by Jaimy Gordon
“You smell any smoke? See any fire?” I whispered to O. “I see nuttin. I don’t even see Emily. Is she here?” “Sure she’s here, she’s in the bed or all the royals wouldn’t be crowding around.” “Sumpm smells funny,” O said, and I smelled it too, like a plastic wading pool lying too long in the sun, or the inside of some cheap toy. “That could make you sick to your stomach. Uh-oh, look.” We saw it glint for a second above the curtain-the delicate boom of one of those rolling IV stands, a bit of the bubbling flask.
“O my godzilla,” I said, “sumpm really bad happened.” “At least she ain’t dead,” O said. “Maybe not, but you don’t get six royals including two regular doctors for a sick stomach.” “I don’t see nuttin black from a fire. Maybe it was a false alarm,” O whispered. “Maybe she did get sick from that coddy,” I agreed, suddenly wanting to be optimistic, “I mean real sick, like toe-main poison sick, I had that coddy two days. I always wondered how they can leave those coddies out like that on the counter, no frigerator no nuttin, little fish things on a metal tray no matter how hot it gets, with the flies and that, right in the hospital snack bar, it’s kinda disgusting if you think about it.” “Aw come on, coddies can’t rot, there’s not even no food in them,” O hissed, “well maybe a little potato or sumpm and just the smell of the grease from fried fish but no fish, that’s why they’re so good.” “They could rot,” I said, “one I forgot to eat rotted in my pocket once. Wooo it stunk.” “Nobody never died from eating no coddy,” O whispered firmly. “What’d you leave her your cigarettes for anyway?”
I looked at O. She was lifting the blueblack dip out of her eye as if to stress the clear sound reason of this question. I shook my head. My scheme for getting Emily to eat sounded so dumb to me now I hated to say. But then I remembered she had smoked and had eaten. My see-through princess loved me best, there was no explaining that. And I knew it was my not coming back that had done this, whatever it was. I shouldn’t have left her sumpm of mine she could hurt herself with, some flammable dreamboxoline, some poison present. I should have made it back to her somehow-I gazed at O-the trashy pirate’s eye-patch of a dip had slipped down over her eye again-I had to admit I had not just been waylaid, I had fallen. I was too starved to be trusted. I moaned to think of the kiss in the elevator and just then Emily moaned from behind the curtain. My moan died and hers, reedy and quavering, was in the air, rising, faraway but clear, like one wolf howling to another on the next mountain top.
I distinctly heard Doctor Zuk say, “Courage, dear, only little bit more,” and then sumpm sailed out of the curtain and flopped on the linoleum. It was pink, brown, black; charred and wet-I stared, my eyes refused to tell me what it was. “Sufferin cheeses, it’s that ugly thing the nurses give her,” O whispered, and then I recognized it, the I CHOCOLATE bathrobe they had just peeled away from her burned skin like skin. My eyes fixed on the maraschino cherry buttons. They weren’t melted. They looked the same as ever, good enough to eat. “She musta set herself on fire,” O said, deeply impressed, “you think she done it on purpose?”
“Listen. I gotta go in there,” I said, “I promised her I’d come back-with these-” I pulled the oil-spotted bag of coddies out of the bib of my overalls. I’d been lying on them. “I gotta show her. I told her I could get in there anytime and I always could.” I gave O a deep, deep look, all the way to the black bottoms of her black-ringed eyes, sorta trying to hypnotize her to come around. I mean, I fell and was a half-baked person but she fell too and was a dangerous person, and she wasn’t even truly buggy, no more than I was. “I’ll help you,” she said.
And without waiting another second, she did-jumped up and sleepwalked (I do a good coma, don’t I?) in her gold lamé ballet slippers, straight for the doorway of Emily’s room, sticking her arms out in front of her like the night of the living dead and chanting “High rat a dreambutton flirty eat a job” or some other line of comic-book buggy. It wouldn’t have convinced a Bug Motel or anyone who really knew her, but the nurses, Hageboom, Roper and Mursch, swooped down on her like buzzards and flapped away with her and I belly-crawled across the hall to Emily’s door and ducked under the curtain with the coddy bag in my teeth.
