Miles from Madame Zuk
She was too many stories above me. Love is a girlgoyle’s proper food, or so Margaret always claimed-the other stuff just plumps up your bra size. And O used to say with a yawn that love at least gave a girl a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Well, I met Zuk and the next morning I woke up out of the tar with a seasick lurch and didn’t care whether I lived or died. So she hadn’t worn any rings-so what-no rings is a quirk of fashion, for godzillas sake, not a marital status. Of course she was married, they all were, probably she had, gag, cute children too. And why did I have to snoop around to find out what she had and didn’t have in the nuptial department, bribe Reggie to check for the dreaded family photos on the desk? Because she had pulled cheap rank on me like a prison matron, firing off poisonal questions and not answering any herself. This offended my mental patient’s democratic principles. Was Zuk a better woman than I was? Well, obviously. But for how long? Just for today? Dream on, Bogeywoman-just for today until the end of time.
The logic is always corrupt which answers the question should I live or should I off myself? Other people hang around in it, audible voices in the wall, as if it were a cheap hotel-snoring in its lobby, shaving at its flatulent sinks, smoking in its bed. The figures lie when I weigh in the girlgoyles who’ve turned me down, since, gone as they are, they weigh nothing. On the one hand I know quite well that life is a dream and every face in it nothing but a lesson for the real world to come, I mean the real world that lies wrapped up in this one like a cheese in cheesecloth. All the same, for every mental patient there comes a moment when this world is ante for every other. The game boils down to you and your dreambox mechanic. Together you argue it out if you should live or die. Gimme somebody I can love or else, you say. Your dreambox mechanic replies you should be whole unto yourself, but she has a date every Saturday night, you’re sure of it.
So shouldn’t they make it illegal? Shouldn’t it be therapeutically incorrect to have a dreambox mechanic like her, Doctor Zuk, Madame Zuk, that disgustingly complete and out of reach? No bughouse doctor too beautiful, no, wait, beauty isn’t exactly the problem-well then, no dreambox mechanic too beautiful on her horse, I mean too sure of her seat, too haloed in round white savoir-vivre like a circus equestrienne in her spotlight. She gallops by, she maybe lets a few circus monkeys cling to her mane as she goes, and maybe I’m one of them. But surely Zuk is too favored from birth to be trusted with cripples? How can she have the proper sympathy? So that the message she throws to the mental patient like her garter, never mind the soothing talk from her mere voicebox, is Try, try in vain, you shall never have me or be me. I mean, after that, when you’ve already lost the game, and for good, why get better? What for?
And that’s a queer phrase right there-get better-as though repairing your dreambox had all the morality of a shopping trip, you have to get sumpm along the way, track it down, pick it up, steal it, beg for it, somehow add it to your equipment or you’re done for. Then here comes Zuk, dreambox mechanic, one of the royals, you gotta have her and worse yet, she isn’t even your dreambox mechanic-you can’t beg, buy or blackmail an appointment with her.
I hated my doctor. Reinhold Feuffer, M.D. Foofer. Especially Foofer, but in fact I despised all the doctors in Rohring Rohring-who were they, the royals, ha ha, to think they could tell what was wrong, really wrong, with a mental peon, especially me? And although at seventeen I was generally more crude than rude, I used to mock any Bug Motel who had a crush on a fuddy of that line. Emily worshipped her doctor, but she was dying and he wasn’t saving her. “Better you should hate old Buzzey and live than love him and croak,” I ragged her. “It iddn’t Dr. Buzzey’s fault I won’t eat,” she said, with plain South Baltimore logic that might have sounded sensible in a fatter person. “Yeah, well if he cooked you anything really good…” I said. (It’s true there was sumpm about not being able to eat I just couldn’t grasp; when I’d taken it up, it was a wrestling match with every chicken leg and pretzel rod, and in the end I cried uncle and fell on the stuff.)
Dr. Marks was O’s new dreambox adjustor; she liked his sturdy buttocks and blond mustache and thought he would be a good oink, which shows how far the royals were getting with her. Bertie hated the nurses, who for some reason were suspicious killjoys about pills, and they cold-shouldered him right back, but he kinda liked the dreambox mechanics. He claimed they thought alike. “Hey, forget about flapping those gums, man,” he said. “Tell em you’re too depressed to talk, five minutes later it’s out with the ballpoint. And then you get air balls or goofers, though the quality is weak, very weak with these pipe suckers, that’s the sad truth.”
“Cheese,” I said, “the bill to Merlin, that’s my old man, is seven hundred a week, and the only one these fuddy dreambox mechanics can save is Jefferson on a nickel, if that.” “They aren’t sposed to save you,” Emily said patiently, and Dion said: “They maintain you, man. Maintain, maintain.” “They’re tryna show you how to get used to stuff the way it is,” Emily elaborated. “Get used to living on these crumbs?” I said, “never! If this is all I’m going to get I want my money back.” “Maybe you could jew em down to five hundred a week,” Dion suggested, “I think my old man got a deal through da guy who put in the basement vending machines.” “I’m talking about life, not the bughouse.” “Aaay,” Dion persisted, looking around in vain for a well-fed person to support him, “the chow here’s okay, whaddaya expect, the Park Plaza?”
Because they were professionally mysterious, rumors flew about the private lives of our dreambox mechanics as if they had been movie stars. What had I heard lately? Dr. Hellwig, who wore a wedding ring, had been seen by the whole school bus walking arm in arm on Charles Street with a tall moon-breasted champagne blonde who by our comic book standards couldn’t be anybody’s wife. Haughty Dr. Dannenberg had been spotted at Pimlico Lanes in a turquoise satin bowling team jacket-someone on weekend furlough had seen him and though we knew it couldn’t be true, the idea was too enchanting: his stock of face plummeted. Dr. Dewey might have got the sack, we liked to think he had, but for sure he left suddenly in the middle of April.
Sometimes we tried to put Emily on the case. We all knew that dear departing Emily could get an answer, maybe not a yes answer but some kind of answer, to anything she asked. By now they had told Emily her organs were rotting inside her and in fact her breath smelled like nail polish remover, not bad but strange. Her dying gave a certain power, a last quality, to all her requests. Everybody felt it. The Bug Motels hated to see it go to waste: “Hey Emily. Ask Dr. Hellwig if he has a girlfriend, ask Doughy Dewey if he got canned, ask Foofer if he’s oinking Miss Hageboom.” But Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, never asked anything she didn’t really want to know.
