The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  The boy loved the bleached, hiddenly ocular pleasure.

  One is not allowed to persist in this flaring light. Well, plod plod, you clod. One has fathered a strand, a small torrent of this different sort of time. To pause in astounded denial of this shit is second nature . . . This supplies a thin-ribbed breath to the throbbing which then replaces it. The thing of being split stops; and then the thing is of being under a roof: time to be respectable. That’s what pays the rent.

  And the soul’s readiness to die (in the adventures and explorings of this stuff—as into being a father or a son—or as into being a hero and having balls . . . or into love and all its clauses and unjocular sacraments), it goes away.

  I feel unsheltered but dry. How can one feel sheltered in being shelterless like this? It’s a shrewdness that comes over you, a modern shrewdness. This stuff is said to be sin. Apple-eating. But among boys I know, practicing this stuff is a virtue—is to be human and friendly. Well, we’ll see.

  A dry memory of a laughter of a denial of lots of things, the memory of it spreads over and through the buttocks, neck, fingers, to the instep of the feet—to my bare toes on the tile floor. The being a slave to things: the tuneless physical hilarity—I guessed back then that a lot of guys felt this—I felt men and boys, women too, and girls, and children had better lives than I did, better experiences.

  They had a different tie to this nowhere-somewhere of explanatory light.

  I am drunk with dryness. With sobriety. You know that state? I scowlingly pump myself: I hate this part—the anticlimax. I am chaste for considerable periods of time, I hate this part so much: it is as if I stood on a kitchen chair and faced its back and bent over and held the back of the chair and made the chair hop across a room and into and out of light—a spotlight, a sunrise—me and my new grip, my long back bent, and MY BIG FEET braced on the chair seat . . . the half-educated jerks of the torso . . . the stringent tics of the abdomen . . . into and out of the light, into and out of a kind of system of ordinary moments and torture . . .

  After another torture.

  Dick and hands—eyes and forebrain—will and sweat glands—unnatural and clownish multiplicity. To be grown is a groan thing: Be smart, don’t overdo, you’ll live longer . . . A scene, really fragmented, really whizzing, goes by, the compressing and wheezing self, a nozzle of coming . . . This isn’t the way it is with girls when they come. Are you a citizen of the real? Are you an idealist?

  Then, all at once, I bend over and constrainingly and partly surrenderingly, using my forearms and my elbows, hug my dick to my stomach, my abdomen. I murmur tactfully under my breath: It’s okay . . . it’s okay . . . Old Kiddo . . . I parent myself often. It’s a little SCARY . . . But then real life is scary.

  What I had done was MASTURBATORY.

  Well, plod plod, you clod. Stupid king of electricity . . . off and on—an agony reveals itself here. God—a memory comes so that I am a cup (of flesh) holding feeling-flecked but fadingly immediate white sparks; I am a vat of fading attention to a hallucination-memory that has considerable power anyway—I am all longing and distaste: I am fretful now and dangerous—cheated . . . I associate this tone with passing for normal.

  Dry and exacerbating as this state is, it is part of, like a back porch to a house of, delirium thrillingly endured . . . and Oh fuck it . . . It feels strange to be alive. One is mostly unworded even if inwardly talkative—or ready to be talkative. It is all sort of ironic—faintly angry, worried, resigned—a thing of what-my-life-is . . . This is a private image. You can dream of sharing it with someone. It is momentarily solidified and glistening, but it has vague edges of a sad and nervous dream, but it is about one’s life: Nobody wants you when you’re old and gray . . . No: that’s not it . . . Maybe that’s it . . .

  Nobody wants to make you happy—that’s not the point of anyone’s life, Wiley . . .

  One’s clumsy hands—knuckly and calloused and pink and nervous . . . and familiar . . . not strange—are redressing oneself. My clothes are, in a way, a true vote for phallic reality . . . I looked at my fingers. I flexed them. I kept on saying for a few seconds, Okay . . . okay . . . It’s okay . . . This is so I can go back to the living room and be in public again. I am trying for Daddy’s tone from when he was young and well of Can’t complain . . .

  It’s sad inside me . . .

