by Jaimy Gordon
“So,” said Zuk, crawling out from under the tarp. “I think maybe I take you gentlemen along with us on People’s Ship Jenghiz Khan for quiet holiday.” I stuck my head out and looked at her in disbelief. She stood on the wagon, the gun at her waist awkwardly poking out her Foofer-style jacket. “Why you wanna take us with yall?” Tuney inquired, “thank yall get sumpm outa somebody? She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, we so lowdown our own mamas pay yall to take us. If we had mamas.” “Yall be stuck with us,” Chug said gravely.
“It’s sumpm to think about,” I said.
“Good, gentlemen. Then we say farewell.” Madame Zuk was no cheapskate. The black water glittered behind her, the wind buffeted her sideburns, and there sat Chug and Tuney, each turning over, worriedly, another hundred-dollar bill. “For health insurance, is clear?” Zuk patted the bulge under her pinstripe. “We don’t know nothing bout nothing,” Chug and Tuney agreed. Then and only then Zuk crooked a finger at me, I jumped off the wagon and we hoofed it up the gangplank.
FLIGHT TO CARAMEL-CREAMISTAN
Maybe it’s what I should have expected of the navy of a Soviet Autonomous Region of gray grass and red sand, five thousand miles from the sea in any direction. The tub bobbing on ruffles of dirty foam was either a dilapidated yacht or a gussied-up oyster boat. Its scaly white paint job showed up in the dock lights as some mineral strain of psoriasis. The deck in its widest part was so low any wave at all would roll over it. The pilot or swabby was shorter than me and threw back his shoulders at silly attention at the end of the gangplank. Besides Doctor Zuk, who was only half, he was the first Caramel-Creamistani I had ever laid eyes on, so I took a good look. Despite his height he was a ferocious-looking fellow with a white shirt, military epaulettes and black sunglasses, a big round head with glittering hair, massive chest, little bow legs under white shorts, and a mustache draped like a Moghul arch. A cigarette dangled from one side of it, and now and then the harbor lights picked out his big square teeth, as white as chiclets. He seemed to be baring them. Doctor Zuk barked some words at him in Caramel-Creamistani as we passed and he threw his cigarette away. I must say she was worse than Merlin, even, for bossing around cheeky menials.
The engine thudded spongily and we shoved off. I pressed my nose to a porthole but Zuk sat in the dark cabin with her back to me and gazed gloomily into space. We sailed southeast, towards the bay and away from the harbor, and surprisingly fast the garble of factories and shipyards and choked-up strands of lights on bridges and moving traffic was slipping away behind us, and the question arose, where could we be going? Where does the old bay lead? I had a feeling right from the start that Zuk and I were going all the way south, south beyond Annapolis where you walk out a mile and are still in warm salt soup up to your shins, south beyond the Choptank, beyond Fishing Creek and the oyster dumps of Crisfield, south beyond Misty of Chincoteague and Seastar, south beyond Tangier Sound and the Rappahannock, south to the end of the bay. If I’d known how far I could get from humid longing in a single night, how far from dandelions spurting through cracked sidewalks and sickly pigeons pecking the dust in hot parks-if I’d known how far a girlgoyle could get from sticky heartsore Baltimore in one long night on the Chesapeake, I’d have struck out long ago in Merlin’s rubber dinghy. I’d have blown it up and dropped it over the crumbling concrete seawall on Light Street. That’s what I was thinking.
“Where’d you say we were going?” I asked Zuk, though she hadn’t said. And still didn’t say, just sat there in the dark cabin smoking a Gypsygirl and staring at a black porthole. Probably sorry she ever met me. “Er, Madame Zuk-” I said to her back. “You will be so kind to swallow that madame or choke on it,” she growled. “I’m sorry if I lost you your job,” I said, “I’m sorry if I got you deported…” “Why you are saying this? Because I don’t laugh? Because I am sad? Is never wrong to be little bit sad. Every day is wedding day of somebody, funeral of somebody.” She didn’t look round. She was miles away, wearing her distance like a poisonous atmosphere, a lethal perfume. She kept her back to me, as if to turn her eyes on me would kill us both.
