Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Oh, ha-ha, look what I am doing—then a look of seriousness on her face—and then, in earnest, but superior: he’s such a pest.

  She was convinced, morally, that I ought not offer her any difficulty, ever.

  She hit me lightly on the chest and then a little harder. Small lumps, knobs of being bumped, like thickened mosquito bites, formed: they did not engulf my consciousness but made me blink, surprised. She hit me harder, she drove the stick harder perhaps as an experiment in correcting my facial expression, my attitude, in making my affection more correct: she meant to put an end once and for all to her being horrified by me.

  It was like that.

  When one is in pain of a sort—not overwhelmed, only partly maddened by it—having had the wind knocked out of one, being hit rapidly by the rounded end of a stick—one feels, primarily, a SURPRISE.

  The SURPRISE is partly located near a bin of rage, of disbelief and rage: the mind is incredibly slow: its advance is halted by each blow: it is advancing slowly toward a wall, into a scream, into some other state of being.

  One waits for an act to declare itself, to define itself, for this—nameless—event to have an expressible cause I can understand. But there is nothing inside the minute that seems to be a cause—except my—having fought with her.

  So she is not fair. (Since I did not hurt her.)

  She keeps hitting me, rapidly, not hard now; she is alert: she hits me to halt a yell I am about to make; she halts it in midthroat.

  SURPRISE and rage so push at me I begin movements that I am too startled to finish.

  I am caught in a net of this, this incompleteness, I am penned in and netted—by her ability to … defend herself.

  The part of me that receives blows is not me yet—I am too loose and communal an identity: it is Mommy-Daddy-the family that she is hitting.

  Meanwhile I began to be crammed with sensations as with rocks piled in a heavy, smelly, stained canvas sack.

  The communal pain … was patently not fit to be looked at: one disregarded it—and made faces at Nonie—and struggled in the sack.

  It is dirty—there is dirt—on the nerves, around the heart, in the lungs: anyone undergoing pain longs for sepsis. It is half a grave: I am worth nothing to anyone: I have wood and stones of pain in me. I am unclean, unpretty. There was a web in me of shaken bile and shapelessness.

  My sense of time was interfered with—this has been happening forever: hope and one’s sense of place are tumbled: where-am-I? Anger, corrosively coerced anger, makes the eyes seem to jerk and bug out, in points, to touch with the tips of those points, tiny, incomprehensible areas visible on Nonie, an arc of cheek, eyelashes. Inside my chest, unknown things ache: liver, heart, spleen—the lights: jostled, they are phosphorescent; I hold organs of dully gleaming unseemliness. I am extraordinarily pure, one is pure, one is without volition: one is scrubbed—informed—moved by pain—to a higher level—to a height that causes sickness. The heart begins to shamble, askew.

  The stick has literally jostled the heart.

  ALL AT ONCE, without clear transition, one slides—I slid—into a gray, oily, uncertainly lit sleeve of almost complete pain. I could say my predicament usurped all my attention to such a degree that I forgot, I lost all sensual familiarity, I lost the immediacy of painlessness. Painlessness seemed impossibly far away.

  I was in the pain continuum.

  I was not exactly aware of this yet—I was simply loosely wrapped in … in a somewhat oily, dirty, semitransparent rubbery sense of dislocation and a loss of any ordinary attachment to life. Certain areas of logic had collapsed—momentarily—such as that of the expectation, the assurance of breath, or of sight. Indeed, it was a matter of the collapse of most of the ordinary expectations, a set of corrections: pain is a hell of corrections—they seem quite final—a hell of other-than-the-light-of-God. One can hate there. Happiness is nonexistent—is a lapse of attention, of intelligence—is a silly, grinning, leering idiocy. One is set free from the curatorship and bounding companionship and ignorance about one’s happiness. One is set free in that one is pressed down; and what arises, from one’s spirit, one’s body, is not willed by one’s self: one gives birth to … a field of dark flowers, … various screams, uttered or unuttered, various grittings, various stares of anguish.

  Memories that are impossible when one is happy or painless gather and make a complete world, a continuum, going back to the beginning. Dog-headed presences, loomings, old thumpings, prickings, hot, abominable, noisome, are here. They are ancient and can transform themselves.

