Harold Brodkey - The World Is the Home of Love and Death

In the end I guess at him. I use a-sense-of-things. In a kind of clouded gray space inside my head, I guess at him. I probably can’t do this, guess at him and be right.

We are silent, one day, Jass and I, after doing dares—daring each other to shinny up the pipe-frame of the row of swings in Jackson Park, riding the swing up and over the bar. Then I stood on the ground and held Jass on my shoulders while he threw the swings back over the bars. He was agreeable to us covering our tracks.

We lay sprawled on the itchy grass in that park. It seems too intense to mention the odors of the ground, of the season. Such sensory reality was part of being that age, being boys. Jass’s unreliable comradeship, today’s fate of the world, the fate of the world so far, and us, him and me, lying on the grass and the odors of the grass are mixed together, unalterably.

Intense rivalry is infatuation of a kind, a sensitivity to the whole shebang of the other person because you want to win. I never started conversations or said things without being asked. He seems more bold. He as if moves in a field or meadow or big schoolyard of such holding back in me. He asks, “Are you scared to think about being dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. Imagine yourself buried.”

After a moment: “Naw. I don’t want to.”

I’m not always aware of color. If I relax, I feel a creeping suffusion of color into the day: blue sky, white clouds, oddly various, changeable greens—as if color itself were nervous and changeable—and greenish shadows on largely pinkish-white-beige-ocher Jass, the topography of the boy’s face. I like the existence of language, but aural color is different from visual color. It smacks of magic, and real color is just the world.

I asked Jass, “Are you frightened of being hurt—in the body?”

I had an adolescent voice: an infatuation and uncertainty toward issues of courage.

Then I hear him. First, the sound. Then the hidden mathematician-thinker-spy called memory deals with what he says and makes it orderly.

He said, “I don’t know. I don’t mind it.”

“You don’t get frightened?”

“I’m not afraid of being hurt .”

I recognized that he had a manner of insensitivity and dry boldness, but it was only a manner, and it seemed sensitive and cagey in its way.

It frightened me back then, that he—and other kids—knew what they thought. I had to think a long time to know what I thought.

I said, shielding my eyes, “I’m not frightened about dying.”

I get up. I stand on the sloping and somewhat faintly spinning disklike floor of park grass, tree roots.

“I have to go home.”

In a more clearly sequential movement than mine, he got up. He has a tensed, wry, small smile—nice— friendly-for-the-moment. In real life, if someone wants to talk or walk or whatever with you, it can be very moving.

We walk maybe twenty yards, and then he starts taking giant steps as in Simple Simon. I start to walk with large Boy Scout hiking strides. Then, after a little while, he starts to hop; he hops up a slope in the small park and onto a six-lane boulevard, Delmar. I speed up and push him into the rear of a passing bus, and I hurry on, not worrying if he is hurt or not. I am deep inside my innocence. I hop past stone walls and up a steeply sloping macadam-and-pebble street in front of a stone church in a neighborhood of large houses. Then he passes me. Then we’re running, racing. He’s the faster sprinter. He sprints and slows, sprints and slows. I can outlast him in a mile, but he suddenly sprints far ahead, and I give up and start to walk. He’s ten, fifteen yards ahead of me. He waits for me to draw near him. He’s not breathing hard. I am. We’re near the intersection of two winding, tree-lined, lawn-skirted, large-house-lined suburban streets, a perspectival crucifix, empty of movement. When we cross the street, the scene assumes a faintly wheeling spoked motion. I am partly still out of breath.

Jass holds his arms out in the attitude of the crucifixion. He says, “Do you dislike Jesus?”

I start to count out loud, “Wuhin, tooo(eee), three-uh, foerrrr, fi-i-i(ve)—”

“Whu-it ehr-are yuh-oo dooooinbn Wo/ih/hileeee?” Wiley, my name. It is odd, what actual voices, unidealized, are like in the real air of a real day.

“I’m counting—if I count to seventeen, I get to see God.”

“No shit? Honest to-ooo Gohw-idd—aw-er yew gointa see Gawh-dddd(uh) now ?”

“It’s not a swindle, asshole. I’m not asking you for anything.”

Jass believes the world is tricky. “Are you going to see God here—right now—in University City? On Melbourne?” The name of the street.

“Nahuhhhhhhh. I won’t see God if you’re here. Wait: now, there He is …”

“You masturbate too much,” Jass says, and hits me on the arm, the side of the shoulder, hard. This is a very quiet neighborhood. The intersection is silent, is empty. He looks at me from a distance. “Admit it,” he says.

He is notorious for talking dirty in the locker room and for doing dirty things and getting everyone else to do them. I shake my head.

He says abruptly, addressing my (comparative) purity: “You—and Winston Churchill …” Noble and unnecessarily ambitiously disciplined.

Then he jumps me and we are wrestling. He is further into exerting himself to win than I expected—the strained, wrestlingly moving, tensed-and-taut physical weight and will are a shock, are dismaying—he is right on me, right on top, like an animal, his braced haunches and physical mass, the fleshiness, wriggling tautly with wild, would-be-victorious purpose.

I hammer him in the face, saying, “Don’t you ever think about ideals?”

He is forcing my arms down. He looms over me. He demands with a surprising amount of breath and only a little breathlessness, “What are you thinking about now? Are you looking for God?”

I frighteningly turn and twist. We’re leery of the ways we each think the other is a nut. We’re as if dressed in spikes to keep feelings off us. They leap bodilessly on us all the time anyway, feelings that seem like cat-family moods, dog moods, horse moods.

“I have Christian ideals,” he says, still breathless, sitting on me, suffocating me.

I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.

I find fighting with someone shocking, dispurifying: it dirties the very air, the very envelope of the world. I half expect birds to fall from the sky, poisoned.

“Shit, get off me,” I said, close to madness. He and I both know I am dangerous despite all my precautions.

He had me pinioned. He watched me in a peculiar way—with a haughtiness-of-a-sort. “It’s all bullshit,” he says. And he gets up.

I see as if down a hallway and through a partway-open door; I see something-or-other in him and me: some of what I see becomes words, although not entirely or clearly. We used to wonder if we would find it easy to kill, to lead others, to be commanders. He said that that was bullshit but he asked, too, if it was bullshit, but he wasn’t asking me.

He was willing to accept the distance between souls. I don’t think he knew yet if such isolation as he felt was incurable. He’s asking for company—companionship—something. But he doesn’t trust me, and he wants to be the winner. Having released me, he stands, and I see the sunlight on his forehead and nose, a subtle armor protecting him from nothing.

“Maybe it is all bullshit, cocksucker ” I say.

I admired Jass. I was pretty sure he would be admired anywhere in the world he went—admired and pitied … the beautiful sand-colored one.