Something Happened by Joseph Heller (1974) (read in 2016)

“And I wasn’t so sure even then that I liked my family well enough as a group to want them pressing upon”

“What would happen if, deliberately, calmly, with malice aforethought and obvious premeditation, I disobeyed? I know what would happen: nothing. Nothing would happen. And the knowledge depresses me. Some girl downstairs I never saw before (probably with a bad skin also) would simply touch a few keys on some kind of steel key punch that would set things right again, and it would be as though I had not disobeyed at all. My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple.”

“I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously. They would simply fire and forget me as soon as I tried. They would file me away. That’s what will happen to Martha the typist when she finally goes crazy. She’ll be fired and forgotten. She’ll be filed away. She’ll be given sick pay, vacation pay, and severance pay. She’ll be given money from the pension fund and money from the profit-sharing fund, and then all traces of her will be hidden safely out of sight inside some old green cabinet for dead records in another room on another floor or in a dusty warehouse somewhere that nobody visits more than once or twice a year and few people in the company even know exists;”

“People in the company like to live well and are unusually susceptible to nervous breakdowns. They have good tastes and enjoy high standards of living. We are well-educated and far above average in abilities and intelligence. Everybody spends. Nobody saves.”

“When salesmen are doing well, there is pressure upon them to begin doing better, for fear they may start doing worse. When they are doing poorly, they are doing terribly.”

“am bored with my work very often now. Everything routine that comes in I pass along to somebody else. This makes my boredom worse. It’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.”

“I frequently feel I’m being taken advantage of merely because I’m asked to do the work I’m paid to do.)”

“think an authentic miracle takes place in the universe every time I come awake again after going to sleep. What is happening to me when I am not conscious of myself? Where do I go? Where have I been? Who watches over me when I am gone to make sure I do get back?”

“A vacuum cleaner that works well is more important to me than the atom bomb, and it makes not the slightest difference to anyone I know that the earth revolves around the sun instead of vice versa, or the moon around the earth, although the measured ebb and flow of the tides may be of some interest to mariners and clam diggers, but who cares about them? Green is more important to me than God. So, for that matter, is Kagle and the man who handles my dry cleaning, and a transistor radio that is playing too loud is a larger catastrophe to me than the next Mexican earthquake.”

“(more and more of us seem to be transferring our children into private schools, which are expensive and not much good, and then transferring them out again into other private schools that are not much better. We don’t like the heads of these private schools. More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution, and soon there will be nothing left. No more newspapers, magazines, or department stores. No more movie houses. Just discount stores and drugs. More and more of us, I think—not just me—really don’t care what happens to our children, as long as it doesn’t happen to them too soon)”

“I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now. Would I like him? I think not. There’s more than one of me, probably. There’s more than just an id; I know that; I could live with my id if I ever looked upon it whole, sort of snuggle up and get cozy with it, exchange smutty stories. Deep down inside, I might really be great. Deep down inside, I think not. I hope I never live to see the real me come out. He might say and do things that would embarrass me and plunge him into serious trouble, and I hope I am dead and buried by the time he does. Ha,”

““Are you angry?” “Do I look it? No, of course not.” “Sometimes I can’t tell.” “Sure, you can. You keep telling me I yell all the time. No, I’m not angry. I want you to talk to me about the things you’re thinking about, especially the things you can’t figure out.” “Do you? I will.” “I do. Ask me anything.” “Do you fuck Mommy,” he asks. “You said I could,” he pleads hastily, as he sees me gape at him in surprise. “Yes, you can,” I answer. “Sometimes.” “Why?” “It feels good, that’s why. It’s kind of fun. Do you know what it means?” He shakes his head unsurely. “Is it all right for me to ask you?” “It’s all right to ask if I do. I think it would be better to ask someone else what it is. It would also be a little better if you used a different word.” “I don’t know a different word. Screw?” “That’s almost the same. You can use the word you want. It’s a little funny, though, to use it with me. Use it. I suppose it’s good enough.” “Are you angry with me?” “No. Why do you keep asking me that? Don’t you know when I’m angry or not?””

