Bogeywoman (32 page)

Maybe it’s what I should have expected of the navy of a Soviet Autonomous Region of gray grass and red sand, five thousand miles from the sea in any direction. The tub bobbing on ruffles of dirty foam was either a dilapidated yacht or a gussied-up oyster boat. Its scaly white paint job showed up in the dock lights as some mineral strain of psoriasis. The deck in its widest part was so low any wave at all would roll over it. The pilot or swabby was shorter than me and threw back his shoulders at silly attention at the end of the gangplank. Besides Doctor Zuk, who was only half, he was the first Caramel-Creamistani I had ever laid eyes on, so I took a good look. Despite his height he was a ferocious-looking fellow with a white shirt, military epaulettes and black sunglasses, a big round head with glittering hair, massive chest, little bow legs under white shorts, and a mustache draped like a Moghul arch. A cigarette dangled from one side of it, and now and then the harbor lights picked out his big square teeth, as white as chiclets. He seemed to be baring them. Doctor Zuk barked some words at him in Caramel-Creamistani as we passed and he threw his cigarette away. I must say she was worse than Merlin, even, for bossing around cheeky menials.

The engine thudded spongily and we shoved off. I pressed my nose to a porthole but Zuk sat in the dark cabin with her back to me and gazed gloomily into space. We sailed southeast, towards the bay and away from the harbor, and surprisingly fast the garble of factories and shipyards and choked-up strands of lights on bridges and moving traffic was slipping away behind us, and the question arose, where could we be going? Where does the old bay lead? I had a feeling right from the start that Zuk and I were going all the way south, south beyond Annapolis where you walk out a mile and are still in warm salt soup
up to your shins, south beyond the Choptank, beyond Fishing Creek and the oyster dumps of Crisfield, south beyond Misty of Chincoteague and Seastar, south beyond Tangier Sound and the Rappahannock, south to the end of the bay. If I’d known how far I could get from humid longing in a single night, how far from dandelions spurting through cracked sidewalks and sickly pigeons pecking the dust in hot parks—if I’d known how far a girlgoyle could get from sticky heartsore Baltimore in one long night on the Chesapeake, I’d have struck out long ago in Merlin’s rubber dinghy. I’d have blown it up and dropped it over the crumbling concrete seawall on Light Street. That’s what I was thinking.

“Where’d you say we were going?” I asked Zuk, though she hadn’t said. And still didn’t say, just sat there in the dark cabin smoking a Gypsygirl and staring at a black porthole. Probably sorry she ever met me. “Er, Madame Zuk—” I said to her back. “You will be so kind to swallow that
madame
or choke on it,” she growled. “I’m sorry if I lost you your job,” I said, “I’m sorry if I got you deported …” “Why you are saying this? Because I don’t laugh? Because I am sad? Is never wrong to be little bit sad. Every day is wedding day of somebody, funeral of somebody.” She didn’t look round. She was miles away, wearing her distance like a poisonous atmosphere, a lethal perfume. She kept her back to me, as if to turn her eyes on me would kill us both.

I could understand. I’d always known her beauty was the space between us. Now that the space had closed I was stuck with looking at myself. I had nothing but her sandals on, and didn’t like my feet in them any more than she did. I stared with savory disgust at my cheese-white legs, my flaky knees which looked sandpapered, the convict stubble growing in where my pubic hair used to be. “I still don’t get it why naked is the best
disguise,” I said. “Why naked is best disguise,” Zuk echoed, “hmmm, is good question. Why did I think this? Naked is best disguise for
you
not me, but why? So I can’t stop? Yes that is it: So I don’t go back. How I can ever explain to somebody why runaway girl, former mental patient, has no clothes? Is hopeless. Therefore now we go on together to end, no matter what.”

