The Dead Fish Museum Read online

  “Can I touch?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I put my finger against a dark, hard burl on her outer thigh, an elevated lump as smooth as a chestnut. I ran the flat of my hand over her hip and down her leg. Whatever I touched prompted a story, some account: auditions, classes, Tuesday nights, phone calls, weddings. I’d been horny, but now I felt detached. This display of her body wasn’t sexy, the way a tour of a battlefield isn’t bloody.

  In the p-hosp, of course, it was seriously against the rules to touch another patient, and being under Bob’s constant surveillance didn’t make it easy for us. In line at the cafeteria I’d palm my food tray with one hand and feel her solid balletic rump with the other. Or I’d play footsie with her under the table at Friday-night bingo. Or I’d grope her up in the little gymnasium where, for RT, we played some of the sorriest games of volleyball you can imagine. In the typical draft that goes on against the fence at school, you know who the athletes are, who the sissies are, who to crib from in a history exam and avoid on the kickball team, but up on psych choosing a squad of decent players was primarily a pharmacological matter, something where, really, you wanted to consult the DSM-IV before you made your first selection. Choosing an appropriate sexual partner in a mental hospital was probably supposed to work along similar lines. You needed records!

  With her malady, the ballerina wasn’t really into fooling around, but I hoped her new medication, Manerix, which was supposed to dampen some of her desire to burn herself, might also lead by inverse ratio to an upsurge in her passion for old-fashioned sex. After a week, two weeks, I was getting frustrated. Most of the contact we made, skin to skin, was glanc-ing and accidental, hardly more than what passes acceptably between strangers on the street. She had this terrific body, so looking and fantasizing was fine—for a while. But of course about this time I discovered that I couldn’t whack off. My medication was giving me erectile hassles, plus Bob outside my open door didn’t help. In anticipation of the day when the ballerina’s Manerix would kick in I started pitching my cocktail of bupropion and lithium and clonazepam out the window.

  But the ballerina made such great progress on her new meds that by the end of February her p-doc wanted her to practice sleeping through the night without restraints. After dinner we’d sit outside, on the patio, and watch the sun go down, knowing she was about to be released. And one morning, sure enough, I saw her dragging a wicker basket and a pillowcase full of clothes to the nurses’ station. Departures on the psych ward were a big deal. People always swore they’d come back and visit but they never did. By the time you were a ward veteran like myself a little bit of your hope left with them and never fully returned. I expected I’d never see her again. She was cured, and that was tantamount to being gone, gone off to reside in some unfamiliar land. Her grandparents met her in the lounge with their hopeless, past-tense faces and their old leafy clothes; standing beside them in a gauzy spring dress, the ballerina seemed a mere puff of self, passing like a spirit out of their heavy Old World sadness, whatever it was about. She told me that as soon as I managed to wrangle my first pass she wanted to see me. She used a red felt pen to write her name and number across the hem of my gown, and we shook hands, but after she was gone and I took up my station on the sofa, I felt certain I wouldn’t rise again until some angel came by and blew a trumpet.

  It was maybe a couple weeks later, and I was no longer on Maximum Observation. Bob was gone and I was on my own. My window was open and little things stirred as they had in my childhood, so that the clothes scattered on the floor were once again the bodies of dead men. When I was a boy, my father and his six brothers seined for salmon out of Ilwaco, Washington, and every couple years one or another of them would wash up in the frog water around Chehalis Slough, drowned. The funerals seemed to last days, weeks, even months, as the remaining brothers gathered nightly in the Riptide bar and stared drunkenly into each other’s eyes like dazed, speechless toads. Left at home, sleepless and alone—I have a mother somewhere, but I never knew her—I imagined that each shirt on the floor was a dead uncle and I could not leave the tipsy life raft of my bed, waiting out those long nights when the ocean fog was cool and full of premonitions and the beacon at the end of the breakwater threw green shadows against the walls of my room. Now I drew the blanket over my head. “Our Father who art in heaven . . . etc. . . . etc. . . . now and at the hour of our death amen!” When the coffin thing didn’t put me to sleep I peeked over the satiny selvage of my blanket and stared at the ceiling and listened to the tedious complaints of patients as they wept into the pay phone across the hall: (8:02) . . . My parents had a bad marriage, then divorced and married worse people . . . (8:07) . . . I’ll show you what’s the matter with me. Then I get my razor. I cut down sharp and quick. I scream and go out onto the court and bleed all over . . . (8:47) . . . It’s hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time . . .

