I don’t know how to rescue myself. I am in the middle of a nowhere. The sky glides pivotingly and I start to feel the coldness of shock . . . I can bear real pain only for a while.
For a while in her life, until now Katie has mostly loved unhurtable, uncheapenable God, her Father, more than she loved the dirtied Jesus. But it will be different now. When her shoulder hit the step near the grass and went out of its socket, she passed into a state of cold patience, a marvel: faith and resignation and numb endurance. In a planeless space of hurt.
Don’t hurt me . . . Don’t hurt me anymore . . .
“NO! NO!” she said aloud as she fell.
In her monstrous momentum, Katie bounced and slid on tearing grass and on firm-edged stone steps; she was flung up and over; the blood when she skidded, the breath knocked out of her and the rigor of shocked suffocation and the supplication for air, well, when I was older, I could almost bear it. Something in the soul is criminal—and perhaps because of its own fright—or pain—knows a lot about these things from early on in one’s life and comes to terms of a kind with them—do you know?
One time when I fell, I fell from a tree; I fell fourteen feet, and in that short section of a minute, I felt myself to be stretched, a wire of inner noise and to have an Animal Impracticality of Shape—my arms and legs were too long and would be hurt—and I would be violated—and insulted by the injury.
The first moment of pain is partly guessed at and is only partly known; it is partly unfelt because of shock—and a kind of horror: Why is this happening to me? Why are you doing this to me? . . . whoever you are . . .
The concrete of the driveway rattles my cheekbone and numbs and stuns my skull.
So far in my life when I’ve been hurt, I’ve yelled or shouted or grunted; I haven’t yet in my life screamed with pain—do you know?
One time, skin-diving, I saw in a rough-edged cavemlike hole in a reef a moray eel, its mouth wide open second after second. It looked to me as if it was insane with combat and with constant, quite awful pain.
And the sound of a bone breaking . . . I told you never to throw the baseball bat, I told you someone would get hurt . . .
Hurt flesh, you can’t promise it that sleep will be unwounding. Sleep is wounding over and over. I don’t love her and I never will love her. I forgive her but I don’t love her. I’m just not interested, I’m sorry. I’m a coward. I’ve been hurt enough.
A local accident: her mother had not wanted Katie ever to feel pain—You’d think she’d know better, Lila said of someone else; but, really, she didn’t know better at all . . .
Thud, thud—the sound of fists on flesh . . . I remember that. Do you love those who torment you? Do you get even? Do you live in a haze of agony? Do you find hate to be useful? Do you hate often? A lot of people? I’m not actually curious about these things. When S.L. died and, off and on, I couldn’t get my breath, I said to myself, Oh my God, it really is like A Blow . . . Momma believed, I think, that the truest awareness of the world was to be found in a sadist who knew what he or she was doing . . . This isn’t something I face often. I remember putting dark thoughts aside when I was a child, especially when Mom said, Well, put a good face on it, company is coming.
Pain and felicity and being trained to handle and endure pain so that you can have some real power over your own life, and trespasses and intrusions and being politic—aren’t they part of every childhood?
Daddy said, A good time isn’t a kick in the pants . . .
Pain: cheap windup clocks clanging and jerking in my breath, and an electric buzzing and chiming in my mind from my alarmingly, seemingly swollen backbone . . .
You goddamned well better know what you’re doing to me or I’m going to educate you in my existence (as someone-who-does-harm). But forgive and forget, we have to learn to take the bitter with the sweet, we only have one life.
Leave me alone . . .
Pain? It was like silk, dirty and scummy silk, and then it got bite-y—like bite-y, dirty, scummy SILK . . . Ora said this. I never want to be THAT wide awake again. I wouldn’t fight cancer: I’d kill myself before I’d live with that pain.
I steal a lot of what I consciously think. I have taken a lot of what I consciously think from things she said during the time we were together. I never want to be that far from my dreams again . . . I have no interest in that part of life . . . The one thing I’m not is a masochist . . . I don’t like pain. I’m probably not a moral person because I wouldn’t go through a lot just to keep things going or to serve my country—I don’t care if things go on or not. I want you to know this about me . . .I am brave, strong, and true, and I am willing to die, but I don’t like pain: you’d better know this about me.
