Something Happened (43 page)

“Mine does too.”)

“I can tell you something else that’s funny,” he revealed to me recently. “Whenever I tickle somebody, I laugh.”

“How come?” I exclaim. This strikes me funny an instant later and I begin to laugh.

“I don’t know,” he squeals in reply, laughing also. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because I think it’s funny! Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re laughing!” he cries gleefully, and
laughs even louder, bubbling all about with delight and folding his arms around his sides as though his ecstasy is too much for his ribs and spirit to contain.

My boy likes to laugh and would be laughing and kidding jauntily all the time if there were not so many of us in the atmosphere surrounding him to inhibit and subjugate him. I have this constant fear something is going to happen to him. (He’s the kid who gets stabbed to death in the park or falls victim to Hodgkin’s disease or blastoma of the eyeballs. Every time I know he’s gone swimming. Every time he’s away from the house. Every time I know my daughter is driving in a car with older kids I expect to be told by telephone or policeman of the terrible automobile accident in which she has just been killed. There are times I wish they would both hurry up and get it over with already so I could relax and stop brooding about it in such recurring suspense. There are times I wish everyone I know would die and release me from these tender tensions I experience in my generous solicitude for them. I don’t suffer these same acute anxieties about my wife, even though I know she drives about a great deal during the day after drinking. I hardly ever think about her death. Just about divorce. I don’t like cars. Or swimming pools or the ocean.)

I think about death.

I think about it all the time. I dwell on it. I dread it. I don’t really like it. Death runs in my family, it seems. People die from it, and I dream about death and weave ornate fantasies about death endlessly and ironically. (And I find—God help me—that I still do want to make that three-minute speech. I
really do
yearn to be promoted to Kagle’s job. Last night in bed, I stopped dwelling on death for a while and began formulating plans for either of the two speeches I might be asked to make. I might be asked to make none, I found good phrases for both.) Last night in bed after fashioning my good phrases—or was it early this morning while journeying back uncrippled again from sleep?—I dreamed that our maid called me at the office while my wife was out drinking somewhere (or screwing somewhere, I have dreams about that too lately every once in a while and I
don’t like them at all) and told me, in her slurred southern accent, with her voice as deep as a colored man’s:

“Mr. _____, your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn’t breathed for fifteen seconds.”

That was precisely the way the words were floated to me in my dream or beclouded waking moments:

“Mr. _____, your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn’t breathed for fifteen seconds.”

(No name. A gap, a portentous omission, an empty underlining—I don’t know how.)

“What?” I gasped, turning freezing cold with prickling skin. (I was numb and powerless in the presence of that approaching tragedy that was at last about to occur.)

“Mr. _____, your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn’t breathed for fifteen seconds.”

I had no name but knew who I was.

I could hear her clearly on the phone but had trouble understanding and believing her—I could see her woman’s face; it was dark and full and impassive and I kept making her repeat what she was saying by asking “What?”—I could not think what else to do except stall desperately for time by hollering “What?”—and making her repeat her message—and the message from the maid was always the same:

“Mr. _____, your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn’t breathed for fifteen seconds.”

(Time was rushing by, and it was still fifteen seconds.)

“Mr. _____, your boy is lying on the floor of the living room and hasn’t breathed for fifteen seconds.”

(I’m sure I dreamed it.) What would I do if something like that did happen, if I were sitting in my office in the city one uneventful day, like today, a day no different from any of the rest, and received a telephone message from my home that my boy had collapsed on the floor of the living room and seemed to be dying. I know just what I would do. I would telephone the police in Connecticut and let
them
handle it.

(“My boy is lying on the floor of my living room
and hasn’t breathed for fifteen seconds,” I might have to tell them, and it would be just like my dream.)

