a few pebbles in a shaking drum become four, then eight larger pebbles, then a great many, and then they become rocks perhaps like numbers made of brass and placed in a tin cylinder, antic and clattering—almost like birds—but more logically. In lunacy, the sound increases mathematically, with a vigor that is nothing at all like the beating of a pulse or the rhythms of rain. It is loud and real and unpicturable. The clapboards and nails, glass panes and furniture, and wooden and tin objects in drawers tap and whine and scratch with an unremitting increase in noise so steadily that there is nothing you can do to resist or shut off these signals of approach. The noise becomes a yawning thing, as if the walls had been torn off the house and we were flip-flopping in chaos. My mother and I. All of us. The noise and echoes came from all directions. The almost unbearable bass of the large interior timbers of the house has no discernible pattern but throbs in an aching shapelessness, isolated. At night, the light on the locomotive comes sweeping past the trembling window shades and a blind glare pours on us an unstable and intangible milk in the middle of the noise. The rolling and rollicking thing that rides partway in the sky among its battering waves of air does this to me: noise is all over me and then it dwindles; the shaking and noise and lift flow off, trickle down and away, and the smell of the grass and of the night that was there before is mixed with the smell of ozone, traces of burnt metal, a stink of vanished sparks, bits of smoke from the engine if it was a night without wind. The train withdraws and moves over the fields, over the corn. The house and one’s senses tick and thump, ting and subside. The trains move south toward St. Louis . . . my life-to-come.

  Here, too, is the wooden-odored shade of a porch, the slightly acid smell of the house: soap and wood—a country smell. My mother’s torso in a flowered print dress. A summer, an autumn, a winter—those that I had with my first mother, my real mother. She vanished. For once and all. She went to the hospital; she was carried from the house to an ambulance; she never came back.

  The house had very large windows that went down quite close to the floor. Those windows had drawn shades that were an inhumanly dun-yellow color, a color like that of the pelt of an old lion in a zoo, or the color of old corn tassels, of cottonwood leaves after they have lain on the ground for a while—that bleached and earthen clayey white-yellow. My mother’s happiness was not the concern of the world. She may have loved women, at least by the time she was in her thirties—perhaps always. I believe my mother had a woman as a lover, a very, very pretty woman, an immigrant, a peasant from the Tyrol, a soubrette sort: she worked for my mother and was perhaps why my mother agreed to marry my father and to go live in such a small town, to be near her and to employ her, that woman. Of course, I don’t know. I half remember going with my mother on a train to escape from the lover—the day had the tone of redemption. I think my mother wept a little bit and made jokes to me. My hand marks and nose marks and breath marks on the window glass of the train, I remember those and the automatic way my mother’s hand wiped the marks away. I see wheeling rows of corn, occasional trees, windmills, farmhouses. Two years after I met Daniel, Lila told me my mother loved women—not men. Lila said, She had more character than any woman I ever knew, but a lot of good it did her. She said, My brother, who was no slouch at making a buck, said she was a genius at business. She said, You know, all things considered, I feel sorry for anyone who falls in love with your pretty face.

  14

  The patterns you see: as opposed to the ones in you that you can’t see: for my tastes then Daniel has mostly the wrong look. And I get to choose. I don’t know. I don’t have a pretty face. Maybe I did for a while. A boy at school, Bill Gill, newly grown, abruptly after being a kid, in him when he was newly sexual I saw a fierce, temporary
sort of new beauty—I saw it when other kids talked about it in him . . . Bill’s newly silvery skin, dark eyebrows, reddish lips, and aghast, staring, and shy and almost horrified eyes. An unsinging—and temporary—Orpheus already half-dismembered. I don’t know by what or whom. Then he got used to it all. He forgot the other stuff, of having been a kid. He woke to his new life; and his eyes became amused, startled, sweet, then sullen. Then snobbish.

  Then the moment of him being pretty was over; he was a good-looking older boy with a lot of brothers.

  He and I had been good friends. His mother had been a real friend. For a couple of years she saved my life.

