The BRUISE

By MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI

FC2

Copyright © 2008 Magdalena Zurawski
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-144-7

Chapter One

The TRANSLATION

I lived in an attic room of one of the older dormitories on the side of campus that used to house the women’s college before the university turned coed. My room was small but had a large closet in which I was able to fit the dresser that came with the room without blocking my access to the hanging rod. The day that I moved into the room I placed the dresser flush against the back wall of the closet so that if I opened the closet door I stood directly in front of it with its drawers opening directly towards me and its left side flush against the left wall of the closet.

The closet was deep enough that I could still take one step into it and turn right. And it was wide enough for me to still walk three paces to the right of the dresser before getting to the hanging rod that hung perpendicular to the face of the dresser. On top of the dresser I kept my soap shampoo toothpaste toothbrush and washrag in a small plastic bucket unless I had just come out of the shower and then I would not keep the soap in the bucket but rather on top of a lid from an old margarine container until it dried. I kept the margarine lid on top of the dresser as well exactly next to the bucket so that the front edge of the lid and the front edge of the bucket were equidistant from the front edge of the dresser and when the washrag was wet after a shower I draped it neatly around the perimeter of the bucket so that it hung parallel to the bottom edge of the bucket until it dried too.

The bucket was white so I was careful to purchase only white cakes of soap white washrags a white toothbrush white tubes of toothpaste and shampoo that came in white bottles. Occasionally though my scalp would begin to itch and its skin would flake and for this reason I was forced to purchase a tar shampoo that had an amber color and came in a clear plastic bottle. In order not to disturb the arrangement of white that I kept neatly on top of the dresser which was oak I kept the tar shampoo in my sock drawer the top drawer of my dresser which was a fine decision since most of my socks were dark colored browns or blacks or grays. It was a better choice than for instance keeping the shampoo in the middle drawer with my underwear and bras which were white or in the bottom drawer with my T-shirts which were all white and my pajamas which were all blue. Besides I held the belief that things needn’t be too orderly once in a drawer. In any case the difference in tone between the oak dresser itself and the objects on top of it made a subtle but pleasant contrast and the brightness of both kept the arrangement from appearing heavy and depressing and so I could be sure that its appearance would not affect my mood negatively when I woke in the mornings and was forced to open the closet door in order to prepare for my shower.

When I had finished arranging the closet I was pleased by the results and I only regretted that the closet was not big enough to hold my bed so that all items related to the care of my body could be neatly hidden from sight there behind the closed door since they were only needed late at night or early in the morning and it seemed strange for them to take up such a large portion of my living space. Had the closet been larger I could have slept in there keeping the closet door open at night so that fresh air or heat could enter depending on the season of course. Then in the mornings I could wake and wash and close the door on everything to do with my body and use the entirety of the room for those things that related to my studies specifically my bookshelves my books and my desk.

I had become very interested in the first stanza of the first poem of Rilke’s Duino Elegies the entirety of which I was supposed to read for my German literature course but since my German was fairly poor I could only plod my way through the text by rendering a tedious translation for myself which required much dictionary work. Only then could I begin to grasp fully the poem whose first line had so absorbed me.

By about 1:00 a.m. on the first night that I began working on the poem I had sketched the first stanza for myself in English. I had printed a clean version of it by hand onto a piece of loose-leaf paper so that it would be easier to read than the working version in my notebook. Because I was tired from leaning over the dictionary for most of the evening I took the piece of paper and instead of sitting in my reading chair I lay down on my back on the bed. Since I am not in the habit of doing so I can only think now that I must have been extremely tired. And there I began to read the lines I had written:

Who if I cried out would hear me among the order of angels? And even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart Would I not die in his stronger being? For beauty is nothing But the beginning of terror which we just barely endure. Yet we admire it as it calmly refrains from destroying us. Every Angel is terrifying.

It is clear to me now that it was the cry in the first line that appealed to me-that sound that would break the sealed capsule of a day as if there were something in me that could move beyond me. I thought about the sound for quite a while and concluded that it could not be a name. It could never be a word of any sort but only a sound. An unplanned unknown sound. Something the body could make independent of the mind’s idea of it. A bellow. A marker of one’s space loud and certain of its own uncertainty outside itself. There was nothing in me strong enough to make a sound like that.

But I knew where it would come from if it could come. I unbuttoned my pants and I pulled my shirt out and lifted it up so I could see myself. And I took my finger and made circles on my stomach dipping just under my navel and staying just inside the ribs. I made these circles slowly. That was the loudest call I could bear to make.