Then I would sigh ponderously and feel very sorry for myself. I would have to cancel appointments, change plans, and make my way home in a hurry by very slow train. A taxicab all the way would be fastest, but I probably would not think of that until I was already in the railroad terminal waiting for the train to budge out. I would be nervous, frantic. But I would also know that I was not really in that much of a hurry anymore but merely pretending, that it was already over, that I would prefer to arrive after the emergency had been handled by other people and the outcome already determined, one way or the other, since it would be too late for me to be of use anyway. I would not want to tell any of my colleagues and employees in the office why I was leaving early that day because I would not want to subject myself to their looks and exclamations of sympathy and impassioned concern. I would not want to answer their questions when I saw them again. More than anything, I think I would feel inconvenienced. (I always feel inconvenienced when plans are changed.)

I was inconvenienced yesterday when a man my age was killed in a subway station nearby and caused a traffic jam that made me late for a cocktail party with salesmen at which I was expected to be early; his arm caught in the closing doors as he tried to push his way on, but the train started anyway while he was still outside, said the newspapers today, even though it was not supposed to, and dragged him along the station platform until he smashed against pillars and the stone and metal walls of the tunnel into which the subway train roared. His wife was already inside the car and watched the whole thing helplessly (I’ll bet she even clutched his hand and held on, stupidly, in a vain and senseless effort to save him. It was like a dream, I bet. I’ll bet she’s even saying that right now:

“It was like a dream.”)

Another man my age was shot to death in the park yesterday and no one knows why. (Men my age are starting to die of cancers, strokes, and heart attacks
now.) Last week, another man was shot to death in the park, and no one knows why. The week before that, another man was shot to death in the park, and no one knows why. Every week a man is shot to death in the park. No one knows why. A boy was stabbed on the subway. I don’t go into the park. (In Jackson, Mississippi, every year or so, three colored college students are shot to death in cold blood by state police and everyone knows why, so none of the rest of us are afraid.) I’m even still afraid of doors. I’m afraid of closed doors and afraid of what I might spy or what might come in through open ones. I know I nearly died of fear from his tonsil operation that day in the hospital when the attendants rolled him back unconscious through the doorway still and pale, reeking of ether fumes that sickened me, and a crust of nearly black blood inching disgustingly before my eyes out through one of his motionless nostrils. (Only a miracle saved me.) My stomach turned. My head reeled. The room swam.

“What’s the matter?” my wife shrieked at me in panic, looking at me. “What is wrong?”

(I don’t know what she thought I saw or knew about him that she didn’t or what she thought was happening to me that filled her with such alarm.)

I couldn’t speak. I thought I’d vomit (but didn’t feel healthy enough). My ears buzzed, my brain ached, the floor undulated insanely, and I really believe I might have fainted away right then and there (like a woman) if my wife had not jumped up from the bedside of my boy to grab me by the elbow, shocking me with the stinging points of her long fingernails and with her shrill, penetrating shrieks. She held me firmly, her eyes burning upon me as large as blazing lamps. She kept me from falling and helped me, like a feeble invalid, to a chair. (My wife is stronger than I am, and better too, but I must never let her find that out.) She poured a glass of cold water for me from a pitcher that had been set on the table near the bed for my boy. The doctor entered as I was sipping from it and asked if anything was wrong. I shook my head, faking.

“There’s nothing wrong, is there?” I said. “Tell her. He’s all right, isn’t he?”

“Good as gold,” he answered with a smile. “He’s going to be fine. These are his. They used to belong to him. He may want to keep them.”

We threw them away before my boy regained consciousness and knew about them.

