The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Winning means you’re not flirting.

  The conceited thing in him is that love in him in general is a monologue—in tones of excited sulkiness and reflecting a spoiled young man’s power. But I can see that we are having an oddly exposed, almost semi-blazing, good-bad time—a struggle.

  I realize again that it is a sort of scandal to be alive.

  He is showy and secretive. I have a think-no-evil smile and a snobbishly arrogant-humble look—like a rich boy—not a rich boy’s smile but like it: a poor boy’s conceit.

  Daniel says, “B? I don’t understand you.” Then, in a dry tone: “I don’t want to understand you.”

  “Why?”

  “It would be bad for me. B? You’re not mistaken?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tell me, do you believe in God or not? You want to be barmitzvahed?”

  “I’ll tell you. I believe in God but not in a God that can be talked about. I can’t imagine an omnipotent God who would bother with gender or speech—even as amusement. I can’t imagine a God that knows the future, but I don’t think what I can imagine matters. I imagine revelation as springing from the efforts of certain people . . . It’s like piling up books and stones higher and higher . . . I can imagine a final, single truth, but not as a knowable frame for here. I think it’s cheap and wrong and really dangerous to pull that single-notion stuff down into stuff that goes on with us. It’s what you move toward in your mind and in a moment; and you can talk about it; but not seriously—you can’t ever use that stuff as a public premise without condoning murder. A single truth means other stuff is lying and is treacherous and is evilly wrong. The us-them shit is a trap. I happen to believe murder ought to be secular. I can’t believe God is more present or is less present. I happen to think the Bible, which I truly admire, is mostly a history of consciousness—the breath moving on the waters and the appearance of the separation between the firmament and the waters and David is about being young, and Christ on the Cross is about a lot of stuff. And so is the Koran. It isn’t that God doesn’t will that you commit murder: how would I know what God wills or doesn’t will? But I believe that God has shown a kind of predilection for wide webbings of interests—democratic Protestant national states . . . In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. Or was with God. Sure. So? I can see that language tends to the condition of prayer—it is a spire of meaning—language is—and a final meaning is a thing of being really right: but you won’t know except at apocalypse. I mean, if you believe a doctrine is right—any doctrine—you are essentially gambling in such a way that only apocalypse can mean you throw in your hand and the pot gets awarded. Anyway, I don’t want to be part of an us-them thing . . .”

  “Jews can’t help it . . .”

  “I know. But everyone gets some of that. It’s in everyone—that’s why seducers get shot. Is it sexual jealousy? Is it racial? I sort of blunder along. Circumstances set up more circumstances—I accept that as a given. My favorite prayer is I don’t know, help me to have enough strength to go on a while longer. Daniel, I just don’t know. Whether or not something is there, I can’t manage the conceit of thinking anyone human can know what It is . . .”

  He said, shocking me into silence, in a certain way for the rest of my life: “It’s rare: a pretty boy who likes to talk about serious things. What’s your word? I’ve already lost.” In the game.

  “Operable.”

  “Is that a real word?” Then: “God would not let me suffer without a message . . .”

  “That’s pretty conceited.” Then, about the game: “Come on: don’t cheat . . . You know it’s a word.” Then: “No one says I’m pretty,” I said. The vanity of a semi-comprehension of him—no, of something like a privilege—is a particular shape of silence. The privilege—such as it is—in real time. And the power, changeable, negotiable . . . in real time . . . The politics of this thing, I’m not human that way. He almost shivers downward into being young in response to my inhuman closed-off-ness. The plush upholstery covering of the seats, the dead bugs and the dust on the window, the live flies in the compartment, the repetitive bangings and clacking of the train as it advances over the curve of the earth are real, too.

  22

  “I don’t ever win at chess,” I offered. “I have a portable chessboard . . . I found it in an ashpit. It’s short a knight and a bishop.”

  “Why don’t you win atchess? Why not?” he said.

