The World Is the Home of Love and Death (32 page)

“Don’t do that!” I mutter.
There’s no point in daydreaming
that things are different—that gets too sexual, using him that way. You’d think when he got sick, he’d get sweet, but he was conceited to the end.… A sick man should be easy to be nice to but I’d swear he was as conceited as possible with the sexual pride of the devil … independent, wicked, male-sultry, with a male-sluttish potency, independent-unreachable, palely intent on kissing me.

For a year and a half now he has said this was a joke, a kind of a joke. As a mean joke, I raise my right leg and push against his ribs. I push him to the edge of the bed.

“Hey,” he says.

I say as if I had not done anything (but I am slightly out of breath), “I’m not a little kid.” Then I partly lose my equanimity: “I don’t want you kissing me on the lips. I’m not a child anymore.… And please don’t say childish things to me about my handsies and my feetsies …” I stand up. I’m six feet, two inches and a quarter tall. “That’s not who I am …” I don’t want to say I get
confused
about who I am and what, for instance, the actuality of my speaking out is—is it a hot, seary, scary thing, a warm-blooded assertion of what-I-can-do, my merit as other-than-a-son, a freight, a labyrinth of perhaps
intelligent
hallucination, a role that will become my second nature? This goes silently roaring in me as it does sometimes, tremendous and glittering like a huge locomotive or like a huge figure on a stage or in a movie in a spotlight, a half-ruthless, half-asinine,
romantic
and personal light.

Daddy says with the occasional poetry that he has and which always astounds me: “Would you refuse a trip among the dead?” Then he says: “Don’t be a bad sport …”

My mind flares like a sail on a moony sea in response to the power he has, his
clarity of will.…
My mother by adoption has said,
He talks you into things.…
Parents do that in your childhood to you. My father’s ill; the spirit he has is different from anything he had when he was O.K. The voice-house of my father living holds my father’s ghost … I can’t help myself here. A white-lit wind of my own clarity of will pushes at me.… This is a matter of what is on my face and what is in my posture.

He says—in mock good humor, metallic and puncturing—"You’re too snotty to be a pal …” He says, “I’m not exaggerating. You’re not a good sport.” He was being rhetorical and tricky, wasn’t he? He says, “The worst thing you can do, Wiley, is not like someone …” He gives a little laugh. “You play with fire when you don’t like the people back who like you …” He speaks reminiscently with some sort of after-flavor of sophisticated threat. Imagine a kitchen match being struck, the abrupt-stinging glare, the
white-lit
, then yellow and orange-tipped stink: that is what the personal heat of his reality, his feelings and will were like—the moment was sensational in this manner, this gray-tinged, privately difficult, even somewhat hellish (for me) stuff, the
do-whatty
of his will and my own will, and the past, the sheer number of memories, ears and tongues and large and small creatures and events and some light, not daylight. The light of thought.

He says, “Don’t be a fearful rabbit. Don’t be a fierce wolf.” I don’t know what he is quoting or if he is. Wills in real time are different experiences from eulogy. Will and character are elements of sanity—God, the rhetorics of sanity. He says, “I mean,
be serious
, that’s the test: if you can’t be serious with someone who has feelings, then you aren’t worth the powder it would take to shoot you. And my life isn’t worth a hill of beans since you are my sunshine. Then you’re crazy with having no heart.”

