Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Tell me," my wife repeats shrilly. "What do I do?"

"You give me," I answer, "a pain in the ass. Both of you!" I add emphatically, with a long, warning look at my daughter to let her know unmistakably that I am including her also this time in my ire, and to deprive her of that pasty, crafty glee she customarily evinces whenever I turn abusive to my wife.

"Don't yell at me," my wife snaps.

"I wasn't yelling," I explain. "I was speaking emphatically."

"I can yell too, you know."

"You are."

"And don't say things like that to me, not in front of the children. Ever again. I don't care how you talk to me when we're alone."

"Like what?"

"What you said."

"Then stop being one."

"You're so clever."

"I know."

"It's no wonder they use such filthy language, when they listen to you. It's no wonder they talk to me the way they do."

"Oh, stop."

"I'm not going to let you talk to me with such disrespect," my wife goes on vehemently. "Not anymore. Not even when we're alone. I'm not going to put up with it. Do you hear me?"

"Fuck off now," I tell her quietly. "Both of you." My wife is stung. Tears spurt into her eyes. (I am sorry immediately. I feel small and shameful already for having said that.)

"I could kill you for that," she tells me softly.

"Then kill me," I taunt.

"I wish there was someplace I could go."

"I'll find one."

"I wish I had money of my own."

"I'll give it to you."

"That's some way," my daughter observes softly in a petulant tone, "for a father to talk to a fifteen-year-old child."

"Go — " I begin (and pause to conceal a smile, for her reproof is humorous and ingratiating, and I am tempted to laugh and congratulate her) "- away to boarding school."

"I wish I could."

"You can."

"You stop me."

"Not anymore. And that's some way," I exclaim, "for a fifteen-year-old child to talk to her father."

"I didn't —»

"Yes, you —»

"I only started —»

"— and you know it. I get — you know something, kid? I bet you'll never guess in a million years what I get from all these frank and honest discussions of yours that you insist on having with me."

"Headaches."

"You guessed!" I declare, hoping that I will be able to make her laugh. "I get piercing headaches," I continue (pompously, after I fail, for I feel myself inflating grandly, and crossly, with a delicious thrill of outrage. I am nearly ecstatic with grievance, and I forge ahead vigorously in joyous pursuit of revenge). "Yes, I get piercing headaches from all those brain tumors and cerebral hemorrhages you keep giving me. And stabbing chest pains from all the heart attacks you keep telling me you wouldn't feel so unhappy about if I got. I would feel unhappy if I got one! In fact, I'm starting to feel pretty damned miserable from having to listen to both of you tell me all the time how miserable you feel." My wife and daughter are silent now and cowering submissively (and a flood of self-righteous gratification begins to permeate and sweeten my throbbing sense of injury. I feel so sorry for myself it is almost unbearably delicious. I also feel mighty: I feel potent and articulate, and part of me wishes that Green or someone else I yearn to impress, like Jane, or Horace White, or perhaps some terribly rich and famous beauty with marvelous tits and glossy hair, were in a position to witness me so fluent and dominating). "I'm sick," I remark misleadingly in a falling voice, just to puzzle them further a moment. "Yes, by now I am sick and tired of having both of you people come barging in here, into my study, whenever you feel like it, just to tell me what a lousy husband and father you think I am."

"You were reading a magazine," my wife remarks.

"You too?" I jeer.

"We're going."

"This is my study," I remind her caustically (and desperately) in a surly, rising voice, as she turns to leave. "Isn't it? And now that I think of it, just what the hell are both of you doing in here right now — in my study — when I've got so many important things I want to get done?"

"Which is more important?" my wife makes the mistake of asking. "Your own wife and daughter, or those other important things?"

"Please get out," I answer. "That's the kind of question I never want to be asked again the rest of my life."

"All right. We'll go."

"So go."

"Come on."

"No, stay!" I blurt out suddenly at both of them.

"We're going."

"You stay!" I demand.

"Aren't we?"

(All at once, it is of obsessive importance to me — more important to me now than anything else in the whole world — that they stay, and that I be the one who is driven out. Out of my study. My eyes fill with tears; I don't know why; they are tears not of anger but of injured pride. It's a tantrum, and I am obliged to give myself up to it unresistingly.)

