Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh."

"Heh-heh-heh. What's so funny?"

"Why are you wearing covert cloth, for Christ sakes?" I admonish him instead.

"What's that?" he asks in alarm.

"It went out of style thirty years ago."

"Covert cloth?"

"Switch to worsted."

"I've got a blue blazer now," he says proudly.

"It's double knit."

"How would I know?"

"It would look terrific in Erie, Pennsylvania. Have we got any big accounts in Erie, Pennsylvania?"

"I'm going to L.A. next week. From there I sneak to Las Vegas. Two on one," he explains with a wink.

"And it doesn't fit. It's loose and lopsided."

"I'm lopsided too, you know," he reminds me gravely, with the shade of a crafty and hypocritical smile I've seen on him before. "I was born this way, you know. It didn't just happen, you know. It was God's will. Don't laugh. It isn't funny. It isn't so funny, you know, being born with this deformed hip and leg."

"I know, Andy."

"It's nothing to laugh about."

"I wasn't laughing."

"This is the way He wanted me."

"Hallelujah," I think of replying cynically. "I wish He'd given as much thought to me as you feel He gave to you."

When Kagle draws upon his leg or God for deference and sympathy, he becomes those odious strands and bushy tufts of hair in his nose and ears — intimate, obscene, and revolting — and I have wished the poor man dead many times lately just for filling me with ire, shame, and disgust. Worsteds won't help him. Everything is going wrong. I have wished other unsuspecting human beings I know and like dead also for most-trivial slights and inconveniences. Let them all die. (I'm liberal: I really don't care how.) I visit fatal curses on slow salesgirls and on strangers who get in my way and delay me when I'm walking hurriedly.

"Die," I think. "Pass away. Let me step over you." I can find many men — they are always men — in public life I'd like to see assassinated (and I can't stand bums anymore. I don't feel sorry for them), although I'd never think (I haven't yet) of doing that kind of work myself. I feel I understand why other people beat, kick, and set fire to bums and panhandlers. (We have too many of them.) I do not grieve at the death of Presidents: (usually, I'm glad): they're finally getting what they deserve. Not since F.D.R., I think, which was the last time in my life, if memory is correct, I was able to raise a tear. I have to choke back sobs now and then (usually at bad movies), but my tears are bottled away somewhere deep inside me. Nobody can tap them. That was a man, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last time I had a President I could look up to (the rest have not been mine), or maybe I only thought so because I was gullible. No — the whole country wept when he died. My mother wept.

"One third of the nation," said he, "is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed."

By now, with our improved technology and humane social and political reforms, it must be more than half. When it hits a hundred percent (the millionaires will have Swiss nationality by then and live in France), trumpets will play, the heavens will open, and everybody will hear Handel's music free. Last night I dreamed again my mother was alive, thin with age but in perfect health, clothed attractively in a cool print dress and thin white sweater, chatting naturally with me without a grudge at some cordial holiday festival in the nursing home. It was Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving. She beamed at me often, as she used to do when I was little. I was forgiven everything. I missed her like a forsaken child when I awoke in the morning — I had a sticky, crusted sensation of tears drying on my cheeks — emerging gratefully from sleep once more in my entirety, bringing my memory and all of my physical parts back with me successfully one more time from wherever it was I had been when I was not here.

"What were you dreaming about?" my wife always wonders.

"Me."

"You were groaning."

"My mother."

"Still?"

"You will too."

"I do already. Ever since she got arthritis. Her fingers curled. Won't it ever stop? The dreams?"

"It hasn't for me."

"Will I get arthritis too?"

"I will too."

"I hope I don't get it in the spine. I wouldn't want to curl up there."

"Fuck me."

"I'm not in the mood. The children are up."

I miss my mother again when I remember how poignantly I missed her when I woke this morning. I miss the forsaken child. He's me. But I'm not he. I think he may be hiding inside my head with all the others I know are there and cannot find, playing evil tricks on my moods and heartbeat also. I have a universe in my head. Families huddle there in secret, sheltered places. Civilizations reside. The laws of physics hold it together. The laws of chemistry keep it going. I have nothing to do with it. No one governs it. Foxy emissaries glide from alleys to archways on immoral, mysterious missions. No one's in charge. I am infiltrated and besieged, the unprotected target of sneaky attacks from within. Things stir, roll over slowly in my mind like black eels, and drop from consciousness into inky depths. Everything is smaller. It's neither warm nor cold. There is no moisture. Smirking faces go about their nasty deeds and pleasures surreptitiously without confiding in me. It gives me a pain. Victims weep. No one dies. There is noiseless wailing. I take aspirins and tranquilizers. I am infested with ghostlike figurines (now you see them, now you don't), with imps and little demons. They scratch and stick me. I'd like to be able to flush the whole lot of them out of my mind into the open once and for all and try to identify them, line them up against a wall in the milky glare of a blinding flashlight and demand:

"All right, who are you? What were you doing in there? What do you all want from me?"

They wouldn't reply. They'd be numberless. I'd find 1,000 me's. (I like to fuck my wife when she's not in the mood. I like to make her do it when she doesn't want to.) I'd like to be able to photograph all my dreams with a motion picture camera and nail the guilty bastards in them dead to rights. I'd have the evidence. I'd like to wiretap their thoughts. I'd like to photograph their dreams to find out what's going on in their minds while they are going around at liberty in mine. (A man's head is his castle.) I don't hear voices. (I sometimes wish I did.) I'm not crazy. I know people do talk about me behind closed doors but I don't imagine I hear what they are saying. Yesterday, a little boy was found dead in the cellar of an apartment building, sexually mutilated. The murderer is still at large. Another child was found dead in the airshaft of a different apartment house, thrown from the top. Nobody knows why. (A girl. The police have not yet determined if she was sexually abused.) Another child is missing from home after several days, and no one knows why. Family and neighbors wait for word in pessimistic suspense, lighting religious candles for the soul already in solemn expectation of the worst. I too believe she's been murdered (and I wonder why she has been. In Oklahoma today farmers decided not to deliver cotton at the price agreed to, because the price of cotton had doubled between the time the sales were made and the time the contract forms were prepared. Buyers will take them to court. Bodies of other people's children are found in airshafts and stairwells all the time, and I'm not even sure what an airshaft or stairwell is). I wonder also what narrow, reedlike Horace White really feels about me. He's such an influential prick. (I hate that influential prick, and he means so much to me.)

"Well, well, well — here comes our company nail biter now," he'll say when I enter his office, and think it's funny. "How are you today?"

He's usually clipping, filing, or buffing his own translucent fingernails behind his enormous walnut desk whenever he summons me to request some kind of new work from me or discuss corrections. (He calls the changes he wants me to make corrections.)