330
LEONARD MICHAELS
ly, I became a dancing fool. She danced me off to the zoo and
said it.
"Undress."
Her clothes were already a heap of white, pink, and gold, and
she sprawled on the bear, its fangs encrusted, shining blood. Her
limbs cast out in the languid shape of her mood, suggesting nets. Her
voice was now soft, yet coarse.in tone. "Get it, Phillip. On the shelf
in the closet."
Still in my shirt and tie I trotted to the closet to get it, what–
ever it was. On a shelf about chest high lay three hundred sausages
coiled in the convoluted complications of a monster brain. A long
gray chain made of iron. The prospect of such appetite suffused me
with feelings of poverty, no education, and moral shock, but in one
clean, swift movement of self-disgust I laid on hands like he who
knows. The chain chuckled as my fingers pierced its holes. I pulled.
It came slowly, heavily, as though each link stirred from sleep, and
then too heavily, gaining speed, personal will and clamor, a raging
snake of cannon balls pouring through my hands to bury my feet,
shins, knees. Writhing, arms out, I was half-man- half-bonsai tree with
impoverished roots, strangled in its springs, sucking denial. "I hate
pain," I screamed, giving up all reserve. Nell bobbled up off the
bear. She seized the chain and tugged. I pummeled the top of her
head. For real, not in a sexual way. She said, "Quit that." I shouted
sincerely, "I hate pain. I'll beat your head off," and continued pum–
meling. She lugged with steady, patient strength; the motion of serious,
honest work which, in different conditions, I'd have considered
beautiful; her naked, multi-dimpled back,.rippling, wheezing, heaving
spine against iron as I beat the measures of her lugging into her head
and shouted my
refra~ll.
At last I fell free and could properly con–
vulse, and she rolled onto me and tried to soothe me with mothery
tongue, breasts, and holes, but something had happened to make me
unreceptive and inconsolable, as if my body, in trauma, had shaken
free of my mind, and now my eyes, my very flesh in every place re–
treated, fleeing toward the murdered buffalo, gazelle, and giraffe.
"That," I gasped, "rub with that." And she, too, seemed unselved,
brained, as she rose and stumbled across the room to grab the giraffe
by the nostrils and tear it off the wall. Then she returned and kneeled
and rubbed its eyes and great slop of lip carefully, gently, against
my face and neck, and then back and forth between my legs until I