"I'll go!" I cry, as both of them stare at me in bafflement. I stride toward the door with tears of martyred grief. "And stop sneaking these extra chairs in," I add, with what sounds like a sniffle.

"What?"

"You know what I mean. And all of you always take all my pencils and never bring them back."

"What are you talking about?"

"Whenever you redecorate. This God-damned house. You dump chairs in here. As though I won't notice."

My wife is bewildered. And I am pleased. (I am enjoying my fit exquisitely. I am still a little boy. I am a deserted little boy I know who will never grow older and never change, who goes away and then comes back. He is badly bruised and very lonely. He is thin. He makes me sad whenever I remember him. He is still alive, yet out of my control. This is as much as he ever became. He never goes far and always comes back. I can't help him. Between us now there is a cavernous void. He is always nearby.) And when I whirl away again exultantly to storm out, leaving my silent wife and daughter standing there, in my study, at such a grave moral disadvantage, I see my son watching in the doorway. And I stamp on him before I can stop.

"Ow!" he wails.

"Oh!" I gasp.

He has been waiting there stealthily, taking everything in.

"It's okay!" he assures me breathlessly.

Clutching his foot, hopping lamely on the other, he shrinks away from me against the doorjamb, as though I had stepped on him on purpose, and intend to step on him again.

"Did I hurt you?" I demand.

"It's okay."

"But did I hurt you? I'm sorry."

"It's okay! I mean it. It doesn't hurt!"

"I didn't mean to step on you. Then why are you rubbing your ankle?"

"Because you hurt me a little bit. Before. But it's okay now. I mean it. Really, it's okay." (He is supplicating anxiously for me to believe he is okay, pleading with me to stop pulverizing him beneath the crushing weight of my overwhelming solicitude. "Leave me alone — please!" is what I realize he is actually screaming at me fiercely, and it slashes me to the heart to acknowledge that. I take a small step back.) "See?" he asks timorously, and demonstrates.

He puts his foot to the floor and tests it gingerly, proving to me he is able to stand without holding on. I see a minute bruise on the surface of his skin, a negligible, white scrape left by the edge of my shoe, a tiny laceration of the dermatological tissue covering the ankle, no injury of any seriousness. (He is probably the only person in the world for whom I would do almost anything I could to shield from all torment and harm. Yet I fail continually; I can't seem to help him, I do seem to harm him. Things happen to him over which I have no power and of which I am often not even aware until the process has been completed and the damage to him done. In my dreams sometimes he is in mortal danger, and I cannot move quickly enough to save him. My thighs weigh tons. My feet are anchored. He perishes, but the tragedy, in my dreams, is always mine. In real life, he is suffering already from secret tortures he is reluctant to divulge, and from so many others he is unable to comprehend and describe. He is afraid of war and crime. Anyone in uniform intimidates him. He is afraid of stealing: he is afraid to steal anything and afraid of having things stolen from him.) He seems out of breath and waxen with fright as he stands below me now watching me stand there watching him (the delicate oval pods beneath his eyes are a pathological blue), and he is trembling in such violent consternation as he waits for me to do something that it seems he must certainly shake himself into broken little pieces if I don't reach out instantly to hold him together. (I don't reach out. I have that sulking, intuitive feeling again that if I do put my hand out toward him, he will think I am going to hit him and fall back from me in dread. I don't know why he feels so often that I am going to hit him when I never do; I never have; I don't know why both he and my daughter believe I used to beat them a great deal when they were smaller, when I don't believe I ever struck either one of them at all. My boy can hurt me in so many ways he doesn't suspect and against which I have no strength to defend myself. Or maybe he does suspect. And does do it with motive. When I think of him, I think of me.) And I know why he is quaking now, squirming awkwardly and plucking nervously and obliviously at the small bulge of penis inside his pants as though he is tingling to urinate. I know I must have seemed enormous to him as I spun wrathfully to storm away and stamped down blindly upon him. I must have seemed inhuman, gigantic, like that monstrous, dark hairy, splayfooted tyrant (that flying cock elsewhere is not the only fur-bearing blot) on that ugly father-card in the Rorschach test.