Doctor Zuk, I speculated, might be Doughy Dewey’s replacement. I fumed that I couldn’t ask one of the royals straight out. And wouldn’t that be just like the bughouse-to replace the nadir of fudd with the apex of glamour and pretend it was irrelevant to treatment, though an hour with Zuk was as likely to ransack your dreambox as to repair it. No, no, no, no dreambox mechanic too beautiful on her horse, I decreed, though it didn’t help either for a dreambox mechanic to be too ugly-I mean, how far would you get in this life if you thought this mug was the only one who ever loved you? I always figured that was why they’d assigned Doughy Dewey to O, who had been loved or at least oinked by ballplayers and even rock stars of the lower magnitudes. She had to get over thinking about men that way. Dewey had a fat lineless face, skin the color of Gouda cheese, his only whiskers grew out of pink moles and his fat little legs dangled an inch or two above the floor under his leather armchair. O said she used to sit there mostly feeling sorry for him.
“I always wanted to ask him if he had sumpm screwed up in his glands, you know, maybe his nuts never came down or sumpm.” “Why didn’t you?” we asked, to make trouble. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.” “Let’s get Emily to ask him.” But Emily Nix Peabody wouldn’t ask him, because that wasn’t one of the things she really wanted to know.
Chastely I marveled at my see-through princess Emily. And yet what was so all-fired pure about her, come to think of it? I never asked my doctor anything I didn’t want to know. I never asked him anything I did want to know either. I didn’t make idle conversation with the thinkbox adjustor. Ever since he had first farted through the door of the green office where I sat waiting for him on a farty leather couch of oxblood Morocco with brass upholstery nails (which I was always trying, on the side he couldn’t see, to pry out with my fingernails)-one year, seven months and eight days ago-I hadn’t said a word to Foofer. Not a single word. (Well, for the first couple days I had asked him over and over how soon I could go back to Camp Chunkagunk, since nothing was wrong with me except could I please go back to Camp Chunkagunk. “Miss Koderer, vy don’t you tell me vot happened to you at zis camp?” “Whaddaya mean what happened to me, nuttin happened.” “I know you were expelled from a camp where you have gone for many years, a place you liked. I would like to know in your own words how zis came about.” “Nuttin happened, I just got lost one day and accidentally left camp, make them take me back…”)
So how did I land this professional? Merlin picked him out. He was-Merlin still insists (on the phone last week he was telling me this again)-a world-famous diagnostician, whatever that means. “Internationally known, Ursie. I mean, think about it-you got accepted into Rohring Rohring by a world-famous diagnostician of disturbed adolescents.”
That accepted burned me up. “Accepted,” I fumed, “you’d think it was Harvard. And for godzillas sake, it didn’t take a Sigmund Food. What adolescent isn’t disturbed? They oughta lock up the ones who think they’re having a good time.” “You weren’t just in a bad mood, Ursie. You were cutting yourself and all that.” “I can’t believe he told you I was a hopeless case,” I seethed, “how the hump would he know, I never even talked to him.” Merlin read me the letter. It took him awhile to unfold the wretched thing out of his wallet; he’d been carrying it around with him from Haiphong to Upper Samovarobad to Outer Hotzeplotz all this time:
… might someday successfully dress herself and see to her own meals and possibly manage some unstressful employment, but in all likelihood you must be prepared to support her for the rest of both of your lives…
Foofer! For the first time I thought he deserved what he got. “And you my own father believed it.” “A world-famous diagnostician, Ursie. I mean you had a mother too. Those Schapiros, they were always a little strange…”
Not that I’m letting him off, but I gotta admit that after Mama died in a trainwreck (and so hangs on to her little round blue hatbox forever in blessed memory, like a passenger saint by Lionel), maybe Merlin wasn’t thinking that clearly where care and feeding were concerned, not even the care and feeding of himself. I was small but I was hungry and I had eyes. When I think of the would-be savioresses who came bustling around for the next seven years, earth mother types, and rich! That swelling bodice Karoline von Etzen, for instance, who wrote the Alsatian cookbook-what a stepmother she would have made. To think Merlin chose the cadaverous vice-puppeteer Suzette, who couldn’t cook, handle money, or even act! Thereafter Merlin had to mother Suzette. Margaret and me had to mother ourselves, after our fashion, and Suzette was left to file her nails and answer the telephone. So I guess tracking down redeemers, or redeemeresses, was never Merlin’s strong point.
Anyhow, in Rohring Rohring I became a legend: Not to speak to my dreambox mechanic for nineteen months, almost twenty, fifty minutes, three times a week, not a single word-it took a will, I won’t say of steel, steel being totally dead, of beech then or even mahogany, a mahogany will, if I do say so myself. It helped that I could never think of Foofer without thinking of farts, which started with his name-and there’s another thing that won’t be allowed when I run the bug hospitals, doctors with funny names, especially those old classical strong-and-silent-type dreambox analysts whose names send you secret messages, scaring the crap out of you-like Dr. Schock, Dr. Ante, Dr. Paradiso and Dr. Hellwig, all names on the table of offices at Rohring Rohring.
Dr. Foofer was the old-fashioned kind himself. He made it easy not to talk; he didn’t talk either. He would fart on in, another hopeless case in the department of la beauté since the first and last chance of a body is in the walk, if you know what I mean-sort of spreading through the door like a farty dollop of batter because of his bottom-heavy duckfooted walk. He wasn’t a glandular case like Dewey-just a round middle-aged guy with a gleaming bald spot, in an itchy-looking brown three-piece suit that he must have brought with him from Germany or somewhere, since no American would wear one, and a gold watch chain. From there on it was his silence against my silence, but I could tell I unnerved him by the light zissing of the watch chain under his thumbnail as he rubbed it back and forth, no more than an inch or so each way but tenser and tenser, I could hear it.
You know what he had? (and that’s why I had to get him): Dignity, Foofer had dignity, that scratchy thick brown wool suit though full of farts looked like it was sewn to last two hundred years, matching vest, heavy flesh, gravity, reserve, an amber silk pocket handkerchief. He had dignity, he had rank like somebody else has a Buick or other big stuff you palpably own. I think those European guys whose brains are cultured from the start in a broth of big Sie and little du, vous and tu, ty and pan and Usted and all those other upstairs and downstairs degrees of you every single day radiate that stuff no matter what they think they think and never mind what they say. Foofer had an air of thinking he was, not exactly better but more, in every way more than me, weightier, and coming down at me from an Alpine height. So naturally it was my job to get him.