He partly intends contradiction, and I have a kind of shuddery response as he gets
crazy.
I am being serious in a way but as boys do, guessingly. I faced it a long time ago: the world isn’t what people say it is: but that’s the way it is. Gauges flip back and forth and fail to control the back-and-forth billowing of maybe crazy obnoxiousness of feeling. One calms one’s scorn by adopting a tone of self-address, the sort of tone in
It feels bad in the relentlessly proceeding light of the morning.
I can at best half-imagine what I looked like to him, a more or less delicate brute face, a tall fourteen-year-old … I can’t read mirrors yet. A delicately browed, thin-boned, bookish and
brute
and girlish and shaped and prettyish face, cheekbones and thin, new eyebrows—not his son’s face. I am only his adoptive son. I don’t know if any facial patterns from my very early childhood survived, if the hints of manhood-to-come suggested my real family. I can’t imagine the optical information he had, the periscope grammar in the third person of seeing
that boy
, the
he
—the dimensional and weighted volume of skinny mass and the dreamlikeness of recent size and of recently acknowledged wakefulness: it was like peeing in a hiding place, that sense of wakefulness. My dad says he can read me like a book but he doesn’t mean
me
—he means something human and male—and similar to him which is only part of me. The faint lineny, nighttime-male-body-smells in the bedroom and the spring presentness and the suburban odors from outside through the open windows wrack me—do you remember when your senses and the mind identifying the sensory, when all that was new and in a new scale of height and early sexuality.

I say out loud to S.L.: “You be a good sport, not me.… Let me be the kid for a change—O.K.?” Because I am not a little kid.

Dad says, “You got no pity in you.” He said, “You ever see a sick elephant die? I was a boy—I know about boys—I sneaked into a circus, it wasn’t a show: I never saw anything worse than an old elephant die … except battle. It was breathing its last … I’ve seen bad things—take a look at an elephant sometimes: their faces can be a lesson even to you. I tell you you stay the way you are, do what you want, I’m not a bad guy—go ahead, shoot me and get it over with—just don’t make a circus out of everything, out of an old elephant. Some things aren’t fit for a child to hear; I don’t want to be stared at like a freak … Everyone blames
me
you’re spoiled but what could I do: you were obstinate like an old elephant …”

A nellisfunt … A
nold uh(n)nellisfunt …

The boy said back: “Well I spoil
you:
what can I do:
you’re obstinate
 …”

“Don’t be a smart-aleck …”

He is speaking in a moment that moves; it is a hallway of sounds in which he moves and speaks. As he proceeds, he sees possibilities in his speech: in front of him, in back, possibilities in his words and in the listener’s attention, a space-and-moments thing with a listener; maybe he thought or refelt things—or maybe he heard as a social person—or maybe he felt his hugeness of self in my mind as a giant and truthful man among liars. Without warning, he becomes angry; it was often said when he said angry things that it wasn’t him—
“it is the sickness talking
”—but it was him: the temper was his. Mostly I think he was a man who was excited inside himself by his sarcasm and the individuality and self-assertion and abuse of others in his rages. The drama of talking mattered to him but not as it would to a politician. Being sick and omnipotent—with sexual or erotic rage—meant that he was a capricious editor of his effect on the world.

He seemed to blow up and to be
huge
as he had been when I was a child. He remodeled his speech; the commanding officer, exasperated-exacerbated tone he used, the topic was how much he didn’t like me, the topic was that I was an asshole compared to him and his illness and his magnitude: it was not a metaphor. He wanted something. My feelings zigzagged, hurt with a fed-upness, a rage at him, but my rage was unlike his. He says, “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings: you don’t know the meaning of
cooperate.… Take that look off your face! Looking at people like that is what sends people like you straight to hell.…
Why can’t you shut up?
Can you shut up?
You can do that, can’t you? Jesus Christ, be your best self, be sweet. If you can’t be human, say nothing—do you hear
me—KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT.
 … Be a human being!”

It is like spilled battery acid when he shouts—it is scorchy and fumy. I cannot know everything about what is going on. Hatred directed at you, hatred displayed, has the flavor of the hater. It’s Dad’s hatred that is directed at me. It has that flavor—of my past with him. In the peculiar light of Dad’s mood, I focus and clench. I have a sense of things-that-have-happened (in the past) sort of tumbling around silently in chambers of what is lost, of secrets in me. I don’t have time now to know the ins and outs of the ghost blackness, the shadowy blankness of past things between him and me; and in the darkish-and-glaring cloud of such ignorance at the age I was, I know the conclusion: that I am not to hurt him back, I am not to laugh at him: he is sick.

