PARTISAN REVIEW
385
to it ... Finally, you must shape the charge to direct most of the
explosive force in one direction. Grind away the center of the first
pipe cap and place this end against your target. Now, what are you
going to do with it?"
"Blow the ..."
"Wrong already. This bomb I've described to you is crude. You
will have to learn to construct one in an emergency, in case something
goes wrong with the more sophisticated explosive you are given. You
need to gear for an emergency, Perfidia. Everything depends on it."
He inspects her teeth, forcing his nails into her gums
till
they
bleed. Five years of murdering statesmen and executives, police of–
ficers and informers probe in her mouth. She gags. He checks her
ears, still caked with wax, finds those areas of her body he knows
will be coated with filth. She will have to preen, but now, for a
moment, she challenges
his
thrust. He can fuck himself. Nonetheless,
she is told, she will preen for the Movement, for her task she will
wash, diet, bend and buckle. Finally, she will leave her door ajar
this night.
In the night she is visited by her migraine, and it enters her via
the ports of her eyeballs. This is her "troll-lover" who has latched
himself onto her face, probing the secret reaches of her nostrils, her
mouth, her eyes and ears. He has kept the fine hours of her life and
caused her unceasing grief. Look now as he carries her to the multiple
Academies of her youth, houses of desperate worship where purpose
and achievement are sanctified. It is to these concentration camps
that Mother Munch forces her, the proving grounds of her fantasies of
the future. Yet Perlidia is strangely at home here what with the
festering values of a century fixed and on permanent display, a
museum-mirror to her casual self-eradication. Here she learns the
root and seed mythologies, the preponderances of the family, the
dominion of the State. Here she is made to understand that life is an
accumulation of its pressures ("the competition's fierce, babe") and
that Man is in a perpetual state of war with Nature, thereby render–
ing a life of achievement a full-scale battle. We must earn our place,
she discovers. We must grow in the process, we must gather the dis–
tressing threads of social history and carry them into a future of con-
