I Blab to Foofer
AND HE BLABS BACK
“So, er, uh,” I inquired, “just exactly what is that Doctor Zuk person, anyhow?” Foofer looked pained. He took off his glasses, laid them carefully in his lap, and touched the shiny bulges under each eye with a green silk handkerchief. “Vot do you mean by vot?” he asked. “Unh-unh, Doc,” I wagged a finger at him, “still my question.” “You must narrow your question. I cannot answer a question the size of seven worlds.” “O all right,” said I.
For, whatever I meant by vot, this is how we proceeded now: by the fishiest bughouse decorums. Even I was scandalized by what the dreambox mechanics were letting me get away with these days. I had a good mind to write myself a letter about it, alerting me to the dark clinical consequences, but perhaps I wouldn’t have understood. And then I’d have had the trouble, for nothing, of smuggling the thing into Rohring Rohring, where of course the mental patients’ mail got read. (Somewhere Royal Censors were busily at work.)
So what the hump. I went along with it. I was a grown-up woman now. I had sniffed the truth: The rewards for playing ball with the royals were not bobkes. This way I could see Doctor Zuk when I wanted, even though it gave me a kind of spongy feeling in my guts to see her, to say nothing of calling her up at the number she had given me, turned out it was a little cellophane square at the top of one of those new medical residences that tower over the old hospital dome like a bunch of giant Krispies boxes. I could see her window from my window, and the candid little eyebrow of her naked balcony. She could have seen my bars, if she had looked.
And listen to this, for two weeks we even had walky-talkies. For my birthday I charged a pair to Merlin at Charlie Rudo’s, fifty dollars. Madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse took one “for experiment” and we talked in the middle of the night when she was on call in some distant part of the bughouse. The static was terrible, like talking through a tunnel of hair on fire, and the whole time I could hear my gopher brain cells popping up and whistling alarms. Who are you and what do you want with me, I shouted into the airwaves when they whited out everything and I was sure she couldn’t hear me. We roared back and forth about the mushrooms in the courtyard, qu. whether poisonous or hallucinogenic, more Weird Tales of the Nurses and the serious prospect of spying as a future profession. (Bad for character, Zuk shouted. What did she know about spies? But somehow I wasn’t surprised.) Who are you, who made you, why are you here? I hollered. Then thank godzilla they broke-those mustard-yellow rubber walky-talkies from Charlie Rudo’s I mean. All I can say is, if I’d been at the big case pow-wows the royals were having about Zuk and me and our “special friendship,” I’d have planted my feet and said no way.
“What I mean by what-well, like, what does that Zuk person do for a living? Is she a genuine dreambox mechanic or not?”
Foofer’s thumbnail zissed along his watch chain. His baggy jaw faintly shook. His eye slid towards the door, against resistance, like a grape swimming in jello. I knew he was glad no classical dreambox analyst was listening in, outside of himself, of course. “You would like to zink she is not a genuine psychiatrist?” he finally hissed. “Unh-unh, Doc, you get a question, I get a question,” I said, for that was our deal. Of course he didn’t have to answer and if I asked sumpm way out of bounds, like about another mental patient, he stared into air and the question wafted away, forfeit. But Doctor Zuk was a striped area, not a mental patient. Also, she was the one thing I wanted to talk about. The hope to talk to Zuk, or about Zuk, was the reason I was talking to Foofer at all.
“May I compliment you to your hair, Ursula?” Foofer said, and his eye drifted to his watch, but this was not a question. He was stalling for time. “How gold it shines.” I smiled. I had begun to wash my hair-after four or five times it had come out lighter than I had any right to expect. I had even attempted to wash my overalls, but they disintegrated upon contact with water. For the three hours it took me to scare up a city-solo pass and shop for new ones, I had had to put on the pink party dress that Tuney had thrown in for nothing, which, even worn with hospital flip-flops, went down in case history as the first sighting of my progress.
For we were progressing, Foofer and I, by unkosher byways and rules not according to Hoyle, but we were progressing. Anyone could see it, I was getting better. I put on shoes. I practiced sedulously on my pilfered surgical catgut and leg-brace-plus-puke-basin ukulele, with others and alone. I began to talk to Foofer-so what if every other thing I said curled up at the end in a question mark? Still I was getting better; therefore, the classical types went along with it, even as they exchanged dark looks. Some of it made my own furtively conservative mental patient’s pencil-straight hair stand on end, but I really couldn’t blame them. The silent treatment had worked on Foofer, beyond I was going to say my wildest hopes, except that back then I had no hopes. A hopeless case, that was just it, everyone had said so-even the famous Foofer could do nothing. Therefore I was nobody’s fault. They looked away. They went along with the experiment, once they were sure nothing would work. But then it did work.
I was getting better, so much better they were all taken in, royals and peons alike. I was a mental peon myself, of course, but a little less mental, now, than before. All at once I had about me, no denying it, some little smack of royalty. I had progressed. As Zuk put it: “Who you think you are now? You are so full of yourself and for why? Because czar’s horse looked at you. So what! Big deal! So Zuk likes you a little! You are still greedy dirty baby, not so, Miss Bogey?” All the same I could tell she was proud.
I cleared my throat and began again. “So is Doctor Zuk a dreambox mechanic or a writer or a foreign bigwig on some kinda mission or what is she?” I asked, and Foofer settled himself like a sandbag, looking down from his plump dignity upon the swirling waters: “Vy is zis woman of interest to you?” he prefaced hopelessly. It was not a question. We were off at last.
“Z’case of Zuk is unique in many, perhaps in all, respects…” he began. “She is z’chief professional in her field in the country where she is coming from, but, ennhh,” his pudgy white hands clasped one another this way and that way, “ennhh, it is a country in which mental science after Sigmund Food, that is, mental science as one knows it in z’Vest, is looked on wiz-?-” he shrugged “utmost suspicion? fear? So trained professionals are few, very few… She is z’chief… not only z’chief… I believe the only…” He sank into his chair, he could not go on. “What country?” I whispered. He was silent. State secret, I inferred. We exchanged what I took for a meaning glance. “Your question, Doc,” I reminded him, and he instantly blurted out again, startling me: “Vy is zis woman of interest to you?” “I… like her hair,” I lied weakly. I had been caught unprepared. But then I was off right behind him.
(You are grown-up woman, Zuk had said, talk to Feuffer, give him that-you want neighborhood pass? You want me for psychiatrist? This place is howyousay pushover for intelligent nut like you… At first, since blab to Foofer I must, I lied. The world-famous diagnostician set to work; he improvised: Let us suppose you may be any zing but human, Ursie, any zing at all you like, vot do you choose? I stared at the fluorescent light sizzling like an egg on his bald crown. I couldn’t think of a single thing. I’d want to be your hair oil, Doc, to be on top of you and go all around with you and see down inside the dreambox what you’re really thinking. And hear what you say about me when I’m not there, especially to Zuk, and then to jump over and be her hair oil-good godzilla what was I saying-but that was how it always went. I’d think I was telling the biggest whopper in the world and as soon as I said it, it had that telltale ruby glow of truth in its belly, like a snake that swallowed a flashlight. I’d try some fancy mouthwork to hide it, just choking, Doc, er, I mean, joking-caught even more red-bellied. Ah what the hump I thought, in that case pile it on, let er fly, serve it up steaming, that’s what I did, and by godzilla I saw that every confession had Jughead ears, I mean those telltale handles of a lie sticking out, even when it was gospel. So shoot! what the hump! From then on, anything went…)
“I like her hedgehoggy titanium hair, you know how it looks, not too mothery, kinda concentration camp chic, with spokes sticking out like the Statue of Liberty, only made out of gray matter, like some idea she had just blew her brains out from the inside…” “You are saying you admire Doktor Zuk for her beauty? Or for that she is a woman of ideas?” “My question,” I reminded him. “Is she famous?” “Hah!” Foofer exploded. (Sometimes these days I honestly feared for his senses.) “Vot is fame? If you alone are dreambox repair in a hundred and sixty thousand square kilometers, that is fame? If you are commissar of mental science, and nomad chieftains who hid you during the purge bring you white Gamaschen and call you daughter of moon, that is fame?” “Is that a question?” I asked, my heart banging in my throat. “No,” he growled. I stared out the window. A fly-sized airplane zipped noiselessly across the sky. “A hundred and sixty thousand kilometers… daughter of moon,” I whispered, tasting them on my tongue. “Why z’devil you don’t ask her yourself, if you are such good friends?” he burst out. I looked at him curiously. “I do ask her, she won’t answer anything,” I said. Grrr his knuckles went up into his teeth, but then he petted his amber cravat, composing himself.
HELP! MY CHILD IS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN
Of course as soon as I knew there was a book by Zuk, especially a book with a title like that, I schemed to get hold of it. Fact was, sneaking into the royal library at Rohring Rohring and pilfering books with weird pictures was one of the oldest missions of the Bug Motels, and one of the easiest. The door stood always open, the “librarian” was a fogbound old lady from the hospital auxiliary, and the stacks made ideal tunnels for alien penetration.
All the same I could tell after reading one page it was a rotten book, with nothing good to say about anybody, not teenagers, not fathers, not mothers, not dreambox mechanics, nobody-and no story, no heroine, no freaks of nature, definitely no weird pictures. What a letdown after a title like that! I’d have asked for my money back if I’d paid for the thing.
As it turned out I only got to read one page-page 63, the one I’d torn out because it had THOMAS HARE ROHRING AND EUGENIA O. ROHRING PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC STAFF LIBRARY stamped on it. I had just been crumpling it up in a ball to get rid of it when Foofer came around the corner of Youth and Adolescence and snatched the book out of my hands. “Why is zis woman of interest to you?” he spluttered, and chased me out of the library.
