The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Look: here’s something: she’s fallen asleep while hugging me. I step, I move, tinily, into another realm of observation: sleep covers her pink face with a smooth look like doors; Nonie is ELSEWHERE. Her eyelids are skin with no fleshy stuff under them—but animal noses twitch and sniff at dead eyes there. Little snores, bleached delphiniums of breath rise from her mouth, stalks and bells above the small vortex at her lips. The insuck. Giant girl—her ribs are muffled spans, the handles of ladles, big, big spoons, faintly vibrant. All this lies against me: she’s hugging me. She is—ELSEWHERE. She is in the mysterious horn of sleep, running inside a rolling egg. I struggle to get free, I push at her arms, I tug, I rub and wiggle against her—chest—I put my mouth on her chin and I bite her. I suck her breath, the bits of private air, the private delphiniums, scratchy grasses. Suddenly she awakes—she looks at me.

  It’s Nonie. Nonie’s eyes.

  A form of speech—do you understand? This is like any look, this is in every look that she gave me—we have years in which we don’t look into each other’s eyes: it’s pointless; but it’s not like that yet.

  Her being wakeful, like every quality of THIS GIRL, has a foreign tonality, often silvery and thin—elf traits; ghost droppings; animal acts; leaf noises in a wood which can’t be identified, which signify an unknown life. Her breath doesn’t have the weight of Daddy’s or Momma’s speechy murmurousness, of their pale groans or sighs that tip suddenly like seesaws into shadows, into the nighttime and me eavesdropping without the hope of understanding anything. Nonie’s face is complex because Nonie’s here—hands, pink body, moods: these multiply and are the opposite of isolation, are implication, a tangle of possibilities, snakes or shrews in a thicket, cottonmouth or a hunting cat, the proximity of Evil from the beginning. Her presence is rhetorical in a spare language. The five public senses are façades breathing mood, an architecture of seduction, of menace. This isn’t play, this isn’t just play, it’s real: Hey, were you lonely? Did you dream of a playmate? Look, this is a dream come true, this is for real. I’m the boss—I’m the older sister . . . A deal. Is it a deal? Her hug, her clayey arms, her tenderness, her ribs, her head opening onto her tickling, finely pretty hair, her affection are a limited speech, opening onto a large-scale babble: common sense. Her eyes and mine are as if in a piazza. The locked gazes form a piazza of apparent and mutual consciousness; awareness is echoing and returned, amplified—a proper blackmail: her size and physical power—Nonie’s being Nonie here—the world has a sudden fluttering tenderness, foulness, Nonie-style. I have no choice: the child’s drowning. His face is parkland, grass, airy vistas; or a flock of pigeons; or a house; or bells, slim fires; secrets expressed as films of wordlessness—a landscape of altered and fluctuating noises of response, attachment; a listening: perhaps the child is noticeably male for Nonie, a weight of foreignness, a genetic glistening. She moves; she grips me in the unfinished, barely begun web of her arms—a species of passion? Ho! Or minor rape—I turn and twist, I subside against her puffed chest; she lifts her prisoner—Her Prisoner. We go sit creakingly in a white wicker chair among the columns and screens of a wooden porch. We are in a drifting light; the chair creaks, a plunging elephant; Nonie swings her legs: a game: I drop through her legs: I yell: Nonie grips me between her thighs, then between her calves—I grunt—I lean backward, and the bones of her ankles bongle-thang my ribs. I drop to the floor. I’m free—she grips my wrist—her hair hangs ticklingly, brightly. Is she bored? It’s hot; a fly is caught in the girl’s other hand, a curled fist; the buzzing is constant, it grows louder, swifter—I twitch. Nonie says, “Die, fly—die-ee-ee.” Her fist is at my ear, shaken, a gourd, an instruction: I hear an insect skeleton snap. Nonie puts the snapped bug on my shoulder. “I’m your mother; you have to do what I say; wear this”—funeral epaulet—“You have to wear that.” I push it off. Her lips touch my nose, she bites me swiftly, in a flush of rosied hate, an eagerness. I stiffen; my soft fists clench; I hunch over and she stops; she lifts me; we go down some steps to the grass; we sit on the grass in silence, among midges and yellow discs: “Those are butter.” Then Nonie pushes my face toward the dandelions: “Lick the butter, Wileykins. “I twist my head, wriggle, get free: I stare at her. She leans closer to me—I bat her nose—she places her firm, fat leg over my folded legs to hold me while she makes a dandelion wreath. “You’re just a wild man, you’re just so bad we don’t know what to do with you.” I don’t have to listen to her. I don’t have to hear the tones. I don’t have to know hers to be now an exploratory malice. No one else here speaks to me with This Immediacy of Evil. The promise of having a separate soul, responsibility, my own life lies in Evil—which is secret. “You’re a bad little prince”. And: “Here.” She bestows the diadem, and then, after a while, yanks it over my eyes—I am inside the wreath, inside the act: I don’t know what’s happened, what’s happening. Here is yellow light, here are yellow shadows. I sit. I’m naked in this part of the day; the child is naked, dusted with faithful suburban light.