Was it my job to live or to off myself? When I no longer knew my job, I became a mental patient with my little menu of behaviors, for example I had purloined the Wilkinson blade from Dion’s razor this morning and graphed the logical debate I was having with the mysterious Madame Zuk, in her absence, over whether I should live or die, on the inside of both arms. They were now stuck solid to the lint inside my sweatshirt. Nobody had noticed anything yet. For cutting myself I had arrived at Rohring Rohring with a little natural talent and some amateur performance history, as mentioned. Under that, I had bedrock, I had the primitive but working machinery set on the rock, to wit: I would never, ever tell Merlin I was a Lemme die first! Or anybody else, certainly not Foofer.
Doctor Zuk, on the other hand. Somehow I knew it right off-Zuk I didn’t even have to tell. Zuk could see without my telling, because she was going to like it. I don’t mean she would rub her hands together over it the way Foofer would, heh heh heh, meaning to snitch to Merlin. No, Zuk would like it as a person likes cadmium yellow, licorice or swimming. Not that I would tell her-no more than she was telling me. Then again, if she wouldn’t tell me, I could track her. Old Emily knew Zuk-hadn’t she pulled her into Bertie’s private bathroom by her silvery dress front? I could find out plenty. And I would. It was spring, I was in the bughouse. What else did I have to do?
MY SEE-THROUGH PRINCESS
I decided to start with my see-through princess and went looking for her. But Emily wasn’t playing O Hell (favorite card game of the Bug Motels) with O, Bertie and Dion down in the dayroom. I walked into the cavernous morning light of the place and her empty chair suddenly made me afraid. “Where’s old Emily?” Bertie jerked his thumb over his shoulder. The door to 607, Emily’s room, was shut, the little window in the door had its louvers down.
I sashayed carelessly as possible down to the nurse’s station and asked Miss Roper, “Where’s Emily?” “Emily is in seclusion today.” “How come?” “I’m sorry that is not public information,” she rat-nibbled without looking up from some card she was filling out, then suddenly caught me full in the pink zeros of her glasses: “Anyhow it’s none of your beeswax, Koderer.”
I could tell right away they didn’t like me today in the nurses’ room. There was accusation in Miss Roper’s mouth, fallen sideways like a twisted swing on a playground, and in Miss Hageboom’s hard squint-even downright disgust with the Bug Motels who had mooched their own canister of N2O yesterday, really, the discipline in this so-called bug hospital! Anyhow nurses have their pets. If they take you as their mascot, look out, you’re probably dying-so I could read it in Miss Hageboom’s slitted eyes, What did you juvenile delinquents who belong in reform school not a hospital do to my little Emily yesterday besides put her down the laundry chute, she’s totally beat this morning, throws up when she even looks at the nice piece of cake I brought her and has a great big egg on her forehead.
Well, I knew what to do in cases like this, go ask the Regicide. I found him at the far end of the dayroom, with a mop in his hands for once. It’s true he kept mopping the same four square feet since the TV was on to his favorite story. “Hey Reg.” He glanced up slowly and when he saw who it was, even his eye went cold. “Hey Reg. I can’t find Emily.” He leaned on his mop and chewed his lip, but then he decided to tell me.
“LIT-TA EMILY,” he announced, entitling his report. “Litta Emily has lost again. Two pound. And they ain’t lettin her out her bed till she eat. She gotta put em back. She look terrible. Not that yall buddies who put her down the laundry chute needs to know anything about where she done been ended up at. Oughta be shamed of yall selves.” “Nobody put her down the laundry chute. She… got emptied in. By accident.” “Sho is! Sho is! And I’m Mayor Goldstein, this just my weekend gig.” “Say Reg, you couldn’t get me in there?” “Way at?” “To see Emily.” “Huh! In her room! You must think I’m foolish-let yall murdous crazies in there with that nice litta gal! I ain’t crazy.” And he walked away. So Nurse’s Aide Reggie was mad at me too.
In Crazyland the craziest is queen, in Rohring Rohring Adolescent Wing everybody loved the see-through princess best, including me. And not just because Emily was Miss Dying Popularity. Talk about ugly-cute-she was the ugly-cutest of all the world’s cute-uglies, sumpm between a bug and a baby bird, with those thready limbs and great big eyes shining out of their bone-holes, a no-nose with yellow freckles on it and bucked teeth that pushed the short upper lip out of her tight face like a little beak. The starving whiteness around her freckles made her skin sort of shine, and I never detected in her-it takes one to know one, so believe me I looked-one flyspeck of showmanship in her sincere desire to disappear. She was more like the embarrassed usherette at her own buggy play, or sumpm even lower than the usherette, the candy seller or the hatcheck girl. Artless is what she was. I call her my see-through princess because you sort of had the feeling you could gaze into her and see every lump and bubble, see all the organs where they lay and the heart where it clenched and relaxed, clenched and gave up the fight again. Every coupla months they carried her off to her bed and locked her in there for a week or two and fed her through a tube. She was patient with this treatment.
She was brave and good, old Emily, and though refusal was her middle name, her starved muscles somehow held up their end when we Bug Motels went on mission. She was like Joan of Arc compared to the fuddy boys in our set. She had only this one problem, that food so disgusted her she was doomed to starve herself to death. And when they rolled her off to bed to force-feed her, her limbs hung over the edge of the gurney like long wax tapers that had been left too long in the heat. The first time I ever saw her, they were rolling her through the dayroom and I stood on my chair to get a good look. She glowed in the dark, the white and yellow curls nodded around her small face like petals of some ragged compositae, and though her neck was too weak to hold up her head, the little beak in her cute-ugly bug face opened and she smiled at me. She smiled at me I can only say hopefully, though we hadn’t been introduced. For some reason old Emily loved me at first sight. And she didn’t even need me-she had cooing nurses to throw away.
So I knew she wouldn’t scream or rat or throw me out. Still it wasn’t that easy to get in to her, if the Regicide wouldn’t help. I stood behind my door, holding a potted cactus that Suzette had accidentally brought with my stuff-I hadn’t watered it in nineteen months but it wouldn’t die and now I was glad I’d kept the thing. I peeped through the crack until the nurse’s aide, Delilah not Reggie, came out of Emily’s room pushing the big rattly-bones housekeeping cart with the dirty linen bin trailing behind it, and turned east. I winged the cactus in a perfect blooper pitch over her head so it crashed in front of her, went rolling off in three prickly balls and she froze and stared up at the ceiling-and meanwhile I ran like hump (in my silent tracker’s moccasins) to slip through Emily’s door before its hydraulic moan came to an end.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
She lay there exactly like a wasting princess in some fairy tale, right down to the snowy counterpane with her pipecleaner elbows on it. Her bottom half, where it went under the crackling sheets, made hardly a bump, and under the bunched-around skirt of her quilted pink I CHOCOLATE bathrobe (a present from the nurses) she was like one of those half-dollies that housewives freakish for chintz use to cover the toaster-I mean she was there to the waist and nothing underneath, not even the blank crotch that drives you to distraction in a plastic dolly when you finally get alone with her and take a look. So let it be declared that, from the first time I saw Emily, who I believe had a strong crush on me, mine was a respectfully crotchless love for her crotchless self, you’d be afraid of breaking that popsicle stick body just by jiggling the bed next to it, let alone lying down on top of it. True, I had designs on Emily, but they were on her mind not her body. I mean she wasn’t quite twelve, her bug face was more ugly than cute when you looked into its caves, and her body was not even there. All the same she glowed, and I wanted to finger the wolfram filament of her incandescence, wanted to know to its hot wire core her amazing lack of appetite. I admit I’ve licked out the pig trough to its dregs, from time to time, in the famine of sex, but what do I know of that other thing, the pure want of hunger, a click in the throat and disgusted blank in the gut of a caterpillar who, unless it lands on a muskmelon leaf, doesn’t even know the world is food?
