by Rachel Caine
Ruben felt completely baffled by this shift to talk of gargoyles and sin, and wondered if he shouldn’t have asked more about the book. “Your body is a cathedral?” he asked, trying desperately to catch up with a conversation that had clearly left him behind.
“Indeed,” she said, then kissed his neck. “You know, you paid four dollars, which means you have me all night. I think we should say our prayers before bed.”
As she continued to kiss his neck, Ruben thought about how making love was nothing like he had expected. He had always imagined working his way to New Orleans, and bedding a soft-spoken Frenchie on satin sheets with lace, surrounded by rich oil paintings, perhaps waking to a glass of brandy or heady cigar. He knew, more likely, that it would have been to some farm girl in a hayloft somewhere where he was working the summer as a hand to make ends meet.
There were particular sensations he had never imagined, in any of his wildest fantasies. He never expected the taste of cigarettes when he first kissed a naked woman. He never expected the stench of elephant dung and motor oil creeping through the window, vaguely masked by the smell of cheap rosewater on her skin. He never expected a woman to look so odd naked, all the seamless curves caught up behind girdle and brassiere unfolding when left unsupported, rolling into shapeless mounds of flesh.
He never expected so many teeth.
COTULLA, TEXAS
Right this way, gentlemen, right this way. Step right up with no delay to see the living wonder of our day. From her ears to her ankles, wrist to wrist, her ice cream scoops to her cherry twist, not one inch of skin is left unkissed by ink and needle. And for one dime, that’s right gentlemen, the one-tenth part of a dollar, you will receive an intimate tour and connoisseur’s edification of this gallery in the flesh. Gentlemen, step into the tent to meet Josephine the Tattoo Queen, lady of one hundred and one tattoos.
STABILIZATION
By Daniels Parseliti
What kind of beings are these anyway,
Who in the end have to be scared away with poison?
—Rilke
There are coloring books for children. Elephants in tall grass. Giraffes eating tree leaves with their young. There are boxes of crayons. There are perhaps eight of us, all dressed in blue paper scrubs and hospital socks. There are walls made of cinder block. A gaunt, silent, blonde woman has drawn a pretty girl’s face in red crayon on recycled paper. In the picture, the girl’s nose is impossibly thin for a crayon drawing, like the woman sharpened the wax tip with her fingernail. The blonde woman is so pretty, she looks like she belongs on television. But she wraps herself in an old blanket and barely moves. I wonder if the picture is supposed to be her. The thought of drawing with crayon makes me sick to my stomach.
My left shoulder hurts from last night’s injection of Ativan. It didn’t stop my raging, so my right shoulder hurts from last night’s injection of Haldol. I have blood spots on my arms from all of the needles. I pull the Band-Aid off the crux of my elbow and see three large purple bruises from where the nurse in the ER drew so much blood. Today I take my Ativan. When I’m sober the Ativan works. I didn’t want to take it, but I did. Today I am Japanese steel. Pounded hard, thin, and brittle. I have to meet with the doctor and I want to be sharp, but not as sharp as I am. I have to act normal. I have to act normal. German steel, not Japanese.
I return to my bed to sleep because I can’t stand thinking about being here, here, where the only thing to write or draw with is a crayon. The bed is slippery, covered in plastic. So is the pillow. How many people have pissed and shit in this bed? I’m sliding off. My head slides off the pillow. My body doesn’t fit on the bed. When I lie flat my feet hang off the end, propped on a slab of wood. I have to curl like a fiddlehead. I desperately want to sleep. But I can’t. A saw-toothed voice fills the ward. I cannot close my bedroom door to stop the voice, because bedroom doors here must remain open at all times. This fact is posted on every bedroom door. This fact terrifies me. The voice will not stop talking about how it is feeling better. About how it tried to kill its mother and that her back and hips are sore from when it dragged her down to the floor and bit her neck, and that the stitches in her neck are healing. But it doesn’t have those thoughts anymore. It feels better now, it isn’t angry. Because it doesn’t have those thoughts right now. There was so much blood when I bit into her neck, it says. It has been so angry its entire life. It didn’t realize it could feel anything else. I need more Ativan. Please, I say, more Ativan, or Haldol, I don’t care. I’m falling off my bed. I have one thin grey blanket that falls off me. Everything is round and I need to sleep. I slide onto the floor and do push-ups until I can’t. I get back in bed, then slide off again and do more push-ups. Where is my ex-wife, I wonder. She should be coming to pick me up. I will call her when I can, when I feel better, when I can talk to her and not sound insane.
