Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

There, I said it. For years I’ve kept it to myself. Before, you were too young to know, but now you’re too old not to, especially if you think you’re doomed to spend your life in the loonie bin. What for, to keep the world safe from the Bogeywoman? Just because those chicken-livered Maine girls threw you out of camp, so what, they were only little girlgoyles, they didn’t know any better.

Can’t you see, Ursie, you being you, the banquet will be laid for you wherever you land? Already that beautiful dreambox mechanic in the bughouse is crazy in love with you, anybody could see it, for godzillas sake she gave you her phone number didn’t she? Actually I don’t know about that old broad-okay so it’s the covert prude inside the hussy talking, but I don’t claim to be helping anybody, she does, and besides she’s old enough to be your mother. I mean, isn’t there some kind of Olympus you’re not supposed to descend from if you work in the bughouse, otherwise where’s that big difference between the bughouse and life which costs ninety-six dollars a day? Aaaaah what does it matter who am I to talk, love rules the camp, the grove, the track but who woulda thought the bughouse-just lemme know when you want outa there.

Love,

Margaret

You are in serious hot water now Miss Margaret head-in-the-fog Koderer , I radioed my sister, you won’t live down this verblundjet act of treachery for thirty years at least. Wait’ll I get my hands on you, and don’t try to tell me you thought their royal highnesses would respect the sanctity of the U.S. Mail …

“She’s joking of course,” I said with a feeble snicker, “quite a whipped-cream-pie-in-your-face type, my sister.”

“Why she would joke about your sexuality, I wonder, some-zing we have never talked about?”

“She’d joke about it exactly so this would happen, so I’d have to face a world-famous fuddy dreambox mechanic on a highly poisonal subject which is, to put it mildly, embarrassing to a girlgoyle like me. She’d find that sorta funny.”

“I wonder why zis subject is embarrassing to you?”

“Hey, no use tryna explain to a royal what a normal person finds embarrassing. You fuddies don’t even see sumpm a little raw in sending Nurse Hageboom to butt in on O Hell and ask us Bug Motels one by one did you have a bowel movement today…”

“Ahem. Your sister Margaret. She is the closest person to you?”

“She used to be,” I said.

“May I ask why she thinks you are troubled by sexual feelings for women?”

“I don’t see where she said I was troubled. She said crawling not troubled.”

“You are quite certain there is nuh-zing worth discussing in what your sister says?”

“Nuttin worth discussing with you ,” I said, and we shared a moment of unpleasant silence. “I might discuss it with Doctor Zuk, if she was my dreambox mechanic. And by the way, not to hurt your feelings or anything, but I always thought from the first time I saw her that Doctor Zuk oughta be my dreambox mechanic. Why won’t you let her be my dreambox mechanic? I don’t see why somebody shouldn’t choose their own doctor when they know, absolutely know, they’ll be better off with that person.” I had a queasy spongy feeling in my guts that the timing might be all wrong for this argument, but I also had a hunch it was now or never.

“Ursula, I tell you frankly because you are so much better. Such a move is simply out of z’question. Can you zink why I might find this not a good plan?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Doctor Zuk will go along with it.”

“I’m afraid you are right,” Foofer said gravely.

I stared at him, trying to gather what this might mean. So hard and clear, so amber, so royal was the glue that stuck the royals together fast in their one big royal popcorn ball, so rare, in fact never, were the holes in it that let you see down to the nothing-but-popcorn at its core-I stared and stared and started filling up with dread like a battery with charge. “We’re not all that good buddies, me and Doctor Zuk,” I panted, afraid I had somehow ratted on her, “she wouldn’t tell me her birth date, or her country, or who she was working for, or whether she’s married or a spy or a Red Army dreambox fixer or what kind of perfume she wears or whether she’s ever been in Caracas or any of that private royal stuff.”

“Yes, but I see you have put her all these questions.”

“So what, whaddaya mean,” I said in rising panic, “we all wanna know that stuff about the royals all the time, that’s half of what we talk about in the Bug Motels, you could put out a royal gossip magazine and it would sell like hotcakes-”

“I zink very little of such talk takes place in telephone calls to private residences of psychiatrists.”

“Margaret made that part up!” I shouted.

