The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Part of the world is a commerce deal in sensations. There is a commerce in this stuff among us . . . maybe all the time.

  This seems a hurtful, really agonized, dimly pleasurable, wowee-pleasurable sort of suicide: Leonie is in the other room . . .

  I feel my consciousness deepen with a dull contrapuntal glow of self-use and of wordliness: it is a deeper, wider, more carpentered sense of something I knew in childhood: an attentiveness—as if to the air—while one is aware of the drifting heat of one’s own childish skin and of your nurse’s skin nearby . . .

  I feel tissue-y and real—and like warm cloth—limply heated, fabric-y—I am cooking myself—sexually—ho, hi, can I ball? I am fried and twisting—like bacon in a pan—oh, oh, hot, agonized sensation: weeeee—whoopEEEEEEEEE . . .

  Perhaps this is the heat of hellfire and damnation . . . Then, all at once, it is human—unmetaphorically so: the heat is like the neck heat of someone you kiss on the neck. It is all over me: it has spilled and it sticks to me: it is me; neck heat; necking did it; the boy is watched by the night shadows in the window screens . . . Ooooh God and Christ, now it’s this mattress-stuffing heat—ticklingly suffocating me—I can’t breathe as the dampish darkness of ebbed sensation crests—with light and heat, a little like lightning—I am hellishly sweaty and blotched with the fake presence of the hallucinations—the piety of my own body, erect, erected, yet kneeling to sensory reality, in this white-tiled and absurd bathroom solitude.

  In the recent past, jacking off with another boy—the hand goes like an automobile jack: quelle levitation, Remsen said—I am startled when the other boy shouts, IT’S HOT! or I’M GETTING HOT! If he shouts that . . . Jass says it in a twisty way . . . Oooh, shit, I am twisted, too: bacon-twist . . . Bacon’s reality is that of well-judged experiment and of reasonable expectation of successful repetition . . . I see, confusedly, how to rub two sticks together (prick and woodenishly curved hand) to get to my own heat . . . I sense the rhythms jazzily as I go along—not clearly.

  The incomplete unleashedness of the moment makes me a ventriloquist of unleashedness: I’m hot, I’m hot . . . I sing jazzily under my breath: scat syllables. Then it all turns dull—my skills at marshalling sexual stuff are limited, and so is my concentration. Then the dullness is blown apart: a certain rhythmical touch, slidingly done, is blowsily explosive—oh wow, nice, I’m glad—i.e., experienced, even semi-expert, yet withal, my Lord, in the matters of the hallucinatory theater here, I am amateurish . . .

  An old sensation illustrates this—the old sensation comes and is present and is gone: it’s me as a little kid, my bathing suit coming off me: I’m on a table in a changing room, in a pool house maybe: the bareness and helplessness, kind of, and the hurtful readiness of the self—bare feet, nude chest, ribs, arms, nerves—for the bareness and helplessness—the truly peculiar recognition of the bareness and helplessness from before and the smells now: damp concrete: Daddy—is it Daddy? Sure: the chest, the abdomen, the thing there, the legs—the smell, blondish, salty—we must be at the ocean, no, the Gulf of Mexico—that complicated odor, odors, of his: he smells of eyes, eyes and new baldness and worry: a kind of glamour of major tissues and size . . . Oh who will love me? Will I ever know love? Be buried in it . . . Be cruel in the lordship or ownership of it? The past is, in part, ignorantly rectified: I am my own father here, I am my son, my lover: the entire act is one of editing—editorial rectification—in a moment of semi-potency after a childhood, much of it extensive with enigmatic longing and amazement with people—as if with numberless corridors.

  That is tied to a flashing-flaring history in brief segments of how good at sports I have been at the different sizes I’ve been so far . . . Capacities of the body. And of the will . . . Do you yearn to shine, Wiley? Do you want to be a star in THE HEAVENS? (Daddy said it.)

  Then those two sections are cupped in a moment that is a trance of exaggerations—all the matters of scale, of relative scale, become instead matters of giantisms and of elfishness: giant breasts on a giant woman, giant prick, giant hands, tiny hands, tiny self among leaves . . .

  Then the world returns and bits of judgment—tribunal shit—toward the masturbation here, toward masturbation in general, toward Leonie, toward me now and as a child, at various ages, toward my dad, toward the toilet bowl and the Bible . . .

