Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

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 through 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.