““Are you angry?” “Do I look it? No, of course not.” “Sometimes I can’t tell.” “Sure, you can. You keep telling me I yell all the time. No, I’m not angry. I want you to talk to me about the things you’re thinking about, especially the things you can’t figure out.” “Do you? I will.” “I do. Ask me anything.” “Do you fuck Mommy,” he asks. “You said I could,” he pleads hastily, as he sees me gape at him in surprise. “Yes, you can,” I answer. “Sometimes.” “Why?” “It feels good, that’s why. It’s kind of fun. Do you know what it means?” He shakes his head unsurely. “Is it all right for me to ask you?” “It’s all right to ask if I do. I think it would be better to ask someone else what it is. It would also be a little better if you used a different word.” “I don’t know a different word. Screw?” “That’s almost the same. You can use the word you want. It’s a little funny, though, to use it with me. Use it. I suppose it’s good enough.” “Are you angry with me?” “No. Why do you keep asking me that? Don’t you know when I’m angry or not?” “Not all the time.” “I thought I yelled so much.””

“don’t like Derek,” he remarks without pause. He wears a troubled, injured look. “You’re not supposed to say that,” I instruct him mildly. “You’re not supposed to feel that way, either.” “Do you?” “You’re not supposed to ask that.” “You just told me I could ask you anything. That’s another thing I always think about.” “Yes. You can. It was okay for you to say what you did and ask me. And it was also okay for me to answer you the way I did. It was all right for both of us. Can you understand that? I hope that’s not too confusing for you. I’m not trying to duck out on the question.” “Am I supposed to say it or not? I don’t know.” “I don’t know,” I admit resignedly. “I’m not sure I like Derek, either, the situation I mean, the way he is, maybe even him too. I’m not sure. But we often have to live with things we don’t like. Like my job. Me too. I don’t know what to do about him yet. And nobody can help me.””

“With my wife by now, I think it no longer matters very much either way to either one of us whether I make her happy or unhappy; the difference is not so great nor the effect lasting; by now, I think we have learned how to get through the rest of our lives with each other and are both already more than halfway there.”

“Lying awake listening for noises, he would hear the same creaks and footfalls we all do; but he would imagine human beings coming to get him, scaling stone by stone the outside wall of our apartment building, boring downward from the roof toward his bedroom, descending from an opening in the sky to the sill of his fragile glass window. Their faces were hooded or shaped in shadows they carried with them like shawls.”

“I think he believes me now, more readily than he used to, I think he feels a little bit more at home with us, I think he trusts me more. (At least he knows now that I am me, although neither one of us is all that positive who that me we know I am is.)”

“If I were poor, I believe I might want to overthrow the government by force. I’m very glad, however, that everyone poor isn’t trying to overthrow the government, because I’m not poor. I don’t know why every Negro maid doesn’t steal from her white employer (but I’m glad our Negro maid doesn’t, or at least has not let us find out she does). If I were Black and poor, I don’t think I’d have any reason for obeying any law other than the risk of being caught. As it is, though, I’m glad colored people do obey the law (most of them, anyway), because I am afraid of Negroes and have moved away from them. I am afraid of cops. But I’m glad there are cops and wish there were more. (I don’t like cops.) (Except when they’re around to protect me.)”

“used to want to rumple my daughter’s hair too, pat her head affectionately or touch or kiss her cheek or throw a hugging arm around her shoulders, but she began to shrink away from me as she grew up, kidding at first, I thought, and I would always pretend to be hurt. And then those times came when I began to comprehend that she was no longer kidding, and I no longer had to pretend I was really hurt. I really was hurt—and now I pretend I am not.”

“It’s so much sweeter when you’re young, so much hotter, so much more fun. I wish I had that frenetic heat back now instead of this sluggish, processed lust I put myself through and frequently have to make a laborious effort to enjoy.)”

