The World Is the Home of Love and Death (33 page)

“This is a crazy day,” he says disgustedly. With
real
disgust.

My sense of truth in opposition to his sense of truth is so intense that it is like being asleep and confronted by a mysterious dream while I am still wide-awake: I peer into a folded dream of his truth.…

“You’re too deep in your thoughts to listen to me. You can’t speak to me? You’ve lost all track of time,” he says.

My
future is in my stammering breath,
my
temper and its links to the past—postcards chopped into flashes of further breath—inward and outward blinks. I’m the last person left who will deal with him. When I leave him he will die. Or try to. He has no benefits to confer. My feelings toward him turn glidingly opalescent, translucent, a preening and unstilled plumage—a moral act, known to be one (people talk about it, my staying near him). But I can leave the room and never return. I can plunge at this moment into being through with him. Patterned flashes of adolescent privacy, the will-to-live as not-a-child, this isn’t spark-speak stuff. I let it show on my face where it is pictorially epigrammatic—you know the ruses of adolescence?

I have the potency of strength and will and of erectile tissue … I-can-be-revenged … I am
real.

He shouts at me, at what is on my face: “I DON’T LIKE YOU! I don’t like you when you THINK.…”

One recognizes things a bit after they occur; this syncopation is part of the guess-hall of one’s mind when something is happening, when you’re trying to talk to your father, say. My strength is a form of my terror and is a form of terror to others … off-and-on. In the pornography of intelligence, my sense of his nearness to death and my closeness to hallucinatory-sexual elements that fill me lately are fed by everything that is
here.

I say, “Leave me alone.”

My
leave me alone
is a force of will in the room: this suddenly tinges and tints and tinctures Dad’s rage in retrospect. It colors everything now. One feels oneself as a fire in the room, burning everything—including him.

Dad’s temper and will are a really disastrous tsk-tsk locally: they
ruined
my childhood.… I wish I were well bred, lucky, well educated and with a superb father. But my family are only people.

My dad goes on with some disgust: “Keep your eye on the ball.… Pay attention to something
that’s not just yourself.…
Would you mind doing me and the world and yourself that favor please?”

Why doesn’t he shut up? His authority is how pitiable he is. Present tense actuality is all there ever is at a given moment but I feel indebted to him because I was a child once in his care, and he tried to amuse me. Essences, the essence of him, the essence of me don’t exist in the moment. The surfaces of things contain
meanings
, skin and hair and light on the wall and the way each person is standing and breathing and the mood he’s in and his emotion
today.
The grammar of tones and eyes, in the geography of the moments as they move, is the biggest element of how “Truth” changes in real life in the geography of the moments without becoming untrue. All the geographies: he’s a sick man.

The “truths” I see I have to gamble on. If even a few people saw
correctly
, the history of the world wouldn’t be what it is. You have to assume a universal degree of error and of
I don’t give a fuck.
This leaves room for the other person, leaves you room
if-you-see-it-well-enough.

Daddy is a man and is suffering. I’m a kid and I want to live.

We’re father-and-son (sort of). We’re not The Same Person. If you love him, he thinks you’re a good sort, and that that means you are the same person he is, and that means that his mind and will are the same as yours—which is stupid but worldly.

“You’re a smart kid, no two ways about it,” Dad said sarcastically in a voice that meant he intended the opposite of the words, that I was dumb,
and
if I was smart in some ways, it was in ways that didn’t matter. My dad is still carrying on with me; so it isn’t certain he despises my mind.

Dad says, “A man can always hire someone to remember things for him.” He has more systems for being in a present moment than

I do: those are the marks of age and of limited mind. it’s part of the way he is someone-with-power. Of course, he’s lost most of his power.

Dad says sarcastically, “Are you made of diamond?” But it’s changed, the pitch or tone of intention, the meaning that’s being thrown at me; now it’s virulent
love
stuff—that sort of righteousness. He says, “Are you true blue and sharp as a diamond?” He’s said that in ironic speech to me often, but, of course, the tone of irony changes and I am supposed to notice even if he uses the same words. He’s calming down. Maybe. The nervous squinting and clenched eyes of my mind watch him and listen with blobs and jerks of comprehension, little detonations of which show—the guesswork and wildness, and the evasive pallors of temporizing in a young person, birdy flickings, flinchings, conceit and wrenching pain in the absence of personal favoritism in the other at the moment. Us and our nerves: a faint perspiration on him; I am cooler and want to be really cool: I have a sweaty, nerve-slimed coolness.

The hope of grace—a mood-wrecked strain—tough, blank faces. You breathe in the tremendous restless weight of
time
—my mind is a dancing cemetery with a sort of waking order of revenant moments glimpsed;
I don’t have to love this bastard
but I do in a way.… Ah, Christ, the fluidities of event. Do you want to be A Great Rememberer? S.L., being ill and with a lot of time, perhaps, had become A Half-Great Rememberer.

He said, “Are you holding a grudge, Wileykins? You want to use your head and look around you and not use your heart? Well, listen, there’s a catch; there’s always a catch—fee-fi-fo-fum: I smell the blood of an Englishman: there’s always a string attached—you want to be a whippersnapper? Do me a favor: don’t be sensitive … is that O.K. with you, pooperkins?”

I think it takes serious bravery to talk to anyone.

He says, “Don’t look so sour. Mr. Sour-grim.… The scene is over … I had my say.… Remember what I said—I meant every word of it.”

It’s likely you haven’t the words for what you’re feeling. I try to hold it uncaptioned, and time tugs it from the closed, imprisoning hands of my mind like a hawk pulling at and dismantling what the madman-hero—thrill-mad, resentful—has captured. Memory never shows things in sequence although you can ask it about the sequence.