So that explained it. I was her doom.
They went south
. We were going on, to some end or other. Our engine growled like a bulldog, dragging us down the wrinkled bay, towards the Bay Bridge, under it, beyond. What was down there? I was her doom, how humiliating. “Wait a minute, a famous dreambox mechanic like you, you can get a job anytime, can’t you?—you
are
famous, aren’tcha?” I needed her to be up there with Margaret Meat, Karen Honey and Ruth Beandip, so I could be sure I couldn’t hurt her in any way. For how could she save me if I had ruined her? And then too, staring into the sun of her glamour I wouldn’t see that black spiderweb strung from thigh to thigh …

“I’m sorry if I ruined your life,” I whispered. “Stop boasting, my dear, and anyhow, my life is not so easy ruined. Ach,
choleria
, I am a little bored of this Foodian experiment anyway,” she sighed. “In my country is not so bad, you know, since I am Foodian Mental Science Unity Institute of whole Karamul-Karamistan. If I have nose full one day of Eatipus complex I say all right is enough, what it matters? Self-explanatorizing that everybody wants to eat somebody. Tell us something we don’t know, tell us something we don’t see with own eyes, or better yet, gentlemen, don’t tell us nothing! Shut up! Shut your muzzles!” She crushed out one Gitane and briskly lit another.

“Cheese, if you’re so famous and got the top job in Mental Science in Caramel-Creamistan, why’d you ever leave?”

“Don’t be silly girl, everybody wants to leave Karamul-Karamistan. This is why you murder for top job like that, so maybe you can find way out. My uncle Nadir Suleymenov, finance secretary of Mrs. Khazarolova, arrange whole Unity Institute of Foodian Mental Science for me, so I can live. Family of my mother, Suleymenov-Suleymenians, they are not modern people. All same they know better than to give me to husband. They know me from child, they know what I live through with my father the Beetle. They don’t marry me to Karamistani man. They don’t want catastrophe in henhouse.” She smiled. “So they find way for me to live. And also when it comes to new Institute of Mental Science, I think, better Gulaim Zuk than Karamistani psychoanalyst next in line, my cousin Dr. Usman Saidbaevich Suleymenov, supposed orthodox Foodian who made his praktikum on Giant Wheel in Prater with pretty yellow-haired barmaid from Carinthia. Of course so soon as I am Commissar of Mental Science and have little money and diplomatic passport, I want to leave Karamul-Karamistan like everybody else. So I go to Paris and write my little book …”

“Are you gonna write about me now?” I asked. “I have already write about you,” she said, annoyed, “you are monster, no?” “You mean I’m just another teenager …” This was worse, even, than being a
Unbeknownst To Everybody. “Lemme die first,” I said. “You want own book like Food’s Dora?” Zuk said wearily. “You must leave this mental peon think behind you. Write your own book, Bogey.

“So. In Paris I write my book …” “It’s a rotten book,” I said. “Even so,” Zuk smiled. “Book gets for me fellowship at Rohring Rohring. And you know from there, yes? At Rohring Rohring, everything doesn’t turn out so good. Supervising psychiatrists don’t like my special relation with Miss Bogey—even though
they admit she is getting better. I say to them, so Miss Bogey gets the idea she is something special, so what? What’s so
geferlich
? Then old-style dreambox analysts like Feuffer yell at me I am
naïf
, I am careless—I yawn at this. They say, what if everybody did it? I say, what if nobody did it? But what is use of explain. To one who understands not, elephant trumpets in vain. Ach, these power-hungry Foodians, these Cossacks of mental science in Sigmund Food beards, you think if they really understand what is man they are humble like bug inside themselves, but is it so?”

“Cheese, you don’t exactly radiate self-doubt yourself,” I muttered. “
Hoopla
, I agree, but I am only Zuk. I don’t take any idea so dead serious like that. I don’t hang on for life. Maybe now I try something new—like they say, mouse with one hole is quick snatch”—and one of her ugly hands shot out, pounced on a thing of air and wrung its neck. “I am interested for new career, something with gorgeous clothes maybe, or real Karamistani restaurant. And you know is true, without one lover is kicked out of doors, a new lover comes not to our divan …” She turned her face to me at last and gave me a brilliant smile. Her mood seemed to have reversed. She was buoyant, even giddy. “But you’d be a beginner,” I said uneasily, “just a nobody, when now you’re famous.” “Only little famous,” she shrugged. “You must have realized my family has money—a little money—like yours. I don’t start from nowhere, from nothing.” She put her ugly hand on my hand.

