Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

She lay naked on the bunk, one hand behind her head, and I sat down beside her. This was it. Zuk was demure enough, or exhausted enough, to close her eyes.

Her body was similar to Central Asia, as I have said, and not young, but age hadn’t ruined it, only made it more dramatic, all its tufted crags and escarpments, the muscle walls hung with moss, folds of tough sod between rock ribs, bristly sedges in the clefts, a certain bareness of the underlying tectonic structures. It was grand, awesome, even gorgeous. So why was I scared to death of it?

No I was not scared of dying-I swear despite her age Zuk was further from death than, say, O. O’s rosebud organs and filigreed sheaths, her silk and satin privacies, were clicking knives all over. And thinking of the other little girlgoyles I had loved, filles fatales so to speak: compared to Zuk’s candid Mohawk, Lou Rae Greenrule’s shining snagless bolt of hair from crown to waist had been the glass mountain-go ahead and break your neck on that, Bogeywoman-or once you roll all the way down, go drown yourself in her twat of pale green jello, where no living thing could get a footing. And even my see-through princess Emily, far more than Zuk, was over the hill of no return. Her skeletal purity was way past death, as everybody knew, into Halloween transfiguration.

Unh-unh, it wasn’t death, in Zuk, not prissy choicy maidenly death at all, but coarse old fat old life that was scary. She looked well fed and well used, Doctor Zuk, she looked calloused and grizzled and tough. She looked well manured, like anything would grow in her, and she smelled yeasty, or would have, if she hadn’t cured her hide for thirty years in Byzance, by Rochas. All right, all right, I’d talked myself into it. I’d polished off swamp water, hadn’t I? I was ready. I shut my eyes and held my nose and jumped.

It was easy. By godzilla I should have realized that wild fun for any dolly who’d lived to be as old as Zuk couldn’t be as far away at the end of the labyrinth as mine was. Or she’d be what I was, a raving mental peon until only yesterday, with a gray under-hull of cicatrix, wicker-woven slash by slash, from her elbows to her wrists. (By the way I’ve decided I’m never gonna get these arms fixed. By godzilla I can see it coming: soon I’m gonna be so terrifyingly sane that I’m gonna need some proof I was ever buggy. And you watch, when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself I won’t even wear long sleeves- let em see, the bloodsuckers- well, maybe in January.)

Coming was as easy for Madame Zuk as blinking, or swallowing. Trills like Fats Waller, I’m not lying. That coochie of hers winked at me so hard I thought she was taking my picture with it, and maybe she was. One eerie thing: how her skin was slippery, papery, over the muscle-that was her age I guess-and I swear at times there was no more to making her melt in my fingers than pulling off an ice-cream wrapper.

So madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse was a better woman than I was after all! Then it set in again, the furtive conservatism of the mental patient. Who the hump did she think she was, this big strong woman, this so-called bug repair expert, running off with a bughead, all right, a former bughead, but still, a former bughead not quite eighteen years old? And this was Dr. Gulaim Zuk, who had earned her fame debugging the dreamboxes of youth. The nerve of her, to write about teenage monsters when she’d never even been one! The kind of ease Zuk had wasn’t sumpm you grew up to. Like scratch it was sumpm you got back to, if at all. Doctor Zuk had been spared adolescence. She’d hidden out with her father The Beetle all through his wondrously weird, unspeakably lonely exile in Caramel-Creamistan. And then the Commies had shot him exactly on time-on the eve of her twelfth birthday-so she never had to grow up in front of him, never had to see his disgusted face.

As for me, adolescent ugliness is my natural state. Bogeywoman I was born, fat and stinky, Bogeywoman is my dowry. Course, I admit it, next to the ease of Zuk, my adolescent repulsiveness suddenly looked like sumpm willful, even to me-gargoyles in the belfry-sticking their nauseous tongues out. All the same I was what I was and could not be saved from myself. For an instant I longed for lobotomy-sure, cut the whole memory bone from the dreambox. Blank me out. But the world had become too beautiful to erase, somehow.

(I could imagine The Beetle first arriving in Caramel-Creamistan-a Yid from the Vistula seeing those camels, asking himself Where the hump have I landed? I lay along her body now and whispered What the hump is this place, I never knew there was a swamp at the end of the bay, tell me where we are or I’ll …)

Her body was similar to Central Asia… well, maybe not, but it was nothing like mine. Dew glazed her throat, her forehead. She had had enough. She stopped my hands. I lay along her side, her head rested on the crook of her arm, and two or three hairs burst out of each calamitous pore of her armpit. Hair too lank and outspoken even to curl, it lay there, black wheat. Now that I saw her up close, I understood how she could look famous-her face was as huge as a movie screen, her eyes, her nose, her mouth all double the size of mine, you could have driven a Cadillac between those Thousand and One Nights ’ eyebrows. Never in her life could anyone have called her petite. She was built like a belly dancer, generous, billowing. She had the kind of lobed showy muscle I once read would keep a girl out of the Rockettes-just right for Princess Noor and Her Six Harimettes, however.

Fazool shrieked and we poked our heads above the gangway stairs. We both saw it: a black bear about as tall as me stood up to look at us, then polkaed away across the bog, his fat little bowlegs splashing.

“Say, got any bears up there in Caramel-Creamistan?” I whispered. “And what about disgust? Weren’t you ever, like, sick-to-your-stomach disgusted with love-the whole twenty-dish ham & chicken potpie firehall supper? And where the hump are we anyhow?”

“You know, one thing people know how to do in Karamistan. This is eat. Sit, talk, eat. September in Samovarobad is paradise, thirty degrees and everybody eating melons from morning till night. But most of all, meat. Is meat culture. Twenty kilometers out of city in red hills, is nothing to find but meat. Sit on carpet, soon some woman brings in great bowl or plate: all meat, naked boiled meat. And you see everything of this meat. Is anatomy lab for sheep. You see every part of sheep, whole stomach, testicles, big steaming heap intestines, and from middle of puddle two whole sheep eyeballs look up at you. My god what makes that scream like crazy woman?”

“O that’s an American Barred and Bedraggled Owl. You’ll never see it-it’s probably in that tangle of black gum trees. Before we get there it’ll go flapping off to the next thicket. Ya know what it says?-I mean what everybody says it says- Who who who, who cooks for you ?” “Ah! Is very good question. And what is answer?” I shook my head. “Answer of course is You do . Answer every time, You do you do you do .

“Alas, I tire of ever the same dish. The world too stays not in a oneness of changelessness. And who would say which is more beautiful, night unveiling to day? or day unveiling to night? Either way, veiling or unveiling, the world is beautiful as a houri.”

“Say, where the hump are we again?” I asked for the hump-teenth time, “and where’d you say we were going?”

“I eat all foods. I eat meat, fish, kasha, apricots. I particularly like feast dish of Karamul-Karamistan, which is baby camel stuffed with goat, goat stuffed with six hens, each hen stuffed with twelve eggs in nest of parsley, and all this roasted on spit through twenty-four hours…”