by Jaimy Gordon
Only the broom closet was slightly ajar. I peered into its darkness. No one. Nothing. Crawled by the nurse’s station to my quietroom, unlocked it and left it open just a crack. Hands and knees back to the broom closet, set the lock to lock, and lost the keys and fuzzy robe inside. Then back to my quietroom. Took a deep breath. Okay, I was a grown-up woman, starting right now. It wasn’t going to be easy to shut myself into that void stark naked, without even the diversion of an itch, but then I saw a little white thing flickering from the exact center of the padded floor. There on the x spot of libations was a torn-off corner of paper. I ran to it in time to see it had a phone number written on it. Then the door closed.
6
I Blab to Foofer
AND HE BLABS BACK
“So, er, uh,” I inquired, “just exactly what is that Doctor Zuk person, anyhow?” Foofer looked pained. He took off his glasses, laid them carefully in his lap, and touched the shiny bulges under each eye with a green silk handkerchief. “Vot do you mean by vot?” he asked. “Unh-unh, Doc,” I wagged a finger at him, “still my question.” “You must narrow your question. I cannot answer a question the size of seven worlds.” “O all right,” said I.
For, whatever I meant by vot, this is how we proceeded now: by the fishiest bughouse decorums. Even I was scandalized by what the dreambox mechanics were letting me get away with these days. I had a good mind to write myself a letter about it, alerting me to the dark clinical consequences, but perhaps I wouldn’t have understood. And then I’d have had the trouble, for nothing, of smuggling the thing into Rohring Rohring, where of course the mental patients’ mail got read. (Somewhere Royal Censors were busily at work.)
So what the hump. I went along with it. I was a grown-up woman now. I had sniffed the truth: The rewards for playing ball with the royals were not bobkes. This way I could see Doctor Zuk when I wanted, even though it gave me a kind of spongy feeling in my guts to see her, to say nothing of calling her up at the number she had given me, turned out it was a little cellophane square at the top of one of those new medical residences that tower over the old hospital dome like a bunch of giant Krispies boxes. I could see her window from my window, and the candid little eyebrow of her naked balcony. She could have seen my bars, if she had looked.
And listen to this, for two weeks we even had walky-talkies. For my birthday I charged a pair to Merlin at Charlie Rudo’s, fifty dollars. Madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse took one “for experiment” and we talked in the middle of the night when she was on call in some distant part of the bughouse. The static was terrible, like talking through a tunnel of hair on fire, and the whole time I could hear my gopher brain cells popping up and whistling alarms. Who are you and what do you want with me, I shouted into the airwaves when they whited out everything and I was sure she couldn’t hear me. We roared back and forth about the mushrooms in the courtyard, qu. whether poisonous or hallucinogenic, more Weird Tales of the Nurses and the serious prospect of spying as a future profession. (Bad for character, Zuk shouted. What did she know about spies? But somehow I wasn’t surprised.) Who are you, who made you, why are you here? I hollered. Then thank godzilla they broke-those mustard-yellow rubber walky-talkies from Charlie Rudo’s I mean. All I can say is, if I’d been at the big case pow-wows the royals were having about Zuk and me and our “special friendship,” I’d have planted my feet and said no way.
“What I mean by what-well, like, what does that Zuk person do for a living? Is she a genuine dreambox mechanic or not?”
Foofer’s thumbnail zissed along his watch chain. His baggy jaw faintly shook. His eye slid towards the door, against resistance, like a grape swimming in jello. I knew he was glad no classical dreambox analyst was listening in, outside of himself, of course. “You would like to zink she is not a genuine psychiatrist?” he finally hissed. “Unh-unh, Doc, you get a question, I get a question,” I said, for that was our deal. Of course he didn’t have to answer and if I asked sumpm way out of bounds, like about another mental patient, he stared into air and the question wafted away, forfeit. But Doctor Zuk was a striped area, not a mental patient. Also, she was the one thing I wanted to talk about. The hope to talk to Zuk, or about Zuk, was the reason I was talking to Foofer at all.
