Noli Me Tangere
by Becky Shirley
This is Eugene, I am Tess, Tess is me, and I am here with Eugene.
The words arrive fully formed, untouched, their rhythm automatic. Her own body begins to take shape and the rest continues to clarify with it. Eugene’s arm, wrapped under one of their flat pillows, squeezing it to his head. His other arm flung wide, reaching for something better. Tess lies tummy down, bound by sheets, arms numb under the weight of herself.
This is Tess, Tess is me, and I am here with Eugene.
Soon, Tess will untangle herself and slip quietly out of bed into their kitchen, her bare feet picking up dust and leaving shadows of sweat on the tile floor. She will stand at their kitchen window with a glass of tap water, looking out onto the courtyard they have never figured out how to enter and do not have enough Italian to ask after. Once, from this window, she saw a peacock silently strut out into the courtyard, seemingly from nowhere, its tail limp and hidden. She watched it peck at the ground like a regular bird until it turned behind a tree and disappeared. She never saw it again and Eugene does not fully believe she ever did.
“Are you sure,” he said, “that you weren’t just hoping to see it?”
Their apartment is sparse in the way that all student housing is sparse. They rent it from a study abroad company that usually houses fine arts students. Neither one of them is an artist. Tess writes about art; Eugene writes about other things, she is never certain what. It’s always changing.
They are here on her visa, her scholarship. The apartment came furnished and filled with things left behind by previous students—mugs with other university’s logos on them, tattered paperback novels, dusty sketchbooks filled with ripped pages, crusty baking sheets. Someone even left a camera with film still in it, though Tess had opened it and ruined the roll. Artifacts of other people’s lives, other ways of being. Sometimes it felt like she was an archeologist in her own home, like entire civilizations had collapsed under the same roof.
Their only change to the apartment was a postcard of a fresco they saw their first week here. They taped it to the fridge door with masking tape someone had left behind, like proud parents putting their child’s work on display. When they saw the fresco in person, Tess had explained to Eugene that it was called noli me tangere, touch me not. This was what Jesus told Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, after Jesus became Christ. It’s a mistranslation, she had said, or an imperfect one at least, because it doesn’t imply how permanent of a thing it is. It doesn’t mean you can’t touch me now; it means you can’t touch me ever again.
Tess does not remember if Eugene said anything back. But she does remember how she felt leaning as far as she could, over the rope that barred her from entering the tiny cell where the fresco hid. Something close to sacrilege, even though she was not religious. She remembers aching for Mary, reaching for the man she’d once known, now lost to something she had to accept as better, and looking uncertain that others would believe what she had seen. And she remembers the coldness she felt towards Christ, wholly divine now, walking past Mary on his tiptoes, as if he could not disturb the dirty earth he’d died for.
Afterwards, in the gift shop, Tess bought the postcard just to have something to buy, something to hand Eugene when he asked what she wanted. This was still the early days, when she would have given anything to have contact with Eugene, to have him take something from her hands.
But even after months of seeing the postcard every morning, she always felt the same as when she saw the real painting. Not as craggy and swollen of a feeling as in person, but too distinct to be called dull. A picture-postcard version of pain. She finally took it down early this spring, carefully peeling off the tape and tucking it into the pages of a novel she knew she would not finish. This was after they could not go out anymore, when she did not need to see loss every morning to feel it. In the mornings, she only wanted to know her dusty feet, the terracotta light that filled their kitchen, the possibility of a peacock. Eugene did not ask where the postcard went and they did not replace it. Sometimes she wondered if they should, but she could not picture what could go in its place. There were some mornings she thought she saw the postcard still there, as if her brain expected to see it and filled in the empty space for her.
Soon, Tess will rise from bed and walk to the kitchen and reach for a glass that belongs to someone else and ignore the empty space on the fridge door and the novel with the postcard still hidden inside. But none of this has happened yet. Now, Tess lies still, her thoughts no longer rhythmic. She has to force them forward by pretending to plan out her day, acting as if she is uncertain of what will happen next. She stares at the clock on the wall and counts the hours back to California time. She does not wish she was home, but she wishes that Florence was closer to the sea. This will be her first summer without seeing water.
Becky Shirley is a writer from Oceanside, California. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Manhattan. Her work has appeared in Vanishing Point Magazine, The Metaworker, and Columbia Journal. When she is not abandoning half-finished cups of coffee around her apartment, she is editing a collection of short stories and writing her first novel.
