The Bruise, by Zoe Dzunko
This is what I did not tell you about those early hours of Christmas morning. We were sleeping on the basement level of that guesthouse on West 20th Street, our window a porthole to the feet of passersby and us, left gazing up in anticipation of those flashes of shadow. They appeared to pass at regular intervals, somehow, we below the skin of the city, seizing little more than mere impressions of it. As if it were—that city and its people—a spinning zoetrope, we were captivated by its movement enough to forget its repetition, those bustling silhouettes seemed exceedingly alive in contrast to us, very still and engaged in little else but the act of watching. Bushmills, bodegas, Chinese takeout, morning, Seinfeld: a cycle that was to be broken only with a museum visit, on occasion.
Witnesses. Perhaps it was the cold, but there was a certain fissure between us, and our surroundings, as though we were peering into a scene but never quite stepping inside. Like the snow, remember? We were often surprised that despite the muddy layer icing the concrete outside, we could never see it fall from the warmth of the bed. It seemed to elude us and we often lamented our unfortunate location within the towering brownstone.
We had been married for three weeks, then. Twenty-one days. Three nights earlier, fingers contracted from the cold, my rings slipped onto the pavement below the front stoop. Clamping the railing like a crutch and swaying with whisky, impatiently I begged you to leave them and for us to go inside. Instead you crouched, brow furrowed doggedly, and pawed the new snow until the narrow bands encircled one another in your palm. That was the night the bruise formed. I slipped on Mulberry Street and you had already stepped off the footpath. When we woke the next morning, it was black. Incontrovertibly black. Without even the slightest dappling of red, it sat against the pale skin of my thigh like a warning. You mused that it looked like a plump spider floating in a glass of milk, and I had to agree. That will teach you, you said, and I nodded solemnly.
Often, I would catch it in the mirror as I stepped out of the shower. A spectre, it floated as a black spot in my vision, as though it were something lodged in the corner of my eye and not, instead, nestled malignly below the skin. Against the white of the sheets it shocked me, like a puddle of blood marring the clean cotton. I would sneak glances at it, trace its uneven border with one outstretched finger, as if a child on the brink of discovery.
After some days it began to transmute, like a landmass over great spans of time. Its barren blackness eventually giving way to spots of green and blue; the great undulating pastures of my parent’s farm, a gleaming ocean cushioning a coast. Before long it was no longer a sphere at all, but a jagged heart-shaped mark, coloured with the browns and yellows of a desert plain.
But on that Christmas morning, it was still black and round as a fist. It was then that I disappeared for a long time and left you lying, pressed below four layers of blankets like a wilted flower, distilling with rage. When I vanished from some time between two and returned shivering, just shy of the dawn, limbs corrugated with cold.
I had only intended to have a cigarette on the front steps, you should know that. Half of me—the diplomatic half—felt that our argument might dissolve were it afforded an intermission. I witnessed the nascent antagonism, how easily it was coming to the both of us, and was clutching at enough sense to know that I also couldn’t possibly be that furious with you. I loved you. Through anger, I saw the flush of your cheeks at the altar and remembered why we were there, after all.
I never meant to leave for as long as I did. The wind was whipping the snow around, shaping it into those small pellets of ice that crunch underfoot like brittle marbles. I only moved off the stoop because there wasn’t enough cover and, in fleeing the room as I did, had left my coat hanging on the hook behind our door. With eyes tightly closed, I remember gripping my palms around opposing biceps and thinking of it fondly, its high collar and thick down. So, I had crossed 20th to take shelter in a doorway and that was why I met him and the only reason I was gone so long.
At first, I supposed he was doing the same as me, taking shelter from the wind. Well, that was what he was doing, but I thought that he lived in the building, if not one of the row houses on the street. I can’t remember how old he was. Thirty, forty, he may well have been fifty.
