So while the teacher drones on about swaying trees and gentle breezes, I don’t stay awake; I just pass out. ’Cause I’m not me anymore, I’m pregnant.
I wake up as the other students are shuffling around, grabbing art supplies and moving desks into groups. Crap. I slept through the assignment. Following a woman with blond ponytails and glasses over to the art supply cabinet, I copy everything she does, taking a gigantic piece of paper, some colored pencils, charcoal and a drawing pen from the cabinet, and scooting a desk over to her group. Surreptitiously peeking over some shoulders to see what “art” we’re supposed to do, I notice the other students are all drawing animals. Okay . . . I can draw an animal.
The paper is enormous and difficult to manage. I try spreading it out on the desk, but it spills over the side, so I put it down on the carpeted floor. Then the pen I’m using tears a hole in it. Goddamn it. I grab a small book off a nearby shelf, place it underneath the paper and, stretching my arms out past my enormous stomach, draw a tiny blowfish in the exact center of the paper.
While I’m coloring it blue, the instructor calls for everyone’s attention and asks that we begin discussing our imaginary animals with the other people in our group. Imaginary? Quickly, I draw a horn on my blowfish’s forehead, then sit down at a desk, leaving my drawing on the floor.
A painfully nerdy guy sitting across from me stands up, offering to go first. “I drew myself as the Golden Eagle of Fantasy,” he says nervously, holding up an incredible picture of a shining eagle on top of a mountain, surrounded by vivid blue sky. It looks like a frame from a government-issue comic book. How did he have time to do that? He must have brought it from home. Every inch of the magnificent eagle is colored in varying shades of gold, with silver cross-hatching. It glares at us from the paper, wings outstretched.
“That’s you?” I ask, without thinking.
“Why ‘fantasy’?” asks a middle-aged woman pointedly. Do you have to ask?
The nerdy guy clears his throat. “I feel at home in the realm of fantasy and I’d like to bring a more dreamlike quality to my everyday life.” He has memorized this short speech.
The woman smiles knowingly. “I feel like you have a lot to offer this world, but you keep it locked away inside you.” She has stiff, puffy, jet-black hair and dark red lipstick and she wears many, many silver bracelets. Her black pantsuit makes a crinkling sound every time she moves. Like when she says “locked away inside you” and folds herself up as if she’s locking away inside her all that she has to offer this world.
Golden Eagle nods noncommittally and sits down. Then the woman reveals her picture. It looks like a pony with butterfly wings. Her paper is completely filled with color, like Golden Eagle’s, but she can’t draw as well as he can. The butterfly pony is crooked and distorted. It could be a butterfly . . . camel? Whatever it is, it stands in a meadow, eating a square-ish apple, its horizon and ears masked by an enormous rainbow.
She stands. “I am Metamorphosis,” she says. “Ever changing, I am in flux, yet constant like a river.”
Huh. We all look again at the pony. It doesn’t look constant like a river. It looks lumpy.
“Where’d it get the apple?” asks a heavyset man in a Budweiser T-shirt. “I don’t see an apple tree.”
Metamorphosis turns her drawing to face her and looks at it. “There’s an orchard nearby,” she answers quickly.
“Oh.” He seems unconvinced.
The blond woman I’d followed over here points at the pony’s butterfly wings. “When you fly,” she asks, “where do you go?” Oh for Christ sake.
Metamorphosis smiles. “I’m a healer. I break through the illusionary walls of space/time to bring clients into balance on a quantum level.” God, Betty, what you’re missing.
The ponytails lady smiles back. “I, too, am a quantum field dweller,” she says, standing and holding up her picture. It looks like puke—a big pile of puke. Her picture fills the paper, too, but with what? “I am Amoeba,” she says proudly.
A quantum-field-dwelling pony and a quantum-field-dwelling amoeba. Do they think the quantum field is an apartment complex? Metamorphosis presses her face up against Amoeba’s drawing, squinting. Slowly, she sits back down in her chair, the wind knocked out of her quantum sails.
“That’s nice,” offers Golden Eagle. Amoeba pushes her glasses up her nose and looks at the group expectantly for questions and comments, but we’re all busy grimacing at her puke picture. Eventually, she sits back down.