  You probably wouldn’t like me if you knew me closely.

  Some people like me.

  I don’t want to be shallow.

  In the dim somehow dark-whitish blur of the room, in the compromised dark of the air, when I turn the light off, I shake in the return, distortedly, sadly, of the memory, undefined, mind you, of childhood catatonia, of grief and madness: the preliminary stuff of my life now. I tremble—or shudder—and am very still. The tiny amount of belated dribble is a convulsion that is past my strength to bear suddenly; and I vibrate with dryness, with winding down when winding down might not work and might be carrying me in the direction of dead madness. The tight-balled postcoital grief and the ashen ache and the brief sociability of the fucked-out orphan’s lost-boy readiness for the world—the rictus-smile on my pale and cooling-off but still sweaty face—the way it actually HURTS—muscularly, electrically—spiritually—in the heart and soul—Well, maybe-I’ll-live-with-it for now. Let’s act as if this were me . . . It burns. Daddy sometimes said when he was alive and I came out of the bathroom after doing this stuff, JESUS GOD LOOK AT YOU—

  I would blush palely-hotly on top of the semi-exhausted heat of the other, which I did now in memory and association or maybe out of habit as if the other (momentary) blaze of supreme heat behind my eyes, now juiceless and cold—ironic-lunatic (by comparison)—spills itself, too . . . seed . . . Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Apple-eater on the loose in the bandit territories behind my eyes where the mind is: I have changed my mind . . . I am of a different mind . . . Peekaboo . . .

  My fear is of going unslaked all my life . . .

  I guess, though, I am scared, too, of being wild in the world and shot down like a dog.

  Air flutters at the edge of my lips. This part is over. I am less safe for a while.

  An internal soliloquy isn’t necessarily in words. Coming was as if it had been dug out of me by a cruel spoon . . . I saw a tin kitchen spoon, dirty with wear, not with dirt, a ten-cent spoon of that era. I cleaned up the john, cleaned up myself; and each motion was like a piece of a speech to myself. When I noticed the light in the john, that was like a piece of a speech. The sound of flushing made me grin but painfully at first, no, second, and then more painfully: it was sort of dry-eyed tears but of the angles of the lips, of the mouth.

  I sloped back toward the living room, anxious to get away from that stuff of one’s actual singularity of being. Scoured and filthy although cleaned up and filthy with will and standoffish (suddenly) and kind of organized, or conditioned to protect oneself now—from her now—and I felt myself to be really a dangerously stupid but (if you can forgive me for this) a forsakenly and unappreciatedly beautiful THING . . .

  Then her, too: I saw her as that.

  “I understand the line about one touch of nature making the whole world kin,” I said, lying down, facedown. Well, first I was propped on my extended arms, then they retracted and then they were folded under me and my feet were pressed against the arm of the sofa and my face was buried. I sighingly said, “It wasn’t all kiddy stuff, was it?”

  “No,” she said intelligently. I felt dominated and constrained by some big, biggish sense of MIND in her. Her voice had liquid in it, not tears—something tearful, maybe. I wriggled a bit, reached over and touched her cheek with my lower lip . . .

  “No! Do nothing!”

  “You want to come?” I asked. I knew next to nothing about this part of things but I’d read in books about men not doing this being no good, unlikable, and so on.

  “No.” Then: “You don’t know how to do that.”

  “You could teach me . . .”

  “Shut
up, Wiley,” she said—really intensely.

  I paid no attention—maybe I was being hysterical—I wasn’t paying attention to her anymore in that other sexual way: “Let’s start a kiss we haven’t seen in any movie,” I said.

  “I WANT YOU TO SHUT UP FOR A WHILE AND I WANT YOU TO DO IT NOW,” and now tears were apparent in her voice. But not on her face—I felt with my fingers and I looked. She sounded genuinely angry. Minutes passed and I thought of various things—worriedly, then contentedly, then I don’t know what I thought, it was so mixed up. She raised herself and she leaned over and she kissed me in a kind of sticky version of how I had kissed her when I was most in rut—if you will pardon me: she was deep and speechful but it was a lecture.

