The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey
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of the street.
“Nahuhhhhhhh. I won’t see God if you’re here. Wait: now, there He is …”
“You masturbate too much,” Jass says, and hits me on the arm, the side of the shoulder, hard. This is a very quiet neighborhood. The intersection is silent, is empty. He looks at me from a distance. “Admit it,” he says.
He is notorious for talking dirty in the locker room and for doing dirty things and getting everyone else to do them. I shake my head.
He says abruptly, addressing my (comparative) purity: “You—and Winston Churchill …” Noble and unnecessarily ambitiously disciplined.
Then he jumps me and we are wrestling. He is further into exerting himself to win than I expected—the strained, wrestlingly moving, tensed-and-taut physical weight and will are a shock, are dismaying—he is right on me, right on top, like an animal, his braced haunches and physical mass, the fleshiness, wriggling tautly with wild, would-be-victorious purpose.
I hammer him in the face, saying, “Don’t you ever think about ideals?”
He is forcing my arms down. He looms over me. He demands with a surprising amount of breath and only a little breathlessness, “What are you thinking about now? Are you looking for God?”
I frighteningly turn and twist. We’re leery of the ways we each think the other is a nut. We’re as if dressed in spikes to keep feelings off us. They leap bodilessly on us all the time anyway, feelings that seem like cat-family moods, dog moods, horse moods.
“I have Christian ideals,” he says, still breathless, sitting on me, suffocating me.
I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.
I find fighting with someone shocking, dispurifying: it dirties the very air, the very envelope of the world. I half expect birds to fall from the sky, poisoned.
“Shit, get off me,” I said, close to madness. He and I both know I am dangerous despite all my precautions.
He had me pinioned. He watched me in a peculiar way—with a haughtiness-of-a-sort. “It’s all bullshit,” he says. And he gets up.
I see as if down a hallway and through a partway-open door; I see something-or-other in him and me: some of what I see becomes words, although not entirely or clearly. We used to wonder if we would find it easy to kill, to lead others, to be commanders. He said that that was bullshit but he asked, too, if it was bullshit, but he wasn’t asking me.
He was willing to accept the distance between souls. I don’t think he knew yet if such isolation as he felt was incurable. He’s asking for company—companionship—something. But he doesn’t trust me, and he wants to be the winner. Having released me, he stands, and I see the sunlight on his forehead and nose, a subtle armor protecting him from nothing.
“Maybe it is all bullshit, cocksucker” I say.
I admired Jass. I was pretty sure he would be admired anywhere in the world he went—admired and pitied … the beautiful sand-colored one.
I drew on my studies and I said, in order to be nice—a degree of clement attention: “If I combine original and primary … I get originar?. Do you know, does the originary real world matter?”
He shrugged. No one at school ever gave away what he or she really felt (truly thought) to anyone, not really. Or the details of what he or she knew. Jass maybe wanted to play at serious talk or intelligent talk (the latter was the term used by somewhat better-bred kids).
The sport, the actual dimensions of the game here, has to do with power, real power in real sunlight. He wants to know which levers control fear and death and being amused in the world. He wanted to be like me but not completely like me, not a Jew—not haunted. This is a moment of my education that mattered, this knowing myself head-on from him and also from inside me, two ways at the same time, glaringly and with a blur so that I squinted.
His actual face in sunlight—and then the air and light at yet another intersection, at the high point of this enclave of houses, yet another perspectival drooping and curving crucifix lined with well-tended palaces—are part of a moment raw with limited and eccentric friendliness. It wasn’t perfect.
He said, “Do you believe in Heaven?”
“No. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” Silence. He said, “I think Heaven is a great thought.”
“Are you serious?” It was good to be tactful if someone was serious about some pious matter or other.
“I’m serious,” he said with his eyelids half shut—that meant he was lying, but not entirely. So did him having his eyes wide, wide open and fixed directly on you, which he did next.
I asked, “Are you being sarcastic?”
“You’re the one who’s sarcastic.”
“You are! You’re being sarcastic!”
“You’re looking at yourself.”
“No, I’m not.” I started to laugh exasperatedly. He didn’t really know how to talk about a subject.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
“Your Adam’s apple is funny,” I said.
The present-tense eyes of the Protestant boy have a quality of well-practiced, frigidly hot attentiveness. His is the best attention I know at this point in school. He takes athletic, picayune, little breaths; he listens with no real movements of his eyes. They have a quality of male will—sort of. Focused, his eyes have, when they look at you, a mocking, American love letter thing—upper middle class, suburban Protestant, deadpan and intelligent.
In the hovering fatedness of any exchange, he says, “Kiss my ass.”
I say to him, “Boy, what crap you hand out.”
Did you ever feel betrothed in your youth to the heat of your present-tense reality, to the slippery and sliding focus on trying to talk—something like that? At yet another intersection, I had a sense of falling, of losing mental control, and my eyes blurred in the all-ways-dimensional now, the mind’s and the world’s great sea, the afternoon light. Real eyes are really real. It is impossible to think your way through moments spent with someone else.
In eight years, Jass will be killed in aerial combat in Korea, because his Sabre jet hadn’t yet been fitted with an afterburner—it was something of a scandal. He had sent me a postcard a month or so before: Dear Smart Guy: Guess what? Now I’m as smart as you …
What do you feel and think when you lose out in an aerial combat for real, when it is going to kill you—is it chagrin you feel? Do you have a sudden knowledge of yourself?
Jass breathes with athletic artfulness. His powers of physical improvisation were really considerable. “Shit,” he says. Then: “Shut up.”
“Sure,” I said, uncertain-eyed, but haughty. I know he likes to hurt people. He likes to play around.
He says, “The way you talk is stupid. Are you an honest person?” I can’t untangle the mockery, or figure out the seriousness.
Syllables in their purposes alight—like geese in a dimly lit yard with a masked whisper and rush, caught air, materialized, aerial—what-he-says—what he said never amounted to much. Interplay blows you this way and that. Meanings, obscene, nonsensical. Incomplete. I can’t handle him.
His rough, mocking gaze drags across my cheeks and eyes. He jumps on me again. We are arguing this way—about beliefs. We are studying affection. This was not particularly intelligent. “Let’s have a truce,” I say. The moment, the smells when he throws me down, the