“Hey Em, how you doing?” I whispered as the door whooshed shut behind me. “Ursie!” she peeped, her beak opened up a crack and I could tell she was glad to see me. “Say Em, want me to sneak you up sumpm? How bout a comic or, uh, a Three Musketeers or sumpm?” I whispered. I would have been glad to crawl through enemy fire on my belly to the card and candy shop in the lobby and give up my last nickel to see her fall; I didn’t want to believe in her purity unless I absolutely had to. But she was as ashamed of not eating as I was jealous of it, which gave me a funny feeling it might be true.
Emily’s face crumpled in a smile that pulled the pale freckles even wider over her little bulb of a nose. “That would be nice since it was from you but I prolly couldn’t eat it,” she said sheepishly, and the tops of her ears pinked up, which was sumpm to see, against the yahrzeit candle color of the rest of her. “They’re going to keep you here till you eat. You better eat. How come you don’t eat?” “It looks good but then it don’t go down,” she explained, “at first it tastes like a hamburger or whatever it is, but then it gets sticky, real sticky like I’m eating…” Her voice got thin as a piece of spaghetti just talking about it and then I heard a soft click-her throat closed, her lips pulled back and I could see all her rotten little teeth. “And I got to spit it out,” she finally said, “or throw up.”
I shouldn’t have asked, but I couldn’t help it: “Like you’re eating what?” “Like I’m eating B.M.,” she whispered. “Oooo,” I said. I saw a human dumpling glowing on a plate where a hamburger just had sat, and, like that, her case looked hopeless. But then I recognized the object I was staring at. “A Baby Ruth could be a poop,” I said, “and nuttin looks better than that. Hey, that’s what makes you want to eat it-cause it looks like a nice piece of poop.” Emily laughed, her big eyes widened like happy clams in their red rims and I thought I was getting somewhere.
“Sure,” I argued, “you know it’s true. O’Henrys too. Must be everybody wants to eat sumpm that looks like poop. You better not tell Foofer I said that.” “I wouldn’t never,” Emily said. She stared up at me and got that grave little soap flake of light in each eye like Joan of Arc in the Classic Comic. “Tootsie Rolls too,” I pursued. “And Mounds.” Emily nodded. “And Fifth Avenue.” Emily twisted her nose bulb and shook her head-“Not so poopy,” she said. She never ever went along with a queer idea for the sake of the conversation, not even to save her skinny life. “O come on-if it’s chocolate in a bar it’s poop. You gotta admit.” Her head was still fanning stubbornly back and forth on its baby bird neck but she was grinning a little.
“Come on, say it. When I eat a Clark Bar I’m thinking poop, umm good, and so are you, so is everybody. Now listen, Emily, never mind Foofer, if you tell any dreambox mechanic in this whole dump I said that, I’ll never speak to you again.” “I wouldn’t never.” “Cause I’m getting a new one.” Emily blinked at me. “A new dreambox mechanic. Well, anyhow I’m going to ask for her.” I waited for Emily to wonder who, but she didn’t. “You know, the one you brought to Bertie’s bathroom when O got her head stuck. What was her name.” Emily didn’t choose to tell me. “Er, Doctor Zuk,” I craftily answered myself.
“You can’t just ask for somebody,” Emily said. “Why not?” “You’re sposed to work with what you got. Like in O Hell.” Meaning our card game. “Besides I think Doctor Zuk don’t have no regular patients.” “How come?” “She just goes around talking to you and writing stuff down. I think maybe she’s famous.” No dreambox adjustor too beautiful on her horse-she was famous. Why do they say My head swam-my head drowned, wave-dragged, glug glug, over stone shoals of hunger, sodden sponges of disgust. She was famous. I was never going to get her or be her. Her swirling bluegreen atmospheres of confidence, that equestrienne spotlight she rode in, the mermaid spangles on her brassiere-it all made sense now that she was famous. I double-drowned for envy: she was famous, and she was studying other people, not me.
“How d’you know all that?” “I ast.” My head swam-my dreambox bobbed emptily on the waves, like a bait float. “Why’d you ask?” (Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, never asked anything she didn’t really want to know.) “She’s old but she’s so purty. I never saw anyone like her before.” “What’s she famous for? Is she a dreambox mechanic?” “I din’t ask.” “Didn’t ask!” I stared at Emily so severely that she added, “Prolly,” in a small scared voice. “She’s from Europe,” Emily recollected, “… or somewheres…” I suddenly recalled, for my part, I was here to save my see-through princess, not to bully her. My ears itched hotly for shame.
Yes I was here to feed my fifty-one-pound princess as well as to milk her. I loved her, I always meant to fatten her up, no mistake about that. “Hey Em. Don’t you ever want to put sumpm in your mouth?” I asked, “just to suck it? not to eat it?” She wrinkled her little spotty-toadstool nose. “Sure,” I said, “like some things just say put me in your mouth as soon as you look at em. You don’t know what I mean? Honest?”
I looked around the room for the perfect thing. Kitchens are good for suckable stuff, bakelite spoon handles and pyrex thermometers and marble pestles. Even a writing desk has silky pens and crunchy pencils, but a room in the bughouse is a desert to the mouth, everything fixed down or flimsy white plastic made to throw away. All I saw were the maraschino cherry buttons of Emily’s I CHOCOLATE bathrobe-thank godzilla nurses have pets, I thought, though it’s kind of awkward to suck another girl’s bathrobe buttons, even if you’re a Unbeknownst to her-especially when she’s wearing the thing. Emily and me, we weren’t that close, but we weren’t that innocent either, I couldn’t just suck her buttons I mean.