They grabbed me as soon as I jumped up but I was ready for them and wrapped my arms and legs around the metal bed corner and yelled, “Look, Em, I got it.” But of course as soon as I opened my mouth the coddy bag fell onto Emily with a plump. I can only thank godzilla she didn’t scream when the coddy bag touched her or I’d have died of shame. Why didn’t she scream? She looked so strange, so shiny, such an odd waxed paper color, but what did I expect? She was naked I think but lay in a sort of black rubber wrapper full of foam, like a spittlebug in a leaf, with her little white throat just showing. She must have had plenty of morphine or sumpm. I guess they were getting ready to move her. She looked up dreamily, she was awake, half-awake, she saw me and smiled that queer bug smile on top of her rotten bucked teeth and I’m ashamed to say I cared more about that than if she would live. “It’s me, the Bogeywoman. I was here,” I said, “don’t forget.”
All this while the royals had been pulling on the back of my overalls and now my arms and legs turned gimp and let go of the bed. I slumped down on the floor and bawled. It was too steep a fall. I had barely had time to conceive of myself as a dreambox mechanic before I had as good as killed somebody. Besides, I loved my see-through princess and was afraid I would never see her again. How much could one little body take? I buried my face in my hands, but in the dark I kept seeing old Emily resolutely igniting the bottom of that cheesy I CHOCOLATE bathrobe, so I opened my eyes again. After a moment I became aware I was looking at sumpm dreadfully familiar. It was my Mr. Peanut cigarette lighter, lying in the wrinkled, venous hand of Doctor Zuk. (Her hands were pretty shockingly decrepit, the one part of her that looked her age.)
She was holding it so only I would see it, but see it I must, since it was all of five inches from my nose. In fact in my first operatic rush of recognition I feared she would set my hair on fire, or singe my face. I knew I deserved it. She towered above me, peering down at me with an undetached queenly rigor that was totally untypical of the average dreambox mechanic at Rohring Rohring, and besides setting off a little alarm in the covert conservatism that’s a part of every mental patient, she was scaring me to death. Her nylons glowed electrically on top of those soccer player’s shins and calves. I had the sensation I was clinging to her chiseled kneecaps, although I was just kneeling there, doing no such thing, and nobody else would have even noticed except-I was convinced-Doctor Zuk-Madame Zuk-herself. Her I clearly saw considering whether to kick me off of her ankles into the gutter. “What you think you are doing?” she hissed, and if Emily hadn’t been lying there, I could tell she would be shouting. “What you can mean with this unacceptable behavior that might further injure your friend? Unacceptable! Unacceptable!” she spat. “Please will you be my dreambox mechanic?” I blurted. “I know it’s my fault that Emily lit herself on fire. I don’t care if I live or die, in fact I hope I do die if you won’t be my dreambox mechanic.” She stared down at me. She was not as tall as she looked, but now she seemed to duck her head to keep from butting the ceiling. “You are thinking to kill yourself? The world will go on without you, you know, Miss Bogeywoman. Now, please to get out immediately,” she said. Her ugly, ringless hand pointed me to the door.
4
Fallen Among Ayrabbers
It wasn’t a daring escape. O well, daring would have been wasted on Rohring Rohring, which was as leaky as a kitchen colander. Hypothetically, the lobby guards knew us mental patients by sight and were ready to nab us if we made a run for it. In fact Lopes was watching me as I dashed past his desk but made up his mind-I saw a movement of his lower jaw like someone setting down a grocery bag with a plump-that this was nothing to risk a heart attack for. After all we Bug Motels were always running around wild. We had the liberty of the lobby and the elevators, the cafeteria, gift shop and snack bar, and of the courtyard
where we played tennis on the doctors’ courts. And although we were supposed to wait for our pint-sized school bus in the morning and get off it again at night only on that little yellow-striped island of concrete on Broadway, next to the trolley tracks and across from the ayrabbers’ barn, still Lopes knew we had nobody but wicked Reginald to guide us, out there on the wickedest of wicked streets. And in fact every day we surveyed the whores and pimps, junkies, stewies, smokies and stuffies who treaded by for any new faces, and meanwhile we longed to be the ayrabbers who came jingling out of the barn across the way behind their swayback nags. Small wonder Lopes had given us up for lost.
