Puzzle – What Really Happened, II
by
Jansen Estrup
A true friend is not always friendly. Any being has its own personae. Al, when he was Monitor, had been mostly antagonistic, John believed for most of his life. Now, when they had finally decided to become chums, pals, buddies, he digressed, donned that inquisition mask, yet again.
“Don't try to change the subject. What was your brother doing while all this was going on?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Oh, no. You want to stay stuck in that 'be a man' mire!”
John says, for the umteenth time, “It wasn't my fault.” His voice sounds mewling inside his head. Could it get any more pathetic than this?
“It isn't about fault, John. It is about pain.”
Pain? One gets over physical pain … mostly. There is scarring. Cell memory.
“No, John. Psychic pain. The pain you cannot endure, cannot even acknowledge. You think it goes away, but it only hides, then takes on a life of its own.”
John cannot answer. There is nothing to say.
“A long life, John. Your long life. Don't you want it back?”
“Back? You saying it has been gone? Taken? Seventy years?”
“What did you learn there, in that strange house, waiting at the window?”
Four year old John does not know. Neither does ancient John. He experiences a flash of dread.
“You learned how to wait, didn't you?”
“I suppose so. There was nothing else to do.”
“Really? You could have waited calmly, enjoyed your stay, played with your brother. Instead you were anxious, afraid.” Al is working himself up, gathering himself for an assault.“What about your brother? What was he learning?”
“I don't know. The fat woman said he just sat there and looked at her. She was afraid of him.”
“Afraid of a two year old?”
“He ran away and broke some other child's toys, with a brick, Mama said. He ran away again. I couldn't stop him.”
“Stop him.You didn't even know he'd gone, this time. You were too busy learning to wait at a window!” Al's tone has lost all semblance of kindness, of friendliness.
“You saying that I should still have looked after him, even after ...”
“No, John. I'm not saying that. I'm asking you to say what your brother did, what he learned those two weeks while your mother was so sick.”
John is frozen again. After all these decades he still has not learned what to say.
“Okay, I'll say it for you just this once. He learned to do something.”
Already frozen, John has no further recourse to immobility. He cracks. His toddler persona liquefies like clabber – jellied and lumpy.
“Something!” Al repeated. “While you, so obsessed with your own pain, while you were learning … what?”
,
“Nothing … “ John whispers. “No, that's wrong. I was learning … helplessness.”
Gently now, Al embraced himself in a flood of silence. Warmth. “Yes, John. You were learning helplessness.”
Indecision, immobility, caution, fear … helplessness.
“Your brother learned to express his pain by doing something … maybe anything. In this case something destructive.”
“I learned to do nothing?”
“Well, not nothing, John. You did create me.”
Another long pause. John finds something else to think about, watches a movie, goes for a walk, pets his dog, argues with his wife … he has not been a drinker for decades, and he fights off a sudden urge to smoke something. He has not been a smoker for more than fifteen years. But suddenly he is four, back to his father, who is smoking his crusty pipe or a Hav-a-Tampa cigar. And there is Al, smirking patiently, as if to say, 'back already?'
“So what happened next?”
“We didn't eat or sleep much those miserable two weeks. By the time we all got home, back to the little white house with the green trim, I was an emotional and physical mess. The first thing I did was trip on our back porch and fall on a big chest … hit the brass corner full face and broke out my two front teeth.“
“So you couldn't talk, couldn't even translate for your brother … couldn't do much of anything, right? Except wait around for your father.”
“Mother was back in bed, recovering. Baby sister next to her. A man came to the door, a soldier. Mama got out of bed. The soldier pointed to the highway, to a long column of trucks. He said, 'Mam, is that kid yours?'”
Pete was sitting in the middle of the road naked. Soldiers were standing around him. She limped down to the road and grabbed him up, swinging him like a monkey in a storm blown tree while she yelled and spanked him, but it was Mama who was crying. Pretty soon, she fell asleep and another soldier came to the door. Pete had stopped another convoy, or maybe it was the same one.
“She beat him again, of course.”
John says nothing. Al insists. “She beat him again, didn't she!”
“Yes.”
“And you did nothing.”
“Yes.” John is suddenly angry, alert. Then, embracing his shame again, quiescent, helpless.
“Your brother went out again, didn't he?”
“Yes, yes! He was always running away!”
“Why not? Didn't he see you run whenever your father came?”
“Other children had it much worse!”
“Don't give me that crap, John! This is your life, not some Russian freezing in Leningrad. Don't intellectualize this, brush it off, minimize your own experience, your own pain. Every two-bit moralizer does that. Your pain is as important as anyone's, just as valid. Avoiding it is not nobel, not brave, John. And if it is not brave, it is …”
“Because they don't want to face it, cannot bear to face their own pain, their own wounding - the shame. Then everyone goes around in pain, pretending, self-medicating, withdrawing, raging. They just cover it up, shunt it off, deal with it later … ”
“They, John? You mean to say 'I', don't you? And later. You mean like 70 years later?”
“But Al, doesn't one develop that hardened skin, that psychic indifference, that man armor it takes to live and grow and mature in the world - grow by the eager embrace of bruising and callouses and scar tissue. Isn't the ability to ignore pain the mark of a man? And doesn't ignoring pain make inflicting it on others the proper greeting of humankind anywhere on Earth?”
John pauses, listening to himself. He understands moral blindness, now. “Umm,” He says to his pal.
“So how did your mother finally keep Pete home?”
“Exhausted, she tied him to the foot of her wrought-iron bed with clothesline.
“I can still see him hanging there in those loops, dirty and bruised, struggling once in a while. He made no sounds, just watched me with shuttered steel blue eyes, hour upon hour.”
Integration of cognition with emotion – the melding of what we feel with what we know – is the very integration of the healing process. Lack of it underlies the fragmentation of the mind.
Dr. Gabor Matė
And so this piece of the puzzle is foundational to the whole, but it has neither edge nor corner.