“Perhaps. Still, plainly it has come to a question of, of far too complicated personal… interest. Perhaps you know I am z’chief of treatment at this clinic. Furzermore, I am one of a staff of fifty-seven treatment personnel including fifteen senior psychiatrists. And I am your psychiatrist. The plan of treatment for every patient in z’Adolescent Wing of Rohring Rohring is discussed regularly before zis whole body. I must tell you that Doktor Zuk has argued long and eloquently in front of zis body for your special friendship, but now, in my judgment and that of many uzzers, it is gone too far and, with my apologies, for I know zis will be difficult for you-it must end.”

“You mean we’re not supposed to talk to each other any more?”

“Nuh-zing.”

“She’ll never put up with that kinda ridiculous game, pretend you don’t know each other and all that!” I said.

“No. She has not.”

“O my godzilla she’s gone-you threw her out…”

Foofer stared at a point just past me on the wall, and his loose cheeks sagged. “For a time, a very little time, Ursula, we place you again on Accompanied status-this means, as you know, under no circumstances you leave z’hospital, I am sure you understand z’reason, and you have an escort wiz you wherever you-”

I never meant to hurt him. It’s true the suit of farts was unappetizing to me and his Buick-sized dignity provoked my mental patience to fury, but he was a gaseous nuisance, basically gaseous, and therefore not quite there. He was just a two-hundred-pound fuddy from Europe, a big bald head I could never speak to again whenever I wanted. I had no reason to hurt him.

But as every mental peon knows, these bug mechanics never close a door behind you without palming alarm buttons up their sleeves or in the kneeholes of their desks, so I had to be fast, whatever I did. I had to get to Doctor Zuk before they locked me up. And if Foofer said escort wiz you wherever , that meant Roper, Mursch or Hageboom starting right now. The three Corny Norns were probably lurking out there in the cholera-green corridor already. Well, clapping a nurse on me again was more than a private person could stand-lemme die first!-and besides I had to get to Doctor Zuk. I had to get out of the bughouse. Damn that Margaret, thanks to her I was now a Lesbo Beknownst To Everybody in this dump, and a buggy, underage, amateur lesbo into the bargain. That was why they had to save me-from myself and Doctor Zuk.

But I wasn’t about to give up the forbidden love of my life. O she was scary all right. Naked she had more of the crone about her than I could look at without sweating. She might even love me, and her love was like a house fell on me. And maybe I could never have her or be her but no mere Foofer could stop me from trying.

So I never meant to hurt him but in front of me was Foofer, then his desk, then the door. The brown worsted suit of farts sat on a leather chair; he was pyramidal in shape, and had a certain comic-book dragon effect owing to the popcorn balls of white smoke rising from his lips where a pipe dangled. I leaped off the couch and in one motion pushed him and his chair over backwards. It was a pretty big chair, with lungs of soft leather on the back that softly hissed as they settled. And that had been so easy, once it was done his still-crossed feet dangled absentmindedly in the air above his head, that I pushed his desk over too. This made a great dust-billowing whump on the old wood floor that was sure to bring the nurses running and shrieking on the double. At the same time out of some secret drawer or bunghole in the desk a file marked KODERER URSULA popped and flapped onto the floor. I should have got my mitts on it and not let go, o a thousand times since then I’ve replayed this scene and made my getaway guarding it with my life, but instead I just snatched it up, wheeled and stuffed it out the window, so that hundreds of pages of me went fluttering down Broadway. Then with the superhuman strength of the mental patient I ripped open the steel door, well maybe it wasn’t locked, probably not, and there was Mursch, here came Roper and Hageboom, whipping around the two corners. I backed into Foofer’s office and holed up fast in the kneehole of the overturned desk, getting ready to spring out like a cornered rat, but the nurses just ran around me and now I saw why. Foofer hadn’t moved. He was knocked out cold, his half-closed eyes were all whites, his face why deny it was blue, his pipe was missing though there seemed to be sumpm round and dark O-ing his bloodless mouth, and his wing-tipped foot still nodded at the point of his trousers abstractly, as a butterfly pants with its wings. O my godzilla I’d probably killed the man! Now I ran and nobody stopped me, and this time when I passed Lopes at the front desk in the lobby I wasn’t even a liquid movement in the air, not quite an itch between his eyes-just a vague, exhausted feeling of having cared more once.