My Guru
1.
This morning my horoscope advised me to look at the world as it is, without imposing my beliefs on it.
A man stands on the streetcorner, chewing glass like candy, blood waterfalling out his mouth. Arms of steel: literally. Sign says: Guru of Blood and Pain.
I am no revolutionary, I say. I’ve just been feeling unbearably sad lately.
Hong Kong, he says, and tickles my left armpit with a metal hook, draws blood.
When I’m not looking, he pushes a clawful of bloody glass toward my face.
I would really rather have a cookie. A nice soft cookie full of peanut butter, or Minnesota, or nothing.
Pretend it’s a cookie of glass.
I don’t believe in cookies of glass.
Then don’t pretend.
He opens my jaws wider, wider yet, so wide I’m not sure whether I’m screaming or swallowing myself whole.
2.
Later, in bed with my guru, I have a lot of questions. He allows me no bandages, no aspirins. He is cruel, my guru, cold and silent, but my guru can fuck. My mouth is an open wound, and I write questions for him on a chalkboard.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD ONE CHOOSE TO EAT GLASS?
Because one has lost his arms.
WHY THE FUCK HAVE YOU LOST YOUR ARMS?
Since childhood, I’d wanted a hook for a hand.
THAT STORY IS BULLSHIT. TELL ME ANOTHER.
Gurus do not have stories. I will tell you someone else’s. Once there was a woman. Once there was a man. Etc.
A WHOLE STORY!
One night the woman cut the man’s arms off while he slept. She ran off with them, and buried them in the core of the earth. The man wandered the earth, searching for his lost arms. He never found them again.
WHO WAS SHE????
She liked to wander the markets with beetleshells in her hair, with fires writhing underskin. In other words she was a cunt.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MAN?
He got distracted. He got distracted again. He forgot he’d ever had arms, or a woman. He became a guru, because gurus have no stories. Now shut your mind and go to sleep.
FUCK OFF.
3.
I am trying to make my guru jealous by telling him a story about a dream I had about another armless man.
In the dream I was the only woman allowed to touch the arms. I removed them, and rubbed a golden ointment into the shoulder sockets.
In the morning his arms had branched and bloomed. In the morning he had soft flowercups for hands, and their petals stretched like fingers to receive my softness. Each time he touched me, petals fell off, so delicate he was. But at night they grew back again, even softer than before.
My guru said I told too many stories that weren’t true. He told me to go to sleep and have a different dream.
But my dream was always the same. What I did for him in the dream was the only thing I had done for anybody in such a long time. I was in awe of my facility, my strength, my faith.
I awoke to my guru touching me, to cold metal on my back, cold metal deep inside me. It was not just the arms: my guru’s whole body was like metal.
4.
That bullet came a century ago, said my guru. Yet you still hold it in your heart. Get over it!
Why don’t you reach for it? I said. For me? Why don’t you try saving me with some wisdom like every other guru?
He shot me in the foot and whistled himself deeper into the woods. He was always whistling Schoenburg, my guru, so that I wanted to tear open his throat with my hands.
5.
The night I was ready to leave, I tugged at my guru’s arms in his sleep. We had supped on whiskey and stale bread and he belched in his sleep without flinching.
The arms were fused to stubborn tendon, hard bone. They would not change, the arms. They would never be the arms he was born with. I would not remove them. I was capable of no salve. They could not save me.
At that moment I fell in love.
