Atrocity upon atrocity, and then more atrocity, and then more.
I’m glad it’s not my body that is actually touching their bodies. I’m glad I have his body, in between. But how I wish I had a body of my own, one that did my bidding. I wish I had a body, just an instrument to feel weary with or through, shoulders that slump, a head that tips back to face the sun, feet that drag, a voice that groans or sighs or asks hoarsely for forgiveness.
I don’t understand. Irene still comes to the apartment but we never see her anymore except by accident. It’s over. She seems cheerful: she seems relieved. Twice a week she vengefully looks in here to dust the place, and dirty all the dishes, and worry the bed. She leaves like four bucks on the kitchen counter—though it’s since gone down to three fifty.
I don’t understand. At the hospital we reward our victims with money. I pay the hospital. Irene pays me. I don’t get it. Are we all slaves? Are we somehow less than slaves?
They wouldn’t believe me, even if I could tell them. They would turn away, in excruciation and contempt.
I’m like the baby taken from the toilet. I have a heart but I don’t have a face: I don’t have any eyes to cry. Nobody knows I’m here.
Is it a war we are fighting, a war against health, against life and love? My condition is a torn condition. Every day, the dispensing of existence. I see the face of suffering. Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.
There’s probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I’m tired of being human, if human is what I am. I’m tired of being human.
PART 2
4
You do what you do best, not what’s best to do
We set sail for Europe in the summer
of 1948 —for Europe, and for war.
Well, I say we, but by now John
Young was pretty much on his own
out there.
Some sort of bifurcation had occurred, in about 1959, or maybe even earlier. I was still living inside, quietly, with my own thoughts. Thoughts that were free to wander through time.
Our ship is loud with all the tongues of Europe, under the big sky and its zoo of cumulus—its snow leopards and polar bears. On the lower deck, where all the people are, there is the sense of an outrageous and clarifying happiness. When it is happy, the human face seeks a particular angle: perhaps you could pinpoint it—thirteen degrees, say, from the horizontal. Also, happiness contains its own ferocity: the right to life and love, fiercely seized. John Young is always especially smart and handsome when he visits the lower deck for his strolls, morning and evening, with ivory-topped cane, with burnished black shoes, with plausible perfecto. Rather forbiddingly he saunters along the lower rink, past the clumps of families, the young mothers, the babies’ cries. The cries of babies: we all know what they mean, in any language. Everybody seems to have at least one baby, suddenly. As if to get them safely stowed, before the violent renewal of war.
To begin with, the voyage seemed a form of evasive action, a form of flight. The sea glared on with a million eyes, a million witnesses to our getaway. Apart from wanting the law or whatever to catch up with him (which it didn’t), I had taken little notice, and no interest, in John’s furtive and elaborate preparations for travel—the series of interviews with the Reverend Kreditor, for example. I didn’t really wake up until we made the short boat trip to Ellis Island. Of course, months earlier, I had dully taken on the likelihood of major upheaval, on account of what was happening to John’s skin. At first it assumed a sallow glow; then, during the cold spring, it went all the way from hot-dog mustard to peanut butter. Jesus, I thought. Jaundice. The
I twigged: it was a suntan. I put two and two together. People often get this way before taking stylish vacations in exotic locales. The idea of John getting sick, the idea of John coming down with something: that’s a good one. His vigor, nowadays, contains something savage and tasteless. It is pink tongued. It is feral—undoctored. The whites of his eyes sting like fresh frost. John’s torso now closely resembles one of his more miraculous erections. At any moment and with no warning he’ll throw himself onto the floor and do like a hundred push-ups. “Ninety-nine,” you’ll hear him grunting, ever the literalist. “Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. Ninety-six.” Even during mealtimes, at the captain’s table, he’s forever girding his muscle and sinew. Under the table his feet jig on their soles. John’s body shudders deeper than the ship itself. This war will start at an appointed time, like a ball game. He is thirty-one.