Read an Excerpt
The Runaway Soul
A Novel
By Harold Brodkey OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1991 Harold Brodkey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2799-0
CHAPTER 1
1944:
6:12 a.m.
Sometimes waking feels piggish: you know? Rooting and snuffling and snouting around? Do you think dreams are elegant? I do. I think they are—sometimes.
Anyway, sometimes it seems a shame to leave one's dreams. Maybe it's because real life is hard. I don't, as a rule, have strong opinions about those matters any more than, when I first awake, I know quite who I am or where I am; I don't remember what I am supposed to look like. The unfixity—well, I was adopted into a new family when I was two. Waking up was weird then. I don't remember waking with confident expectations about the color of the hair I had; in life, my hair has changed color often—I was white-blond until I was five, dirty blond for a year, then reddish-blond ever more reddish; and then I had brown hair, dark in midwinter, reddish in spring, blondish (again) in high summer, and so on. And people talked about this, so I erratically knew it was so while it was happening. As a question it was something like a kite attached to me—Wiley's hair as a subject of conversation and of reality. His aura, sort of. My mother, ill in 1944, lately makes scenes about how I look like something the cat dragged in and shame her by not being sane, clean, semi-Godly, sensible, the rest of it; she wants me to be kempt, groomed, whatever the term is.
Hi, I say snidely to the pillow, to wakefulness ... to the morning.
The tone of snotty self-address is adolescent, upperish-middle-class ... wartime. I can place social class and physical setting, the era and me—I mean my age and size, my physical condition in terms of sports. A suburban fourteen-year-old in wartime 1944, Middle Western and large.
—Who are you, Kiddo?
—That's for me to know and you to find out ...
—Ha-ha. You're as funny as a crutch ...
I'm Wiley Silenowicz ... I am real, a fate for others ... I am real ... God, what a mess.
In one sense, waking is like leaping from a boxcar into roadside gravel, into the realities of your own waking breath. The night's long jostling in the runaway actions of dreams (which insisted they were plausible) fadingly echoes in the unstable, living-in-a-weedy-ditch-among-old-fading-pictures shaky moment waking up (in bed) when I hear my own breath. My monkey flesh ... flibbertigibbet electricities ... me ... I'm here classically—in the physics sense: life-size—in the almost always unreportable actual scale of the world. Not a dreamer, I have lasted to this age, this moment. I am colossal in the mistaken sense in which consciousness tends to feel itself and its reality first as an image of all that is real— this is in the remaining and drenching sense in which it was the universe for my dreams and the landscapes and the inhabitants and machinery in them.
But now one has a side, daylit, leaning and lit at the edge of the unknown future, at the very edge of an unknown logic—a day with others in it—every one of them independent of my mind and ungoverned by my consciousness. The not quite daylit world. Science was different in 1944, not so scientific, not so widely popular. In my morning confusion, I am a Jew suspended for a moment in no real order of things. Boy, did I love everything. It's odd to have the beginning of not being young, of my being flesh and blood in my pajamas. I feel battered by waves of the barely albino pallor of the air. The vague lightedness of the air: objects in the room had dim outlines, not clear ones; and the air outside the window screens is translucent. Inside the room the darkness is more complete, although, as I said, things are visible at their edges. My outward senses, like butterflies newly out of the chrysalis, do a slow monochromatic fluttering. I am deeply patterned for the moment by the night's introspection.
I have to take a leak. The I-have-landed-on-a-new-planet thing, the realities of the room ticklingly hardening, the all-that-is-here, the slow, pale—half-dark—roses of the actuality of sight, the thing that nightlong was not lifelong although it seemed it while it was happening: this stuff means my nighttime gullibility aches and fades. Here is a real windowsill. The upper edges of real trees, the real leaves there, lightly scratch at the window screens. The sounds in the variably shuffling Middle Western air joins with the sound of my breath in the pillow: I pay attention to one and it predominates and drowns the other. Then I switch. I am the-voice-that-matters and I have risen to the day—fascist— image-drenched—fantastically nursed. The sensually factual present tense after so many chapters of images (from the flesh-pool), so many episodes of dreaming—in it are no figures from my dreams. The onetime seemingly actual people have been erased, massacred, obliterated ... Waking is pitiful—my father used to say (S.L.)—it is naked and republican for me now; the weight of tousled hair on my new skull is grownup hair after the years of having a child's fine hair up there. I stare, a fourteen-year-old boy, at my own wakefulness. I am no longer a dreaming tyrant who can command and match the light. I am geographically placed here with my head at the foot of the bed, where air from the windows in two walls flows ... It is May. In St. Louis, Missouri. The window facing me as I lie here looks down into a walk-trisected, flower-bedded, U-shaped courtyard. We live on the third floor. The courtyard is empty in dim light. My skull, boulderishly heavy, is farther from my feet than I remembered—I have grown more than twelve inches in two years. I have gained thirty pounds in that time ... If I loved you, this is the creature who would love you.