And now the creep Wiley will have his name inscribed in THE BOOK OF AMERICAN PAIN.
Lila said, This is a democracy. We all get our turn in the sun, we get our turn at winning and then we get the other, the pie in our face . . .
Things I didn’t think about when I was young included a cousin’s suicide in an insane asylum and never admitted to except in a low, secret voice—I mean the texture of feeling in her before she did it—and an uncle’s heart attack while his wife was yelling at him—this was also a family secret—and a neighbor’s death while waiting for an ambulance to come . . .
Except when showing off with other kids who wanted to talk about and maybe think about such things, I never thought how bad it was inside some people when they were going through a terrible moment . . . I had friends who had said that was middle-class and stupid, to think about such things, to be afraid that such things existed.
I hate it when someone says, No, no, you’re not hurt . . . when I am hurt. I hate it when someone plays with my feelings, causing me stupid pain, and they’re not really licensed to do that. I hate when people say of your pain that it’s minor; it doesn’t count; it’s all in the game. And it’s major and it does count and it’s no game I volunteered for. I hate that amateur self-absolution.
Lila said, I have to hand it to Nonie for one thing—she lives in the real world.
I read in a book that devils were interesting and angels were boring as shit—and I agreed until I thought about devils and pain, and I thought, Oh oh, the hell with that jazz.
I’LL BE CRAZY IN JUST ONE MORE MINUTE IF YOU DON’T SHUT UP . . . YOU’RE DRIVING ME CRAZY. I DON’T KNOW IF I’M COMING OR GOING AND I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT CHILDISH THINGS RIGHT NOW DO YOU MIND? BAD THINGS HAPPEN AND THAT’S THAT.
Momma said to me once, You know that thing where they say, “My strength is as the strength often because my soul is pure”—do you suppose there’s any truth in that? She said more than once, Pain is a terrible thing. And: Pain is just disgusting.And: It is very hard to be with someone in pain, Wiley, unless they’re brave.
A lot of people I knew, young and old—everyone really, at least now and then—was finally merciless in any of several styles.
I figure I can kill. Mostly I’m a pacifist, but I can stop caring about self-restraint. Ora’s mother asked me with resignation when she first met me, Are you a psychopath? Of any kind?
I said, Do you think Ora would pick a psychopath?
She said, Just tell me if you are or not.
Ora did like psychopaths; she’d told me: ex-cons, crazed, great ex-generals, loon-lesbians of a great order of accomplishment, mean theater directors . . . So long as they had glamour. She liked glamourous psychopaths and always had, she said.
I said to her mother, I’m very middle-class—I’ve never really hit anyone. You can look into my eyes and see. See what’s there: I’ll hold still.
Ora’s mother, Millie, a heavy drinker, said, I’m nearsighted. Just answer my questions. I’m her mother and I don’t know you.
Irritated, I said, I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and find out. I would say that I doubted that I was a psychopath.
I am not certain what terrifies me in real life. I think I have an inherent chemical suitability for bearing ho
rror, a genetic thing of anticipatory or a priori shock or anesthesia but not numbness. It permits concentration. I used to be able to help at accidents. Don’t get your father angry—you don’t know what it will lead to . . . When S.L. became angry, purple came and went in his face. His lips darkened and his eyes swelled up and looked at stuff without fondness or caring. Mom used to send me to talk to him then. I would be tense and excited but not scared and sad. My Uncle Henry had cold, snobbish malice and dismissal at his disposal—he was the richest person in the family. All the guys and women I know have some sweaty reality of temper or other. S.L. said of my real mother, angrily, She was some kind of religious nut and a whore who slept with killers and rednecks . . . She liked laughing at people—she got what she deserved—you’re well out of it, knowing that fat bitch of a whore . . .
Lila said to me: Don’t hold it against him. You never know with him who he’s going to be jealous of next. And he apologized later, too.
S.L. often said he was ashamed. He would sit on my bed at night and he would say, Give me a hug, Pooperkins: make everything all right for me, will you? How about it, how about telling your old man all is forgiven: he’s a real good guy: he pays the bills: he’s a good guy and he loves you, Pooper; so you want to tell him what a sweetheart he is?
