The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey
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her voice is large and echoey in the bathroom but it curls down into smallness and music, hooks him and then, as an aftereffect, yanks him. His ears hum—his skull shivers. Little packets of skin on his chest vibrate. Bits of his mind explode daintily—he is close to convulsions.
She stops. Blank-faced, this mother, here, has some fear: a sense of shame, calculations about scandal, the aroma of female apocalypse. The garish light and suffering, in the child, the sheer final violence of his disorder in the white, cubelike room, with its chill and pallors and half heats, are convulsed; only his illness-weakened body’s shyness halts the progress of the convulsions. Shyness saves him.
“You look like you’re going to run amok,” she says, getting it wrong. “I’m not good at boys; I hope you’re not too wild.” She used to be, earlier, someone of almost unshadowed strength of opinion. Now she is evasive and blown about, uncertain, subject to fate, playful. Embarrassed.
“Listen: Be smart. Learn to be nice. I don’t use big words, but I like brains. I like it when people are honest with me. I’m heartless, you know, that’s what they all say. The way to my heart is to look, listen, and be nice to me. I have a nice side. I’m not one of those women who make a big thing out of sugar and spice and everything nice; everything doesn’t have to be nice; I do what I do, take me or leave me. I know something’s going on in you. Tell me what’s on your mind, why don’t you?” She asks this in a melodious voice out of keeping with the words but not as much out of keeping when you heard her as when you remembered and puzzled over what you thought she said. This one likes to fool people.
To the child the sweetness of her voice is like a bunch of robins pulling worms from him as from a lawn after a rain. She poisons my ears with sweetness. The wind inside and under my hands lifts and moves them; they shift like leaves—it is an odd, manual half-smile. And the skin on his tiny, rash-fiery chest stirs and wrinkles … He guesses that her intention is to amuse and to stir hopes and half-hopes, and the child half blindly looks at her. Her voice when it is being particularly pretty is like an odd kiss on the mind under the bone under the hair of my head and on what is in my chest.
“Look at you—you’re shaking—what’s the big idea, will you tell me, please?” She is looking at my body more than at my face, perhaps at the way the bones show. If she sees in his face the loony shifts of lit and slopping and breaking and melting and burning lights which are his mind holding for the moment his sense of her, she avoids it as too difficult to know about and to answer to. She is someone who hates to be mistaken. By looking at my body, she makes us into two people: one is an odd citizen and the other is a liar. “You want me to go ‘Rock-a-bye-baby in the tree-top’! Will you come down? I don’t know what you’re doing and I can’t tell if you’re crazy or not.”
This making a deal is new to me; it is not like before at all. It is racking. Meaninglessness and trickery seem sweet—honeyed.
I wanted to tear her open, I wanted to dive into her and scatter her as one does leaves from a pile of leaves. As one breaks a toy. This came and went in blinks.
“I’ve read that baths are calming, hot baths—they do it a lot in Hollywood. And,” she said half under her breath, “in loony bins. I’ll give you a bath; you’ll like that. Maybe I should give you a bath.
You’ll have to cooperate.” She cheated when she negotiated; it was not a joke. Propping the child with one hand, she went ahead. She says, “Hold still,” and she moves toward the tub, an arm’s distance, and finds her arm is not long enough; and she glances at the trembling child, maybe incurably deranged, and she remarks, “You have a speaking face. Hold still.” And she takes her hand, her face, her eyes, the gorgeous bird consciousness in each of them, away—I am a mass of audiences, distant and near audiences. “I think you know what I’m saying. Now stay still; don’t fall. I’m turning on the water.”
I predicted to myself the sound of water coming from a faucet—part of the continuous sequences, now perhaps partially restored, of the world. An incomplete and strange restoration. My home for a long time now has been—madness. Catatonia. Autism. The movement is open at one end—inconceivably open. Memory hides it that the three walls of consciousness in a present moment have a fourth side open: perhaps I will die now. In memory, I am a child at the door of that room, with the figures in the room mostly stilled.
But in the real moment the child was sitting on the sink and staring unfocusedly at the ghostly distance between the back of her head and my eyes. The pain (of madness) was close and granular; a suffocating delirium. It compressed part of my consciousness so that the distance between sleeping and waking was no distance at all. My mother does not smell of the real belonging of before. Her breath is not one of the decisive terms of companionship in my language. I breathe in a rhythm that I share with no one. Any gamble I made may end in my return to madness: it is part of what gambling is, it is part of the stakes. Madness is at the open edge of the moment. My childhood sense of farce was not a joke but rested on the utter faithlessness of spirit in the flatness of madness and farce: a happy ending of a terrible kind. Vile. But to accept this woman means the absolute has rejected me. I have two mothers.…
Now I suddenly focus and see her, the softened volumes of Lila’s body busying itself with the tub.
I remembered the smell of linoleum and words such as “hot wasser.” This present version of my mother in a white room did not smell like the other one in a brown room. These walls did not smell like the walls in a country house at the edge of fields of mud and snow. The woman’s hair and arms—the softness behind the shoulders (where my hands rest when I am bathed in a sink in some kind of cloth-lined basin: this is from long before) are not the same.
The rhythm of illness and shock and the truth of death are the original terms of my life, and they make a faery music. The glamour and finely made tunefulness of so much oddity line the inside of my eyelids and the inside of my ears and the inside of my mouth with an unfamiliar sensation of newness as home, as the familiar thing now. The sound of water in the tub has, then, its own infinity for me which this woman notices.
“You like water, do you? Are you an Arab in the desert, are you a little sheikh?” The faithless and farcical little gambler stares—and listens.
I did not speak, because speech refers to absent things, and I could not tolerate absence: whatever is real is here, near me. Words are a category of extreme failure in these kidnaper-rooms, chambers of time unexpectedly askew. I was astounded to feel that any pardon extended by me toward the wrong woman caused a certain amount of cure. A state of pardon is unlike a state of illness. But I knew it was blasphemy … I knew it was violently wrong.
The paradoxes of observation heartbreakingly start with dissimilarities. I am wrenched into observing things; this woman is not the same as before. Something has killed me but I am not entirely dead: I have a seed of life in me. The mind’s limits are very clear in childhood. Madness and my mother are perched and gorgeous; one is a horrible bird outside the window and in the mirror about to fly redly in the room. And the other is a strange woman pretending to be the most familiar part of the world for me—this is farce, this is the farcical underpinning of my reality—my reality, such as it is.
Splashingly enormous, the water noise transports me. The sound in the earlier house was never like this. I begin to topple from the sink.
She is not looking at me; she is saying, “See how calm I’m being; some people would say that’s a miracle.” Then she looks and she cries out, “Whoa! Hold your horses!” She half rises and reaches; she restores my balance; when her hand touches me, the mood of prettiness from before makes her touch incandescent. The complications of her identity unlock me, and my openly thumping heartbeat authenticates the circumstance as interesting to me.
She glances at me, and she shoves me—settling a doll in place on a couch. “Now, let’s have a little hot water on the subject. Watch my dust … as they say. Listen, I think you’re just too cunning for words; now it’s your turn to flatter me and be nice and just keep your balance, Mr. Rag Doll,” she says as she tests and alters the proportions of hot to cold in the water.
The noise of the water is louder and