  I think, too, the presence of that memory of pain—I mean the completion of the pain continuum as a real world, maybe a realer one—shows on one’s face: I think Nonie saw it—on my face—and I think that then she became more interested in what she was doing: she experienced an increase in the voltage of her interest in what was happening to me.

  That interest was smeared with a sense of duty—a sense of duty made of two strands, pagan and animal: duty to herself, to the daylight, to winter, and a sense of social, ladylike duty: she was a nurse, a nursemaid, preventing me from doing harm: she was teaching me a lesson: she was taking care of justice in the world.

  She had a look of scrubbing away—at a foulness—a look of excitement of a kind. She was intent, more than before, busy—pleased and busy.

  MY BACK, untouched by the pole, bristles, wrinkles.

  I stare uncontrollably at her.

  All at once she takes a short swing and hits me on the side of the head with the pole.

  The bone of the skull vibrates, shudders in small arcs. I do not know I am hurt. My head and eyes—and mouth—are invaded by, they gorge on, skinny sensations, shiny, cold, lengthy, hurting.

  The sensations spin and ring (like coins on marble or glass) but almost at once they grow thick, like dirty washrags in the basement, wet and foul: they grow thick and wadded and vile in me.

  The air here, under the porch, begins to show hostility toward me: it claps bits of my soreness between its fine, airless, cold-hot wings; it catches in its thin ribbon claws bits of raw, pummeled, half-bruised skin: it rubs with abrasive cold, stabs at the sewn-in, clutching stars of heat and ache. Still, there is no disbelief.

  What does Nonie see in the child’s face? Perhaps what she sees illuminates her life.

  Walls of oilskin, drooping, wrinkled, slimy, rise around me. I can hardly see. I am panting now.

  She says, “See, you don’t know how to play, you don’t play right, I can hurt you, you can’t hurt me.”

  On this occasion, it first occurs to me—it brings on overwhelming rage—that she brought me here in order to do this, she meant to hurt me.

  We are brother and sister.

  I am dazed and enraged and struck in the increasing animal difficulty for me of the moment.

  THAT PART of religious emotion which is I-was-happy-once-but-it-was-taken-from-me-and-will-be-restored-to-me was on Nonie’s face.

  A child’s dislike for someone often takes the form of an erasure, an obliteration in the child’s mind: “Wiley, don’t you see Nonie is talking to you…?” I didn’t hear her or see her: she went spinning away, as if a telescope, wrong-ended, hid her: she was quaint with distance: my sister. Her pain did not exist for me—nor did her pleasure. I did not care about it, I did not know it was there—her life, her rights. She was a roughened blur, like an erasure where the paper grows furry and there is a yellowish oval and a hole where the light shows through.

  The bony fingers of winter air.

  The smell of Nonie’s navy blue schoolgirl coat. The smell of her coat. Of her hair.

  “I’m the good one—you’re the bad one,” she said as she hit me, on the chest, with her stick.

  But her face had a look of malice, meant to terrorize—look and fear me.

  She is just a child.…

  How is she to avoid being enslaved?

  She meant no harm. Yes, she did.

  This is my first, uncertain knowledge o
f evil.

  If I fell apart—and was guilty—and helpless…

  There are fashions, standards, in crimes, in treatments.

  Under the porch there was, as a form of anesthesia, a god’s presence. She felt that, too.

  She will jab with the stick into my stomach hard enough that my hands will float helplessly, and my head will loll: there is no air: she has taken all the air, put it in a basket, put the basket behind her: I can have no air … Nonie says so.

  Say that love animates her.

  She said, “I have common sense.”

  Not on this occasion—some other one, in a living room, in a car, a moving car.

  She talks to keep it a world that she belongs in, that she is not unsuitable for. The ego world of dreams extended into her waking life: she was Baudelairean, Proustian.

  IF ONE ESTABLISHES a this-is-bad-I-won’t-feel-anything-I-won’t-cry-I’ll-wait-until-it’s-all-over (that is, I won’t try to understand this thing that’s happening), it breaks the connection between you and your tormentor: it ruins the game: everything your tormentor knows is made into a pointless bludgeoning, a blundering craziness.