His face had a gentle wear, like a child that had fallen down. I remember he had a scar from the corner of one eye to the base of his nostril, it seemed like a strange place to have a scar. It split his face into quadrants, like a torn mask. When he smiled it crept towards his lash line, glowing angrily in the cold air. After some polite conversation, he put his coat over my shoulders. I had tried to brush it off but he wouldn’t hear it. It smelled of grease and smoke. He offered me a sip from his bottle of bourbon but I said no. I feel like he was offended, maybe, because he kept offering as though I were too polite to indulge. So we stood there for a time, and after a while we sat.
At some point, two people exited the building and stepped over our legs. The woman glared at us, her face seemed all the more enraged when cosseted by the wool of her scarf and hat, but her male companion brushed her arm and said, in a hushed voice, don’t let them bother you, it is Christmas. I was wearing a new dress and had done my hair nicely for our dinner earlier that night, and even now I remember wondering why she had looked at me that way. As she passed, I glanced up at her and smiled. I suppose that I was imploring her to corroborate, know that I was just like her and not, instead, a stranger crouching in her doorway. Which was, after all, what I was. She frowned and descended the stairs.
He looked at me and smiled. Don’t let them worry you Mami, they got a warm place to sleep tonight, we got nowhere else to be but here. I nodded in agreement and thought of you in the bed. I thought of how cold I was and how I longed to press my back into your warmth. How I missed you and how wrong it was that I wasn’t with you on Christmas morning. Our argument, by then, already seemed quite trivial and my conscience had revived itself. I dreaded the thought of your silhouette appearing at the glass double doors above the stoop, opposite. Your apology or your relief at having found me abruptly snatched away by your contempt for having done so under the current circumstances. This thought alone nearly impelled me to rise to my feet, to walk away without word or explanation. But I wondered why you hadn’t at least come outside to look for me and so I was also suspended in a state of mild annoyance for your apparent lack of concern. It sustained me, every time that I felt as if I would stand up and cross the street towards home. So, I just sat there, near frozen to the concrete, and listened to him talk.
He had gotten out of prison that morning. That day, it was Rikers Island and before that he had been somewhere in Ossining. I asked him why he was there, in prison, and he shrugged. The first time, he said, was because of what happened here. I followed his finger to the Rite Aid across the street. The pharmacy, I asked? No, no pharmacy. The deli, he said.
It was 1986 and he had been sent by his mother to pick up an order. No, I don’t remember the order, or why he was carrying a suitcase full of coins. I know that sounds absurd, it really is strange. He collected them, all quarters, for three years. From the street, the pockets of trousers in the dirty washing, the change slots of ticket machines and candy dispensers and vending machines. I’m not sure that I believe him, but I’m dubious as to why anyone would fabricate such a detail. Anyhow, the deli manager phoned the police, suspecting the money was stolen, and he was apprehended. When his mother couldn’t afford the bail or representation, he found himself in prison for the first time, until the early nineties, without any visitors. I frowned at him then, and he said, as if knowing what I was thinking, my mother, she was very ashamed. When he came back to their home on this street after his release, his family had left. I nodded my head because it seemed unbelievable and there weren’t any questions I could ask to dispel my doubts. Maybe it was just really horrible, the idea of returning home to nothing. I wondered why you would continue to put yourself through it, coming back each time to a haunted street. To a deli, a bank, a coffee shop, a Rite Aid.
I asked where he was staying that night and he said, with you Mami and I smiled at him, but said that I had to go home now. I was really cold. His brow dipped and he leaned forward, where you got a home? I said that I was staying across the street. I emptied the notes from my purse in his hand, and he just stared at me, hurt. Under his breath he spat, why you sitting out here with me when you got family inside? Partirse el alma.
I undressed in the dark, dropped my snow-sodden underwear and stockings to the floor, rolled into one like dough. In the grey of the mirrors reflection, the bruise seemed to have spread further across the skin—the curve of my thighs and buttocks tracing a line against the frost white windowpane—nestling itself like a plump tarantula; the gaping open mouth of cave. In the bed, anger allayed by sleep, you pulled me in and I let you, the heat of your body felt scorching against the wintriness of my own. With one large insentient hand, you caressed my hip, my thigh, and came to rest upon the dark, as though you would cover it and render it invisible. But I could still feel. Its restless pulse throbbing importunately, like the two hands of a clock.
