Something Happened (2 page)

I hate funerals—I hate funerals passionately because there is always something morbid about them—and I do my best to avoid going to any (especially my own, ha, ha). At funerals I do have to attend, I try not to speak to anyone; I merely press palms and look overcome. Occasionally, I mumble something inaudible, and I always lower my eyes, the way I
see people do in movies. I don’t trust myself to do more. Since I don’t know what to say when somebody dies, I’m afraid that anything I do say will be wrong. I really don’t trust myself anymore in any tight situation whose outcome I can’t control or predict. I’m not even happy changing a fuse or an electric light bulb.

Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur. I dislike anything unexpected. If furniture is rearranged even slightly (even in my office) without my prior knowledge it is like receiving a blow in the face or a stab in the back. I dislike everything sudden. I am angered and hurt by surprises of every sort; even those surprises that are organized to bring me pleasure always end with a leaden aftertaste of sorrow and self-pity, a sensation that I have been planned against and exploited for somebody else’s delight, that a secret has been kept from me, that a conspiracy has succeeded from which I was excluded. (I am not the easiest person to live with.) I loathe conflict (with everyone but the members of my household). There are many small, day-to-day conflicts with which I am simply unable to cope any longer without great agony and humiliation: a disagreement with a repairman who is cheating me out of service or a small amount of money, or a conversation of complaint with one of those blankly elusive people who work in the business offices of telephone companies. (I would sooner let myself be cheated.) Or the time the mice got into the apartment before I became a minor executive with my company and began earning enough money to move out of the city into my own home in Connecticut (which I hate).

I didn’t know what to do about those mice. I never saw them. Only the cleaning woman did, or said she did, and one time my wife thought she did, and one time my wife’s mother was almost sure she did. After a while the mice just disappeared. They went away. They stopped coming out. I’m not even sure they were really there. We stopped talking about them and they seemed to be gone, and it was just as though
they had never been there at all. They were baby mice (according to all responsible accounts) and must have squeezed their way in through the small squares in the grille covering the radiator. I didn’t mind the mice too much, as long as I didn’t have to see or hear them, although I would often catch myself listening for them and occasionally believe I did hear them. But they gave my wife the creeps and kept her in a constant state of fright. She wanted me to do something about them.

So every night I had to set traps for them. And every morning, while my wife and children watched fearfully over my shoulder, I had to open each of the closet and cupboard doors, peer behind each of the sofas and beds and corner armchairs, to see what new and ugly surprise was lying in wait for me to help launch that particular day. Even no surprise was a shocking surprise. It bothered me to have my family standing around staring at me in such grave absorption and suspense, because two of my children are high-strung and insecure to begin with and were already scared enough. My other boy has brain damage and doesn’t know anything. And I wasn’t so sure even then that I liked my family well enough as a group to want them pressing upon me so closely in such a tense and personal situation.

I never knew what I would find when I opened the doors to inspect my traps or looked behind the furniture, stove, or refrigerator. I was afraid I would catch the mice and find them dead in the traps and have to dispose of them. I was afraid that I wouldn’t catch the mice, and that I would have to go through the same repulsive ritual of setting and inspecting the traps night after night and morning after morning for God knows how long. What I dreaded most of all, though, was that I would open a door in the kitchen and find a live mouse crouching in a dark corner that would hesitate only long enough for me to spy it and then come bounding out past me beneath the thick, rolled-up magazine I always gripped in my sweating fist as a weapon. Oh, God, if that ever happened. If that ever happened, I knew I would have to make myself hit it as hard as I could. I knew I would
have to force myself to swing at it with all my strength and try to bludgeon the poor thing to death with one solid blow, and I knew I would fail and only cripple it. Then, as it lay there before me still struggling on its smashed and broken legs, although I would not want to, I knew I would have to raise the heavy magazine and club it again, and then again, and perhaps then again, until I had killed it completely.

The possibility of finding a live mouse behind every door I opened each morning filled me with nausea and made me tremble. It was not that I was afraid of the mouse itself (I’m not that silly), but if I ever did find one, I knew I would have to do something about it.

In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it.

All these twelve men are elderly now and drained by time and success of energy and ambition. Many have spent their whole lives here. They seem friendly, slow, and content when I come upon them in the halls (they seem dead) and are always courteous and mute when they ride with others in the public elevators. They no longer work hard. They hold meetings, make promotions, and allow their names to be used on announcements that are prepared and issued by somebody else. Nobody is sure anymore who really runs the company (not even the people who are credited with running it), but the company does run. Sometimes these twelve men at the top work for the government for a little while. They don’t seem interested in doing much more. Two of them know what I do and recognize me, because I have helped them in the past, and they have been kind enough to remember
me, although not, I’m sure, by name. They inevitably smile when they see me and say: “How are you?” (I inevitably nod and respond: “Fine.”) Since I have little contact with these twelve men at the top and see them seldom, I am not really afraid of them. But most of the people I am afraid of in the company are.

