Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

My daughter doesn't laugh much anymore (she enjoys my boy a great deal, but picks on him often with bad intent) and has few interests or pleasures. (The same seems true of the boys and girls who remain her friends. They like music but not much, not as much as they seem to wish they could. None are cheerful. All are glum and creepy, usually. They cast a pall. I hope they outgrow it. I don't know how to talk to them.) She sits alone in her room for long periods of time doing absolutely nothing but thinking (I sit alone in my study for long periods of time doing absolutely the same thing); and what she likes to think about most is herself; what interests her most is herself; what she broods about most is herself; what she likes to talk about most is herself. She is not much different from me, I suppose.

I think, though, that I was happier than she is when I was young, and that all the boys and girls I grew up with and went to elementary school with and high school with were also much happier than she and her friends. I like to think that. But I really didn't know these other boys and girls as well as I know her. And perhaps they were not so happy as I think they were. And perhaps I was not. I didn't have as much to do with them when we were out of school and not in the street; I did not know them in the home and did not know them when they were alone. And I'm not so confident anymore that my own recollections of my childhood are as infallible as I have always believed them to be. I also think I may have been more unhappy than my daughter when I was young, and felt even more entrapped than she does in my own sense of pathless isolation. There are long gaps in my past that remain obscure and give no clue. There are cryptic rumblings inside them but no flashes of recall. They are pitch black and remain that way, and all the things I was and all the changes and things that happened to me then will be lost to me forever unless I find them. No one else will. Where are they? Where are those scattered, ripped pieces of that fragmented little boy and bewildered young man who turned out to be me? There are times now when it seems to me that I may not have been any place at all for long periods of time. What ever happened to all those truly important parts of my past that no longer exist in my memory and have been ignored or forgotten by everyone else? No one will ever recall them. It is too late to gather me all up and put me together again. My life, therefore, is not entirely credible.

I have trouble believing it. I can believe that it was me (I know) with Virginia in the storeroom of the automobile casualty insurance company and me with my wife making love on our honeymoon and me who is bored, melancholy, and reflective in my office at the company now, or in my study at home; but I can't really believe it was really me (Even though I know it's true) who sang those silly military songs exuberantly so long ago as we marched slovenly along in formation in uniform, sorted accident reports in an insurance office, filed folders, shot crap and played cards for pennies, nickles, and dimes, had satisfactory erotic dreams and was thankful for them, masturbated, and was thankful that I could, read the comic strips and sports pages of the New York Daily News and the New York Mirror, which, alas, is now defunct — soon there won't be anything left — said good-bye to my mother five mornings each week if I reminded myself to say anything at all to her when I left, carried a brown paper bag containing an apple and two baloney, egg, or canned salmon sandwiches with me into Manhattan for lunch, had tantrums as a child in frenzied and incoherent arguments at home with my mother or sister and wept inconsolably over matters I could not understand or explain, was a hardy and impetuous patrol leader in the beaver patrol of the Boy Scouts of America for many years and worked to earn merit badges, masturbated some more, even as a Boy Scout, and rode back and forth to my automobile casualty insurance company each working day on a very stuffy subway car crowded with tired, hostile, grimy adults who glared, sighed, snored, and sweated. That was somebody else, not me — I insist on that; it exists in my memory but that's all; like a children's story; it is way outside the concrete experience of the person I am now and was then; it never happened — I do insist on that — not to me; I know I did not spend so much of myself doing only that; so there must have been a second person who grew up alongside me (or inside me) and filled in for me on occasions to experience things of which I did not wish to become a part. And there was even a third person of whom I am aware only dimly and about whom I know almost nothing, only that he is there. And I am aware of still one more person whom I am not even aware of; and this one watches everything shrewdly, even me, from some secure hideout in my mind in which he remains invisible and anonymous, and makes stern, censorious judgments, about everything, even me. He hardly ever sleeps. I am lacking in sequence for everything but my succession of jobs, love affairs, and fornications; and these are not important; none matters more than any of the others; except that they do give me some sense of a connected past.

Who cares if I get Kagle's job or not? Or if I do get into young Jane in the Art Department's pants before Christmas or that I was never able to graduate myself into laying older-girl Virginia on the desk in the storeroom of the automobile casualty insurance company or in a bed in a hotel, although I did squeeze her good tits many times and feel the smooth inside of her thighs?

I care. I want the money. I want the prestige. I want the acclaim, and congratulations. And Kagle will care. And Green will care, and Johnny Brown will care so much he might punch me in the jaw as soon as he learns about it, and I know already I will have to begin making plans beforehand for coping with him tactfully or getting rid of him altogether, even though he's good. But will it matter, will it make a difference? No. Do I want it? Yes. (Should I want it? Nah. But I do, I do, dammit. I do.)

And there's no mistaking, either, the fact that my daughter does honestly covet the greater freedom enjoyed by girls and boys she knows who have lost a father or a mother through accident or illness, or whose parents are divorced or separated. (Even though they don't really seem to be enjoying it; they just seem to have more freedom.)

"Who the hell would take care of you if we were divorced, or if we were killed in a plane or automobile accident?" I try to explain to her tolerantly one evening during one of those «frank» (and generally abusive) discussions she persists in inaugurating regularly, usually when she observes that I have settled myself alone in my study to do some work or read a magazine. "You couldn't live alone. You know that. Who would feed you and clean up after you, help you pick your clothes out and remind you to brush your teeth and help you keep your weight down? You'd have to live with someone, you know. So it might as well be us. You know, you get some pretty God-damned good things from us, too."

"I wish," says my wife, "that you wouldn't swear so much when you talk to the children. And that you didn't always have to yell. Can't you see you're only scaring her?"

"Can't you make her keep out of it?" says my daughter to me, sullenly, about my wife.

"And I wish," I reply to my wife -

"She's always butting in."

— in a growl that rises menacingly.

But I don't know what I wish (except that I damn well wish I were somewhere else), so I grind my jaws shut without completing my sentence. (My voice does have a tendency to get loud whenever I am irritated, frustrated, or attacked. And I will stammer ferociously if I attempt to speak a long sentence with strong emotion.)