Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Get lost," I repeated more sharply, when he appeared not to understand.

"Huh?"

"I've got nothing to do," he had grumbled a moment before.

"Go someplace."

"Where?"

"Away. Take a walk."

"With who?"

"With yourself. Mommy and I want to be here on the beach alone for a while."

"I won't know how."

"Yes, you will."

"I won't get back."

"Yes, you will."

"Now?"

"When then?"

My wife stared away from him stonily. "You'd better go," she advised unsympathetically.

"Go down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and come back. Just follow the water down the beach to the amusement pier. Then turn around and follow the water back."

"I want to stay here."

"I want you to go."

"I'll get lost."

"You'd have to be pretty damned smart to do that."

I was determined. He stood up, rubbing sand slowly from his palms, and walked off submissively in mute dejection without looking back. He was soon gone from sight behind the heads and torsos of other people jamming the shoreline. The amusement pier looked farther away than ever before, the beach more densely packed. I was afraid he'd get lost. (I was afraid I'd get lost if I had to do what I'd sent him to do.)

"Why did you do it?" my wife asked critically, already repenting her own passive cooperation.

"You wanted me to do it, didn't you?"

I kept craning my neck to keep slim flashes of him in view for as long as I could and grew worried and sorry also as soon as he was gone.

"I know," my wife admitted. She nodded absently. "I couldn't stand him hanging around here anymore."

"Me neither."

"He's always here. It breaks my heart."

"Mine too."

"He always looks so unhappy."

"That's one of the things I can't stand."

"Do you think he'll get lost?"

"He can't get lost. It's that damned play group, damn them. None of this would have happened if they'd kept closer watch of things. I want him to see that he can go from place to place alone without having something terrible happen to him."

"The beach is so crowded."

"He won't get lost."

He got lost.

(At least we thought he was lost.)

When twenty-five minutes passed and he did not return, we went surging after him in panic, my wife scurrying along the shore, myself trudging through deeper sand in the middle of the beach in the direction of the amusement pier. (I thought of homosexual perverts or of other kids from the play group spotting him, mocking him, ganging up on him.

"The sky is falling!" I wanted to shout in horror at groups of adults I hurried past with a thundering heart. "Have you seen a little kid? He's lost. He'll look worried.")

We found him standing by himself along the shore about two hundred yards away, floundering in one spot as though lost: he was not certain if he had overshot us already, and he did not know, therefore, in which direction to proceed. His cheeks were white, his eyes were distant, and his jaws were clamped shut. The tendons in his neck were taut, and he had a lump in his throat. The landmarks along the boardwalk — all those familiar signs and structures — meant nothing to him.

My first impulse was to kill him. "Were you lost?" I shouted to him.

"I don't know." He shrugged. I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as though all the bones in his ankles were broken. I was ashamed of him and wanted to disown him. I was sorry he was mine), then I wanted to clasp him to me lovingly and protectively and shed tears of misery and deepest compassion over him (because I had wanted to kill him. Imagine having a father that wanted to kill you. That's the part they all leave out of the Oedipus story. Poor Oedipus has been much maligned. He didn't want to kill his father. His father wanted to kill him ). I don't know what I felt when I found him standing there like that, immense gratitude that he was unharmed and intense, depressing disappointment over everything else, a terrible rush of ungovernable, dissonant emotions in which landmarks made no sense to me, either. (I don't always know what I feel now.) (I wish I were a chimpanzee.) The next day my wife and I had a scathing quarrel in the house over money and sex that had nothing at all to do with him (although he could not know that). We snarled and snapped and sneered at each other like barking jackals. She yelled at me and I yelled back (we called each other bastard and bitch and told each other to go fuck ourselves), and when I stormed away into the kitchen to fling some ice cubes into my glass of whiskey, nearly shattering it in my hand with my violent force, I heard my boy move into the living room timidly and say, softly, to my wife:

"Should I go for a walk again? To the amusement pier?"

