Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

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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 moved 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.