  “What a pretty pair of children!”

  I’m hugged; my head is forced to a weird angle.

  Locked into her affections, the prey of some sentience of hers about what is real, I fight. See the kid push at her unfurry, slidy, technically fond arms. She pulls me close: “Wiley adores me. See, he loves me.”

  “Don’t hurt her feelings, Kiddo. Stay with Nonie.”

  “You’ve made a conquest, Wiley. She’s crazy about you.”

  The mysterious potencies of what I am, which include the way I look, lie like cut flowers in the baskets of her head, her chest. Jesus: the mad and silent child (“He’s a beauty; he’s a real winner”). The child’s somberness and force are lunatic, noiseless. Here come her arms: I’m between her legs: her eyes, nostrils, mouth—and mine—apertures, heat, childhood.

  I saw her beat a dog to death. Like a farm woman. A heroine.

  This is the way I am: I play dumb, or sleepy, or watchful. If I’m too knowing, someone says, He’s mischiev-i-ous, or, He’s a tease; he’s teasing her: he’s teasing you, hon. Her eyes do a Nonie thing: curiosity, pain are mixed: curiosity starts as part of a deficiency; it is an extension of an ache. Nonie will squeeze me so hard that I go airless and briefly shameless, limp; she will lie on me while I struggle to breathe and to get free until my struggling tapers off, and then we gasp, almost in unison. Is this an uncorrected foulness or is this a merely human thing? Her face is reluctant, obtuse. She has a smell of wakefulness, a stench. Is this A TORTURE? I’m clutched in her smelly arms near her childlike breath. Nonie interprets the world for me and to me: she supplies the terms of my sense of things . . . of my language.

  I see her everywhere.

  I have a sense of union with her, an odd form of transport, a childhood pleasure. I am not free of being her—or of being near her, whatever I do. “Are you happy?” she asks me in a dry, earnest, menacing way. “I want us to be happy.”

  Nonie says, “I want everyone to be happy—I want everyone to be happy so they’ll be nice.”

  She is politically serious when she says this. Her politics govern many of the ways in which we are lovers.

  I feel the wind at my ear. Nonie’s over there in the sunlight on the tennis court under the blue sky, with two dibbie clouds in it and two sour crows ashriek. Her shoulders are hiked up; she holds her racquet stiffly; she crouches; her legs swell and bend and she runs sidlingly: Look at the dear thing run—she’s quite a good little competitor. She had the rapid postures of physical concentration that are possible for her when she competes, when she is revved up, when she is playing with her full will. But she’s not-good enough—the sports talk is Poor Thing, she’s dying on her feet, Nonie’s being just slaughtered out there, she’s in over her head . . .

  Sweat lies in the folds of her skin. The intricate wind guides and deflects, raises and stymies and presses on the flight of the ball. Nonie is not in her league here—this is a serious matter.