  Is he still interested? Do I have his protection? I care enough to keep track. “I don’t know—is that okay?” I said. My heart broke, perversely, literally, in the poisoned increment of opportunity moment by moment. I’m a jerk. I have been called names a lot. I don’t know how to figure the proportions and ratios—some kinds of refusal are maybe too much of an acknowledgment. I half acknowledge my own perversity. I don’t want to know what I am saying no to. To say no can be a game. One can be a problem—steal things, make scenes, cause jealousy. Pure—ghostly, stare-y—hallucinatory moment of the racing mind flinging itself this way or that against the bone as against the walls of the compartment. His breathing makes me fearful.

  These moments in a kind of moral lesserness of history—history being one’s father—“I can’t keep the whole game in my head,” I say—earnestly.

  How much innocence does anyone have in a real moment? This is as innocent as I ever got.

  HOMOSEXUALITY 2

  After the Train Ride

  On Winning and Being Normal Up to a Point

  The Soliloquy

  At night in that house, in my bedroom, among the sights available in that room by lamplight, and then in the dark the sounds from outside—the summer giggle of the wild grass in the fields beyond the lawns, the ones near the foothills, the rustle of the weedy grassheads, through the window—and the stars dit-dotting the partly silver-bluelit night sky, lit by a crescent moon above the torn tin sheet of the not-very-distant mountains, the Blue Ridge, I was aware in my recurrent nervous sleeplessness of the great whale of this other landscape, partly white with moonlight, with dark moonlight-bordered shadows, swimming with night motions.

  One is sleepless. A ceiling fan turns indifferently and with a grinding noise. A wind sprang up, and the house seemed to be shuddering and stirring. I always slept soundly for a while at home . . . This torment was new; I hadn’t expected it as part of the obvious fact of rescue.

  I feel I am caught in nervous sleeplessness as in a web of personal history.

  Daniel, later, will tell me he can never sleep in anyone else’s house and not well in hotels. He suggested I read Proust on sleeping in strange rooms—but the foreignness of the walls, the misplaced windows, the ceaselessly original rumble of physical reality, while recognizable—and dear and attractive—did not seem to be what so savagely cut into the feeling of escape and of things being, at least in large part, all right now.

  More, in my case, I suspected the presence of an unsuitability of sleep—of a kind of reproduction in the—comparative—stillness of the room and of the night world at that hour of the thing of being a visitor in this house, of being me, but not really: but being first and foremost a visitor—and unlike, in too many ways, the people here.

  The unsuitability of my former sleep and previous dreams here, if they were to show up, if I were to have them here, kept me awake the first night I was there—this unsuitability of what I was and had been was the measure of the distance I had crossed to come here—the long landscape of a sentence which now must be followed by another one. The measure of some reality of time or other. The unmoored patterns of earlier kinds of sleep seemed to drift by, out of reach on the black, oily surface of consciousness at night. Old nighttime soliloquies recurred, memories of other circumstances, of questions concerning duties at home and at school—back home, back at school; a dozer’s dreams now, the ones I woke from to find insomnia here, were inhabited by people in St. Louis, by friends, by Lila and Nonie: they were together that summer; they were back in St. Louis—f
ar to the west.

  I refused to think about St. Louis and sum up, study, emend and judge my opinions of life there, of my life there, and of my leaving it now—that was both cowardice and anesthesia. Logic is presumed to be emotionless but, of course, what is meant is that it is comparatively so—it is supposedly less greedy than most things. I mean the real thing. In real life, a vacuum is comparative; and the attempt to stop the motions of thought and to substitute one kind of logic for another—dream logic for a sense of things in wakefulness—a You don’t have too many worries here for one’s past logic, a moral emptiness, very sweet, a vacationer’s vacuum in which real obligations and one’s true history and one’s long lists of duties fulfilled and others evaded or faked, one’s chronicle of emergencies and one’s responses are not there, are supposed not to be there: no list of old and accumulated thoughts: a listlessness . . . The playboy kept playing—but not so lightly. The odd misery I felt was new but was partly worry about Daniel, partly worry at refusing to worry about Daniel—He’s rich; he’s young . . . The stuff of what things meant socially was present. How you talk reflected who you are speaking to and why, now, you are speaking at all; and it is related—not in a fixed way but in a way peculiar to the tie, to the proximity—to the odd factor of near-meaninglessness and, indirectly, a sense of one’s purposes and of one’s authority—one’s charm or social standing—one’s right to determine what is said and how it is taken, as wise or as foolish. The rules of that are new—I mean who decides or how do the two of you or all of you as in this new family decide what makes sense and what sanity is like and how you’re supposed to talk when alone or at dinner or with Aunt Casey? And what is eccentric and what is boring and where the limits of meanness are—and so on.

