I was in no mood for the inscrutable god of the East. I eyeballed her keys. I was thinking how most of the people who ever lived probably itched like mad at their x. I wondered if that made it easier to die-a half million soldiers scratching away all night in the trenches, never any peace, or latrine detail in some prison camp, ten females shaved to their skulls, shoveling shit and still scratching. “God doesn’t even know I’m in this bughouse,” I said. “He’s still tryna find the six million Jews he lost, and the one million Gypsies and the five million Poles and the fifteen million Russkis, what does he care about one mental peon in a dump like this…”
Funny how all that itching and death composed me as good as any little red or blue pill. I almost smiled, but Zuk didn’t smile. She was staring at the tabletop, her face hard. I was scared I had bumbled over some line, I mean who knew what she was-a Jew, a Gypsy, a Pole or a Russki, she looked like all of em mixed up together. But then I saw what she was seeing. Never mind the corpses at Auschwitz, she was waiting to see if I’d grab those keys, maybe even-hoping? Possibly… even… suggesting? Finally she got bored, leaned back in her chair, folded her arms and looked me in the eye.
“What you are doing in this hospital, Miss Bogeywoman?” she asked. “You are not so crazy. You know in old country where I come from people don’t run so fast to psychiatrist. Somebody think she has djinn in head, somebody say she is Fatima bride of Mohammed, then maybe yes. Why are you here?” “Whaddaya mean?” I said, feeling my citizenship called in question, “I’m not just in the bughouse, I’m in the bughouse bughouse. And I don’t have a key either, well, now I do,” I added, suddenly plunging a finger through the O of her keyring. Five matching silver keys marked DO NOT DUPLICATE. I played them like a castanet. “Somebody thinks I’m buggy,” I said.
She made no move to snatch them back but pressed her ugly fingertips together. “With you, Miss Bogeywoman, is all game. Is funny hunger for craziness, itch for crazy,” she said, and I almost fainted-dropped her keys and snatched them up again-Charlie Chan gong in the nervous system, the shock of being found out. But then I saw I wasn’t found out. This was accidental telepathy out of the hot-wired air. She knew not what she said. “Don’t worry, I tell no one. You are crazy like hare in March, like weasel in henhouse maybe. You want to be crazy. Is some kind mating dance with you.”
What cheek! “Ahem, more like an anti-mating dance,” I replied truthfully, but she ploughed ahead. “You work at crazy. You are artist of crazy. It comes natural for you but you are not damage by this like the others. I think you are fanfaron of crazy, actor of comedy of crazy, and most of all you do not like if they send you away from here. You like this ugly hotel.”
“I hate this place.” I jangled her keys in her face. “Where else you would go?” she mocked. I said nothing. “Hah! you see? You are stuck. Stuck.” “That’s what you think.” I jumped to my feet, so my chair sorta fell over behind me (it didn’t have room to fall all the way down in this hole), and stumbled to the door, where I kneaded tremulously through the ring for the master key. “What! this is not funny joke, Miss Bogey…” “I guess you know you’ll have to stay here awhile,” I panted, “sorry about that part…” “What! Return me those keys immed-ach-choleria-” She was kicking at my collapsed chair with her soccer player’s legs and silver sandals. Maybe she had not been inviting me to leave as unequivocally as I thought, her mouth was a ragged O and when she finally got by the chair she snatched at the handful of keys but too late, they were already through the crack in the door and I was halfway through behind them. “There was only one gate… sorry…” I explained as I tugged the door closed. She was tugging on her side but that’s where my Bogeywoman strength has always been, in pulling things toward me. “How far you think you get in big city in this thing?” she cried, giving up on the keys and grabbing for one floppy tail of my hospital gown; it ripped and left a big Pepto-Bismol pink flap of itself in the door lock. Which nevertheless turned with a chunk once I got Doctor Zuk’s key in. “Sorry,” I whispered through the keyhole. You’d think she’d be hollering. But I didn’t hear a thing.
By now it must have been midnight and I had a sense of flying down half-lit halls and up the stairs in my half of a hospital gown, barefoot, with a handful of magic keys. In the stairwell I heard rubber soles slapping the stone steps below me, but I clung to the wall and waited and soon they sank away. On the landing, an elevator flew by, pinging. I saw a white face in its square window. I fell to my knees and touched, just touched, the bottom of the ward door to East Six. On the oiliest, most lubricious of hinges it swung open without a squeak. Even in the middle of the night they didn’t lock the thing! Just as I always suspected, any nut could break into this rotten bughouse, even easier than any bugbrain could break out.
On my hands and knees I went by the green-glowing nurses’ station. Down the hall, into O’s room. Crawled by the delicate escarpment of O under white sheeting, snowfield from elbow to hipbone, arm flung over her eyes and, dangling down to the floor beside me, the golden climber’s rope of her hair. Crawled into her bathroom. Pulled the door to.
No locks on these temples of offing yourself of course, with their bloody bathtubs, noosy towel racks and ghostly cabinets of pills. Wedged two Creepy Comix from the back of the toilet under the door. Squeezed on the light to see, since O’s makeup case was the size of a doctor’s bag and stuffed to its froggy hinges. Pawed blind through the tubes and bottles, quarter pound of bobby pins on the bottom, dimes nickels quarters, bottle caps, two bullets of different calibers, tornado-shaped shard of mirror, cannabis-smeared pipecleaner, some scary gadget that looked like a corkscrew but wasn’t and at last, it, the tweezer, two little silver bowlegs encircled with golden garters. I climbed into the gleaming bathtub and went to work.
It took hardly any time at all to open up a little bald spot, but from there on out it was rotten sameness, progress invisible, would it ever end? One by one, out they came, the hairs and the doomed crustaceans at the root of them, and finally they all lay in one big thin eyebrow around the drain at the far end of the tub, to be washed down at the end in one loud burst when I soaped and scrubbed and made my getaway. I had to keep my tracker’s eye on them of course, who knew if the crabs couldn’t smell me, a kind of mother to them, and come trooping back to me over the porcelain? And the longer I looked, the more the skimpy fringe around the drain looked like writing, a sentence in the round, a motto in some kind of letters I couldn’t understand. What could they have to say to me? I eyeballed the secret message around the drain and by and by it was like those crackles in the closet walls of Rohring Rohring where the queen of spades, or Margaret Meat or Karen Honey or Mahalia Chicken or Ruth Beandip, put in their appearances. Or any other dame I wished to summon, so long as she was grande. Suddenly I got this oracle: SHE IS A LEVIATHAN, EVEN HER KISS IS LIKE A HOUSE FELL ON ME. I blinked in the white light.
I was almost done. I mean I was only seventeen, maybe I wasn’t the grizzled she-gorilla I thought I was. By now where black hairs once grew there was only a rather raw pink heart, faintly perforated with tiny red dots. And inside it, that crack I hadn’t seen since I was twelve. Did it hurt? Did and didn’t. Of all pains, after all, the most agreeable is to pluck out a part of the body that offends, thus millions dine on cuticles and fingernails and a Haitian lady on West Four, one Mrs. Yib, had landed in Rohring Rohring after polishing off her own chignon, a whole bowlful, with a fork and Thousand Island dressing. Bored parrots sometimes beak out their green-and-gold breasts feather by feather, and if you aren’t getting any, it must be tempting to hold the starving member to anything that whirls, even a whetstone. Anyhow the more the V between my thighs puffed and pinked, the goner the vermin seemed, and I was almost happy. I eyed the ring around the drain. It said Who knows? She who eats, knows not, but she who plucks the chicken, knows.