Then the Budweiser guy stands up, placing his picture in the center of the desks. He has drawn Batman. No one says anything. “I’m Batman,” he says.
Golden Eagle looks terrified. Metamorphosis stares at the guy’s drawing, then at his face. “What did you say your name was?”
“Batman.”
“No, your real name.”
“Oh. Bob.”
“Bob, I believe the assignment was to identify our personalities with a mythical creature—”
“Batman’s not real,” he says defensively. “He’s mythical.”
“—of our own invention,” finishes Metamorphosis, inventor of the butterfly pony.
Amoeba cuts in, looking sorrowful, her glasses glinting, ponytails swishing. “So it can’t be human.”
Bob thinks for a second. “Oh yeah. Batman’s human. He just wears a bat suit, huh?”
“Yes,” says Amoeba sadly.
“I see what you’re saying,” says Bob, folding up his drawing.
Metamorphosis stops him with a bangled, manicured hand. “No, Bob,” she says. “Tell us why you’re Batman. If it’s important to you, then it’s important to us.” Amoeba nods vigorously, not to be outdone.
“Well,” says Bob. “I’m a rebel.” He looks at us all. “Of society,” he articulates. He looks around again, with growing desperation, then points at his drawing impatiently. “And so’s Batman!” Golden Eagle and I nod with tight, gruesome smiles on our faces.
“Stay focused on the assignment, Bob. Tell us where you live,” says Metamorphosis gently. “What are your immediate goals?”
“In the Bat Cave, see?” Bob, exasperated, points at a penciled semicircle over Batman’s head. His picture looks like it was drawn by a six-year-old. “I guess my immediate goals,” he adds miserably, “would be to . . . fight crimes.”
Golden Eagle says, “That’s important.” This can’t possibly be educational —I can’t wait to get back to the studio. Boy, Betty, when you’re right, you’re right.
“I may have misunderstood the assignment,” Bob mutters, looking at the clock. Four more hours to go, Bob.
Metamorphosis won’t let him off the hook, though. “Tell me,” she presses. “How did you become interested in art therapy?”
Bob looks like he’s under attack. He starts talking fast. “I’m-a-maintenance-professional-employed-by-the-University,” he says. “Completing-my-degree-nights-and-weekends.”
“I see,” says Metamorphosis, looking smug. “And what is your degree in?”
Bob’s crumpling. Golden Eagle looks like he’s gonna die. “I’m . . . undecided,” says Bob quietly.
Golden Eagle comes to his aid. “Sometimes a double major is the only option for those of us with varied interests,” he says hopefully.
Bob looks over at him, grateful. “Yeah, pro’bly.” Art therapy creates strange bedfellows.
There is a tense silence; then they all look at me. Shit. I’d hoped we’d run out of time before we did me. Batman was making it look possible. I look up at the clock in spite of myself. Four more hours to go, Kris. Then I pick my drawing up off the floor and spread it out on the desks. It’s difficult to see the tiny blowfish in such a huge expanse of white. Golden Eagle, Metamorphosis, Amoeba and Bob all stare at my dumb little fish. Help, I need help.
“Who are you?” Amoeba asks me.
“I guess I’m a . . . blowfish,” I say, looking down at the pathetic blue dot. “With a horn.”
Metamorphosis cocks her head
to the side, trying to understand. “Where do you live?” she asks. “What are your immediate goals?”
I think for a second. “I live underwater.” I can’t think of any pressing mission I might take on in the form of a blowfish with a horn on its head.
They all look from the drawing to me. Bob says to Golden Eagle, “Aren’t those things poisonous?”
Golden Eagle nods. “I think so. If you eat them.”
“Do they bite?” asks Bob. “Do they got that kinda poison?”
“No, I don’t think they’re aggressive.”
“Not like a piranha.”
“No.”
“Those things’re nasty,” says Bob.
“Yeah,” agrees Golden Eagle.
