The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  He offers comfort: “You’re pretty: you don’t have to suffer: you-all’ll get to go to a good college: ev’y one’ll like you’air.”

  “Christ, what bullshit,” I say, shakingly gored by the pain of my blood running cold at the edge of my ribs near my heart—at what he is as a person, how far I am from caring about him, how far he is from what I need in a world in which bad things happen to me at fairly regular intervals. He is what Casey needs. She’s a rich woman.

  Naked, I manage to get to my feet. Without shame. And with my back to him, I bend over the sink made of china and flowered, which is in the room, and I splash my face with hot water and use the towel there, and then I wrap the towel around my waist and cover my nakedness. I was, actually, sexually innocent. I was shaking inwardly. I no longer remembered the dream; and I didn’t remember the thinking from before during the bout of insomnia. I didn’t much care to what extent I had been damaged by my past—or whether Benjie was moved by my youth or not. What embarrasses me is the extent of my own now uncontrollable sadness. Benjie is breathing oddly . . I turned to him and said, “I still am very young for my age emotionally.”

  I have no interest in his sins or in my own; they hardly matter in wartime—except when they are being committed. I have some trouble walking and breathing but I get to that door of my room which leads to a very small porch set in a slope on the roof. The porch is high off the ground. I get the screen door open and I held on to the jamb of the wooden door and shivered and shuddered and tried not to breathe too melodramatically—I was blacking out off and on; and I felt recurrent bursts of grief, I think, but pain in the mind; and I expected it to kill me—if not then, in a day or two from the strain of enduring it now. I could not admit to the pain to Benjie since I did not want his comfort . . . I can imagine him saying, Well, if you’re going to be like that, you’re welcome to your agony, bubba . . . In the doorway to the porch, with the screen door open, the outdoors begins. The scale of the freshness out there is helpful. The fear of violence includes the fear of it in me and then the dream fact of the return of the dead and the differences among bodies and lives and destinies and nature choosing among us, and this stuff set in time, in the onrushing nature of time: my life horrifies me.

  It need not have been what it had been, What pulled me together was a sense of the triumph of other people if I did go mad here: that competitive stuff is present here shamefully.

  Benjie cannot read this in me; it is not a defect in him that he prefers not to read people’s feelings—it is merely part of the differences between us. The pain of this is eased to the point of being bearable by a sense of the outdoors. And my being able to kill myself—I can throw myself from the roof. S.L. is dead. I am free. I can choose to go out and lie in the greatly massive extent of dark out-of-doors and I can tell Benjie to leave me alone.

  “See, you-all on your feet: you got nothing to be afraid of. Did you-all hev a bed dream?” He sees I’m coming out of the spasm.

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  The stars and the dark trees on the lawn—the Boy Scout conformations of identifiable trees, the Boy Scout points of restless light of the stars, the constellations, the Milky Way—the silent corporeality of the darkness: it is, of course, unlike the racing oppression of noon heat. The as-if-muscular body of darkness, the shattered lamp of clouds and starlight suggest a kind of ordinariness in everything I have undergone in my life and everything I have done. A singular nurture is in the sense of one’s own ordinariness. A singular nurture is in the dark.

  “Your peepee’s ready for night baseball,” Benjie says.

  “Go to hell,” I say—not angrily—moving out onto the porch. The towel starts to slip. Benjie and Isobel, using the peephole through Benjie’s closet wall, have spoken of my genitalia jokingly and of my rear end in some sort of unmasking and owning-me way that I know from high school. I know it, too, from my father. My father liked me differently from whatever way it is Benjie likes or half likes me. The separate differences curl like the warmish Carolina summer night breeze around me when I stand on the porch.

  Benjie says, “You got a hell of a pecker, you got a hell of a cute little pecker.”

  If I hold him in (spiritual and sexual) contempt, do I then despise Casey? And money?

  “Shut up, Benjie,” I said. Then: “Like a bird’s beak, peckerwood . . . You ever fuck a tree? I had a teacher last year who muttered ‘Peckerwood’ all the time. Daniel has been using the word ‘pecker.’ “I speak with difficulty—I am trying to be polite.

