HAROLD BRODKEY
47
rapidly by the rounded end of a stick-one feels, primarily,
A
SUR–
PRISE.
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 mid-throat.
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 shape–
lessness .
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, incompre–
hensible 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 unseemli–
ness. I am extraordinarily pure, one is pure, one is without volition:
one is scrubbed-informed-moved by pain-to a higher level-to