I wonder if I can sit down yet. I begin lowering myself into my seat when Metamorphosis sticks out a hand and pokes at the blowfish violently and repeatedly. I stand back up. Her shiny red nails strike angrily at the little fish. “It! Makes! Me! Sad!” she says shrilly, punctuating each syllable with a jangly blow to the paper, “that you live in a sea of nothingness, with no immediate goals, no friends and nothing to eat!”
“Do I?” I ask, looking again at my drawing. Maybe there’s an orchard nearby.
Amoeba heartily agrees. “I feel sad, too,” she says, shaking her ponytails from side to side.
Bob and Golden Eagle look sympathetic. Golden Eagle says, “Some people are natural loners.”
Bob nods. “Poison’s like a superpower . . .”
♋ bright yellow gun
i think i need a little poison
Headlights race past in a spring drizzle. The nausea’s coming back. Nobody told me about third-trimester morning sickness. I don’t even know where I am right now. I can’t make out highway signs through the mist and rain; they’re just green and white blurs. Watching them whiz by makes the nausea worse.
The bus driver and I are the only people on the bus who aren’t asleep. No old ladies to sit with, no goth knitters, but pregnant women are never alone. I’m gonna miss my dancing belly when it’s gone.
The bus driver catches my eye in the rearview mirror. “Where you headed, ma’am?” he asks. I’m ma’am now ’cause of the gut; everybody calls me that. I’m in the grown-up club. “You going home?”
“Nope, leaving home.”
“Going to visit relatives maybe?”
Wow. Do people still “visit relatives”? This guy lives in an old movie, just like Betty. I wish I was an anachronism. I bet it’s nice. “I’m working, actually.”
“So am I!” He laughs. “Would you care for a pretzel, ma’am? I got a whole bag of ’em.” He holds the bag out to me and the bus swerves into the other lane.
I grab the seat in front of me. Ugh, this isn’t helping. “No thank you, sir. I’m not feeling well.”
“Pukey?” he asks, interested.
I laugh. “Don’t worry. I won’t throw up on your bus.”
“It ain’t my bus!”
“Well, just the same. I’d rather not throw up at all.”
“I know a guy,” he says, looking at me in the rearview mirror for emphasis, “I know a guy who never once puked in his whole life.”
“Wow . . . cool.”
“It’s cool as long as he don’t eat poison or nothing,” he says seriously.
“Yeah, I guess he can’t eat poison.”
“Naw, but my wife,” he catches my eye again, “all you gotta do to make my wife throw up is say fruitbread to her.”
“Fruitbread?” What the hell is fruitbread?
“You could say, for instance, ‘banana bread’ to her and she would vomit.”
Oh. “Wow.”
“You could also,” he continues, grabbing a pretzel out of the bag and eating it, “you could also say, for example, ‘banana’ and ‘bread’ to her in the same sentence and she would then vomit.”
“Gee . . . I guess you gotta be careful. She could throw up at the grocery store.”
“That’s right.” He nods. “It happens with all the various fruits,” he says. “And breads.”
The windshield wipers wheeze rhythmically; rain spatters the glass.
Dave and Gil are sitting at the dining room table with crumb-covered plates in front of them when I get in. They both look spent. I take off my damp sweater and put it on the back of a chair, then sit down with them. My wet hair drips onto the table.
Gil smiles kindly. “Had to do some thinking?” I nod. “It’s okay. We laid down some drum tracks. Dave got three songs done . . . sounds really good.”
I look at Dave, stunned. “You can play without me?”
“Yes,” he says for Gil’s benefit, shaking his head at me. Whoops. Poor Dave.
“Is there anything to eat?” I ask, looking over their shoulders into the kitchen to see if the scary chef is there.
“She went home; we can finally eat,” says Gil. “We were starving.” Dave looks too tired to move. He manages a wan smile. “Look, Kris. I’ll fix you something to eat, but we have to call Ivo. He wanted to know as soon as you got in.”
Shit. I suck and now Ivo knows it. Gil walks over to the phone and takes a piece of paper out of his pocket. He dials two numbers, then checks the paper, then dials two more numbers. It takes forever, giving me plenty of time to get nervous. I run away too much and now I’m in trouble. It’s Ivo’s money I’m wasting. I wonder what the queen sounds like when she’s mad.
