The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Harold Brodkey

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      Lila sniffed at the shit-odor, pursed her lips, and, holding her breath, came near and looked at me from the other side of the chairs—over the wall of chairs—a sultry and yet airy scrutiny, flirtatious, self-conscious, proddingly clever.… She is sadder than anyone else who tends me. She leans forward, one hand on a chair arm, and she pulls the sheet that’s over me away from me and takes a towel, one of several, set out on one of the chairs around the bed, “I’m not good at this,” she says.

      That remark silences me with its absolute strangeness. She earlier (the other woman) and other women—my nurse now (a fat woman), and Lila’s twelve-year-old daughter—were (are) proud: they boast and dance-in-a-way (when they hold me, when they touch me). Lila’s apology startles the child with its illegality: it is illicit and part of her heartless awareness. I might be incurable. There had been no limit to her absence and none to my dying—well, some suspicion had slowed the process of my dying. Being placed openly first by someone, being close to someone in certain ways, and being lawless when you are alone with someone—these are roughly equivalent for the child as life-giving.

      The child: there are no words for how blackly thorny he is.

      Lila has a quality of being indomitably obscene, guilty, blameworthy, unrepentant. She stares at you and does what she likes.

      I could not successfully blackmail either of my mothers. Neither was merciful. All that worked with either of them was me being secretive.

      Lila, cleaning up some of the mess with the towel, watches her own clumsiness. I play to myself in the balcony is a remark of hers. She is nosy and yet, this morning, she is dream-stained, quilted or padded or tufted with night heats. Her odor, her dark eyes, the rhythms and manner of movements of her hands gave the child the un-Euclidean turmoil of doubt. Nothing matches from before. She ostentatiously holds her breath, she disgustedly mops at the bed, she throws the towel into an open hamper—its lid is off; it is a woven, basketlike thing—and she takes another towel from the chair seat and wraps me in it. She plays her eyes on me, self-reflexively; she is contemplating the dangers before she lifts me: “Don’t throw up now,” she says.

      Her eyelids blink rapidly. This softens her stare, makes her very pretty—greatly pretty. Lila says, getting ready—she is very hesitant—“I can’t let it simmer on my back burners all day. I’m the last of the red-hot mommas. My motto is ‘strike while the iron is hot and get things done.’ I’m the executive type.” She moistens her lips, squints blindly, pushes her hair behind her ears. She stands flat-footed. She sets her breasts with her left hand. Her breasts have a powdery largeness. A constant nervousness is worsened if she has to touch someone. She bends near; her shadow is an imported dusk; her arms are around me; she lifts me, the giant woman, owl-fluffy Momma and her large, owl-soft breasts. And then, over that, the nearness to her is a moonish glare that tugs tidally at my breath and at my mind.

      “Phew, you stink, pretty baby,” she says.

      Her voice is troubled, vaguely storm-lit, spotted with lurid light: she has an innate melodrama.

      She ferries us past the obstreperous transparency of the windows—mostly a curious shine but still knowable as part of the outer, widening morning.

      “Well, another day, and you’re still sick, don’t you know it? Don’t you always know it?”

      She is sad; she is out of breath; charmingly, conceitedly, she is drudgery-minded. She picks on me: “Hold your head up; don’t let your head do that; straighten it; stop looking like an idiot: I warn you, I’m not good with idiots—once you lose my sympathy, you lose me.… Listen, I’ll tell the world: I’m not a nursemaid; that’s not what I’m good at.” Heavy-fleshed, small-town Lila walks, and I shake with the rhythms of her body. Her movements are interfered with by me—my weight and looseness and indiscipline of posture.

      In the bathroom, she sits me lankly on the sink. My feet are in the white basin; she props me with her shoulder and unwraps the outer towel, shifting me, and slipping it out and throwing it on the floor. And then she unpins the other towel, the one that I slept in, the diaper towel: “What a mess: don’t look innocent; you do it, you’re the mess: you’re worse than a horse. You’re lucky you don’t get thrown out with the diaper. You could learn to handle your bowels: it wouldn’t kill you. I hope you’re listening. Cooperation, they say, is the mark of a leader. Don’t make me wear myself out.” Her fingers are clumsy but neat, shy then bold—she has a glidy, pinchy, nervous touch. It is a touch that seemingly can easily be frightened off, like a fly. My eyes have grown flimsy with nerves—an obscure physical crowdedness of sensation in skin and mind.

      “Are you looking at me? I can’t tell what you’re up to; you’re one of the crazy ones; you’re a crazy little meshuggener, a meshuggener sheikh. Are you getting better? I think you’re improving. My guess is you’re sitting there and you know what I’m saying: tell me if I’m right.”

      She’s bluffing, partly bluffing, mostly bluffing. As she speaks, she stops believing herself, because my eyelids are so unblinkingly dulled—I am masked in lostness in the vividly glaring bathroom light. She has turned on the lights, a bulb overhead, and bulbs alongside the mirror so that reflected everywhere on the white walls are melted foil, blurred gilding, moonish flares. The mirror shines outward, and morning light bulges in at the window. Against my back are her breasts, sleeping, stirring animals, slick lambs vaguely furry with sensations; and, as in a dream, like masses of very pale pigeons or piles of silent whitish leaves.

      Her large, moonish female face, with lines and vistas focused with her curiosity about my illness, about me, has a foreign meaning, like paths in a strange garden. She unpins and strips me down below.

      I am a half-lifeless drowsiness and limp and boneless, but I am an inward mass of tense amazement. Moving my head, my chin into my chest, I cannot understand what I see down below—myself or her hands.

      I am too ignorant, too embarrassed. Sightless with embarrassment, perhaps with rage among unreadable meanings. Although I don’t move, the woman says, “Hold still …” Life and consciousness are hard to bear.

      The terrible preliminary sensations of nakedness, tickling birdlike glitter of the nerves, cut the moment into strange shapes and spaces; Momma’s eyes are as large as a sparrow, the sparrow being at an unreadable distance from me in meaning if not in real inches. Fluttering bird breath. Eyelid-bird-wings. A thin fabric shimmer-noose followed by a tube rises over my face and wraps my head—it is smelly; and light pierces the web that, as it ascends, hauls at my eyelids, blocks my nose, and opens my mouth so that I breathe a forced indraft of air—silvery, silent, shiny, bathroom air.

      Naked. My amazement and dullness are aflame. I am all hurting pleasure and nauseating pain. My no-longer puritan mother, a lawless sensibility, neat-handed and oppressively new, says, “Are you playing tricks? You’re hiding something from me—believe me, boys playing tricks are not news to me.” This one has a dark-and-light face, a fanatic’s fervor: a form of nervousness: she quivers with distinct but distant shamelessness—like a bird. This is especially distant from me, and is as if holy and wrapped in light, in speculative mercy, this thing of sharing a moment of life.… The only meaning one knows lies in the distinctions between mercy and the limitlessness of mad, veering pain. She is electric and unbridled and she is acuity and an impatient will-toward-mercy, a fanatic of uncertain persuasion.

      She is tentatively and then recklessly fearless: she has a fearless prettiness. She is being a disciplined other self—other from her usual self—maternal: of course, a challenge. I do not recognize it, but I can hear the ticking of her waiting for me to recognize her. I have never been seduced before.

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