  I remember his prophetic and lunatic eyes during his pretty period when guys and girls started following him, pantsing him, courting him. He was not so tall and gawky with such frozenly careful movements as I’d been a few months before. He’d felt some appalled rejection of orphan’s whorishness that I hadn’t felt and some heat of carelessness in the middle of his being so careful in this temporary masquerade of the flesh that I hadn’t indulged.

  His mother came to the schoolyard one morning to apologize to me for what Bill had become. Lying in my bunk, in the lower bunk, the night I spent on the train, as the train clattered, I heard Daniel stirring above me. At school we’d sort of had the cute boy of the month—the next boy to go through this phase of initiation to this stuff.

  It lasts only for a short while, that prettiness, that view of another world. If you forget it and then remember it, it seems very strange, as if it had no real duration. People who come near you at that time are shocked. Jolted. Not everyone. Some days it is everyone. It feels like a ticket to the loony bin. Dan at moments had been averted and yet staring or peering or aware—remembering? Was it that you are like a scene in a movie that is too harsh or something, too reminiscent, and children and some nice people hide their eyes? Some absurdity or other colors your outline with glare—a boy is burning at his edges. I rush along sleddingly on my breath.

  Is everything foreordained? If it is, why do I have to decide anything? One laughs silently—for no reason. If one laughs aloud, Dan will say, Are you all right, Wiley?

  In the dark, the window of the compartment still holds a dulled reflection. One remembers drawing, oh, whistles of derisive interest in the shower after football and track. One remembers people showing you an oddly intrusive indulgence. One feels rigidly uncaring. Sometimes it feels like when a friend is driving you in his car too fast: one endures the moment: your youth—your crotch suddenly a prize, in no simple way. To be uncaring is a glamourous thing especially after you’ve lived with someone sick whom you did care about, often dutifully. Along the edge of the whisper and rush of actual distances between cities and in the lurching clatter of the train at night—minutes whirring and galloping and trotting by, and one’s new crotch in the dark of one’s pajamas—one lives on. I’d counted in February and March eighty-two people who tousled my hair, fifty-eight men (including boys), twenty-four women (and girls). On the train so far, eighteen people have spoken to me. And most of those touched me.

  Being touched makes me nervous. I follow Lila’s advice: Don’t give a hint you know what’s going on or you’ll be asking for it . . . Don’t show ANYONE you know ANYTHING.

  I don’t know what’s going on, Momma: tell me. Tell me in simple terms—am I a special case? What am I, Momma?

  She decided to answer: You’re cute, you’re cute this year. It’s wartime. You have a fresh look. People will never say you’re pretty. Wiley, I will say it is interesting how you aren’t like me.

  But most likely none of this means anything. I whisper inwardly, I wish I knew more . . . And attempting to measure possibilities, Don’t touch me . . . And: Touch me.

  Lila said: People who care about you—I want you to try to be grown-up about these things—they don’t mind using you and throwing you away . . . Like a Kleenex. I will say this: I don’t envy you.

  She does but not all the time.

  When you listen to someone talk, do you listen more to the words or do you mostly look at the momentary stagecraft of it? What part of what she says really concerns me? She makes some sort of exception of me. I knew the spy-ey feeling you get sometimes at how you were treated when people were interested in you.

  Lila said, Daniel respects you. He’s good-looking and smart and he can be counted on.

  I doubt it. I doubt that he can be trusted. He is what he is. Don’t expect too much of people.

  15

  If I introduce the idea here that Daniel expects actual sex of a kind unheard of by me so far and not easily guessed at by me—me taking off my clothes and not in a locker room, and him taking off his, even if the two of us are with a B-girl or a whore—well, I feel it as a kind of unsacramental marriage that is being proposed—like being asked to be seriously on a team Or like being initiated into a club or into a fraternity you’re expected to take seriously—and which I haven’t taken seriously so far. And like a mysterious secret thing that maybe could belong to me and might have no outward consequences, or none worth thinking about, except, of course, for the metamorphosis of the self into someone who has had that experience. This moment exists and is like a roadway into moments unlived so far. If you do certain things the moments ahead of you for a while are slain—are as fixed as consequences as if they were corpses—except you can sort of run away or die or go crazy. You have to guess what will kill your future and make the moments seem dead. Or semi-dead. Or worthless. If we proceed, Dan and I, won’t I be semi-helpless then, the rest of my life? Angry or limp? Maybe just human. And he will be consoled. By the sacrifice. The robbery. But I don’t know anything here for sure. What do I know? I have a friend in U. City who tells me to forget things and just be myself. He means: Be a zero . . . Naked—like Tarzan—pretend only to a simple identity. Life is scary. Be a hero-zero, Wiley . . .