Finally, Gil finishes dialing and waits. I can hear the phone ringing—two short rings, silence, then two short rings again. Sounds like Pink Floyd. I bet everything’s just a little different in England, I think. They have phones, but they ring funny; they have tea, but it tastes better. “Hey,” says Gil suddenly into the receiver. “Kris’s right here.” He holds the phone out to me.
I take it and push it under my wet hair. “Hi.”
“Guess what I saw in the park today,” Ivo says through the familiar long-distance static.
“What?”
“This old man, a very old man with a cauliflower ear, was sitting on a park bench, feeding a bunch of pigeons, right? And his cauliflower ear was fucking enormous, never seen bigger. So while I’m walking by, I see one of the pigeons hop up on his knee, yeah? And then a few more hop on his lap; some fly up onto his arms. He’s got like a dozen pigeons on him. And these are filthy London pigeons, mind you.”
“Ew.”
“And he doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care. He just sits there with pigeons all over him.”
“Hmmm.”
“Right. Then they start hopping up on his shoulders and his head like they’re gonna eat him.”
“Aw, crap.”
“Yeah, they’re crapping on him.”
I giggle. “Geez.”
“—and then they start nibbling at his bloody cauliflower ear! And he’s letting ’em! They just keep chewing on his filthy old ear and he keeps throwing bread on the ground, like he doesn’t know they’re there!” God, I love Ivo. “Eventually. The birds. Engulfed. His entire. Body.”
Laughing, I settle into a big, squishy chair next to the phone. “Know what I saw today?”
“What?”
I tell him the story of Golden Eagle, Metamorphosis, Amoeba and Bob. I leave out the Betty heartache and make it sound like my day was hilarious. As he laughs, I start to believe that my day really was hilarious. Then I realize that it was. Ivo is an angel. Possibly misguided, but still. “Do you have the blowfish?” he asks, chuckling.
“It’s in the pocket of my sweater. It’s probably wet.”
“I’d like you to send it to me, please.”
“I don’t see that happening.”
“Do your best,” he says briskly. “Good luck tomorrow. Goodnight, Kris.”
“Bye, Ivo.” As I hang up the phone, I notice that Dave’s gone. Or else he slid under the table; he looked like he was about to. Gil has put a plate of scrambled eggs and toast at my seat. “Oh, Gil, thank you! You didn’t have to do that.”
“I can onl
y make breakfast, sorry. And I can’t find any butter.”
I sit down with him. “I can’t believe you did this.”
“Not a problem, Kris.”
I start eating, then stop. “Gil.”
“Yeah?”
“What time is it in England?”
He checks his watch. “About 4 A.M.”
Wow. “Ivo’s great.”
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Ivo’s great.”
Music’s screaming in my ears to keep me from hearing my own voice. The headphones are at top volume and my vocals aren’t in the mix at all. It’s a strange effect. Like a hurricane sucking words out of your mouth.
Gil’s glasses are reflecting the glass of the control room window; he’s staring at me with empty Little Orphan Annie eyes, framed by the curly brown hair that’s looking more unkempt by the day. I want to do this right for Ivo, for Gil, for Gary, for Betty, for my bandmates, but, honestly, I don’t know how—I’m just going through the motions. What I’m doing isn’t art or science or inspiration or craft or anything, really, except self-parody. I’m simply fulfilling a commitment. I probably shouldn’t have taken that bath.
“I know going through the motions when I hear it, Kris,” Gil says kindly into my headphones.
“Yeah, me too.”
In Roxbury, I used to kill. Just shake apart every time I put down vocals—shake apart willingly—the rats running around me. Not enough rats here. Not that I care. Hey, maybe that’s it: I don’t care anymore. Should I care about not caring?
“Is there anything else I can get you to make you more comfortable?” Gil asks with his spooky Little Orphan Annie stare.
“Rats.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Not enough rats here,” I answer.
“Not enough what?”
“Rats. They used to crawl around my feet.”
Gil pauses to think, but it doesn’t work. “What the bloody hell are you talking about?”
“This studio is too nice; it makes yucky people like us feel out of our element.” There, I said it.
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