  In a certain way, I spoke better than most people, than anyone I had yet met, but not all the time, and not to everyone’s taste—and that didn’t mean jokes or wit or logically—at least, all the time—but it meant some of those things some of the time; but that gave me too much authority . . . Nonie insisted all her life that I made no sense and I talked like a book—and like a fool . . . No one likes the way you talk . . . And she, like Aunt Casey, insisted I must talk her way if I was to talk to her: she, they refused to let me talk; I did it anyway—but not often. Silence and smiles offered a kind of no-man’s-land of not-head-on confrontation or truce-by-default that was what most of the smart boys back home did, practiced a kind of useful silence—somewhat worried and often self-conscious, with a kind of quality of rebellious delinquency and at the edge of scenes related to the ones I went through but expressed differently.

  This was part of the speech of intelligent women, young or old, that rebellious delinquency in their manner, in their talking, as such—so earnestly, so mockingly and allusively, that war with the rules of polite talk, that admission of the presence of difficulties almost not to be borne except among sophisticatedly troubling people, of multiplicities, diversities, novelties of opinion and of hypothesis.

  To adopt the pidgin of decency here—a decent pidgin, this—this talk-the-way-others-talk discourse, that of these monied people, to live, to live well—I was tired and more than a bit anxious and I was somewhat angry and a bit fierce about being judged in these ways—but I want to give what I am rather than to be forever alone in this world with a peculiar seriousness for company: Jesus: think of it . . .

  Almost the smallest thought woke me, yanked me from the path into sleep. Starved thoughts, hobo, derelict . . . Logic hates motion: people invent things that have more stillness in them than natural things do: iron and gold . . . I wish this was a gold-walled bedroom, as anchored in place as that. The stillness of gold in one’s breath—a ballast, a keel. An armor against males grabbing me—ha-ha. Nothing that occurred here among these people was part of my past—had Nonie enjoyed her historylessness? She was cleverer than I was and more sensible, Mom said, and knew more about winning and losing. I supposed she had enjoyed having a clean slate—was that term too lawyery, too smart-alecky? Probably. Too much like something a newspaperman would say: it would upset Casey.

  For me it was a little like trying to sleep on top of the slow evolution at night of my sense of things into a mood of sadness-floored, darkness-chuted dancing tautness of a personal reality of trying to prune myself and costume myself, exercise my will to try for the large prizes visible in the distance, rewards detached from the paragraphs of self-description of their destinies by anyone else I knew . . .

  The nervous unwillingness to sleep was an inability—just as a privilege was a deformity (and a deformity was a privilege if you knew how to see it that way), an inability to dream or rest or hope just yet.

  Something like an appalled sense of identity at having no identity during this period of transition, not different in kind from part of a night I’d spent in jail once, the dangerous claustrophobia that overtook me in the stinkingly close air of an excursus into the nothingness of being imprisoned, of being unable to choose to leave, of having no duties, of being, literally, no one for a few hours.

  I hadn’t given my name. The boy I was with and with whom I’d been in the brawl in the dirty bar, his uncle came and got us out. It was not that an angel might not hear me or know my voice and protect me but that no one human from the past would: they had all failed. They were all dead or dying. Or bent elaborately on simplifying me, making me working-class, say, or rabbinical, or shy. Personal freedom and personal doom smell alike; they have the same structure, the nearness of death one-way-or-the-other and a sense of being parenthetical, not important to the main line of the sentence but being a note of testimony, a pool of cairn of language—of articulated consciousness.

