Something Happened   ::   Хеллер Джозеф

I loved the food that fed me — that's all I knew — and the arms that held and hugged and turned me and gave me to understand, at least for those periods, that I was not alone and someone else knew I was there. Without them, I would have been alone. I am afraid of the dark now. I have nightmares in strange beds, and in my own. I have apparitions underneath my bed waiting to stream out. I have spirits in my bedroom closets. I am anxious as a four-year-old child. I am afraid of the light. I am afraid I will open my eyes someday and it will still be dark. And no one will come. (I woke up without tonsils and adenoids in the hospital one thousand times that night and it was always dark, and I thought there would never be light again. And no one came.) What will I have to look forward to if morning comes one day and there is no light? What will I be like when I am senile? Will I molest children, break wind, defecate on living room floors, say nigger, bait Jews? I say nigger now occasionally; it slips out. I could bait Green. I think I know expressly how to cope with Green.

"Jack," I could begin, with an air of disarming joviality, "I think I'd like to hire a Jew. Do you know of any? I'd want a smart one."

"I'm afraid that would be impossible," he might reply, with the same pretense of amiability.

"Aren't there any smart ones left?" I could follow up, tauntingly.

"Oh, yes," he would answer. "But a smart one wouldn't work for you. And if you're going to hire the other kind, you'd might as well stick with a Protestant. They'd make a better appearance, for you."

And I'd discover once more that I'd still not been able to cope with him at all. I'll bet I'm probably one of the very few people in the entire world who know (not knows) that livid means blue and lurid means pale. A lot of good that knowledge has done me. (Green may be one of the others who know, and it's done him even less.) My boy's complexion is pale again, and his eyes are blue and deep. I wish I could look all the way inside them to see what is going on in his mind.

"Why are you staring at me?" he asks uncomfortably.

"I'm not staring."

"You were."

"I'm sorry. I was thinking." He intends to remain silent. "And if you asked me what I was thinking about, do you know what I'd say?"

"What?" he asks, to oblige me.

"I was thinking about when you were going to ask me why I was staring at you."

He grins with a small noise of appreciation as a token of acknowledgment, and goes into his room, closing the door.

I don't want him to go.