The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  “Jesus …,” I mutter nuttily, a first-thing-on-waking response to avoid saying something to hurt him, to avoid pushing him away from me. One’s consciousness moves from thing to thing in its acrobatics of attention and decision, moves across what is called a distance, time and bits of air and a sense of magic in the skull. After having been a child so long I’m a pretty boy with an erection and trying to keep it away from S.L.—I’m pretty big and he’s a joker—and partly I am being shameless: let him kill himself if he wants.

  Attempting privacy is hopeless, me so skinny and my pajamas gaping, and Dad being sick and shameless, nostalgically shameless, twenty times as much as I am.

  I try to cover myself. He’s there …

  “Boy, you’re crazy—you’re a crazy boy … I never saw anything as crazy as you.” He’s looking down a chute of darkness at a white, very young prick. His face is foreign in his doing that. When I was little, I’d had finer hair and a little boy’s chest. I find this change to be dizzying. I am blurred by it. He has an odor—this is like being in the odor in a classroom the day of a really scary test. S.L. leans over my sleep-heated body to kiss me. He is bigger and fleshier than me in his pajamas—not taller. We have had symbols and symbolism at school but I understand them as ways of saying my father kisses me too much without anyone knowing what you are saying. His real fingers touch my actual chest. I push his hand away—gently—I don’t want to upset him, his heart.… The unwilled rationality of real time and real light, the elements of restless reality inside the room, my dad, with his arm partly over my skinny neck, is sloppily kissing the side of my head.

  I endure his actual breath. He is big, sad, smelly with loneliness and a kind of sloppy cruelty. I have a thin blanket wadded in front of my cock. The smell of him is redolent of my exhaustion. In the six years he’s been ill I haven’t left him often.

  The throbbing blindness-and-sight of memory is both statistical and esthetic; the flickers are like a lot of big leaves on an old tree when you are up on one of the higher branches in the tree. Old feelings are present—I know this man. I partly ache with life, a form of seamanship. I brace my legs, skinny legs and count the seconds.… LET IT KILL ME … BIG DEAL … WHAT THE FUCK … LET IT GO … LET’S GO … A madman-hero. I endure then I reproduce sarcastically silently his posture—tinkeringly. I make my stomach stick out. I purse my lips. Such physical sarcasm—or is it physical exploration?—is forbidden now but was permitted when I was little. He is saying, “Give me a nice kiss—do me a favor …” He is moving his face over my cheek—I bring my forearm to block him, and I go on imitating him. He has the gall to tug at my arm.

  “Don’t do that!” I mutter. There’s no point in daydreaming that things are different—that gets too sexual, using him that way. You’d think when he got sick, he’d get sweet, but he was conceited to the end.… A sick man should be easy to be nice to but I’d swear he was as conceited as possible with the sexual pride of the devil … independent, wicked, male-sultry, with a male-sluttish potency, independent-unreachable, palely intent on kissing me.

  For a year and a half now he has said this was a joke, a kind of a joke. As a mean joke, I raise my right leg and push against his ribs. I push him to the edge of the bed.

  “Hey,” he says.

  I say as if I had not done anything (but I am slightly out of breath), “I’m not a little kid.” Then I partly lose my equanimity: “I don’t want you kissing me on the lips. I’m not a child anymore.… And please don’t say childish things to me about my handsies and my feetsies …” I stand up. I’m six feet, two inches and a quarter tall. “That’s not who I am …” I don’t want to say I get confused about who I am and what, for instance, the actuality of my speaking out is—is it a hot, seary, scary thing, a warm-blooded assertion of what-I-can-do, my merit as other-than-a-son, a freight, a labyrinth of perhaps intelligent hallucination, a role that will become my second nature? This goes silently roaring in me as it does sometimes, tremendous and glittering like a huge locomotive or like a huge figure on a stage or in a movie in a spotlight, a half-ruthless, half-asinine, romantic and personal light.

  Daddy says with the occasional poetry that he has and which always astounds me: “Would you refuse a trip among the dead?” Then he says: “Don’t be a bad sport …”

  My mind flares like a sail on a moony sea in response to the power he has, his clarity of will.… My mother by adoption has said, He talks you into things.… Parents do that in your childhood to you. My father’s ill; the spirit he has is different from anything he had when he was O.K. The voice-house of my father living holds my father’s ghost … I can’t help myself here. A white-lit wind of my own clarity of will pushes at me.… This is a matter of what is on my face and what is in my posture.