I could understand. I’d always known her beauty was the space between us. Now that the space had closed I was stuck with looking at myself. I had nothing but her sandals on, and didn’t like my feet in them any more than she did. I stared with savory disgust at my cheese-white legs, my flaky knees which looked sandpapered, the convict stubble growing in where my pubic hair used to be. “I still don’t get it why naked is the best disguise,” I said. “Why naked is best disguise,” Zuk echoed, “hmmm, is good question. Why did I think this? Naked is best disguise for you not me, but why? So I can’t stop? Yes that is it: So I don’t go back. How I can ever explain to somebody why runaway girl, former mental patient, has no clothes? Is hopeless. Therefore now we go on together to end, no matter what.”
So that explained it. I was her doom. They went south. We were going on, to some end or other. Our engine growled like a bulldog, dragging us down the wrinkled bay, towards the Bay Bridge, under it, beyond. What was down there? I was her doom, how humiliating. “Wait a minute, a famous dreambox mechanic like you, you can get a job anytime, can’t you?-you are famous, aren’tcha?” I needed her to be up there with Margaret Meat, Karen Honey and Ruth Beandip, so I could be sure I couldn’t hurt her in any way. For how could she save me if I had ruined her? And then too, staring into the sun of her glamour I wouldn’t see that black spiderweb strung from thigh to thigh…
“I’m sorry if I ruined your life,” I whispered. “Stop boasting, my dear, and anyhow, my life is not so easy ruined. Ach, choleria, I am a little bored of this Foodian experiment anyway,” she sighed. “In my country is not so bad, you know, since I am Foodian Mental Science Unity Institute of whole Karamul-Karamistan. If I have nose full one day of Eatipus complex I say all right is enough, what it matters? Self-explanatorizing that everybody wants to eat somebody. Tell us something we don’t know, tell us something we don’t see with own eyes, or better yet, gentlemen, don’t tell us nothing! Shut up! Shut your muzzles!” She crushed out one Gitane and briskly lit another.
“Cheese, if you’re so famous and got the top job in Mental Science in Caramel-Creamistan, why’d you ever leave?”
“Don’t be silly girl, everybody wants to leave Karamul-Karamistan. This is why you murder for top job like that, so maybe you can find way out. My uncle Nadir Suleymenov, finance secretary of Mrs. Khazarolova, arrange whole Unity Institute of Foodian Mental Science for me, so I can live. Family of my mother, Suleymenov-Suleymenians, they are not modern people. All same they know better than to give me to husband. They know me from child, they know what I live through with my father the Beetle. They don’t marry me to Karamistani man. They don’t want catastrophe in henhouse.” She smiled. “So they find way for me to live. And also when it comes to new Institute of Mental Science, I think, better Gulaim Zuk than Karamistani psychoanalyst next in line, my cousin Dr. Usman Saidbaevich Suleymenov, supposed orthodox Foodian who made his praktikum on Giant Wheel in Prater with pretty yellow-haired barmaid from Carinthia. Of course so soon as I am Commissar of Mental Science and have little money and diplomatic passport, I want to leave Karamul-Karamistan like everybody else. So I go to Paris and write my little book…”
“Are you gonna write about me now?” I asked. “I have already write about you,” she said, annoyed, “you are monster, no?” “You mean I’m just another teenager…” This was worse, even, than being a Unbeknownst To Everybody. “Lemme die first,” I said. “You want own book like Food’s Dora?” Zuk said wearily. “You must leave this mental peon think behind you. Write your own book, Bogey.
“So. In Paris I write my book…” “It’s a rotten book,” I said. “Even so,” Zuk smiled. “Book gets for me fellowship at Rohring Rohring. And you know from there, yes? At Rohring Rohring, everything doesn’t turn out so good. Supervising psychiatrists don’t like my special relation with Miss Bogey-even though they admit she is getting better. I say to the
m, so Miss Bogey gets the idea she is something special, so what? What’s so geferlich? Then old-style dreambox analysts like Feuffer yell at me I am naïf, I am careless-I yawn at this. They say, what if everybody did it? I say, what if nobody did it? But what is use of explain. To one who understands not, elephant trumpets in vain. Ach, these power-hungry Foodians, these Cossacks of mental science in Sigmund Food beards, you think if they really understand what is man they are humble like bug inside themselves, but is it so?”