  This segment of failure and dullness gives way to bolts and batterings of pleasure such that I push my pants down and shrug my shirt off: I am so sweaty suddenly, so closed in, so much a prisoner. Pleasure is not knowable by memory: it can only be glanced at; or it can sting you—then it vanishes: this is so even in immediate memory, of just a second ago. The jagged zigzaggings and moonings of memory are really palpable loss and ego . . . Grim. But this stuff . . . the good stuff . . . it is only knowable here. Reality has a monopoly of it. Nature. It owns, it has a patent on, you have to come here to this puzzle-ridden and sometimes large-scale light-struck area of maybe general illumination . . .

  Leonie won’t share this with me . . . This is the third time in twenty-four hours that I’ve done this . . . This passage of it is palely redlit, the redlit adolescent trek among rhythms, among fantastic imaginings—among hand movements—and their speed and emotion—like a carpenter with an adze or a tree guy with an ax, chop and chop, hands on the handle—for a minute, I do this stuff just physically—without any thought and without images: you can (at this age) do this.

  Hey, Wiley, do you pay other people for your thinking about them when you jerk off? That’s Jass Nolloquot. The first voice in the darkness. I hadn’t thought about it until he mentioned it. He said, Do you think we ought to pay people if we use them for jerking off? Royalties? Sure. One mounts, grandly and humbly from that, in something like familiarity with the phenomenon, and this despite the always great novelty of the intensity; one stirs like a ruthless hobo on heavy, just barely workable, illicit wings. At that time. A boyish, ragged, shabby Piece of Thievish Fire—I don’t know how to punctuate the terms of the action—through whitelit, quivering distances, and unsteadily through what seem like immense elevations, to a quivering ache of altitude, tormenting, into an alluring and aerial and wicked, and banned, and uncalibrated and imaginarily dimensioned dementia of meaning, one comes to a stage of feeling in which duration and pungency are shown to be dimensions of the universe—as true as width and length, which one feels in one’s hands—in them and in what one of them holds—and in one’s feet, bare, and the floor. And one sees then the animal bribe: the seeming reality of a favorable apocalypse . . . You can fight it off still; it’s not quite irrevocable . . . But it’s here, in this elevation, that you are falsely persuaded that the conclusion is everything and its brother.

  To ripen toward the false apocalypse is real easy—the hand and bent knees and a dirty picture in your mind—a leering girl spread-legged in the leaves, sly-eyed, moist and witless or worldly and filthy with sexual wit—these are bits of sun in this caverned planet: it’s here—and only here—that the Platonic shit is true. And here it’s really true. Here, boy, you lived before. And here are the caverns measureless to man . . . (Poetry, ageless, matchless, et cetera.) And here are chained prisoners—I love holding slaves in my dreams . . .

  When you see this, you giggle. I do. Mostly not out loud. My mouth gets twisty and full of feeling; and mostly my body giggles, thin bones, attenuated height, weird-weirdly craning neck all of a sudden . . .

  Ooh shit, here comes a big one: Do-I-want-to-come-and-then-go-back-(quickly, all things considered)-to-Leonie? The boy sees and is inwardly silent as if in the face of a tidal wave, a cyclone, a huge grown-up appearing suddenly—or a god in the old sense, or faith in the new—he is violently affected and silent and dense and steady and not twisty and moving: he sees big red, convulsed zeroes and pallid ones that moo or mow at him—it is so interesting that some of the stitches of the self-in-relation-to-the-sensation—staring, feeling, containing, inflicting—break into near-orgasm, which is to say, into a kind of Homer
ic and later death, sword strokes, arrow piercings, hand grenades, bullets, explosions. Do I want to come? NO—N-O—NO, UNH-UNH, GO AWAY, I’LL COME SOME OTHER DAY . . .

  The sensation does retreat, but incompletely: it leaves behind corpses that jump up or minefields that go off: its echoing is present and has receded; it passes and burbles and bumbles on—the sinewless hand—the staring boy . . . Hey, this is me . . . Is life interesting? In a horrible way? Yeah. Sure. Well, why not? A surf and then a web or net of quick thought—almost as of a shark or of a turtle or of a school of gleaming mackerel attempting to break free of the waves and to climb—amphibiously—into the air: that stuff, in this second wave of wavelets of the stuff, breaks him at certain odd other seams, memory here being a killing half-illusion of your knowing the stuff now so that it is happening now as well as then, less really now, but more known or something . . .

  Then that announces itself as not present: this is all within a few half-seconds; it strains you; you can feel this stuff is bad for you if you want a long life.

