Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"I'm not worrying," he will reply.

I wish I could be more of a help to him. I wish he would let me try.)

"What are you worrying about?" I will ask again.

"I'm not worrying," he answers, looking up at me an instant with a glimmer of surprise.

"What makes you look so glum?"

"I was thinking."

"What were you thinking about," I persist with a smile, "that makes you look so worried?"

"I don't know. I forgot already."

"You looked so glum."

"I don't know what that means."

"Sad."

"I'm not sad."

"Tired?"

"Maybe I'm sleepy."

"Do you stay up late?"

"Sometimes I don't fall asleep right away."

I sometimes wonder if he really worries as much as I think he does. I sometimes think he worries more. He is a cautious little thing (or seems to be. I know I worry for him and expect the worst to happen to him also. So does my wife. I used to worry about my daughter too when she was little, but now she is past fifteen, and the worst hasn't happened. What is the worst? I'm not sure). Maybe the worst has happened and went unrecognized, because my boy, now that I look back, has never had an easy time of things (and my daughter is having a lousy time of it now, unless she is acting too. Wouldn't it be funny if both were acting more unhappy than they are merely to spite and upset us? Ha, ha. I wouldn't find it funny at all. Even as an infant in a playpen he always seemed to be siphoning everything around him in through large, mysterious, intelligent eyes and judging everything he absorbed tentatively before making up his mind and allowing himself to react — even when he reacted spontaneously, as when grinning or giggling suddenly, there always seemed to be a premeditated delay, an infinitesimal lag, but a lag nonetheless, during which a decision had been arrived at. Even an offer of money, or an ice cream pop, would bring a moment's weighty consideration before acceptance. I lose patience with him often. I shout and shame him sometimes — then deny I shouted and try to persuade him I was only being emphatic. It's no way to build confidence. I try to be generous and companionable to make up for it.

"Say yes or no," I demand of him in explanation. "What difference would it make if you are wrong? What would you lose by making a mistake?"

He is confused.

He is afraid of making mistakes.

So he makes them with me by vacillating).

I know he must wonder now why his life has been arranged to be so unceasingly difficult (why I shout at him so frequently, or seem to, why I undoubtedly do raise my voice) or if there ever will come a time of tranquillity and bliss for him in which no new implacable demons are waiting in ambush for him, stirring in time as the moment of contact draws near, making ready for him, practically in view. (I know I wonder all of that for him. When will he be able to relax and take things easy, so I can relax and take things easy too?)

"Tell me, what do you want to do?" I ask him so many times out of disconsolate, moody concern. "What do you want to be?"

"I would like to learn how to drive a car someday."

"Everybody does that."

"If I can. Do you think I will?"

He likes the smell of gasoline and is afraid of fire, height, and speed (but not of airplanes, if he is in one).

How weary (I feel) he must be already of challenges and adversity, like a spent and weatherbeaten old man (homunculus), or a resigned, moribund, whitehaired old woman embracing her own demise with relief. Often, when something of a particularly eroding nature seems to be preying on his mind, a shadow of gaunt consternation will fall across his fragile, fine features, a stricken look of transfixing amazement, as though he is troubled deeply by the fact that he is troubled at all.

