Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Virginia Markowitz?" Ben Zack repeated in a tone of bemused surprise. "Oh, yeah. Didn't you know?"

"What?"

I didn't tell him who I was but felt he could see me anyway. I told him I was an old college friend of hers from Duke University, a football player, and wanted to get in touch with her. That last part was true. I was an officer. I had wings, and I wanted her to see them. I wanted to station myself erect before her in my uniform and suntan and exclaim:

"Hey, Virginia. Virginia Markowitz — look! I'm all grown up now. I'm twenty-two years old and a real smart aleck, and I get lots of good hard-ons. Let me show you."

But she wasn't there.

(She was no longer employed by the company because she was dead, you know.)

"Oh, no," Ben Zack explained with patient good humor, as though pleased to have someone to talk to about her. "She's not employed here anymore. She's dead, you know, poor kid. She killed herself about a year and a half ago."

"Was she sick?"

"Nobody knows why."

"How?"

"She did it with gas."

"Did she turn all red?" I was tempted to ask in an outburst of caustic bitterness the next time I dialed the switchboard and asked to speak to her.

"I'm afraid I don't know," I could hear him reply in the manner of serious courtesy he was developing. "I wasn't able to attend the funeral. I don't get around too easily, you see."

"Then she's really out of a job now, isn't she?" I thought of observing irreverently.

(And am not positive if I did. I sometimes think of saying something and am not certain afterward if I did. Even in conversations I know are imaginary, I'm not always sure I remember what I've imagined.)

"She doesn't work here anymore, if that's what you mean," he might have replied tartly. "I'm not sure I understand."

She was out of a job, one of the unemployed; she had been let go for committing suicide and would probably have difficulty finding a suitable position anywhere (in her new condition and without favorable references) else but in one of the file cabinets downstairs where I would have laid her if I could while she was still alive and kicking (I bet she would kick, until she got cramps) and should have done it to her right there on the desk if I only knew how. If there was room enough on that desk for titanic Marie Jencks and Tom, there was room enough for tiny us.

That was the time to have done it (if I'd wanted to). We signaled salacious caresses to each other all day long with coded phrases and patches of melody from ribald songs we shared.

"I asked for number one. She said let's have some fun. Ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba."

I would color a lot and feel my happiness bubble up into tingling ripples of joy and warmth. I have never been so pleased by intimacy with anyone since. She would smile and color a lot with merriment too, dimpling. She was always pleasant with me, even when she was having her period (I wish my wife was) and imagining that her face was breaking out into ugly boils and craters. (It wasn't.)

"Look what she did to me."

She killed herself before she was twenty-five, doing it with gas, as her father had done before her (and maybe his father before him — she didn't say — deserting me without two weeks' notice) and leaving me feeling destitute again in a phone booth in a train terminal. After a moment of utter shock, I found myself feeling like a foundling again, abandoned heartlessly in a soiled telephone booth in Grand Central Station (through tears, I saw banner headlines and front-page photographs in the next day's editions of the New York Daily News and Mirror, which is gone now too. O, weep for the peregrine falcon and the New York Mirror: ARMY OFFICER FOUND ABANDONED IN TERMINAL PHONE BOOTH. No Clue to Identity) in my Mediterranean, bronze suntan (which was turning yellow) and natty military officer's uniform (spotless dry-cleaned pink gabardine trousers and forest-green regulation tunic with ribbons above the breast pocket, or both pockets — I forget things like that. I had done well in the service. I was a twenty-two-year-old success) with a malodorous, black telephone instrument in my hand announcing her death. Things stank. I thought I smelled my armpits, neck, and feet stinking.

And then the air cleared (a breeze, a breath of fresh air) and I was glad — glad, God dammit — glad she was gone and dead and that I would never have to see her again. (I would not have to screw her.) And glad that I was the one who was still alive.

I had not realized how much hidden tension I was under (I had jokes massed on my lips to conceal and ameliorate it) until I watched the sweat flowing in torrents from the hand holding the telephone. I was released from my obligations. I did not have to say hello, make a sociable wisecrack (and hope she'd remember and want to see me. She could have been married, engaged, going steady, and I would have believed none of it. I would have believed she had lost interest in a seventeen-year-old file clerk like me and was going with older married men and gangsters). She was a challenge, and I did not have to meet it. I did not have to make a date, show up early, sip whiskey, look her over (while she looked me over), sound her out to see if she was still the same, move her into some kind of bedroom, undress with her (until we were both naked), and then get right down to the sheets with her and look it squarely in the eye once and for all. I had no idea what I would find, what she would look like. (And I was still afraid.) I still didn't want it from her. (And I didn't want to see. All I still wanted, I think, was to lay it in her hand and have her lead me around with it like a domesticated pet.) I would have preferred malted milk. I have cravings for food. I have a weakness for dairy products and never liked baseball. I could have handled it all with a dashing display of confidence and technique, but I was so glad I didn't have to (she was dead, God dammit. And she was also nearly twenty-six). I had a rich chocolate malted milk in a tall, cold glass at a lunch counter in the train station and called another girl who'd been crazy about me the last time I was in, but she had moved out west to marry a sheet-metal worker in an airplane factory who was making a big salary. I called another girl I'd laid once a year and a half before who didn't remember me by name and sounded so absurd in her tinny and stand-offish mistrust that I laughed and made no effort to remind her. (She was putting on airs.) I had no one else to call. I had no close friends around. Before the week was out, I went back to the air base a few days earlier than I had to. I felt more at home in the army than I did in my house. (I feel more at home in my office now than I do at home, and I don't feel at home there. I get along better with the people there.) I don't think I ever had a good time at home on a furlough. I don't think I've ever had a good time on a vacation (I'm not sure I've ever had a good time anywhere); I find myself waiting for them to end. We have too many holidays. Birthdays and anniversaries come around too often. I'm always buying presents or writing out checks. The years are too short, the days are too long. I called Ben Zack again before I went back and pretended to be somebody else. (I did that twice. I couldn't help it.)

"I asked for number two.

She showed me what to do."

"How odd," he said.

I inquired innocently about Virginia as though I had not done so before. I told him I was a former eastern intercollegiate boxing champion from Duke University.

"It's really very strange," he said.

Calling Ben Zack again like that was a malicious trick, a practical joke. It did not feel like a joke. It felt like a willful, destructive crime, a despicable act of obscene perversion. It felt thrilling and debasing. It felt like it used to feel that time I was telephoning hospitals for a while to inquire about the condition, my very words: "I am calling to inquire about the condition. " of people I knew who had just died. "I'm sorry. Mr. is no longer listed as a patient," they'd say.