In real life, attention is physical. My skin and muscles and eyes remember the times he has insulted me.
All of them.
I don’t remember them one by one, only fragments to prove I am not making any of it up, the sense of him using this stuff and being aroused by it. The actuality of feelings, compound and time-riddled and onward-going as they are, is that they hold a cannibal echo of the past whether we like it or not: everything is reinterpreted all the time.

If I lose my deadpan, the knowledge of him-in-the-past becomes an illumination, a weight, a heat of light. That Daddy’s rage diminished so rapidly means I did the face-stuff right and scared him a little. (One describes this to oneself as
my face showed nothing.)
He was looking. He and I keep count, but you can keep count only in a sense.

You can’t be vengeful toward a sick man but sometimes I can’t help myself. Along the corridors of the memories of the pain he caused, his role in
the pain continuum
of my life, his temper now stirs such summaries of pain and disgust and hurt:
I’m tired of it.… He’s not
really
my father.

The mind’s electrical lawns and light and festivities, its aerial blacknesses, its angled fragments, its clouds and chutes of associations and opinions and present feelings become the electrical fulminations of excitement in actual moments, the reactive excitement of being with someone. He only half-knows this. He wants it not to be true. He cheats on it.

Dry or magically broad, the images and hypotheses, tentative insights as climate and light, as reality, are lit by
perhaps
and
maybe
and
let us suppose … let us suppose the people are morally limitless.…
The blindman’s buff of mooded half-decision in him, his blind temperament and headlong mood make me feel he is stupid. And cowardly. I don’t think he knows about people’s minds and bodies remembering the past. Or he does know and goes into a rage.
He wants what he wants when he wants it.
Remembered bits fuel stuff; they mess things up too and block possibilities. I have an invisible force of temporary conclusion in a quickened mental light. Emotions here scratch and trigger things as if they were, in an electric sense, overloaded and unstable. They set off pale flames of emotional heat which burn jigglingly. I am hungry to bully him into silence toward my life. I hate his nervous examination of how much life (and youth) is in me.

He pursues the rage thing (he may think he knows what I am thinking); he says as if dismissively but watching me closely, “You’re pitifully ugly.”

He means physically and more-than-physically. And eerily he means I am not good enough for him which is fine with me. His tone is that he is disappointed in me, and that he is free-willed and determined and “goaded.” The part of the insult that was just maneuvering and the part that was bluff and the part that was real hatred are elements of the giant humiliation and great elevation and as if great drama I felt talking to him, that day and other days, my dad, a full-grown male, a dying one. A lot of his mind and
opinions
are in that pantomimic, bulging-eyed stare.

Some of the new meaning now that I am grown swings definingly and blurrily. As a child, one had been a living consolatory factor and victim close to his heart, a measure of his life. The inner flush of attitude is unsayable but feelable hotly, like sweat; it has an aroused heartbeat.

A polite outer blindness takes over protectively. Dad and I are
wartime buddies
and to desert him would be a
serious
betrayal.
We have our ups and downs.… He can blow up if he wants to.… It’s bad for him but I can take it.

Ah, I am lying to myself. Actually I can’t take it … not anymore. He has stupid methods: flattery and blackmail and then abuse.
He was always NO GOOD.
Well,
So what?
The next stab and opening-up-of-feeling in me has the regurgitant wildness and vileness of pride in that I know he won’t stop. He’s always right—he has to be right …

He says, “Are you a hyena feeding on carrion?” Then: “You like to eat the dead like a hyena does?”

His temper is shaped by his past, by things he’s felt in the past, and by his defeat now. For him I’m
truly loathsome
now. An optimistic patience can be cowardice-and-courage strangely mixed. Or a mistake. Amusement—amusement-and-shame—are the most dangerous physically: they arouse even more of Dad’s feelings of love-and-hatred, and he can become really stupid and murderous.