I remember a phrase or two. It went sumpm like this:
doing exactly what their age requires of them in turning into monsters, that is to say, unbearable people or their parents would never have the courage to wish them gone, and they themselves would never have the stupidity who have never worked a day in their lives and haven’t any real fired in ten minutes for slacking exactly as it should be they are right to loathe their parents equally right to loathe them
Well! that’s about enough of that, I thought, considered lining the sound hole of my brand-new pukelele with the thing, but on second thought, threw it the oink away.
BUG MOTELS IN CONCERT
Pipette, test-tube & beaker glockenspiel,
bed-panioforte…
Egbert Stein
(President)
Vocals,
catgut puke basin & leg brace ukulele…
Ursie “The Bogeywoman” Koderer
(Secretary)
Vocals,
speculum castanets,
breathometer pings,
sterilizer-top steel drum,
toilet-bowl float mariachis,
other assorted noise…
O
(Treasurer)
Vocals,
scrub tub bass…
Dion
(Sergeant-at-Arms)
Vocals,
PVC pipe kazoo,
penny whistle…
Emily Nix Peabody
(Vice President in absentia)
Screeches,
mumbles,
falsetto,
sirens,
miscellaneous industrial sound effects…
Mrs. Wilmot
(Member ad libitum)
HOW LOVE GOT US OUT OF THERE
Though behind ourselves in every other way, as rockers we Bug Motels were ahead of ourselves, or our time, or at least far out in front of the sagging royals, and we intended to stay there, up around the bend where they had found us, or sent us. We were getting better, every one of us, at least there were signs. Long ago on his druggie’s endless wanderings, when he used to pace the corridors beaming every deadend wall and locked door with his x-ray eyeballs, Bertie had found the Bug Motels a clubhouse, NO ROYALS ALLOWED it said on the door-we had taped that over the old sign that said NEUROPATHOLOGY. Bertie, now happily reunited to his legal moniker Egbert since (he thought) it had a certain musical ton, had turned up this weensy surgical amphitheater on the second floor, locked up tight so no mental patient of our day would even think of the kind of procedure that probably went on there once upon a time. But we liked it exactly because of that, because of the sick dream of skull tops sawed off like the ends of hairy coconuts and ice-cream scoop brains glistening wetly under their lids. Center stage down front was a dusty American flag and, in front of it, no lie-down table but a sit-up chair like a barber chair; here the poor wretch must have sat with the top of her head flipped open; here (we shuddered) must have clicked the doctors’ knives, forks and spoons to put an end to that mental peon’s troubles for good. And so after Bertie organized us a key we sneaked downstairs and took turns sitting in the barber chair, playing medical experiment, tongues hanging out, x’s in our eyes. We sat in the student desks around the barber chair and rested our medical instruments on the stomach-shaped desktops and played bughouse music. We were trying to fool around as much as we could before the royals threw us out. But they never did throw us out.
“Keeps yall off the street,” Reggie Blanchard joked and that was more or less the line the royals took on the Bug Motels and their “funny-farmyard noises,” which were, in fact, to the surprise of everyone, us as much as them, eerily beautiful and as light-fingered and sparsely knotted one to the other as audible cobwebs.
Then everybody got into it. By now hardly a day passed without somebody’s nurse escort or dreambox mechanic smuggling us a peculiarly melodious surgical instrument or scrap of hospital plumbing. But we Bug Motels didn’t take just anything. Love will get us out of here, we sang, but how to know it was love when we heard it tinkle or hiss? We had to listen hard. O had charge of a fleet of noisemakers not one of which percussed above a violent whisper.
O in song had a slow gluey quaver to her spooky-flute, a faintly wobbling vibrato deep in the gut of it like near-boiling gumbo, and, maybe to go along with the speculum castanets, she dug up a mantilla you could have sung Carmen in, webbed herself in red and black fishnet, stuck sequin beauty spots on her face and, not exactly flounced, more like lurked, lurked darkly around in this getup, staring at all of us unforgivingly out of the bottoms of her eyes. Her song, written by me, Bogeywoman, went:
O’S SONG
Doobee doobee dubio
Doowop welladay
Hugga bugga yumma yum
How do you like your buggers done
Boiled in bug juice, boiled in rum
Says the Queen of the Cannibal Islands
Love love
Love will get you out of here.
Who were we Bug Motels now? Come to find out inside our old confusion was fusion, anyway Egbert said so-fusion and conk. “They drop the k cause it reminds every mental patient that he is king, king of his own conk. Conk ya see is an old American negro word for the dreambox or a hairdo on top of it,” Egbert explained. This was the missionary Egbert at the peak of his conk-version. “You probably noticed, Bug Motels, how we are getting our heads together playing this music? We are conk-neck-ting our conks to our bodies like yesterday we connected our gut strings to our instruments and, whaddaya know, come to find out Love will get you outa here. Like it says in the weird kinda tunes the Bogeywoman writes for us.” (Egbert gave my shoulder a fond little punch, and I saw that O saw. I smiled weakly at her.)
Out of the bottoms of her eyes O peered at Egbert when he talked of love, to find out if he meant her. He didn’t, but still he was the one she looked at whenever she sang. She was off into labyrinths of twisted love for this bughouse Orpheus and his sawed-off-sneaker sandals and the sweaty prongs of dark hair sticking out around his ears and his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses that bounced on his nose whenever he dabbed at the keys with his hammers. She was staring out of the bottoms of her eyes at Egbert’s skinny, shiny, piecrust-crimper spine where it curled out of his tee shirt. He didn’t know she was there. That’s what she liked in a fuddy, he should be so absorbed in The Importance of what he was doing he didn’t know she was there. When a fuddy started tryna please a girl it got repulsive fast, well that’s what O said anyhow.
I was wondering if she still loved me, loved me at the same time she loved Egbert, and was I any better off if she did. He hunched in that miserly way over his homemade keyboards, plinking out tiny unearthly bug trails of notes, microscopic music-box rolls, jerky tunes, spastic countertunes, faint and far far away. Dion nodded to the beat. He went for all that love stuff and moreover couldn’t wait to love himself in a baby-blue spangled tux and kick in unison, if he could get anybody else to kick with him. His baritone was best bopping up and down the stave in round monosyllables like bum and boo. His song, composed by himself, went:
DION’S SONG
There was a bug lived in a zoo
It bugged him havin nuttin to do
bum bum bum di boo boo boo
Love will get you out of there
Reggie helped him with the second verse:
Fee fi fo fee fi fo fo
Hello? Say who? Don’t live here no mo.
Love has got him outahere
Outahere.
Rich bug poor bug buggerman thief
Bug mechanic Winnebuggo chief
Love will get you out of there
Only love will get you out
of
there.
The Regicide hung with us down in our surgical amphitheater as often as he could get off the mop. He fronted as our chaperone, as usual, but nowadays we prized his counsel, for his street corner doo-wop experience went deep. The refrain of course was from me, Bogeywoman.
You could see it in the scared respectful eyes of our dreambox mechanics: our music had made it beyond their usual categories, maybe even come bubbling up from someplace prior to them-the tar pits or the mysteries or sumpm. Anyhow they shoved over, the royals. Weren’t we getting better?
I liked Egbert myself, now that he was getting better. His skinny body looked good hunching over his bed-panioforte like a man overboard clambering onto a life buoy. As a Bug Motel, I admired him. After fifteen minutes fooling with the object, he could play anything, beef bones, bottle caps, orthodontic braces, PVC pipe with the plumbing code still on it. He sang the song I rustled up for him, although it was square as a barn door and old as the itch and he suspected it was filched from somewhere, which it was.
EGBERT’S SONG
And this will pass for music when nobuggy else is near,
The bug song for singing, the bug song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the bughouse that screeches and the bughouse choir.
“Where you come up with them complexicated vocabules, Bogeywoman?” the Regicide, who was visiting, wished to know. “She has plagiarized Mother Goose and God and a few other bigwigs,” Egbert explained smoothly, “chops em up and conk-nects em all together. Don’t let it go to your conk,” he warned me.
I wondered where Egbert had gotten that love idea all of a sudden and it was easy to ask him because we two were the grinds among the Bug Motels. All the livelong summer’s day the two of us were plinking and strumming down the clubhouse when pretty soon the rest of em got sick of it and went back to playing O Hell for dimes and quarters at their old table in the dayroom. Egbert and me saw The Importance. Of course O didn’t see The Importance, but she saw us seeing it. She gazed and gazed at the pair of us out of the bottoms of her eyes.
Still, even O had to be alone sometimes; first thing every morning she had to make up her eyes to their usual mine disaster hugeness and scariness, and that took maybe an hour. At nine o’clock in the morning, Egbert and me were already plucking and twanging away in our clubhouse that had NO ROYALS ALLOWED taped over NEUROPATHOLOGY on the door. Our snack bar coffees were steaming, our Kools lay fuming on our armrests, and I asked Egbert: “Where’s this love stuff coming from? Used to be it was all D.O.A.P. with you, Egbert, and now it’s love.” Naturally I suspected that he, like me, had a Doctor Zuk behind it all, a secret passion moving everything it wasn’t crushing. Come to think of it-I narrowed my eyes at him-maybe he’d fallen for Zuk himself. Of course it had to be madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse! I mean, who else in this fuddy bughouse was worth it?
“Naw, it was always love,” Egbert smiled up at me from tightening the endpin on some soundboard. “I just didn’t know back then what I was hungry for. I used to chase all day after D.O.A.P. and now I run after-better stuff. Higher stuff.” “Like-royal stuff?” I asked. “Royal stuff?” he echoed, looking at me conk-fusedly. He lifted the drain pan manjocello or gourdolin or whatever it was he was tuning, laid it on his desktop and stroked it sweetly. “See, when you track that D.O.A.P. all over the city it’s love, Ursie, but when you cop that D.O.A.P. and shoot that D.O.A.P., it’s nowhere, man, you’re right back where you started. But real love,” he turned his smiling face up at me and the fluorescent lighting starred all his very straight teeth, “love takes you up a level.” “Ya mean like-to the seventh floor?” That’s where the royals had their offices. “Hump no, Ursie. You don’t get it, do you?” I shook my head. Who cared what love was? Who do you love, that’s what I wanted to know, but I hadn’t figured out how to put the question.
