fuck you are. The person’s trying so hard to create a twenty-
four-hour day. The person picks words carefully, sculpts
them into paragraphs, selects details, the victim ’s selection,
selects details and tries to make them credible— selects from
what can be remembered, because no one remembers the
worst. They don’t dare scream at you. They are so polite, so
quiet, so civil, to make it a story you can read. I am telling you,
you have never read the worst. It has never been uttered by
anyone ever. Not the Russians, not the Jew s; never, not ever.
Y ou get numb, you forget, you don’t believe it even when it’s
happening to you, your mind caves in, just collapses, for a
minute or a day or a week or a year until the worst is over, the
center caves in, whoever you were leaves, just leaves; if you
try to force your mind to remember it leaves, just fucking
empties out o f you, it might as well be a puddle on the ground.
Anything I can say isn’t the worst; I don’t remember the
worst. It’s the only thing God did right in everything I seen on
earth: made the mind like scorched earth. The mind shows
you mercy. Freud didn’t understand mercy. The mind gets
blank and bare. There’s nothing there. Y ou got what you
remember and what you don’t and the very great thing is that
you can’t remember almost anything compared to what
happened day in and day out. Y ou can count how many days
there were but it is a long stretch o f nothing in your mind;
there is nothing; there are blazing episodes o f horror in a great
stretch o f nothing. Y ou thank God for the nothing. Y ou get
on your fucking knees. We are doing some construction in our
apartment and we had a pile o f wood beams piled up and he
got so mad at me— for what? — something about a locked
door; I didn’t lock the door or he didn’t lock the door and I
asked him w hy not— and he picked up one o f the w ood beams
and he beat me with it across m y legs like he was a trained
torturer and knew how to do it, between the knees and the
ankle, not busting the knees, not smashing the ankles, he ju st
hammered it down on m y legs, and I don’t remember
anything before or after, I don’t know what month it was or
what year; but I know it was worse, the before and the after
were worse; the weeks I can’t remember were worse; I
remember where it happened, every detail, we had the bed in
the hall near the w ood beams and we were sleeping there
temporarily and it was early on because it w asn’t the brass bed
yet, it was ju st a dum py old bed, an old mattress, and
everything was dull and brown, there was a hall closet, and
there was a toilet at one end o f the hall and a foyer leading to
the entrance to the apartment at the other end o f the hall, and
there wasn’t much room, and it was brow n and small and had
a feeling o f being enclosed and I know I was sitting on the bed
when he began to hit me with the beam, when he hit me with it