  And it is easy to do this, in some parts of the pain continuum, to leave someone behind, to leave them and there they are, alone. I discarded everything that made me her accomplice.

  Now who will love her? I have undermined her hopes, so that she is throwing herself away: she is hardly more than this: a girl with a stick.

  There comes an irregular gasping rhythm to her breath: a greater righteousness, a beleaguered righteousness: she begins a half-murmured half laugh and then continues it: she is half laughing, corrosively, to fill me with the acid thing of it’s-easy-for-her-to-win-out-over-me.

  She is leaning forward: she wants to see clearly.

  She is correcting … the ambience—the impression I make on the … episode: it is terrible to me when her eyes pore over my face with their curiously narrow clarity of studying the power and success or powerlessness and failure of her correction of me.

  She did not usually, or perhaps ever, think of herself as stupid—she felt only that she was innocent, menaced, a girl.

  I know I have been tempted to be violent, to slice someone’s head open, only when there has been the revelation, the abrupt emergence, of the fact of my superiority, undeniably—in my view, by my standards—a fact made overt beyond my caution’s denying it any longer: some incredibly long-drawn-out stupidity in the person I am trying to respect becomes insistently noticeable: my egoist’s fantasies of super-manhood are suddenly verified: suddenly the fact emerges: and that fact is being ignored, trampled on, forever obscured. The logic of superiority is that it be recognized. Bloodshed is an attempt to make the world properly, obviously logical.

  I did not think she would hurt me—or to be accurate, I did not suspect that there would be more pain, greater pain.

  She moved the stick: jabbed with it—it danced in front of my eyes. Against my will, my nerves were drawn to that, reacted to that: there had been, if not a vivifying of the nerves, then their triumph as being the sole story, as being the curtain that filtered everything—the pain, the pained excitement of my nerves, I should say—and that pain and excitement colored the glozing sound of the pulse in one’s head: life-was-bad—the pulsing hurt, with every ballooning of it. My fixated, not hypnotized, but coerced vision; its concentration on that dancing stick, so near to my face; the pain or bump on the side of my head; the pains, confused now, overlaid, being of various kinds, on and in my chest, were in some instances like a glare and noise, and in others like the night, the night outdoors, a bulge of murmurs, perhaps menaces, a row of bulging trees, weighting down, rustling—the rustling of sensation.

  My contempt for her was a failure of belief, a measurement of her: she is bluffing.

  I do not have to fear her if she cannot hurt me.

  But meanwhile my face, against my will, winces: I suffer the foretaste, the imagination of blows, an imagination based on other experiences, such as falling on concrete, such things as that: but a falling has been converted to a—to a joke: a joke is you-can’t-scream-this-is-a-joke: that is, the comic is an inability, an absolute inability to hurt or kill. I have already been hurt—but it is as much mental as physical: this reintroduction to the pain world, the pain continuum in my life. But I am on my feet, I am not screaming, I can manage to hold Nonie in contempt. This is not an absolute joke—I can still hate her for this—but it is still a joke, a bad joke: it isn’t death, so far as I know.

  When the mop handle approached my face, my skin nearest it, the skin of my face, would shrivel circularly, would pucker—I would be clutched by cold, as if in preparation to be hit, the cold of incipient shock, of anesthesia, of purposeful and unpurposeful anesthesia, humiliation.

  Then the cold would turn into a chafing—as it might after I fell and was not seriously wounded (no brain concussion, no tearing open of my nose)—a chafing that led to an abraded heat: but the chafing was also the humiliation of she-made-me-think-I-was-about-to-be-hit (and-dissolved). Anger, somewhat diluted by helplessness, by concern about what is going to happen next, about when-will-this-end, oozes into a stinging sweat, pure—that is, light and childish—a smoothed, horrible sweat of it-is-over, which was foolishness, since here the stick comes again: I hated the—burning—foolishness, the humbling, and angering, chagrin, the being a puppet in this way—shriveled, chilled, chafed, opened out into anger—chagrin, too, at ever having liked my tormentor, at having been fool enough to come here: or to put it in terms closer to the wordless ones of what I felt, chagrin at not knowing Nonie-was-always- bad, was always-this-bad, at having forgotten that anything like this could happen, that life can get to be this bad.