And all of a sudden I saw it, just what I needed: Emily’s pink pearl plastic three-piece toilet set, maybe the one thing she had from home, with a shoehorn of suckable handle on the hairbrush, an ordinary L-shaped comb, and a mirror like a wreath of pinky lips that twisted to a pink scepter, positively mouthwatering, at one end. “Yum,” I said, picking up the pink comb and smoking it rakishly. I handed the hairbrush to Emily. I wanted her to notice that mirror handle herself and ask for it. But no, refusal was her middle name. “I wanna smoke like you,” she piped up. “Sure, okay,” I shrugged, and gave her the comb and took back the hairbrush, but then I smoked its fat handle like a big pink cigar. Use your imagination, Peabody, I was trying to say. We smoked her hair set peacefully for a time. Two little kites of spit started glinting in Emily’s mouth corners and I thought I was onto sumpm big.
“Next you gotta try bubblegum,” I said, since it’s pink and you don’t swallow it. I mean, Emily was all of eleven years old. I poisonally despise bubblegum. “Hey,” Emily whispered, “let’s smoke real cigarettes.” “Real cigarettes?” I echoed uneasily. What could I say?-my Pall Malls and matches were in plain view, squaring the front of my overalls. “Real cigarettes? What for?”
I repeat: we teenage mental patients weren’t given to foiling each other’s stupid schemes. Heads were for dreambox mechanics to fix. We were young and set in our ways; it was our job to be crazy, not to be fixed. Time would change us, not our doctors in their wildest dreams, if we were in their wildest dreams, which I doubt. I mean, mental patience is a culture like the one it’s wrapped in; insanity is like sanity, it can’t stay the same or it rots. Fresh bad ideas were not to be sniffed at. And anyhow, everybody smokes in a mental hospital; it’s like drinking wine in France. If my see-through princess wanted a cigarette, it was my job to whip out the smokes, but I didn’t. Not just yet.
“You’re not even twelve years old,” I said. “You’re gonna puke if you smoke. You puke all the time anyway. That’s why you’re here. You can’t afford to lose even one more calorie or you’ll croak.” “I smoked awready,” Emily said, “my brother Barney showed me.” “Brother Barney,” I sneered, “what an example. When was this?” “They let him home for Christmas when I was ten.” (Barney was in reform school.) “I bet he pushed one in your mouth and made you smoke.” Emily was no snitch, but she didn’t deny it. Instead she said proudly: “We smoked Kools.” “Okay, I’ll give you a cigarette if you promise not to throw up.” “Okay.” “Swear.” “I swear.”
I believed her. In fact, suddenly I was afraid she would choke back her puke or die trying, for this was another way of being pure. Things were getting out of hand, it was like she was going down the laundry chute headfirst again, and this was not what I’d had in mind for my see-through princess at all.
“Also, you have to eat a coddy,” I stipulated. “I’ll throw up.” “So smoke and eat a coddy and you won’t throw up. You swore.”
There was a nub of logic there and you could see her circling it, circling it, looking for a place to land. Luckily I had a coddy on me as I often did in those days. I took a puck of damp white napkin out of my pocket and spread it open and there was my rusty round coddy, fifteen cents at the snack bar in the lobby, and next to it I laid a cellophane two-pack of saltines, a squirt-tube of mustard, a Pall Mall and my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter, not available in any store.
“You gotta eat, Peabody, or you’ll never get out of here,” I said. No, that argument was lame, for none of us Bug Motels exactly wanted out of here. “I mean out of this room,” I added. “Okay.” “Swear.” “I swear.” She took up the coddy in one hand and the cigarette in the other, and I picked up my lighter.
And now I ignited and she nibbled and puffed, gulped and hacked and fizzed and choked. The cigarette smoke steamed out of the yellow baby-bird angles of her beak, curled like chicken feathers around those agonized calluses where the rough little lips came together, and all at once two worms of sumpm worm-white gleamed in the corners of her mouth, regurgitated coddy I guess-
I turned my back on her and grabbed the first thing that stuck out-which turned out to be the most disgusting object a person could bump into, an old dry sink on the wall that could have been a urinal, that’s how it looked. I threw back my head and gasped for air and accidentally caught sight of Emily in the mirror over the sink. She was waxier white than the pillow behind her, a little cloud of smoke floated over her face and her ugly-cute forehead was dented with worry.
“You don’t have to eat anything,” I gave in, “I can’t save you if you’re gonna do like that.” “S’purty good,” she said meekly, “kinda dry.” “Aw spit it out,” I said, “or I might puke myself.” “S’kinda sharp. I mean it tastes kinda sharp, when I’m chewing and the smoke goes up my nose. Like chewing needles or sumpm.” “Oooo, that does sound good. Much better than poop,” I said bitterly. “I thought you liked poop,” Emily said. “I said everybody liked poop, not me.” “Ain’t you everybody? One of em I mean?” “I guess so,” I sighed.
“You could still save me,” Emily said plaintively, the way a kid wheedles you to keep playing. Only, old Emily would never say I could save her just to keep me playing. I sneaked a glance at her in the mirror. Her cute-ugly mug was peaceful against the white pillow. The back of her hand smeared over her mouth in an almost satisfied way. “Whatcha do with that coddy?” I demanded. “I eat it.” “Aw come on, Emily!” “Yeah. Honest. It was good.”
I squinted at her suspiciously. Her fingers, as short and skinny as birthday candles, lay on the coverlet and half a cigarette still stuck up from them, fuming. There were ashes in every direction: black smears on the pillowcases, pale gray drifts down the front of her I CHOCOLATE bathrobe. But nothing worse.
“You didn’t puke?” “Unh-unh. I swore.” “You’re not really going to smoke that thing to the end, are you, Emily?” “I like it with a coddy.” “You swear you ate that coddy? I’m going to get you another one and see.” “Don’t go. Pretty please don’t go. Let’s play Old Maid.”
Old Maid! I remembered the last time Margaret and me playedOld Maid: when Merlin got called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and they put us on the B &O to New York all by ourselves. Grandpa Koderer gave the porter five dollars to keep an eye on us but everyone forgot we would be alone on the ferry. We were thrilled. First we exhausted our quarters in the car-deck candy machine. The water looked heavy and black like motor oil and when we were staring into it, eating Caramel Creams, Margaret’s hat fell in. This was so pleasant that some of our cards “blew away” too. At last we watched the Old Maid’s pruny face float, curl, sink. So the deck was ruined. On Central Park West we had colds and Aunt Henrietta Schapiro sat on the bed and taught us Hearts and that was the end of Old Maid. Poor dears. You’re more than half orphans now.