  I proceed cautiously and sighingly—it hasn’t been more than three minutes or so in the john, the loo, the head—I proceed cautiously in a greeting-to-death way, so to speak, wide awake in a way, but then the silence and slippage of feeling—becomes in the motion—a bunch of wordless, unsyllabled, but elevated and babbling voices, a neural chorale: one is half-tranced, witless, witty, contrapuntal—with breathing: with echoes among the tile: with memory and the present tense; with the present tense and the future locked into place if you pump yourself right—with pleasure and no pleasure and with highly nuanced comparisons of pleasure resulting in unworded judgments which are moods, actions, tempos really—and with the throbbing and twitching sweetness, motionful but seeming to be static, the honied pricklings and bursts of eerie self-lightedness—as if one were buried in the dirt—the sporty, odd, and loony light, and then the lapses, now so incomplete, into troughs of failure—one is almost beyond failure—this crazed stuff has a set kind of glamour to it: an irresistibility: it starts—a kind of abandonable wisdom—a ripeness is all thing—you can see where advertisements and art and certain pieties come from. Why-am-I-doing-this-jerkhole-asinine-thing? It’s not really dirty: it’s educational . . . Oh God . . . Oh God . . . I’m coming . . . The rhythmic accretions and the pungency of the fanatic-of-desire hallucinations go into the jerking dance of coming and the boy backs off—mentally and physically: he raises his hands until they are waist-high: he stares with exaggerated innocence into the whitish air—he looks withered and bursting with blossoming both. He likes this world of sensation whether he trusts it or believes in it or not. Also, the boy is something of a prude and is embarrassed often, even in solitude, by sensation . . . by pleasure in the lurching and shoving half-breathless gauntlet-labyrinth of the sensationalism and puzzle-ridden semi-somnambulism of nearly coming.

  The attention and inattention of backing off—look: no hands: I’m a cripple—and the not-stayingness of the pleasure hurt in combination and separately oracularly and intimately—they testify to some feebleness or other.

  But it’s as if your skin is ripped off. Mine, I mean. Now would I do this with Leonie? Would I trust her? I’m ripped, flayed, stripped—I mean this is the real nakedness that the boy knows—I am down to the burning inner skin, heats and oils, exudations and flares, consolation, BRILLIANT renderings of this peculiar crossroads in one’s life in nature. I know something here; I half know it; I know that I know stuff here that I don’t with her; and I know that this is shallower for me . . . It has rooms to it, though, where I stand and watch . . .

  But pleasure as a coalescing conviction that pleasure exists, that it has been invented or found, or carried off from the garden or was given after the expulsion, this thing that is the world and that other people showed me, sort of—Christ, God, the beauty of what some people know: I know that nothing can undo your life—so, it is safer here, less of a roll down into the ravine, into the darkness of the not-yet-unbudded future; there is less feeling and more sensation: it is okay to be alone. Except it is minor. One half wakes. This chimpanzee reality and light. Lord. I am in love with Tarzan doings—animal carryings-on . . . Is it all right with YOU, OLD YAH? The cheapness of sexual images? This gambling and sport and rehearsal? It is irreligious but true here that lazy easiness and lies rule everything (here). Simple thoughts (here) are okay. They are good enough here to grip and alter the crude obstinacy of daily pleasurelessness.

  But if I resume—If I presume to resume is what I used to sing to myself when I was in college—I am, all at once, on a higher plane of feeling, with great space all around and below me, and above me: I am in the middle of emptiness and I am the eye, the human eye, the sole source of pious deference in the universe. I accede to this nomination—this election . . . I accede to being chosen here. On this different level of reality . . . I agree to be sincere and driven. (This is practice for breeding children—to be sincere and driven.) This is on the edge of a gulf of waste.

  Here I am: homemade flesh. But I have risen to this plane of identity—whatever it is worth.