  This kind of serial conversation went on night after night, a litany of complaint and outrage, right outside my door. People were hospitalized when their feelings reached an acute phase, but if you eavesdropped on all the jabbering, all the lonely, late-night calls, the whole long history of pain and madness fused into a single humdrum story, without much drama. It went flat. I’d been revolving in and out of various mental wards my whole life and previously had always considered myself touched and unique. I was kind of snobby about it—like a war vet, bitter and proud—but now I flipped the covers to the floor and queued up with all the other lunatics, waiting my turn.

  “Look,” I said, “can I come see you?”

  “You can get out?” the ballerina asked.

  “What’re you saying?”

  “Are you better?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really. But I’m off MO.”

  She didn’t say anything. On the p-ward you often found the phone swaying from the end of its metal cord like the pendulum of a clock, no one in sight. People just drifted away from conversations, too frazzled and forgetful to end the call or maybe too medicated and lethargic to hang up. That’s what I was imagining when the ballerina went silent, the dangling phone.

  “Okay?” I said, finally.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I hung up and crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling and listened: (9:31) . . . I swear I spent sixty percent of my life puking . . . (9:33) . . . Then can you explain to me why every time I got in my car to go somewhere “Mr. Bojangles” was playing? . . . (9:45) . . . I started keeping a journal almost two years ago. I used to write only when I was happy. Then I realized that I’d look back and think that my whole life was happy, so I started only writing when I was depressed. And I realized that I wasn’t always depressed, so I started to write every day. Now I calculate I’m fifty percent happy and fifty percent depressed so I don’t see the point of writing at all anymore . . . (10:07) . . . It hurts.

  I used my very first pass to visit the ballerina. With three hours before lockdown, I caught a cab, stopped for a bottle of wine, then hustled over to her place, a small apartment just off Varick. She showed me around with exactly three gestures. “Kitchen,” she said. “Bedroom. Bathroom.” We uncorked the wine and toasted my new freedom.

  After being abstemious for so long, I was drunk in no time. I bent and gave the ballerina a kiss on the tip of her big old nose and crossed the room in that deliberate way of drunks. Her bathroom was a frilly gift that one girl might give to another, an assortment of powders, soaps, oils, lotions, perfumes, sea sponges, lava stones, and so on. There were yellow candles set at the corners of the tub. Bath beads in translucent capsules sat in jars like sapphires. A fragrant potpourri filled a blue glass bottle and there was a bar of brown soap with chunks of something abrasive, like sawdust, embedded in it. The whole place was stockpiled with not just your boring brand-name products but all these totally recherché and esoteric potions searched out in faraway quarters of the city. I opened the medicine cabinet and fingered throug
h the shelves, reading. A jar of astringent lotion said that it would rid your skin of the toxins that are an inescapable part of modern life. I didn’t believe it, of course, and yet who doesn’t want to “revive” and “replenish,” who doesn’t love the words “pure” and “essential”? My p-doc hadn’t been using any of this uplifting language, and after a couple months on the ward the exotica listed on the backs of these bottles—olive, kukui, Saint-John’s-wort, wild yam—sounded good to me, sounded like the fruits of some heavenly place, an island off somewhere in the blue future. Hadn’t Columbus set sail in search of these very ingredients?