  “We aren’t synchronized,” I said, guessing. I didn’t care but I used an especially naïve tone so she wouldn’t know I was being wicked; and I goaded her in how I kissed her back; but I wasn’t confident—I didn’t feel I tempted her: I felt I tempted her into invention—only that: of course, I was a young kid, I had privileges of stupidity—maybe not as much as grown men had but, still, quite a few, or to quite an extent.

  But she was irked. I might not like her or what she did . . . you know? I’d set the pitch of a kind of dangerous high-school game—it was dangerously high for kids—and she remembered it and returned to it, visited it, or she recognized it in its male form and she showed me the mechanics of a sincere kiss—for her—now that I had come and we were in this other context. She descended through murky levels back to a nursery-nursy thing of neediness and power and letting go—she let go of self-defense—briefly: she let go blackly and sloppily. But briefly.

  And I didn’t like it.

  I went, “Ugh, aargh,” softly, kindly, but still, judgingly—you know? And she was dumbly enraged and self-righteous because she knew that was real sexy. And she had flattered me by doing it with me and I hadn’t known what it was all about—I had failed in sophistication (one) and in sensitivity (two). But I really had. I had wanted her to let me be dominant, but I was like this . . .

  “See, you can’t trust me,” I said almost inaudibly—to her cheek, a little in front of the shallow whorls of her ear.

  I said it so she would trust me some and go on even though I had failed. I was being sensitive-and-good kind of shame-facedly because I couldn’t be truly MALE or whatever the hell it was I wasn’t being.

  Her mood in relation to her engagement, which had been set in regard to I-don’t-know-what—her half-approval of my unmanly maleness—now was whirringly reset to my voice . . . not to my body.

  And this was tied to how she looked. She had odd good looks and a very, very good body—so good it couldn’t last in this form past childbirth—but this was quite a high rank she had—some of this (maybe all of it) was tied to its being wartime . . . And I was invisible to her once again—a mere figment of corporeality realer as a voice—that’s what she liked me for . . . now.

  So she is kidding THE VOICE—more for her sake in a kind of ghostly romance story than for my sake. I mean I’d been taken care of, so to speak—and she was showing me something, anti-patriotically; she restarted the self-invented kiss; she said, “Here, you’re sweet, this is my own patented kiss . . .” Her own patented kiss? Firm-lipped up to a point but not-quite-closed-mouthed, and soon, almost at once, openmouthed because of the nestling-and-nursing-and-nursy-wrestling stuff she liked—the kiss as dominant, the odd meanings and fluctuations of the kiss . . .

  “Sort of kiss my kiss,” I said, like a smart-ass.

  She ignored that—or didn’t get it—she was busy showing me what she liked . . . or what it was like for her. She didn’t like that . . . doing that . . . But she liked not liking it . . . the uncoerced confession in a sense: telling Wiley . . . I don’t know. My view of it was that in her (Lutheran) mind she wanted to tempt me then-and-there at the edge of hell . . .

  She thought I knew a lot. She thought what she knew was knowable easily by others. She moved further into her system, her ritual—there was no way for me to know this but I knew she was unshielded, as much as I had been: I felt the echo thing in it—the equality do-jigger—but I did not know what to do about it.

  Her kiss got directionless and nowhereish. I happen to be good at taking tests, at answering questions, as I’ve said probably a dozen times by now. On oral tests, you answer questions in any number of ways but the first way is you look at the questioner and you try to read the mind of the questioner. If you really engage with the question, you lose all confidence: the world dissolves into atoms and rays; all your own lights are turned off. All light, all, is elsewhere—well, on that basis, I thought maybe that she wanted something, me to do something, something masculine, and I closed my lips over hers, drew hers into a kind of pout like before, but this time I bit them gently-sharply in syllables of a sincerity of condescension to her wish that I be smarter and older and richer and tougher and yet not too much—it shocked me that I felt superior to her—and yet I knew that coming did that.

  I thought I felt sincere rage and hatred in her and sincere wonder and attachment—for a moment—alternating with childish nothingness and half-lying directionlessness—I mean a bit of how rocky she was and how she set limits, or more than a bit, that showed, too. It was kind of monstrous.

