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

of
enough.
The sense of completion is like a satisfaction with its spine of shameful triumph … of peace and escape. It is shallow of me and in my blood—an old traditional thing—and it is the deepest and most savage emotion I ever have, it is the deepest part of me, to be happy. It is based on my ignoring an important number of things, but I have a rebellious nature of this sort. In a pagan sense it is a serious business to be happy.
    This is absurd, this sequence of thoughts. How far would I go morally, toward death, how far did I go, to own my so far unnamed, not deeply known trees? If I want money now, I have to think harder about how to negotiate, how to handle
cleverly
the situations that will establish the amount of money I will have while I die. I have to figure out how to put the fear of God into the pimp-Jones and the rat-Moore.
    I will probably do what is necessary—what part of my soul do I want to save at this point? What do I care about? When I was a child, no one told me what life was actually like.… I wish I had been told. Now I am waiting while the wind mumbles and stammers, twitches, as if it were alive and standing still, an immense, transparent ruminant-acrobat, a glass creature resting from its stampede of a moment ago. I wait for it to return, the large, invisible, active, somersaulting mountain wind among the trees in my wood. The brief, embracing wind.
    Death? Ugliness? Who gives a goddamn fuck? Who gives a good goddamn fuck? Here it comes, the first transparent steps—and leaps—of the wind among the trees.

RELIGION
     
    In the end I guess at him. I use a-sense-of-things. In a kind of clouded gray space inside my head, I guess at him. I probably can’t do this, guess at him and be right.
    We are silent, one day, Jass and I, after doing dares—daring each other to
shinny
up the pipe-frame of the row of swings in Jackson Park, riding the swing up and over the bar. Then I stood on the ground and held Jass on my shoulders while he threw the swings back over the bars. He was agreeable to us covering our tracks.
    We lay sprawled on the itchy grass in that park. It seems too intense to mention the odors of the ground, of the season. Such sensory reality was part of being that age, being boys. Jass’s unreliable comradeship, today’s fate of the world, the fate of the world so far, and us, him and me, lying on the grass and the odors of the grass are mixed together, unalterably.
    Intense rivalry is infatuation of a kind, a sensitivity to the whole
shebang
of the other person because you want to win. I never started conversations or said things without being asked. He seems more bold. He as if moves in a field or meadow or big schoolyard of such holding back in me. He asks, “Are you scared to think about being dead?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Come on. Imagine yourself buried.”
    After a moment: “Naw. I don’t want to.”
    I’m not always aware of color. If I relax, I feel a creeping suffusion of color into the day: blue sky, white clouds, oddly various, changeable greens—as if color itself were nervous and changeable—and greenish shadows on largely pinkish-white-beige-ocher Jass, the topography of the boy’s face. I
like
the existence of language, but aural color is different from visual color. It smacks of magic, and real color is just the world.
    I asked Jass, “Are you frightened of being hurt—in the body?”
    I had an adolescent voice: an infatuation and uncertainty toward issues of courage.
    Then I hear him. First, the sound. Then the hidden mathematician-thinker-spy called memory deals with what he says and makes it orderly.
    He said, “I don’t know. I don’t mind it.”
    “You don’t get frightened?”
    “I’m not afraid
of being hurt
.”
    I recognized that he had a manner of insensitivity and dry boldness, but it was only a manner, and it seemed sensitive and cagey in its way.
    It frightened me back then, that he—and other kids—knew what they thought. I had