I’ve never forgotten that tonsillectomy. (I’ve never forgotten my own.) I still relapse into acute symptom recurrences in which I gag on the sweet, suffocating odor of ether rising from him and remember that pale face and dried smudge of blood desecrating one nostril and recollect with inescapable pain how, back home and recovered, he began crawling obsessively and instinctively (for a little while he was like some living prehuman thing small and obsessed) through the low and musty darkness into our bedroom over and over again after calculating each time until he hoped we were both soundly asleep because it was impossible for him to remain alone at night in his own room. (We did not realize then that it was actually impossible. We thought he was just being smart. I think it was impossible for me to remain alone at night in my own room after my tonsillectomy. I think I remember being allowed to sleep in bed with my mother and father once, and I can’t imagine why they would have let me unless I was ill and scared.) We would chase him out. Each evening, he would not even want to go inside his own room when we told him it was bedtime. We made him. (He was afraid, I think, that we were plotting to nail him in for good as soon as we tricked him into entering and permitting us to close the door. He would not let us close the door. We always had to leave it open at least an inch.) We did not lock him in. We locked him out. We locked ourselves inside our room because we could not stand him crawling back to us all night long with his gaily colored quilt, which he always dragged along with him (and found him huddled up outside against the door on the floor of the narrow, drafty hallway. We had to stifle screams in the morning when we opened our door and bumped him because, at first, we forgot he might be there. Later, we were
almost unable to open our bedroom door because we sensed he was. Sometimes he was not; he was missing, and that was just as appalling until we found him where he was). It was a scary, nerve-wracking time for all of us (mostly, I guess, for him, although we tended to ignore that. I slept out someplace as often as I could. He got over it in a week. It took me longer). It was torture (and he was putting us through it). It was maddening and exasperating to have to lie in bed trying to sleep each night while waiting to hear him testing our doorknob again or scratching against our thick pile carpet as he came worming his way back inside our bedroom again, rousing us, frightening us, from sleep in sluggish protest and torment again, or to awake disgruntled in the morning and discover him lying prostrate on the floor at the foot of our bed or in some corner of the room, with his quilt, near the legs of a dresser or chair, his sticky, heavy-lidded eyes glued shut finally with exhaustion, his misshapen lips lax, swollen, and blubbery, his thumb lying lifeless near his mouth as though it had just fallen out. (What a terrible time that tonsillectomy of his was for me. It was worse than my own. I may never recover from it fully.)

“Stay in your room,” I would command him sternly.

“You have to go back to your room,” I would try to coax him gently in the darkness of our bedroom when some unexpected new reserve of kindness and pity would flow within me (pleading with him, really, to please let us alone). “You can leave the lights on if you want to. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“One of us will stay with you.”

“Then you’ll go.”

“I can’t stay in your room all night.”

“Then why should I?”

“It’s your room.”

“I want to be in your room. I want to stay with you and Mommy.”

“A doctor said you shouldn’t. He said it would be bad for you.”

“What doctor?”

“A doctor we saw.”

“I don’t believe him.”

“Do you want to go see him?”

He was afraid of doctors then and has been afraid of doctors, nurses, and dentists ever since. (He doesn’t ever want to have to have teeth drilled or pulled.) I don’t think he will ever recover from that operation of his fully either. I fear he and my daughter too may never forgive me for permitting their tonsils to become so severely infected that it was necessary for them to be taken to a hospital to have them pulled out (or cut, if that’s what they do. And his adenoids too. He isn’t mad at me about his adenoids because he doesn’t know what they are yet, and neither does anyone else, although those were taken away from him, too. They seem to be highly specialized organs growing inside a person’s pharynx whose only natural function is to be taken out), and he keeps associating men he doesn’t trust (not me, although he doesn’t always trust me) with the anesthetist there, whose appearance he recalls only hazily.

“He gave me an enema,” he alleges with abiding resentment and embarrassment during one of our disorganized discussions about everything that might be on his mind.

“No, he didn’t,” I correct him again. “That was an anesthetic. We gave you an enema at home the night before.”

“He looked like Forgione.”

“He was a Jap. You didn’t even know Forgione then.”

“Forgione is an Italian,” he concedes abstractedly. “Forgione doesn’t like me.”

“Yes he does.”

“No he doesn’t.”

“Yes he does. He does now.”

“I don’t like him.”

“You don’t have to. Just pretend.”