A nurse tells me that it is lunchtime. Something that looks like ground beef between two doughy white buns. I shuffle to the table and sit down. Everyone shuffles. A man stands in the middle of the room and asks if he is in a movie. He throws his arms back and says that he is an actor. His teeth twinkle and his body arcs. I take a bite, chew twice, and spit out my food. I eat three chunks of canned pineapple and throw the rest away. A tall black man in scrubs with cornrows says, “You didn’t like your Sloppy Joe, Mr. P?”
“Not hungry,” I say.
I hear the saw-tooth voice and then he is in front of me. Saw-tooth looks to have teeth that shape the sound of his words. They are small and jagged and jutting. There are spaces between them large enough to fit cigarettes. Several look to be broken and sharp, like shattered pottery. The teeth are fixed in a purple mouth, the mouth fixed in a head the shape of an inverted strawberry. The head is disproportionately large for the size of his body. The boy is perhaps 4’ 11’’ and 90 pounds. His eyes are giant, surrounded by bruise-blue coffee cup rings. He does not blink, he does not sit, he does not stop talking. He is so slight and so sharp. I just kept thinking, bite her neck, bite her neck, bite her neck, and I did, I just did, and I sucked on it, as hard as I could, and I dragged her down, so I could keep sucking because I wanted her to die, I wanted to suck the life out of her. I don’t think like that anymore, I’m getting better, don’t you think I’m better? And I jumped on her back and dragged her down to the ground, by pulling her head back, by pulling on her hair, and biting into her neck, it was bad, it was really bad, and she is still hurting from it. But I get so angry, I can’t control it, I have no control over it, but I’m getting better, I never knew, all my life, that I could be better. Do you know that I am twenty-six? I know I don’t look it. He looks like he is thirteen. He does not blink. He goes from table to table telling people this story, the same energy and earnest enthusiasm at each. He tells the blonde girl, who sits at a table covered in coloring books. She does not look up at the boy and this seems to make him angry, twitchy. He pauses in front of her, a literal unblinking pause, his arms flexing, thin metal tubes, little popping blue veins, kinks for elbows. He stares, his lips pulled back, his bottom jaw jutting, his teeth exposed.
“Mr. P, please come this way, the doctor will see you now.”
“You get to see the doctor now?” says saw-tooth, in front of me again. “I suppose,” I say. “When can I see the doctor?” he asks the nurse. “You are on the list,” she tells him. “I want to see the doctor!” he yells. “You will,” she says. He sticks out his bottom jaw, baring his teeth.
The trip to see the doctor is a tremendous cruelty. To get to her I have to walk down a hall, at the end of which is the locked exit/entry door. Behind the door is an elevator that operates by key. It is the only way out. The thought of the door makes my heart pound and my fingers tingle. It makes me sweat. It makes me dizzy. All of me wants to run to the door and to pry it open. I will jump down the elevator shaft. There must be other floors from which I can escape. I don’t belong here. I have to seem normal. The doctor’s office is just before the exit.
The doct
or’s head is surrounded by a mane of flame. She is half woman, half beast. I think of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Her face is bronze, and through the bronze shows two pure white and blue eyes, a set of straight white teeth, glowing. She has large fake breasts that rest, immobile, on levers of flesh. She wears Capri pants and high heels.
“Please have a seat,” she says. I sit on a rounded plastic chair, gripping the sides. She sits across the empty room, writing on a pad on her lap, her presence burning up the atmosphere. A nurse sits off to my right, watching us. We make an uninterrupted triangle.
“So, Mr. P. Can you please tell me how you are feeling?”