  He says—in mock good humor, metallic and puncturing—"You’re too snotty to be a pal …” He says, “I’m not exaggerating. You’re not a good sport.” He was being rhetorical and tricky, wasn’t he? He says, “The worst thing you can do, Wiley, is not like someone …” He gives a little laugh. “You play with fire when you don’t like the people back who like you …” He speaks reminiscently with some sort of after-flavor of sophisticated threat. Imagine a kitchen match being struck, the abrupt-stinging glare, the white-lit, then yellow and orange-tipped stink: that is what the personal heat of his reality, his feelings and will were like—the moment was sensational in this manner, this gray-tinged, privately difficult, even somewhat hellish (for me) stuff, the do-whatty of his will and my own will, and the past, the sheer number of memories, ears and tongues and large and small creatures and events and some light, not daylight. The light of thought.

  He says, “Don’t be a fearful rabbit. Don’t be a fierce wolf.” I don’t know what he is quoting or if he is. Wills in real time are different experiences from eulogy. Will and character are elements of sanity—God, the rhetorics of sanity. He says, “I mean, be serious, that’s the test: if you can’t be serious with someone who has feelings, then you aren’t worth the powder it would take to shoot you. And my life isn’t worth a hill of beans since you are my sunshine. Then you’re crazy with having no heart.”

  He partly intends contradiction, and I have a kind of shuddery response as he gets crazy. I am being serious in a way but as boys do, guessingly. I faced it a long time ago: the world isn’t what people say it is: but that’s the way it is. Gauges flip back and forth and fail to control the back-and-forth billowing of maybe crazy obnoxiousness of feeling. One calms one’s scorn by adopting a tone of self-address, the sort of tone in It feels bad in the relentlessly proceeding light of the morning. I can at best half-imagine what I looked like to him, a more or less delicate brute face, a tall fourteen-year-old … I can’t read mirrors yet. A delicately browed, thin-boned, bookish and brute and girlish and shaped and prettyish face, cheekbones and thin, new eyebrows—not his son’s face. I am only his adoptive son. I don’t know if any facial patterns from my very early childhood survived, if the hints of manhood-to-come suggested my real family. I can’t imagine the optical information he had, the periscope grammar in the third person of seeing that boy, the he—the dimensional and weighted volume of skinny mass and the dreamlikeness of recent size and of recently acknowledged wakefulness: it was like peeing in a hiding place, that sense of wakefulness. My dad says he can read me like a book but he doesn’t mean me—he means something human and male—and similar to him which is only part of me. The faint lineny, nighttime-male-body-smells in the bedroom and the spring presentness and the suburban odors from outside through the open windows wrack me—do you remember when your senses and the mind identifying the sensory, when all that was new and in a new scale of height and early sexuality.

  I say out loud to S.L.: “You be a good sport, not me.… Let me be the kid for a change—O.K.?” Because I am not a little kid.

  Dad says, “You got no pity in you.” He said, “You ever see a sick elephant die? I was a boy—I know about boys—I sneaked into a circus, it wasn’t a
show: I never saw anything worse than an old elephant die … except battle. It was breathing its last … I’ve seen bad things—take a look at an elephant sometimes: their faces can be a lesson even to you. I tell you you stay the way you are, do what you want, I’m not a bad guy—go ahead, shoot me and get it over with—just don’t make a circus out of everything, out of an old elephant. Some things aren’t fit for a child to hear; I don’t want to be stared at like a freak … Everyone blames me you’re spoiled but what could I do: you were obstinate like an old elephant …”

  A nellisfunt … A nold uh(n)nellisfunt …

  The boy said back: “Well I spoil you: what can I do: you’re obstinate …”

  “Don’t be a smart-aleck …”

  He is speaking in a moment that moves; it is a hallway of sounds in which he moves and speaks. As he proceeds, he sees possibilities in his speech: in front of him, in back, possibilities in his words and in the listener’s attention, a space-and-moments thing with a listener; maybe he thought or refelt things—or maybe he heard as a social person—or maybe he felt his hugeness of self in my mind as a giant and truthful man among liars. Without warning, he becomes angry; it was often said when he said angry things that it wasn’t him—“it is the sickness talking”—but it was him: the temper was his. Mostly I think he was a man who was excited inside himself by his sarcasm and the individuality and self-assertion and abuse of others in his rages. The drama of talking mattered to him but not as it would to a politician. Being sick and omnipotent—with sexual or erotic rage—meant that he was a capricious editor of his effect on the world.