  Look: the Silenowicz
es don’t have and can’t get—they’ll try, but they can’t do it—a similar commitment to Wiley as they have to Nonie as a conduit of genetics, let’s say, traits of theirs passed along, a family line expanded and multiplied—as they do, willy-nilly, to Nonie. It is possible that they “love” me more, far more, than they do their daughter or each other or anyone else, “love” here as feeling—amusement and also wanting-to-be-with—but not love as the power and full strangeness of alliance, of competition, of serious blackness. The Silenowiczes were told again and again and again and again that they can’t care what becomes of me as someone can who is of the same blood. Blood? Do we have to see some blood soon? Whose child am I? I am there for the sake of these people’s happiness, so to speak, not for the sake of their or my or my real mother’s lineage—they are not loyal to what’s found in me: why the hell should they be? They love me passionately—Our life was you, our whole life, off and on, and for a while you liked that. No matter how feelingly they care, I will never exist in certain ways for them—and nothing is compensated for: it is a convenience to say this balances that: it has nothing to do with it to say that otherwise the child would not have lived—perhaps. I had my audience early; they were attached to what I meant to them—in actual moments, always a now, a romance. I am expendable to them in a way a son of theirs could not have been—my lovers: not my family. I don’t know that a family sense is much different: it’s less clear, certainly. I have no family sense. This gives a glitter to everything I know—and feel.

  Nonie is closed in, as it were, on three sides, or two, and open only on one, and I am open all around.

  Nonie has sweaty, slightly spread legs; her thighs, her crotch—she’s aware of heat in them.

  Wiley, I don’t ever want to think you’re jealous of her.

  I can’t as a general rule locate my cruelty toward others; it tends to lie in my acting on acknowledgments of superiority in me. If I’m smarter than you, why don’t you LISTEN to me? I tend to display virtues rather than to take on obligations—a child, a younger one, adopted, piratic, unrooted.

  The sunlight: the tennis court: the girls on it . . . I ran out on the court. “GET HIM AWAY! I DON’T WANT HIM NOW! GET HIM AWAY FROM ME!”

  “Wiley, don’t do that!”

  I hit Nonie a number of times in childhood—never with male embarrassment or a boy’s regret or that vile remorse of what-have-I-done. I felt satisfaction, a sense of order—a sense of symmetry sated by a feeling of decency at hitting her—this is a truth: I admit it. Nonie sometimes disgusts me. Often. Always—a little . . . No: only sometimes . . . Nonie, when she strikes at someone, feels it to be JUSTICE. I’m below and behind and ahead and high above her in a dark space, a black sky—without team spirit, contemplating her sense of JUSTICE.

  She runs inside the airy globe of my sight at this minute. She is on the tennis court. She will never know about this representation of herself as something in nature both immediate and recalled, as physical and real in present moments, one after the other. “Whee!” she says. Her speech does not represent the life in her except as a contradiction of what she hides inside herself. She shouts, even so. I dislike or hate her because she hit me on the arm with her tennis racquet while Daddy dragged me off the tennis court. I must sit here and watch her play. The pockets of her flesh move me. The ball in one flight has ninety-nine positions of ghost readiness and then an arc of accusation: You better hit me—an accusation means itself plus, unspoken, Hit me, since everyone fights back or falls to one side. Nonie hears time’s soon-to-be-changed sportive accusation and test questions and score in her head. She hears, she sees and hears and feels the flight-of-the-ball—the ghost tails, cherubic ghost heads of the arcing ball, fill her sight—her foresight, her powers of prediction. Look: Without enmity, she has no edge; she’s not solid in her game; she’s cloudy, overweight—strange. Do you forgive her? Why can’t you forgive her? She’s slowed in the weird geometric set pieces of her emotions and of her faith in things, as in a dream in which motion is recalcitrant and her screaming is interdicted and her only safety is in rescue by something outside the machinery of this particular episode. By justice, or luck in a disguise. Let her fight back. Let me. Her sense of the court, the battleground—my sense of ecstasy—form an unshiny, heat-struck outdoors rhythm. Is it the game, the remembered game? She speeds, quickened, deadened in consciousness, narrowed to the game: she escapes me. I want her, Nonie, for my own purposes: my feelings want her to sit still now.

  She proceeds in the unforgiving indignation of her art in sports. Her mind is on top of—a healthy body. Her dearest treasure, her weapon, her soul, her prize of competition and rivalry, is her body below: her mind is no trophy: it’s hers: her admiration is loathsomely allied to the compromises of that body: her mind rises on the flailing arms, pivoting torso, chuffing and then braced and then scuttling legs, like a perched dragonfly on a brick colossus, in a space of great ice, great cold. Inside a sheltered dome, a brainpan mosaicked with visions, the motto, the point is lodged: Wiley can’t hurt me, things can’t hurt me. A victory is to the girl’s wakefulness as a dream is to her consciousness asleep. Life is explained in an intensely theatrical (a directed) light.

