The World Is the Home of Love and Death (31 page)

Ah, it is too hard a story to tell, the evanescence of attachments, the greater importance always of something else, the specific form this takes in one’s life. Simon had begun to respect me as someone who had power. He was not vengeful toward me but he expected to win out in the end, no matter what. He expected me to work in the store, to brush lint off the suits men tried on, to brush men’s behinds and backs: I went blind with distaste. I worked with two black kids in the storeroom, but you can imagine what they needed and how little I could give. Twice, for a few minutes, I suffered hysterical blindness, nerves.

Simon breathes noisily in the small cove of air around him. I suffer nausea when I am near him. What failure means and the pains of increasing age and what male destiny is when it winds down are reflected distortedly in a privileged child and his powers and hislacks—and his tendency to collapse. I have no regrets about what happened. I think it’s funny. I had decided to return to St. Louis and to live with the Bakers for a half year and then transfer to a private school—the scholarship had been arranged for—but Lila had called and said she knew Simon would bore the hell out of me, and she needed me, life was hell, S.L. wouldn’t live with her anymore unless I was there, and so on: “You won’t let me down, will you? And you
know
how S.L. feels about you. The sun rises and sets on your hind end. You may be ugly, but he likes you. Wiley, he doesn’t like me at all anymore.”

I didn’t know if I was strong enough to tell her to fuck off. I didn’t know if I would go home. It weighed on me. I hadn’t inwardly signed off toward my dad as I had toward Lila. I didn’t know anything.

Simon. The albatross spirit of that aging man mounts on a thermal of last-minute heat, a heat of the feeling of possibility of last-minute victory, a triumph with, over, through the luminously reputable child, “the bluebird of happiness to a dying man,” thus, S. L. Silenowicz. I mean the albatross knew that, knew the terms on which I was summoned—well, asked or sought, even besought—by his sister, the quickest-witted one in the family, the one who’d had the most
fun
, if I can put it like that. Let us imagine the broad-beamed, big-faced senator on a visit, and the child tells the senator’s fortune, and takes a walk with him around the yard, the senator’s arm on his shoulder, the two discussing armament, the Spitfire versus the Messerschmidt. It is not a day when interest flags. The generation gap is bridged well enough. The senator leaves. Now I am sitting on Simon’s lap, a rigid boy trying not to be rigid, ugly, you know, wearing glasses, with badly cut, ugly hair; the boy is wearing a slack suit and Buster Browns. It hardly matters though, since I was the child who was not a child, but who was, off and on,
a bright bird of a soul
(S.L.), now a blue jay, I might add, cawing and mischievous, now a cuckoo in some other child’s nest, now a silent red cardinal, bright-bright-faced, now a dimly visible, recessive bluebird haunting the shadows, a paled sunburst on its breast and—if one thinks of everyone as bird-souled—then in an invisible aviary, undergoing one adventure after another, the birds shrieking and cawing and darting from room to room among the shadows and in the pallor of emotional light that is all that these domestic adventures permit—if one sees the smaller bird in the talons of the larger one—or escaped while the larger one is shot and is dying, one might suggest the complicity and the complexity of the chase-and-response.

But what it was felt as was, oh, imprisonment and brief horror. Uncle Simmy wanted me to run for him, to show what I had learned, to demonstrate how much stronger I was after visiting him. And so I did, but I was in the slack suit and not in shorts. And I was unhappy because of what lay ahead of me—I felt the melancholia of wanting things to be O.K. with him even while loathing him for not knowing what to do, for being so Christly stupid. I didn’t really dislike him. The plunge and whir of the child’s mind and Uncle Simon’s deadish fixity, the procession of imageries a greedy and unhappy child’s opinions are, the history of abductions, the smiles of the late light among the leaves, the half-wish in the child for death.… Oh I remember. Oh how I remember. And then the dog showed up, a dog I knew from when I was with the gang of boys, a neurotic terrier that we, the boys, knew bit erratically.

Be careful, I said to Uncle Simon. Watch out. That dog bites.

No dog bites if it is carefully treated, Uncle Simon said, and he stretched out his hand.