  “He gets it from me, honey.”

  The thing about privation—of being stripped of identity and having no home and not finding conventions of attitude to be useful—the thing is not to let yourself be denied access to the terms that are the first step of the comparisons which are the chief furnishings and work of the mind. The comparisons that make identification possible. What too great a change in your circumstances does is force you to see in a general way—at least for a while you live in more than one room at a time then, generally, unrootedly—you live only vaguely, may I say that? And you lose the power to distinguish between one moment and another and a lesser kindness and a greater one. The larger number of the comparisons I make (which are often reasons for patience) have to do with my real history. With reality. One has a pain-riddled sense of the difference between the lightlessness in the air now outdoors and the lightlessness earlier in the room when one first tried to sleep, but one has this as my real mother’s son and as S.L.’s son. One has been educated and not stripped of one’s education, one’s experiences as oneself.

  But to be stubborn about one’s past is to be freed—only to bleakness. One is not barren and new, not sleek—is this bearable? It seems so. One shivers in one’s new, thin nakedness among the memories of this event-so-far and at the nearness of the night and its extent of air and one’s own naked completeness of history in it. On the ranch of transparency, among the herd of winds, the cowed boy (the thin boy is suddenly soaking wet with fear that films his body with a kind of easy terror, a mental recurrence, physical as well, of the nightmare) has a theory about the power to be gained by banishing all this from one’s daily self.

  The convulsions: I am only shakily in the present tense, but I am a king in the present tense, a major figure for Benjie: “BENJIE, GO AWAY,” I say to distract myself from this goddamn revelation. Then, STRUGGLING to get hold of myself, struggling to get hold of the regular moment: “I want to be alone.”

  “Listen, Garbo, I’m the head nurse and chief bottlewasher here, so let’s just make sure you don’t get pneumonia—while you’re staying in my mother’s house—she’s had QUITE ENOUGH ILLNESS FOR ONE YEAR, THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. What you look like isn’t going to turn up in any message to García . . . I’ve seen better peepees before.”

  I am soaking wet—I have no real idea what he is talking about. He may be making sense. But it’s not my sense. What does sense matter? I doubt that my life matters. Why does that comfort me? I am bound to the hidden voice, so wordless and clear, of what I have known so far; and he has no clear sense of that—perhaps he doesn’t care. But I want my pain, my luck, my life for my purposes, not his—surely this is common.

  Perhaps it is more common among women—he avoids women.

  Benjie’s assertions of innocence, his protestations of harmlessness, his actions that are meant to be kind have little to do with the consequences that follow on the acts he has in his head that he thinks he wants to do or that follow on the ones he actually does. The way things turn out: he’s not responsible for that. In America, morality is an open question, an issue open still, and it has to stay open—that is a political given—and then there is the human freedom of the reality of the acceptance as a general thing in citizens of seeing what you can get away with—and then the guilt, the hypocrisy of living with that.

  “I’ll be all right in a minute, in five minutes.”

  Will, projected and trained, still can
not exist consecutively: it blinks and reverses itself: it is a complex of yes-no’s, a range of them. He knows this. He is courting me. I don’t really know why.

  “Let me help you,” he says, having come to the doorway of the porch.

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to hurt my feelings, do you?”

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone—not you, not your mother, not Daniel. Not myself. A lot of times, Daniel”—I forgot it was Benjie; I forgot I was talking to him—“Lila said to me, ‘You don’t need to know how to box; you don’t need boxing lessons; all you have to do is just walk over to someone and say in your nice little sincere way, “I’m smarter than you are,” and you can ruin their whole lives.’ “I had found my bathing suit on the railing. “This bathing suit is dry.” I pulled it on and I put the damp towel around my neck. I moved toward the door of the room in the dark; I moved into the half-light that came from the door; and I said, “I’m smarter than you are, Benjie.”