Memory can’t reproduce the real flavor of waiting in a real light or the reality of the pain then. I am sitting on the windowsill, my arms folded, my pajamas still falling off me, waiting for his peacemaking to finish. I think memory tends to romance, omitting the details and the suspense and the tired fear and anxiety and defiance, and a lot of the uncaringness. It omits the ordinariness and the scandal.

Sometimes conscious memory is so much sweeter than reality that compared to living I feel remembering like being gripped by an angel, the blinding brevity and the guidance.

I said to Dad, “I want to get dressed now …”

He said correctingly, “Go ahead-—shower and shit and shampoo …” showing me how we talk, how men talk, how I should talk.

You can’t remember the waiting or the mental oddity of thought while you shit. The cold water when I reach over to the sink and get some drops on my fingers from the leaky faucet and rub my eyes with the spottily, coldly wetted fingers and then palms while I’m sitting on the toilet, I remember some of the recent moments of the talk, in a dried out puzzled way.

I try to
rise above it
—a milk drinker. I have an idea of my innocence: it’s very iffy and partial. Those who claim to be totally innocent are punished by stupidity. You can be moderately, limitedly innocent. You have to understand contemporary male innocence as it’s practiced around you. And whatever else.

To be “moral"—which is to say kind to your dad and not horrified and not broken by him in his illness—is thrilling and dirty.

Dad comes walking into the bathroom—he often follows me in here—S.L. says, “You’re like a monkey with a load of coconuts—be a good monkey, do me a favor, see no evil, do no evil, say no evil.… Be a little white-bottomed monkey—with a monkey face …”

I don’t have a monkey face. He is seeing something else, the new-boned quality.

He pays no attention. “Not so little a monkey—do us all a
big
favor: see no evil, do no evil, say no evil …” He can’t think of what else to say.

In the John

The opinions of a dreamer are set oddly in time. A daydream is a lying correction of waking life, of otherness and multiplicity and of the moment, in favor of one’s dreams, of what one’s head can picture. In real life you can prove you’re O.K. and sane masculinely by hitting someone. Daddy patted me, my hair.
One
, I said to myself,
two.
Actuality is unconstrained by my ideas of it. But I am often constrained by ideas. Daddy is running the cold water. I think, approximately,
Oh whoop-de-doo, goddamn fucking MESS, snafu: it’s all fucked up good—and proper—PERIOD.

My hands remember things, my back does too; my feet remember this tile floor. My mind peers at nothingness: I am moving a turd out of me. Daddy is standing at the sink and I am on the toilet seat, hunched over my arms; my elbows on my knees, a yelled-at boy taking a shit—maybe patient, maybe loving, maybe malicious as hell: I don’t know for sure. The familiarity of hiding my rage (and my boyish power) and shitting itself produce a gooey and oozy sensation, partly calcified, like my own tissues and bones and effluvia being squeezed in a football tackle or an embrace.

For a moment, I am blind-souled. Part of the drama of the legibility of my breathing is the drama of breath itself, a biological universal.

“Are you sent us from heaven? Don’t make me laugh,” Dad says. It’s an old joke. I listen skimpily, with a pulsing heart, with no privacy except in lying and in deceiving him. Kinship, kiddyship … a clement attention toward him, as if he weren’t in the room, me among the stuttering waves of sensation: is this an emotion? Is the immediate wish to leave, is the impetus to get out—is that choking and private impetus an
emotion?
Feelings run off like the sensibility, like images from a mirror into the air.…
We were happy; I was happy; make me happy some more.

“Do you love me or not?” I mutter and ask. My mouth is in the crook of my elbow, and my head is down. I say it but really I am thinking it.

He says in a weird tone, “Now and then: it
depends
 …” Then he says in a different tone, insiderly, perhaps also partly true and sad and cruel: “I can’t love someone like you.” It’s all true, all of it, whatever he says, ha-ha. It’s true if it’s properly understood, but I am only the person who makes an effort to understand him now.

I would like him to apologize for the tirade. I don’t want to be so quick to do it next time; he’s not supposed to do tirade stuff at all because it strains his heart and sets off a climb in his blood pressure. But Dad hates shit that turns him into an obedient citizen; he controls his own uncontrol.

Time-riddled, lovely, slippery Dad. I would like real life to be as I dream it and as I plot it in my head, with rational clear meanings, ones that I know. Like I expect to hear the universe scream when I get an erection on the street in a dream. Or in real light. Or where my dad can see it. But real life is different from that stuff. An erection of mine amuses S.L. It’s keepaway time. Ideals and dreams can be anything anyone says they are; they can’t be measured … they laugh at real stuff—that’s what they’re for.

“Are you dead-to-the-world while you’re wide awake?” he asks—he means am I daydreaming. He uses a kind of chivvying, half-baby-talk as in the past.

My posture hides my midsection as I sit on the john. But he knows what is going on … the longish, fluffed out thing. And I am dead-to-the-world while wide awake and close to sexual illusion. He was deep inside my privacy in the insobriety of the superminute which means all the minutes so far—in the really tippy thing of
two
people, the thing of not chickening out and leaving the refracted heat of the presenee of the other soul for the comfort of one’s own daydreams. A
clement attention
can feel hot in you—aroused, arousal is a lighted thing like an orange heat, the dance of it, in my pallor.

How much nerve do I have? A reluctance to see and judge veils my worded opinions as well as my sight of the slightly flabbed skin of my dad’s neck and the gray beard stubble there. Dad is forty-four. How much am I willing to see? The opacities of bodies in real light is incomplete, the mooded dimensions which become calculation, a placement of the I in the steadying curve of the ribs. My visual registry of my dad includes my estimate of his health. It seduces him to be noticed.
He’s worn me out.
I clean myself of shit carelessly:
He’ll live to the afternoon.…