  I licked the outside of her mouth and her nostrils and said, “Monster loves monster.”

  She ignored that, too.

  Licking her had a salt taste and I saw red and purple behind my eyelids: I was partly open-eyed for some of the seconds as they passed: it turned into a “deep” kiss, a lot of tongue, but it was like being eaten by a sea anemone while you were holding your breath underwater. I hate being bossed; and she reacted to the kiss so that, as usual, when someone reacts to something and you’re there, what you do is like your being an angel or a Cupid or a man or a bad boy to them, in their view of things—and it is in order to rule that that you do it and go on, but they judge and so they have the upper hand. To impose a notion of the universe that was in me and which was anxious to enclose her, as in a net, I proceeded to respond—to be me and not just a figure she could judge. I did it until she pushed me away and then she turned onto her back and she breathed—she took a loud breath and then a few little ones—and she may have farted. She said, “You’re hot stuff . . . You’re bad . . .”

  “You don’t mean it . . . You’re just saying it.”

  “Shut up and kiss me,” she said; she covered her mouth with her arm, though, and looked at me—that line was in a lot of movies at that time.

  I was embarrassed—and a little happy—since being bad in this way is altogether part of being intimate. And your whole background—and your body—are being said to be acceptable at least to this extent. It may be that you and the other person respect each other as sinners and co-conspirators or as opposites and magnetic even if you really don’t respect each other overall.

  And I was trying again to get seduced or to get her to be seduced-and-ruled (by an amateur).

  One of the things you feel in a kiss is the degree of susceptibility and resistance of the other person to being ruled and how nice (and submissive) you are each being now or not. I could feel in her that she was a death-or-freedom girl . . . No one to joke with.

  And all the acceptance stuff of me was just honey-and-delusion. Cross-pollination time. Not only that: it’s really hard to describe . . . You pile on sloppy kisses, filler kisses, fuller kisses, nursery-amoeba kisses inside the one big continuing (and often interrupted) kiss even while you both know the real sexual stuff is not in kisses. And yet it is for now. She is learning things. And she is the judge and I’m just a kid . . . a spoiled kid. Spoiled kid with judgment-handing-out harlot—sort of.

  I tried to make it that each individual kiss inside the big kiss had individual meaning but she bit me and went sloppy and kept generalizing things and distracting me; and then when I would heat up, she would pause and comb her hair with her fingers and look at me and sigh . . . affect
ionately. Meanly. In a homelike way.

  It was and was not kissing-in-general. It was clear that I was being eaten up alive. She’s going to loll here in the surf and roll back and forth and she is going to fuck me over but that’s it . . .

  But she’s given me a lot already. I am laughing at her in a way by not respecting my own defeat too much—by being cynical in the face of her soul which is using my defeat sort of—my defeat such as it is. And she rebels against all sorts of shadows, not just against me. She asserts herself generally, although specifically, she is here with me. She reveals who is the lost queen of local paradise around here. She says, “No. Don’t kiss me like that . . . Do it like this . . .”

  I am very sweaty (in a youthful way: a damp blond) with all this. We weren’t lying so much anymore although we were lying a lot. We had come out of the cavern into a shallow bit of lighted territory. Sexual truth? I could say we were lying enough to be credible but were naked enough that it was sort of a truth where we were, what we were doing. I had a sense I was of more value than she was, not privately or as a mother, and not overall or across-the-board, but in-the-world. She kept receding somehow, for some reason, inside her mischief, her will, her honor, her courage, her whatever-it-is, her what-she-was. I was stringently consequential and took a broad view and saw, maybe falsely, her and her religious stuff, her father and him being of another generation, and her job and her knowing Nonie, and AMERRRRRICA and the pilot she was engaged to and her being young in relation to him and her becoming a mother soon or maybe she was even pregnant now and pissed about it . . . That would explain me. I knew it wasn’t love for me in any case—it was love off and on, sort of, that she felt. And I didn’t want to die to protect her. She wasn’t the most important thing in the world to me at that moment. (That was the system I used for telling whether I loved someone or not.)