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

it dirties the very air, the very envelope of the world. I half expect birds to fall from the sky, poisoned.
    “Shit, get off me,” I said, close to madness. He and I both know I am dangerous despite all my precautions.
    He had me pinioned. He watched me in a peculiar way—with a haughtiness-of-a-sort. “It’s all bullshit,” he says. And he gets up.
    I see as if down a hallway and through a partway-open door; I see something-or-other in him and me: some of what I see becomes words, although not entirely or clearly. We used to wonder if we would find it easy to kill, to lead others, to be commanders. He said that that was bullshit but he asked, too, if it was bullshit, but he wasn’t asking
me.
    He was willing to accept the distance between souls. I don’t think he knew yet if such isolation as he felt was incurable. He’s asking for company—companionship—something. But he doesn’t trust me, and he wants to be the winner. Having released me, he stands, and I see the sunlight on his forehead and nose, a subtle armor protecting him from nothing.
    “Maybe it is all bullshit,
cocksucker
” I say.
    I admired Jass. I was pretty sure he would be admired anywhere in the world he went—admired and pitied …
the beautiful sand-colored one.
    I drew on my studies and I said, in order to be nice—a degree of clement attention: “If I combine
original
and
primary
 … I get
originar?.
Do you know, does the originary
real
world
matter?
”
    He shrugged. No one at school ever gave away what he or she really felt (truly thought) to anyone, not really. Or the details of what he or she
knew.
Jass maybe wanted to play at
serious talk
or
intelligent talk
(the latter was the term used by somewhat better-bred kids).
    The sport, the actual dimensions of the game here, has to do with power, real power in real sunlight. He wants to know which levers control fear and death and being amused in the world. He wanted to be like me but not completely like me, not a Jew—not haunted. This is a moment of my education that mattered, this knowing myself head-on from him and also from inside me, two ways at the same time, glaringly and with a blur so that I squinted.
    His actual face in sunlight—and then the air and light at yet another intersection, at the high point of this enclave of houses, yet another perspectival drooping and curving crucifix lined with well-tended palaces—are part of a moment raw with limited and eccentric friendliness. It wasn’t perfect.
    He said, “Do you believe in Heaven?”
    “No. Do you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Why not?” Silence. He said, “I think
Heaven
is a great thought.”
    “Are you serious?” It was good to be tactful if someone was serious about some pious matter or other.
    “I’m serious,” he said with his eyelids half shut—that meant he was lying, but not entirely. So did him having his eyes wide, wide open and fixed directly on you, which he did next.
    I asked, “Are you being sarcastic?”
    “You’re the one who’s sarcastic.”
    “You are! You’re being sarcastic!”
    “You’re looking at yourself.”
    “No, I’m not.” I started to laugh exasperatedly. He didn’t really know how to talk about a subject.
    “What’s so funny?” he said.
    “Your Adam’s apple is funny,” I said.
    The present-tense eyes of the Protestant boy have a quality of well-practiced, frigidly hot attentiveness. His is the best attention I know at this point in school. He takes athletic, picayune, little breaths; he listens with no real movements of his eyes. They have a quality of male will—sort of. Focused, his eyes have, when they look at you, a mocking, American love letter thing—upper middle class, suburban Protestant, deadpan and intelligent.
    In the hovering fatedness of any exchange, he says, “Kiss my ass.”
    I say to him, “Boy, what crap you hand out.”
    Did you ever feel betrothed in your youth to the heat of your present-tense reality, to the slippery and