“Don’t go. Let’s play Old Maid.” Why couldn’t I stop? “Only if you eat a coddy,” I bullied. “I ain’t hungry no more. Don’t go.” “Swear you’ll eat a coddy and I’ll come right back.” “I swear. But don’t go. They won’t let you in,” she said, and the bottom lip of her little buggy mouth trembled.
“Don’t worry, I can get in anytime I want. I’ll stay till you stop eating coddies, I swear. Hey, wanna split a Hollywood Bar?” She gave me a sickish smile-her lip curled back on her bucked bad teeth in friendly, bashful disgust. “Unh-unh. Too-maybe,” she said.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
The door hadn’t quite hissed shut behind me when I hit the dayroom, running. “Gimme fifteen cents,” I panted at the Bug Motels’ card table, “I got her to eat a coddy.” The whole place was smoking like an Indian encampment. There were around ninety little aluminum foil ashtrays in that room, and every ashtray had its mental patient. O, Bertie and Dion sat together in the whirly, cobwebby light, in a rubble of gum wrappers and potato chip bags, slapping their cards against the table. “Come on, gimme fifteen cents,” I repeated, “she ate a coddy, the whole thing.” Laughter burped out of the TV.
Bertie lazily shoved a dollar at me. “Who ya talking about-Emily? She ate?” “She ate a coddy.” “So what do you need fifteen cents for?” “Another coddy.” “You think she’s gonna eat another one?” “She swore.” “Cheese, Koderer, you’re doing better than Buzzey, maybe you should open up your own bughouse,” Bertie said with a smile. I squinted at him to see if he meant it. Probably not, but I didn’t care. I was Sigmund Food crossed with Margaret Meat, maybe I’d be Doctor Zuk someday after all.
“So how’d you do it?” O spooky-fluted, one eye narrowing at me in suspicion, the other hidden under the blueblack dip of her forelock. I wondered then, I wonder now, why a dark billow of hair over one eye makes a woman look dangerous, like a pirate’s eye-patch, but beautiful too. O watched me with her other smudgy eye that was telling me, Walk the plank. “How’d you get her to eat?” she asked again, without smiling. She was bristling mad, I could tell, and suddenly I didn’t care to go into that just now. “Tell you later,” I huffed, snatching up the dollar.
“Hey, pick me up a coddy too,” Dion said, “while you’re down there. And a pack of Tareytons.” Another dollar fluttered to the table. “Get me a coddy and a chocolate snowball and ten pieces of Bazooka,” someone else chimed in. “Five pretzels. And a strawberry turkish taffy for Mrs. Wilmot.” “A dime’s worth of banana BB bats and a pack of peanut butter crackers.” Pretty soon half the nuts in the dayroom were putting in their orders. “Forget it,” I shouted, “I’m just buying for the Bug Motels.” “Yeah, all you grown-up mental patients ever do is sit on your fat asses and watch TV and fart,” Bertie tactfully assisted me, “go get your own stuff.” “That doesn’t represent my views,” I announced to the dayroom, since I was Sigmund Food crossed with Margaret Meat, “I just have an urgent mission to execute.” Under my breath: “Damn you, Bertie, don’t stir up the mental patients, I’m in a hurry and this could be a matter of life or death.” Bertie laughed. “We might grow up into mental patients ourselves,” I hissed. “We are mental patients,” O reminded me. “Yeah, well we’re not hopeless cases yet,” I said.
I started for the sixth-floor landing where the elevators were, put my hand on the ward door, and all at once I felt O’s pirate eye pegleg it up my back. You’re not loving me and me alone the way you promised, it told me telepathically. You’re no beauty but you’ll pay. I looked around reluctantly. This was when I figured it out that O was insanely jealous (I do not speak figuratively, we were in the bughouse), and like all insanely jealous people she was clairvoyant. It didn’t take a Sigmund Food-I mean everybody’s dreambox is a cellar full of the stuff, hungers half and whole, lost loves, unobtainable oinks, etc. Now she was peering into my dreambox and sniffing another woman in my life and I was making haste to cut Doctor Zuk out of my thoughts with a can opener. “Emily’s organs are rotting,” I said weakly-but everybody knew that already. “Er, how bout you, O?” “What about me?” she echoed spookily. “You want anything from downstairs?” She didn’t even answer. “How bout a Hollywood Bar?” “I can get what I want myself,” she replied. She was scary but-well I’ll bring her up a cherry snowball I thought-just lemme feed old Emily first.
SNOWBALLS SWEATING IN A cardboard six-pack, pretzel rods marching across breast pocket like a squadron of cigars, candy bars crackling low in my overalls, soft warm coddies swinging in a small white bag from my teeth. And one of Dion’s Tareytons fuming away between my knuckles. I had had to ask an intern for a light. Wouldn’t you know, when Emily was ready to eat, it was the world’s lunchtime; the line had stretched from the snack bar to the newspaper kiosk all the way across the lobby. Where had I left my own cigarettes and my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter? Godzillas sakes-on Emily’s bed-fifty-three minutes ago. The first floor, the second floor sank away, beaten-looking people, broken-off chunks of families, got on and off. Yes I’d lost my perfect fix on Emily’s rescue by funding this expedition with Bug Motels’ candy money, that was a mistake, my fault for flouncing around pretending I was Margaret Meat, but now I was on my way back to her cute-ugly, spindly self.
Then the elevator jerked to perfect blackness and stillness and stopped dead and right away I started to be very very sorry just like O had telepathically said I would. I knew O was at the bottom of it, she had the power-some electrician or maintenance guy or orderly she had oinked, or who was praying to oink her next week-she had to stop thinking of men that way. There was an emergency phone in all these elevators. When I felt around for the receiver and pressed it to my ear, O spooky-fluted out of the earpiece: “You ate my heart with ketchup, jewgirl, and now you’re gonna pay,” and hung up. In the black elevator, sweat started to trickle under my dirty bangs. My armpits itched madly. That was when it came back to me, the queer story I’d heard about how O first got to Rohring Rohring. The same old stuff about working the Pratt Street bars from the age of twelve, and busting out her stepfather’s bathroom window where they had locked her in and climbing down the garage roof and never coming back, and ten foster homes and fifteen shows in juvenile court and three years’ probation later-but what I now remembered was the judge finally kicking her case to Rohring Rohring after she nailed her little foster sister, who she liked better than anybody, that was the part I particularly remembered, to the kitchen door with an oyster knife. The little sister had been trying to slip away… Had O thrown the knife like Mary Hartline on Super Circus? I wondered uneasily-Mary Hartline who walked upside down on the knives in her hands, her back arched like a bow.
