Джозеф Хеллер - Something Happened

I hate to have to stand still.

I have had to stand still for the longest time now, it seems, for nearly all of my life. Nearly every time I search back I come upon myself standing still inside some memory, sculpted there, or lying flattened as though by strokes from the brush of an illustrator or in transparent blue or purple chemical stains on the glass slide of a microscope or on the single frame of a strip of colored motion picture film. Even when the film moves, I am able to view the action only in arrested moments on single frames. And yet I must have moved from where I was to where I've come, even while standing still. Was I brought here? I have this full country acre in Connecticut. I think I was. Who did it? Only in the army do I think I had more freedom of choice, more room in which to move about. At least I felt I did. I did. I was outside my family, had no wife, job, parent, children, met no one I cared for. I had no ties. I had no one anywhere I cared for. I got laid a lot. Overseas I went with prostitutes and enjoyed that too. I had fun. I enjoyed being away (at least it was something to do. If you sat home alone Saturday night, at least you were sitting home in a barracks, which was better than sitting alone in your own home on a Saturday night. One New Year's Eve in the army I had nothing to do and didn't care. We take weekend drives now to people I don't want to be with and can't wait to leave. A long weekend will break up my family one day. I stroke my dick. I stroked it often then too. I was often lonely and wished I had someone I could care for. I would have liked a pen pal, a pin-up girl in a cashmere sweater and chaste pleated skirt, a sweetheart I adored who photographed beautifully and mailed me snapshots. I still would. I felt cheated, underprivileged. I wanted to be the nice boy in the Hollywood movie the nice girl was crazy about, that fellow in the love songs the girls were all singing to on the radio. I wasn't); and I know already that I'll be standing still again after I've been moved one giant step forward into Andy Kagle's position and have nailed down the job. I'll make my speech. I'll have important new work to do (nailing down the job), but I'll do it standing still. (And after I've done it and know I'm not in danger of being kicked out for a while, my interest will abate and my work will grow monotonous again.

I will not want what I have and will be in fear of losing it. I will not ever be convinced my illegal thoughts and dreams are not apparent to the authorities in the company, and I will still slither numbly into dismay at sight of a closed office door of a higher executive from behind which something small as a mouse might emerge that will bear my secrets out into the open and leave me worse off than dead. For everyone to see.) Everything dead lies still unless winds ruffle the feathers, fur, or hair. (I have the feeling now that I have already been everywhere it has been possible for me to go.) The sight of a dead dog on a highway is enough to turn my stomach and wrench my heart with pity. It reminds me of a dead child. And I never even had a dog. Children and dead dogs evoke sympathy. Neither can speak. No one else. Two dead dogs on a highway seconds apart lead me to think my sanity is finally going and that it is no longer possible for me to separate what I see from what I remember or what I don't want to see. In flickers of disorientation I often glimpse in silhouette from the rear or side people I did not know well and have not seen or thought about in decades (total strangers take on the identity for a second of kids I remember from elementary or high school or people I was acquainted with briefly in other jobs or brushed against uneventfully in the army. I was once beaten up by an enlisted man who didn't know I was an officer). They are always people I was not close to and do not want to see again. (I don't catch unreal glimpses of people I do want to see.) Real and imagined events overrun each other in my mind in hazy indistinction. I sometimes find it hard to be certain whether I have done something I intended to or only thought of doing it but didn't. I have answered letters twice. I have no system. Others I don't answer at all because I remember wanting to promptly and think I have. There's much I think of doing and saying I know I'd better not. I'd lose my job or go to jail. I am growing forgetful. My eyesight is deteriorating: I wear reading glasses now and require a stronger prescription every year. Periodontal work will save my teeth only for a while. I know I repeat myself at home with my children and my wife (my children point that out with unkindness): soon I'll be repeating myself with everyone everywhere and be shunned as a prattling old fool. In southern Louisiana, I learned recently (on a business trip to New Orleans, where, because I found myself alone in a strange, big city, I picked up a chunky, Negro whore in a bar and asked her to follow me to my hotel room. I figured if she could make her way through the hotel lobby into my room, I could make my way into her. I get so lonesome in glamorous cities in which I have nobody I can call. Everybody else, I feel, is having a good time. I get the blues when it rains. The blues I can't lose when it rains. I've never learned how to make friends in strange cities. Men who strike up conversations with me appear homosexual and drive me off.

"I've got to go now. I have this friend I have to meet."

"Take care."

All I know how to do in a strange city is read the local newspapers. Late at night, I'm good at that in bed. I'm good at eating candy bars in bed too. I get the feeling when I'm alone in strange American cities that I have no inner resources and no cock. She was just under thirty. She said she was a mixture of French, Chinese, and Mexican parentage and could therefore do sweet things to me in bed no one had ever done before. She said it only half seriously in a husky southern drawl. I knew she was Black. I haven't been with Black girls much in this country, only twice before, but I knew that much. I've been afraid of them, first for my dignity, now for my life.

"I don't dig," I said, "French, Chinese, and Mexican girls." I was kidding back with her in the bar. "I want someone Black."

"I'm a little of that too," she chuckled heartily. She was simple, good-natured, guileless, and I felt myself in charge. She asked for fifty dollars, grinning. I got her to agree to twenty. Then I threw in ten dollars more to inspire her by my generosity and make her like me and really do sweet things to me no one had ever done before.

"I can show you a good time," she vowed.

By the time I returned to my hotel room I no longer wanted her and hoped she wouldn't follow. I had all the evening newspapers for New Orleans and Baton Rouge and was raring to take my clothes off and get to work on them. I have this clinging fear of catching a venereal disease somewhere and bringing it home to my wife. How would I get out of that one when she found out she was infected? Easily. Lie and deny. She did. She paid off the desk clerk, she said. She rapped softly on the door and came in smiling, and I had to stare at her as she undressed in order to get interested again. She wasn't pretty.

"Do it slowly," I requested. "Take them off slow. And shimmy a little."

"Sure."

I don't like girls who get out of their clothes too quickly. I get the feeling they've been getting out of those same few clothes all day long for other men before they came to me. "Okay."

"Sure. Some men —»

"Not now."

"Huh?"

"Come here. Shhhh."

"Sure."

She was still grinning. She had nothing different to offer. In San Francisco not long ago a stunning, willowy blonde who looked like royalty whispered the same alluring promise and turned out to be lying also. She made me give her a hundred dollars. Whores in Naples, Rome, and Nice after the war had uttered the same exotic guarantees and had been no more successful in filling them. I guess there's really not that much variety around for normal degenerates like me. It was flat, and over quickly.