“You know, I was a doper before I was even born and I still am and that’s how I wound up in the bughouse and got in the Bug Motels and met you,” Egbert said. “My Unkie Jerry told my old man and old lady to put me in this place and I cussed the hump out of all of em but now I see they were right. My Unkie Jerry’s an obstetrician. He’s the one who was always telling me, Bertie, get off that shit! Be a producer not a consumer! But you know, since he delivered me, he was the first one pumping it in.” “Um, er, uh, pumping what in? Whaddaya mean you were a doper before you were even born?” I inquired, half curious half squeamish to hear this story. “Pinky, that’s my mom, when she’s pregnant with me she has to be the hippest thing in motherdom, the most in the know, so she goes through La Mayonnaise or however you call that training, but when the day came, no matter how natural she breathed I wouldn’t come out until they put some D.O.A.P. in her. So there you are, that’s why I say I was a junkie before the Steins ever got hold of me.” “Aw quit bragging,” I laughed. “No, man, I mean it, this sounds funny but I swear I can sorta remember it. I’m squinting down the rabbit-hole and see Unkie Jerry standing there in the light at the end of the tunnel, in his white coat. Come on, son! he says, Be a producer. Not a consumer! He’s got this little blue starter pistol sticking straight up in the air, and it goes BANG! Sumpm about him got on my nerves, man. I wouldn’t budge.” “You remember all that?” I said doubtfully. “Sure! Then in comes this beautiful toasted-almond-color nurse carrying a little ampule and a big syringe. Hello junior, she says, I got sumpm here I bet you like, and shoots up Pinky, and bingo, I came, soon as the stuff was in her, see? So I figure if it was just me I didn’t even want to be born. Only the idea there was D.O.A.P. out there could move me.”
“I dig,” I said. I liked Egbert. I mean, we were in the bughouse, where they’re always tryna get you to rat on your parents. I had to admire him for stealing the blame for his own bughood, even if he had to sneak back into the womb to do it. “Say, are you rolling in dough, Egbert?” I asked. I remembered that the concert house across from the B &O was the Stein, the third floor where Emily got wedged in the laundry chute was the Stein Otolaryn-gological Institute, the Stein Cartography Collection on the high mezzanine of the downtown library was a hot contender in my search for the primo launching pad in the city for offing myself to a greasespot, all the most tubercular-looking blue period funambules were in the Stein Wing at the art museum-“You met Egbert and Pinky,” Egbert said, “if they ate their dough with a knife and fork it still wouldn’t run out. They’re so godzilla rich they don’t do anything. They run the foundation, that’s about it.” “The foundation?” “For draining off the family money… But I think I’m more like Unkie Jerry, I gotta do sumpm.
“You know, Ursie, some people-not you-” he waved his hand, breezily exempting me, “need sumpm to chase after, and I’m one of em. I need sumpm to do, some kinda thing outside of a person. D.O.A.P. takes care of all that. When you’re a junkie you know what you’re looking for all day long-you’re looking for stuff. That’s why love is the same as D.O.A.P., it gives you some kinda half a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” he added-where had I heard that before?
“Hey, that’s what O says about love,” I snuck in. “Does she?” Egbert yawned. Not that I was trying to sic her on him, I even kinda missed the life-or-death thrills and chills of her amorous persecution, but it came down to this: better him than me. “Speaking of O…” I said. “Back off, it’s hopeless, Ursie,” Bertie said gently, “I’m in love already. Hey, I know the one I love is, er, funny about fuddies, but we’re both in the Bug Motels and that’s love too. Draining music out of death supplies is a high form of love, man. That’s what we do. She sees The Importance…”
He didn’t dare look up from his bed-panioforte. I felt the heat rush up to my ears, for that could only be me he was describing. So he knew I was funny about fuddies. If he had divined, who else was hot on my trail? I didn’t mind his love so much: Like I said he looked kind of sweet hunched over his keyboards, and not much of a fuddy at all, maybe a hundred and five girly pounds with sharp little hipbones barely holding up his pants. He looked like a stiff breeze would flatten him, I mean I couldn’t see him and O at all, but, who knows, these musical wizards have fingering, and they see The Importance. If he had to love a Bug Motel, it came down to this: better her than me.
“O…” I opened my mouth. “O… O…” I shut it again and looked hard at the flagpole, that little tent of stars and stripes behind the barber chair, for I had just spotted a pair of gold lamé ballet slippers at the bottom of it. O was among us. Egbert followed the dotted line of my gaze and I saw he saw. What had we said that might egg on a murderess? It seemed like every word of love could have stuck to O as well as to me. Was O funny about fuddies?-well who wasn’t? And O of all people had to stop thinking about men that way. Was O in the Bug Motels? Did O make bughouse music? I had the words but she had the tubes, the spooky-flute and the gumbo wobble. And as for who saw The Importance: what girlgoyle thinks herself a lightweight? not even Tinkerbell. We ought to be safe, Egbert and me, but the American flag was muttering under its breath.
There was one way out of this fix: “… a three and a four and a…” I burst into song.
Shananah so what shazaam
Ma nishtanah hullo whozat?
Meeka mooka boppaloo adonoy
So what shazaam bray pree hagofen
The words were pure foam off the top of my head, but I knew I had never sung so well. Egbert outdid himself falling in with this doggerel. His double-jointed thumbs on the bed-panioforte dribbled out their usual tender monkey dissonances, his pinkies whisked the jingles on a distant tambourine.
And then I caught wind of sumpm else: O oowooing from inside the Stars and Stripes, not mad anymore but sobbing like the lost soul of America she really was. How come she hadn’t jumped me on the general suspicion, as was her habit? I gazed at the flag in perplexity, and right away I saw a certain roundness behind the thirteen colonies where her belly was. Yes, O had been unusually zaftig lately, her momps as a matter of fact had left even Mary Hartline’s in the dust, good godzilla could she be
“You are angels from heaven for the world! My god, where you have learned to make music like that, what nobody can teach-”
In rolled Doctor Zuk, and not only Doctor Zuk, for she had in her hands the wheelchair handles of Emily Nix Peabody.
It was the first I had seen of my see-through princess in months. So much had happened since I burned her up in her I CHOCOLATE bathrobe that a different me struggled to my feet to get a look at her. And of course it was a different Emily. Fatter, way fatter, and it wasn’t just the padding she was wrapped in. Her arms stuck out over the sides of her wheelchair like a blow-up doll’s, each one ending in five gauze sausages. Her thighs were mummied up too and propped wide, but on the other side of her knees her regular old shins and feet dangled, in her regular old dirty white socks and scabby Mary Janes. Her face was puffy, still Emily but too tired to be ugly-cute anymore. She looked plain and sad. When she saw me her beaky little top lip poked out in the old way and her bucked teeth showed, but I wasn’t so sure she was glad to see me. “Hey Em, how ya doing,” I whispered. “Not so good,” she whispered back, the colorless fringes of her tapwater-blue eyes gummed up with tears, and she looked away.
Lemme tell you, such a negative report of herself from Miss Dying Popularity, the nurses’ pet, the Bug Motel most prized for her guts, was a shock and my jaw dropped and I didn’t know what to say. “You look fatter,” I finally observed, “that ain’t bad.” “Miss Peabody is doing better in highest degree,” Doctor Zuk announced. “She will soon be well.” Emily sniffed mightily. “What is wrong, my dear?” Zuk asked, peering into Emily’s face; now even she seemed puzzled. “They played so purty,” Emily said. “Yes indeed, and so shall you,” Zuk said heartily, “what I have promised? why are we here?” But Emily didn’t answer and in a moment madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse leaned over with a handkerchief and wiped her nose, from which a curtain of green snot had descended. “What I have promised, eh?” she soothed, polishing Emily’s little freckled cocktail onion of a nose, flashing her eyes angrily at me over Emily’s head. What did I do, I almost asked, but what kinda question was that, when Emily sat there like Europe in ruins? “You shall sing, you shall play,” Zuk boomed like a prophetess.
All the same I didn’t like that, Zuk telling Emily and all the world that any girl could be a rock star if she only tried. “You could hum along,” I told Emily, and Zuk gave me a look that said Monster, despair, you shall never have me or be me.
But come to think of it Emily could sing, I suddenly recalled, sing, yes, like a little girl, but not just any little girl, the little girl, the fabulous girlgoyle of myth and legend, that is, a high voice straight as a pencil that doesn’t quite land on the blue rule it’s aiming for but pierces to the numbest cochlea… We could use that in the Bug Motels and in fact Emily was a Bug Motel, she had always been a Bug Motel, what was I thinking of?
“Um, er, uh, maybe you can sing after all,” I said. “Soon’s you pick up the tune.” “I couldn’t never make up no wacky words like that,” Emily was sniffling. “Whaddaya mean,” I argued, trying not to look as frog-proud of my word salad as I naturally was, “you just hold your mouth open and the bugs swim out. You’re in the bughouse, right? There’s always some in there.” “Unh-unh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,” Emily whined. It was like her fabulous girlgoyle nerve had burned up with her fingers.