Just then the elevator lurched back into motion, seemed to sink more floors than the hospital had floors, into the sewers beneath Broadway. It grounded like a submarine; I heard it scrape gravel. The doors sprang open, some kind of spotlight beamed into my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing-and then sumpm boinked against the wall behind me. I turned around. The spotlight picked out its edges. A jeweled dagger (probably it was just a garish letter opener filched from one of the royals) stuck there in the padding a second or two and fell to the floor, clunk. I leaned down and picked it up and squinted into the black. “What do you want, O?” “I don’t want nuttin from you,” she spooky-fluted, from a few feet away. “Well, cheese,” I said-I was impressed; the sweat rolled steadily, copiously out of my armpits-“if you don’t end up in the bughouse for life, you could get a job in a circus. Maybe Merlin would even hire you.” I thought better of that. “But for Merlin’s World Tour you’d have to be nonviolent. I don’t think you qualify.” “I could plead insanity if I killed you,” O trilled darkly, out of the darkness. “Besides, I’m still a juvenile. I betcha I’d get off,” she speculated. I tried my best to ignore this line of thought.
“Ain’t you gonna ask me what you did wrong?” O spooky-fluted. “No,” I replied, but on she went. “You said you’d be mine all mine. I oughta cut your nose right off, you dirty jew bull dagger.” I stared into the blackness, found the gauzy glow of her ratted hair like a frozen eddy in a stream, and imagined her wild raccoony eyes ringed with black, sparkling over my death. This was a side of beauty I’d never seen. Could you sink your face between her momps after she called you that, even if she asked you to? Of course I didn’t know yet exactly what a bull dagger was. “Takes one to know one,” I ventured recklessly, “and anyhow I never said I’d be yours all yours.” “I oughta cut your lying lips off too. You love that skeleton baby-you love her more than me. You sneaked into Emily’s room, you dirty liar.” “You love Emily as much as I do,” I pointed out, gesturing into the blind dark with my bag of coddies, for O was deeply sentimental when she wasn’t throwing knives. “That don’t make me no bull dagger,” she growled. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me,” I croaked out carefully, “what a bull dagger is?”
Sumpm about that was going too far: O bloomed out of darkness, furious, grabbing at my hair and throat and shedding great wet sobs: “Go eat yourself, you jew jasper-” She could throw a knife but not a punch I guess. Or maybe she didn’t really want to hurt me. I held the jeweled letter opener firmly behind my back and let her bite and scratch. Toothmarks on my neck might make Doctor Zuk… vaporized that idea, think of Emily, Emily! My poor see-through princess who even ate for me, I had to see that she truly loved me, loved me more than she loved any of them, and now where was I when she needed me? I had been gone over an hour. Suddenly the lights came up, with a lurch we started to move, 3B, 2B, 1B, through the basements. O’s face was still in my face, but now we were drenched with fluorescent light. You’d think I wouldn’t be able to see beauty so close up, just hair roots and blackheads and tiny red threads in the eyeballs, but tears webbed her gunky eyelashes like dew in the grass at night and even her sweat was flowers. When the kiss came it was hot and dry, then hot and wet, it sucked in all bodily terrains, a southwestern national park of a kiss and I forgot to notice if it was any different because the other one kissing had just called me a dirty jew.
We hit L for Lobby and the buttonboard came back to life, flashing red and green and buzzing from every floor, a throttled ping ping ping came from the speaker box and “… Buzzey, Dr. Buzzey, code green, six-o-seven, stat. Repeat, Personnel, code red, code red, six-o-seven, stat. Dr. Beasley, Doctor Zuk, code green, six-o-seven, stat”-over and over. We stopped kissing. We stared at each other. We had been in Rohring Rohring long enough to read this sort of audio minestrone with our ears closed. It was trouble with a patient and the patient was Emily, it was fire, fire, fire and the fire was in Emily’s room.
The elevator stopped, the doors rumbled apart and a bunch of emergency guys of a type I had never seen before, in khaki with long schnozzes of gas masks dangling from their shoulders, trooped on like D-Day and pushed us off and went zooming up the shaft, as we stood there in the lobby blinking at each other. The buttons down the sides of all four elevators were pulsing colors like the dashboard of a spaceship, and so many pings pinging at once I thought death death and busted out crying and so did O. “I bet she’s okay,” O said, changing her mind a second later, her eyes huge in their smutty rings, violently sniffing down a sob, for I guess to see me, the Bogeywoman, bawling was almost as scary as death. “She ate a coddy today, innit?-she ain’t ready to die. Just a little smoke in the quipment or sumpm, I betcha.” “I did it, O, it’s my fault-I left my cigs up there with her,” I said, “and my Mr. Peanut lighter.” “Sufferin cheeses,” O said, her face grave, and didn’t even try to say sumpm to make me feel better. “The stairs,” we both blurted, and ran up them two at a time.
Outside Emily’s room was one of those mob scenes like you always see at a downtown Baltimore fire, where the official standers-around, with their uniforms on and their official autos blocking the street, fold their arms and squint sternly at the unofficial standers-around and make sure the nobodies don’t get close enough to see anything good. The nurses were part of this inner circle-all three Corny Norns, Miss Roper, Miss Mursch, Miss Hageboom. O and I ducked behind a medications cart that somebody had abandoned and lay on our bellies and peered between the shelves of snort-sized dixie cups and through the holes between the nurses. Those gas mask emergency guys were gone, which could be a good sign, but Emily was in trouble or this whole crowd of royals would have drained away in two seconds flat.
Now someone rolled one of those portable curtains around the bed, and looking at this was like watching some pitiful amateur puppet show trying to start, elbows dispiritedly punching cloth, flat rubber soles shuffling at the bottom of the curtain, and now and then some big thing accidentally sticking out, bald head of Dr. Buzzey, muscled bicep in green sleeve of Dr. Beasley, potato-shaped butt of Dr. Schock in her sack dress. Then I heard an exotic, familiar squinch, and taking my chin to the floor I saw, on the far side of the bed, the silver sandals of Doctor Zuk, who had just heavily shifted her weight. I heard, illegibly vibrating, the low tobacco-cured C-string of her voice. She was sort of crooning sumpm. My heart drowned.
“You smell any smoke? See any fire?” I whispered to O. “I see nuttin. I don’t even see Emily. Is she here?” “Sure she’s here, she’s in the bed or all the royals wouldn’t be crowding around.” “Sumpm smells funny,” O said, and I smelled it too, like a plastic wading pool lying too long in the sun, or the inside of some cheap toy. “That could make you sick to your stomach. Uh-oh, look.” We saw it glint for a second above the curtain-the delicate boom of one of those rolling IV stands, a bit of the bubbling flask.