“So much of misfortune seems a matter of timing. We were late coming for him that day, and we saw him, half a block from the play area, standing alone on the sidewalk in his bare feet and bawling loudly, helplessly, because he thought we were never going to come for him at all. (I was incensed when I saw him. We were simply late. Nothing else had happened.) Other people, children and grown-ups, looked at my boy curiously as they walked past and saw him standing there crying: none of them offered to help, none of them questioned him. (Good God—even I will help a small child who seems to be in trouble, if no one else does.) He did nothing when he saw us, except shriek more piercingly, quail more frantically, in a tortured plea for us to rescue him from whatever odd spell was holding him to that spot in terror. (I was so deeply incensed with him for a moment that I was actually tempted to stop with a sneer and delay going to him.) He was convulsed with grief by the idea that we had abandoned him, just because we were a little bit late, that we had left him there purposely because we were dissatisfied and disgusted with him, and that he was never going to see us again or have anyone to take care of him.”

“We found him standing by himself along the shore about two hundred yards away, floundering in one spot as though lost: he was not certain if he had overshot us already, and he did not know, therefore, in which direction to proceed. His cheeks were white, his eyes were distant, and his jaws were clamped shut. The tendons in his neck were taut, and he had a lump in his throat. The landmarks along the boardwalk—all those familiar signs and structures—meant nothing to him. My first impulse was to kill him. “Were you lost?” I shouted to him. “I don’t know.” He shrugged. I wanted to kill him. I was enraged and disgusted with him for his helplessness and incompetence (standing there like that on the sidewalk in town that day as”

“The company is still there. (She isn’t.) It hasn’t grown. Nobody ever hears of it. And life has pretty much been one damned sterile office desk after another for me ever since, apart from those few good years I spent away from home in the army.”

“There’s nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter’s ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He’s a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I must not think about him as much as I could if I let myself.”

“It’s all Kagle’s fault, I feel by now: I blame him. Minute imperfections of his have become insufferable. Irritability sizzles inside me like electric shock waves, saws against the bones of my head like a serrated blade. I can quiver out of my skin, gag, get instant, knifing headaches from the way he sucks on a tooth, drums his fingers, mispronounces certain words, says byooteefool instead of byootafal and between you and I instead of between you and me, and laughs when I correct him—I have an impulse to correct him every single time and have to stifle it. The words spear through my consciousness and slam to a stop against bone, the inside of my skull. I can restrain myself from saying them, but I cannot suppress the need to want to. I am incensed with him for provoking it. He bubbles saliva in the corner of his mouth and still wears the white smudge on his chapped lips of whatever antacid pill or solution he has been taking for his stomach distress. “Heh-heh,” he has fallen into the habit of saying, with lowered, escaping eyes. “Heh-heh,” I want to mock back. I loathe Andy Kagle now because he has failed. I’d like to hit him across the face with the heavy brass lamp on his desk. I tell him. “Andy,” I tell him, “I’d like to hit you across the face with that lamp.” “Heh-heh,” he says. “Heh-heh,” I reply.”

“That was a man, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the last time I had a President I could look up to (the rest have not been mine), or maybe I only thought so because I was gullible. No—the whole country wept when he died. My mother wept. “One third of the nation,” said he, “is ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed.” By now, with our improved technology and humane social and political reforms, it must be more than half. When”

“Horace White can go no further in the company because there is nothing more he can do than be Horace White. He can be named to prestigious government commissions that issue reports on matters of grave national importance that are methodically ignored.”

“The children sit as still as replicas in a store, hiding inside their own faces as they wait to see what will happen.”

“Dirty movies have gotten better, I’m told. Smut and weaponry are two areas in which we’ve improved. Everything else has gotten worse. The world is winding down. You can’t get good bread anymore even in good restaurants (you get commercial rolls), and there are fewer good restaurants. Melons don’t ripen, grapes are sour. They dump sugar into chocolate candy bars because sugar is cheaper than milk. Butter tastes like the printed paper it’s wrapped in. Whipped cream comes in aerosol bombs and isn’t whipped and isn’t cream. People serve it, people eat it. Two hundred and fifty million educated Americans will go to their graves and never know the difference.”

“It tastes like shit. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horseshit is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don’t find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. “America the Beautiful” isn’t: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live.”