  After a kind of dry silence, he grinned and said, “Well, honey, THAT makes me no never mind. Honey, I’m the kind that accepts all kinds of bullshit . . . I like everyone . . . What you say makes me no-never-mind; I take whatever comes my way and I’m as happy as a little ol’ clam at high tide . . .”

  I said, “I’ll be all right soon—and, no shit, Benjie, I have to be alone now.”

  His face did something; I don’t know what it meant . . . It wasn’t ordinary comprehension—I think it was fear of scandal. I think he saw me as being a lot like Nonie—or his mother—as someone on the make . . . and tough. I’m pretty sure he was scared of me in a way that he was used to being scared. Fear entered him. Blew inside and around his eyes and puffed at his eyelids. And cheeks. He said, “Call if you want something. If you need me . . .” And he skedaddled.

  In love—in a way . . .

  You move into the world somewhat explosively—whoever you are—no matter how flaccidly you pretend to be a sort of semi-no-one-good-guy . . . I have my potencies . . . I can do things . . . In the real world, I mean. Maybe not as a writer. Not as an operator.

  I was alone on the porch, where I lay down on the porch glider—fourteen, unhoused . . . unhouseled—that means outside the range of Communion. I am under the American sky; I am a tenant here; I see the stars overhead. I am in the open air, which will dissolve my outcries if I wake screaming again. Out here my presence is not a trespass. I am a nervous and able boy in a bathing suit, a towel around my neck which I draw up over my mouth and which I bite and keep between my teeth at one side of my mouth silencingly as I try to sleep.

  I wonder if it was like this for Nonie . . . I wonder in what ways I share the world with her . . .

  HOMOSEXUALITY 3

  or Second Sight

  I Study What Is Normal (Up to a Point)

  In a story, a major character back then was supposed to know the degree of Benjie’s loyalty to Danny—preparing the ground, being influenced by him, or double-crossing him and being a rival—and how this affected me, whether it made me sadder and crazier—and, often, in a story the teller used riddles and a cold consciousness of mystification and of paradox to suggest “reality”—but, in life, you may not know enough even to begin to ask (or feel) such important narrative questions much; or your life doesn’t go on that way; those questions don’t matter except as part of everything else—how much and why Casey disliked me—you’re relieved to know anything at all.

  Or you’re upset but are determined not to show it; or repelled and want to escape from here, too—as if escape were, at once, an addiction and a universal.

  For me, the formal element—or knowledge or point—was that under a fit of despair or nerves and semi-madness, at least in a way, was the possibility of a homosexual, or male, flirtation . . . a kind of identity of success, something in a parenthesis and not really part of your destiny (or mine).

  And a sense that this was true of “everyone”—men and women—and was how alliances were formed and business concerns and friendships; and the sexual part was unexpressed, not done . . . whatever . . .

  The main thing, day to day, was the thing of fitting in, of having a loosely-jointed, flexibly articulated personality—an easy impostorship. Mom and Dad had “understood” the difficulties of “fitting in”—after all, both of them had been kicked out of college (never to return) and both complained about the world and what it cost to live in it.

  Fitting in: predictability was abandoned. Obvious safety was gone—since you could fail. Your capacity to feel—as yourself—your having a history, your having attributes separate from this—survived if you rebelled inwardly, if you continued in this birth-rebirth on the hateful quest, genetic, genetically given, world-and-time-tormented, to be yourself and to continue to grasp your own fate.

  Surely, Nonie refused, or failed, to become Caseylike but change was not perhaps asked of her to the same extent or much at all. Change is not a light matter. A bend in time around light beams can’t really come—only sometimes glimpses and conclusions, theories and (logical) constructions of the past can be reached blindly around the dogleg in the corridor, the grubby but monolithically sincere (it seemed) and monotheistic past.

  Mom (and Dad) had been right: I had not realized what would be asked of me, what love would consist of—lies and illusions, while life was real, was corrective, but the illusions came first—the ripping away of the self, the substitution of making-things-work and more in your case as a visitor than in theirs.