The dog bit him, and that, of course, is the end of the story.

S.L. and Wiley, Saturday, 8:10
A.M.
,

April 1944

The time-ridden tickling of the air and the rustle of real moments: wakefulness. I open my eyes and light overprints me, the boy in that room, seen-from-years-further-on, visible from the corner of my eyes in the present tense of the memory and from far away now as I write. Then my consciousness in the room is like a ship placing its shadow on water as it goes along, the waters of the moments. On one bare shoulder, where the pajama top has fallen away, is a single gleaming epaulet of light. The lightly muscled boniness of the boy, the shy-looking skin, newish since puberty, are freakish. The mind moves secretively. If I begin when the story has gone on for a long time, then the characters should be known to be dependent on mostly unexamined memory. Such dependence is a flickering blindness alternating with sight.

The skull has boyish hair atop it. The skin registers light. Left-over, faded hallucinations from sleep and memories and distortions of the senses in the changes since puberty, the self is shadowy, undefined—I am rigged with the question
Is this me?
The sense of who
I
am was wrecked in my sleep, and this anguishing vulnerability is me, but I am foreign to myself. This is in a bedroom in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, in Missouri. It is 1944, the last year before people like us knew about the bomb and the camps. My father by adoption, S. L. Silenowicz, has risen from the other bed in the room, the twin to the one I am in, and he is sitting on my bed.

One story is that this is the sixth year of his invalidism. This is a month before his death but we don’t know that. The story of his life and then the story of his invalidism and then the story of his tie to me during his illness are coming to an end; perhaps we did feel that but musically, as a sense of coherence in a form yet to be worked out. I am his adopted son: William
Wiley
Silenowicz. I was born Aaron Stein. He and I don’t look alike, but I will look like him when I am old. I will look like both my fathers and like myself as well.

S.L. is ill with a bad heart and uncontrollably high blood pressure; killingly high blood pressure wasn’t treatable yet in those years. And only some diseases were easily diagnosed, and his was one. I mean the one assigned to him. He has had four strokes so far. And been in a coma three times. We were told each time that if he did recover he would be a vegetable, but he never became a vegetable. He is forty-four years old.

Wrecked by sleep and dreams, my mind moves with a drowning hiss and thump (of the heart) of my being shipwrecked in the wreck of my father’s life … the wreck of the ship.
The Unbearable.
Life is unbearable. He has a flattedly musical voice,
gentlemanly
North Texas with a friendly overlay of jokingly lower class—you have to talk that way in America. He had Southern and Midwestern
rural
tones and he was folksy-incantatory, my invalid father. It was very male. He is telling me to wake up; it is not an emergency; he is using affectionate, coaxing tones, distant tones, those of a sick man.

He doesn’t like people anymore. He is rude or silent with people. He plays with dialects and kinds of discourse in tones that are sometimes educated and openly socially complicated just as he did when he was well, but he does it mockingly—with people he doesn’t like. His voice has grown smaller and paler with illness, but my father’s voice is still the voice of a man who is large-chested. When he was well, he sometimes coaxed and wheedled and talked to bartenders or business partners and women and children and old people and animals—it was interesting to me, my father’s voice and the ways he spoke that were formed in our flyaway democracy—but in a way he does only spiels and confessions, only those.

He is shaking my foot and saying—my head is turned away from him and he can’t see my eyes—“Dead to the world? Can you hear me in there? Listen to me: we want you out here—” He has promised not to wake me. I’m a growing boy and under extreme strain, and my mother and father get scared at night and make scenes. S.L. says, “The world is waiting for you—wake up, Mr. Shakespeare—” I’m not a young poet or anything like that, but people think I have a big vocabulary. “Mr. Too Piss-elegant for Words. You’re the
Black Prince of the Morning
—I admit it—time to get up so you can honor us with a sight of your bright and shiny eyes. You’re a sight for sore eyes, this bright and shiny morning.” He is kneading my thigh, patting the side of my thigh. “Talk to me, Sleeping Beauty.… Cat got your tongue?”

