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

The lion breath of grief stinks. The infant is a co-traveler of the light, mad and swift, glancing and unrooted. Is your life grotesque? Are you a grotesque creature, Aaron?

Wiley?

I can’t insist that I am human, that I am licensed. The stale and cruel stench of vomit. I lay stinking and half mad in excrement, in vomit and in tired, perhaps secretly tireless grief and rage … peeking at life but still lost in vileness.

The room, my room, my shell, my outer identity (I did not name it “room”), it ticked and creaked, hummed and tinkled in the wind.

In the bed, constrained by taut sheets and tucked blankets and by chairs set around the bed, I wait. The people here have not yet invested in a crib. Somber conceit: the nearly silent sweeps of sight, the slower blotting up, the sending out on expeditions of sight, the brushing past the sides of sight by things, things in their rays, things brush against or flutter or scurry tickingly by the sides of sight, sight is an imaginary finger or nose: palpings, hesitations: a set of physical hypotheses ranging through the room; things press back, insectlike, itchy, ghostly, real. For a while, any shadow is a wall. That it is my bed …

The woman came to the door of the room, to the edge of the shallows of breath and stink and harsh light and sickness where I am. The confusion of light and the window sounds and wind noises held her and me in the invalid’s observation. The Lost Woman now was shorter and had different eyes. I assumed her prettiness was kindness. I felt the clenching and the whirring of the possibility of the return of madness, because this woman (I thought) had let me suffer and go mad, a single second’s flicker of (mistaken) fact on a tiny fulcrum of a lunatic child’s absurdly clear reasoning. The child was not careful. He said inwardly, Momma. The small boy was rigid and racked with the pulse of diarrhea then.

Lila Silenowicz said, “Oh, my God, you’re worse than a pigeon.” She made a joke for her own amusement.

The woman does not look at the child closely. Around her is a space, a blankness, of coolness , the border where the too difficult heat of shape and identity in someone stops and outline takes over.

Lila has an air of submission to tragedy—this has a domestic tone, scary and alert. I am not exactly visible. I am a sick child. Lila’s tragic and clear-eyed air has a blustery, softish heat, and an immeasurable quality—an absence of boundaries except for her outline—this is part of what identifies her to me as my mother.

My body’s feelings of recall, my body’s interpretations of people are shudderings that seem like magical nonsense to the mind, but they have a profound quality of unarguable sense. Her presence is heavy with heat like real sunlight; my mind manages my body’s uproar by narrowing itself—it is the mind squinting.

Lila sniffed at the shit-odor, pursed her lips, and, holding her breath, came near and looked at me from the other side of the chairs—over the wall of chairs—a sultry and yet airy scrutiny, flirtatious, self-conscious, proddingly clever.… She is sadder than anyone else who tends me. She leans forward, one hand on a chair arm, and she pulls the sheet that’s over me away from me and takes a towel, one of several, set out on one of the chairs around the bed, “I’m not good at this,” she says.

That remark silences me with its absolute strangeness. She earlier (the other woman) and other women—my nurse now (a fat woman), and Lila’s twelve-year-old daughter—were (are) proud: they boast and dance-in-a-way (when they hold me, when they touch me). Lila’s apology startles the child with its illegality: it is illicit and part of her heartless awareness. I might be incurable. There had been no limit to her absence and none to my dying—well, some suspicion had slowed the process of my dying. Being placed openly first by someone, being close to someone in certain ways, and being lawless when you are alone with someone—these are roughly equivalent for the child as life-giving.

The child: there are no words for how blackly thorny he is.

Lila has a quality of being indomitably obscene , guilty, blameworthy, unrepentant. She stares at you and does what she likes.

I could not successfully blackmail either of my mothers. Neither was merciful. All that worked with either of them was me being secretive.

Lila, cleaning up some of the mess with the towel, watches her own clumsiness. I play to myself in the balcony is a remark of hers. She is nosy and yet, this morning, she is dream-stained, quilted or padded or tufted with night heats. Her odor, her dark eyes, the rhythms and manner of movements of her hands gave the child the un-Euclidean turmoil of doubt. Nothing matches from before. She ostentatiously holds her breath, she disgustedly mops at the bed, she throws the towel into an open hamper—its lid is off; it is a woven, basketlike thing—and she takes another towel from the chair seat and wraps me in it. She plays her eyes on me, self-reflexively; she is contemplating the dangers before she lifts me: “Don’t throw up now,” she says.

Her eyelids blink rapidly. This softens her stare, makes her very pretty—greatly pretty. Lila says, getting ready—she is very hesitant—“I can’t let it simmer on my back burners all day. I’m the last of the red-hot mommas. My motto is ‘strike while the iron is hot and get things done.’ I’m the executive type.” She moistens her lips, squints blindly, pushes her hair behind her ears. She stands flat-footed. She sets her breasts with her left hand. Her breasts have a powdery largeness. A constant nervousness is worsened if she has to touch someone. She bends near; her shadow is an imported dusk; her arms are around me; she lifts me, the giant woman, owl-fluffy Momma and her large, owl-soft breasts. And then, over that, the nearness to her is a moonish glare that tugs tidally at my breath and at my mind.

“Phew, you stink, pretty baby,” she says.

Her voice is troubled, vaguely storm-lit, spotted with lurid light: she has an innate melodrama.

She ferries us past the obstreperous transparency of the windows—mostly a curious shine but still knowable as part of the outer, widening morning.

“Well, another day, and you’re still sick, don’t you know it? Don’t you always know it?”

She is sad; she is out of breath; charmingly, conceitedly, she is drudgery-minded. She picks on me: “Hold your head up; don’t let your head do that; straighten it; stop looking like an idiot: I warn you, I’m not good with idiots—once you lose my sympathy, you lose me.… Listen, I’ll tell the world: I’m not a nursemaid; that’s not what I’m good at.” Heavy-fleshed, small-town Lila walks, and I shake with the rhythms of her body. Her movements are interfered with by me—my weight and looseness and indiscipline of posture.

In the bathroom, she sits me lankly on the sink. My feet are in the white basin; she props me with her shoulder and unwraps the outer towel, shifting me, and slipping it out and throwing it on the floor. And then she unpins the other towel, the one that I slept in, the diaper towel: “What a mess: don’t look innocent; you do it, you’re the mess: you’re worse than a horse. You’re lucky you don’t get thrown out with the diaper. You could learn to handle your bowels: it wouldn’t kill you. I hope you’re listening. Cooperation, they say, is the mark of a leader. Don’t make me wear myself out.” Her fingers are clumsy but neat, shy then bold—she has a glidy, pinchy, nervous touch. It is a touch that seemingly can easily be frightened off, like a fly. My eyes have grown flimsy with nerves—an obscure physical crowdedness of sensation in skin and mind.