  Mixed in with all that humbug were the serious amber bottles of medication: Effexor, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Prozac, Zoloft, the whole starting roster of antidepressants. The ballerina couldn’t have been taking them in combination, so what was the history here? I lined the bottles up according to the date the script had been filled at the pharmacy but the time line gave out about a month before she entered the psych ward. No refill for Manerix in sight. What was the deal? In a back row of the medicine chest she kept the scrubs and utility players, and I popped a few Tuinals, washing them down with water from the faucet, and then tapped a couple Xanax and Valium into my palm, to save for a rainy day. I took a leak and flushed the toilet and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were dark pits and my gums had turned a pulpy red. I seemed to be looking at the portrait of a man who hadn’t eaten a piece of fruit in years.

  When I came out she said, “Lots of medications, huh?”

  “You got the whole library in there,” I said.

  “You were snooping around, trying to get a read on me. I know, so don’t even bother saying you weren’t.”

  “I said I was looking.”

  “I don’t care. I always look, too. It’s okay.”

  I shrugged. “What’s up with the Manerix?”

  “That new antidepressant that’s supposed to depress my depression better than the old antidepressants did?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “I ditched it.”

  “Is that a good idea? How’s it going, without meds?”

  “I feel like burning myself, if that’s what you mean.”

  For ten years I’d been dutiful and hardworking, cranking out those big-time Hollywood screenplays in order to bankroll a lifestyle that broke the sillymeter. Now it was like, Bring on the degradation! Let’s break through the bullshit and get real! I wished I’d brought another bottle of wine, to help lower me back into the bohemian hopes I’d had at twenty-five—literature and pussy. Baudelaire and women that stank like Gruyère! I’d never really wanted to write screenplays. I’d wanted to be a poet. And here I was, in poetry central. There were candles on the shelves, on the floor, fat and thin candles, tall and short, red and green and all the gradients of soft pastel, scented with the sweet and cloying flavors of guava, pomegranate, mango. Everything here was luxe, calme, and volupté, all right. In his Tahitian diary Gauguin wrote, “Life being what it is, we dream of revenge,” a phrase whose ruthlessness used to be right up my alley. But what kind of revenge did I need when last year I’d managed to enjoy three summers, two springs, and four falls—one in Moscow, another in Florence, two more in Cairo and Burma? I was a touch manic, and after I walked off the set of my last movie, winter just didn’t make it onto the itinerary. I was like a god, laughing at the weather. Who needed Gauguin and his gaudy painted paradise? For me, now, the most extreme, remote, Polynesian corner of the globe was inside the ballerina’s skull.

  She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees and the front of her dress gaped open and showed her breasts just hanging in that lovely, lovely way, guavaish and weighty, ready for plucking. I reached in and pinched a nipple. She shrank back and told me she didn’t feel like being touched tonight.

  “You don’t?”

  “Not really,” she said. “You look scared. Are you scared?”

  “Scared?” I looked up at her. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am right now. I’m all bottomed out. I’m down here with the basal ganglia and the halibuts.”

  “Did you take any of my pills?”

  “You bet.”

  “You liar! You did, too.”

  “I said I did, you goofy bitch!”

  That started the ballerina pacing, head erect, back swayed, tense. Her heels pounded the floor like a ball-peen hammer. She marched over to her dresser and rearranged some objects. I heard glass clinking and jars slamming down. She jerked a chair away from the window and set it by the door. She slapped shut a book that had been lying open beside a cereal bowl on the table. She disappeared into the kitchen alcove. She stomped back in with a cup of ice in her hand. She chewed the ice and the broken shards fell out of her mouth to the floor. She grabbed the chair at the door and returned it to its original place by the window. Her whole total animal thing took over, while for me, thanks to the downers, all memory of the upright life was gone. I would never again walk into a room and shake someone’s hand. I could barely turn my head to keep track of the ballerina. Some words came out of her mouth but I don’t know where in the room they went. I never heard them.