If I wanted to hurt him then, I would push him away and not let him hold me and I would say—in one tone or another—I like Momma better than I like you . . .
Often I did, in part because it seemed to me that she did less harm in the world, that she hurt people less.
If he wanted to fight back with me when I was unforgiving, he would indirectly call me a baby: Well, maybe you’ll outgrow all the horseshit, he would say; and maybe you won’t.
Sometimes you get sick and you give up.
Lila said before she died, I would have been nicer but I thought I was having a good time the way I was.
The Nazis: about the local ones and the ones in Europe, she said, It takes only one fool to burn your house down. And: I don’t want to be insulted. I don’t think it’s smart to live in a small town at this time. She made a joke in front of company about this: In St. Louis, the houses are brick. I take The Three Little Piggies seriously. Well, that’s the long and the short of it. I’ve got a new project: tell the truth and shame the devil—you think that will work?
Nonie Continued: Welcome: At the Net: University City: 1934
In University City, Katie Rogers lived in a large brick cottage on a street, a cul-de-sac, of such cottages, each one imaginatively droll, with high sweeping gable fronts and lower gabled front porches in brick and whitestone. And each had an unusually tall, fairly droll brick chimney, with decorative white brick crosses and lozenges set in patterns here and there or had twisted bricks at the corners. Each cottage had small leaded windows with black shutters with brass fastenings—a real street of a hundred of these windows, one street over from ours—actually, half the street, and on one side of the street only, facing larger Queen Anne brick houses.
Katie’s house was set high on a plump round of lawn, through which a curving reach of sixteen brick- and whitestone-walled steps were cut from the front porch down to the concrete driveway which led to the garage in the basement of the adorable cottage. The driveway, too, was partly underground and had brick stone-topped walls of different heights on either side and beds of daffodils on top of both walls.
Likelihood changes when people freely shop and read advertisements often. Unreality becomes real: fairy tales are told and are acted out and influence the architecture.
“I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! I DIDN’T DO IT, PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BELIEVE HER—PEOPLE BELIEVE THINGS ABOUT ME BECAUSE I’M AN ATH-A-LETE AND I PLAY TO WIN. PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BELIEVE BAD THINGS . . . KATIE IS NO GOOD! LISTEN TO ME, SHE WETS HER PANTS, SHE LIKES TO DRINK LIQUOR—I KNOW ABOUT HER, MOMMA, LISTEN TO ME!”
“What a tumble she took . . . My God, I don’t want to think about it . . .” Then: “Well, it isn’t life or death, thank God.”
Nonie said, “IT IS TOO LIFE AND DEATH . . .”
Daddy said, “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill: no one was killed, she took a real tumble is all it is . . . We’re lucky it’s not worse . . . It’s only good sense to know it coulda been worse. Everyone got off easy this time.”
Margy, Katie’s mother, is combative and pious, not dressy, and she goes from sad discipline to surprised interest and amusement. Sometimes she seems as if she has been thrown into a pit of innerness. She is mostly present but dutifully, patiently. She has frizzy hair and good features. She has a nice, tuneless, flat voice. She took her daughter out of parochial school and put her in the pretty-much-Protestant public school. I have heard people say her husband is better educated than she is, and better looking; but he married her and they’re Catholic; so he sticks to her. Lila has said, He plays around; he’s cute; but I don’t like him.
It may be because of her mother’s voice of because she is tense and somewhat pious but Katie blinks her eyes as often as if she were in a noisy factory. Katie was interesting-looking—tall for her age and freckled, big-legged and blurting, soft-eyed. Katie has longish, wavy hair often braided with escaped and often shiny red-brown filaments in the light. Her presence is actually honeylike for me—I taste it . . .
I played with the two of them, Katie and Nonie. Sometimes we played in hidden places, such as the porch of some people down the street who were away on a trip. The porch had a low brick wall around most of it; and if you sat down you were out of sight of the street. The porch was unswept. Some twigs and dried leaves here and there mean the people are away.