  If it is like being locked in a coffin, rather than a cell, to be alone with yourself and your destiny (if I might say that), then it follows that it is sensible for the senses to bulk up so in one’s consciousness that every fragment of color and bit of smell registers and not nostalgically but as a blur of clarity of something largely not to be explored here, merely experienced and to be thought about later and known then if it is to be known.

  Everything is filtered through the uninformed senses and hidden inside the eyes in the dark and is closed in, in moments known as both wadded and fluttering, caught and held, stifling me, or as outspread and moving like breath or like the outer skin and bony top of my nippled and tucked-and-skinny chest teasing me, the faintly heaving, semi-moored reality, folded, wadded, known . . . A moment here is an extraordinarily odd shape, sleeved, or like a sleeve, and the rest of the coat or caftan is the house, a now, sleepless and unsettled and extending in the sleepless minutes. Penniless. To my dismay I am unamused by linen sheets. I was as startled to be me as if my awareness of it was like a whirring owl descending toward me or as if my spirit was like a porcupine on the tree branch, its quills erected, guarding it against me, against my eyes and appetites, the creature in the forest. How strange the independent-of-others effort to stay alive is—and then it seems strange that it is like that in you but is secret. Or shy. Let me be happy, do you mind?

  I come by blood from an unreasonable family—known for doing as they liked, men and women both.

  My grandfather said that he spoke to God every day and that he expected his children to honor this. They hated him instead and he said they were no good. He obeyed no one human and didn’t mind their hatred.

  As for my father: Give him an order and he hits you . . . S.L. said, Trash like that, they wind up in the gutter . . . What else can become of them?

  Insomnia

  I am afraid. I am afraid and I prefer not to dream and if I dream, I prefer not to remember my dreams and the dramas in them, the messages, the jumble of images in their ominous and sweet grammars unknown in any spoken language. One sleeps among the omens and among one’s opinions of things named as objective and shown as objects and as dramas, each an example of clarity of vision convincingly; and this goes on for a while if no one interrupts your sleep and wakes you.

  A clarity
interfered with. Fear and horror in the dark, the dreams of life and death, the thing of wanting in the ways I want it, to be like other people. Of course, one can go to someone’s bedroom for company. A number of times I went to the door of my room and I stood there, waiting for a wish, for some automatism to guide me; and I turned back each time. One can rob the house. I am governed by moral distaste, perhaps by fear. The nomadic zero among the spaces of the night—I scream silently in the dark. I do. I am adopted and odd. Crazy.

  The reality of that, of a zero risking his life and everyone else’s, it seemed ill-advised in a moral sense. I hadn’t the genetic self-respect to go about gambling everything sexually. Or socially. I am too afraid of what one might lose. As it is, I am at best a collection of shadows, of a lot of shadowy things, a false name, a temporary look of youth, a reputation as a young guy who had stood by his dying father. An anthology of shadows and not an encyclopedia of real things—like richer kids. In my borrowed bathrobe, a recipient of charity, I stood by the door of my room. You don’t love anyone enough to ask for help.

  I have never been real; no one is as unreal as I am.

  If I let myself believe that I am real, my heart races around and my breath gets funny and my nerves twang and jump like wires or grasshoppers set on fire or beams of light but ones that ache. My reality, minute by minute, actual minute by minute, is inset with a flickering madness of joyous self-will and carelessness of which I am deeply ashamed, violently proud. Madness is near. To murder someone’s pride or to pass into social catatonia, these are the common terms of conscious existence for me.

  Rage or quasi-pietistic acceptance, I distrust the wavering tick-tockishness of the shrinking and of the dangerous enlargement of the self.

  I often masturbate in order to sleep. I am ashamed of what I think of when I jerk off. The mood and the life’s history that has led to this dark and devious grandeur—this grandeur of lowness—is linked to self-disgust, self-admiration. Help against the temptation is summoned and found in the various incantations of the radio turned on low until that low mutter of distant voices and what is said in that mutter, the cheapness of it, the fantastic folly and uselessness—not the folly of breath but a cruel brainlessness—I prefer, after a while, a silly motionlessness of almost simple pain, the simpleminded and unmoving staring at the dark to distraction and to masturbation.