“May I compliment you to your hair, Ursula?” Foofer said, and his eye drifted to his watch, but this was not a question. He was stalling for time. “How gold it shines.” I smiled. I had begun to wash my hair-after four or five times it had come out lighter than I had any right to expect. I had even attempted to wash my overalls, but they disintegrated upon contact with water. For the three hours it took me to scare up a city-solo pass and shop for new ones, I had had to put on the pink party dress that Tuney had thrown in for nothing, which, even worn with hospital flip-flops, went down in case history as the first sighting of my progress.
For we were progressing, Foofer and I, by unkosher byways and rules not according to Hoyle, but we were progressing. Anyone could see it, I was getting better. I put on shoes. I practiced sedulously on my pilfered surgical catgut and leg-brace-plus-puke-basin ukulele, with others and alone. I began to talk to Foofer-so what if every other thing I said curled up at the end in a question mark? Still I was getting better; therefore, the classical types went along with it, even as they exchanged dark looks. Some of it made my own furtively conservative mental patient’s pencil-straight hair stand on end, but I really couldn’t blame them. The silent treatment had worked on Foofer, beyond I was going to say my wildest hopes, except that back then I had no hopes. A hopeless case, that was just it, everyone had said so-even the famous Foofer could do nothing. Therefore I was nobody’s fault. They looked away. They went along with the experiment, once they were sure nothing would work. But then it did work.
I was getting better, so much better they were all taken in, royals and peons alike. I was a mental peon myself, of course, but a little less mental, now, than before. All at once I had about me, no denying it, some little smack of royalty. I had progressed. As Zuk put it: “Who you think you are now? You are so full of yourself and for why? Because czar’s horse looked at you. So what! Big deal! So Zuk likes you a little! You are still greedy dirty baby, not so, Miss Bogey?” All the same I could tell she was proud.
I cleared my throat and began again. “So is Doctor Zuk a dreambox mechanic or a writer or a foreign bigwig on some kinda mission or what is she?” I asked, and Foofer settled himself like a sandbag, looking down from his plump dignity upon the swirling waters: “Vy is zis woman of interest to you?” he prefaced hopelessly. It was not a question. We were off at last.
“Z’case of Zuk is unique in many, perhaps in all, respects…” he began. “She is z’chief professional in her field in the country where she is coming from, but, ennhh,” his pudgy white hands clasped one another this way and that way, “ennhh, it is a country in which mental science after Sigmund Food, that is, mental science as one knows it in z’Vest, is looked on wiz-?-” he shrugged “utmost suspicion? fear? So trained professionals are few, very few… She is z’chief… not only z’chief… I believe the only…” He sank into his chair, he could not go on. “What country?” I whispered. He was silent. State secret, I inferred. We exchanged what I took for a meaning glance. “Your question, Doc,” I reminded him, and he instantly blurted out again, startling me: “Vy is zis woman of interest to you?” “I… like her hair,” I lied weakly. I had been caught unprepared. But then I was off right behind him.