And when I began to feel the angel pressing on top of me-when I knew she had come I kept calling not with my fingers but only through my breath moving in and out of my mouth beneath her ear. She pulled me closer into her and for a moment I thought she was beautiful and I did not open my eyes but I imagined a face for her and the face I imagined wasn’t unusual. It was the face of any girl and to make it angelic I gave her long curls and these fell upon me and I felt calm beneath her and I let her touch me and I let us be lost in one another. I didn’t want to open my eyes to see her so I clasped her face with my hands and felt its form soft in my palms. It felt just as I had wanted it to feel and I pulled it close against my own. I could feel the heat from the streak of red across her cheek. It became too hot against my face so I pushed away. I felt cool again for a moment but then her body grew warm around me and she began to move faster against me and her heat gradually took me over and except for my face and thoughts I could not tell the feeling of myself from the feeling of her.

But soon I had the urge to open my eyes and I did but I couldn’t see her face only her hair and I felt suddenly where my body ended and where hers began and so I felt nervous. I couldn’t move my neck because she was so close on top of me but I strained my eyes downwards and when I did I saw her swollen breasts crushing my own and I could see the small hairs on them and I thought of hog flesh as the tops of them grazed my neck and the underside of my chin as I struggled to break free. She had grown so heavy that it was impossible to pull away from her. I could only feel her hairy swine breasts pricking my skin and her body pushing the breath out of me. Her wings flapped rapidly up and down thrusting her hips hard against mine. I felt the springs of the mattress pressing painfully into me from underneath.

Her wings were white but filthy like a pigeon’s and longer than the length of me. They closed upon us making a cave for me beneath her. And their smell surrounded me: an unwashed dog. She grunted in pain each time they came down because her left wing had no room to fall along the right side of me but would bend and scrape against the wall and sound like a branch swiping across the side of a house in a storm but here it was incessant like a heartbeat and since the wings came so quickly the grunts were rapid too. They became louder and louder as if they were coming from deeper inside of her and she didn’t stop but pushed her wings with greater force as if she were testing her own strength. It became more difficult to rise with her since she was pushing me with every round deeper down into the mattress. I was sweating now and had no more breath in me and then with the strength of terror that the helplessness gathered I rose again and gasped and heaved and quickly shook my head. I had wished her away.

When I entered the women’s shower room the light was turned off as it usually was when I entered to shower but this time I was entering to shower at night which I never did and because I never turned the light on when I entered to shower I had to consider carefully what I was going to do now. I only had to think for a moment about whether to turn the lights on and then I saw that the streetlights surrounding the parking lot out back were sending an orange glow into the bathroom that reflected off the white tiles and the chrome and the mirrors that lined the walls across from the showers. Mornings I always opened the window twelve inches before showering so I thought that if I did this now more light would flood the room and there would be no reason for me to break my habit now and turn the light switch on despite the hour. I walked to the shower stall as I always did and opened the curtain. I placed my bucket in the right-hand corner furthest from the showerhead and then hung my towel on the hook outside the stall.

At the window I could see the wind was blowing hard and the streetlights made a shadow of a tree branch dance across the frosted glass in front of me. When I opened it the light and shadow fell flat off the glass onto my body and the light and shadow that didn’t fit onto my body fell off my hips and stretched out onto the floor. Limbs moved on my stomach and if I looked down on myself to see where they fell I could feel a slight pressure through my robe-a warmth as if I were being touched but of course I wasn’t being touched but seeing the shadows of the branches there made me feel as though I were being touched. As long as I looked it was as though I were being touched and so I felt touched.

In the shower I could hear the branches etching against the glass behind the sound of water. If it weren’t for the sound of them there was nothing I could have seen that would have made me think that there was anyone outside the curtain and I would have just showered in the dark. But the scratching on the glass made me think I wasn’t alone and sometimes I would stick my head out of the curtain to see if I were alone and I would see myself alone in the mirror looking at the light and shadows. It’s difficult to say why I felt I wouldn’t be alone but there was something about the way the branch moved that made me think of a girl dancing outside the curtain and when I opened the curtain and stepped out to dry myself the light and shadows were there again and in the mirror I could see I was in the shadows and I knew when I saw her there that she wouldn’t ever leave me and I was scared though I wasn’t in the dark anymore. I was standing in the light now too.

