by Jaimy Gordon
Reginald shook his head disgustedly. “Ain’t East Six a locked ward, she want to know? I tell her it is and it ain’t. What means is and what means ain’t, answer to me immediately, she say. Must think she the queen or sumpm. I tell her all the wards is officially closed, only in the daytime we don’t lock but East Five and the quietrooms. She holla back, Ain’t we spose to keep track of these patients? And her nose joint jump so high, like it’s walking on her eyebrows. I see a patient disappear in that stable over there, she say, this a very troubled young woman who don’t have the brains of a pissant.” “She said that?” “Sumpm like that. Custody-ain’t that your lookout, Mr. Blanchard? she say. What I’m gonna say? It ain’t my lookout? So I come get you.”
“She was worried about me,” I whispered in a moony daze. The hot gray city and the red brick bughouse disappeared; I seemed to be gazing into the crystal ball of my fate. “I ain’t said that. I never see her go down and play in no Broadway traffic to haul your ass back here her hinkty self.” “There’s probably some law against dreambox mechanics crossing the street to chase after patients,” I said dreamily. “Hmmm, I don’t think the Rooski dreambox fixer got patients like the regular docs in this joint. She like a VIP. She writing a book or sumpm. They give her the keys to the castle. I tell you what! She turn up everywhere like ants at a all-day picnic. Think she the queen or sumpm. Answer to me immediately. Don’t they have no democracy down they in Costa Rica?” “I thought you said Russia.” “Russia, Costa Rica, some cockamamie place where they talk funny and think the homeboys got bones in they noses.” “She is the queen,” I said, “I call her madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse.” “You see a hoss under that old bird? You best tell Foofer.” Reggie slitted his eyes at me, but I smiled back sweetly. Now that Doctor Zuk was worried about me, I could afford to be generous. “She ain’t no queen of mine,” he grumbled, “this a free country.”
AMONG THE ROYALS
Reggie opened royal office number 709-DR. DEWEY, it said, though Doughy Dewey was long gone-and gave me a little shove from behind. Then the door closed at my back, didn’t slam exactly but fell shut with the dreadful huff of absolute monarchy, followed by a small digestive munch of hardware. The door had locked itself behind me. In my honor? And there she sat under her crown of spiky hair, twirling a golden pencil on the blotter. At last it was just the two of us, face to face: I, the Bogeywoman, and she, Doctor Zuk-Madame Zuk. She rose on her high-heeled sandals, tilted her head and gazed at me but said nothing for some minutes. I believe she was taking in my outfit.
It was the same old office of all the royals, long as a railroad flat, with a jute doormat like a penal haircut and a gray umbrella stand, an ancient desk up front and a couch and two easy chairs in back by the windows. The windows, I could see from here, looked out over Broadway all right, down to the ayrabbers’ barn. But the office had been purged of its last resident, Dr. Dewey. (I had seen Doughy Dewey on tennis court matters once-he had owned a set of botanical etchings.) The nakedness of the place supported the foreign guest theory of Zuk-where in Outer Hotzeplotz was she from, with that accent?-as did, in a way, the desk shaggy with papers, as though she had to erupt into emptiness somewhere. O, there was one mysterious object: a pair of what looked like genuine Eskimo mukluks, fixed to a base and bronzed over, squaw-chewed leather, slumping ankles, crisscross thongs and all. This object sat in one corner like a trashcan, and as I stared at it, a cockroach the size of a Tonka toy poked its head out of the left shin and looked around.
I stared at the mukluks, Zuk stared at me and finally she asked me: “You are iceskater or bricklayer? Or fire swallower is also possible?” “Er, uh, I’m a brick swallower, if you wish to know the truth,” I said. She smiled at that, so I bumbled on: “May I please ask where the hump you’re from?” You may not. Her smile flattened to glass, she stared down at me with the remote grandeur of the pyramids until I shrank to a coolie and pretended I didn’t know myself.
“Please to roll up your sleeves, Miss Bogeywoman,” she directed. “Do I have to?” “Not at all. I telephone for medical emergency.” She placed her hand on the phone, I hastily pushed up my sleeves. She took hold of my two wrists, turned them up and surveyed their undersides, the rusty cuts furred by sweatshirt lint, with a look of mild distaste.