(You are grown-up woman, Zuk had said, talk to Feuffer, give him that-you want neighborhood pass? You want me for psychiatrist? This place is howyousay pushover for intelligent nut like you… At first, since blab to Foofer I must, I lied. The world-famous diagnostician set to work; he improvised: Let us suppose you may be any zing but human, Ursie, any zing at all you like, vot do you choose? I stared at the fluorescent light sizzling like an egg on his bald crown. I couldn’t think of a single thing. I’d want to be your hair oil, Doc, to be on top of you and go all around with you and s
ee down inside the dreambox what you’re really thinking. And hear what you say about me when I’m not there, especially to Zuk, and then to jump over and be her hair oil-good godzilla what was I saying-but that was how it always went. I’d think I was telling the biggest whopper in the world and as soon as I said it, it had that telltale ruby glow of truth in its belly, like a snake that swallowed a flashlight. I’d try some fancy mouthwork to hide it, just choking, Doc, er, I mean, joking-caught even more red-bellied. Ah what the hump I thought, in that case pile it on, let er fly, serve it up steaming, that’s what I did, and by godzilla I saw that every confession had Jughead ears, I mean those telltale handles of a lie sticking out, even when it was gospel. So shoot! what the hump! From then on, anything went…)
“I like her hedgehoggy titanium hair, you know how it looks, not too mothery, kinda concentration camp chic, with spokes sticking out like the Statue of Liberty, only made out of gray matter, like some idea she had just blew her brains out from the inside…” “You are saying you admire Doktor Zuk for her beauty? Or for that she is a woman of ideas?” “My question,” I reminded him. “Is she famous?” “Hah!” Foofer exploded. (Sometimes these days I honestly feared for his senses.) “Vot is fame? If you alone are dreambox repair in a hundred and sixty thousand square kilometers, that is fame? If you are commissar of mental science, and nomad chieftains who hid you during the purge bring you white Gamaschen and call you daughter of moon, that is fame?” “Is that a question?” I asked, my heart banging in my throat. “No,” he growled. I stared out the window. A fly-sized airplane zipped noiselessly across the sky. “A hundred and sixty thousand kilometers… daughter of moon,” I whispered, tasting them on my tongue. “Why z’devil you don’t ask her yourself, if you are such good friends?” he burst out. I looked at him curiously. “I do ask her, she won’t answer anything,” I said. Grrr his knuckles went up into his teeth, but then he petted his amber cravat, composing himself.
HELP! MY CHILD IS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN
Of course as soon as I knew there was a book by Zuk, especially a book with a title like that, I schemed to get hold of it. Fact was, sneaking into the royal library at Rohring Rohring and pilfering books with weird pictures was one of the oldest missions of the Bug Motels, and one of the easiest. The door stood always open, the “librarian” was a fogbound old lady from the hospital auxiliary, and the stacks made ideal tunnels for alien penetration.
All the same I could tell after reading one page it was a rotten book, with nothing good to say about anybody, not teenagers, not fathers, not mothers, not dreambox mechanics, nobody-and no story, no heroine, no freaks of nature, definitely no weird pictures. What a letdown after a title like that! I’d have asked for my money back if I’d paid for the thing.
As it turned out I only got to read one page-page 63, the one I’d torn out because it had THOMAS HARE ROHRING AND EUGENIA O. ROHRING PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC STAFF LIBRARY stamped on it. I had just been crumpling it up in a ball to get rid of it when Foofer came around the corner of Youth and Adolescence and snatched the book out of my hands. “Why is zis woman of interest to you?” he spluttered, and chased me out of the library.
I remember a phrase or two. It went sumpm like this:
doing exactly what their age requires of them in turning into monsters, that is to say, unbearable people or their parents would never have the courage to wish them gone, and they themselves would never have the stupidity who have never worked a day in their lives and haven’t any real fired in ten minutes for slacking exactly as it should be they are right to loathe their parents equally right to loathe them
Well! that’s about enough of that, I thought, considered lining the sound hole of my brand-new pukelele with the thing, but on second thought, threw it the oink away.
BUG MOTELS IN CONCERT
Pipette, test-tube & beaker glockenspiel,
bed-panioforte…
Egbert Stein
(President)
Vocals,
catgut puke basin & leg brace ukulele…
Ursie “The Bogeywoman” Koderer
(Secretary)
Vocals,
speculum castanets,
breathometer pings,
sterilizer-top steel drum,
toilet-bowl float mariachis,
other assorted noise…
O
(Treasurer)
Vocals,
scrub tub bass…
Dion
(Sergeant-at-Arms)
Vocals,
PVC pipe kazoo,
penny whistle…
Emily Nix Peabody
(Vice President in absentia)
Screeches,
mumbles,
falsetto,
sirens,
miscellaneous industrial sound effects…
Mrs. Wilmot
(Member ad libitum)
HOW LOVE GOT US OUT OF THERE
Though behind ourselves in every other way, as rockers we Bug Motels were ahead of ourselves, or our time, or at least far out in front of the sagging royals, and we intended to stay there, up around the bend where they had found us, or sent us. We were getting better, every one of us, at least there were signs. Long ago on his druggie’s endless wanderings, when he used to pace the corridors beaming every deadend wall and locked door with his x-ray eyeballs, Bertie had found the Bug Motels a clubhouse, NO ROYALS ALLOWED it said on the door-we had taped that over the old sign that said NEUROPATHOLOGY. Bertie, now happily reunited to his legal moniker Egbert since (he thought) it had a certain musical ton, had turned up this weensy surgical amphitheater on the second floor, locked up tight so no mental patient of our day would even think of the kind of procedure that probably went on there once upon a time. But we liked it exactly because of that, because of the sick dream of skull tops sawed off like the ends of hairy coconuts and ice-cream scoop brains glistening wetly under their lids. Center stage down front was a dusty American flag and, in front of it, no lie-down table but a sit-up chair like a barber chair; here the poor wretch must have sat with the top of her head flipped open; here (we shuddered) must have clicked the doctors’ knives, forks and spoons to put an end to that mental peon’s troubles for good. And so after Bertie organized us a key we sneaked downstairs and took turns sitting in the barber chair, playing medical experiment, tongues hanging out, x’s in our eyes. We sat in the student desks around the barber chair and rested our medical instruments on the stomach-shaped desktops and played bughouse music. We were trying to fool around as much as we could before the royals threw us out. But they never did throw us out.
