Something Happened

"I'm not worrying," he will reply.

I wish I could be more of a help to him. I wish he would let me try.)

"What are you worrying about?" I will ask again.

"I'm not worrying," he answers, looking up at me an instant with a glimmer of surprise.

"What makes you look so glum?"

"I was thinking."

"What were you thinking about," I persist with a smile, "that makes you look so worried?"

"I don't know. I forgot already."

"You looked so glum."

"I don't know what that means."

"Sad."

"I'm not sad."

"Tired?"

"Maybe I'm sleepy."

"Do you stay up late?"

"Sometimes I don't fall asleep right away."

I sometimes wonder if he really worries as much as I think he does. I sometimes think he worries more. He is a cautious little thing (or seems to be. I know I worry for him and expect the worst to happen to him also. So does my wife. I used to worry about my daughter too when she was little, but now she is past fifteen, and the worst hasn't happened. What is the worst? I'm not sure). Maybe the worst has happened and went unrecognized, because my boy, now that I look back, has never had an easy time of things (and my daughter is having a lousy time of it now, unless she is acting too. Wouldn't it be fu

"Say yes or no," I demand of him in explanation. "What difference would it make if you are wrong? What would you lose by making a mistake?"

He is confused.

He is afraid of making mistakes.

So he makes them with me by vacillating).

I know he must wonder now why his life has been arranged to be so unceasingly difficult (why I shout at him so frequently, or seem to, why I undoubtedly do raise my voice) or if there ever will come a time of tranquillity and bliss for him in which no new implacable demons are waiting in ambush for him, stirring in time as the moment of contact draws near, making ready for him, practically in view. (I know I wonder all of that for him. When will he be able to relax and take things easy, so I can relax and take things easy too?)

"Tell me, what do you want to do?" I ask him so many times out of disconsolate, moody concern. "What do you want to be?"

"I would like to learn how to drive a car someday."

"Everybody does that."

"If I can. Do you think I will?"

He likes the smell of gasoline and is afraid of fire, height, and speed (but not of airplanes, if he is in one).

How weary (I feel) he must be already of challenges and adversity, like a spent and weatherbeaten old man (homunculus), or a resigned, moribund, whitehaired old woman embracing her own demise with relief. Often, when something of a particularly eroding nature seems to be preying on his mind, a shadow of gaunt consternation will fall across his fragile, fine features, a stricken look of transfixing amazement, as though he is troubled deeply by the fact that he is troubled at all.

He hardly seems altogether at ease anywhere but at home, although he has always laughed a great deal when with people he knows. He makes jokes. He has wit and a talent for giddy and imaginative tricks. They are mainly verbal, always harmless, usually successful by one light or another. He seeks safety and invisibility in humor. (I do too. I find it in sex, which is always humorous too.) And he labors industriously to surround himself inside a womblike atmosphere of compassion and good spirit and survive there eternally (like the me I really think I am, I think, swaddled cu

"Good night," he will call out to me from the hallway, keeping himself so deeply withdrawn that I will be unable to see him when I turn my head and look up, and recede skittishly into his own room unless I call right back:

"Good night. Come in here a minute. Will you?")

Unless I make him. Once I do make him step inside my study to talk to me, we have little to say to each other. He brings a barrier with him. Or I have one of my own. But I do want to talk to him. We have nothing to talk about. I have to search for questions. He is unresponsive. He makes me interrogate him; he gives one-word replies. I think he knows I am not really interested in answers to the questions I ask him — he seems cross and stubborn with me for even trying.

He is wary of strange men with mean, sinister faces and of wild-eyed men and women in the street who talk out loud explosively to themselves. (He keeps an eye out for them always. Many of them use such filthy language.) He is u