“For why you are drawing these pictures in blood?” she asked, pronouncing it bla-a-a-a-d, like someone in a vampire movie. “It’s a graph,” I reported sheepishly, “the columns got sorta messed up.” “Why you don’t use copybook if you are interested for mathematics?” Doctor Zuk inquired crisply, “this way three weeks go by, you have no record, nothing, well, very ugly arm of course, but nothing useful for science.” “Don’t worry, I got a record-up here,” I said, tapping my greasy forehead with my finger.
“A record of what, if you please?” Zuk asked. “A kinda debate I was having with myself and, and”-I knew better than to get poisonal-“and a higher being, so to speak-about whether a person should be, er, uh, sumpm or nuttin… that is, live or die.” “Ah. And who is win this debate?” “Well, see, that’s where I got stuck. If she wins I’m sumpm, but only if I turn into her. If I win, I stay me and then I end up nuttin. Either way I’m nuttin… It doesn’t seem right.” “Why it doesn’t seem right? You don’t feel you are nothing?” “That’s one thing about being a mess. All those slimy organs in the soup, everything sloshing around like too many matzo balls-I get the urge to spill sumpm…” “So. You spill your bla-a-a-a-d.” I nodded. “After you have spilled your bla-a-a-a-d, then what you feel?” I thought this over. “Seasick,” I said, “but lighter. And then I am the Bogeywoman.” “Seasick I understand,” Zuk said, “but help me, Bogeywoman I am not follow.” “So people just look at me and think, cheese, if she did that to herself-! Better not get her in a corner. Probably she’d eat me alive.”
“Ah.” She drew down my purple satin sleeves with a snap. I remembered her soaping O’s head, when it was stuck in the toilet pipe, in a manner roughly maternal. How much tenderness could I hope to corner for my bush league self-mutilations?
“You will have ugly scars from this.” “Cheese,” I said, “how much uglier can I get?” “Take care, your mouth to god’s ear,” Doctor Zuk said, “you should see some monsters I have seen in villages where no doctor comes, and all of them pretty children once, loved by their mothers. Besides, you are not ugly. This is rubbish and you know is rubbish. You look like, like Greek boy, perhaps.” The aspect was in the air, buzzing like the fluorescent lights. “I ain’t no fuddy boy,” I said, “lemme die first.”
Doctor Zuk suddenly held out to me my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter. I took it and put it in my pocket. “Why you have run away?” she asked. I shrugged. Life will go on without you she had kindly pointed out, and offing myself had lost its charm for another day. Anyhow if I croaked I might have to lie in the hospital morgue next to Emily, which would scare a person to death if they weren’t dead already. I thought of Emily’s drinking-water-blue, unaccusing eyes, not quite closed but fixed forever in disappointment because Ursie never came back-“It’s just I thought I’d killed her,” I muttered. “You will be glad to hear it: Miss Peabody is not good, but life,” Zuk said, in a clucking, practical tone that almost made me laugh. “This is most I can tell you. Anyhow we have something else to talk, yes?” “We do?” I wished to get it over with so I said: “I guess you mean what I did to Emily.” “No. Not Miss Peabody.” Zuk was patient; her gnarled fingers moved like a spider over every inch of her pale throat as if counting the tiny wrinkles. She wanted me to guess again, but I was stumped. “Miss Bogeywoman-you like if I call you Miss Bogeywoman?” “Just Bogeywoman,” I said, but that was too democratic for her.
“Miss Bogeywoman, I want you should explain me something. Let us sit down.” She led me to the chairs in the back of the room. She lit a Gitane. “Now. Why you want I should be your psychiatrist?” she asked in a gravelly voice. “What put this idea in your head?”
So that was it. How had I
ever had the nerve to ask? “You look like somebody who’d be interesting to talk to, that’s all,” I mumbled. “I think you are saying you want to talk. Yes? That is what I hear?” “Well, not to just anybody,” I said. Didn’t she see the pressure I was under? If I had a claim to fame in this dump it was my one year, seven months and eight days of silence-going on nine. And my dreambox mechanic was Foofer, the world-famous diagnostician-probably the best known doc in the place. Word of this had gotten around, we all knew the royals had case supervisions and case retreats, case manhattans, case hardenings and case bakeoffs, case jousts, summits, progresses and councils of war. I narrowed my eyes at her: Could she be Foofer’s Injun scout? The thought that they might be in cahoots, that her special interest in me might be for Foofer’s sake, filled me with such bilious jealousy I almost puked.