“Um, er, uh, tell me about Caramel-Creamistan. Sumpm. A little,” I stammered. “Later.” Out of the blueblack swimming
dark the planes of her large face pointed this way and that like a turban of crossed scimitars, like some kind of opera headdress flashing, sumpm from
Aida
. My head drowned.

“First I will look at every part of you and not even touch you.”

And now my time was up, here she immaculately rearranged me, I mean I don’t know how she did it, as far as I can remember I never felt those gnarly fingers at all, but I found myself lying flat on the grimy bunk under her hands like a baby being changed, and the dim planchette of her palm drifting, floating, above me. All my beauty was the invisible tracks over desert between us, the rubbed-out thread suddenly shining with the electricity of my baffled hunger. Or was it the thin moonlight of her neglect that picked out the footpaths?

“Desert of Kyzl Kum is beautiful,” she whispered, “if you like empty. No tree, no house. Where does anybody live you ask? Nowhere, nobody, you think, then you come over hill, there is
yurta
same color as weeds of ground, and another, and another. Red crack sand, pink dust, gray-pink hills, soft rolling, next and next, everything empty. Maybe small bunch pines along top of hill, or little bit thorn, maybe, in fold where spring is, like hair in folds of girl of trouble age. Beautiful if you like hard, beautiful if you like empty. No house, no road, and tomorrow every
yurta
is vanished away, not even rag or half-burnt lump of dung in grass. And then old people say, in red desert of Kyzl Kum only bones point way to Samovarobad.”

The bones of her face—those crossed scimitars—pointed to outer space, and, I don’t know, maybe I was asleep, the turban fell apart like an eggshell and then it was the boat we rocked in. Going south.

Whereupon sumpm
really
queer happened, I mean I fell into a hole pitch-blueblack and I was crawling around in my own
body, which I knew because of tryna get out, every nerve sat up and pulled on its burnt-out light cord and sparked, and what I saw, it was like everywhere there was some sort of unarrived light running loose in the blue vein dark, spilt skim blue milk of, or moonlight, fingers of, picking out trails up my itchy capillaries, or stringing neon beads up the nerve trunks, shooting pearlized baby-blue plastic popbeads up my privatemost, some coming together with a pop, some popping apart

All this time I’m literally under her hand, without ever landing her white palm clambers like a spy airplane over the corrugations of fat and bone drawing some kinda hot spark, good godzilla I’m lighting up all over, I’m a circuit board, a little hot and seasick I shut my eyes and the queer thing is that’s me I’m seeing, far down below lit up like the twinkling spiderweb of a desert town seen from the air at night. And then I’m prowling myself in a creaking taxi up trashy backstreets or zooming up and down my own lymphatic ducts, my golden noggin light glowing, my meter ticking like crazy

[Where are you Doctor Zuk? I don’t even see your face, just now and then your hands and even they are sumpm else, a plectrum or maybe—a knife and fork?]

“What I should do with boygirl like you, eh? so young, so reckless, unbranded like donkey who knows not the world—so silly, so never-from-home—so
shayn
.”

Whereupon sumpm even queerer happened, now I’m mining my own tunnels, tracking inside myself for the lost chunkagunk, I’m blipping out of my own miner’s hat, lozenges of light torpedoing down and up the personal plumbing, so many melting pills of exploratory, medicinal light, surging up the gut gutters into the armbone legbone headbone like in the old aspirin ads and now I’m mining myself with baby-blue gunpowder,
creepy-crawling up the gulley, pouring a trail out of the chewed-off corner of the TNT sack, and now the little fin of flame hisses over the rocks into the mine anyone still in there o my godzilla I wait BLAM I rain down sizzling

How to get out, follow the lost chunkagunk, track the blue moldy crumb of, through the black woods on my scalp, between my legs, peck them out of the hairy roots shudder of horrified pleasure until all completely hopelessly lost pitch blue black

“Poor dear, you have learned what I know, love is calamity to the head,” Madame Zuk whispers.

You are a leviathan, even your kiss is like a house fell on me