There was a brief, huge moment, dilated with the disbelief, the sudden vision that the disbelief was misplaced: one is so astounded—the
correction is so immense—when one knew the stick had passed a line, and was going to strike, or might strike: it was all a set of circles, of an unspoken
Oh
of vision as through a telescope (not a binocular), of rising through the oval or circular limit of sleeping consciousness to wakefulness: this painful and startling expansion of the self was in part the painful and startling expansion of openings to pain. A newborn infant perhaps has no senses: or they are barely used. Just so for a moment, a second, I had none, only agony.
Nonie was a
floor
—the air was a tree trunk: do-you-remember-rough-tree-bark-and-being-pushed-or-falling-against-it? It was almost as if I asked myself that. The sense of agency, of confusion about the nature of existence, of possibilities, of the obduracy of this and that (including oneself), saw nothing, saw everything—Nonie, her grasp of the stick, the trellis—saw it not through the eye but as part of the enormous expansion of all the sensory world as it changed its quality to entire loss and pain: later, it could be interpreted; now it simply hurt.
It is possible that I had moved, that I had twitched, and thereupon happened onto the blow.
But one knew she’d-done-it.
The stick struck me. The skin is thinly stretched over bone on the forehead: the eyebrow of a child is twitchy: the eye socket, the eye are quick to close, to squint. Disbelief—Nonie is a floor, is not
human
—then finally anger and rage and hurt—
she hit me
—continued, without a seam, into vertigo; not a clean vertigo: one was at the edge of a fall into crawling slime.
It could have been a mistaken notion of what the
air
had turned into: a return to some earlier-in-childhood sense of severe or extreme pain—a sense of the roughness and foreignness of the air, as after birth, maybe. My comfort had been entirely destroyed.
Some children learn quite early to live as hawks, to circle and be cold, to stride as best they can on their short legs.
Others have a more complicated relationship to pain-in-the-world: they stride as a bluff, safe in their charm or in their hardness: they are vulnerable then so that pain, destruction seem entirely instructive.
I was already sufficiently old—four, I’d say—to resent and to be reluctant to permit the baby in me to reemerge: a certain casting back in time, to an earlier self, was something I resisted as best I could.
Perhaps, too, I did it to taunt
her
—to resist the coercion of the
floor.
I did not shrivel up, or scream—later, I learned, as a tactic, to yowl
at once, to overact, to suggest immediate death, that my death was at hand.
B
UT NOW
I held the posture of pride, pride in a tableau: you-have-not-broken-me; I-can-still-rebuke-you.
The stick entered the eye socket, the shallow, childish cup of bone around the soft eye. My mouth opened wide.
My scream (and perhaps what I looked like) immediately changed the game, the atmosphere, the meaning: my scream tore Nonie open; or shoved a scream out of her: what she yelled was, “
YOU MADE ME DO IT!
”
She also yelled, “
YOU WALKED INTO IT! YOU DID IT ON PURPOSE!
”
It is possible that she was biologically geared to be a lookout for a herd of animals, to see and be frightened and to shout, to change at once; and I was geared to be a hunter, to receive blows and ignore them while attacking game. It is, of course, hard to say.
She was, however, now defending herself, the family, against the false accusation of my struck eye, of my scream: she was in a sense—and briefly—morally hysterical: to punish me, to fend me off, she struck me a third time.
With the stick.
When I’d screamed, I’d lifted my head—I mean I bent it upward. She may have meant to strike the eye again but she got the nostril—there was a shoving disarrangement of the center of my face and a squishing-squashing woodeny noise.
Part of her
experiment
was a dabbling, so to speak, in delivering a blow in the masculine style—but she hadn’t taken on masculine attributes: she had hit me as a girl. It was a little like being underwater and watching someone stick a stick into the water and poke at you: there is a mask, a shield of refraction: the refraction in this case led to her being a floor, a masked girl dabbling.
But her identity, for me, was packed full of history. Another girl—that is, if Nonie had been a different sort of girl, a witty one, a laugher, and had done this, the meaning of the blows would have been different: her innocence would have been proportional to her, oh, worth-to-me: it would have been almost a percentage, a twenty-five percent guilt, a lesser horror.
But Nonie was not valuable to me as a person unless she made an effort to be nice to me—or if not an effort, so long as she was drawn to me, or needed me.
Now she had dabbled—I would have felt another girl had not meant to hit me: but in this case, it was
Nonie hit me.
My sense of her guilt was total, was absolute.
A
BSOLUTE
? Only in a sense. The initial emotion was partly like a blow by a pipe swathed in cloth—of it-was-impossible-she-should-hit-me, this-had-not-happened.
The sudden accession of shock, the physical shock, the anesthesia, perhaps brought on the mental shock, the sense of impossibility, and its moral tone: the impossible is either magic or a dream.
We need logic so desperately that the unlikely is always in effect seriously criminal. The more unlikely something is, the more it swells into a grandeur of wickedness, as the Calvinists thought.
The thick petals of galling sensation and of numbness, of half-sickness, of darkness, were as innocent and ignorant as any flower, a blossoming of darkness. I did not live among people who thought pain was inevitable: pain has not been unmanageably ubiquitous for years.
I was already middle-class and modern, in a sense; and I expected an immediate cure: I expected this not to have happened, to be untrue.
But at the same time, there was—there is only the faintest hope the pain will stop now, stop at once; there is very little chance that this isn’t bad, isn’t really bad, isn’t real.