“Hey, you don’t need a song. I got a song for you, Emily. I got songs for everybody,” I bragged. “Quiet, is enough from you, Miss Bogeywoman,” madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse had the cheek to cut me off in my own clubhouse, NO ROYALS ALLOWED, and then she turned to Egbert: “Mr. Stein, you have instrument for Miss Peabody?” “It’s around here somewhere,” Bertie mumbled. I could hardly believe my ears-the two of em had schemed behind my back! Bertie bent down and thrashed around in the big black doctor’s bag he used for his music stuff. “Egbert plays even gooder than Ursie,” Emily commented helpfully. She was mad at me, not for setting her on fire of course but for forgetting to save her place in the Bug Motels.
Meanwhile Bertie pulled out this wire thing made of godzilla knows what orthopedic appliances and set it on Emily’s head. It looked like the halo from a Sunday school play, only with one rakish antenna spronging out of it and curling around into Emily’s face-some kinda clear plastic laboratory-pipe kazoo or whistle or sumpm was bobbing there at the end of it. Bla-a-a-at! Wouldn’t you know she got a pure A out of it the first time she tried.
Well I had never felt so rudely put in my place in my life but as it was madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse who had put me there, I wouldn’t give up so easily. “Hey, Em, wanna hear my song?” I fired off, “even though yours is better?” Emily stopped blowing, the wastewater whistle dangled there patiently in its off-the-eyebrows orbit, and she said with a sick little smile, “Yeah, sure, Ursie.” “We have heard your song,” Zuk intervened coldly, “it is very fine song, like we told you once already, but now is time for somebody else.” Exactly when she put on these democratic airs, Doctor Zuk was the royalest royal of them all. “Ahem, NO ROYALS ALLOWED,” I quoted, pointing to the hand-lettered sign thumbtacked over NEUROPATHOLOGY. “Will you please shut up and let Emily play, Ursie,” Bertie said to me. I stared at him in disbelief. He was a whole new person, he was getting better, he was getting even better than me. I didn’t like that. Now that he was in love with me I could see he meant to jack me up to the highest standards. I stuck out my chin and announced: “That last tune was just an improv. I got my own song, everybody gets a song.” “Give Em a turn now. We all know you’re the best,” Egbert said. Dead silence after that, since everybody knew who was really the best. They all stared at me, waiting for me to be a better person. “I ain’t the best, you are and you know it,” I caved in, and was ready to lay my pukelele down or even play humble backup when Emily said, “I got nuttin to sing yet, honest, all-a-youse. Whyncha let Ursie go first.” They looked at each other, shrugging. What could they do? Hah!
Instead of my own ditty, I tuned up my puke and sang
EMILY’S SONG
Because I couldn’t stop for lunch,
It kindly stopped for me.
The van read PIZZAS BY HASSAN
FAST FREE DELIVERY
It’s two weeks later now and I’m
No fatter than the day
I started eating pizza
To postpone mortality.
It’s two years later now and I’m
Still tryna put away
That eighteen-inch cold pizza
Known as immortality.
“I think I heard that song before,” said O, wrinkling up her nose. She was always poking that nose into some ragged anthology in the dayroom, maybe she really smelled a rat. “Heh-heh, I don’t think so,” I muttered, but then my eye fell on Zuk. Her ugly hands were on her hips and her dark eyes flashed. “You have steal Miss Peabody’s song,” she said, “I am shocked.” “No I didn’t,” I said uncomfortably, “I just borrowed it.” True, I had sung Emily’s words to O Susanna in my sloppy haste. Probably that gave away my larceny even to a dreambox mechanic from Outer Hotzeplotz. Yes, all at once I was sure that even in Outer Hotzeplotz, third graders sang “O Susanna!” the same way we sang “La Cucaracha” and “Song of the Volga Boatmen” at P.S. 149. I turned red. “Greedy, greedy girl,” Doctor Zuk rolled her guttural r’s at me, “what I will do with you? Look what you have done,” and she pointed down at gauze-upholstered little Miss Peabody, refusal was her middle name. Emily had managed to twist her face into her wheelchair so all I could see was the tangled back of her head.
I saw I’d better do sumpm for Emily or Zuk would be disgusted with me for weeks. “Hey Em.” She turned back around and she was a puzzle piece of sad lumps around her face, like all Bug Motels when they wonder how they fit in. But the thing about puzzle pieces is, you can turn them. “Say Em,” I said, “I made up that song just for you and if you don’t like it, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” And my neck, it’s a pretty long neck, wilted like a strip of bacon. I got so low and depressed that I even banged my chin on my pukelele, which played a weird, going-nowhere, broken-down fence gate of a chord. Then she had to do sumpm for me, see. Then she fit in again. “That ain’t it, Ursie, I love that song,” she said nobly. “It was my best,” I sniffled.
I slid a glance over at Doctor Zuk to see if she bought it. I don’t think so. Her eyes glowed down at me like nuggets of greenblack kryptonite or sumpm. “You are good little horse thief,” she said to me without smiling. “So-what shall be punishment of Bogeywoman, Miss Peabody? She must be punished. You may choose.”
“Whatcha gonna punish her for?” Emily asked in genuine consternation. “For too big will,” Doctor Zuk replied, “she eats too much, she talks too much, she sings too much, she takes whole room and lives only little bit for somebody else.” “She wrote me that purty song,” Emily pointed out. Doctor Zuk smirked knowingly behind Emily, but only for my benefit. “At everything, everything she touches, Miss Bogeywoman is good,” Doctor Zuk agreed, “but she can be better. So what is right punishment for her?” Emily looked around for some kind of help, her grave little Joan of Arc eyes gone watery, almost scared now. “Make her sing her own ugly song,” I whispered in Emily’s ear. “Make her sing her own ugly song,” Emily repeated in relief. “Your song, please,” Doctor Zuk ordered. She was furious. Her eyebrows arched, her eyelids descended; she was imperially bored. “It’s ugly,” I warned em. “I hope is ugly, since you have steal show from Miss Peabody,” Doctor Zuk said, “now please to get it over.”
MY SONG
Bugs Baloney, who’s a phony?
The fat begins to fry
Nobody home but the telephony
Who’d call a goyle like I?
Doowop dwop dead
The blind eat many a fly
Every slave will have a slave
Why not you and I
It was ugly all right, hungry and repulsive. It was Emily puffed up in her yellow salve and white gauze like a cheese stick, and me trying to save her, and Zuk trying to save her from me, and me showing off and feeling rotten. It was me feeling like kissing somebody, but even more like throwing up.
Egbert caught the smack of gay disgust as only a musical genius could, and gave it a Leprosy Tango beat on the bed-panioforte, and where the eyeball goes into the highball, O oowooed inside the flag with the righteous spookitude of one in whom spookitude is innate. Emily blatted in the classic manner of a fabulous girlgoyle, somewhere in the general vicinity of the beat and just slightly off key. O, she was a Bug Motel all right from the first blat. Now I see it was always Emily who gave us our air of ninny self-confidence, of dumb innocence ploughing on, of infant hope already caught in the jaws of failure but bumping cheerfully over the molars, like a babe bouncing down thickly carpeted stairs.
Just then Dion showed up in the clubhouse and took over the sterilizer-top steel drum, energetically playing pianissimo (it had only one dynamic, pianissimo) so you could thank godzilla hardly hear him. It didn’t matter how he played, for with his black forelock leaping around like Mighty Mouse, he was as handsome as he thought he was, and while we stared at him, he stared entranced at his own spoonified face in the drumhead mirror.
Nobody home but the telephony
Who’d call a goyle like I?
Dwip dwop dwop dead
Boruch a tweet tweet tweet
ENTER THAT DIRTY STOOLIE, MARGARET KODERER
And this is where you came in. “Ursula?” “Margaret! Godzillas sake what took you so long and where the hump have you been. How’d you find me?” You smiled slyly. “This adroit professional showed me around the hospital and escorted me down here poisonally and even fixed the parking ticket on my pickup truck.” Behind you stood the Regicide in his custom-tapered white orderly’s trousers and three-button white jacket, which, pinkies genteelly extended, he was just now buttoning once, at the breastbone, as was the fashion.
Everybody was waiting to be introduced. O even came out of the flag and got in line. Reginald had a new Polaroid camera, ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP-a Great Day in the Bug Hospital. That’s why this famous picture exists. “Doctor Zuk and The Bug Motels: Egbert, Dion, Emily, O and me. May I present my older sister, Margaret Koderer?” “Hi.” “Pleased.” “How ya doin.” “Enchanté.” “Gr-r-r-r-r.” [“Cheese, O, you look all ballooned up, are you pregnant or sumpm?” “None of your beez-wax, what do you care.” “So whose is it?” “Keep your big nose out of it but suppose I tell you my hubby-to-be is here in this room and is a lowdown royal.” “Reggie! You don’t think the Regicide is gonna marry you?” “He better cause I gotta get better fast or they won’t let me keep my baby, I mean I been in the bughouse two years already.” “You wanna keep it? You call that better?” “Oink yourself, Ursie.”]
“So you are Margaret. I have heard very much about you and now is fascinating to see you with own eyes.” “Well don’t look too hard or my legend will crumble.”
How do you do it, Margaret? Even with O in the room, and Emily, and Doctor Zuk herself, the forbidden love of my life-even in that starry group, you were the center of attention, ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP. Well, for a minute, anyhow. That certain air of erotic abandon you have-godzilla knows it isn’t your good looks. “Pfui,” Doctor Zuk muttered, sniffing the air, peering around for the reason the whole clubhouse suddenly smelled like a horse barn. They eyed your bristly pigtails tied off with red vegetable-stand rubberbands, and your muck-stiff dungarees, and your yellow-green eyes afloat in big black eyeglasses like two frogs in two ponds. For maybe a minute they eyeballed you, and Reggie snapped shots of you, ker-POP, ker-POP, ker-POP. O thought about cutting your throat, no doubt, but she had to get better now.
Then you broke the spell: “Say, that tune was cooking, Ursula, you got genius like I never knew you had. And you look good, surprisingly good. I don’t know, I was gettin a message on the pineal channel like you’d landed at the end of the world and I’d better swoop in and get you outa there, but I’m beginning to see this joint must have its compensations. For example who woulda thought you had blond hair under all that grease? But long as I’m here and that barber chair is so handy, lemme give you a haircut.” You unrolled the Morning Telegraph you had in your pocket, fanned out sheets of it, produced scissors, waved your hand at the chair. And like a zombie I climbed in, ancient habit.
[“Who are these people?” you whispered in my ear, “I mean, can we talk here?” “Nothing too poisonal,” I hissed back, I mean how was I gonna tell you that I’d changed my mind about leaving?]
“Ahem,” you began, “well who would have picked this dump for the place where the birth of the blues O-riginated? But I’m only a sane person, you bughouse guys are so talented… [Ursula, who is that cute, well sorta cute, little girl wrapped in gauze and what in godzillas name happened to her?” you fizzed in my ear, snip snip snip.]
“Excuse me, we Bug Motels don’t presume to play the real negro blues on our bughouse instruments,” Egbert expounded, trying to collect any little stray crumbs of your attention, and I could see you registering his dimensions, thinking, The glasses are cute but what a squirt, I could wrap my legs around that sardine twice, “we play conk-fusion,” he continued, “which is to say, using whatever hospital stuff we can pinch to play the tinny tiny noises of our own unknown inner machinery, on the notion that love will get us out of here, er, are you doing anything tonight?” (I eyed O, who eyed me. I shrugged. Poisonally I was beginning to wonder what was with all these bugheads? Had every one of them scarfed some love gunk today like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?)
“Blues was just a manner of speaking,” you smiled serenely, as if this happened to you every day, which it did, snip snip, tinka tinka tinka, “and actually I’m only here to parlay privately with my sister, that is, if I can ever pry her out of this schubertiad, but thanks.”
“Ursie writes all the words for the Bug Motels,” Emily tattled gravely.
[“Who is that child?” you whispered, “does she need a home? Could she be fostered?” “Not by you,” I hissed back, “you live in sin with a racetrack bum for godzillas sake, you think the folks that run this bughouse are crazy?” “So maybe I’ll get married,” you said. “Yeah sure, Margaret, when pigs fly and rivers run uphill. And anyhow I gotta admit he’s not just a racetrack bum. Mr. Tod Novio, alias Boyfriend Death, would be a bum anywhere. The exact face of Lovelace in the Classic Comic! And by the way, on which ten-cent racetrack are we refusing to sully our hairy hands with labor now?” “Indian Mound Downs,” you smirked, “Great Cacapon, West Virginia. I gotta be back to feed by five. Listen Ursula I could fix that little girl, I could fatten her up, I could get her all the way better.” “Better kidnap her then, they’re never letting you have her.”]
“Bertie plays the bestest, but Ursie sings the loudest,” Emily further reported. (Loudness was not a point in your favor with the Bug Motels.) “Regardless,” you said, raising a finger: “I can only say, Ursula, your song is shayn vi die zeeben welten. Honest I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“First learn to talk, then learn to sing, say wise old men of treatment staff, okay I go along with this,” Doctor Zuk recalled, “but when Miss Bogeywoman finally opens her mouth, after twenty-one months silent like grave, song comes out, only song, and what song! like an angel. I wonder what Sigmund Food would say? Surely is something for mental science in all of this?” Doctor Zuk ran her strong ugly hands through her spiky hair and smiled secretively.
And this was the first you must have awakened to the mysterious powers of this beautiful dreambox mechanic or bughouse commissar or whatever exactly she was, from some pre-Foodian oblast east of the Urals: you stepped back from the barber chair and took a long look at her. “You know I knew old Ursula here wouldn’t talk to the dreambox mechanics no matter how much Merlin had to pay for a room in this dump-in fact the more the better. Twenty-one months, eh?” You laughed hysterically.
Doctor Zuk arched an eyebrow at you, possibly she had been indiscreet? But then she continued decisively: “I see you are getting incredibly better, Miss Bogey. You can make songs like that! Why don’t you tell me what you want. You want music lessons? You want go back to school? I talk tonight to Dr. Feuffer.” I stared at her. Sumpm about that I talk tonight to Dr. Feuffer got seriously on my nerves, what was it? “Don’t talk to Foofer tonight. I’ll talk to Foofer myself. Cheese I turned into the creakiest gate in the bughouse while you weren’t looking,” I whined, “and now you’re gonna talk to Foofer!” “What makes you think I was not looking?” Zuk said loftily: “How dare you say this? You think you know me? My dear, you don’t know where I come from, where I go. You must see big, not small, to find me. You must get much more better to know me. You don’t know me at all.”
Sumpm about this speech so crushed my heart I threw myself into my little NEUROPATHOLOGY desk and banged my pukelele on the desktop and sulked right in front of everybody. And it’s a good thing there were no razor blades handy-I looked for the scissors, but they were in your hand. “Hey, Ursula, your haircut’s not done,” you said. “Got a dime?” “Sure.” “Call somebody that gives an oink,” I snarled. “Why you are so evil-tempered when somebody praised your song?” Doctor Zuk inquired, in her most enlightened and dreambox-mechanical voice. I glared at her. You are a leviathan, even your kiss is like a house fell on me.
Finally I tried to save face: “Look, it isn’t just me. Where our music is concerned, all us Bug Motels hate to get our hopes up.” “Bingo,” Egbert said, “don’t make us hope for fame or you’ll spoil everything. We know we could be as good as Chuck Berry and still get nowhere but Neuropathology. Or maybe we get a fifty-dollar gig playing Cousin Freddie’s bar mitzvah now and then, but we don’t care. Only love will get us outa here. Everybody’s a rock star now.”
“Wait-how many rock stars live in the bughouse? I mean dat’s a new angle, ain’t it?” Dion declared. Bla-a-a-at, spla-a-a-t, we all blew raspberries at this childish idea.
[“That is one Adonis of a retard, definitely better than anything else I see around this bughouse, he’s got a genuine Greek cevapcici fattening the pinstripes in those pegged pants and anyhow he’s not so dumb. When you think about it, the publicity angles for a rock band from the bughouse are fantastic,” you hissed in my ear, “what’s he in for anyway?” “Terminal narcissism… go ahead, laugh, he’s so in love with himself he had to go to Emergency one time for trying to oink himself in his own bunghole, in front of the mirror.” “Well, judging by the structure in those trousers it wouldn’t be out of the question…” “Ugh, Margaret, how can you even think of oinking that mooncalf.” “At least I’m just thinking about it,” you smiled.]
“O why can’t you dreambox mechanics leave us the oink alone,” O said gloomily, “we’re the Bug Motels, we don’t play to get famous, we don’t even play for ourselves. We play to forget ourselves, for O… O… O… O… blivion.” “What she means is, we’re kids, we don’t zackly like grownups,” Emily explained. “There you are. That’s why we don’t get our hopes up,” I concluded.
Doctor Zuk blew a great cloud of Turkish smoke in our faces. “Hopes? who talks anything about hopes?” she said. “Who lives on hope dances without music, but who has music lives without hope. You five Bug Hotels have music, this I know. I, I have no music, but I know how to set saddle on right donkey. This is my God-given gift.” And her face filled up with light and looked love, not on us, on me, me alone, for seven straight seconds. Well it was more than five, less than ten, but I could tell it was love-I snuck a glance over at you-you saw it too.
Trouble dented your forehead. Your idled scissors snipped air, tinka tinka tink. Doctor Zuk, having blessed me with that look, was already squinching out the door in her silver sandals. I watched her, the familiar systole diastole of her muscular buttocks, the flickering curves of her soccer player’s calves. All at once my heart opened up like a peacock’s fan, I knew all the colors of love. First red hunger drenched me, hot and disgusting, and I almost choked on my own tongue, so strongly did I want to put all that in my mouth. Then, black shame-you were watching, worried sick, with that dent printed on your forehead. Then I went white, for suddenly I knew why it made me furious, that Tonight I tell Dr. Feuffer. This wasn’t epidemic insomnia among harassed professionals, with late-night telephone calls. It was a dinner date! The scoop on Foofer (via the Regicide, hence you could run trains by it) had him outa here and into Haussner’s for a kirschwasser every afternoon by five on the button. Ergo, cocktails at the very least. They were in cahoots, no, in love, it explained everything. My heart drowned. What else did I expect? She was beautiful, she was famous, I could never get her or be her. Then that hot surf of hunger slapped me around again and ground me into the sand and when I stood up again I was dizzy and seasick, and knew what I had to do: spy on Madame Zuk.
“Hey, how about getting back in this barber chair and letting me finish. You look crazy as a bedbug with your hair half on, half off.” Snip snip. [“It’s not just your hair, Ursula, you got a mad light in your eye, the way you were eyeballing that old dame’s hindparts when she left like you were gonna track her and do bad stuff to her, say, what the hump’s going on here anyway? You’re not really buggy, are you, Ursula?” I suddenly realized I better explain. “Er, uh, you got any dough, Margaret?” “Sure.” “How about you take me down to the Chesapeake Room and feed me?” “The which?” “Glorified cafeteria, ground floor.” “My pleasure.”]
Crabcakes, coleslaw, devil’s food cake, your treat, just like old times. “So whaddaya think?” I finally asked you, wanting your take on Doctor Zuk-I was gonna tell you, I really was.
“Cheese, are you sure you don’t want out of the bughouse, Ursula?” you jumped right in instead, “I mean it may be a private joint and sorta ritzy, and setting Merlin back a yard a day which he deserves for deserting you, but it still smells like industrial solvents and dead people’s farts and it’s kinda like jail.” “That’s just all the overcooked vegetables,” I said, “breathing those farts is better’n eating, I mean there’s a lotta vitamins in em, and besides you deserted me too, Margaret.” I pointed my fork at you.
“I’m not your mother or father,” you said. “Sure you are if the real ones are missing, and anyway you took the job till you got, er, uh, boy-crazy is too weak a word, how about bug-eyed for outlaw fudd of every stripe and color?” You laughed. “I don’t know why,” you sighed, “the respectable type just doesn’t appeal to me…” “So is that con-man-in-a-ragged-silk-shirt doing any work around the farm these days?” “Not a lick.” “What good is he anyway?” I grumbled. “Ahem, you really want the venereal details?” “Some other time maybe…”
“It’s crazy fun on the racetrack, you’ll like it,” you said. “I was gonna come for you, Ursula, I had to fight down the urge… tell you the truth I’m sorta scared if you come to the track you’ll end up in even more trouble than I’m in, you’ll find some way. But are you really getting better in this place, I mean your arms look like two raw meatloafs, godzillas sake what’s that all about…”
“I’m in the hospital aren’t I? I gotta have sumpm wrong, long as I’m here. You wouldn’t want me hearing voices or picking up secret messages from “Louie Louie” or anything really buggy like that.” “You don’t want out? I mean I was sitting in the track kitchen and I got the most urgent flash, Margaret come get me get me get me outa here.” “Well I gotta own up I had one bad day, but that was before I made all these, er, musical friends and”-I whispered-“Zuk gave me her phone number.”
“What?! She’s a dreambox mechanic in this hospital and she gave you her private telephone number? What for? What kinda place is this place?” “Take it easy, don’t go flooey on me, keep your voice down”-Dr. Buzzey and Dr. Beasley were polishing off potato chips two tables to our left-“she’s, er, uh, a special foreign visitor, she lives on the grounds.”
Your forehead got that special dent again, dark blue and V-shaped, the shadow of some doomy bat, or bird. You wanted to tell me no no no but choked it down. Like mental patients we two sisters were not historically in the habit of hollering down each other’s stupider schemes. No squealing, lemme die first, doesn’t quite sum it up. There comes a day when even the other sister’s hair is standing on end, like when I watched you climb into that forty-foot frog-green bus marked Girl Scout Troop No. 49, headed for the Yukon with Mr. Johnny Rico, a car thief on the lam. Shrieking Margaret what is your problem would have been by our standards deplorably impolite. I watched you go. And likewise now I thought I saw your nut-brown hair stirring at the root, getting ready to raise those kinky braids like drawbridges, and your mouth fell open, but not one word did you say, just that bruise-blue dent in the middle of the forehead. “Well, so long, Ursula,” you finally managed, “when you get sick of the bughouse, you know where to find me. I guarantee you the racetrack won’t make you any buggier than this joint.” And you clomped off to feed for Boyfriend Death at 5 PM, on the backside of Indian Mound Downs, in Great Cacapon, West Virginia.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
When you’re buggy, there’s nothing like having a mission. Then like a flying bug you shoot through space, short, straight and frictionless. All those crawly bugs that in nightmares perforate your dreambox and riddle your conk with their busy incessant comings and goings have only aerated your machinery for this light-headed zoom. And so it was once I resolved to spy on Doctor Zuk.
I started running in the second floor stairwell and by the time I passed Lopes at the front desk in the lobby, I wasn’t even a blur-a blur might have required interpretation-I was the August heat, a liquid twitch of air between eye and pavement, so that he yawned and shook his head once, and went on picking his teeth.
My sneakers flailed the hot sidewalks up Monument, down Gay, straight to Charlie Rudo’s. It had been lying on a blue satin pillow in a locked display case when I bought my walky-talkies, I had peered at it with longing, and the salesman had let me twirl its knobs and hold its soft rubber bumper to my eye-a Zeiss Model 1-1000, the Field Marshal or should I say Marschallin of all spyglasses, a tool that could pick out the wrinkles around a raccoon’s fingernails in a mulberry top a mile distant, or, more to the point here, find a drop of blood, well it could be a drop of blood, on a girlgoyle’s white shorts and follow it up three escalators. Now I looked underneath at the price tag and reeled: $499.99! O well, for spying as for tracking, cool wits, doggedness, and if you had to have equipment, the best that you could buy or rather charge to Merlin and return tomorrow or the next day. “To the account please of Mr. Melvin P. Koderer, 18 Ploy Street, Baltimore, 2, Maryland.” And then I ran back to Rohring Rohring with this queen of spyglasses in a plain brown wrapper in my arms.
I couldn’t just lie on my bed and spy. Plenty of times, before the Bug Motels had their clubhouse NO ROYALS ALLOWED, I had back-floated there all the summer afternoon and stared at the eensy black domino that was Doctor Zuk’s balcony, and how should the nurses know what I was looking at? What could be more like a mental patient than to stare into empty space? But to lie there with a spyglass would give my staring a purposeful, even a paranoid air, not at all the sort of impression you want to make in the bughouse.
So I whipped up a “bath gate”: this was when you got the bathroom door and the hospital room door to stick together at their latches. Meanwhile you turned on the plumbing full force so that the elephant-trumpet of the bath boomed all the way to the nurses’s station; and you dumped in Her Secret Moments by the pound and threw clothes all around. It took a royal a good twenty seconds to get the doors unstuck and usually they just gave up and yelled through the crack.
I used up all my clothes that way, but what the hump, why not spy on Doctor Zuk stark naked? I lay on my back, my left hand stole to my crack, the sheets were cool, a faint breeze stirred from the harbor, it was almost lovely with my spyglass climbing the balconies rung by rung to Zuk’s altitude…
“Whuzzup, Bogeywoman, you gettin into sumpm you shouldn’t?” It was the Regicide on the half-hour, rattling at the hooked doors. “I’m in the bath,” I hollered. “I never know you to take you no bath before, raggedy as you be. I be back in five minutes.” “I take plenty of baths since I started getting better. You better keep out.” “Five minutes, Bogeywoman, I’m coming in.” “You just wanna see me naked.” “You think so? I see better than that in the buggy old ladies’ ward every day, better tips too. Say! talkin bout better, way your hot sister at?” “Why don’t you oink yourself?” “Fi minutes.”
By now Her Secret Moments had started clouding up the czarina of spyglasses, and the main thing I saw from my back was a big black blur-my own window bars. I sighed and stood up on the bed, threaded the spyglass carefully, carefully through the bars and twirled the knobs and ratcheted up the balconies, flowerpot by flowerpot.
I knew her balcony right away by its nakedness-I mean you couldn’t imagine madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse angling a watering can over pink petunias, or dangling dingy brassieres from a clothesline. But there was nothing, not even a bent-up chaise longue, and of course she wasn’t there, why was I even doing this? Wait, sumpm flickered, no, glinted, at the sliding screen door, and behind the gray rain of the metal screen, sumpm white floated, I rolled the velvety knobs and sumpm black, a black smudge, a black star, precipitated out of it, good godzilla cold sweat sprang out like horns on my temples it was an islet of black pubic hair I was hanging on, sort of a tropical isle, or like an old scary garden, overgrown, shadowy, sprawling, the arcs to the thighs lightly bearded like trellises, not all neatly edged in its pretty little patch like O’s. I went dizzy-except for Mrs. Wilmot’s scattered bristles I had never seen any but a girlgoyle’s-but maybe it wasn’t Zuk, no, lower, those were definitely her famous soccer player’s calves, I’d know them anywhere. Deep navel, lobes of well-fatted muscle, and suddenly I was looking at her breasts, I almost fell over backwards. So not like mine, so not like a girlgoyle’s, sumpm really hanging there, heavy bosom, weight, heft, I thought of the round provolones always dripping in their pale cloths in Karoline von Etzen’s basement but it was useless to scare up anything merely edible to save me, these were real and naked, I could even see the freckles on them and the big purple nuzzies hung low on their fluid roundness like old dried beach roses. It was scary all right, she was old, beautiful but old as the hills and crags, and slightly sickening like you ate too much Coquilles St. Jacques even if it was your favorite food. All at once I fixed on another black tuft-densely crosshatched armpit, course godzilla knows they don’t shave in Outer Hotzeplotz but it was the ripeness, the more than ripeness of everything that made me woozy like being in an orchard left to rot. And looking at that black thatch and the round arms and the white elbows I realized the breasts were draped in that offering way that breasts fall when arms are raised, saw the spiky hair all around and secretive smile but why couldn’t I see-what was she holding in front of her face-my godzilla it’s a pair of binoculars! She knows perfectly well I am looking, she’s looking too, she laughs, she even waves. The czarina of spyglasses leaps out of my fingers, floats on air, and slowly, slowly, rolls to the-cheese I can’t look-deep squeak and punch of metal, someone screams-
“Psst, hey, Ursie-” “Egbert, what the hump are you doing in my room?” I shriek. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you naked,” he says. “Me neither.” I yanked a sheet up in front of me-behind him I saw gray surf, dirty lace of bathwater inching across the linoleum. “Bertie, go turn off my bathtub”-he did it. “Now what the hump are you doing here,” I snarled ungratefully, for all I saw was my beautiful spyglass rolling over and over, Merlin’s face when he got the bill, the dense grizzled slightly sickening beauty of Madame Zuk, looking at me looking at her and shaking with laughter, I imagined her Red Army binoculars that probably wouldn’t break even if she dropped them thirty stories, I wondered if I’d killed somebody with my own fabulous spyglass and suddenly I saw my hand deep in my crack, o my godzilla how many afternoons and her laughter
“Ursie, I was thinking about maybe we should get married.” “What!” “We can’t stay in this joint forever, we don’t want to be hopeless cases. We could get our own place and still be Bug Motels. Pinky and Egbert would be so glad to get me outa here but not have me with em, they’d give us the money. I could take care of you since you’re sorta an orphan.” “I am not an orphan.” “Half an orphan.” “I’m not that pitiful.” “Well, nobody else wants you.” I thought of Margaret and certain other people and didn’t lower myself to answer him, the fuddy, at least not now.
“Ursie, I know you don’t like fuddies, much…” “You got a nerve to say I don’t like fuddies, what do you know about it, maybe I don’t like anybody”-(I was seeing that wild garden of pubic hair)-“probably I don’t like fuddies or girlgoyles or anything.” “Well I mean you never got a boyfriend, but I don’t exactly consider myself a fuddy,” he said, “… more like a lesbo.” I burst out laughing. “You got a frog dangle don’t you?” He nodded guiltily. “Well then I’m sorry you can’t be a lesbo.” “I didn’t say I liked having it.” “That’s got nuttin to do with it,” I said. “Say, you’re not the grand librarian of the lesbos of the world,” Egbert protested, “you can’t just decide sumpm like that.” I wasn’t going to argue with him. “The way I figure,” he said, “you’re a lesbo if you like girls cause you think you’re more like a girl yourself. What makes you queer is liking the same thing you are.” “Then I guess I’m not queer,” I said, “cause I really am queer, I mean I’m a monster, I don’t know any fuddies who are like me, including you, Egbert, or any girlgoyles either, or any grownups or lesbos or anything.” I was saying the first thing out of my mouth, but I decided I better shut up fast, cause this sounded like it might be true.
Egbert stood there for a while looking at me, feeling those few little blondie whiskerettes on his nice square chin. He was skinny, and his long silky hair lay on his skinny shoulders like a cape, but he was nothing like a girl. “You know, you’re right, you really truly are queer, and that’s what made me love you, Ursie,” he said, and at first he looked surprised and then his face got long as the bus ride home, “so there goes my whole theory out the window.” “It ain’t a bad theory, it just goes upside down,” I said. “I still want to oink you,” he said. Hmmmm, I was thinking about it, thinking about it, I mean all I had to do was drop the sheet, already I had this green and spongy feeling around my liver from my spyglass and Doctor Zuk, I mean, it’s sumpm when the love of your life makes you kinda seasick, like eating six Tastykakes all by yourself, and for a minute I wondered if oinking Bertie might cure me, but I didn’t think so.
“Yall two wouldn’t be about to engage in some of that four-legged bughouse athletics?” asked Reggie Blanchard from the doorway.
“Some five minutes,” I said, “it’s a good thing I wasn’t offing myself.”
“Well if that’s what you had going, I was gonna let you off with a warning,” Reggie said. “But this four-legged bughouse athletics stuff, mercy me, wouldn’t that be a nice change for the Bogeywoman-you know sometimes I thought you was one of those she-he’s.”
“I’m the lesbo here, not her,” Bertie said gravely.
The Regicide looked him over. “That’s what I like about this bughouse gig,” he finally said, “some new divergiation on the human spectacular you never heard of before, every single day. Now what is this?” He had just stepped into two inches of water. “I guess you taken that bath on the floor,” he said to me. “You dusty as a peanut too. I knew you was inexperienced at personal hygiene, but I ain’t expected this-good thing I get off at four-somebody be up here with a mop afta while,” he sighed. “As for that four-legged bughouse athletics, yall have to save it. The Bogeywoman here is already late for her Thursday date with her dreambox mechanic, and which I know cause Dr. Foofer sent me to cay her up there…”
“O my godzilla-”
I blab to Foofer
AND HE BLABS BACK
“I know you can’t name her exact country, Doc, top secret and all that”-
I mushed on with the program, but sumpm was different. To get myself in the right mood for dreambox repair, I had tuned up the scary couple on my crystal ball. Sekt, Madame? To the Koderer adolescent, yes? Stubborn as fungus, but now Gott sei Dank she gets always better and we may at last get rid of her! You want to get rid? I like this greedy baby. Yes, we have noticed. We even fear a little the sorcery of your influence, Doktor Zuk. But we can rely on the authority of your technik, Dr. Feuffer. Na ja! Even so she gets better. Kiss! kiss! Prosit! Nazdravje! Clink clink.
But no, his date with the love of my life seemed to have some way tightened the boilerplate on the world-famous diagnostician. Foofer sat before me more sealed than ever in his sphinx suit full of farts, his notebook closed, his ballpoint nowhere in sight, his baggy cheeks motionless, not even his thumbnail zissing.
“But howsabout we do it this way, Doc: If it’s no, say no, if it’s yes or maybe, say nuttin. Then nuttin’s for sure, but like you put it so succinctly” (I wasn’t above ladling on the shmaltz when he got that trapped look behind his bifocals) “at least then the truth shrinks down to my size, instead of staying as big as seven worlds like it is right now.”
“Ursula,” Foofer creaked, “nuh-zing you can propose, no game, no trick, will make me utter one word more or less than I zink good and right. Is it quite clear?” “It’s quite clear,” I echoed, We’ll see about that I was thinking.
“Okay, Doc, we’re talking Soviet Central Asia here, that narrows it down to six million square miles. I’m on the right track, aren’t I, at Camp Chunkagunk I was always the champ at this kinda thing… We’re talking Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, or Kyrgyzstan-cheese, there can’t be two Foodian dreambox mechanics in the whole six million miles, just try getting your conk fixed in Betpak-Dala!-you can forget it! So once Doctor Zuk let it slip that she grew up in Forty Maidens Feasting-that was the name of this real old fort where they hid her when the bad guys took away her old man. I swear the name’s got fourteen k’s in it-sumpm like-well I’ll know it when I hear it. So I figure all I gotta do is dig up Forty Maidens Feasting in all the languages in Central Asia and I got my Rosetta Stone. Don’t look so surprised, Doc, I was trained by the best! the wood wizardess, namely Willis Marie Bundgus of East Millinocket, Maine.”
(I eyeballed him. Maybe August had put the dew on his wooly eyebrows, but what could explain the wild look under them, the restless irises stranded in bloodshot aspic-and he sat perfectly still-not even his thumbnail zissing-)
“Make it easy for me, Doc! I can tell I’m getting warm. Now the big question is who the hump was her old man and why did they take him. Are we talking Nazis here or Commies-”
“Nuh-zing means nuh-zing,” Foofer suddenly exploded, but quietly, like a dropped grapefruit, with a thud and a fizz, and only afterwards the shiny eyebags under his glasses reddened, “when I say nuh-zing, it needs no dolmetscher, do you understand me, Ursula?” he whispered.
I was shocked. “Hey, I thought that was the main way you dreambox mechanics operated, you say nuttin and we fill in the holes, work the crossword puzzle, stuff the sausage casing-and here for godzillas sakes I thought we were doing better-”
“I object to nuh-zing if you want to talk. I gladly hear all you have to say. I mean that my silence is not to be translated by some, splutter, teenager into confirmation of nonsense concerning another mental scientist and particularly not into cheap romance! Is it quite clear?”
This was stunning news, but as it was not love of Foofer that had set me talking in the first place, I refused to let him hurt my feelings. I drew a breath and ploughed on with the program: “Just tell me this-Doc-I mean it is my question-the old man was a Jew, am I right?”
“Zis Zuk woman is of far too much interest to you. I tell you nuh-zing more about her! nuh-zing! We will have no more questions. This concerns you not a damp chicken dropping, do you understand?” It was my jaw that dropped. “You have scratched up far too much already what is nuh-zing of your affair, Ursula. If you can find Doktor Zuk you may ask her. There is an end of the matter.”
“Sumpm’s different about you today, Doc,” I had to observe, “you used to be more, er, softer. Sumpm more in the overcooked vegetable line-don’t get me wrong-I like overcooked vegetables, they’re real good for you. But used to be I could push with the program and you fell over splat.”
“Yes.” He was recovering the Buick and the Alps before my eyes, I mean his dignity, the height and bulk of it, and to tell you the truth (maybe I really was getting better) he was easier on the eyes this way than when his baggy jowls shook. “Let us say I expect some-zing more of you now,” he said, after a pause, in a perfectly calm, dreadfully slow voice. “I can treat you as… some-zing of a fellow… seeker… now I see you are getting better. And I know from Doktor Zuk you are a young woman of great nerve… and respond to challenge… in fact I change my mind… I honor our bargain. I answer one last time-about Doktor Zuk’s fazzer-if you promise to respond as grown-up woman to some-zing I set before you…” Does it stink like some animal squashed five days ago under a pickup truck? Did I smell what was coming? I gobbled that ripe old catfish-bait hook line and sinker. “It’s a deal.”
Foofer settled himself in his chair with an urbane little kick of his pinstripes and folding of knuckles and liquid sparkle of watch chain that told me this interview was going exactly as he had planned. What did it matter as long as I’d find out about her at last?
“Her fazzer,” he began, in his creakiest, millstoniest voice, “was a writer of, what to say, odd, grotesque tales, in Yiddish. Self-evidently, then, a Jew… but razzer a phantast of z’nowhere… than a portrayer of some-zing very much Jewish. What to call these… promiscuous mystical tendencies…?
“Born in Poland, in Galicia… fled before German troops to Lvov… deported by z’Soviets to Kazakhstan-ah yes, your six million miles narrows it down very nicely. And here he went hungry. Then did some-zing clever… married an Uzbeki woman from a powerful family. They disappeared, and for a while this saved him…
“He was a phantast, but smart, you see, he was simply never seen… His stories appeared, out of nowhere, in z’last Yiddish papers… He signed them The Beetle, the one who lives in dung…
“He was betrayed by a Uigur guide to Stalinist agents, found and liquidated in 1951.
“Certain persons remained interested for z’daughter. She was hidden in the nomad villages, then sent to university… god knows where, some fantastic capital, Tashkent perhaps, or Samovarobad… She had studies in Vienna, in Paris and a little bit here… wrote in French a curious small essay, about, eh, puberty as ephemeral monstrosity that was translated into English and made for her some little passing celebrity in z’field… Before she is invited here she is Commissar of Mental Science in some Soviet Autonomous Republic, nine tenths desert, z’size perhaps of…” He shrugged. “Kansas?… She calls herself a Foodian, if you will ask me she has to z’world of everyday a hinge quite her own, razzer like her fazzer…”
Foofer recrossed his legs, comfortably. “Zis is all I know. He was a little famous, The Beetle. You can look under Der Kaifer in z’bigger Jewish encyclopedias… So.
“And now.” He drew from the inner pocket of his jacket a dirty pink envelope, unfolded a paper and smoothed it in front of me. “What do you say about zis?” It was a mimeographed menu from Stubby’s Seventh Furlong, Track Kitchen No. 2, Indian Mound Downs. I picked it up, turned it over and over in disbelief. On the back were ketchup stains and Margaret’s familiar scrawl:
My dear sister,
It’s not like me to dish out my judgment uninvited, but now that I’ve seen you, I take my greasy pen in hand. Ursie! What in godzillas name are you doing in that bughouse! Not that the joint has nuttin to recommend it, that scrambled Egbert is a genius in his shriveled little way, the Greek noodle is a masterpiece of simple cuisine and I could certainly oink that suave and helpful nurse’s aide Reginald once or twice, but the point is: What the hump are you doing in the bughouse? Godzillas sake I know you’re not buggy, Ursie, just crawling with love for womankind.
There, I said it. For years I’ve kept it to myself. Before, you were too young to know, but now you’re too old not to, especially if you think you’re doomed to spend your life in the loonie bin. What for, to keep the world safe from the Bogeywoman? Just because those chicken-livered Maine girls threw you out of camp, so what, they were only little girlgoyles, they didn’t know any better.
Can’t you see, Ursie, you being you, the banquet will be laid for you wherever you land? Already that beautiful dreambox mechanic in the bughouse is crazy in love with you, anybody could see it, for godzillas sake she gave you her phone number didn’t she? Actually I don’t know about that old broad-okay so it’s the covert prude inside the hussy talking, but I don’t claim to be helping anybody, she does, and besides she’s old enough to be your mother. I mean, isn’t there some kind of Olympus you’re not supposed to descend from if you work in the bughouse, otherwise where’s that big difference between the bughouse and life which costs ninety-six dollars a day? Aaaaah what does it matter who am I to talk, love rules the camp, the grove, the track but who woulda thought the bughouse-just lemme know when you want outa there.
Love,
Margaret
You are in serious hot water now Miss Margaret head-in-the-fog Koderer, I radioed my sister, you won’t live down this verblundjetact of treachery for thirty years at least. Wait’ll I get my hands on you, and don’t try to tell me you thought their royal highnesses would respect the sanctity of the U.S. Mail…
“She’s joking of course,” I said with a feeble snicker, “quite a whipped-cream-pie-in-your-face type, my sister.”
“Why she would joke about your sexuality, I wonder, some-zing we have never talked about?”
“She’d joke about it exactly so this would happen, so I’d have to face a world-famous fuddy dreambox mechanic on a highly poisonal subject which is, to put it mildly, embarrassing to a girlgoyle like me. She’d find that sorta funny.”
“I wonder why zis subject is embarrassing to you?”
“Hey, no use tryna explain to a royal what a normal person finds embarrassing. You fuddies don’t even see sumpm a little raw in sending Nurse Hageboom to butt in on O Hell and ask us Bug Motels one by one did you have a bowel movement today…”
“Ahem. Your sister Margaret. She is the closest person to you?”
“She used to be,” I said.
“May I ask why she thinks you are troubled by sexual feelings for women?”
“I don’t see where she said I was troubled. She said crawling not troubled.”
“You are quite certain there is nuh-zing worth discussing in what your sister says?”
“Nuttin worth discussing with you,” I said, and we shared a moment of unpleasant silence. “I might discuss it with Doctor Zuk, if she was my dreambox mechanic. And by the way, not to hurt your feelings or anything, but I always thought from the first time I saw her that Doctor Zuk oughta be my dreambox mechanic. Why won’t you let her be my dreambox mechanic? I don’t see why somebody shouldn’t choose their own doctor when they know, absolutely know, they’ll be better off with that person.” I had a queasy spongy feeling in my guts that the timing might be all wrong for this argument, but I also had a hunch it was now or never.
“Ursula, I tell you frankly because you are so much better. Such a move is simply out of z’question. Can you zink why I might find this not a good plan?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Doctor Zuk will go along with it.”
“I’m afraid you are right,” Foofer said gravely.
I stared at him, trying to gather what this might mean. So hard and clear, so amber, so royal was the glue that stuck the royals together fast in their one big royal popcorn ball, so rare, in fact never, were the holes in it that let you see down to the nothing-but-popcorn at its core-I stared and stared and started filling up with dread like a battery with charge. “We’re not all that good buddies, me and Doctor Zuk,” I panted, afraid I had somehow ratted on her, “she wouldn’t tell me her birth date, or her country, or who she was working for, or whether she’s married or a spy or a Red Army dreambox fixer or what kind of perfume she wears or whether she’s ever been in Caracas or any of that private royal stuff.”
“Yes, but I see you have put her all these questions.”
“So what, whaddaya mean,” I said in rising panic, “we all wanna know that stuff about the royals all the time, that’s half of what we talk about in the Bug Motels, you could put out a royal gossip magazine and it would sell like hotcakes-”
“I zink very little of such talk takes place in telephone calls to private residences of psychiatrists.”
“Margaret made that part up!” I shouted.
“Perhaps. Still, plainly it has come to a question of, of far too complicated personal… interest. Perhaps you know I am z’chief of treatment at this clinic. Furzermore, I am one of a staff of fifty-seven treatment personnel including fifteen senior psychiatrists. And I am your psychiatrist. The plan of treatment for every patient in z’Adolescent Wing of Rohring Rohring is discussed regularly before zis whole body. I must tell you that Doktor Zuk has argued long and eloquently in front of zis body for your special friendship, but now, in my judgment and that of many uzzers, it is gone too far and, with my apologies, for I know zis will be difficult for you-it must end.”
“You mean we’re not supposed to talk to each other any more?”
“Nuh-zing.”
“She’ll never put up with that kinda ridiculous game, pretend you don’t know each other and all that!” I said.
“No. She has not.”
“O my godzilla she’s gone-you threw her out…”
Foofer stared at a point just past me on the wall, and his loose cheeks sagged. “For a time, a very little time, Ursula, we place you again on Accompanied status-this means, as you know, under no circumstances you leave z’hospital, I am sure you understand z’reason, and you have an escort wiz you wherever you-”
I never meant to hurt him. It’s true the suit of farts was unappetizing to me and his Buick-sized dignity provoked my mental patience to fury, but he was a gaseous nuisance, basically gaseous, and therefore not quite there. He was just a two-hundred-pound fuddy from Europe, a big bald head I could never speak to again whenever I wanted. I had no reason to hurt him.
But as every mental peon knows, these bug mechanics never close a door behind you without palming alarm buttons up their sleeves or in the kneeholes of their desks, so I had to be fast, whatever I did. I had to get to Doctor Zuk before they locked me up. And if Foofer said escort wiz you wherever, that meant Roper, Mursch or Hageboom starting right now. The three Corny Norns were probably lurking out there in the cholera-green corridor already. Well, clapping a nurse on me again was more than a private person could stand-lemme die first!-and besides I had to get to Doctor Zuk. I had to get out of the bughouse. Damn that Margaret, thanks to her I was now a Lesbo Beknownst To Everybody in this dump, and a buggy, underage, amateur lesbo into the bargain. That was why they had to save me-from myself and Doctor Zuk.
But I wasn’t about to give up the forbidden love of my life. O she was scary all right. Naked she had more of the crone about her than I could look at without sweating. She might even love me, and her love was like a house fell on me. And maybe I could never have her or be her but no mere Foofer could stop me from trying.
So I never meant to hurt him but in front of me was Foofer, then his desk, then the door. The brown worsted suit of farts sat on a leather chair; he was pyramidal in shape, and had a certain comic-book dragon effect owing to the popcorn balls of white smoke rising from his lips where a pipe dangled. I leaped off the couch and in one motion pushed him and his chair over backwards. It was a pretty big chair, with lungs of soft leather on the back that softly hissed as they settled. And that had been so easy, once it was done his still-crossed feet dangled absentmindedly in the air above his head, that I pushed his desk over too. This made a great dust-billowing whump on the old wood floor that was sure to bring the nurses running and shrieking on the double. At the same time out of some secret drawer or bunghole in the desk a file marked KODERER URSULA popped and flapped onto the floor. I should have got my mitts on it and not let go, o a thousand times since then I’ve replayed this scene and made my getaway guarding it with my life, but instead I just snatched it up, wheeled and stuffed it out the window, so that hundreds of pages of me went fluttering down Broadway. Then with the superhuman strength of the mental patient I ripped open the steel door, well maybe it wasn’t locked, probably not, and there was Mursch, here came Roper and Hageboom, whipping around the two corners. I backed into Foofer’s office and holed up fast in the kneehole of the overturned desk, getting ready to spring out like a cornered rat, but the nurses just ran around me and now I saw why. Foofer hadn’t moved. He was knocked out cold, his half-closed eyes were all whites, his face why deny it was blue, his pipe was missing though there seemed to be sumpm round and dark O-ing his bloodless mouth, and his wing-tipped foot still nodded at the point of his trousers abstractly, as a butterfly pants with its wings. O my godzilla I’d probably killed the man! Now I ran and nobody stopped me, and this time when I passed Lopes at the front desk in the lobby I wasn’t even a liquid movement in the air, not quite an itch between his eyes-just a vague, exhausted feeling of having cared more once.