Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

(That was a good one.)

Maybe I do love my wife. I think I would have been stricken sightless and mute and turned into a dangling form of dingy cement or sodden papier-mвchй from the top of my head down if I'd ever been forced to mate with Marie's. (She was so large and domineering.)

"I asked for number six."

I asked for Marie Jencks.

"Oh, yes," Ben Zack remembered immediately. "I'll always remember Marie."

"The sperm began to mix."

"Her husband passed away from heart trouble at a very early age. They didn't have heart surgery in those days. She married again soon after and moved with her husband to Florida to cash in on the land boom."

I was not ready for Marie Jencks then. I was not ready for Virginia. My wife has brown nipples as lovely as any I've ever seen in the movies or still photographs and a nest of curly black hair I can rest my head on snugly. I feel safe with her. I feel safe with Penny. (I wonder why I always think of Penny last.) I don't think a human twat has teeth and don't believe I ever did. I've got this idiot child of mine I don't want and don't know what to do with. He belongs to me. Little Derek. (He doesn't even know what he is.) He is small, heartrending. He is unbearable. (He cannot be borne.) What threats he will pose for me later. What hazards he poses for me now. What will they do to him? Who will take care of him if I don't? How will he survive? What will become of the poor little thing if he doesn't die soon?

There's no getting away from it. I've got to get rid of him. There's no getting away from it. (He is so sweet. People who meet him tell us how sweet he is. They are being sweet when they say so.)

I've got to get rid of him and don't know how. And there's no one I can ask. There's no one I can tell I even want to, not even my wife, who wants to get rid of him also (but doesn't dare say so to me). Especially not my wife. We blame each other for him, when we aren't blaming ourselves, and that's another thing we haven't been able to say to each other yet.

"It's your fault, not mine."

We have to try to make believe he was nobody's fault, that he was a circumstantial twist of nature, a fluke. (A fluke is a fish.) All of us want to get rid of him, but only my daughter is honest enough to say so (and is set upon like a pariah by one or the other of us).

"Is he going to have to be with us forever?" she'll complain in a temper.

"What do you care?" I'll lash back at her, as though she had said that just to wound me. "You'll be away at college."

(She might stay home, just to torture me. I sometimes feel that if not for Derek we would never quarrel with each other. I know it's a lie.)

He does not seem to be mine. He may be my wife's.

There is no idiocy in my family that I know of (or in hers). My wife has begged me not to use that word (which may be why I do. She winces every time).

"How would you like me to describe it?" I inquire, with a lordly air of inexhaustible tolerance. "Do you think it would help him much if I called it genius?"

"It's heartless." She shudders, pale and close to tears. "Mean. I get so frightened when I see you so cold."

It is ungodly the way I am able to forget about him for long periods of time, even when he is close by. (I blot him out and try to keep him out.) I think of myself as having just two children. One says:

"What would you do if I came home with a Black boyfriend? And wanted to marry him."

The other asks:

"What would you do with me if I couldn't speak?"

"But you can," I've answered.

"If I fell down the ropes one day in the gymnasium when I was trying to climb them and hurt my head and Mr. Forgione had to carry me home and I couldn't speak anymore, either?"

"I used to be afraid of rope climbing and falling down too," I try to explain encouragingly. "And of swimming naked in the pool in the high school also."

"I never said anything about swimming naked in a pool," he protests firmly (as though that fear had not yet taken root in him, and I had just implanted it). "Did I?" he demands.

I am embarrassed.

"Suppose I had an extra set of car keys made after I got my license," says my daughter, "and used the car when you were away. You couldn't stop me, could you? What would you do, have me arrested?"

The third one doesn't speak to me at all.

I have conversations that do not seem to be mine.

I feel afloat (legless). Legless, I walk around with headaches that do not seem to be mine (on feet that do. Arches ache and seem to be crumbling, I have a spur on one heel, middle toes are hammered, others are gnarled and require Band-Aids or corn plasters frequently, the tender pads of flesh on the bottom of my toes chafe and inflame if I do not switch pairs of socks and shoes, the soles itch dryly in cold weather, the tissue between the gnarled end toes splits and peels and I have to pour talcum powder in. There is no limit to the ills I could describe). I do not always feel securely connected to my legs or to my own past. The cable of continuity is not unbroken; it is not thick and strong; it wavers and fades, wears away in places to slender, frayed strands, breaks. Much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine. Mountainous segments of my history appear to be missing. There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me may have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present. I sit in my office and think I am at home. I sit in my study and think I am at my office firing Johnny Brown or retiring Ed Phelps, in Penny's or some other girl's underthings, rolling them off, or in a bank, hotel lobby, or police station searching my pockets for some form of evidence or identification required of me. It may be that I talk to myself already without being aware of it. How debasing. No one has said so, but I don't think I do it when I'm with someone who might. I think I do it only when I think I'm alone. Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember. Ha, ha.)

"What? Did you say something?" one or the other of the members of my family has shot at me when I assumed I was alone and unobserved in my study or in some other room in my house, deep in thought.

"What? Nothing," I reply, startled and shamefaced. "I was just thinking."

Or:

"I was just reading the paper."

(Probably I was deep in thought imagining myself orchestrating rhythmic, polysyllabic replies to Green's thrusts without tripping over a single vowel or consonant.)

"You were laughing in your sleep again last night," my wife will say.

And I won't know if she's toying with me or not. It's the sort of lie I might make up for her, if I had thought of it first. I can never remember what it was I was laughing about when she tells me I laugh in my sleep. I wish I could. I could use a big laugh on days when I have these headaches that do not seem to be mine.

I get the willies in my spare time; I don't normally sleep well (although my wife tells me I do); I get the blues I can't lose; they decide when to leave (I either talk to myself or believe I might); I get depressed and don't know why; I mourn for something and don't know what; (legless) I walk around with jitters, headaches, and sadnesses ballooning and squiggling about inside me that seem to belong to somebody else. Is this schizophrenia, or merely a normal, natural, typical, wholesome, logical, universal schizoid formation? (I could plead temporary insanity. They would call it a mercy killing. There would be testimony under oath that it was done to put him out of his misery. He isn't miserable.)

I have these perfectly controlled conversations with Arthur Baron about Andy Kagle and with Andy Kagle about Arthur Baron, and I find myself wondering even while they are taking place, just what the fuck I am doing in them. (Is that really me there talking and listening?) I'll float away outside them a few yards to watch and eavesdrop and begin to feel I am looking down upon a pornographic puppet show of stuffed dolls in which someone I recognize who vaguely resembles me is one of the performers, and I have no more idea of why I am taking part in them, even as this separated spectator, than I do of these weird melancholies, tensions, and arid impressions of desolation that come upon me when they choose in my spare time.