“I’m never going to talk to Foofer, in case that’s what you’re after. You might as well forget it, I ain’t talking to that fuddy till I buy my frozen Milky Ways in hell. In other words never ever.” “Good. Okay. Then please, Miss Bogeywoman, you will explain me the difference between somebody you want for talk and somebody you will never ever talk?”
I curled a chunk of oily hair on a finger. “Ahem. I got certain private business which I would never discuss with a fuddy dreambox mechanic. Hey, it’s none of his beeswax, he’d just tell Merlin and don’t tell me he wouldn’t, I know he would. Merlin chose him and I know these famous fuddies, they’re all in the same club.” “So it is nothing that Dr. Feuffer has done or said, but whom he will tell?” “It’s nuttin he said cause he hardly says nuttin.” “Maybe you are angry at him he doesn’t say more?” I just shrugged. “What you would like him to say?” I glared at her. “I have get the feel,” Zuk said, “you don’t like Dr. Feuffer no matter what he says. Is fair to call this a pree-judice?” I stared at Zuk and suddenly I saw straight into her dreambox, as through the peephole of a diorama. I wouldn’t talk to Foofer cause Foofer was a fuddy-that’s what she was driving at-cause Foofer was a hairy-onions, a grizzle-bearded, frog-dangled male. She was right of course, but I wasn’t telling them that-lemme die first.
“You think it’s cause he’s a fuddy-well you’re wrong. Even if he was Margaret Meat I wouldn’t like him,” I sneered, “under the circumstances.” “Ah! Not even… Margaret…!” she exploded softly, as if she knew Margaret Meat poisonally. (Suddenly I was sure-my heart drowned-she did know Margaret Meat poisonally.) “Why do we have to talk about Foofer, anyway?” I muttered, “like I said, all these famous fuddies play in the same band, and speaking of bands, that’s the main reason: Even if I wanted to say sumpm to Foofer, now I never could, because my rock band, I mean the Bug Motels, is watching me. I’m famous for not talking to my dreambox mechanic. So now the only way I can talk is if I get a brand-new dreambox mechanic. And soon’s I saw you I knew it oughta be you.”
Doctor Zuk sank her fingers into her spiky hair and scratched energetically. “So-is important for you to be famous for something, like your father is famous,” she said. “How do you know he’s famous?” Her eyebrows flew up. “You have just said so!” “Yeah well I thought you might at least have to ask who the hump Merlin is…” “I can ask, if you wish me…?” I narrowed my eyes at her. Of course she knew who Merlin was, they all did: wasn’t he one of Baltimore’s three television ambassadors to the world, along with Miss Sally of Romper Room and Doctor Tom the chimpanzee from This Is Your Zoo? Of course she knew! Even in the steaming borscht jungles of Russian Costa Rica, the village TV set was tuned to Merlin’s World. And he was the tragic one of the trio, the one with the wife who died in the trainwreck-probably Zuk knew that too-and she was famous herself-good godzilla they were all in on it!
“Let’s just drop it about Merlin,” I fumed, “I’m not talking to Foofer and that’s it.” “Good, is okay,” Zuk said, with a sly smile, “only explain me, if you can, what is big difference between Dr. Zuk and Dr. Feuffer? Listen, my dear, I tell you big secret. Dr. Feuffer is famous doctor, not me. I come many thousand miles for work and study with Dr. Feuffer. Every psychiatrist of adolescence wants to be Dr. Feuffer. I want to be Dr. Feuffer. What is big bloody difference between me and Dr. Feuffer?” “Maybe you need glasses,” I suggested. “Ach! So that is big difference-how I look?” she gushed-because of course madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse knew exactly that she was beautiful and more than beautiful, she was counting on that. “This is the answer? I am look different from Dr. Feuffer, and this is why you want me, not him?”
“Cheese,” I said, staring hard at the floor for this lie, “you don’t look that different from Foofer. You’re both old.” There, that shut her up. I stole a glance at her. Her crackly old lips were pursed. But then I had to come crawling back or maybe lose her altogether. “Course, you do got sumpm on Foofer. A little sumpm that everybody needs every once in a while. I mean a little of, er, uh, la beauté. Not much,” I added carefully, “but that’s what I need, some old person who’s got la beauté. Some old person to talk to who’s got la beauté like, like a piece of the lost chunkagunk, so I can stand to live to be old-cause what the hump, maybe, just maybe, I’ll turn out to be her not me.”
