Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Ma," she moaned deliriously again and again from her drugged and agitated stupor near the end, her glazed, reddened eyes showing unfocused fright and welling with tears, and that was almost all she had to say, except for what I think she had to say to me at the end.

I like her more now than I did when she was alive.

My mother was almost eighty when she died, and her memory had gone almost entirely, but she died crying for her mother, and I suppose that I shall die crying for mine (if the Lord, in his infinite mercy, allows me to live long enough. Ha, ha). So much of misfortune seems a matter of timing. We were late coming for him that day, and we saw him, half a block from the play area, standing alone on the sidewalk in his bare feet and bawling loudly, helplessly, because he thought we were never going to come for him at all. (I was incensed when I saw him. We were simply late. Nothing else had happened.) Other people, children and grown-ups, looked at my boy curiously as they walked past and saw him standing there crying: none of them offered to help, none of them questioned him. (Good God — even I will help a small child who seems to be in trouble, if no one else does.) He did nothing when he saw us, except shriek more piercingly, quail more frantically, in a tortured plea for us to rescue him from whatever odd spell was holding him to that spot in terror. (I was so deeply incensed with him for a moment that I was actually tempted to stop with a sneer and delay going to him.) He was convulsed with grief by the idea that we had abandoned him, just because we were a little bit late, that we had left him there purposely because we were dissatisfied and disgusted with him, and that he was never going to see us again or have anyone to take care of him.

I was infuriated. He knew the way home. It wasn't far. The walk was uncomplicated. Many mornings we would let him lead us from the house to the boardwalk to the play group just to show him he could get there alone safely and then let him lead us back afterward to demonstrate to himself and us that he also knew how to return. The village was small, there were hardly any cars, it was impossible to get lost — if he did, he could always follow the boardwalk or ask somebody for directions. He knew that too. (We were always pressing him to ask people for directions when he was unsure, but he was afraid of strangers, even children his own age, and reluctant to talk to them. When he did, he mumbled inaudibly with lowered eyes, and whoever he asked always requested him sharply to repeat what he had just said.

"Do you know how to get there?" my wife and I would ask. "You know how. Are you sure you won't get lost? Which way do you turn from here? Do you see you can't get lost? Even if you turned here instead of there or a block later you would still wind up on the boardwalk or the main avenue. You can just follow the people or ask somebody if you do get lost. Will you get lost?")

Yet he had gone only far enough to be almost out of sight of the play group area, where the few remaining counselors were languidly cleaning things up, and could go no farther. Even when he recognized us and saw us coming he did not move, as though even to budge one hair's-width from that agonizing place he occupied would be to risk fainting away over some invisible precipice and swoon out of existence. He remained stationary on the pavement in that single spot on his tiny bare feet as though every bone in his ankles had already been crushed (I noticed then, I think, for the first time, how his feet pronate, how his arches are almost flat, and how large and sharp and close to the ground his ankle bones are) and even to continue standing there was excruciating and unendurable. He couldn't move and he couldn't stay where he was. (He did not rush to us.) He howled. We were salvation, God, his only hope for life, but we had to go all the way to him in order to save him, while his gaping, glistening eyes fastened on us frantically. He would not (could not) take even one step toward us to assist in his own rescue and abbreviate his torment. (It was pitiful, pathetic, heartrending; and I fought back violent surges of anger and impatience and the feeling I might lose control and start berating him right then and there. I wanted to hit him. I felt he deserved it and felt I would have done so if he were older and bigger.) My wife quickened her pace and moved out ahead of me and I plucked at her elbow to hold her back. "Don't run!" I hissed at her. "You'll scare him." But it was me he waited for, my presence and protection he needed, and he did not begin walking again until he had felt my hand and was able to grip it solidly. (I had the impression then, as I have now, that if we had turned away from him and gone back, or if, for some unavoidable reason, we had not come for him that day at all, he would have remained stranded unalterably on that same spot at which by invisible forces he had been brought to a stop, a tiny mark on the surface of the world no greater than the dimensions of his own naked footprints, until he had perished or collapsed from exposure, hunger, thirst, fear, or fatigue, or until some unnaturally concerned and curious lady or man had gone searching for a policeman to notify him that there was a small boy standing in one place on the sidewalk who had been crying there all day and night and was in danger of dying from starvation, fright, or loneliness. I had the feeling then, and I sometimes have it now, that he would have failed to survive without my wife and me, will not be able ever to exist without the two of us to sustain him, and he may have that feeling too. What will he do when we die? What will Derek do?)

"If you were swimming," he asked me recently, "and thought you were going to drown, would you yell for the lifeguard and let everybody on the beach see them save you? Or would you let yourself drown?"

I don't know which I'd do. I do know, though, that I no longer go swimming in water over my head.

I would be embarrassed to yell for the lifeguard.

I would be embarrassed to call for a doctor at night if I was having a heart attack but wasn't sure.

"You don't have to be afraid," I told him.

He clung to my hand and walked beside me gingerly with his head down, making each step he took on his bare feet a delicate, probing test. His chest panted, his ribs and breastbone heaving as though they might splinter and stab through his fine translucent skin.

"I don't feel well," he said. His tears dried slowly, staining. "I felt sick."

"We'll take your temperature. Do you feel sick?"

"I was afraid you were never coming for me."

"If you really feel sick when we get back to the house we'll call a doctor and have him fix you up, so you've got nothing to worry about."

"I didn't feel well this morning either."

"I don't know what you're so scared about. You couldn't get lost coming back to the house even if you tried."

"I knew you'd think I was making it up."

He didn't go back to play group the following morning. He didn't want to and we didn't make him. (He adored us for allowing him to stay at home.) He never went back.

"Don't you want to go back there at all?" I asked at breakfast on Sunday.

"He doesn't."

We let it drop.

But after that he had little to do. He had no other kids to play with, no more friends. He spent much of each day on the beach with us, sifting sand. And saying nearly nothing. He wanted to remain indoors a great deal. He read picture books and built lots of models of cars, planes, and aircraft carriers that he took no pride in completing and no joy in preserving. He had no interest in anything. He reread comic books and stared torpidly and sporadically at the television set. He offered to help my wife with the housework. (This made her nervous.) His attention span was nil; he could not concentrate for long on any of the jigsaw puzzles we bought him. He seemed forgetful. He glued himself to us and went with us almost everywhere, holding on. He did not want to go into town but did not want to be left behind.