  4–2, Lisa—it’s not credible that Nonie should lose, and be without meaning. She will be an ordinariness—a matter only of sentimental report.

  Nonie is trying. But Lisa finds it apparently easy to tip Nonie into a rubbish heap of miscalculations, the frenzied clumsiness of someone who does not matter as a force but who will not give in yet. Such contradiction between will and result lays bare the presence of meaning—usually unwanted. Unprepared for. So this is what is to end up badly . . . Help, help . . .

  Daddy says under his breath, “Our girl ain’t lookin’ too good. Well, there’s other things in life besides winning.”

  In the text I have failed to supply here—Nonie’s Book of Pity for Herself, Nonie’s Sadness, Nonie’s Charities Toward Her Will, Her Life—among the victories she does not gain, Nonie’s mind is described as an agency of discipline beating with mad persistence at a single point, beating herself into a single point, then that single point against the adamancy of being eighth-rate, against odds and defeat, perpetually turning its sharpest side outward.

  All her truths are secret—all. When she killed the dog, the boys and the other girl egged each other on to strike; one boy was dogmatic, exasperated: “It’s probably DISEASED.” Nonie, mostly silent, spoke twice, as if she were the leader. “Here we go.” Then, during the execution: “It just has to be done.” She struck firmly with a half-clutched half-brick; her eyelids were lowered partway, they fluttered; she peered and didn’t look, both; her nose was wrinkled at first. A rope had been wound around and around the dog’s legs and then around a tree trunk and then under the dog’s belly and over its ribs and its back haunches and around its neck so that its head was held, loosely, against the rough hide of the tree skin. The sounds of breath—the dog didn’t bark—the sounds of the blows: a childhood thing. The squish of the pelt: struck bone. As if politely, Nonie struck the dog on its ribs first, far from the center points of the senses, but she saw that was a girl thing, as in Watch out for its eyes—or ears. She’s concentrating; she’s goddess-like. Her temperament, her uncertain temperament, rests uneasily in these areas of life and death from which girls are unfairly excluded, excluded from open and from secret discussions of this stuff. She held her neck stiffly, her head back as if to mimic and understand the musculature and terror and courage of the dog: she goes berserk over ideas of good-and-evil, of justice, of I-like-it-and-I-don’t-like-it—the permitted idioms—sometimes with phony innocence, or ignorance, girlish, useful, a cover story for a bloodied agent. She struck at the forehead, at the squelchy fur and bone. She struck at the jellied eye and called out “Oh,” and then she boasted, “I hit it IN THE EYE . . .” Nonie, when she was young, was afraid of being buried alive. Nonie advances in her classroom-and-chapel study of DEATH: the real thing—not a word, not
a word for a state of quiet, for an intervention in life’s time, but for a finality of one’s will, one’s citizenship, one’s role in the epic of the world.

  The kid, he plays unmeanly—well, I’m adopted—he plays gently: he’s a Jew, he’s not very Jewy (ha-ha): I’m welcome here: he’s a little king.

  Do you hate her, Wiley?

  Yes. I’m sorry.

  “I’m so normal it’s awful. I’m not like Wiley.”

  Go slow, pace yourself, turn yourself inside out.

  I-went-for-the-kill—I-went-for-the-killing-shot, but-I-just-didn’t-have-it.

  Lisa’s mouth is set; it shakes from time to time; her eyes hold intention, unnegotiably—she is prepared for winning—she is defeating Our Little Sister of Tennis. Nonie says, “I got too eager; I was just too hot to trot. Coach Bill says you have to be a tiger, not a pig. I got silly in the second set. You have to know that a game takes a long time, you have to just be patient and stick to your game strategy—and your strategy will stick by you . . .” A strategy unfolds—it is a form of obtuseness toward others, it is a cancellation of accident, it magnifies parts of oneself. She holds me between her legs and tightens the barrette in her hair. “I learned my lesson. I’m just going to be a ti-ti-tiger, like Coach Bill says, and never a pig. Hold still, Wileykins.”