Something Happened

'If you'd give me my own car, I wouldn't have to steal it,' she'll argue when we catch her, and believe she's right.

I'm in the dark:

(My lucid visions bleed together.)

Something terribly tragic is going to happen to my little boy (because I don't want it to) and nothing at all will happen to Derek. Police and ambulances will never come for him. I see no future for my boy (the veil won't lift, I don't get a glimmer, I see no future for him at all) and this is always a heart-stopping omen. When I look ahead, he isn't there. I can picture him easily the way he is today, perhaps tomorrow, but not much further. He is never older, never at work or study as a doctor, writer, or businessman, never married (the poor kid never even goes with a girl), never in college or even in high school; he is never even an adolescent with a changing voice, erupting skin, and sprouts of sweating hair discoloring his upper lip and jaws. I mourn for him (my spirit weeps. Where does he go?). He doesn't pass nine. He stops here. (This is where he must get off. Every day may be his last.) Either he has no future or my ability to imagine him present in mine is blunted. I view the empty space ahead without him dolorously. Silence hangs heavily. I miss him. I smell flowers. There are family dinners, and he is not present. What will I have to look forward to if I can't look forward to him? Golf. My wife's cancer? A hole in one. And after that? Another hole in one.

'I made a hole in one,' I can repeat endlessly to people for years to come.

When obscurity and old age descend upon me like thickest night and shrivel me further into something small and unnoticeable, I can always remember:

'I made a hole in one.'

On my deathbed in my nursing home, when visitors I don't recognize arrive to pay their respects with gifts of very sweet candy and aromatic slices of smoked, oily fish, I may still have it in my power to recall I made a hole in one when I was in my prime — I'm in my prime now and I haven't made one yet. It's something new to start working toward — and it may cause me to smile. A hole in one is a very good thing to have.

'Will you believe it?' I can say. 'I once made a hole in one.'

'Have another piece of smoked fish.'

'A hole in one.'

I don't know what else one can do with a hole in one except talk about it.

'I made a hole in one.'

'Eat your fish.'

'Hello, girls.'

'Did you ever hear the one about the amputee without arms and legs outside the whorehouse door?'

'I rang the bell, didn't I?'

I can picture such scenes of myself in a nursing home easily enough. I can picture Derek out front easily too, slobbering, a thickset, clumsy, balding, dark-haired retarded adult male with an incriminating resemblance to a secret me I know I have inside me and want nobody else ever to discover, an inner visage. (I think I sometimes see him in my dreams.) I bet Arthur Baron doesn't suspect he's there (that I have the potential for turning myself inside out into a barbarous idiot) or that I am stricken chronically with a horror — a horror so acute it's almost an exquisite appetite — of stuttering (or experiencing a homosexual want. Perhaps I already have) or having my tongue swell and stick to the roof of my mouth and be unable to talk at all. (No wonder I am terrified of being condemned behind closed doors, without my even knowing sentence has been passed. Perhaps it's already happened.) But not one day more of life can this fertile imagination of mine provide for my poor little boy.

(What work will he do? What clothes will he wear? Oh, God, I don't want to have to live without him.)

And Kagle's job will be proffered to me and I will accept it. By now, I want it. (By now, I no longer misrepresent to myself that I don't.) Kagle is an enemy: he is blocking my path, and I want him out of my way. I hate him. The need to kick him grows stronger every day, to yawp with contempt right in his hollowing, astounded face. (It would turn to a human skull. I would steam the flesh away in a second.) I'll never be able to do that. Civilization won't allow me to. But I might kick him in the leg if the temptation persists and my self-control flags. I will kick him before I can stop myself. I will be at an utter loss afterward to explain. I might want to die of embarrassment (and I'll feel like a caught little boy).

'Why did you do it?' people will demand.

I'll have to shrug and hang my head. I'll weigh eighty-four pounds.

'He kicked me in the leg,' Kagle will protest to everybody.

'He kicked Kagle's leg.'

'Did you see that?'

'He kicked Kagle in the leg.'

There's nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter's ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He's a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I must not think about him as much as I could if I let myself, and I hate his nurse, whom I propel over the threshold — throw her out of my house — bracing her below with one arm to prevent her from falling to the ground and suing me. She falls anyway and sues me. The repulsive woman exudes an unpleasant odor of rancid grease mixed with dust and perfumed bath powder. She bathes mornings and evenings. Her hair is ghastly white. Her cleanliness is reproachful. I can't bear her intrusive familiarity. She treats me with no more solicitude than I get from my family, and she's a salaried employee.

I know what hostility is. (It gives me headaches and tortured sleep.) My id suppurates into my ego and makes me aggressive and disagreeable. Seepage is destroying my loved ones. If only one could vent one's hatreds fully, exhaust them, discharge them the way a lobster deposits his sperm with the female and ambles away into opaque darkness alone and unburdened. I've tried. They come back.

It's all Kagle's fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byootefool instead of beautiful and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him — I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress.

'Heh-heh,' he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes.

'Heh-heh,' I want to mock back. I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I'd like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him.

'Andy,' I tell him, 'I'd like to hit you across the face with that lamp.'

'Heh-heh,' he says.

'Heh-heh,' I reply.

I chuckle kindly when I see him, joke with him snidely about Green's vocabulary and well-tailored, showy clothes, help him dutifully in ways he can observe. I weighed one hundred and ninety-eight pounds this morning, down four and a half since Monday (when I decided to begin losing weight), and am nearly a whole foot taller than he'll ever be.

'Heh-heh,' he wants to know. 'How you getting along with that kid in the Art Department?'

'Fine.'

'The one with those small titties.'

'She's young enough to be my daughter.'

'What's wrong with that? Heh-heh.'

'Heh-heh. I've got these call reports for you from Johnny Brown.'

'Didn't think I noticed, did you? Going to cut me in?'