"They only got what they deserved," she said. "In a way, they'd really been asking for it."
My wife was sorry for the children.
I must remember not to smile too much. I must maintain a faзade. I must remember to continue acting correctly subservient and clearly grateful to people in the company and at the university and country clubs I'm invited to who expect to find me feeling humble, eager, lucky, and afraid. I travel less, come home more. (I'm keeping myself close to home base, which isn't home, of course, but the company.) My wife is pleased to have me around, even though we quarrel. My daughter suspects I'm checking on her. We suspect she's been using one of the cars when we're out — she has older friends with junior driving licenses — and that she's been threatening my boy with disfigurement and blindness if he tells. (I think I might kill her if I found out she's been threatening him with death or mutilation.) Derek can't say anything. I wonder what impressions flow through his mind (he does have one, I must force myself to remember, and ears and eyes that see and hear) and what sense he is able to make of any of them. I would not care to wiretap his head. I would hear much crackling, I think. I think of him as receiving stimuli linearly in unregulated currents of sights and sounds streaming into one side of his head and going out the other into the air as though like radio signals through a turnip or through some finely tuned, capstan-shaped, intricate, and highly sensitive instrument of ceramic, tungsten, and glass that does everything but work. I can't call it a terminal, because nothing ends there. I think of my own thoughts as circular, spherical, orbicular, a wheel turning like the world in a basin of sediment into which so much of what I forget to think about separates and drops away into the bottom layers of murk and sludge. (I even forget the things I want to try to remember.) Like a vacuum tube, he can peak suddenly into fiery heat. Like a transistor, he is affected invisibly by jarring and by variations in humidity and temperature. I have a son with a turnip in his head. I think there must be static and other kinds of interference there, and possibly then is when he has his tantrums. (I have static in my own that leads to cranky outbursts at home and wish my head would break open and let the crackling pressure escape.) He does have a sweet face. All my children do, and my wife is more attractive for her age than any other woman her age I know. I wonder what architectural connections stand unfinished in his brain. Is he too ignorant to apprehend yet that he is an idiot and will grow up to be an imbecile? Does he know he's supposed to be wishing me dead and reacting with fear I'll murder or castrate him for experiencing that hope? He'd better learn to keep his filthy designs on my wife to himself. He is blameless. I dream he's dead also and am inconsolable when I awake because I'm sorry for him and know I'm dreaming of me and don't entirely want him gone.
"What were you dreaming about last night?" my wife wants to know as she fixes breakfast.
"Derek."
"You were laughing."
"You. I dreamed you were fucking another man."
"You were laughing."
"You were funny. A big black spade. You grabbed me by the prick. I like girls who grab my prick."
"Should I grab it now?"
"I have to get to work. Make dinner tonight."
"I had a horrible dream."
"You were crying."
"In your dream?"
"In yours."
"Why didn't you wake me up? I dreamt I was crying and couldn't stop."
"I was busy in my dream. Maybe it was the same dream. Did you dream you were fucking a big black nigger last night?"
"I don't have to. I get all I want from you."
"I think the bitch is stealing one of our cars. He started to say something at dinner last night and she gave him a look."
"I'll ask her."
"I'll trap her. Make dinner tonight. I like trapping her."
"You're sure coming home a lot these days."
"So what?"
"I didn't mean anything. I'm glad."
"Neither did I."
"And you don't have to yell."
"And I'm not yelling. I don't see why I can't raise my voice around here once in a while without being accused of yelling. Everyone else does. You do. I don't know what you're so edgy about."
"You're the one who's edgy this morning. I'm glad when you come home. You even whistle. Maybe you're starting to enjoy being here with us."
"Of course I do."
"Is everything all right?"
"Everything's fine. And would be even better if you stopped asking me if everything's all right."
"I knew it wouldn't last until you got out of the kitchen."
"No wonder I can't wait to get to work."
"If anything's wrong at the office I wish you'd tell me."
"Everything is fine."
"What's wrong?" Green demands of me bluntly as soon as I get to work.
"Wrong?"
"I said it loudly enough." (Oh, Christ — he's in a mood also, and he's taken me unawares.)
"Nothing."
"Don't lie to me."
His exophthalmic eyes are glaring at me with moist and sadistic petulance, and his sensual face is hot and beady around the brows and mouth. Green will normally not allow himself to perspire where other people can see him. (I wonder if he is bothered more this morning by his thyroid deficiency or his enlarged prostate.) He is wearing a large, soft, box-plaid camel suit with notched, wide lapels and a gray vertical weave and fine violet lines, and can get away with it. The rest of us have to wait for festivals and expositions, although box-plaid slacks are okay on weekends at barbecues, marinas, and country clubs. Green is a flamboyant presence with an overwhelming vocabulary that keeps most of his superiors in the company aloof and ill at ease. Horace White shuns him like the plague. Green courts Horace White; White flees from him toward Black, who despises Green and vilifies him openly; Green retreats, nursing his wounds.