  He seemed to blow up and to be huge as he had been when I was a child. He remodeled his speech; the commanding officer, exasperated-exacerbated tone he used, the topic was how much he didn’t like me, the topic was that I was an asshole compared to him and his illness and his magnitude: it was not a metaphor. He wanted something. My feelings zigzagged, hurt with a fed-upness, a rage at him, but my rage was unlike his. He says, “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings: you don’t know the meaning of cooperate.… Take that look off your face! Looking at people like that is what sends people like you straight to hell.… Why can’t you shut up? Can you shut up? You can do that, can’t you? Jesus Christ, be your best self, be sweet. If you can’t be human, say nothing—do you hear me—KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT. … Be a human being!”

  It is like spilled battery acid when he shouts—it is scorchy and fumy. I cannot know everything about what is going on. Hatred directed at you, hatred displayed, has the flavor of the hater. It’s Dad’s hatred that is directed at me. It has that flavor—of my past with him. In the peculiar light of Dad’s mood, I focus and clench. I have a sense of things-that-have-happened (in the past) sort of tumbling around silently in chambers of what is lost, of secrets in me. I don’t have time now to know the ins and outs of the ghost blackness, the shadowy blankness of past things between him and me; and in the darkish-and-glaring cloud of such ignorance at the age I was, I know the conclusion: that I am not to hurt him back, I am not to laugh at him: he is sick.

  In real life, attention is physical. My skin and muscles and eyes remember the times he has insulted me. All of them. I don’t remember them one by one, only fragments to prove I am not making any of it up, the sense of him using this stuff and being aroused by it. The actuality of feelings, compound and time-riddled and onward-going as they are, is that they hold a cannibal echo of the past whether we like it or not: everything is reinterpreted all the time.

  If I lose my deadpan, the knowledge of him-in-the-past becomes an illumination, a weight, a heat of light. That Daddy’s rage diminished so rapidly means I did the face-stuff right and scared him a little. (One describes this to oneself as my face showed nothing.) He was looking. He and I keep count, but you can keep count only in a sense.

  You can’t be vengeful toward a sick man but sometimes I can’t help myself. Along the corridors of the memories of the pain he caused, his role in the pain continuum of my life, his temper now stirs such summaries of pain and disgust and hurt: I’m tired of it.… He’s not really my father.

  The mind’s electrical lawns and light and festivities, its aerial blacknesses, its angled fragments, its clouds and chutes of associations and opinions and present feelings become the electrical fulminations of excitement in actual moments, the reactive excitement of being with someone. He only half-knows this. He wants it not to be true. He cheats on it.

  Dry or magically broad, the images and hypotheses, tentative insights as climate and light, as reality, are lit by perhaps and maybe and let us suppose … let us suppose the people are morally limitless.… The blindman’s buff of mooded half-decision in him, his blind temperament and headlong mood make me feel he is stupid. And cowardly. I don’t think he knows about people’s minds and bodies remembering the past. Or he does know and goes into a rage. He wants what he wants when he wants it. Remembered bits fuel stuff; they mess things up too and block possibilities. I have an invisible force of temporary conclusion in a quickened mental light. Emotions here scratch and trigger things as if they were, in an electric sense, overloaded and unstable. They set off pale flames of emotional heat which burn jigglingly. I am hungry to bully him into silence toward my life. I hate his nervous examination of how much life (and youth) is in me.

  He pursues the rage thing (he may think he knows what I am thinking); he says as if dismissively but watching me closely, “You’re pitifully ugly.”