“Keeps yall off the street,” Reggie Blanchard joked and that was more or less the line the royals took on the Bug Motels and their “funny-farmyard noises,” which were, in fact, to the surprise of everyone, us as much as them, eerily beautiful and as light-fingered and sparsely knotted one to the other as audible cobwebs.
Then everybody got into it. By now hardly a day passed without somebody’s nurse escort or dreambox mechanic smuggling us a peculiarly melodious surgical instrument or scrap of hospital plumbing. But we Bug Motels didn’t take just anything. Love will get us out of here, we sang, but how to know it was love when we heard it tinkle or hiss? We had to listen hard. O had charge of a fleet of noisemakers not one of which percussed above a violent whisper.
O in song had a slow gluey quaver to her spooky-flute, a faintly wobbling vibrato deep in the gut of it like near-boiling gumbo, and, maybe to go along with the speculum castanets, she dug up a mantilla you could have sung Carmen in, webbed herself in red and black fishnet, stuck sequin beauty spots on her face and, not exactly flounced, more like lurked, lurked darkly around in this getup, staring at all of us unforgivingly out of the bottoms of her eyes. Her song, written by me, Bogeywoman, went:
O’S SONG
Doobee doobee dubio
Doowop welladay
Hugga bugga yumma yum
How do you like your buggers done
Boiled in bug juic
e, boiled in rum
Says the Queen of the Cannibal Islands
Love love
Love will get you out of here.
Who were we Bug Motels now? Come to find out inside our old confusion was fusion, anyway Egbert said so-fusion and conk. “They drop the k cause it reminds every mental patient that he is king, king of his own conk. Conk ya see is an old American negro word for the dreambox or a hairdo on top of it,” Egbert explained. This was the missionary Egbert at the peak of his conk-version. “You probably noticed, Bug Motels, how we are getting our heads together playing this music? We are conk-neck-ting our conks to our bodies like yesterday we connected our gut strings to our instruments and, whaddaya know, come to find out Love will get you outa here. Like it says in the weird kinda tunes the Bogeywoman writes for us.” (Egbert gave my shoulder a fond little punch, and I saw that O saw. I smiled weakly at her.)
Out of the bottoms of her eyes O peered at Egbert when he talked of love, to find out if he meant her. He didn’t, but still he was the one she looked at whenever she sang. She was off into labyrinths of twisted love for this bughouse Orpheus and his sawed-off-sneaker sandals and the sweaty prongs of dark hair sticking out around his ears and his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses that bounced on his nose whenever he dabbed at the keys with his hammers. She was staring out of the bottoms of her eyes at Egbert’s skinny, shiny, piecrust-crimper spine where it curled out of his tee shirt. He didn’t know she was there. That’s what she liked in a fuddy, he should be so absorbed in The Importance of what he was doing he didn’t know she was there. When a fuddy started tryna please a girl it got repulsive fast, well that’s what O said anyhow.