HAROLD BRODKEY
51
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 herselfaway: she is hardly more than this: a girl with a stick.
There comes an irregular gasping rhythm to
her
breath: a greater
righteousness, a beleagured righteousness: she begins a half-mur–
mured 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 ambiance-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 stan–
dards-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
