This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. Harold Brodkey
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Название: This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
Автор: Harold Brodkey
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007401741
isbn:
My adoptive parents were ill for most of my childhood, and I was aware of the implacable dissimilarity between the people and events in the active world and the people and events in the grip of medical reality, the medicines scouring and wrecking, or surgical intervention doing that, or radiation. My adoptive father, Joe Brodkey, had raged and grieved. My blood father, Max, had suffocated—he had something that was described to me as senile asthma: the asthma starved his heart, and his heart gave out. And he had raged and cursed, as did my adoptive mother, Doris, who had cancer and told all those around her that they were getting on her nerves. I was prepared for the irritability or even madness of being a patient, but except for the suffocation, none of those things was happening to me. I felt very little of anything, I mean as comment. It was a relief to have the illness unmasked, to have Death be openly present. It was a relief to get away from the tease and rank of imputed greatness and from the denial and attacks and from my own sense of things, of worldly reality and of literary reality—all of it. In the last few years, mental and physical revulsion toward the literary empire-builders and the masters of fakery had grown to the point where hiding and containing it had been a bit like having tumors that cleared up whenever I was upstate in the wilds or in Europe. The inadequacies of the work these people did and in the awful work they fostered, the alternate revulsion and pity they aroused, I had had enough of. It was truly a perceptible relief to be out of their reach and into another sort of experience, even if it was terminal.
It was a relief to have the future not be my speculative responsibility anymore and to escape from games of superiority and inferiority.
Yet I couldn’t sleep; I was able on the prednisone only to doze in a kind of shallow unconsciousness, and perhaps in fear, I dozed better by day than at night. I believe in sleep. In the past, when I was ill, or even just sad, I would sleep it off.
When Ellen slept, I expected to meet, as it were, my own grief and mortal loneliness. When I dozed, I expected phantoms and nightmares. It was not like that. I woke each time precariously placed in horizontal stillness, protecting my heart and lungs as I had with my posture when I was awake. I woke aware that I’d dreamed, and there was a fraction’s hesitation before it became obvious I would not remember my dreams, that they had been about death and that my waking self would not reproduce any part of them for me. But I knew they had been gentle. I woke without the slightest confusion; in my weakness I knew who I was and where I was and what my predicament was. I did not once imagine myself well—or safe. I woke in a secondary mental chamber, as if I were an Olympic runner of illness and death, one who would lose this time but who had trained off and on throughout his life for this. And so I woke prepared to play the day’s game again.
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