Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

Rigo fashioned a gun out of his right hand; the hammer of his thumb slammed down rapid fire as he squinted and swept his aim along the glimmering funhouse row of bottles behind the bar.

“They kill my brother,” he said. “But I go home, Ramish. One day I go home.”

He slapped the bar and rose; Ramage watched him weave toward the door; it looked as though he was only taking a rough guess about the way out.

____

At different junctures, Ramage tried to recall what he and the blond woman were talking about, but he found the words were just falling out of the back of his head as they went along, and he was arriving in the present always empty. When last call was announced, she suggested they buy a bottle and stroll along the boardwalk and keep drinking.

“You’re right,” she was saying. “My name isn’t Desiree Street — good God! — but we can just leave it at that anyway. I prefer it. Let’s make up a name for you instead.”

“Call me Payne, Payne with a ‘y,’ ” Ramage said, “Payne Whitney.”

“Payne’s okay, Payne’s a good porn name. Payne-with-a-y-Whitney. Okay Payne, where to?”

“You smell that?”

As they drifted up from the beach and further from the ocean the damp cloying odor of kelp and sea lettuce was replaced by the arid and spacious scent of oregano cooking in the spice factory. It was if they’d entered a new, fairer latitude. They walked through a back section of town where the sidewalks were cracked and slabs of concrete heaved up to make way for weeds and tree roots. A wooden boat listed in the dirt of a vacant lot; a cat with yellow eyes watched them from the glassless wheelhouse. A brick building dominated by a high square clock tower was just across the street. The clock had a white face and Roman numerals and the black hands were stuck at the pleasant hour of seven, a time of beginnings, of a new day, a new night. They leaned their heads through a window, canted open with a pull-chain; blue smoke rose from the ovens and spread and was sucked away by a whirring exhaust fan. Ramage shushed drunkenly with a warning finger to his lips. “Look,” he whispered, “natives.” Two men and a woman stood in front of a large spinning machine; they were dressed in white smocks and paper hats and surgical masks; behind them glass bottles filled with spice and were shunted down a metal chute and conveyed up a rubber ramp into waiting boxes; the clinking bottles made a cool Latin-flavored jazz in the cavernous factory; particles of oregano rained down in a fine green dust that settled over the cement floor; a faint trail of foot-prints was visible, the tread of sneakers stamped into the green spice, and the men and the woman were coated in green dust, too. Ramage leaned in and inhaled the warm fragrant air, and he started choking and hacking; the woman inside the factory, laughing at the conclusion of some joke or story, lightly touched the elbow of the man beside her. They stiffened and the laughter went out of them. They stared uncertainly at Ramage and Desiree in the window; they ventured a wave. Ramage waved back.

“Somebody got married,” Desiree said, when they’d returned to the motel. She pointed to the neighbor’s car.

“They’re on their honeymoon,” Ramage said. “That’s why they came to this paradise.”

“You are wasted.”

“I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

Ramage put a finger to his lips. He led her to his neighbor’s room and tested the knob and it turned. Inside, the man and the woman slept naked on top of a tangle of sheets, the baby nestled between them like a puzzle piece. Whatever it was inside of Ramage that understood that he was outrageously drunk stifled the urge to scream. He quietly shut the door.

He put the key in the lock to his own room and then flopped over the threshold and crawled on his knees across the carpet to his canvas tool sack. He unzipped the bag and fumbled through an omnium-gatherum of plumb lines and box wrenches and pencil stubs and ratchets and tape measures until he found his gun. Further searching produced a plastic case of shells. “Look,” he said. He lay on his back like a playing child, holding the gun in one hand, the shells in the other. He smashed the gun and the case against one another and shells rained down on his face.

“Hello, gun,” he pantomimed. “Hi, bullet.” The black polymer barrel waggled as the gun asked, “Will you marry me?”

“Is this like a kink or something?” Desiree asked.

“Let’s have a baby,” the bullet said.

“Fill me with your seed,” the gun said.

Ramage loaded a shell in the gun. The bullet made a satisfying click in the chamber like a key turning in a lock.

“I’m pregnant,” the gun announced.

“I’m out of here,” Desiree said.

“They got a baby. The newlyweds have a child.” Ramage jumped into bed and beckoned Desiree with the gun.

“Why don’t you give me that gun?”

“I came here to kill myself.”

“Why?”

“Why kill myself?”

“Why come here?”

She walked out, leaving the door open, and for a while Ramage lay on the bed, listening to the crashing of the ocean across the highway. His display had been grotesque. He had humiliated himself and now it disgusted him; he was mortified and filled with self-loathing and yet he watched the open door, hoping she might return. He had almost felt decent, standing with Desiree outside the spice factory, watching the quiet green dust spin through the cavernous room, but now he couldn’t stop his black ruminations. His mind went round and round, churning pitifully, and finally he pictured himself crossing the highway and wading into the sea and pulling the trigger; if he lost nerve and flinched and only managed to blast off part of his head the ocean would drown him. It wasn’t so unusual to consider these scruples; it was like a math problem one worked until there was no remainder. Regina, his friend from the hospital, had dressed ceremoniously in her grandfather’s bathrobe and soaked the terry cloth in gasoline and then struck a match, immolating herself, and what she remembered was the noise, the horrid rushing sound, the wind howling inside the flames — that was what made her want to stop it. She’d rolled herself in the garden, digging into the dirt and desperately spinning, smothering the flames not to save her life, not to end the pain, but to stop the noise. She was hideously disfigured, her mouth a dry withered hole, her eyes drooping from their melted sockets, her graphed skin puckered and glossy, red and raw, as if she’d been flayed and turned inside out, but all she ever wanted to talk about, two years after striking the match, was the noise.

Ramage gulped a yawn to clear his head; tendrils of chalky saliva hinged his mouth and alcoholic tears welled in his eyes. Breeze from an open door did little to refresh him. When Greenfield cleared the set, Ramage went out onto the fire escape and found RB sitting on a metal step, furtively turning the crank on a hand drill and boring a hole in the plywood that blocked the window. When the half-inch bit punched through, he tested the peephole, then enlarged it, carving away at the wood with a pocketknife.

“Spooky,” RB said. He stopped to pinch at a blood blister on his thumb. “You smell that smell?”

“Clove today,” Ramage said.

“I been trying to figure it out.”

“There’s a spice factory,” Ramage said.

“This town is ugly,” RB said, “but it smells good.”

“I’m all tore up,” Ramage admitted. “I got drunk with Rigo last night.”

“Harvard,” RB said, with a laugh. “He don’t like me kidding him, do he?”

“He might appreciate it if you laid off.”

“Good. Then I’ll keep on.” RB finally popped the blister, wiping the spurt of blood away on his pant leg. “Guy doesn’t know where he’s at.”