When I sleep, I breathe outside the mysterious circle of my attention. I breathe on another planet, far from the stories in front of me. I start in now on a male flirtation with my breath. In a blurry alertness, a sort of embarrassment, I feel my new skinny neck—my Adam's apple ... my height: my toes down there: gosh ... And I breathe.
Actually, to be tall does feel like a ladder that I escape on ... perhaps this is unforgivable. I had not been confident that, if I slept, I would wake. I am conscious of being erect sexually—my father sleeps in the other bed in the room. Then I remember that my father is dead ... Daddy's dead. The breath-scraped, ribby, itchy sexual heat and then the weird memory-thing of my father's dying four days ago, a thing which has its own heat, shakes me like two currents of steam pushing in different parts of a machine.
Then I am weirdly still. Then I shake. Then I am weirdly still.
I stretch out my arm and hand to touch the wire-mesh screen on the window. My fingertips. My rustling consciousness is stilled, light-tropic—a broken-domed, lightly hissing observatory—an aspect of light itself. In this broken-domed thing I perch in the hawkish miracle of attention. Part of what I like about girls—and my mother—is that they say, Don't go crazy and embarrass me. I stay sane to show off to them that it's okay to like me. In the at-the-moment-ill-lit actual congresses of the consecutive physical world, tiny particles in me, tiny Noah's arks, carry me between now and darkness. In a kind of Goddishly faintly rolling, somewhat roiling now, silent, more or less quiet, and more and more lit, the smell, the morning smell has a blasphemously moral thing to it—freshness, I suppose. It stinks of God, kind of—stinks as in stinking, dirty Jew, rotten goy. I ask the Powers of Prediction—they're in me, mounted in such a way they can see things approaching from farther away than my toes can feel things—Will the war eat me up? Will all the Jews be killed? Am I all right even if my Dad is dead? Do I have to die, too? Do I have to die soon?
I apologize to myself in the real air now for having dreamed nightlong: I'm sorry I was stupid ... The inconsecutive, lovely wildness of the mind in the huge present tense of the morning now, the morning head and my bony spine form material low wild angel stuff with death and a sexual fall in it. The mind pokes up blackly, snaggingly—witlessly—I have a queer sense of personal defect—and I take my hand from the screen and tuck it into the warmth under my chin—Samuel Silenowicz, Samuel Leonard (S.L.) Silenowicz, my dad (by adoption) is dead ... Is absent from the drifting, thuggish real. The mind's caterwauling whisper is: THERE'S A WAR ON: LEAVE ME ALONE. I snuffle at the air: an electrical feat of consciousness: a snout-tic ... Then Venetian blind passages of grief and some self-concern and wake-up peerings—water wiggles of perception, glints, flashes, and semi-mechanical off-and-ons of trying things: if I don't blink, I see spots; if I roll over onto my side, the bed will creak; if I touch it in a certain way, the window sash will grunt. Look, look-a-here, look for yourself, see, rays of absurdly pale light out the window are touching fat, gray, low clouds and some leaves in the treetops.
The pale light—the false dawn—a diffuse grayness—do I want to live? Blind emperor-boy, Gestapo agent in his nosiness, so Gestapoish cock-a-doodle, the whisperingly breathing fourteen-year-old boy, I am alive so far—So what? I more or less want to die with this curious pain of actuality; but that is almost clearly part of the border of how wanting-to-live defines itself in me.
In a glamour of obscure distortion, I remember my face as his face from glances in the mirror—a little scared—as those glances were—with the reason-to-live stuff, the reason- to-die stuff in the silent mirror. This becomes embarrassed amusement, taut-nerved, fattened with uncertain and embarrassed recollection: imbecile. My temper: what I look like ... who gives a fuck ... is contentiously male. In the liquor of the blind-sightedness of recall of one's circumstances first thing in the morning when one awakes, I remember that, on the average, he (I am) is odd-looking but okay. My looks are not a torment to me.
CHAPTER 2
The Masturbation
IN THE STRANGE-FOR-ME new privacy in the room, my (maybe) okay face first and then a lot more of me, but not all of me, takes on the temperature (the temperament) of heated and mercurial permission, deadened with caution and reluctance: Sir-Kamikaze-Fleet-of-Carbon-Compounds Little-Cutie-Little-Cutie-Wants-to-Die-Love-All-Used-Up does this other stuff.