  It was advisable not to read—not to hold to ideas, the sorts of ideas there were in books. Written reasoning consists of a self, an intimate voice (in a way) addressing one’s selves separately from one’s life: that is bearable if you are a bedouin-spirit or if your sense of home and of others is solid or if it includes such oddities as what becomes of you if you read (and believe what you read, or experiment with the ideas offered there).

  A soliloquy in a moment of rescue can end as an unspoken anathema toward memory, bedrooms, rivers, selves, and ideas; and becomes a song of metamorphosis, maybe an unwilling one, in which, as I said before, you give up your language, and its meanings, in order to live, the decent pidgin, the pidgin of decency—and you adopt talk-the-way-the-others-talk so that you are not alone in the world.

  The inadequacy of conversation—and of essays and of theory—in any sense of being of use to oneself in this matter of metamorphoses, physical and year by year and mental, in terms of what one learns, and spiritual, and in terms of grief or guilt or both, or in terms of happiness of some kind—the uselessness of philosophy and of imaginary dialogues when you cannot know of what use you will be in the world ever: one is left with indirection and narrative, with sentimentality and its hidden, always falsely sexual base.

  Starting in kindergarten, at recurrent intervals, at my school, people would get upset and say I was a genius . . . Big deal, Momma said of that often enough: Is there money in it? Will people take care of him for the sake of that?

  Actually, yes—which hurt her. It was an odd form of rivalry with what she was.

  You don’t know how things work, she said. Wait and see what your father does when he hears about THIS . . .

  I said, He’ll be proud of me; he’s not mean like you—he likes me . . .

  He doesn’t like books—he likes to have the upper hand, Pisher . . . He wants to have you dependent—like the rest of us . . .

  The free will of his kindness?

  I did not believe her. I thought I owned his affection. S.L.’s, I mean. I thought it was something I could count on completely.

  I went out onto our large screened porch and I lay at an angle on the glider, on the pillows on it, and I pushed it with one leg on the rattan rug and while the glider glided back and forth creakingly, I held a third-grade textbook over my head and looked up into it and read it aloud to myself . . . I had taught myself to read that day—actually, within a few seconds; well, chiefly in a few seconds, at a glance; and then I worked out the details over t
he next half-hour; and then I could read magazines and newspapers—the more and more upset teacher had tested me . . . Miss Chatterton, who disliked boys, who was a famous battle-ax, kept testing me; and then she grabbed me and shook me and said, “You little Jew, your parents are pushing you, aren’t they? They trained you at home to do these things . . .”

  No. I learned to read just now, sitting in the class.

  She hit me. And I said, with sudden, quite abrupt self-importance, Stop that . . . You better not do it . . .

  We went to the principal’s office, and I saw that when I described what happened, it was clearer and closer to truth than when Miss Chatterton talked.

  And the principal, Mr. McClure, saw it, too; he had a funny look but then he pulled me onto his lap and he said, Well, well, what do we have here?

  The ability to read was oddly like having a moon inside one—it was that way for me that day.

  When Daddy came home, he, S.L., sat on the glider in his suit and tie and in his fedora and he hugged me—as per usual, he said while I resisted—as per usual lately—What got into you, Pisher?—and he kissed my face, my cheek, a number of times, passionately, really; and I said, Stop, listen to me. I can read . . . The school said I was A GENIUS . . .

  I read to him and he got up and left the porch and came back to the door to the porch and said, You little show-off . . . you goddamned little snot—you don’t have a modest bone in your body: YOU HAVE BAD BLOOD IN YOU . . .

  His temper was real enough to me but it had never been shown as directed at me before, only at Lila in front of me and at my nurse. I was amazed, enraged, curious, and yet bored: his raised, cold voice, his hurt, his dislike—really, the first dislike he’d showed me so far as I knew—DON’T BE SNOTTY! he cried.

  I said—I was not quite five years old—I will too, if I want to.

  “He doesn’t like books. He liked me for a while—he will always like a part of me . . . These are things Momma said, and which, clumsily, I accept as part of myself without understanding them: they are not to be understood by me. They are not common things. Actually, they are if you think of them differently—if you think of them as being about unlikeness and varieties and differences of being. And about love—the nature of love . . .