Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

I can picture such scenes of myself in a nursing home easily enough. I can picture Derek out front easily too, slobbering, a thickset, clumsy, balding, dark-haired retarded adult male with an incriminating resemblance to a secret me I know I have inside me and want nobody else ever to discover, an inner visage. (I think I sometimes see him in my dreams.) I bet Arthur Baron doesn't suspect he's there (that I have the potential for turning myself inside out into a barbarous idiot) or that I am stricken chronically with a horror — a horror so acute it's almost an exquisite appetite — of stuttering (or experiencing a homosexual want. Perhaps I already have) or having my tongue swell and stick to the roof of my mouth and be unable to talk at all. (No wonder I am terrified of being condemned behind closed doors, without my even knowing sentence has been passed. Perhaps it's already happened.) But not one day more of life can this fertile imagination of mine provide for my poor little boy.

(What work will he do? What clothes will he wear? Oh, God, I don't want to have to live without him.)

And Kagle's job will be proffered to me and I will accept it. By now, I want it. (By now, I no longer misrepresent to myself that I don't.) Kagle is an enemy: he is blocking my path, and I want him out of my way. I hate him. The need to kick him grows stronger every day, to yawp with contempt right in his hollowing, astounded face. (It would turn to a human skull. I would steam the flesh away in a second.) I'll never be able to do that. Civilization won't allow me to. But I might kick him in the leg if the temptation persists and my self-control flags. I will kick him before I can stop myself. I will be at an utter loss afterward to explain. I might want to die of embarrassment (and I'll feel like a caught little boy).

"Why did you do it?" people will demand.

I'll have to shrug and hang my head. I'll weigh eighty-four pounds.

"He kicked me in the leg," Kagle will protest to everybody.

"He kicked Kagle's leg."

"Did you see that?"

"He kicked Kagle in the leg."

There's nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter's ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He's a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I must not think about him as much as I could if I let myself, and I hate his nurse, whom I propel over the threshold — throw her out of my house — bracing her below with one arm to prevent her from falling to the ground and suing me. She falls anyway and sues me. The repulsive woman exudes an unpleasant odor of rancid grease mixed with dust and perfumed bath powder. She bathes mornings and evenings. Her hair is ghastly white. Her cleanliness is reproachful. I can't bear her intrusive familiarity. She treats me with no more solicitude than I get from my family, and she's a salaried employee.

I know what hostility is. (It gives me headaches and tortured sleep.) My id suppurates into my ego and makes me aggressive and disagreeable. Seepage is destroying my loved ones. If only one could vent one's hatreds fully, exhaust them, discharge them the way a lobster deposits his sperm with the female and ambles away into opaque darkness alone and unburdened. I've tried. They come back.

It's all Kagle's fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byootefool instead of beautiful and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him — I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress.

"Heh-heh," he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes.

"Heh-heh," I want to mock back. I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I'd like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him.

"Andy," I tell him, "I'd like to hit you across the face with that lamp."

"Heh-heh," he says.

"Heh-heh," I reply.

I chuckle kindly when I see him, joke with him snidely about Green's vocabulary and well-tailored, showy clothes, help him dutifully in ways he can observe. I weighed one hundred and ninety-eight pounds this morning, down four and a half since Monday (when I decided to begin losing weight), and am nearly a whole foot taller than he'll ever be.

"Heh-heh," he wants to know. "How you getting along with that kid in the Art Department?"

"Fine."

"The one with those small titties."

"She's young enough to be my daughter."

"What's wrong with that? Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh. I've got these call reports for you from Johnny Brown."

"Didn't think I noticed, did you? Going to cut me in?"

"How would you like a kick in the leg?"

"My good one or my bad one? Heh-heh."

"Andy, this time I think you ought to look at them and make some comments before you pass them on."

"Clamming up? Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh-heh. What good are they? Salesmen lie."

"Catch 'em. You'll make a good impression on Arthur Baron and Horace White."

He pays no attention. "Ever go two on one?"

"Two on one what,"

"I do that now in Las Vegas. I know the manager of a hotel. Two girls at the same time. I did it again last week. You ought to try it."

"I don't want to."

"Two coons?"

"How about these call reports?"

"You do that for me. You're better at it. What do you hear about me?"

"Don't travel."

"Do I need a haircut?"

"You need a kick in the ass."

"You're sure doing a lot of kicking today, aren't you?"

"Heh-heh."

"I'll let you in on something. Green is finished. How would you like his job?"

"Bullshit."

"I'll recommend you. They're cutting his budget."

"How much?"

"You won't get a raise. I will. I made a killing in Xerox last week."

"That's more bullshit. You're always making a killing in Xerox and always complaining about all the money you owe."

"Heh-heh."

All he's got is his home in Long Island and a house in the mountains, to which he sends his wife and two children every summer. He goes there some weekends. I inquire after Kagle's family as periodically as Arthur Baron inquires about mine.

"All fine, Art," I always reply. "Yours?" (Green never asks. He isn't interested in my family and won't deign to pretend.)

I have dwelt wistfully more than once on the chances of his being killed in an automobile accident driving back or forth to work one lucky day. Kagle is careless in a car and usually sluggish or drunk when he leaves the city at night. Kagle is one of the very few upper-middle-echelon executives left in the country who still make their homes in Long Island, and this gaucherie too has scored against him, along with the white-tipped hairs growing out of his nostrils and the tufts in his ears. Nobody has hair growing out of nostrils or ears anymore. (He ought to see a barber now just for that.) This is something I've not been able to bring myself to mention to him. (I fear it would hurt him.) It has become difficult for me to look at him. He senses a change. I think that is why he heh-hehs me so much now. I pity him. (He does not know what to do about everything that is happening.)