Something Happened (50 page)

“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
.)

“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?

“Get out!” I order clearly.

But what comes out are croaking grunts of pain that alarm my wife.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s okay.”

“You were screaming.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Sounds.”

“I was only groaning. I’m all right now.”

My wife and children are never in danger then. They aren’t even home. There’s only me. He’s coming after me. I’ve got no one I can ask about this but my family religious adviser or my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist enlightens me on this question by replying:

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because—”

“You bite your fingernails,” he guesses.

“—I’m afraid. I have dreams and thoughts that trouble me, even when they’re pleasant. I get headaches. I’m dissatisfied. I believe I suffer from thought disorders. I don’t hear voices—”

“Ah,” he observes in a long sigh.

“—and I never have hallucinations.”

“What would you call this?”

“I smell excrement often.”

“Ah?”

“But there is always dog shit on my shoe.”

“You will have to learn,” he says, “to walk more carefully.”

I don’t have a psychiatrist (the company takes a disapproving view of executives who are not happy) and my family religious adviser belongs to my wife. (He takes a disapproving view of people who are.)

I know I will have to stop biting my fingernails soon if I ever want to go much higher in the company than Kagle’s job or grow up to be President of the United States of America someday when the job falls vacant and no one else wants it. I know I was sorry
when John F. Kennedy was killed because he was shot in the head when neither he nor I expected him to be and because of the magazine and newspaper photos. They were gruesome. (They could have sold a million of them as souvenirs if they had thought of it.) Poor man. I hope that I am never shot in the head. He’s scaled much smaller now in my imagination (but he’s there. It’s him. I’ll take care of him for as long as I can); it’s necessary he be reduced to miniature to fit inside my thoughts and move about in memories, whimsies, and night dreams and do unnoticed things on his own when I’m too busy with other duplicates and shades to bring him out and play with him. Other people might have him on half dollars; I’ve got him saved in my head. He’s clean, glazed, handsome, grinning. His hair is glossy. I like him now. My wife’s sister doesn’t. His kid brother didn’t live as long as he did. It isn’t generally appreciated that Lyndon Baines Johnson was only forty-six and still a U.S. senator when he had the first of his heart attacks. It was all over for him right then. He never amounted to much after that. Eisenhower got better after his. His golf game improved. (So will mine.) Harry Truman died too. I knew he would. My own head hurts a good deal these days, and I haven’t even been shot there. I get pains in the back of my neck too, very close to the top of my spine. Aspirins help. My wife’s tranquilizers help me sleep. Three layers of tissue envelop my brain and spinal cord and are called, collectively,
meninges
. I was delighted to find out I had three. I didn’t know I had any. Meningitis, then, is an inflammation of the head. Infectious meningitis is an infectious inflammation of the head. Meningitis appears frequently on military installations. Civilians get encephalitis, which is an inflammation of the substance of the brain and is often mistaken for sleeping sickness. People doze off into paralysis. It is another good cure for insomnia. I have grown too old now to worry foolishly about something like meningitis. I don’t have chest pains yet. I have exchanged my infantile fears of meningitis for more adult infantile fears. I never give meningitis a thought anymore. (Ha, ha.) Meningitis kills. So
do bullets in the head. Martin Luther King got one: several months after he died, our alert FBI stopped tapping his telephone (and started tapping mine). Meningitis ravages the nervous system, leaves one deaf, dumb, blind, paralyzed, and dead. I was even sorrier when Bobby Kennedy was killed because he was younger than John and the photos of him on the floor of that hotel kitchen were worse. He looked so weak and confused with his immense eyeballs adrift in their sockets and his outflung arms and legs lying angular and spindly. His shoes were still on. He was dressed in black for the occasion. He is covered with glaze now too. He will never sneeze. He is in my head now also. I have him tucked away. I will keep him warm. And there he will lie, until I die—or the day comes when I forget to remember him again. I don’t know what will happen to him after that. He’ll have to fend for himself. I don’t know how he’ll survive when I’m no longer able to take care of him. Or where. It used to be when I was hot for a girl there was torrid heat. Now I’m only horny. There’s just an erection. My wife’s sister does not approve of violence, she says, but was pleased when the Kennedys were killed, seeing grim justice prevail.

“They only got what they deserved,” she said. “In a way, they’d really been asking for it.”

My wife was sorry for the children.

I must remember not to smile too much. I must maintain a façade. I must remember to continue acting correctly subservient and clearly grateful to people in the company and at the university and country clubs I’m invited to who expect to find me feeling humble, eager, lucky, and afraid. I travel less, come home more. (I’m keeping myself close to home base, which isn’t home, of course, but the company.) My wife is pleased to have me around, even though we quarrel. My daughter suspects I’m checking on her. We suspect she’s been using one of the cars when we’re out—she has older friends with junior driving licenses—and that she’s been threatening my boy with disfigurement and blindness if he tells. (I think I might kill her if I found out she’s been threatening him with death or mutilation.) Derek can’t say anything.
I wonder what impressions flow through his mind (he does have one, I must force myself to remember, and ears and eyes that see and hear) and what sense he is able to make of any of them. I would not care to wiretap
his
head. I would hear much crackling, I think. I think of him as receiving stimuli linearly in unregulated currents of sights and sounds streaming into one side of his head and going out the other into the air as though like radio signals through a turnip or through some finely tuned, capstan-shaped, intricate, and highly sensitive instrument of ceramic, tungsten, and glass that does everything but work. I can’t call it a terminal, because nothing ends there. I think of my own thoughts as circular, spherical, orbicular, a wheel turning like the world in a basin of sediment into which so much of what I forget to think about separates and drops away into the bottom layers of murk and sludge. (I even forget the things I want to try to remember.) Like a vacuum tube, he can peak suddenly into fiery heat. Like a transistor, he is affected invisibly by jarring and by variations in humidity and temperature. I have a son with a turnip in his head. I think there must be static and other kinds of interference there, and possibly then is when he has his tantrums. (I have static in my own that leads to cranky outbursts at home and wish my head would break open and let the crackling pressure escape.) He does have a sweet face. All my children do, and my wife is more attractive for her age than any other woman her age I know. I wonder what architectural connections stand unfinished in his brain. Is he too ignorant to apprehend yet that he is an idiot and will grow up to be an imbecile? Does he know he’s supposed to be wishing me dead and reacting with fear I’ll murder or castrate him for experiencing that hope? He’d better learn to keep his filthy designs on my wife to himself. He is blameless. I dream he’s dead also and am inconsolable when I awake because I’m sorry for him and know I’m dreaming of me and don’t entirely want him gone.