Something Happened

I want to keep my dreams.

Ball-bearing roller skates. I melt.

I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

I miss my father, they told me. As if I didn't know. (I miss my boy now too. He is pulling away from me. He does his homework in his room without my help and doesn't talk to me anymore about what is happening to him at school. I don't know if he's more unhappy or less.) They didn't tell me anything I didn't know. They couldn't help. They said I was perfectly normal — which was the most deplorable thing I have ever been told! With time and much treatment, that condition might be remedied. They envied my sex life. (So do I.) The pity, we agreed, is that I don't enjoy it more.

(The company takes a strong view against psychotherapy for executives because it denotes unhappiness, and unhappiness is a disgraceful social disease for which there is no excuse or forgiveness. Cancer, pernicious anemia, and diabetes are just fine, and even people with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease may continue to go far in the company until they are no longer allowed to go on at all. But unhappiness is fatal. If my daughter or son were to commit suicide, that would be overlooked, because children do things like that, and that's the way kids are. But if my wife were to jump to her death without a prior record of psychiatric disturbance, did it only because she was unhappy, my chances for further advancement would be over. I'd be ruined.)

I have acrimony, they told me (which is also normal. I have more pain than acrimony. My mind is a storehouse of pain, a vast, invisible reservoir of sorrows as deep as I am old, waiting always to be tapped and set flowing by memory. I can discharge acrimony. I can only experience pain).

There are times when I am attacked from within by such acrimonious enmity toward people I like who have suffered serious personal tragedies or business failure that if something (or someone else) inside me were to give voice to the infamous words that leap to mind, I would be put away and reviled, with no possibility ever of absolution or apology. (The tragedies of people who are not close to me move me distantly, if at all.)

"Good for you! It serves you right!" I want to sneer.

(I want to spit.)

I'm afraid sometimes I might. (I have sat at tables with men I've known a long time and have wanted to touch their hand.)

It's not I who wants to kick Kagle in the leg. New people are hatching inside my head always, whether I want them to or not, and become permanent residents the moment I take note of them. We are often at cross purposes. They have time. They have time to work without interruption at whatever it is they came there to do, and they saunter away with great self-possession into darknesses I've not been able to penetrate. They weave back and forth in droves through a labyrinth whose tu

Vile these evil, sordid, miniature human beings who populate my brain, like living fingers with faces and souls. Some wear hats. People suffer. I suffer. Children wander. Women weep. Mothers lie on deathbeds. I am afraid — I have been afraid — a screaming, wailing, or sobbing might start at any instant inside my ears, be taken up by other tortured voices from within, and never stop. I would not know if I was imagining it. It would not matter. I would hear it. Minikins move, and I can feel them, and dirty, cynical old men with sharp crutches and pointy beards pass with insinuating glints in their cruel, unscrupulous eyes. They hurt. Ugolino eats a head: mine (that son of a bitch).

No one will help. (Only my wife's sister verges close enough to that delicate nerve of truth we want unbared, but her front is callous, her motives unkind, and I want to hit her.)

"Give the kid away," she as much as commands with taunting relish in her rasping, obtrusive way, attacking, pressing her advantage, and we must unite to resist her and beat her back.

"Good for you! It serves you right," is what I hear her snarling invidiously at us in my own voice and words. "I'm glad it happened. Ha, ha. I'm glad it happened to you because I know you, instead of to people I don't know who live far away."

I want to hit her because I feel she sees inside me and steals my thoughts, compelling me to repudiate them.

We want to get rid of him. We want to give him away. And need people in positions of respectable authority to tell us. We haven't nerve to do it alone. What will people we know think of us?

Unfeeling.

Inhuman.

We want to give him away and are afraid.

(Other people we hear about in Co

"Don't," my wife's sister has warned consistently almost from the first day there was no longer any doubt (which was too soon). "Do it fast. Don't be hypocrites. The longer you wait, the worse it's going to be for everybody."

That suggestion was monstrous. (Hypocrisy was easier.)

"Don't say that again!" my wife flares up at her that last time. "I don't ever want to hear you say anything about it again to us, or I won't let you come here. I mean that."

"I've had it," I roar at my wife afterward. "I don't ever want to hear her talk about him again. Or about any of the other kids either. I'll throw her out if she does. If you won't tell her I will."

"I did tell her. You heard me. Did you think that was easy?"

"You're only reacting that way because you know I'm right," her sister had responded self-righteously.

"She was only trying to be helpful," my wife continues repentently. "Now I'm sorry I yelled at her."

"No, she wasn't. Do you think she was trying to be helpful? I wish she'd move to Arizona with your mother."

"Her store is here."

She is a seamy, murky i