“O my godzilla,” I said, “sumpm really bad happened.” “At least she ain’t dead,” O said. “Maybe not, but you don’t get six royals including two regular doctors for a sick stomach.” “I don’t see nuttin black from a fire. Maybe it was a false alarm,” O whispered. “Maybe she did get sick from that coddy,” I agreed, suddenly wanting to be optimistic, “I mean real sick, like toe-main poison sick, I had that coddy two days. I always wondered how they can leave those coddies out like that on the counter, no frigerator no nuttin, little fish things on a metal tray no matter how hot it gets, with the flies and that, right in the hospital snack bar, it’s kinda disgusting if you think about it.” “Aw come on, coddies can’t rot, there’s not even no food in them,” O hissed, “well maybe a little potato or sumpm and just the smell of the grease from fried fish but no fish, that’s why they’re so good.” “They could rot,” I said, “one I forgot to eat rotted in my pocket once. Wooo it stunk.” “Nobody never died from eating no coddy,” O whispered firmly. “What’d you leave her your cigarettes for anyway?”
I looked at O. She was lifting the blueblack dip out of her eye as if to stress the clear sound reason of this question. I shook my head. My scheme for getting Emily to eat sounded so dumb to me now I hated to say. But then I remembered she had smoked and had eaten. My see-through princess loved me best, there was no explaining that. And I knew it was my not coming back that had done this, whatever it was. I shouldn’t have left her sumpm of mine she could hurt herself with, some flammable dreamboxoline, some poison present. I should have made it back to her somehow-I gazed at O-the trashy pirate’s eye-patch of a dip had slipped down over her eye again-I had to admit I had not just been waylaid, I had fallen. I was too starved to be trusted. I moaned to think of the kiss in the elevator and just then Emily moaned from behind the curtain. My moan died and hers, reedy and quavering, was in the air, rising, faraway but clear, like one wolf howling to another on the next mountain top.
I distinctly heard Doctor Zuk say, “Courage, dear, only little bit more,” and then sumpm sailed out of the curtain and flopped on the linoleum. It was pink, brown, black; charred and wet-I stared, my eyes refused to tell me what it was. “Sufferin cheeses, it’s that ugly thing the nurses give her,” O whispered, and then I recognized it, the I CHOCOLATE bathrobe they had just peeled away from her burned skin like skin. My eyes fixed on the maraschino cherry buttons. They weren’t melted. They looked the same as ever, good enough to eat. “She musta set herself on fire,” O said, deeply impressed, “you think she done it on purpose?”
“Listen. I gotta go in there,” I said, “I promised her I’d come back-with these-” I pulled the oil-spotted bag of coddies out of the bib of my overalls. I’d been lying on them. “I gotta show her. I told her I could get in there anytime and I always could.” I gave O a deep, deep look, all the way to the black bottoms of her black-ringed eyes, sorta trying to hypnotize her to come around. I mean, I fell and was a half-baked person but she fell too and was a dangerous person, and she wasn’t even truly buggy, no more than I was. “I’ll help you,” she said.
And without waiting another second, she did-jumped up and sleepwalked (I do a good coma, don’t I?) in her gold lamé ballet slippers, straight for the doorway of Emily’s room, sticking her arms out in front of her like the night of the living dead and chanting “High rat a dreambutton flirty eat a job” or some other line of comic-book buggy. It wouldn’t have convinced a Bug Motel or anyone who really knew her, but the nurses, Hageboom, Roper and Mursch, swooped down on her like buzzards and flapped away with her and I belly-crawled across the hall to Emily’s door and ducked under the curtain with the coddy bag in my teeth.
They grabbed me as soon as I jumped up but I was ready for them and wrapped my arms and legs around the metal bed corner and yelled, “Look, Em, I got it.” But of course as soon as I opened my mouth the coddy bag fell onto Emily with a plump. I can only thank godzilla she didn’t scream when the coddy bag touched her or I’d have died of shame. Why didn’t she scream? She looked so strange, so shiny, such an odd waxed paper color, but what did I expect? She was naked I think but lay in a sort of black rubber wrapper full of foam, like a spittlebug in a leaf, with her little white throat just showing. She must have had plenty of morphine or sumpm. I guess they were getting ready to move her. She looked up dreamily, she was awake, half-awake, she saw me and smiled that queer bug smile on top of her rotten bucked teeth and I’m ashamed to say I cared more about that than if she would live. “It’s me, the Bogeywoman. I was here,” I said, “don’t forget.”
All this while the royals had been pulling on the back of my overalls and now my arms and legs turned gimp and let go of the bed. I slumped down on the floor and bawled. It was too steep a fall. I had barely had time to conceive of myself as a dreambox mechanic before I had as good as killed somebody. Besides, I loved my see-through princess and was afraid I would never see her again. How much could one little body take? I buried my face in my hands, but in the dark I kept seeing old Emily resolutely igniting the bottom of that cheesy I CHOCOLATE bathrobe, so I opened my eyes again. After a moment I became aware I was looking at sumpm dreadfully familiar. It was my Mr. Peanut cigarette lighter, lying in the wrinkled, venous hand of Doctor Zuk. (Her hands were pretty shockingly decrepit, the one part of her that looked her age.)
She was holding it so only I would see it, but see it I must, since it was all of five inches from my nose. In fact in my first operatic rush of recognition I feared she would set my hair on fire, or singe my face. I knew I deserved it. She towered above me, peering down at me with an undetached queenly rigor that was totally untypical of the average dreambox mechanic at Rohring Rohring, and besides setting off a little alarm in the covert conservatism that’s a part of every mental patient, she was scaring me to death. Her nylons glowed electrically on top of those soccer player’s shins and calves. I had the sensation I was clinging to her chiseled kneecaps, although I was just kneeling there, doing no such thing, and nobody else would have even noticed except-I was convinced-Doctor Zuk-Madame Zuk-herself. Her I clearly saw considering whether to kick me off of her ankles into the gutter. “What you think you are doing?” she hissed, and if Emily hadn’t been lying there, I could tell she would be shouting. “What you can mean with this unacceptable behavior that might further injure your friend? Unacceptable! Unacceptable!” she spat. “Please will you be my dreambox mechanic?” I blurted. “I know it’s my fault that Emily lit herself on fire. I don’t care if I live or die, in fact I hope I do die if you won’t be my dreambox mechanic.” She stared down at me. She was not as tall as she looked, but now she seemed to duck her head to keep from butting the ceiling. “You are thinking to kill yourself? The world will go on without you, you know, Miss Bogeywoman. Now, please to get out immediately,” she said. Her ugly, ringless hand pointed me to the door.