Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“I… had to have sumpm to do in this dump,” I whispered. Until I saw you , I thought. She didn’t smile. I felt her peer through my buggy disguise as through a glass pane; one of her eyebrows arched up mockingly. “How you are called, my dear?” “Bogeywoman,” I said, and O and Emily tittered, because I had never let a dreambox mechanic in on my moniker before. Doctor weasel put out her ugly hand. “Is pleasure,” she said. I stared at the hand floating between us. Then I remembered to take it.

“How… how you are called?” I mimicked her, not only to be fresh to a dreambox adjustor in front of the Bug Motels, though I knew they would be impressed. No, I must have sensed I would have to haggle and track and scheme and beg for every crumb of truth about her as long as I knew her. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Zuk,” she finally said, in her peculiar, salivary accent, sumpm between shook and zook . “Doctor Zuk?” “Zuk,” she repeated, her voice loud and bored, as if she regretted having said so much.

She leaned into Bertie’s closet and laid a finger on the cold pebbly cylinder of laughing gas. “Pfui,” she exclaimed, “unpleasant feeling like skin of dead hairless animal. Here is interesting fact: human beings despise everything hairless-at least I think is true. Pig, snake, legs of chicken, wing of bat, bald head of man, tail of opossum and rat, I wonder why is this? Why they would hate everything bald like themselves?”

“Cause they got taste,” I said-talk about an easy question!

She didn’t answer, but her silvery eyes lit on me for maybe five seconds as though I were the most interesting animal on earth. Then she turned and walked away. And I remember her sleek behind flexing like a fist under the velour, and the pinprick her champagne-flute heels made across my forehead as she went-that was as close as I came to taking her in.

Bertie came creeping back as soon as she was gone. “They didn’t even call the cops,” he said in a hurt voice. “Well, maybe they still will,” I consoled him, “she just left.” “Did she look mad?” “Er, not exactly.” Of course we were too nervous now either to sniff the H or to leave it alone, but a few minutes later Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard came in without a word-just shot us a scornful look, kiddie D.O.A.P . it said, like the time we five choked down a whole McCormick’s tin of nutmeg between us and all of us puked for an hour but nothing else happened-and rolled the H bomb away. But two minutes later he left in its place a modest little E cylinder on a cart with its twin oxygen tank and gauges and valves and other appurtenances, all in working order, and said, “Yall damn fool huff-heads got fi-teen minutes with this baby and that’s it, so get to work.” We dutifully sat down and huffed, but all the fun had gone out of that mission. I didn’t see any more giant popcorn. Instead I had a vision of Zuk, the international doctor weasel, skiing in her high-heeled sandals on a sort of slag heap of stars. A great dust of stars flew up all around her-she was brilliant, but she was dust, and she was skidding down down down.

Miles from Madame Zuk

She was too many stories above me. Love is a girlgoyle’s proper food, or so Margaret always claimed-the other stuff just plumps up your bra size. And O used to say with a yawn that love at least gave a girl a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Well, I met Zuk and the next morning I woke up out of the tar with a seasick lurch and didn’t care whether I lived or died. So she hadn’t worn any rings-so what-no rings is a quirk of fashion, for godzillas sake, not a marital status. Of course she was married, they all were, probably she had, gag, cute children too. And why did I have to snoop around to find out what she had and didn’t have in the nuptial department, bribe Reggie to check for the dreaded family photos on the desk? Because she had pulled cheap rank on me like a prison matron, firing off poisonal questions and not answering any herself. This offended my mental patient’s democratic principles. Was Zuk a better woman than I was? Well, obviously. But for how long? Just for today? Dream on, Bogeywoman-just for today until the end of time.

The logic is always corrupt which answers the question should I live or should I off myself? Other people hang around in it, audible voices in the wall, as if it were a cheap hotel-snoring in its lobby, shaving at its flatulent sinks, smoking in its bed. The figures lie when I weigh in the girlgoyles who’ve turned me down, since, gone as they are, they weigh nothing. On the one hand I know quite well that life is a dream and every face in it nothing but a lesson for the real world to come, I mean the real world that lies wrapped up in this one like a cheese in cheesecloth. All the same, for every mental patient there comes a moment when this world is ante for every other. The game boils down to you and your dreambox mechanic. Together you argue it out if you should live or die. Gimme somebody I can love or else, you say. Your dreambox mechanic replies you should be whole unto yourself, but she has a date every Saturday night, you’re sure of it.

So shouldn’t they make it illegal? Shouldn’t it be therapeutically incorrect to have a dreambox mechanic like her, Doctor Zuk, Madame Zuk, that disgustingly complete and out of reach? No bughouse doctor too beautiful , no, wait, beauty isn’t exactly the problem-well then, no dreambox mechanic too beautiful on her horse , I mean too sure of her seat, too haloed in round white savoir-vivre like a circus equestrienne in her spotlight. She gallops by, she maybe lets a few circus monkeys cling to her mane as she goes, and maybe I’m one of them. But surely Zuk is too favored from birth to be trusted with cripples? How can she have the proper sympathy? So that the message she throws to the mental patient like her garter, never mind the soothing talk from her mere voicebox, is Try, try in vain, you shall never have me or be me . I mean, after that, when you’ve already lost the game, and for good, why get better? What for?

And that’s a queer phrase right there- get better-as though repairing your dreambox had all the morality of a shopping trip, you have to get sumpm along the way, track it down, pick it up, steal it, beg for it, somehow add it to your equipment or you’re done for. Then here comes Zuk, dreambox mechanic, one of the royals, you gotta have her and worse yet, she isn’t even your dreambox mechanic-you can’t beg, buy or blackmail an appointment with her.

I hated my doctor. Reinhold Feuffer, M.D. Foofer . Especially Foofer, but in fact I despised all the doctors in Rohring Rohring-who were they, the royals, ha ha, to think they could tell what was wrong, really wrong, with a mental peon, especially me? And although at seventeen I was generally more crude than rude, I used to mock any Bug Motel who had a crush on a fuddy of that line. Emily worshipped her doctor, but she was dying and he wasn’t saving her. “Better you should hate old Buzzey and live than love him and croak,” I ragged her. “It iddn’t Dr. Buzzey’s fault I won’t eat,” she said, with plain South Baltimore logic that might have sounded sensible in a fatter person. “Yeah, well if he cooked you anything really good …” I said. (It’s true there was sumpm about not being able to eat I just couldn’t grasp; when I’d taken it up, it was a wrestling match with every chicken leg and pretzel rod, and in the end I cried uncle and fell on the stuff.)