Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

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.

She said, “What?”

I hadn’t said anything. “Isn’t there anything else you like to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s raining out.”

“Why?”

“Why?” I said. “Why is it raining?”

The air in the room was stale and hot as a kiln, the motion baked out of it. I opened another window in the kitchen alcove. Instantly a sort of pulmonary breeze blew a green curtain into the room, expanding the space. I saw a forgotten slice of bread in the chrome slot of her toaster and a used tea bag set to rest on the edge of her sink, the stub of a cigarette going soggy inside it. When I returned to the bedroom the ballerina hadn’t moved. She’d sleep in these ashes, like some black-feathered bird. Her back was to me, and I went to her, but the burns covering her body — how would you even hold such a woman? Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere? I stopped short. I’d never seen her back before, and it was pristine. The skin was flawless, a cold hibernal blue where her blood flowed beneath. I blew on my fingers, warming them, and then laid my hand between her shoulder blades, lightly, as though to press too hard would leave a print.

“How about cleaning up?” I said.

“Oh,” she sniffled. “I don’t know.”

In the bathroom I plugged the drain with a dry cracked stopper and dialed the spigots until the water running over my wrist was hot and tropical. I looked around at all the ingredients. The stuff in jars looked like penny candy, and I spilled some of that in. The beaded things were especially pretty, and I tossed a combination of yellow and green gelcaps in the tub, followed by a pill that effervesced and changed the color of the water to a pale Caribbean blue. I gave up on any idea of alchemy and just went wild. Pine Forest, Prairie Grass, Mountain Snow, Ocean Breeze. Once I got into it, I saw no reason to stop — juniper, vanilla, cranberry. A capful of almond oil, a splash of bain moussant, some pink and blue flakes from a box that turned out to be ordinary bubble bath.

“Okay,” I said, closing the bathroom door to trap the steam.

She hadn’t budged from her place on the bed. I hooked her arm over my shoulder. For a ballerina she had pretty much zero ballon at this point. Her feet dragged across the floor like the last two dodoes. I was afraid that when I lowered her into the tub she’d sink to the bottom. I made her sit upright. With steam curling down from above and a heady lather of bubble bath rising over the edge of the tub, the bathroom was now one massive cumulus cloud.

“A candle,” she said.

I snapped the chain on a bare bulb above the sink. “No more candles tonight.”