I heard myself sigh. I wanted to weep.

"Is that why Daddy's unhappy?"

I felt myself feel so utterly awful.

My wife came into the kitchen quietly.

"Did you hear him?" she murmured, her anger against me gone. (I said nothing.) "He wants to know if he should go for a walk again. He thinks that's why you're unhappy now."

"He did not," I denied finally, without spirit.

"You must have heard him. Go ask him."

"I don't believe you."

"You get crazy when you're this way," my wife lamented. "I can't talk to you. None of us can. You won't listen and you won't see. Go ask him. Go see what he looks like if you don't believe me."

I knew what I would see (and did not want to). I stepped around my wife without looking at her or touching her and walked into the living room. He was standing docile and repentant (as though he were to blame) near the door leading out to the porch, awaiting my directions. His skin was shaded blue. (He would do whatever I asked. He did not want me to be angry or unhappy because of him. His eyes were wide and serious. I have never before or since in all my life felt so totally cruel, so rotten, depraved, and inhuman. He was prepared to yield himself to any sacrifice I requested of him. I did not want him that way.) His look was expectant, grave, and resigned. I did not speak for a second. (I couldn't.) I had a lump in my throat.

"From now on," I told him gently, "at least until the end of the summer, you won't have to do anything you don't want to do. And you'll be allowed to do everything you do want to do. Will that be okay?" My tone was tender, apologetic.

His gaze was skeptical. "You mean it?"

"I promise."

"I love you, Daddy," he said, and rested his head against my belly to hug me peacefully. "You're the best daddy in the whole world."

I am the worst daddy in the whole world. Yesterday, I helped a blind man across the street and was surprised that I did not feel revolted when I took his arm. (Actually, he took my arm. I started to grip his, but he told me:

"No, let me hold on to yours.")

I think I will do things like that more often (now that I see I can).

I broke my promise to him many times. He continued to love me anyway.

I identify with him too closely, I think, and remember that once, when he was still an infant in diapers, kicking his legs away as he lay on the Bathinette, rocking it perilously and raising a violent clatter and spray of powder cans and safety pins, my wife yelled to me urgently to come into the room and showed me a fiery red blotch on the side of the head of his penis. (It must have been minuscule, had to be, but appeared a gigantic blister at the time.) And I doubled over with a keen, slicing pain in my own penis the instant I saw the rough (small), flaming-red patch and cupped my hands over all my genitals reflexively to preserve and soothe them. It hurt then. It hurts now when I remember. I don't have to look to make certain nothing's there. Once when I was small I felt a stinging itch at the tip and saw a brown ant come crawling out, but I no longer tell this to anyone because nobody believes me. I guess I really do love this little thing of mine still, although I'm not sure why. Where would I be without it? Neuter. It had led me into strange places. I have led it. Through these thrilled and limp, leaking tissues have come decades of exquisite and often intolerable pleasures and three big, fully formed children who were mammoth in camparison to it, from the day they were born, one of them defective. In a factory he would be a reject. He suffers less than normal. We make up the difference. By and large, I believe I really don't get all that much pleasure out of it anymore, although I think I'd like to hold on to it a little longer, ha, ha. I don't always like putting it in, and I don't like taking it out. I wish there was something more to do with it than there is. Once in my early teens, I paid a younger cousin of mine, a girl, a dime to pull it for me and was terrified afterward that she would tell my mother or my brother or someone in her own family. I wonder if it warped her. It might have helped. She made me happy. For only a dime. I see her still as a dubious little girl, without a gleam of mischief or curiosity or sensuality of her own to enrich the experience for her. She was bored, and a little puzzled. I touched her gingerly. I molested a child. I was molested as a child. Everyone is molested. Maybe that's why I worry about my boy so much. I used to worry that way about my daughter. Now she is old enough to molest children on her own. I have paid much more than a dime many times since.