58
PARTISAN REVIEW
I cannot cross such distances, they are so great.
Maybe I will be here forever. I am as good as dead. I start to cry.
I did function somewhat. I managed to get my vision past the gray
wadding stuffed into my eyes: I sensed Nonie's staring-her disgust,
satisfaction-which was hateful-her victory and her
staring.
I raise my hand to my face. This sense of Nonie's looking at me,
this purposeful, slow, frightened, uneasy movement of my hand, my
not fainting means I am existing in the pain continuum-means I am
dead only in a way, I am only in part a ghost.
It
may perhaps be deeply
insult~ng
to the identity that one learns
to live in pain, as in filth or poverty.
I raised my hand to my face. I realized that in the clutter of general
pain there was a fearsome tepid trickling, threads and patches of creepy
semi-heat on my face, on my lips : silly sidling sliding crawling fragil–
ities and tiny pools: a furtive wormy end-of-life.
I touched it with my hand.
I must have known what it was but I doubted.
I looked at my hand : my vision was wadded and gray, with
speckles ofclarity: I saw still glistening gray threads, spottedly red; but
I couldn't really see color: I saw gouts, heavy, tear-shaped drops .
Ah, now, the fantastic wrongness ofeverything in me is capped by
a coldish fear-because of the blood. The sickness of spatiallostness, of
where-am-I, where-am-I, that disorientation, now lay beneath a cold,
specialized fear: flowing sheets and shiftings of cold-of cold resigna–
tion . I move my arms but only slightly: I move them to free myself
from those cold sheets: but they are not to be displaced; those sheets.
It
is blood .
It
is blood.
Something full-sized blunders through me: there is a stink-as of
an elephant's passage in a narrow corridor: a smothering and a stink .
Nothing in me is of quite the same importance as blood .
Pain is lesser than blood.
All at once, bravery becomes different: bravery becomes I-will–
bear-this-filth -and-filth -to-come.
It is as if there was no help now. I am walking: I am going for
help-but it is an icy formality, this pursuit of-help . There will be
other pains, an entire medical sequence which will not end with the
rasp of bandages on sewn soreness. Convulsions from antibiotics, sickly
sleep, the stomach-turning waking to the smell of antiseptic-nausea