“Cheese, you don’t exactly radiate self-doubt yourself,” I muttered. “Hoopla, I agree, but I am only Zuk. I don’t take any idea so dead serious like that. I don’t hang on for life. Maybe now I try something new-like they say, mouse with one hole is quick snatch”-and one of her ugly hands shot out, pounced on a thing of air and wrung its neck. “I am interested for new career, something with gorgeous clothes maybe, or real Karamistani restaurant. And you know is true, without one lover is kicked out of doors, a new lover comes not to our divan…” She turned her face to me at last and gave me a brilliant smile. Her mood seemed to have reversed. She was buoyant, even giddy. “But you’d be a beginner,” I said uneasily, “just a nobody, when now you’re famous.” “Only little famous,” she shrugged. “You must have realized my family has money-a little money-like yours. I don’t start from nowhere, from nothing.” She put her ugly hand on my hand.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
“Um, er, uh, tell me about Caramel-Creamistan. Sumpm. A little,” I stammered. “Later.” Out of the blueblack swimming dark the planes of her large face pointed this way and that like a turban of crossed scimitars, like some kind of opera headdress flashing, sumpm from Aida. My head drowned.
“First I will look at every part of you and not even touch you.”
And now my time was up, here she immaculately rearranged me, I mean I don’t know how she did it, as far as I can remember I never felt those gnarly fingers at all, but I found myself lying flat on the grimy bunk under her hands like a baby being changed, and the dim planchette of her palm drifting, floating, above me. All my beauty was the invisible tracks over desert between us, the rubbed-out thread suddenly shining with the electricity of my baffled hunger. Or was it the thin moonlight of her neglect that picked out the footpaths?
“Desert of Kyzl Kum is beautiful,” she whispered, “if you like empty. No tree, no house. Where does anybody live you ask? Nowhere, nobody, you think, then you come over hill, there is yurta same color as weeds of ground, and another, and another. Red crack sand, pink dust, gray-pink hills, soft rolling, next and next, everything empty. Maybe small bunch pines along top of hill, or little bit thorn, maybe, in fold where spring is, like hair in folds of girl of trouble age. Beautiful if you like hard, beautiful if you like empty. No house, no road, and tomorrow every yurta is vanished away, not even rag or half-burnt lump of dung in grass. And then old people say, in red desert of Kyzl Kum only bones point way to Samovarobad.”
The bones of her face-those crossed scimitars-pointed to outer space, and, I don’t know, maybe I was asleep, the turban fell apart like an eggshell and then it was the boat we rocked in. Going south.
Whereupon sumpm really queer happened, I mean I fell into a hole pitch-blueblack and I was crawling around in my own body, which I knew because of tryna get out, every nerve sat up and pulled on its burnt-out light cord and sparked, and what I saw, it was like everywhere there was some sort of unarrived light running loose in the blue vein dark, spilt skim blue milk of, or moonlight, fingers of, picking out trails up my itchy capillaries, or stringing neon beads up the nerve trunks, shooting pearlized baby-blue plastic popbeads up my privatemost, some coming together with a pop, some popping apart
All this time I’m literally under her hand, without ever landing her white palm clambers like a spy airplane over the corrugations of fat and bone drawing some kinda hot spark, good godzilla I’m lighting up all over, I’m a circuit board, a little hot and seasick I shut my eyes and the queer thing is that’s me I’m seeing, far down below lit up like the twinkling spiderweb of a desert town seen from the air at night. And then I’m prowling myself in a creaking taxi up trashy backstreets or zooming up and down my own lymphatic ducts, my golden noggin light glowing, my meter ticking like crazy
[Where are you Doctor Zuk? I don’t even see your face, just now and then your hands and even they are sumpm else, a plectrum or maybe-a knife and fork?]
“What I should do with boygirl like you, eh? so young, so reckless, unbranded like donkey who knows not the world-so silly, so never-from-home-so shayn.”
Whereupon sumpm even queerer happened, now I’m mining my own tunnels, tracking inside myself for the lost chunkagunk, I’m blipping out of my own miner’s hat, lozenges of light torpedoing down and up the personal plumbing, so many melting pills of exploratory, medicinal light, surging up the gut gutters into the armbone legbone headbone like in the old aspirin ads and now I’m mining myself with baby-blue gunpowder, creepy-crawling up the gulley, pouring a trail out of the chewed-off corner of the TNT sack, and now the little fin of flame hisses over the rocks into the mine anyone still in there o my godzilla I wait BLAM I rain down sizzling
How to get out, follow the lost chunkagunk, track the blue moldy crumb of, through the black woods on my scalp, between my legs, peck them out of the hairy roots shudder of horrified pleasure until all completely hopelessly lost pitch blue black
“Poor dear, you have learned what I know, love is calamity to the head,” Madame Zuk whispers.