“I’m fine. I don’t like being here.”
“Are you thinking of killing yourself right now?”
“No.”
“Could you please show me the cuts on your forearms?” she says, crossing her legs and tapping on her pad. The linoleum floor is cold through my socks.
“Look, is there any way that I can get out of here today? That kid is scaring me.”
“Can you tell me why you think you are here?”
“Yes. Sure. I reacted badly to a bad situation.”
“Okay… Can you be more specific?”
“I have a hard time dealing with my ex-wife.”
“Okay.”
“Look, I thought everything was going to be fine. I felt fine. I had felt fine for weeks. My ex-wife stopped by to drop a lamp off at my apartment. She said she just wanted me to have it back, that she knew how much I liked it and felt bad about keeping if for so long. I know that. It wasn’t her fault.” I stare at the floor and tap my foot.
“All right, can you keep going?”
“I thought everything was going to be fine. But she showed up and had a new tattoo on her wrist. This bright black thing that looked like a bunch of grapes. It was shining. I was already kind of drunk. I don’t know. I didn’t want to see her to begin with, but it was my favorite lamp and I figured what the hell. But then there she is with this new, glistening, tattoo, on her wrist. So I asked her about it, and she just refused to tell me anything. I wanted to know where she got it and what it meant. She told me she wanted me to have the lamp and that everything else was no big deal. I should have told her thank you, and asked her to leave it on the steps. She should have worn long sleeves.”
“The tattoo made you very upset. Does she have others?”
“Yes, but those are old. From before she met me. She never got a tattoo when we were together. But now, I don’t know, she’s reliving her youth or something, having someone draw on her. She had to know that it would make me upset to see it. I was just trying to get her to leave. I didn’t want anything bad to happen. I was trying to feel better. To get away.”
“By cutting your wrists?”
“I don’t know.”
I remember screaming at a doctor in the emergency room. He kept asking me to calm down. Once my blood alcohol count was low enough to let me out of emergency, they brought me here. They strapped me to a stretcher, bound my arms, drove me here in an ambulance. Some guy rode with me the whole way. I kept apologizing to him, that he had to do this, that he had to be with me between hospitals. I miss my ex-wife so much, I thought on the ride over. I miss her so much. I just want to talk to my ex-wife. I always miss her when I am sober, even though I am afraid. I just want to talk to my ex-wife.
“They’ll figure out something when you get to the hospital, sir,” said my chaperone.
“Can I please just get an arm free so I can talk to my ex-wife on my cell phone? Where are my things? Can I please see my things? Where are my things?” I was covered in so many blankets. My arms hurt.
The floor has grown colder under my feet. “That kid is really scaring me. He seems like he might kill someone. I’ve never seen anyone like that.”
“Jeffrey is fine. He is well medicated.”
Jeffrey is not fine. Jeffrey will kill me if he doesn’t receive enough attention. He will suck the blood from my neck.
“Can I please leave today?”
“I don’t think today is a good idea. Here is what we are going to do. I’m going to prescribe you 400 mg of Tegretol twice a day, 6 mg of Risperidone once a day, and 4 mg of Ativan three times a day. Let’s see where that gets you over the next couple of days. It will help you calm down. You seem very agitated.”
“In the next couple of days…” I am trapped here. Breathe, I think to myself, try not to seem insane, seeming sane is the only way to escape.
“Look, I had this girlfriend once. A girl that broke my arm, actually. She was a real bitch. We’d moved into a new apartment, and the night we’d moved, in the bedroom, there were like a hundred moths, flying around. We didn’t know where they were coming from. Just one hundred shitty, regular moths. Finally, we figured out that the top of one of the windows wasn’t fully shut. We shut it, and we vacuumed up all the moths. About an hour later, I was watching TV in the living room and I heard her screaming. ‘There’s a moth in my ear, there’s a moth in my ear!’ She was just screaming and screaming. So I go into the room and I look in her ear and there is no moth. But she keeps going at it, for fifteen minutes. ‘I can hear its wings beating!’ she says. I try blowing in her ear. Nothing. I stick tweezers in there. Nothing. The whole time I’m thinking to myself, ‘This is it, she’s finally lost her fucking mind. I’m going to have to bring her to the mental hospital.’ Then I had one last idea. I took a cap full of vodka, bent her head over the sink, and poured it in her ear canal. After about five seconds, guess what came floating up? A moth. So, it’s like, I can seem crazy, but really, there is a natural reason for it. A reason outside of me.”