  I make a small noise in a dream of (genital) happiness and I move against the mock-mocking cuntflesh of my unfortunately bony hands (one hand holds the balls crushingly a little, a little the way a girl has)—the head of the cock sticks out of its knuckly nest in what seems full memory of pleasures and difficulties in the past—and in anxiously flinching recklessness, it and the boy, in a kind of pathos, blindly—the boy does fuck motions with his hips—he persists in these partly, mostly involuntarily—the warm-hot clasp of the false cunt—of a sort—this homemade fucking, oh God oh God God—the intoxication—the foolishness—the shamefulness—the distance from the actual air—in an unwilled, unwieldy semi-sobriety of an early acquaintance with masculinity, I laugh out loud, under my breath . . . I feel normal and part of the world’s history as it is commonly known among boys . . . What a mess: hoo-ha—okay? I keep my mind on this matter. I pay it such scandalous attention that if the house caught on fire, I don’t think you’d even notice. Holding myself and fucking my hand, I say, “I love you, Leoneeeee, I love you, good old right hand . . .” I laugh—ha-ha—hotly under my breath in this scandal of imbecile close attention and scandalous absence from here—from real life—and from the presence in that scandalously unperpetual otherwhere of the whitelit shock. I mutter, Oh you DARLING—to pleasure? To the white light? To nature? To my cleverness and heroism in coming here? This is while I am hallucinating rhythmically mostly about having sexual power with people . . . over people. To reward myself a little, I spit on the palm and fingers of my hand and I start being tender with little motions of the spittle-dampened fingers. My concentration is good but I am dimly awake, aware in a satiric way of the brute romanticism. I wouldn’t want anyone to see me like this. Certainly not a girl unless I loved and trusted her A LOT. The unsystematic mad twisty jerking of the lips and of the mid-body and the blurred eyes and the grunts—the acrobatic, pantomimic, aromatic, grotesque nakedness, weird and chanty—there is a necessary absence here of anyone else in their real existence. I could not write this until I was quite old. I am romping here in a mental reality of the real existence elsewhere of people and their sexual realities, their sexual momentums . . . But no one is here. I’m not here. Pleasure and astonishment and shame and curiosity become the blabbery pseudo-bonelessness of the as-if-coerced and final writhing devotion to the sensations here and the final light . . . OH FUCK FUCK FUCK OH YOU DARLING (INNNNNNGGGGGGGgggg) and KAZOW, KAZOWIE . . . I fail to semi-control things here with words and exclamations. Substitutions and apings and compensations be damned: this is REAL, THIS mental light. Money and power and personal beauty and some truths are like this—are a kind of explanation of the world. This is a corner of the world common to boys. No one is more beautiful or commanding than oneself in this light. It is dreamlike and ambitious. The self-enclosed irreversible alteration in one’s knowledge here happens ridiculously, I grant you, but with
a tentative and dirty (and changeable) glory. One is a bore-whore, a dull jerk . . . A jerk-off . . . Uh-oh . . . Duhhh . . . The grammar of childhood, which I learned from other (mostly older) boys in fear and attention—and in supposed wickedness and ruthlessness toward one’s destiny—sheathed in that as in the tinctures of different sorts of sweat, I am afraid I might be broken—that I am more child-y or more womanly than other boys and cannot do this stuff and live. Just before the lurch into irreversibility of coming, I always think it is scandalous to be a real person and I am always—truly, really always—consoled for the scandal. It’s okay. And that it is scandalous to be alone, that is consoled, too.

  The scandalous excitement of the pulsating hemorrhage, the scandalously coerced attentiveness as you come, the hallucination of having all your wonderings answered and you yourself validated. S.L. said when he was terminally ill, I swear to God dreams can kill a man: they have no mercy: ask me what I want and I’ll tell you: I want a woman’s dreams—I want to dream like a woman: I want to live a little longer yet . . . He wanted a woman’s dreams at the end of his life. He didn’t want this stuff anymore.

  The boy’s head—as if in a pointless wartime accident, as bumping onto a land mine while doing a cartwheel, say—explodes in a baffling noise of breath. The operative, tensely cooperative will, the hallucinatory white physical consciousness, the slowed, elevated, inspired state, the flaring up of heat, the woundedness, the violence of the sensation—its limitlessness it’s like being hit; nothing matters but this . . . Life is a cheat but not this part . . . I feel this about other things when I do them or feel them, sports and friendship, good books, good weather, real wind . . . Here, the body in its duplicitousness takes up a reversed stance: it is not only oddly illuminated flesh; it is passionately committed to nothingness (and impotence-of-a-kind), except toward this—it commits itself, it enlists itself in service to the echoes and the liar’s sense of certainty: the stupid king of electricity . . . The head bows forward; the lips loosen drastically; then the head jerks upward and the neck tightens; sexual sensation felt as a large jolting heat-and-visibility of inner light becomes a beautiful whitish light outspread in the neural marvelousness that a slowed and pulse-ridden and kindly lightning would be, a heartbeat-and-pulse-ridden-but-silent furnace of seemingly explanatory consolation. It is all metamorphosis.