Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

"I wash up. I bring my wife there too."

"You've been acting like a simpering college fool with that young girl in the Art Department."

"No, I haven't," I reply defensively. (Now my pride is stung.) "Jack, that's only kidding." (I can feel my eyes welling with tears. They must be moist as his own.)

"She isn't pretty enough. Her salary's small."

"You flirt."

"I have a reputation for arrogance and eccentricity to protect me. You haven't. You're only what you're doing. I have rose fever. If I look like crying, it's allergenic. What's so funny?"

"I wish I could use a word like that."

"You can't. Not while I'm around to use a better one. You can't think as quickly as I can, either. You don't have style enough to be as eloquent and glib as I am, so don't even try. That girl won't help you. Go for wealthy divorcees, other men's wives, and attractive widows."

"Widows aren't that plentiful to come by."

"Read the obituary pages. You're smiling again."

"You're funny."

"But you aren't supposed to be laughing now. Slocum, you're in trouble and you don't seem to know it. And I don't like that."

"Why am I in trouble?"

"Because you work for me. And you've been too 'fucking' cheerful for my taste."

"I thought you didn't want that word."

"You don't seem as much afraid of me as you used to be."

"I am, right now."

"I don't mean, right now."

"Why should I be afraid?"

"And I don't like that. It makes me afraid. The last thing this Jack Green wants is someone secure enough in his job with me to walk around whistling Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor — I looked it up. Don't grin. You're as easy to impress as the rest of them. What baffles me is how you know it."

"I know a girl who —»

" I can be that pretentious here. You can't. I don't want whistlers working for me. I want drunkards, ulcers, migraines, and high blood pressure. I want people who are afraid. I'm the boss and I'm supposed to get what I want. Do you know what I want?"

"Good work."

"I want spastic colitis and nervous exhaustion. You've been losing weight too, haven't you? I've got spastic colitis. Why shouldn't you? I take these pills. I want you to take them. Want one?"

"No."

"You will, if you want to keep working for me and ever make a speech at the convention. God dammit, I want the people working for me to be worse off than I am, not better. That's the reason I pay you so well. I want to see you right on the verge. I want it right out in the open. I want to be able to hear it in a stuttering, flustered, tongue-tied voice. Bob, I like you best of all when you can't get a word out because you don't know what that word should be. I'm not going to let you speak at the convention this year either. But you won't know that, even though I'm telling you. You won't be sure. Because I'm going to change my mind and let you prepare and rehearse another three-minute speech on the chance I might not change my mind again. But I will. Don't trust me. I don't trust flattery, loyalty, and sociability. I don't trust deference, respect, and cooperation. I trust fear. Now, that's a fluent demonstration of articulation and eloquence, isn't it? You could never do something like that, could you?"

"What's wrong, Jack?" I repeat lamely, almost whining, with a weakness that makes me abject. "Why are you doing this?"

"I have the best paid department in the company. You're stuck here."

"I know that."

"I get criticism for the high salaries I pay."

"I know that."

"Unless I decide to fire you. I'm stuck here too. Do you know that also? I want inferior people with superior minds who feel in their bones their lives would be over if they lost their jobs with me. And I want that to be true. Now it's visible, now it's coming right out in the open where I want it. Now you're afraid. Yes. Go ahead, Bob, relax — hide your hands in your pockets. They're trembling."

(I would kill him if I dared.) "Why do you want me to be afraid?"

"You work for me! I can fire you, you damned idiot. And so can two hundred other people neither one of us even knows about. Do you doubt it?"

"Christ, no."

"Isn't that reason enough? I can bully and degrade you anytime I want."

Oh, Christ, yes — he's got the whammy on me still. He can't fire me; but every cell inside me is convinced he can and bursts open in panic. (My mind has a brain. My glands don't.)

And I do not trust myself to reply without stuttering disgracefully, effeminately, a sissy. I do not feel I can unblock my mouth, unlock my tongue, and unlimber all my cheek and lip muscles to try a single word until I have sorted through all possible sounds and selected what that first word should be, and at least the one behind it, which might guide me safely to the next. (If I keep my sentence short, I might get out a complete one. I must begin with a one-syllable word. All possible sounds go clumping about in my mind like a jumble of lettered wooden blocks in a noiseless children's classroom.) Otherwise, there might merely come from me an unintelligible gabble or shriek. I feel like a slice of scorching toast ablaze in a toaster, and then my pores gush open in a massive flow of sweltering perspiration before I even have time to recollect that they don't have to. I don't need to be afraid of Jack Green anymore. I merely have to pretend. But I am.

(And I fear I always will be.) I hate him so and wish him dead as Kagle. I wish he had cancer of the thyroid, prostate, and colon. He hasn't. Him I probably would visit in the hospital just to hear him speechless and see him wasting away. I'll probably be in a hospital before he will, and he will not stoop to visit me. (Perhaps he will — just because he'll know I'll think he won't.) I wish I could be like him. I envy and idealize him, even now as he gazes away from me with a look of studied indifference that approaches boredom. He will not even give me the satisfaction of gloating victoriously. (I am not that important to him. How marvelous.) I wish I could do that. Maybe someday, if I practice regularly (when he is not around to observe with excoriating contempt that it is he I am training myself to emulate), I'll be able to carry off similar things with other people with the same disdainful composure.

Green is not going to fire me now — he merely wants to abuse. He is having one of his tantrums. (He has static in his head.) But my fear blows hot and my fear blows cold. And I sometimes think I am losing my mind. The fear (and the mind I am losing) does not even seem to be mine (they seem to be his) — broiling on my insides one moment like a blast furnace, chilling my whole skin like foggy whiter wind the next, alternating out of control against me from within and without inside the sagging pavilion of my tapered, made-to-measure, Swiss voile, powder-blue shirt, the very finest shirt fabric there is, Green has told me. It's almost funny. I could have worn a dark broadcloth or heavier oxford weave to work today that would have contained without blotches the flows of telltale sweat spreading beneath my arms and trickling down my chest and belly from my breastbone.

"Try wearing a sweater next time," I can almost hear Green saying, reading my mind. "Cashmere. A cardigan. Like mine. That's why I wear one," I can hear him add, reading his.

It's almost uncanny the way he's still got the whammy on me. I wish he would die. But this one, I feel with some basis, I might eventually be able to lick. I have age, Arthur Baron, and spastic colitis on my side.

But not as easily as I'd hoped.

I'd like to shoot him in the head.

I wish I could make a face at him and stick my tongue out. (I wish I could have a hot sweet potato again or a good ear of corn.)