“Can you tell me more about the cuts on your arms?”
“These? They aren’t even deep. I mean, if I really had wanted to, I would have.”
“Can you please unwrap the bandages for me? The nurse here will rewrap them for you. The wounds need to be cleaned, anyway.”
“These are just scrapes.”
“You wouldn’t have needed stitches if they were just scrapes.”
“I was drunk.”
And then the lion holds up a document in her jeweled paw that says that a doctor has “committed” me. It is, the lion explains, a signed affidavit attesting that I was a threat to myself and to others. The document, at least visually, is hilarious. It has been written in a looping, junior high school kind of script, the kind of writing that girls used in letters passed behind the teacher’s back in class.
“It looks like a fucking clown wrote that note. A fucking clown wrote that, and it’s going to kill me.”
I feel my body tightening, my hands losing their grip on my chair, and I am sliding forward, my head leading.
“Can’t you see? A thirteen-year-old wrote that. Where did you get it? Is it dosed with perfume from fucking Walgreens? Is there a Chapstick kiss somewhere on the document serving as a watermark? Is your brain a fucking hash of jelly and shit?”
Four hands on each arm, four arms on each leg, a hard hit of Haldol in my shoulder and a hard board with cuffs for my hands and feet and men carrying me into a room to strain against the cuffs, a bit in my mouth to bite on until the light turns pure white and red and blossoms. Losing consciousness, I turn my head to the door and see saw-tooth staring at me through a small window, mouth open, gnawing on the glass. His teeth make little ticking sounds as he gnaws. Help, I try to say, help, but the Haldol is digging in and all that comes out is slurred and through a gag. I’m going to die if he gets in the room, the thought is clear, He’s going to rip my neck open and I’m going to bleed out on this table… Somewhere in the Haldol, going down, coming out, I don’t know, I realize that saw-tooth’s mouth is not his own, not his own purple opening, but the mouth of some kind of vampiric parasite that has eaten its way into his giant strawberry of a head, some kind of hungry, needlish, parasite that feeds on blood. It has sucked him near dry, kept him small by absorbing his nutrients as it grew.
Dinner time. �
�Mr. P. You want to eat dinner?”
I am sick of being by myself. Trying to move, my body feels made of ice, ready to crack. I slide off the bed. It takes several moments to get my balance. I shuffle to the dining room, which is also the social room. I sit by myself. A grilled cheese. “Cheese bread, Mr. P,” says the man with cornrows. He gets to leave, I think.
On one of the walls a man is drawing with his finger. It looks like he is trying to draw a door. He traces the outline, over and over.
Those who eat, eat slowly. It is a confused operation. A very tall, thin man with bare feet lifts his sandwich to his mouth and holds it there, opening his jaws with monumental deliberation. It seems like minutes. Without taking a bite he drops his sandwich onto his tray and pushes his fingers into is, spreading it apart. He then stands up, looks from side to side, and sits down again. I pull my sandwich apart as well. White cheese and white bread. I cannot eat. They have generic ketchup here. I return to my room and urinate. Half way through I can feel urine running over my testicles. It soaks my paper pants. I return to bed.
I’m in the TV room with the blonde. “Do you find me attractive?” she asks. She does not look at me. She stares at the TV. Her voice is lower than I had expected.
“Yes.”
“So would you fuck me right now?” I’m not sure I heard her correctly.
“The guards would stop us,” I say.
“Jerk off under your blanket. Then maybe I’ll eat your cum.” She looks at me and runs her thumb and forefinger down from the corners of her mouth, until they meet in the middle of her bottom lip. She drops her hand and lets out a little smile.