As for these horses, even if they were the world’s ugliest, with feet like laundry irons and drooping underlips as hairy as catfish, still they were horses and even to the seen-it-all Bug Motels, such an ancient career as horse and wagon and a load of vegetables seemed a romantic occupation, even movie starry-where else but the movies did you see a horse and wagon nowadays? The ayrabbers’ horses clopped up one street and down another with the frail rigidity of elderly mental patients. They knew the way. If the way changed, say, the street was torn away down to its brick sewer line, old Broomstick wouldn’t pull the wagon straight into the hole-he wasn’t blind-but he would stand there till tomorrow. Till he starved. Till somebody saved him, led him home to his bucket of oats and flake of hay. We could tell the horses were low beasts and the ayrabbers the lowest of the low, lower even than mental patients-dusty black wretches with caved-in chests and a few mossy crooked tombstones for teeth, even the young ones.
All the same we Bug Motels put ayrabbers, not that we knew any poisonally, up there with movie stars-in a way one end of the social ladder was as good as the other. The important thing was to live at the far end, where one more step and you fell off into nothing. Like the ayrabbers’ nags, we Bug Motels knew the way. We saw that yawning hole, the grownup world of work we weren’t ready for. For all our separate frenzies we were standing at the edge of it staring in, until we starved.
And funny how the Bug Motels, city slickers one and all, each dreamed themselves into movies of some kinda golden days gone by. Sometimes Dion got sick of Nino, his tailor, running his life and he said: “Who I really wanna be is the wild man of Druid Hill Park, hide in the bushes all day and let the lions and monkeys out of their cages at night and run around wit em.” “Ya mean naked?” “Nuttin but my hairy legs and froggies, man.” Emily was a saint in some Dark Ages nunnery living on communion wafers and dew, Bertie loved hashish because he wanted to wander around in humble disguise all night like the Caliph of Baghdad and his trusty wazir whassizname in The Arabian Nights, O was the beautiful slave girl who walked upside down on the golden daggers in her hands. And I always had this pipe dream of trekking with Broomstick, my nag, up the grassy median strip of the New Jersey Turnpike. Not that I wished to show off in my buckskins to the millions who travel that road. No, it was the only way I knew to get to New York City, which in turn was the only way I more or less knew to get to Camp Chunkagunk. I figured I could sleep over at Grandma Schapiro’s and tie Broomstick up in Central Park. After that I wasn’t so sure of the road.
I had probably killed my see-through princess, and Doctor Zuk, Madame Zuk, had bawled out my monster carelessness from high up on her horse-snorting greengold sparks from her nostrils, bareback, spume of silvery hair, spangled brassiere. And had refused to be my dreambox mechanic-would not even look down my rabbit hole, though I had clung to her ankles and begged. And now I would never have her or be her. My face hot as a frying pan for shame, swearing never to return, I bolted out the main entrance of Rohring Rohring, right under the bored nose of Lopes, the PM guard, and-maybe I was dreaming of Broomstick-ran across six lanes of traffic and four silver staves of trolley tracks, to the wide-open doors of the ayrabbers’ barn.
It was cool, dark and dusty inside, the dust dancing in great blocks in front of the open doors, and the perfume of horse manure lifting the air like a leaven, rich and tingling. Still halfblind from sunlight I walked in deeper and peered into the stalls one after the other. I was looking for Broomstick, for a nose to stroke, for some dumb creature to love me, but the cubicles were all empty though they reeked of horse piss that never dried. The straw bedding, what little there was of it on the wet cement, clung to itself in sweaty cowlicks. When I stuck my head over each gate, no Broomstick but a sharp slap of ammonia-tears sprang into my eyes. The water buckets were oily swamps of whatever had fallen in them. They stank.
Well it ain’t the Rohring Rohring of horse hospitals, I mumbled to myself-more like some horror behind the workhouse in a Dickens novel. To think old Broomstick shlepped all day, up street down street, to come home to this. The workhouse loomed blackly in front of me as it often had, the world of grownups: Doing what you didn’t like from one end of the day to the other, then shoving some unappetizing thing in your mouth, then falling exhausted into the sack. This made grownups mean and ugly before they got old, and they took it out on the young, except for Merlin of course and the rare other escapee like madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse. I knew I would not escape. I might as well weep on the neck of some pitiful nag, some circus reject like myself. Or I might become an ayrabber. If I were an ayrabber, a movie star yet the lowest of the low, I’d be good to my Broomstick, we’d be a legendary pair, known the length and breadth of Monument Street if not the New Jersey Turnpike. So where was Broomstick when I needed him? Didn’t these beasts get a day or a week off, to say nothing of a year seven months eight days, when they were sick or lame? No-one stumble and straight to the knacker. Of course you could hardly say with some of these fruit-wagon horses what was walking and what was stumbling. With some you would have said, to look at them and their eyes full of flies, they had died in their traces.