  He means physically and more-than-physically. And eerily he means I am not good enough for him which is fine with me. His tone is that he is disappointed in me, and that he is free-willed and determined and “goaded.” The part of the insult that was just maneuvering and the part that was bluff and the part that was real hatred are elements of the giant humiliation and great elevation and as if great drama I felt talking to him, that day and other days, my dad, a full-grown male, a dying one. A lot of his mind and opinions are in that pantomimic, bulging-eyed stare.

  Some of the new meaning now that I am grown swings definingly and blurrily. As a child, one had been a living consolatory factor and victim close to his heart, a measure of his life. The inner flush of attitude is unsayable but feelable hotly, like sweat; it has an aroused heartbeat.

  A polite outer blindness takes over protectively. Dad and I are wartime buddies and to desert him would be a serious betrayal. We have our ups and downs.… He can blow up if he wants to.… It’s bad for him but I can take it.

  Ah, I am lying to myself. Actually I can’t take it … not anymore. He has stupid methods: flattery and blackmail and then abuse. He was always NO GOOD. Well, So what? The next stab and opening-up-of-feeling in me has the regurgitant wildness and vileness of pride in that I know he won’t stop. He’s always right—he has to be right …

  He says, “Are you a hyena feeding on carrion?” Then: “You like to eat the dead like a hyena does?”

  His temper is shaped by his past, by things he’s felt in the past, and by his defeat now. For him I’m truly loathsome now. An optimistic patience can be cowardice-and-courage strangely mixed. Or a mistake. Amusement—amusement-and-shame—are the most dangerous physically: they arouse even more of Dad’s feelings of love-and-hatred, and he can become really stupid and murderous.

  “This is a crazy day,” he says disgustedly. With real disgust.

  My sense of truth in opposition to his sense of truth is so intense that it is like being asleep and confronted by a mysterious dream while I am still wide-awake: I peer into a folded dream of his truth.…

  “You’re too deep in your thoughts to listen to me. You can’t speak to me? You’ve lost all track of time,” he says.

  My future is in my stammering breath, my temper and its links to the past—postcards chopped into flashes of further breath—inward and outward blinks. I’m the last person left who will deal with him. When I leave him he will die. Or try to. He has no benefits to confer. My feelings toward him turn glidingly opalescent, transluce
nt, a preening and unstilled plumage—a moral act, known to be one (people talk about it, my staying near him). But I can leave the room and never return. I can plunge at this moment into being through with him. Patterned flashes of adolescent privacy, the will-to-live as not-a-child, this isn’t spark-speak stuff. I let it show on my face where it is pictorially epigrammatic—you know the ruses of adolescence?

  I have the potency of strength and will and of erectile tissue … I-can-be-revenged … I am real.

  He shouts at me, at what is on my face: “I DON’T LIKE YOU! I don’t like you when you THINK.…”

  One recognizes things a bit after they occur; this syncopation is part of the guess-hall of one’s mind when something is happening, when you’re trying to talk to your father, say. My strength is a form of my terror and is a form of terror to others … off-and-on. In the pornography of intelligence, my sense of his nearness to death and my closeness to hallucinatory-sexual elements that fill me lately are fed by everything that is here.

  I say, “Leave me alone.”

  My leave me alone is a force of will in the room: this suddenly tinges and tints and tinctures Dad’s rage in retrospect. It colors everything now. One feels oneself as a fire in the room, burning everything—including him.

  Dad’s temper and will are a really disastrous tsk-tsk locally: they ruined my childhood.… I wish I were well bred, lucky, well educated and with a superb father. But my family are only people.

  My dad goes on with some disgust: “Keep your eye on the ball.… Pay attention to something that’s not just yourself.… Would you mind doing me and the world and yourself that favor please?”

  Why doesn’t he shut up? His authority is how pitiable he is. Present tense actuality is all there ever is at a given moment but I feel indebted to him because I was a child once in his care, and he tried to amuse me. Essences, the essence of him, the essence of me don’t exist in the moment. The surfaces of things contain meanings, skin and hair and light on the wall and the way each person is standing and breathing and the mood he’s in and his emotion today. The grammar of tones and eyes, in the geography of the moments as they move, is the biggest element of how “Truth” changes in real life in the geography of the moments without becoming untrue. All the geographies: he’s a sick man.