At the touch of my hand on me, in the tremble of relief, of sensation, I promptly entered a territory of sexual hallucination ... masturbation is a plenum of hallucination; my solitude fills promptly with hallucinatory fullness—love is now naked in the world. Isn't it deathless here now, for a while? Aren't we all gathered here—anyone I want? Hallucination—and sexual will—clobber me with softly ravenous wingbeats. The heft of things and the cawing of nerves (here, where gesture is soliloquy) becomes a tautening balloon of sensation. No one has told me how sexual reality tugs and pushes at a sane sense of things. I find out for myself. The morning drama and the insanity of pleasure and the overripe silliness of pulls-pushes, yanks-presumes—I move without moving. Hallelujah—semi-Wowee ... The moment, unbridled, boy-bridal, is loathsome, racked: exaggerated, and grotesque—and okay. Disgust, fear, bitterness, horror, boredom, pleasure—it's of a puzzling enormous interest to me.
In the act, my skin feels like warm cloth on me—a privacy of heat like being rolled up inside a smouldering mattress, in the stuffing. Tickled, sweaty, blotched with heat—IT'S HOT, I'M GETTING HOT—I feel self-contempt; and I stop. Self-contempt cools me.
But I remember—and am oddly unsettled—that the rhythms and touch had been blowsily explosive. I refeel some of the sensations scatteredly. And piercingly.
Then I remember being a little kid and my wet bathing suit coming off me, the bareness and hurtful readiness of the self back then—ignorantly alight; and my dad, too, but unignorant, him.
Pleasure now, in some almost childish sense, means that a childhood sense of something odd is rectified.
Then, in a trance of exaggerations I begin again—giant breasts on a giant woman, giant prick, I have giant hands—as if I were nostalgically in or half in the scale in which childhood is set. I ache. God, this is foolish. Other boys seem to me to be professional, expert and well instructed—and practiced—in this stuff and in being boys generally whereas I am unprofessional ... uncertain and capricious, goadedly unsteady ... personal ... (this was tied to the age I was).
I had tried to remember, but pleasure is not knowable by memory with anything like its passionate convincingness when it is directly gained and present. Reality has a monopoly of real pleasure. A lad and his lamp. The alluring, imaginably dimensioned dementia of meaning tucked into the animal bribe with its hint of favorable apocalypse: I have to fight it off, this sense that the conclusion is ALL. Masturbation is nutty with idealism, with hallucinations, with self-induced finalities.
The boy has big red convulsed zeroes and pallid ones that moo or mow at him: mad doorways: this is his sense of sexuality for the moment. It is so interesting that, as he denies it, some of the stitches of the self break at odd seams. It is a killing sense: it strains him and it feels like it is shortening his life.
I proceed in a sensible or greeting-death way, a little shocked, a little resistant ... Bits of throbbing and twitching sweetness—motionful, honied—storylike pricklings. I can see where advertisements come from. Odd and loony with lapses and collapses, I avoid the jerking dance of coming—I lie here and let it die away. Nothing can undo your life. I am in a lurching and shoving, half-breathless gauntlet-labyrinth of mind and body in the morning. I am in a state of sensationalism and puzzle-ridden semi-discontinuous attention.
The not-stayingness of pleasure hurts oracularly—and intimately. Heats and oils, exudations and flares of consoling and BRILLIANT renderings of pleasure become a momentarily irreversible knowledge that pleasure exists ON ITS OWN TERMS. This chimpanzee reality and the light, I have been in love with these Tarzan doings, these animal carryingson, since I discovered them two years before; it is almost true in sex that easiness and lies rule the world. Some people are good at this stuff. Some are against it. Christ, the beauty of what some people know. I am homemade flesh, I am sincere—I am a sincere jerk-off. I miss my father.
I turn over and move; my hands are under me on the linen sheet; I move in A KIND OF anxiously flinching recklessness—in a pathos-tinctured heat of the body ... As in the bony hand of a girl. Of a boy.
The sensations, good, bad, dry, moist, effective, ineffective, irritating, inside a clouded mass of hallucinations, and then, at the edge, neural and a thing of the flesh, and then outside and watching but half-painted with the oddity of the aching intoxication of onwardness—as if one were in love with time and the future—actually the boy was—and with the foolish shamefulness of such a complex state calculatedly brought about and yet partly accidental, the increasing number of more and more serious seizures and the abrupt passages of decline as a kind of meaning (of refused sobriety), I laugh at myself and this stuff (pleasure and absurdity), I laugh out loud but under my breath, I laugh at the world's history as it is known by boys.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Runaway Soul by Harold Brodkey. Copyright © 1991 Harold Brodkey. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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