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

sliding
focus
on
trying to talk
—something like that? At yet another intersection, I had a sense of falling, of losing mental control, and my eyes blurred in the all-ways-dimensional now, the mind’s and the world’s great sea, the afternoon light. Real eyes are really real. It is impossible to
think
your way through moments spent with someone else.
    In eight years, Jass will be killed in aerial combat in Korea, because his Sabre jet hadn’t yet been fitted with an afterburner—it was something of a scandal. He had sent me a postcard a month or so before:
Dear Smart Guy: Guess what? Now I’m as smart as you
 …
    What do you feel and think when you lose out in an aerial combat for real, when it is going to kill you—is it chagrin you feel? Do you have a sudden knowledge of yourself?
    Jass breathes with athletic artfulness. His powers of physical improvisation were really considerable. “Shit,” he says. Then: “Shut up.”
    “Sure,” I said, uncertain-eyed, but haughty. I know he likes to hurt people.
He likes to play around.
    He says, “The way you talk is stupid. Are you an honest person?” I can’t untangle the mockery, or figure out the seriousness.
    Syllables in their purposes alight—like geese in a dimly lit yard with a masked whisper and rush, caught air, materialized, aerial—
what-he-says
—what he said never amounted to much. Interplay blows you this way and that. Meanings, obscene, nonsensical. Incomplete. I
can’t handle him.
    His rough, mocking gaze drags across my cheeks and eyes. He jumps on me again. We are arguing this way—about beliefs. We are studying affection. This was not particularly intelligent. “Let’s have a truce,” I say. The moment, the smells when he throws me down, the smells of dirt and of grass, have a hotly defeated, presence-of-another-will quality of defeat. Warm, rough, dirty …
    He moves off me. And we stand up, and arrange our clothes, and he says: “You’re so fancy.
Jews
are always so fancy.”
    “Cut it out,” I say.
    “Scissors, scissors,” he says, nonsensically.
    It is all nonsensical. No part of it was ever final enough to make sense.

WAKING
     
    When I was a child, at a certain moment, I woke in a different house made of wood. The slow movement of my eyelids, whispering and scraping, in tiny lurchings, tickled me. A sense of the disorder of the wicked vaudeville, the foul inventiveness of pain kept me uneasy, so that I was as if crouched. I have been ill.
    It is almost light. The child is in pain; he lies half in, half out of an abominable breath-bag. The ill child watches in a feverishly illiterate way the slow oozing of the increase in light. Inside the delicacy of the uneducated stare, soft, opened, lightly fluttering, the pallor of consciousness, tampered with by pain, observes, anyway, the shimmer of the advance of the light.
    After a while, cool and flighty, mindless cousinhood to sense breaks out—the first time in weeks, but then after a while it passes into spasms of sweaty apprehension, of waiting for the pain—of madness—in its criminal mysteriousness to return and blind me. This continues and doesn’t worsen: that it doesn’t worsen puts a weird and private jollity on his face. The recognized thump and rattle of a window frame, a dull, tremulous bass, and the rapid soprano twitterings of the glass panes in the mullions make the child twitch; then the noise takes on a weight of the familiar; it is beautiful with monotony; it persists.
    Then pale-gray and yellow and pink fragments of light appear and slowly unbud, until I am embiered by rose after rose of unlikely light in a room filled with morning. The light is palpably warm. It warms and regulates my soul ungeometric with madness. The child gags and stutters in his breathing. My hand, a childish hand, burns and aches; it has a wind inside it, under it; it moves; it unfurls. The child stiffens in uneasy dominion over this phenomenon of his unfamiliar body. See, he has been ill