HAROLD BRODKEY
45
The actual inability to hurt someone strikes people who observe it
.
.
.
10
you as comte-you are comIC .
It
flashes through one, a heat , a blank fog, of surrender and of
not-surrender to being comic, to being (angrily) the one who can be
hurt .
I pick up the mop handle again and use it to poke and swing at the
blowy dust, to fan dust toward her: I want to dirty her.
She takes hold of the mop handle with both her hands : she
pulls-and it is gone, the mop handle is gone from me.
Her back is straight : her posture holds the lines of force of her
kidnapping the stick.
I stoop and scrabble at the loose blowy dust.
It
has rough-edged
flakes in it', bits of old house paint (those flakes), hard bits of foil.
Caterpillary scrambling fingers gather it up, throw it. It hovers as if
with great moral delicacy between Nonie and me . She waves it off:
blows at it.
It
is terrible to attempt a maneuver that doesn ' t work at all .
I stoop and dig with fingerends at the puke-colored under-the-house
dirt.
The small clod I throw comes apart in the air : hypnotic flotillas
float: the air is full of slowed dirt. She bats some of the pieces aside–
ducks-but one lands on her cheek.
The moment becomes greatly vivid and enlarged. She leans back
on her arms (the mop handle is held in her hand : she does nothing
with it) and kicks at me : she reaches out her plump, round-y leg and
her foot and kicks me in the chest (which is not very high for her) .
Something like a knot of wood forms where she kicked me, a
dulled, less sentient thing in me, it seems at first , rough-edged , dis–
colored . It lodges in
me ,
in what had the orderly-silky-toylike-rapid–
thing-or-whatever-which-is-me-behind-and-below-my-throat. I am ,
or rather , my chest and nearby parts of me, are cast into a furnace of an
unfamiliar throbbing: the wood feeds it: it is unpleasantly gooshy,
knotty , grabby, twisty in me: the pain is heaviest at its center but most
unsettling at its edges where it seems to push at me and crowd me.
What is unhurt in me seems to scream or half-scream with dis–
owning what-is-hurt as well as with sympathy and surprise .
The hurt part of me is tragic and dishonored.
Inside the moment , Nonie is completely, unutterably mysterious
to
me . There is no worded or
envis~oned
explanation: it is simply