  Always doesn’t mean every minute to a child but simply an attempt to express a recognition that this happens sometimes, more than once, that if one is not obdurate—and unaffectionate—things come to this.

  I can remember, when the stick withdrew—between feints—a crazy resurgence of pride, even though I was in pain, a crazy dismissal of the pain, at least partly, and of the above, replaced by a lunatic semiswagger, a baby’s swagger of she-has-to-like-me: now-this-will-end: I would look at her—and at the stick only obliquely—with a stiffish, backward-leaning babyish calm—and disbelief: a child doing that: you-have-to-stop-now-and-be-charmed-by-me.

  It was the pride, the distance between me and the real abyss, that made her feel failure, a girl’s impatience of it-is-not-tidy-yet.

  The stick approached.

  My skin winced.

  The stick continued to approach.

  There was a brief, huge moment, dilated with the disbelief, the sudden vision that the disbelief was misplaced: one is so astounded—the correction is so immense—when one knew the stick had passed a line, and was going to strike, or might strike: it was all a set of circles, of an unspoken Oh of vision as through a telescope (not a binocular), of rising through the oval or circular limit of sleeping consciousness to wakefulness: this painful and startling expansion of the self was in part the painful and startling expansion of openings to pain. A newborn infant perhaps has no senses: or they are barely used. Just so for a moment, a second, I had none, only agony.

  Nonie was a floor—the air was a tree trunk: do-you-remember-rough-tree-bark-and-being-pushed-or-falling-against-it? It was almost as if I asked myself that. The sense of agency, of confusion about the nature of existence, of possibilities, of the obduracy of this and that (including oneself), saw nothing, saw everything—Nonie, her grasp of the stick, the trellis—saw it not through the eye but as part of the enormous expansion of all the sensory world as it changed its quality to entire loss and pain: later, it could be interpreted; now it simply hurt.

  It is possible that I had moved, that I had twitched, and thereupon happened onto the blow.

  But one knew she’d-done-it.

  The stick struck me. The skin is thinly stretched over bone on the forehead: the eyebrow of a child is
twitchy: the eye socket, the eye are quick to close, to squint. Disbelief—Nonie is a floor, is not human—then finally anger and rage and hurt—she hit me—continued, without a seam, into vertigo; not a clean vertigo: one was at the edge of a fall into crawling slime.

  It could have been a mistaken notion of what the air had turned into: a return to some earlier-in-childhood sense of severe or extreme pain—a sense of the roughness and foreignness of the air, as after birth, maybe. My comfort had been entirely destroyed.

  Some children learn quite early to live as hawks, to circle and be cold, to stride as best they can on their short legs.

  Others have a more complicated relationship to pain-in-the-world: they stride as a bluff, safe in their charm or in their hardness: they are vulnerable then so that pain, destruction seem entirely instructive.

  I was already sufficiently old—four, I’d say—to resent and to be reluctant to permit the baby in me to reemerge: a certain casting back in time, to an earlier self, was something I resisted as best I could.

  Perhaps, too, I did it to taunt her—to resist the coercion of the floor.

  I did not shrivel up, or scream—later, I learned, as a tactic, to yowl at once, to overact, to suggest immediate death, that my death was at hand.

  BUT NOW I held the posture of pride, pride in a tableau: you-have-not-broken-me; I-can-still-rebuke-you.

  The stick entered the eye socket, the shallow, childish cup of bone around the soft eye. My mouth opened wide.

  My scream (and perhaps what I looked like) immediately changed the game, the atmosphere, the meaning: my scream tore Nonie open; or shoved a scream out of her: what she yelled was, “YOU MADE ME DO IT!”

  She also yelled, “YOU WALKED INTO IT! YOU DID IT ON PURPOSE!”

  It is possible that she was biologically geared to be a lookout for a herd of animals, to see and be frightened and to shout, to change at once; and I was geared to be a hunter, to receive blows and ignore them while attacking game. It is, of course, hard to say.

  She was, however, now defending herself, the family, against the false accusation of my struck eye, of my scream: she was in a sense—and briefly—morally hysterical: to punish me, to fend me off, she struck me a third time.