It’s difficult to say how I brought her here or how she had fallen into the mirror because when I turned around to look in the stall she wasn’t standing behind me but was just there in front of me in the mirror. She was trapped in the glass though in my bed she had been able to fall on me in sleep. Poems make it easy to dream of angels but the girl she had no wings so she couldn’t have been the angel. I thought that I knew that I didn’t know her so I thought it best not to move. And even though she was someone very much like me still she was strange and I was scared and I couldn’t have been just looking at myself and been so scared. And then I moved closer to the mirror because I wanted to make sure she wasn’t me. And she followed me to the mirror so I thought for a second I was right. She was me and I didn’t have to be scared and I moved my eyes to the right and then to the left and she did the same but then I thought I saw her lip curl about to smile but I was too nervous to smile so I knew that she wasn’t me. She was some stranger come to trick me and in the second that I thought she wasn’t me she felt too close. She was too close to me and I was scared she would creep inside me and before I even thought what to do I swung. I swung and I wanted to hit her but I hadn’t hit her. I didn’t hit her and I fell. I had fallen. I fell against the mirror and she was gone. And then my head began to pulse where it had hit the glass so I put my nose to the mirror and watched the blood push there to make the skin swell. The skin above my eye rose and stretched. A darkening bruise swallowed it.

Something shone in the light and where it shone I felt a sharp pain and when I pushed it it was hard and it cut into my finger. I pushed the bruise from the side to squeeze the glass out like the puss of a pimple and when it came out my head bled a little.

When I saw the blood I hoped that I wouldn’t vomit but whenever I see my own blood I vomit and I was sure now that it was my own blood and it was because I touched it. And I was sure that it was my own body getting sick because I saw myself buckle over in the mirror. I couldn’t see myself get ill because my head was down but I could see the floor and I could see what came out of me onto the floor and I could feel what came out of me and when I was done having everything come out of me I looked in the mirror and saw that my lip was still dirty so I knew it was me who was ill. And then Amanda came into the bathroom by chance and turned the lights on just after I finished being ill and suddenly the shadows and the branches were gone and I was just standing there under the fluorescent lights in my plastic shoes next to my own vomit with my head bleeding and a piece of the mirror missing. I couldn’t tell her what happened because it was hard for me to explain my imagination especially on a night when my head was bleeding and there was a piece of the mirror missing.

I told her I had gotten dizzy because I ate something bad and then the heat of the shower made me feel worse so I got out and was going to go to my room to lie down but before I could leave the shower room I fell and vomited there right outside the shower in front of the mirror because I was so weak and I asked her if she thought the bruise was bad and she said No M-. It doesn’t look too bad. It will probably go away in a few days. But it didn’t.

Chapter Two

The HAM STEAK

I sat and ate my ham where I sat every night and ate my ham or my roast beef or my chicken or my turkey or whatever other meat was due to be served according to the plan of food services. I sat at the head of a long dark brown wooden table that was near the center of the east dining room and I sat there as I did every night with my friends who were amused by my habits and I didn’t mind that they were amused and I was grateful to have friends to eat with because otherwise I would be simply eating the ham by myself. Although I could not let myself stop seeing the beauty in the way that I ate ham I was grateful not to be alone when eating ham because the sense of pleasure that I felt when I ate it as I wished to eat it seemed so great that I was often scared to be lost in the detail of my experience thereby losing the sense of my greater surroundings.

The ham in the dining hall was cut by machine into steaks that were about a quarter of an inch thick and they were a light pink but there was an iridescent purple film that shone on the flesh. When it was put on an institutional white plate and handed to me by the men working in the dining hall who wore white caps and white shirts it was handed to me almost sideways. The plate was never completely parallel to the ground. Maybe it was almost nearly parallel to the ground but I was careful to notice each time they handed me a plate of ham that because of the way the human hand is built it was easier for the server to hand me my plate of ham in the cafeteria line in such a way that the side of the plate bent slightly in the direction that his thumb pointed. If it were being served by a right-handed person for example who of course held it from the side closest to him with the thumb coming over the lip of the plate it was easiest for him to hand it to me so that the plate was slightly bent in a direction towards his feet and the center of his body. The plate was handed to me at an angle that pointed down somewhere between the left and the right arm not somewhere in a direction outside to the right or left of the body. Because of the angle at which the ham steak was handed to me because it was at an angle not parallel to the ceiling my eye would catch the meat in the fluorescent light in a certain way that let me see that the ham steak that I was about to eat was not pink but that it was covered in a purple film an iridescent purple film like the inside of a sea shell. This made me think that the meat had a special kind of magic. It wasn’t an extraordinary magic but an ordinary one. It was the magic of knowing that the comforting order of the ordinary which sometimes appeared as the extraordinary purple glow of a piece of meat was in fact just ordinary and it would always rise to greet my mind in the exact same manner that it had greeted it before and for this reason I loved to eat ham steak best.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from The BRUISEby MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI Copyright © 2008 by Magdalena Zurawski. Excerpted by permission.
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