In the corner of the porch, out of sight behind the low wall, we sat cross-legged on the cold concrete and the girls spoke in low voices or in whispers. Bribed, kissed, hugged, cajoled—ordered by Nonie, smiled at by Katie—I joined in their games—mostly silently . . . Sometimes idly and hardly interested, sometimes incontinently interrupting, I was the child if they played house, and one or the other of them was the wife, and the other was the husband. I was sometimes the patient when they played doctor and nurse. Katie undresses me: nifty Catholic fingers, her soapy odors, the half-nutty glare she had when she was playing these games; and the tremor she had, as it were of unease or fear or interest at the no-clear-boundaries of unwatched games.
Nonie, the ship’s doctor, makes a play incision in my stomach—with a twig. My short pants are around my ankles. My shirt is unbuttoned. I am largely undressed except for my socks and shoes behind the brick wall of the porch, a smallish, blond child, a month or two short of being four years old. Katie kisses my stomach to make it well after the operation. She is the mother of the ship’s surgeon and a queen—something like that. The two of them bent their varicolored, bright-skinned girls’ heads over me down there; and they studied my balls—they handled and turned over and lightly pinched the little, pale beans. I remember the girls stroking them with bits of dead leaf. And using twigs like pick-up-sticks and even like tongs. They used their fingers delicately, and I remember their breath on my small stomach and the wind above my head at the height of the wall and the concrete on my bared ass. I remember laughing and the girls telling me to hush.
Or we played more safely, and they sang lullabies, and I pretended to sleep. I would softly cry out “Wah-wah” like a real baby. Sometimes the wind circled downward and nipped and bit at me like a puppy.
In dreams when I am naked on a suburban street I feel I will die in some final way if anyone sees me. I will congeal with exposure and embarrassment and will burst and not live anymore, but in real life I didn’t always much care.
Katie, big-eared, unshrewd, gets angry if Nonie teases her. Nonie waits miserably-angrily for Katie to telephone her sometimes. In street games in which a lot of the kids join, Katie is a tearing (Catholic) maniac, people say. Katie’s moods are like river birds scuttering in her, ticklish to see . . . for me. She screams easily in large games, breathes tensely in smaller ones.
She screams
when Nonie boosts me onto a tree branch to hide and then she gets Katie to come near; and when Katie comes near I say boo and Katie screams and screams.
Katie says, “I have a stupid silly face, I KNOW it.” The freckles and large, emotionally simplified, farsighted, eerily vague eyes.
“She gets to go to heaven—that’s very consoling. I feel worse for atheist kids.” Dad said that of her after she fell. He often spoke of hellfire and of goblins and of demons and pitchforks. Of hell he said, “It’s noisy down there.” He was haunted by it, the idea, the possible reality of the sizzling clutch of a demon, the wretched whisper and scream of eternal pain. “The goblins’ll git yah if yah don’t witch out.” And: “In hell, bad folks’ll sizzle and grunt like pork sausage.” He was mostly interested in women who were Catholics and in ex-Fundamentalists who had a fear of hell. He’d say to me, “You in a rush to go to hell?” I was playing with a cigar of his that I’d taken from his pocket—the cellophane, the band, the smell of the thing. “Give it back, Little Pretty Eyes. Hanging’s too good for a cigar thief . . .”
(Lila said after his funeral, “My heart breaks for him now, that poor son of a bitch. I knew him backwards and forwards and I don’t hold it against him one bit what he was.”)
Katie’s a pet of Wiley’s, he likes her freckles, Momma said. I lolled against Katie’s barely started new breasts childishly. Katie was nice. In high school I had a teacher who said the word nice was an abomination and conveyed no information whatsoever but it did. Katie spoke differently from Nonie but Nonie then talked like Katie for a while: Fant-TAS-TICKLE . . . Grub-grub . . . OOooh, that’s worse than WHALE DOOO-DOOO! Yuh-yuh-UGHhhhhh.
Katie fell-in-love with trees, sports, sunsets, children, movies, famous people—and insisted blankly that you had to, too. Of a certain boy she liked, she said, “Oh, he’s just so cuuuuuuute I ca-hint stannnnnnnnnn(d) ITTTTT . . . I will probuhhhhhhhblee die-eeeeee . . .” It was his bike she mostly liked—and his style riding it, it turned out.
The Runaway Soul Page 27