Loneliness in a voice is like small movements of water in a pool. I am not detached from him: what he does affects me physically. The sound is caught in my ear like the noise of a fly.

“You’re the Cock of the Walk.… What a sleeping beauty.… I’m the Queen of the May.…
I want to see your eyes.…
Don’t look at me like you’re seeing a ghost … I’m not a ghost—You’re asleep with your eyes open.… Why don’t you join us for a while.…”

The ghost stuff of waking hardens.

Every surface in the room has a sheen in this light—the pillow near my eyes glows with whiteness. After the sly, scary changeability of identity I had in my dreams, I don’t want to talk to him. There is a sense of papery masks and of staginess, lies and truths hidden by a mask of silence. Now he is touching my shoulder.

I am in the voice-house of him speaking. His voice, poolingly, lappingly, moves in the dark flow of bedroom minutes. I am immersed in connections to his voice. He says from his partly recumbent position on the bed—rehearsingly, remindingly—“Get up: It’s like tearing down a stone wall with my bare hands to wake you. Wiley hates to leave his sleep; Wiley loves his sleep … he’s a dreamer.… Listen: sleep is common as dirt: there are more sleepers than nice people: Get up, sleepyhead.… Did you have nice dreams, are your handsies cold, are your feetsies cold, are you cold?
Oh how I hate to get up in the morning
—is that what it is with you? Did you have bad dreams? Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”

I blink with my eyes unfocused, say, “I’m awake …”

The fullness of blood and erection—the potency there is in my sleep (and not in his), this arousal at-the-edge of hallucination converts it, his voice, into an ironic diabolism.

“Jesus …,” I mutter
nuttily
, a first-thing-on-waking response to avoid saying something to hurt him, to avoid pushing him away from me. One’s consciousness moves from
thing
to
thing
in its acrobatics of attention and decision, moves across what is called
a distance
, time and bits of air and a sense of magic in the skull. After having been a child so long I’m a pretty boy with
an erection
and trying to keep it away from S.L.—I’m pretty big and he’s a joker—and partly I am being shameless: let him kill himself if he wants.

Attempting privacy is hopeless, me so skinny and my pajamas gaping, and Dad being sick and
shameless
, nostalgically shameless, twenty times as much as I am.

I try to cover myself.
He’s
there …

“Boy, you’re crazy—you’re a crazy boy … I never saw anything as crazy as you.” He’s looking down a chute of darkness at a white, very young prick. His face is foreign in his doing that. When I was little, I’d had finer hair and a little boy’s chest. I find this change to be dizzying. I am blurred by it. He has an odor—this is like being in the odor in a classroom the day of a really scary test. S.L. leans over my sleep-heated body to kiss me. He is bigger and fleshier than me in his pajamas—not taller. We have had symbols and
symbolism
at school but I understand them as ways of saying
my father kisses me too much
without anyone knowing what you are saying. His real fingers touch my actual chest. I push his hand away—gently—I don’t want to upset him, his
heart.…
The unwilled rationality of real time and real light, the elements of restless reality inside the room, my dad, with his arm partly over my skinny neck, is sloppily kissing the side of my head.

I endure his actual breath. He is big, sad, smelly with
loneliness
and a kind of sloppy cruelty. I have a thin blanket wadded in front of my cock. The smell of him is redolent of my exhaustion. In the six years he’s been ill I haven’t left him often.

The throbbing blindness-and-sight of memory is both statistical and esthetic; the flickers are like a lot of big leaves on an old tree when you are up on one of the higher branches in the tree. Old feelings are present—I know this man. I partly ache with life, a form of seamanship. I brace my legs, skinny legs and count the seconds.… LET IT KILL ME … BIG DEAL … WHAT THE FUCK … LET IT GO …
LET’S GO
 … A madman-hero. I endure then I reproduce sarcastically silently his posture—tinkeringly. I make my stomach stick out. I purse my lips. Such physical sarcasm—or is it physical exploration?—is forbidden now but was permitted when I was little. He is saying, “Give me a nice kiss—do me a favor …” He is moving his face over my cheek—I bring my forearm to block him, and I go on imitating him. He has the gall to tug at my arm.