The World Is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey

to think a long time to know what I thought.
    I said, shielding my eyes, “I’m not
frightened
about dying.”
    I get up. I stand on the sloping and somewhat faintly spinning disklike floor of park grass, tree roots.
    “I have to go home.”
    In a more clearly sequential movement than mine, he got up. He has a tensed, wry, small smile—nice—
friendly-for-the-moment.
In real life, if someone wants to talk or walk or whatever with you, it can be very moving.
    We walk maybe twenty yards, and then he starts taking giant steps as in Simple Simon. I start to walk with large Boy Scout hiking strides. Then, after a little while, he starts to hop; he hops up a slope in the small park and onto a six-lane boulevard, Delmar. I speed up and push him into the rear of a passing bus, and I hurry on, not worrying if he is hurt or not. I am deep inside my innocence. I hop past stone walls and up a steeply sloping macadam-and-pebble street in front of a stone church in a neighborhood of large houses. Then he passes me. Then we’re running, racing. He’s the faster sprinter. He sprints and slows, sprints and slows. I can outlast him in a mile, but he suddenly sprints far ahead, and I give up and start to walk. He’s ten, fifteen yards ahead of me. He waits for me to draw near him. He’s not breathing hard. I am. We’re near the intersection of two winding, tree-lined, lawn-skirted, large-house-lined suburban streets, a perspectival crucifix, empty of movement. When we cross the street, the scene assumes a faintly wheeling spoked motion. I am partly still out of breath.
    Jass holds his arms out in the attitude of the crucifixion. He says, “Do you dislike Jesus?”
    I start to count out loud, “Wuhin, tooo(eee), three-uh, foerrrr, fi-i-i(ve)—”
    “Whu-it ehr-are yuh-oo dooooinbn Wo/ih/hileeee?” Wiley, my name. It is odd, what actual voices, unidealized, are like in the real air of a real day.
    “I’m counting—if I count to seventeen, I get to see God.”
    “No shit?
Honest to-ooo Gohw-idd—aw-er yew gointa see Gawh-dddd(uh) now
?”
    “It’s not a swindle, asshole. I’m not asking you for anything.”
    Jass believes the world is tricky. “Are you going to see God here—right now—in University City? On Melbourne?” The name of the street.
    “Nahuhhhhhhh. I won’t see God if you’re here. Wait:
now, there He is
 …”
    “You masturbate too much,” Jass says, and hits me on the arm, the side of the shoulder, hard. This is a very quiet neighborhood. The intersection is silent, is empty. He looks at me from a distance. “Admit it,” he says.
    He is notorious for talking dirty in the locker room and for doing dirty things and getting everyone else to do them. I shake my head.
    He says abruptly, addressing my (comparative)
purity:
“You—and Winston Churchill …” Noble and unnecessarily ambitiously disciplined.
    Then he jumps me and we are wrestling. He is further into exerting himself to win than I expected—the strained, wrestlingly moving, tensed-and-taut physical weight and will are a shock, are dismaying—he is right on me, right on top, like an animal, his braced haunches and physical mass, the fleshiness, wriggling
tautly
with wild, would-be-victorious purpose.
    I hammer him in the face, saying, “Don’t you
ever
think about
ideals?”
    He is forcing my arms down. He looms over me. He demands with a surprising amount of breath and only a little breathlessness, “What are you thinking about now? Are you looking for God?”
    I frighteningly turn and twist. We’re leery of the ways we each think the other is a nut. We’re as if dressed in spikes to keep feelings off us. They leap bodilessly on us all the time anyway, feelings that seem like cat-family moods, dog moods, horse moods.
    “I have Christian ideals,” he says, still breathless, sitting on me, suffocating me.
    I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.
    I find fighting with someone shocking, dispurifying: