The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  “You’ll be twenty-five years old.

  “Twenty-five years,” he said.

  Almost by way of acknowledgment the boy nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Drummond fitted his old snap-brim hat on the boy’s head and looked at him. But his face, reflected in the yellow glass, had already faded into its cryptic and strange cloister. His heavy purple lips were shaping the words to a prayer and the rosary was ticking in his lap as the maroon beads, one by one, slipped through his fingers.

  “I love you,” Drummond said, expecting the boy to laugh, but he only rested his head against the seat and looked out the window at the gray city going by.

  Screenwriter

  How was I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private? My first suicidal ideations occurred to me when I was ten, eleven, twelve, something like that, and by now I was habituated to them and dreams of hurting myself (in the parlance of those places) formed a kind of lullaby I often used to rock myself to bed at night. I got into trouble when I told my p-doc I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d made myself comfortable by drawing the blankets over my head and imagining I was closing the lid of my coffin. In confessing to him, I was only trying to be honest and accurate, a good patient, deserving. But no dice: the head p-doc put me on Maximum Observation and immediately I was being trailed around by a sober ex-athlete who, introducing himself, put a fatherly hand on my shoulder and squeezed and told me not to worry, he was a screenwriter, too—not as successful or rich as me, sure, but a screenwriter nonetheless. He said that his name was Bob and he let it be known that he’d taken this position on the mental ward only to gather material for his next script. Half the reason I was in the ward was to get away from the movies, but my whole time with Bob I kept wondering, Is this, or that, or this or that, or this, or this, or this going to be in a movie? Everywhere I went, he went, creeping along a few sedate paces back in soft-soled shoes, a shadow that gave off a disturbing susurrus like the maddening sibilance settling dust must make to the ears of ants.

  One morning I was lying on my mattress, flipping through women’s magazines, but after a while Bob started scratching his ankle, so I got up and went to the bathroom. Bob stood right behind me and in my state of excited self-consciousness the splashing of piss against the urinal cake was deafening, a cataract so loud it was like I’d managed, somehow, to urinate directly into my own ear. After that I watched a television show about a guy with massive arms but no legs climbing a mountain; with a system of pulleys and ropes he managed to belay himself up the slope like a load of bananas. He planted an American flag on the summit. This ruined man’s struggle and eventual triumph moved me; in fact I began to cry. To calm myself I listened to the languorous pick-pock of two heavily medicated patients thwacking a Ping-Pong ball in the rec room, but there was a final phut and then that unnerving nothing, nothing at all, and finally an attack of the fantods drove me out to the patio. Where I sat, Bob sat, and pretty soon the patio started making me crazy, too. Sitting still—just sitting!—was like an equestrian feat. But if I stood up, if I walked in circles, then Bob would have to stand up and walk in circles with me.

  The patio was perched high above the FDR and the East River and caged in with chain-link fencing. Concrete benches were scattered around like cuttlebone, and there were potted shrubs in each corner. Scavenging pigeons and seagulls flocked overhead, vaguely white and whirling in the wind. I crushed saltines in their cellophane packets and poured the crumbs in the lap of my paper gown and fed the pieces to the birds.

  Bob said, “Are you gonna get better?”

  I looked up from my lap and said, “This isn’t very interesting, is it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I know you want to write a movie. You’re looking for material. But this— It’s not a thriller, that’s for sure.”

  “And it’s not a whodunit because, like, you’re not doing anything.”

  A young woman known on the ward as the ballerina was dancing across the patio. By the way she kept her hair twisted into a prim, tight bun, and by her body, which seemed to have a memory separate from her mind, a strict memory of its own, you immediately guessed she was a dancer. Her grandparents were with her, two hunched-up people in colossal overcoats and tiny black shoes, people I assumed were immigrants or refugees, because their clothes were so out-of-date, like from the nineteenth century, and because, all bent over, they looked wary and vigilant, as though they were ducking. Lumpen, I kept thinking, or Lumpenproletariat—when I probably meant just plain lumpy. Every evening they came to visit their granddaughter, and now they sat on a bench and watched as she swooped like a bird through the lengthening shadows. The old man smoked an unfiltered cigarette, working his tongue in a lizardy fashion to free the flecks of tobacco lodged in his teeth. The old lady sat with her knuckle-like face rapt, a Kleenex balled in her fist. She was crying for the beauty of her granddaughter, and in motion the girl was beautiful, she was ecstatic. She wore a sacklike standard-issue paper gown the same as me and she was barefoot. Her arms floated away from her body as though she were trying to balance a feather on the tip of each finger. Then she jumped around, modern and spasmodic, as if the whole point of dance were to leap free of your skin. She raced from one end of the patio to the other, flew up, twirling and soaring, clawing the fence with her fingers and setting the links to shiver. But as soon as her grandparents left, blam, the dance in her died. She went cataleptic.

  I clapped, and said, “That was nice. Brava, brava. Bravissima!”

  “Got a smoke?” she said.

  I rose to hand her a cigarette and my lighter and to look into her strange blue eyes. “You’re really a good dancer,” I said.

  “No I’m not,” she said.

  Her voice had no affect and its deadness sat me right back down on the bench. She turned away and flicked the wheel of the lighter, cupping the cigarette out of the wind. A paper plate rolled as if chased, around and around the patio, like a child’s game without the child. A white moth fell like a flower petal from the sky, dropped through a link in the fence, and came to light on my hand. The cooling night wind raised gooseflesh on my arms, and a cloud of smoke ripped into the air. The girl’s gown was smoldering. A leading edge of orange flame was chewing up the hem. I rose from my seat to tell the ballerina she was on fire. The moth flew from my hand, a gust fanned the flames, there was a flash, and the girl ignited, lighting up like a paper lantern. She was cloaked in fire. The heat moved in waves across my face, and I had to squint against the brightness. The ballerina spread her arms and levitated, sur les pointes, leaving the patio as her legs, ass, and back emerged phoenix-like out of this paper chrysalis, rising up until finally the gown sloughed from her shoulders and sailed away, a tattered black ghost ascending in a column of smoke and ash, and she lowered back down, naked and white, standing there, pretty much unfazed, in first position.

  ____

  After a month on the p-ward you don’t get telegrams or get-well cards or stuffed animals anymore, and the petals fall off your flowers and curl like dead skin on the dresser top while the stems go soft and rot in their vases. That’s a bad stretch, that Sargasso in the psych ward when the last winds of your old life die out. In the real world I was still legally married—my wife was a film producer, but she’d left me for a more glamorous opportunity, the star of our most recent movie. The script I’d written was somewhat autobiographical and the character he played was modeled after my dead father. So now my wife was banging Dad’s doppelgänger and I hadn’t talked to her in I don’t know how long. In between therapy sessions and the administration of the usual battery of tests (Thematic Apperception, Rorschach, MMPI), as well as blood-draws and vitals, I sat on the sofa in the lounge, hoping for a certain zazen zeroness—serene and stupid—but mostly getting hung up on cravings for tobacco. One night after dinner I sat on the sofa and mo
ved my finger to different locations around my head—below the ear, right in the ear, above the eyeball, against the roof of my mouth—experimenting with places to put the gun. I tried filling the dreary hours with poetry—my first love—but I’d been a script doctor too long. I hadn’t futzed with an iamb in ages, and the words just dog-paddled around the page, senselessly. I was desperate enough for a nicotine high to harvest some of the more smokable butts out of the Folgers coffee cans the staff filled with kitty litter and set out on the patio. The pickings were slim, though; in the p-ward people tend to smoke their cigarettes ravenously. You look around, and everybody’s got burnt, scabby fingers just like the Devil.

  Finally I worked up the nerve to bum a smoke from Carmen, an operatic Italian woman who was my next-door neighbor on the ward. She tapped one free of her pack. It looked like a sterile, all-white, hospital-issue ciggie that would never do anything bad, such as give you cancer. I drew it under my nose, giving it a sniff in the manner of a man with a fine cigar.

  “You saved my life,” I said. “Could I bother you for a match?”

  “You know,” she said, “I grew up a only child and was chased by every kid in my school! Teased all my life, my mom’s dressin’ me didn’t help! I was the school clown, I can never remember being happy as a child, sexually abused from eleven to fourteen, then I started to run away at sixteen, raped several times, tried suicide several times . . . then I met a thirty-five-year-old man, got pregnant, married him, suffered beatings for seven years, left him, alone, had nowhere to go, three kids, I collapsed, went for the sixth time into the hospital . . . came out, nowhere to go, so I stayed with this guy, a friend, we started to mess around, I had my fourth child, now when I look back at it all, phew, I never had love, I hate my life, I wish I was never born, I get days when I feel so stupid that taking a bath takes two hours ’cause I can’t think!”

  Man, on the p-ward you asked for a match and people told you stuff. After a week on the ward you knew everybody’s etiology. Illness was our lingua franca. Patients announced their worst infirmities right off, but no one dared talked about normal life. Oh, no—that was shameful and embarrassing, a botch you didn’t bring up in polite conversation. Fearing I might blow my chance for a pass if I hung around Carmen, I grabbed a book of matches from a table in the Ping-Pong room and stepped out onto the patio. But the ballerina was out there, dancing.

  “Got an extra smoke?” she asked.

  “I don’t want any encore of the last time,” I said. “Besides, I only got this one. I’ll share it if you want.”

  She sat beside the bench. Her skin smelled of ointments and steroid creams.

  I said, “Are you a professional?”

  “Professional nutcase,” she said.

  “No really.”

  “I’ve been in here and uptown at Columbia for like a donkey’s year.”

  “I meant are you a dancer.”

  “Not with this body.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Do you have a knife?”

  “I haven’t worn pants in five weeks.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t have any pockets. No wallet, no keys, no spare change, no lint, no rabbit’s foot, and no knife. It’s emasculating. Why do you want a knife anyway?”

  “Never mind.”

  Her nose was fat and fruitlike, a nose for pratfalls and slapstick, not jetés and pirouettes and pliés and whatnot. But her lips were lovely, the color of cold meat, and her eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, were clear blue. When you looked into them, you half-expected to see fish swimming around at the back of her head, shy ones.

  “All I ever wanted to do was dance, all I’ve ever done is dance, and I grew up into a linebacker.”

  “Yeah, well, I wanted to be a screenwriter, and guess what? I am one. That’s the other tragedy in life.” I eased back against the fence. “Anyway, you got nice legs. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “My thighs, stupid!”

  From the patio you could see the red gondolas rising over the East River, pendant and swaying as they made their way to Roosevelt Island. The sun was setting and I thought it would be so calm and beautiful to be hanging in a bucket way above everything, especially if they could just ride you out over the river and suspend you there, bobbing around, twilight for all time, the sun never going down, the glass forever warm, just hanging out in a lovely red bucket with that senile light dusting your cheeks.

  “Calm down.” I lit the cigarette and passed it to her. “Your legs are fine.”

  She smiled. “Well, thank you,” she said. Then she puckered her lips, made a loud wet smack, sucked down a single deep drag, exhaled, and drove the cigarette into her thigh. She twisted and snubbed and jammed the coal against her skin, staring at the burn, red and flecked with ash, until the last live cinder dried out.

  “You ought to quit smoking,” I said.

  Bob followed us back to her room where she applied some kind of topical anodyne or steroid, smoothing the white cream into her wound, dreamy as a lover, and crawled into bed.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be here, now would I?”

  “Sure you might. You might know exactly why you did it but you might not be able to stop yourself anyway.”

  I leaned over her bed and tried to kiss her but she put a hand to my lips.

  After that, I came to see her every night. I totally dug her broken bohemian thing, it was so the opposite of my trajectory, my silly success. I’d made a million dollars each of the last four years running and never felt worse in my life. I’m not whining—I’m not one of those whiners. One of those affluent crybabies. But I’d lost the plot and was afraid that if my life improved any more I’d vanish. By contrast a woman setting herself on fire seemed very real; on doctor’s orders, she was strapped in at nine o’clock sharp, pinned to the flat board of her bed like a specimen. At first it was unnerving to talk to a woman who was lashed to her bed with a contraption of leather belts and heavy brass buckles, so I angled my seat away from her face and spoke to her knees, which looked, in the faint blue light, as though they’d been carved by water from a bar of soap.

  “How are you?” I said.

  She seesawed her wrist, comme ci, comme ça, beneath a band of heavy saddle leather. The leather was burnished to a rich gloss by the straining of a thousand sweaty wrists on a thousand other agonized nights.

  “Would you grab me an orange?”

  I fetched an orange from a basket and peeled it; it was especially fragrant in the semidark. Bob was sitting in a chair in the hallway and I could hear the dry scratch of his pencil as he took notes. I didn’t care. The ballerina’s window was open and in the breeze the heavy curtains swept aside and the hospital courtyard, with its scalloped pattern of cobblestones, its wet bare trees and February emptiness, seemed like a scene recollected from an expatriate life in Paris that I’d never lived, a moment out of some tawdry romance I’d never had in my youth.

  “Make sure you peel as much of the yuck off as possible,” she said. “I hate the yuck.”

  “I hate the yuck, too,” I said, and held a jeweled segment over her mouth. Her lips spread and her tongue slid forward. It had been ages since I’d fed anyone. It was excellent the way, when I held the crescent of orange there, poised above her blue lips, her mouth just opened. I dangled another piece and watched her mouth open like a little starveling bird’s and then I pulled the piece away and watched her mouth close. Then I gave it to her.

  “You don’t have a match, do you?” I put a cigarette in my mouth. “A pyro like yourself.”

  “I’d love a smoke.”

  “I bet you would. Why do you burn yourself?”

  “My doctor’s theory is it puts the pain in a place I can find it. On the outside.”

  “I know exactly what he means. I thought making movies was going to be that way. Now I’d just rather be crucified.”

&n
bsp; “I don’t like your mind.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not here for a pedicure.”

  “Untie me,” she whispered.

  “No can do,” I said.

  “Please.”

  “Can’t.”

  “We’ll just smoke that cig and then you can buckle me right back up.”

  “I don’t have any matches.”

  She smiled. “I do.”

  She told me to lift the table lamp and underneath it I found a cache of contraband matches. Each individual match had been ripped from the book and mustered in a neat, soldierly line, and the strip of striking was there, too, the whole kit flat enough to hide beneath the green felt base.

  “Great, but I’ll just hold the cig to your lips. I’m going to leave you strapped in for now.”

  We worked the cig down to a nub, fanning the smoke out the window, and then she yanked at the sides of her gown. A couple of the snaps popped open, and she pulled aside the paper. It made a rustling like the thin parchment pages of a Bible.

  “This was the first time, after an audition for the Albany Ballet,” she said, using her finger to trace a faint cicatrix the size of a postage stamp. “I wanted a sharp blade, I just had the idea. I had a disposable razor for shaving my legs, so I put that in my mouth. I bit down on it real hard, trying to crack the plastic so I could get the blade free. But I couldn’t get it. It wouldn’t come out. I was so frustrated. I started crying. I lit a cigarette. I had no idea what that hand with the cigarette would do—it was like it was somebody else’s.

  “Sometimes, like this, I’m just tense,” she said, pointing out an ellipsis of brown dots down the length of her belly, marks the size of moles she’d made by extinguishing stick matches against her skin. All along her body, a palimpsest of older lesions darkened beneath the rawer, more recent burns. Her arms were crosshatched with brands she’d seared into her skin with a coat hanger heated over a gas stove.