  Her dress dropped to the floor and she sat on the bed. Her panties were black, webby things; it looked as if a huge hairy spider had clamped itself onto her. Beside her she had a pack of cigarettes and a candle and a green knitting needle I wasn’t too crazy about. She lifted the candle and lit the cigarette and drained some of the hot wax on her thigh. All the while she watched me, and after a few minutes she had me hooked, I was mesmerized, charmed, I was down way deep into that blue pool where the fish shyly waited. She took a drag of the cigarette, exhaled, then turned the hot coal around and twirled the ash off against her nipple. Another drag, and she turned her attention to the other nipple. Pretty soon both aureoles were ashy smudges. Her eyes remained wide open and, I guess, fixed on me, but they were blue and unfocused, and the pain was miles away.

  I watched her, but something had gone wrong. Her torment wasn’t turning me on. I didn’t feel a thing. Obviously the drugs I’d snatched from her medicine cabinet weren’t elevating my mood, and the thought of all those sundries in her bathroom was bringing me down, hard. Every last sad soap in that utopian toilet was bumming me out. They were all part of a repertoire of hope I’d already lived through. I’d already washed myself with that crap. I’d taken those pills. I’d tried to feel loose and relaxed in a tub of hot water, beneath that shadowy candlelight. It all seemed so familiar. Her paisley sheets and the fan of peacock feathers above the futon and the tasseled lampshade screamed boudoir. The tiny shells and rocks and twigs italicized a special moment long ago. In the little syncretic boutiquey spiritual figurines lined up on the windowsill and the crystal prisms strung from the ceiling on threads of monofilament I saw the very same occult trinkets that had decorated every bedroom I’d ever been in. My anticipation was gone, I couldn’t lust or desire.

  All this intense specialness, along with the way she was effortfully trying to turn her pain to pleasure, was ending up as a very dull result in my brain. I heard the tindery snap, the kindling crackle of burning hair. She was burning herself, là-bas. The whole room stank. As she closed in on a climax, soot washed down her thigh like the aftermath of a calamity when the uncaring rain begins to carry it all out to sea . . .

  “Here,” she said, passing me the cigarette.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Burn me.”

  I’m a screenwriter and my movies gross millions and when I write “THE CAR BLOWS UP” there’s a pretty good chance a real car will indeed blow up, but I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of roasting this woman’s cunt over a hot coal. I can’t even say the word “cunt” convincingly. The Frenchy sang-froid I’d felt leaving the psych ward was completely gone now. I wasn’t Henry Miller, I wasn’t Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin, I wasn’t any of those expat guys. My career as a sexual adventurer was about half an hour old, and it was over already. I’ve read Baudelaire but I wouldn’
t want to have his big ugly forehead. I was known among my friends as a major cork dork and the wine I’d bought I wouldn’t even have cooked with at home, fricasseeing stew meat for the dog. When I left the ballerina, if I chose, I could check myself out of the hospital and into the Plaza, stay a month, order room service, conduct business through my agent, while I watched other people out the window, real lunatics, splashing in the fountain, singing holy songs, dancing and shouting hosannas into the sky until the police came and tasered them back into submission. When I squared up my tab at the p-hosp it would run me about thirty-five grand and at that rate the Plaza would be a bargain.

  I needed air. I managed to stand and make it to the window and was swinging a foot onto the fire escape when a wet gob of something hit with a splat on the back of my neck. I thought for sure it was bird shit. I looked up. A blue rain was falling through the streetlamps and at the Korean deli on the corner a crippled man leaned on a wooden cane, picking through a pyramid of oranges. An old Korean woman sat on a white bucket, cutting the stems on peonies, huge lion-headed flowers with pink petals that shook loose in the wind and were pasted to the wet sidewalk like découpage. Everything seemed to have been given a new coat of varnish sometime in the night. Every wire and railing glistened, and the air was clean and cool. Above the intersection a traffic signal turned green. Several cars went by, their sleepy wipers blinking away the drizzle. Down at the deli the cripple reached into his pocket and paid for the orange, and the old woman went back to cutting her peonies. How could so much peace and calm reign between two people? I balanced on the windowsill and looked back at the ballerina.

  She was a mess, ghoulish with a plastering of soot and ash. Her body, crisscrossed with brandings and burned by match heads, looked fully clothed. She’d never be naked again, not with the textile weave of her scars, the plaids and polka dots she’d made of her skin.