Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction

Paul Maliszewski

135 Paul Maliszewski Headaches Pain, behind my eye. It’s a kind of pushing, this pain, like something impossible is being insisted upon, some crude point in a long-running argument. This is my left eye. The headache starts at the back of my head, somewhere toward the top, the part that sticks out a bit. But then the pain moves, shifting slowly forward, until it covers the whole top of my head. It feels like somebody—somebody strong—is grabbing the back of my head and squeezing. Another pain behind my eye. The right eye this time. A new pain, this one larger than my head. It’s a force, pressing down on me. The pain is larger than my head but still shaped like my head. It’s like an electromagnetic cloud, hanging there, surrounding me. I forget what I do, if I do anything. It doesn’t matter. I can’t remove myself from the cloud. 136 paul maliszewski The headache—this was another headache—did go away finally, though it lingered for hours, for the rest of the day, in fact. It was as if there were these little wisps of pain, souvenirs from a time when things were worse. My wife can feel a bad headache coming on. She has to stop what she’s doing and lie down in a dark room, or else the pain will get so bad, it won’t go away. Last night, she felt one of those headaches. “I haven’t had one of these in a while,” she said. “Can I get you anything?” I asked. “Some tea?” “I don’t think so,” she said. She turned in the bed, away from the light. “What about your sleep mask thing?” I said. My wife has a sleep mask she wears sometimes, to rest. “That’s cold,” she said. “The cold will just constrict the blood vessels even more.” She pulled the sheets up over her head and let them down on her face. “Do you know what a migraine is?” she asked. I didn’t, not exactly anyway. She explained then about the blood vessels in the brain and the blood flowing through them. “What’s a regular headache?” I asked. She wasn’t sure. “I could warm up the sleep mask,” I said. “In some warm water.” She said she’d like that, so I turned out the lights in the room and walked down the hall, turning out the lights as I went. Downstairs, I boiled some water for the sleep mask. While I waited, I sat at the bottom of the stairs and read some book just because it was handy. headaches 137 I once went to sleep with a light headache. It was there, though easy enough to ignore. I thought it was on its way out, but when I woke up, I still had the headache. It might have been slightly worse. Another headache today. I picture my brain wrapped, encircled, held fast by a thing with tentacles. My wife said she once got a headache that lasted a month. “A month?” I said. I thought I must have heard her wrong. She went to several doctors, but they could do nothing to help her. They had no idea what was causing her headache. Finally, she went to one who gave her a shot. “A shot of what?” I said. She couldn’t remember. A few days later, my wife told me that she remembered something else: when she had the headache that wouldn’t go away, she needed to have a cat scan. We had been watching a movie in which a character got a cat scan. It occurred to me that I had little idea what a cat scan even is. Like with so much else, I just said the words, not knowing what they meant, what the procedure entails or what the scan might reveal. And yet I pictured something when I said the words. I saw a patient in a white room. I saw her lying down. I saw a machine moving over the patient, as if grazing on her. Or perhaps the machine was placed around her head. The machine shot rays. Emitted rays? The picture grew vague here. 138 paul maliszewski The way a headache, when it’s just starting to come on, makes me feel queasy from its power. As if I’m being...