An odd, spaceless, timeless almost floating, circling, a gradual descent, occurred, to lightlessness: a descent from, a dissent from time: this is unbearable, this endless greasy slide.
It hurts—only a little—but it hurts enough so that there is nothing now but resignation or helplessness toward this slow discovery of just how much it hurts.
Around this clouded waiting or ignorance is now a dull memory of the series of thumps: I
hear
them now, notice them only now: I felt them then: I feel their consequences now—the times are mixed up, of the noises, the wood-and-squashing noises, and those of the nerves jumping around; the sounds continue, sickeningly: the memory is stuck, wetly, fibrously, in my consciousness.
I see, out of my eyes, in flickers, Nonie, Nonie’s face,
flesh-colored:
mostly I see a gray foggy wad, a dirty cotton wad that has been jammed (it seems) into my eyes or eye sockets, into the eyes themselves: a damp oppressive grayness: there is no color (colors are a special treat of well-being). My lips are supernaturally dry. In my gullet, the air drags.
All at once, there is something like a gasping, of swollen, terrified, hysterical
tissue
—but this is buried, shoveled under by some hunter’s madness in me: I think, I would expect boys and girls to die differently.
A child has an inexact fear of death, a wordless is-this-death in the way a child says is-this-the-circus?
Animals in a ring.
I am about to give birth—to death.
Sensations push in and out and in all directions in me: I am full: I am a plenum of sensation: I am swollen with nausea, with self-abandonment, with I
will let go,
not as words, but like opening my fists: I will not resist anything: anything can emerge from me, be taken from me—I suppose, too, anything could be put into me.
There was a simultaneous rush of unforgiveness, forever incurable.
Thin, underlying currents and spasms of fear and violence passed beneath the resignation, the letting-go, the willed surrender (which had an unwilled part as well).
Perhaps it would be accurate to say my pain made itself more and more known to me.
It is not metaphorical or a figure of speech or a conceit to say that as that knowledge grew to occupy the center and the periphery of my attention, whatever else I knew seemed unimportant, and was, in a geographical sense, forgotten: that is, there was no room for it in my attention.
My name, the value of daylight, the assurance of any logic besides that of a short statement such as I
hurt,
are gone, are worthless. There is a stew in me, meaty, acid, of unswallowable present consciousness of being deep inside the realities, the boundaries, of pain: this stretches forward and backward without interruption or memory or hope of another state: this is, as I said, the pain continuum.
The nerves are lunatic more and more: with hardness, flights, stirrings, yowlings, heats, softness (a rottenness), ignorance.
This is what she wanted.
The actuality of internal disorder is of another life: nothing here is
right
except one’s own painlessness—or death: the cessation of consciousness. Pain does not have to be charted unless one is determined
to escape: and then it is charted only so that one can find a way to its edge in order to see the world again. If a woman is watchfulness itself, perhaps then pain is worse for her. So far as I have experienced my life, a man does not have to notice or understand or observe or map his pain. He tries to function, and if he cannot function, he is as good as dead: pain kills him early in a way.
Everything in me is wrong: everything in me gives off screechings, thumpings, everything is muffled and shuffling maloccurrences, forbidden stretchings, distensions, ill-advised compressions—bruisings, knot-tings—everything bears down and on the self, shrinks and leaves a sore hollow: one gags everywhere, inside oneself, from surfeit, from emptiness. The distance from here to painlessness is astronomical.
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, her 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, mean I am existing in the pain continuum—mean I am dead only in a way, I am only in part a ghost.
It may perhaps be deeply insulting 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 semiheat on my face, on my lips: silly sidling sliding crawling fragilities 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 of clarity: 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 of everything in me is capped by a coldish fear—because of the blood. The sickness of spatial lostness, of where-am-I, where-am-I, that disorientation, now lay beneath a cold, specialized fear: flowing sheets and shiftings of cold—of cold resignation. 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 that 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 will be inflated over and over. Blood is the boundary of a special seriousness. Or unseriousness: a silliness of constantly introduced new dislocations, wavering spacelessness (one is imprisoned), faintings, weaknesses, blackings-out, continual and spasmodic imbalances, wrongnesses: there is even an itching that is
illness
—that is sickening and that induces despair.
One is crazed, dull-headed, resigned, human.
Nonie utters a birdlike shriek, she throws one arm up into the air, she passes out.
I make an odd, loud breathing noise—I don’t know.
I go in search of what comfort there is for me now.
T
HERE IS
something odd about voices in memory—thinking of memory as a chamber, a state or condition of mind, and the mind’s running like a machine or a track star, that sort of state: the voice in there, the remembered voice is strange—in my memory anyway. There are unmodulated, gray sounds and unidentifiable words—I mean it is a very strange mumble, with the words indistinguishable from each other and from the gray, electrical hush of the mind, remembering, running.
Sometimes, even with great effort, the words can’t be made clear, although I seem to know what the figure—gray-lit, somewhat obscure—is talking about; and if I wash out the figure, if I make the memory purely auditory, I often hear words, phrases, fragments of a sentence (rarely a whole sentence), and what I hear is not the voice of the person who once spoke those words; I mean the music is missing, the actual sound, the actual pitch and key, the inflections, the riding-on-the-breath thing (by which you recognize a voice on the telephone): none of that is there at all. But suddenly a sentence will appear in my head; and some identifier, some cataloguer will say,
My mother said that.… Ha-ha,
I think amiably;
yes, she did; that’s her voice
—but it isn’t her voice: it’s only her words—and part of what she meant.