It was sumpm like being a Unbeknownst To Everybody all your life: was it life if you didn’t notice when you died, and went right on shlepping? I was a higher being: I could know my own misery, ergo I could off myself.
And just then I came to the last stall and found myself eye to eye with an animal after all. She was a big brown mare, and filthy, great clots of hairy manure hanging in her mane and crosshatching her rump, and besides that, the meanest-looking equine I ever hope to see. Not that I discerned behind her sneering lips, as yet, those teeth as long and playful as piano keys-all right at first I wasn’t properly wary, never mind that face, I still hoped to love her and scratch between her ears-but I did note that she wasn’t the dull resigned workhorse I was expecting, head drooping from withers like a soup spoon in a tired hand. I did note the possibly sinister intent with which she looked down the long brown barrel of her nose at me, as if using the thug’s bump in the middle of it as a sight.
“Probably I got sumpm in here you could eat,” I mumbled, feeling through my overall pockets for a Sugar Baby or a Pez or sumpm. She arched her neck, tucked her chin and rolled her cough-syrup-colored eyes. I found a linty green lifesaver, put it on the palm of my hand and thought about sticking it out. “So, how come you’re off work today?” I asked her cautiously. “Sick? Lame? Tired of it all? Heh-heh. Er, not confined to the quietroom for any… violent acts I hope?” She eyed me from those lowered pools of Robitussin. For some reason she seemed to be hissing. And suddenly she did a strange and hideous thing: she reared a little, the lips rolled up on those yellow piano key teeth and they crashed down hard against the gate of her stall. She made a noise like dishwater down a drainpipe, a sort of backwards belch, the air rushing in, not out, with a great froggy croak. Then she just stood there, gazing out of the bottoms of her eyes, looking bad, dazed and satisfied-like a mental patient who’s thinking she’s really done it this time with that old dreamboxoline, while she’s still vaporously elated and just a little wild and woozy, before she pukes up her guts or jumps out the window.
Cheese maybe you’re sick after all I said, and that was when I so unwisely put out my hand. She swooped around sideways and bull-dogged the meat of my right bicep right through m
y Camp Chunkagunk Tough Paradise for Girls sweatshirt. Then either I jumped four feet in the air, or she threw back her head with her teeth still clamped in my shoulder and yanked me off the ground. Anyway I remember dangling as if from a nail. I’m the Bogeywoman, needless to say on the way down I gave her a left hook to the right eye that sent her scrabbling to the back of her stall, where she sort of crouched, as much as a horse can crouch.
I realized that this of a drayhorse, this imposter vegetarian, was only coiling for her next strike and I stepped back as it came. I felt the mighty snap of her long teeth against my breastbone but as it happened only my sweatshirt and the brass-buttoned bib of my overalls got caught. I heard them rip. This time as she sawed away at my duds, I brought my two fists down on her ears, and when she lurched away, Tough Paradise For Girls flapping from her jaws, I felt a sickening relief. I was free but I was also naked, or anyway half-naked: my momps were open to the world. I was alive, but what if I ever cared to leave this dump? I could hardly stay in an ayrabbers’ barn for the rest of my life.
Not only was my chest bare, there was also that small matter of the graph inscribed by razor blade, in claustrophobic detail, on my forearms this morning, the complete record in blood of my debate with Madame Zuk-in her absence, of course-on whether I should live or die. Now that my sweatshirt was kaput, it was out in the open-what excitable people might take for a botched suicide-as if the Bogeywoman, once bent on offing herself, would ever use a technique so merely artistic and irresolute, as if I hadn’t long ago mapped out all the fifth-floor windows without bars and unscreened balconies on my daily and weekly rounds. I liked for example the mezzanine in the sky-painted dome of the Enoch Pratt Free Central Library, a straight shot to the stone floor, though for a sure thing you’d have to put your hands in your pockets and dive headfirst. I liked the long gullet of stairwell of the Mathieson Building, thirty-four vertiginous stories. The Washington Monument, 228 steps up, had an iron grating, but in ninth grade I could still wiggle by it and probably I could even now, if I lost ten pounds.