Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"If you ever write a book," he has repeated to me, "put me in. I'll buy a lot of copies."

I'd like to wiretap his head too. I'd like to know if I range about impertinently in his dreams the way he roams about in mine (as though he owns them). I doubt I symbolize enough. Horace White strolls into my dreams often with his nearly featureless face, hangs around awhile, and turns into florid, fleshier Green, who fumes and glares scathingly at me as he starts to make a cutting remark and then clears out as rapidly as I'd like to as soon as the menacing, dark stranger enters and draws near with his knife I never see, either waking me up moaning in primordial fright or quitting the scene graciously to make way for someone like my wife's mother or sister, Forgione, or Mrs. Yerger. Or my daughter, boy, and/or Derek. Or someone else I haven't invited. What a pleasant interval it is when I can hump my wife or Penny in my dreams. I come a lot with Penny and wake up just in time. I come a lot with my wife. I'll fondle my wife sometimes after I awake until she turns over amorously and do it to her for real. (It was usually better in the dream.) Dreams of Virginia never move toward climax. I fiddle with her blouse and fumble with her thumb-smeared garter snaps. I have so many people to cope with at night. Many are made of varnished glass wax. There's no such thing. Ghouls are there, and midgets. Carcasses. I have my wife, mother, children, sister, dead brother, and even my dead father to bother about in my dreams (even though I don't know what he looks like. The photographs he left behind don't convince), all of them but my dead father petitioning me for some kind of relief that I cannot give them because I am in such helpless need myself. No wonder my dreams all seem to unreel in the same stuffy, choking atmosphere of a chapel in a funeral home. Only Arthur Baron provides some solace, but he is busy and never stays for long, and I'm not even sure it is my father or able to understand why he is so displeased. (I haven't done anything.) My staring, waiting nine-year-old boy becomes staring, speechless Derek. Both are motionless. I was speechless once. I did not know what would become of me. Now I've derived some idea. I have only to sit down to holiday dinner with the full family and have something arise that recalls my dead father or older brother and my dying, wordless mother and I can see myself all mapped out inanimately in stages around that dining room table, from mute beginning (Derek) to mute, fatal, bovine end (Mother), passive and submissive as a cow, and even beyond through my missing father (Dad). I am an illustrated flow chart. I have my wife, my daughter, and my son for reference: I am all their ages. They are me. (But I'm not them. They'll run through sequences obligingly for me as many times as I want to view them.) The tableau is a dream. The scene is a frieze.

"Freeze."

None of them moves. All of them sit like stuffed dolls. And I can perceive:

"This is how I am when I was then."

And:

"That was how I will feel when."

Now they can move.

I think I know how it must feel for my wife to be married to a philandering executive like me to whom she can no longer make much difference unless she gets cancer or commits adultery. (Suicide won't do.) It must feel cold. Shifting my eyes left or right, I can transfer myself into my mother's, brother's, sister's past to see my present and my future. I shift my glance into the future of my children and can see my past. I am what I have been. I incorporate already what I am going to become. They inform me like highway markers. And here is another dream I imagine as I see myself hunched over the smoking, roasted turkey with my bone-handled carving knife, poised for severing, after separating the second joints, that first dramatic slice of white meat from the breast while they all watch and wait silently in high-backed chairs like skeptical shadows, unbreathing: they're mine. I own them. They belong to me. I'm in command (and hope the white meat will be toothsome and the dark meat juicy). Now we are frozen again and do not move. (Get the picture?) We cannot move. I stand over my turkey; they sit rigid. And I feel weirdly in that arrested dumb show in which we are all momentarily statues that even if I'd never had them, had never married, sired children, had parents, I would have had them with me anyway. Given this circle, no part could be different. Given these parts, the circle was inevitable. Only Derek deviated, and that was an accident, somebody else's. (We played our parts.) Now he is fixed in place with the rest of us. They have been in my head for as long as I've had one (the stork didn't bring them) and I cannot remember myself without them. (So much of me would be missing.) They bump against brain and give me headaches. Occasionally, they make me laugh. They're in my plasm. Now we can move. They don't. They wait like stumps. They sit like ruins in a coffin in their high-backed chairs. The turkey's carved; white meat, dark meat, second joints, wings, and legs lie laid out neatly like tools on a dentist's tray or surgical instruments of an ear-nose-and-throat man about to remove tonsils. But the platter's not been passed. There are spiced apples, chilled cranberry molds, and imported currant jams. It's a gelid feast, a scene of domesticity chiseled on cold and rotting stone. I'm in control, but there's not much I can do. (I can pass the platter of meat to my wife.) My mother's there with hair that's white as soap. My father's elsewhere. She'll die. I know she will because she already has. (I was so offended by my father when he died that I did not want to go to his funeral. I wanted to teach him a lesson. I taught him a lesson.) My wife is the only wife I could have had till now (I had no choice) till death, divorce, or adultery do us part. My children were the only ones permissible. (Other people's belong to them.) No dimpled, freckle-faced smiles, no cheerleaders, gladhanders, backslappers, or starlike overachievers were ever in the cards, for them or for me. They became what they were; if I had to imagine them better they would be no different. It was not within my scrotum to father a child who would ever be invited to the White House to pose for a picture with the President exemplifying all that's shimmering and wholesome in national life. Soon they will have to invite a porcelain bowl of strawberries and cream. The people have started to look accursed. (The strawberries will be tinted redder with synthetic coloring. The cream will be adulterated with something whiter. The porcelain bowl will be made of painted rubber.) All but Derek, who sits with us — we give his nurses family holidays off and hope to God they take them. I can imagine him otherwise. I could not conceive of him this way. Now we can move. I can pass the platter of turkey meat to my wife and offer the others some sweet potato pie, which is made of yams. There are no sweet potatoes anymore. (They're gone too. I don't know what became of them.) I don't know why my father comes into these dreams of mine in which I cannot speak or move but only stay and hear, since I hardly know the man, except to turn into someone fearsome as a nigger or Horace White, who, in my dreams, uncovers a scarlet underside of erotic cruelty to the insipid outerface I know. Horace White owns stock. I wonder if I miss a memory of having been spanked at least once on the bottom by a father. I don't own one. There is a closeness in that, a stable understanding, a promise for the past and assurance for the future. Perhaps I ought to start spanking both my sons every fortnight for their own good. My daughter is too old. My wife isn't, and I do. She likes to scratch with her fingers and toes or bite mildly. We let each other.

It's more fun for both of us now if we sting at least a little. I wonder if I'm the only middle-aged man in the whole world who still contains within himself his distant childhood fear of homosexual rape? Is that why that man invades my dreams?