“The lost-excuse me, what it is?” Like I said, Doctor Zuk had a thousand cracks around her lips-she was beautiful but she looked maybe forty fifty years old-and they all cracked deeper on contact with the lost chunkagunk. “You have make up this word?” “Not exactly,” I said. “Choleria, English already has water from seventy-two valleys,” she muttered, “how I will learn if patients make up words as they go…”
“All I mean is, that’s why I need you instead of Foofer. Cause he reminds me of a fart, his walk is a fart for instance, his itchy brown suit is all puffy with hot farts and, and-” (Doctor Zuk’s face turned oddly stony and I saw she was getting disgusted with me) “-and farts are good, you need farts I know but I already got plenty of farts,” I hurried on weakly. “Enough,” she cut me off, “I am not interested to hear insults of Dr. Feuffer. These are matters to talk to Dr. Feuffer himself.” “But, see, you remind me of… of a silver weasel, which is sumpm I don’t have and never was…” “Weasel,” she said suspiciously, “please explain me what is weasel?”
This time I thought I knew my way through the woods. “It’s an animal, their spines are very elastic, you notice that right away. They look long on account of their backs though none of em are all that big-and they always seem like girlgoyles to me probably cause they’re so graceful and agile, but they’re ferocious. Give her a chance, a weasel kills lots more than she could ever eat-like the wood wizardess used to say, A weasel is a catastrophe in a henhouse!”-(this had gone all wrong; I could see I had better say sumpm to fix it)-“and-and she has a really nice coat-that turns silver in the winter.”
After a time Zuk said drily: “Is possibly true I am, what you say, catastrophe in henhouse.” “Don’t worry,” I said, sweating, “plenty of henhouses need a catastrophe.” “And who is, excuse me, wood wizardess?” “Course you wouldn’t know the wood wizardess-the greatest tracker of all time, Willis Marie Bundgus,” I cleared my throat, for somehow this name alone didn’t sound sufficient to her greatness, “of, er, Millinocket Falls, Maine.” Doctor Zuk acknowledged her fame-a slight bow with the chin-and then I saw to my amazement a faint twitch in the pond-green irises-could she be… jealous?
“So you want me for psychiatrist-and weasel.” She smiled a little coldly. “Have you never thought maybe the right one to ask for this, even if you don’t like-is Dr. Feuffer?” “I can’t believe you’re still trying to get me to talk to that old fart.” “Listen and maybe you understand, little bird with big mouth. Why I should care if you talk to Dr. Feuffer, if you don’t care? Now I make advice to you because you are grown-up woman. First you will have big problem because you are run away and cut your arms again. Big problem, but even big problem will pass. Then, if is something you want, talk to Feuffer, give him that-you want go back to school? You want neighborhood pass? city-solo? You want me for p
sychiatrist? This place is howyousay pushover for intelligent nut like you.”
My heart was thudding cause now I saw she wanted me for a patient. “I don’t know,” I said, “they might throw me outa the Bug Motels…” “That is rubbish and you know is rubbish.” “Anyhow I already talked to Foofer,” I hastened to add, “I’ve said around, lemme see, two hundred words to Foofer by now-depends if you count hello good bye as two words or three. Once he said: Ursie, I don’t think you like yourself much. I thought that was pretty smart. Hey, he’s not such a farty old fart after all, that was my first idea, but then I realized godzillas sake you could say that to anybody in the whole rotten bughouse or even the whole world and it would be true. If that’s all there is to being a dreambox mechanic, sign me up.”
“You are saying you would like to be a psychiatrist?” I stared at her. I had never thought of this possibility before, somehow I figured once you landed in the bughouse that disqualified you from ever running the dump, but suddenly I saw it in a different light, like rising to royalty the democratic way, from the bughouse up: “Cheese, why not? I guess so. Sure,” I said.
“Why you would like to be psychiatrist?” “It isn’t exactly that,” I said. “It’s more like-I’d like to be a particular dreambox mechanic. You. I’d like to be you.” “Ah.” I saw the light shift in her eyes, another backswimmer’s twitch in the green pond scum, and then-nothing-the pond froze over, just like that. “We see about that,” she said, “when I am your psychiatrist and sit many hours in front of you and say you what I think, soon I will not be cute weasel anymore, this I promise you.” I looked down at my feet, for certainly this much was true: already she was not as beautiful on her horse as she once had been, she had come down a great way already, or she would not be sitting here throwing her time away on the likes of me.