Just about everybody in the company is afraid of somebody else in the company, and I sometimes think I am a cowering boy back in the automobile casualty insurance company for which I used to work very long ago, sorting and filing automobile accident reports after Mrs. Yerger was placed in charge of the file room and kept threatening daily to fire us all. She was a positive, large woman of overbearing confidence and nasty amiability who never doubted the wisdom of her biases. A witty older girl named Virginia sat under a big Western Union clock in that office and traded dirty jokes with me (“My name’s Virginia—Virgin for short, but not for long, ha, ha.”); she was peppy and direct, always laughing and teasing (with me, anyway), and I was too young and dumb then to see that she wasn’t just joking. (Good God—she used to ask me to get a room for us somewhere, and I didn’t even know how! She was extremely pretty, I think now, although I’m not sure I thought so then, but I did like her, and she got me hot. Her father had killed himself a few years before.) Much went on there in that company too that I didn’t know about. (Virginia herself had told me that one of the married claims adjusters had taken her out in his car one night, turned insistent, and threatened to rape her or put her out near a cemetery, until she pretended to start to cry.) I was afraid to open doors in that company too, I remember, even when I had been sent for by one of the lawyers or adjusters to bring in an important file or a sandwich. I was never sure whether to knock or walk right in, to tap deferentially or rap loudly enough to be heard at once and command admission. Either way, I would often encounter expressions of annoyance and impatience (or feel I did. I had arrived too soon or arrived too late).

Mrs. Yerger bullied us all. In a little while, nearly all of the file clerks quit, a few of the older ones
to go into the army or navy, the rest of us for better jobs. I left for a better job that turned out to be worse. It took nerve to give notice I was quitting, and it always has. (I rehearsed my resignation speech for days, building up the courage to deliver it, and formulated earnest, self-righteous answers to accusing questions about my reasons for leaving that neither Mrs. Yerger nor anyone else even bothered to ask.) I have this thing about authority, about walking right up to it and looking it squarely in the eye, about speaking right out to it bravely and defiantly, even when I know I am right and safe. (I can never make myself believe I
am
safe.) I just don’t trust it.

That was my first job after graduating (or being graduated
from
) high school. I was seventeen then—that “older,” witty, flirting girl under the Western Union clock, Virginia, was only twenty-one (too young now by at least a year or two, even for me)—and in every job I’ve had since, I’ve always been afraid I was about to be fired. Actually, I have never been fired from a job; instead, I receive generous raises and rapid promotions, because I am usually very alert (at the beginning) and grasp things quickly. But this feeling of failure, this depressing sense of imminent catastrophe and public shame, persists even here, where I do good work steadily and try to make no enemies. It’s just that I find it impossible to know exactly what is going on behind the closed doors of all the offices on all the floors occupied by all the people in this and all the other companies in the whole world who might say or do something, intentionally or circumstantially, that could bring me to ruin. I even torture myself at times with the ominous speculation that the CIA, FBI, or Internal Revenue Service has been investigating me surreptitiously for years and is about to close in and arrest me, for no other reason than that I have some secret liberal sympathies and usually vote Democratic.

I have a feeling that someone nearby is soon going to find out something about me that will mean the end, although I can’t imagine what that something is.

In the normal course of a business day, I fear Green and Green fears me. I am afraid of Jack Green because my department is part of his department and Jack Green is my boss; Green is afraid of me because most of the work in my department is done for the Sales Department, which is more important than his department, and I am much closer to Andy Kagle and the other people in the Sales Department than he is.

Green distrusts me fitfully. He makes it clear to me every now and then that he wishes to see everything coming out of my department before it is shown to other departments. I know he does not really mean this: he is too busy with his own work to pay that much attention to all of mine, and I will bypass him on most of our assignments rather than take up his time and delay their delivery to people who have (or think they have) an immediate need for them. Most of the work we do in my department is, in the long run, trivial. But Green always grows alarmed when someone from another department praises something that has come from my department. He turns scarlet with rage and embarrassment if he has not seen or heard of it. (He is no less splenetic if he
has
seen it and fails to remember it.)

The men in the Sales Department like me (or pretend to). They don’t like Green. He knows this. They complain about him to me and make uncomplimentary remarks, and he knows this too. He pretends he doesn’t. He feigns indifference, since he doesn’t really like the men in the Sales Department. I don’t really like them, either (but I pretend I do). Generally, Green makes no effort to get along with the men in the Sales Department and is pointedly aloof and disdainful. He worries, though, about the enmity he creates there. Green worries painfully that someday soon the Corporate-Operations Department will take my department away from his department and give it to the Sales Department. Green has been worrying about this for eighteen years.

In my department, there are six people who are afraid of me, and one small secretary who is afraid of all
of us. I have one other person working for me who is not afraid of anyone, not even me, and I would fire him quickly, but I’m afraid of him.

The thought occurs to me often that there must be mail clerks, office boys and girls, stock boys, messengers, and assistants of all kinds and ages who are afraid of
everyone
in the company; and there in one typist in our department who is going crazy slowly and has all of
us
afraid of
her
.