  The idea of an intrinsic identity and of difference is hateful to the guy I was just talking about. Like everyone else I know, he has more rage in him than I have. He’s way to the left politically; he ascribes identity to money and family—and to athletic stuff. Sometimes to sexual stuff but not really: that stuff can all be settled medically. The whole thing of being hetero for him is to get even for every single advantage that every other identity has. I think he learned that in psychoanalysis, the guy I’m talking about.

  A bit of sexual do-jiggery buys a truce or a half-truce. But if you kind of whore around, you may turn into a frog. It would be interesting to try whatever Dan wants and see if one froze up and was sickened or could manage, say, as Nonie couldn’t with any of the rich guys she hadn’t been able to manage with.

  Again, I know a little about this stuff because of the locker room at school and because of my sick dad.

  Dan doesn’t know that I know anything. A series of yeses or no’s, flashingly, like flicking light switches or the gauges of machinery—that’s what he sees. Maybe he sees that.

  A dozen times or so, I decide to say yes to anything he offers, but part of me knows I won’t say it. I can’t. I know that nothing will happen.

  Was it like this for Nonie? Did it happen like this for Nonie? Are we really brother-and-sister in lots of ways?

  16

  As a rule, one can’t guess the nutty direction individuality in someone will go in. A sweaty moisture in one’s crotch—one is young. Being unchanged is a myth—even if you say no to everything, that admits you’ve changed. One can be less changed or more changed. I know some of what is true for me. I half know . . .

  Dan is, I think, homosexual, realistic, and moral; but he never said so; we never had it out. He is apologetic on the edge of being triumphant—my observations of him are that the moments now irritate and excite him into an unwise love. I don’t know how this happened. I won’t gamble on it—that’s for sure.

  A real moment of almost unbearable exoticism, not without its attractions, sexual reality, secret stuff, and the immanence of something, the weight of that in me: and
something is now tormented in him almost every single moment while we get dressed in the morning. The whole thing of charity is reversed—is two-sided, anyway. If-you-love-me-you-find-the-aroma-of-my-torment-in-what-you-see-in-what-you-sense-in-a-touch-over-a-period-of-time. It is cruel to be relieved, in my pride, at his torment.

  My mother said, You don’t always have to be so sensitive. I can get drunk, toute suite. I can have a morning Scotch with Daniel. We have a kind of malely sinful openness to event; plausibility has changed. I can insist on The Old Plausibility, though. It seems to me I feel each moment in its own lighted frame in its momentariness with emphases of dutiful worry about what ought to happen next, about what one ought to do, and with frivolous not-caring, with unaccustomed mischief and with the sense of his new torment and of the new plausibility between us.

  The train goes clickety-clack, and so do my feelings; and the train and its motions are intensely and pulsingly and unclearly present in his chest, his shoulders, his skull this morning—my cousin’s—in my cousin’s heart: that man and his faulty love—if it is love. I have to wait and see. I am half overwhelmed, half merely amused that the train’s motions have become my feelings. I suppose I mean the train’s motions carry that meaning—is it a meaning? I am an exile from yesterday here in the lurchingly tormented morning. It’s his torment. I eye him obliquely getting dressed in the compartment, shirtlessly shaving. Perhaps one way or another I will die, castaway, derelict. Frivolously thrown away. Plausible sexuality sucks at my balance and makes me giddy as in a play about warriors and girls. Dan’s feelings are directed at a boy—at the boy he sees, skin and eyes, not at the boy he does not yet know, the compendium-and-anthological boy of days and days and days—the one my mother suspects of too much conceit.