You are a leviathan, even your kiss is like a house fell on me
“By the lover’s reckoning,” she hisses, “Samovarobad is not far.”
Who are you, who made you, what do you want with me
“All the same, my dear, love is a command and the heart is khan. Finally I am not spoon of your mouth. But I follow this to end of this. Open your eyes.”
I OPENED THEM. And I guess by the book if there is a book I shoulda made love to her now, I mean she was the scary love of my scary life and I never let on I was yellow if I could help it. So I made up my mind to unbutton her-but what happens is her Foofer suit flops open and whaddaya know she’s opened it all up in there herself. Her gnomy whitegreen hands are spreading out the wings of white shirt and under there she’s naked. I lie there looking up at her, wondering what do I do with this, what do I do now
This isn’t a comic book but kreeech, right then I heard a sickening scrape. Bone on bone. It was our bottom, I mean the bottom of the People’s Ship Jenghiz Khan. “Idiot! donkey!” Zuk exploded, “outcast! What they send me for pestilence, this runaway of wormy camels and sheep’s eyeball soup who knows no more of sea than I know of taxidermy…” I watched Zuk’s soccer player’s calves storm up the gangway stairs two at a time, she pulled her shirt flaps together and buttoned her pants as she went, and there followed more terrible curses-I couldn’t understand a word of course but I stole up the stairs behind her, the better to take this in.
She stomped up and down with her hands on her hips, yelling bloody murder. What a swashbuckler she was with her glinting slaver’s eye, her rose cravat tied for a sweatband around her brow, and the jagged décolletage of her misbuttoned shirt! One word she sneered over and over-fazool, fazool, fazool, as in pasta? I realized the word must mean sumpm disgusting in Caramel-Creamistani-then it dawned on me it was the fellow’s name. He stood at pathetic attention with his mouth fixed in that same tooth-baring grin, then suddenly jumped overboard as if to kill himself, one last obedience to her command.
He came up gasping in black water to his chin, bent to the hull and grunted with all his might, but nothing happened. We were stuck. Run aground. I could see one red glowing channel marker a few feet off our stern, just behind us, and a green one like a cartoon serpent’s eye on a pole just in front of us, and then I put it together. We were smack in the middle of the two, right where we oughta be. It was low water-not even the poor drudge’s fault.
Zuk came up and curled her cragg
y hand around my shoulder-stood cheerfully beside me, panting a bit from all that theatrical wrath. “Kinda hard on that shnook, aren’tcha?” I whispered. “So what you want, Bogey, maybe we too should jump in water, with frogs and snakes, and push?” she loudly whispered back.
What frogs and snakes did she mean? I looked again at the cartoon serpent’s eye on the channel marker and saw it was no cartoon. A viper, real as my foot, hulaed down the pole and splashed into the wet. I saw its bald little skull periscope away, the point of a fan of ripples, and heard other soft splashes all up and down the-good godzilla, we were in some swamp, you could practically reach out and touch it on either side.
At first I thought we must be stuck in some boggy creek off the Choptank, but what about that endless bulldog growl of the engine and the gyroscopic sense I had that we’d sailed south all night? I knew I’d lost track of time in the cabin of the Jenghiz Khan but surely a night had gone by-and now that I peered into it, the dark did have some of that dusty velvet grain that meant dawn was on the march. What came after Virginia, if you sailed straight down the bay? The ocean, you’d think, but now I saw with my own eyes that the land had closed in rather than opened out. The walls of a channel straight as a blowgun lay ahead and behind. Steep black banks pressed in, flecked with white things like ghostly shoes, and above them jungle treetops on both sides, every hole chinked with vines, even the purple sky overhead crisscrossed with the necklaces of creepers, and from where I sat in my deck chair and gaped, my head tipped back against Zuk’s arm, a thousand little arabesque spit curls dangled from the silhouetted greenery, a thousand living curlicues which could have been water moccasins and probably were.
“Where in godzillas name are we?”
“You see why I must encourage Fazool.”