Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

I grabbed a soft white cloth from the shelf and sat beside the tub, in a pillow of suds.

“My life is so simple a one-year-old could live it,” she said.

“You’re just having one of those days,” I said. I wrung the washcloth and let the warm water dribble down her chest. “What’s up with those old people? Your grandparents?”

“They emigrated here after my mom died.”

“Where’d they come from?”

“Yugoslavia,” she said. “Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, that whole thing.”

“You speak their language?”

“Mala koli(breve)cina.”

I soaped her shoulders and neck, rinsed the cloth and ran it slowly along the length of her arm, studying the scars. I was stupidly surprised when the wounds didn’t wash away. A siren passed in the street. Her startled fingers took off in flight, fluttering up from the sea of foam and sailing through the fragrant steam, darting here and there.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You must have a diagnosis. Everyone has a diagnosis.”

“Well, just before I came to the hospital I spent three hundred dollars on Astro Turf and PVC pipe, trying to build a driving range in my dining room.”

“It’s your dining room,” she said. “You can do what you want.”

“I’ve never owned a golf club in my life.”

“Oh.”

“Travel brochures are a bad sign, too, but you know what’s the worst? Messing with the medications. Like lithium — it makes my hands shake and I can’t walk steadily. So I decide to back the lithium off a little and titrate up on something like BuSpar or Lamictal. My hands stop shaking but I can’t remember anything or I start eating like a pig. I keep trying, you know, making all these little adjustments, but it’s like— I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like.”

“It’s not like anything,” she said.

“Eventually I can’t move. I’ll have the thought, Oh, I want to go out, so I put on my hat and stare at the door. Right about then I check into the hospital, they fix me up, send me back out. I kick ass for a while and then collapse.”

“You know your diagnosis,” she said.

“Whatever — bipolar II, Fruit Of The Loom IV, it doesn’t make a difference.”

“We’ll never get out,” she said.

“ Au contraire —I’m getting myself discharged AMA, first thing tomorrow.”

“But at least we have our own language.”

“Yeah, Greek.”

“In grade school,” she said, “I wrote a report about how a myth was a female moth. We were studying the Greeks.”

“You have a beautiful mouth,” I said. “I’d like to crawl in it and die.”

“I’m twenty-nine years old,” she said. “My mouth is full of dead boys.” She blew me a kiss. “Sometimes your mind gives me a feeling of great tiredness. Aren’t you exhausted?”

“My curfew,” I said feebly.

“The fires are going out, it’s true.” She sank down in the tub and submerged so that only her knees, her small dancer’s breasts, her big nose, her lovely mouth and blue eyes, these isolated islands of herself, rose above the darkening water. Flecks of ash floated over the surface. “Here’s my idea for your next screenplay,” she said. “Sirens are going everywhere. People are weeping. It doesn’t really matter where you are, it’s all black. You can’t open your eyes anyway.”

“What are you saying?”

“And there’s a donkey marooned on an island in the middle of the ocean. A volcano is erupting on the island and rivers of hot lava are flowing toward the donkey. In addition, all around the small island is a ring of fire. What would you do?”

I considered the possibilities. “I don’t know.”

Smiling, she said, “The donkey doesn’t know, either.”

“That’s a good one.”

She poked at the remaining bubbles with her finger, popping them. I checked my watch. It was midnight on the nose and all that awaited me back at the p-ward was another morning and a long walk down a putty-colored corridor and, at the end of it, a paper cup full of pills. And in a month or a year the ballerina would touch a scar on her breast and tell a rather pointless story about a screenwriter she’d met in the psych ward. Waves of dirty water lapped against the sides of the tub, and her skin, moist and gleaming, was fragrant with wild yam and almond. Then everything went briefly quiet in one of those strange becalmed moments where it’s hard to believe you’re still in Manhattan.

We angled our heads back and opened our mouths like fledgling birds. Smoke gave the cool air a faintly burned flavor, an aftertaste of ash. A single flake lit on my wife’s eyelash, a stellar crystal, cold and intricate. I blew a warm breath over her face, melting the snow.

“It’s been falling since Saginaw,” I said.

“Listen,” she said.

The flight from New York had been rough, and my ears were still blocked, but somewhere in the distance, beyond the immediate silence of the falling snow and the thick woods, I heard the muffled echo of rifle shots.

“Deer season,” Caroline said.

“Your father go out?”

“He usually goes,” she said. “He and the boys. And now you. Now you’ll be one of the boys.”

Caroline brushed her hair free of a few tangles and clipped it back in a ponytail that made her look a decade younger — say, twenty years old, taking her back to a time before I’d met her. Perhaps in reflex I remembered the sensation I’d had the first night we slept together, thinking how beautiful she was, how from every angle and in every light she was flawless, like some kind of figurine. Now she examined herself in the small round mirror she’d pulled from her purse, grimacing. The shallow cup of the compact looked to be holding a kind of flesh dust, a spare skin. She dabbed powder around her cheeks, the set line of her jaw. She took a thick brush and stroked a line on either side of her face, magically lifting her cheekbones. She traced her lips lightly with a subdued shade of red and suddenly she was smiling.

“Up a ways there’s a fork,” she said. “You want to stay right.”

Before I could start the car again, two men in orange caps crossed in front of us, rifles slung over their shoulders. They stopped in the road and waved, the ears beneath their caps like pink blossoms in the raw cold, and then they bumbled into the woods. I stared at their fresh footprints in the snow.

“You know them?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

At the cabin, we ate a late lunch without the men, who were out on a mission that was, it seemed, top secret. Caroline’s mother, Lucy, had been kept in the dark, and so had Sandy Rababy, whose husband, Steve, was a partner in the accounting firm founded by Caroline’s father. We ate tuna sandwiches and potato chips on paper plates that had been gnawed by mice. Lucy set out a plastic tray of carrots and celery sticks and black olives. We drank mulled wine in Dixie cups, from which I nervously nibbled the wax coating.

“They took their guns and vests and packed peanut-butter sandwiches and a half gallon of Scotch,” Sandy said. “Now, where do you think they’re going?”

“We heard guns on the drive in,” I said.

“Isn’t it awful?” Lucy said.

“What’s worse,” Sandy said, “the toilet’s busted.”

“It froze,” Lucy said, “and the bowl cracked. Or the pipes broke or something. We’re using the outhouse.”

She pointed, and through the window I saw a rickety leaning structure, and a dirty trough of footprints in the snow where people had traipsed back and forth.