Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"It's exciting me right now."

"I see, said the blind man."

"Come outside."

"For a minute."

"On the staircase?"

Sometimes she'd give me about three and one third seconds.

"Someone's coming!" she'd hiss with vehemence, and tear herself away. "Let me go."

I should have guessed from her educational curriculum at Duke that she was a little bit nuts and would probably kill herself sooner or later. I am able to spot propensities like that in people now (and I keep my distance). A friend in need is no friend of mine.

I envied and abominated those five football players at Duke. They thought so little of her. They treated her like crap. And she did not mind. There were days I found myself detesting her on my long, drab subway rides back and forth. There were mornings I would not talk to her and could not force myself to look at her, she seemed so foul. (I was betrayed. She was trash, that fatal kind of trash that can make you want to die. I'm glad I didn't die. I'm glad I outlived her.) I felt — and knew I felt correctly — that she still would have preferred them to me.

I am gifted with insights like that and able to prophesy with conviction in certain morbid areas. I know already, for example, that my wife (as she foresees also) will probably die expensively of cancer (she'll need a private room, of course, and private nurse) if she doesn't outlive me and we do not divorce because of drunkenness or adultery (hers, of course). If we're apart, or if I'm already dead, who cares what she dies of? (I'll probably miss my boy every now and then for a little while if I do move out for a divorce. I like it so much when he smiles. I'll have to leave so many things behind. My golf clubs. How can I rationally make time and room for my golf clubs and new golf shoes when I am breaking away from home and family in an irrational rage?) Will I be happy when my wife is dying of cancer? No. Will I be sorry for her? Probably. (Will I be sorry for myself? Definitely.) Will I still be sorry for her after she's gone? Probably not.

I am especially good on suicides and breakdowns. I can see them coming years in advance. Kagle is close to his breakdown now; his God won't save him, but maybe his boozing and whores will (supplemented by fortifying compounds of vitamin B-12 and self-pity mixed with self-righteous claims of mistreatment. If nothing else, everybody will agree he has been a nice guy). Kagle won't kill himself; he'll enjoy his wronged status too much for anything like suicide (he'll enjoy smiling gamely, forgiving generously). I'll have to get rid of him. I try to help him now. He grins incorrigibly (and I want to kick him in his leg). I know something he doesn't know, while Green, Brown, Black, and others watch mistrustfully and theorize (I feel. I know I don't feel honest with them). I want Arthur Baron to note my efforts to aid Kagle. Kagle's job will be given to me; it's all but inevitable now. Kagle welcomes my criticism (and ignores it. It's the attention he welcomes. If I threw spitballs at him he'd be just as grateful). He thinks I am a doting parent fussing over an appealing child. It does not cross his mind that I am a zealous heir grown impatient to supplant him. (I'd like to spit in his face. Won't he be surprised?) Martha, the typist in our department, will go crazy eventually (probably in my presence. I'll get rid of her deftly and be the talk of the floor for a few days), and I won't lay Jane, although I'll continue to flirt with her (fluctuate and vacillate, hesitate and saturate) and ferry the prurient interest she stimulates in me home (like melting ice cream or cooling Chinese food) to my wife in Connecticut or uptown to old girl friend Penelope, my weathering, reliable Penny, who still studies music, singing, and dance diligently (while working as a cocktail waitress in one place or another) and still likes me better than any of the younger men she successively falls in love with for a few months three or four times a year. (She should like me better. I am better. They're jerks.) My wife loves doing it with me in Red Parker's apartment in the city, and I like doing it there with her too. It's different than at home. We go at each other full force. I have grim premonitions now for Penny, who traveled through her thirtieth birthday still unmarried (with much deeper emotional changes than she seems to recognize) and is not as jolly as she used to be. I've known and liked her now for nearly ten years. I don't know what will become of my daughter. I make no firm predictions for teen-age girls today. (The boys, I know, will all fail. They've failed already. I don't think they were given a fair chance.) She'll want to take driving lessons even before she reaches sixteen. Then she'll want a car. She'll have duplicate keys made and steal one of ours. I wish she were grown up and married already and lived in Arizona, Cape Kennedy, or Seattle, Washington. Someone older will advise her to steal our car keys and have an extra set made. She steals money now from my wife and me to chip in with friends for beer, wine, and drugs on weekends. I don't think she uses the drugs. I think she's afraid and I'm glad. I'm glad they seem to be going out of fashion in our community, along with spade boyfriends. I'm glad she's afraid of Blacks too.

"If you'd give me my own car, I wouldn't have to steal it," she'll argue when we catch her, and believe she's right.

I'm in the dark:

(My lucid visions bleed together.)

Something terribly tragic is going to happen to my little boy (because I don't want it to) and nothing at all will happen to Derek. Police and ambulances will never come for him. I see no future for my boy (the veil won't lift, I don't get a glimmer, I see no future for him at all) and this is always a heart-stopping omen. When I look ahead, he isn't there. I can picture him easily the way he is today, perhaps tomorrow, but not much further. He is never older, never at work or study as a doctor, writer, or businessman, never married (the poor kid never even goes with a girl), never in college or even in high school; he is never even an adolescent with a changing voice, erupting skin, and sprouts of sweating hair discoloring his upper lip and jaws. I mourn for him (my spirit weeps. Where does he go?). He doesn't pass nine. He stops here. (This is where he must get off. Every day may be his last.) Either he has no future or my ability to imagine him present in mine is blunted. I view the empty space ahead without him dolorously. Silence hangs heavily. I miss him. I smell flowers. There are family dinners, and he is not present. What will I have to look forward to if I can't look forward to him? Golf. My wife's cancer? A hole in one. And after that? Another hole in one.

"I made a hole in one," I can repeat endlessly to people for years to come.

When obscurity and old age descend upon me like thickest night and shrivel me further into something small and unnoticeable, I can always remember:

"I made a hole in one."

On my deathbed in my nursing home, when visitors I don't recognize arrive to pay their respects with gifts of very sweet candy and aromatic slices of smoked, oily fish, I may still have it in my power to recall I made a hole in one when I was in my prime — I'm in my prime now and I haven't made one yet. It's something new to start working toward — and it may cause me to smile. A hole in one is a very good thing to have.

"Will you believe it?" I can say. "I once made a hole in one."

"Have another piece of smoked fish."

"A hole in one."

I don't know what else one can do with a hole in one except talk about it.

"I made a hole in one."

"Eat your fish."

"Hello, girls."

"Did you ever hear the one about the amputee without arms and legs outside the whorehouse door?"

"I rang the bell, didn't I?"