He hardly seems altogether at ease anywhere but at home, although he has always laughed a great deal when with people he knows. He makes jokes. He has wit and a talent for giddy and imaginative tricks. They are mainly verbal, always harmless, usually successful by one light or another. He seeks safety and invisibility in humor. (I do too. I find it in sex, which is always humorous too.) And he labors industriously to surround himself inside a womblike atmosphere of compassion and good spirit and survive there eternally (like the me I really think I am, I think, swaddled cunningly inside my cocoon, hiding secretly in a foxhole no one knows is there), dissembling, peeping out guardedly nearly all the time (one part of me anyway) to reassure himself (myself) that our outer shell of protection is still there and intact (and we are there and intact too), recoiling hastily (searching in horror for some unobstructed avenue of escape, I am sure, and searching in horror in vain) when we spy or think we spy any omen of any hazard of puncture, deflation, and disintegration. (He is upset by basketball, which he does not understand.) His impulse always is to be endearing; he wants no enemies, dislikes disagreements, and does not enjoy competition. He feels least in jeopardy when everyone around him is happy and sated with contentment (he feigns complete indifference to Derek when we let him and tries to pretend he is able to ignore him); he feels most in jeopardy in proximity to somebody sullen or someone manifesting anger, especially me. (He is as much afraid of me at times, I believe, as he is of any sullen stranger glaring to himself in a cafeteria, or even as he is of Forgione, or Forgione's assistant, with their demands for rope climbing, chinning, tumbling, push-ups, and basketball games that my little boy finds impossible to do well and baffling to understand.) He is the only member of my household who hesitates to come into my study to interrupt me. (He is even too diffident to come inside to say good night to me at bedtime, though I keep asking him to do so and keep assuring him that I will not mind.

"Good night," he will call out to me from the hallway, keeping himself so deeply withdrawn that I will be unable to see him when I turn my head and look up, and recede skittishly into his own room unless I call right back:

"Good night. Come in here a minute. Will you?")

Unless I make him. Once I do make him step inside my study to talk to me, we have little to say to each other. He brings a barrier with him. Or I have one of my own. But I do want to talk to him. We have nothing to talk about. I have to search for questions. He is unresponsive. He makes me interrogate him; he gives one-word replies. I think he knows I am not really interested in answers to the questions I ask him — he seems cross and stubborn with me for even trying.

He is wary of strange men with mean, sinister faces and of wild-eyed men and women in the street who talk out loud explosively to themselves. (He keeps an eye out for them always. Many of them use such filthy language.) He is unnerved by erratic behavior of any kind (even mine when I'm drunk or kidding around in certain ways in public or with his friends. He prefers me to remain dignified when other people are around). If I do lose my temper with my wife or my daughter, or if one or the other of them begins shouting at me, my boy is apt to continue fretting over our abrupt motions and cruel threats and accusations long after the argument has ended and the rest of us are back on favorable terms. My wife and I make endeavors now not to quarrel in front of the children, mainly because of the bad effect our fights have on him (and the salubrious effect they generally have on my daughter. They cheer her up. My daughter will come sniffing up avidly whenever she scents the elements of a marital quarrel brewing and will often gratuitously, and shrewdly, supply the remark needed to make it erupt, although she will sometimes blanch and shrink out of sight in dismay if the outbursts she had hurried up so enthusiastically to observe, and so hopefully to participate in, turn more vicious and hurtful than she could have envisioned. There were times, in large, noisy, crowded cafeterias or restaurants near sports arenas, circuses, or shopping centers, or in hotel lobbies or railroad stations or other cavernous, ceilinged areas in which we found ourselves surrounded by strangers, when he would feel that someone there was glaring at him with hot fury and cold dislike, planning something hurtful. He told me this; and sometimes he would describe and single out the person, always without daring to turn his own face around to look again. When I moved my own eyes swiftly to gaze at the man he was indicating, I was unable to be positive he was wrong. But I always told him he was imagining it. I did this to reassure him). He has a patient habit of mulling things over privately for long periods of time, roving through his mind in search of keys to secret riddles, and I am often unable to determine positively if he is indeed bogged down in something clutching and constraining or if he is merely relaxing and I am only imagining that he is in difficulty. (I make him enigmatic. I do not want my boy to be troubled by things he is unwilling to discuss with me, even if I am prominent among the things that are troubling him. I do not like him to keep things from me. I would like to know he confides in me. I would like to be certain he is eager to answer all my questions fully, even though his answers might be lacking in excitement and amount to little of interest to either of us. How can I know something he is thinking about is boring until I know what it is? I would like him to want to tell me everything he thinks of even before it occurs to me to ask. He is, after all, really my only son, and I think he should understand how much I need him.)