Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

Dr. Buzzey (Emily’s friendly but useless dreambox mechanic) met Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger, the medical residents, in her doorway. Then her private room sucked in all three, along with a coupla nosy nurses, Hageboom, if I remember right, and Mursch, and the door flapped shut behind them. Fluorescence streamed from its little square window. Somebody clicked shut the louvers. We stood there staring at the nothing of it.

“Ursie,” Bertie said, tenderly pinching his nose to make sure it wasn’t broken, “get down to three before they move that thing.”

“Me!” I said. Bertie after all was my height, had subsisted on tablets, syringe squirts and aromas for five and a half years and was skinny as a Yeshiva boy from Ruthenia. “I weigh one twenty-five,” I argued pointedly, knowing his own weight couldn’t be over a hundred. Even O was fatter than he was. “But girls aren’t as noticeable for being up to sumpm,” he said, an insight which didn’t quite hold up in the bughouse, but I was pleased that he clumped me with girls , it meant my cover was working. “And if the bomb is a heavy motha,” he went on, “who else but you can carry it?” He had a point there. Now ya see how Bertie got to be a mastermind: He knew his henchwoman, just which body part was headquarters of all her vanity, and mine was my muscles.

So I said yes but I stuck at going downstairs in a canvas laundry cart as long as some unknown unbribed nurse’s aide was still on the loose on three, zealously dumping the laundry bins down the chute without even checking them for mental patients. “And besides, we got no cart,” Dion reminded us. It was true, Emily had been launched from the one laundry bin we’d purloined. We were stuck. But all at once Emily’s door opened a brilliant crack-I caught sight of Dr. Beasley leaning down to her face like a strangler-and the empty gurney popped out. The linens on top of it had been whipped into peaks and gulleys, alarming as a meringue pie. Forty seconds later we had a new plan. Big Blue… just standing there , Emily had said, which sounded like that H, big as ya motha (Bertie’s charred old doper’s eyes glowed like furnace doors), wasn’t even on a cart-so we needed all the muscle we could get.

Bertie faded around the corner, came back in a minute with two surgeon’s tops he had pinched during some other caper, two pale green blouses with only a few smears of sumpm liverbrown and crusty down the front. He handed one to Dion. “Cheese, cool,” Dion said, and waltzed off down the hall with the thing. “No, man, keep away from that mirror!” Bertie called after him but Dion was already turning into his own room. “That’s the last we’ll see of him,” Bertie sighed, and it was. “Hey, what the hump, I guess I can push the thing by myself, it’s got wheels. Okay, girls, climb aboard.” O and I stared at each other while Bertie pulled his own green top over his head. It was big as a bank lobby on him but the smears of ancient gore and baggy fit looked touching on his haggardness, as though he were in med school at the age of twelve, a boy genius whom dissection of dead bodies had shocked out of his growth. I mean he looked plausible in a certain way. Fact was even Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger looked kinda babyish, big-eared and simian in those green smocks. And by the way, what were they doing in there with Emily so long, I wondered. Bertie must have had the same thought. “Is she stand-up?” he asked, squinting at her blank door. “As a fuk in a phone booth,” O replied, in the voice of vast experience. She and I still stared at each other and I saw her heart beating fast in the faint blue fork under her temple. Climb aboard , Bertie had said. Did that mean-lie down together on top?

“Okay, you two, lie down together on top and I’ll wrap you.” To my amazement, she nodded. She was wearing a pilly pink orlon V-neck sweater, sumpm only a drapette would wear, and a black bra you could see through the pink, and the V-neck almost down to her pupik. And so it came about that O and me, the Bogeywoman, lay body to body, or more specifically her lovely head stuck out the top and my bulby nose was pressed to the washboard of bone between her momps, so that I almost swooned for real from hyperventilating while Bertie tucked and patted and sculpted us, under that froth of used sheets, into one improbably thick beauty. “How do we look,” I muttered, for an excuse to move my lips. “Don’t talk, it tickles,” O spooky-fluted. But at least she didn’t say don’t breathe. I turned my chin up a little so my breath was mossing her throat. “Calm,” said Bertie, “you look calm,” for O always did, and down we went to the third floor landing with Bertie pushing.

Of course every hair of me waved like a sailor at the nearness of her. She was the shikseh oxymoron personified, she was the highest girl and the lowest girl and nothing in between: She was a drapette but also Mary Hartline of Super Circus , she had that public gorgeosity, she could be famous right now, a star, a TV star at least, and at the same time she was that sullen teenage underbitch calling you a jew, goading you in her peroxide hair and trashy clothes, then beating you up for looking at her funny. She reeked of the last cheap perfume tester she had boosted from Read’s, probably My Sin. I felt my heart budge against her and knew she could feel it too-like a mole under a tent floor. But then, was I right? she swiveled the tiniest bit, toward me not away, and my lips were quivering like a rabbit’s in the gulley between her momps, kinda folded into the dunes that swelled out of her bra and actually quivering, I would just need to stick out my tongue-and all would be lost lost lost! She might even knife me. I pulled myself together. I stayed where I was. I was almost happy: I was on mission, but at the same time I was a snouty cub who’d fallen asleep at the teat and woken up again in sweet milky darkness. Then suddenly her hand pressed the back of my head, her nuzzy pressed my lips and I knew she’d let me do whatever I

The elevator doors shuffled open and Bertie sang, “Oink me, it is an H. Holy godzilla, look at that motha.”

And I peeked out of our sheets at the thing. It sat on a stainless steel dolly in a row of dowdy linen bins, a Nike among Miss Muffets. It had been many times slicked over with paint but still had a rough, psoriatic crumb to its blue enamel that made me loath to touch it. It was like sumpm left to rust in a marine junkyard because it might explode-and yet it did resemble somebody’s mother: five feet high, all the power in the bosom and shoulders, some sort of undersized glass-faced gauge where the head should be-a meter instead of a dreambox, isn’t that just like a mother? Well what do I know, never having had one since I was two.

“Come on, Ursie. O, you stay put-make like you’re paralyzed or sumpm. Perfect.” Bertie and I stood side by side, looking down fascinated at O’s big eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling-two Caribbean portholes ringed with stove black, in each of which a blind dab of fluorescent light floated. “I do a good coma, don’t I,” she said, and we both jumped.

Bertie grabbed the H around the waist, tipped but couldn’t lift the thing. I laughed. “Okay, Koderer, you do it,” he grunted. Then panic whited out his face: “Cheese it-the Regicide!” And suddenly the H was rocking like a bowling pin on its heel. Bertie dove into one laundry bin and I took the next one down the line, and pretty soon we heard the swat, swat of Reggie Blanchard’s tennis-racket-sized white rubber-soled hospital loafers on the linoleum.

“Lady O! How ya doing. You be up here scouting again for that doper cat? What did that eight ball ever do for you?”

Comatose. Not a blink. A drapette of the highest principles was O, stand-up to the final hour, a stone stoic even though we both knew that Bertie would have swapped either one of us, or both, to the hoods or the cops in a minute for eight ounces of Saigon gage or anything else really hard to get.