“(Last night, my wife had another one of her bad dreams. I didn’t wake her. Afterward, after all the smothered moaning and spastic shuddering, she began to snore lightly, and I did wake her, to tell her she was snoring and complain she was not letting me sleep. She apologized penitently in a drowsy, cranky voice and turned over on her side while I looked at her ass. I smiled and slept well.)”

“The years are too short, the days are too long.”

“Someone like Amazonian Marie Jencks would have suctioned me right back up into the womb with a single siphoning contraction, and then puffed me out on a flat trajectory into the spongy, red catacombs of a testicle belonging to a man riding the subway trains in search of a curvy backside to splash me back out against. That’s what I call dismemberment. That’s regression. (It wasn’t so bad living in my old man’s scrotum, as far as I can recall. It was warm and humid, and there was lots of companionship. I had a ball.) (That was a good one.)”

“I’m content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce.”

“I’m content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce. (I’m not sure I can do it without her.)”

“It is so easy to make my wife happy it’s really a crime we don’t do it more often. (She’s even prettier when she’s feeling good, her face lights up. She doesn’t hide it.) I try. When I can. (It isn’t always easy to want to.) I’ll make the children come along with us to church when I go, and we’ll generally have a joyful time. (It isn’t always easy to want to be kind and make her happy when I’m thinking of death, murder, adultery, and divorce.)”

“I can’t always get a divorce. I don’t know how it’s done.”

“(Some nights I can sleep and she can’t: it registers upon me that she is leaving the bed repeatedly in some state of agitation, and I doze off again more blissfully as a result of this knowledge.)”

“She hasn’t asked in years. Age and self-respect, I think, have stilled the question every time she wanted to ask: “Do you still love me?” It is in her mind, though. I can see it as a verbal sculpture. She fishes, hints. I decline to oblige. Or perhaps she believes I don’t love her any longer and fears that if she were to ask: “Do you love me?” I would answer: “No.” And then we would have to do something. (And wouldn’t know what.)”

“And I am so pleased she doesn’t ask, feel so grateful and deeply indebted to her at times, that I want to throw wide my arms in relief and proclaim: “I love you!””

“(I have sat at tables with men I’ve known a long time and have wanted to touch their hand.)”

“I think there’s a sauna, for many of the more affluent, better-bred occupants of my thoughts seem the type that likes to scorch itself leisurely after playing squash. I suspect there’s a homosexual haunt located somewhere secret. Tiny shops are all about at which wicked contraband is exchanged by grimy, unshaven men who know how. Grimy, unshaven men expose themselves to me and to children of both sexes and go unpunished. All crimes go unpunished”

“My memory does get faulty of late, merges indistinguishably with imagination, and I must make efforts to shake them apart.”

“(Some tickle my fancy. Some do not.) The day before yesterday, I walked into a luncheonette for a rare roast beef sandwich on a seeded roll and thought I found my barber working behind the counter. “What are you doing in a luncheonette?” I asked. “I’m not your barber,” he answered. I was afraid I was losing my mind. A week ago I looked out a taxi window and saw Jack Green begging in the street in the rain, dressed in a long wet overcoat and ragged shoes. He was a head taller, thinner, pale, and gaunt. It wasn’t him. But that’s what I saw. I was afraid I was losing my wits.”

“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.”

““Daddy!” He is dying. A terror, a pallid, pathetic shock more dreadful than any I have ever been able to imagine, has leaped into his face I can’t stand it. He can’t stand it. He hugs me. He looks beggingly at me for help. His screams are piercing. I can’t bear to see him suffering such agony and fright. I have to do something. I hug his face deeper into the crook of my shoulder. I hug him tightly with both my arms. I squeeze. “Death,” says the doctor, “was due to asphyxiation. The boy was smothered. He had superficial lacerations of the scalp and face, a bruised hip, a deep cut on his arm. That was all. Even his spleen was intact.””

““Good-bye, Martha.” “Good-bye, Martha dear.” “Bye, bye, dear.” “Did you leave anything behind?” “Don’t worry, dear. We’ll send it along.” “Be gentle with her,” I adjure. “She’s a wonderful girl.” I hear applause when she’s gone for the way I handled it. No one was embarrassed. Everyone seems pleased with the way I’ve taken command.”