Bogeywoman (38 page)

I let Emily be. She got the best room in the trailer, the one that looks out over the Cacapon and the horses tripping down the bank to drink. Then she got little black lizard cowboy boots
with tooled green lariats and flying yellow pineapples on them, and Margaret gave her our big pony Broomstick, and with her nerve, that was that, stunted anatomy became destiny—she’ll be a jockey before it’s done.

As for me, the former mental peon, this topsy-turvy racetrack world, this dump of queens and tramps, this sometimey escalator of nobodies to the stars, was a good place to land, but I’m only passing through, or that’s the basic idea. Our mother of sainted trainwreck’s alma mater Belcher College turned me down once they saw on my transcript that I had been bussed to Girls’ Classical every day from the bughouse. And maybe somebody there remembered my name from the Foofer wrongful death case—well, damn em to hump, but what could I expect? It won’t be easy to break into dreambox repair from Paw Paw Community College, but that’s what I by godzilla plan to do. If Doctor Zuk could pull it off in Caramel-Creamistan, then I can do it here. Back to the bughouse, that’s my plan! But only as high commissar of the dump. It’ll happen, you watch.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve decided to stay a
Unbeknownst, or anyway unannounced, for the rest of my life. What’s it anybody’s business, anyway? I am what I am, not what you are or they are. That’s why I have to be one-of-a-kind. I don’t dare be a club, for if I were a club I would soon be kicked out of it. I want someone to love, of course, some big woman with fire and la beauté, who’s never known anyone like me before. I expect to find her soon.

My arms don’t resemble raw meatloaf nowadays. Instead they’re sorta like two slim, egg-dribbled, unbaked loaves of bread—two baguettes of thready, shiny white scar flesh from elbow to pinky. I have to admit they don’t look human. You’d be surprised how few people ask me what happened to them,
and when strangers do, either I silently smirk them down, from the dignity of my new mysteriousness, or, practicing to be a dreambox mechanic, I ask them—affecting a vaguely trans-Ural accent—
Why is this of interest to you?
I think of my arms, in the privacy of my dreambox, as the last sweet vestige of my monsterhood—sorta like the Queen of Sheba’s goose feet, which Solomon glimpsed, to his fright, at the bottom of her gown as she daintily stepped across the floor of mirrors—or the swan-feathered forearm of the sixth brother in the fairy tale, whose left sleeve wasn’t ready when the liberation came. I think of my arms as my monster ticket, you might say, in case the whole world should go the monster way and monstrosity comes into its own. I’ll be there. I’ll be ready.

The more I think about it, the more I’m sure Zuk’s alive somewhere—
Not good but life
, as she once said about little Miss Peabody. Sometimes I wonder if her downfall was all some sumptuous piece of theater she staged for my education, or rather for my violent graduation, with no going back. And maybe, though the glamorous madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse could never vulgarly think such a thing, she had had enough of me just when I had had enough of her. Or did we both see that one desert, even one six million square miles, wouldn’t be big enough for the two of us?

So what if she fooled me? Even if she’s in Paris right now, dining at Chez Maxim on cousin Édouard’s tab, taking in Balenciaga, the spring collection, still she disappeared for me,
for me
—disappeared royally—she did me that favor. Therefore, she loves me to the end of time.
Love is a command and the heart is khan
.

Sometimes when I’m alone in the trailer late at night, when Novio Stables is running a horse in the tenth race and
everybody’s there except for me, the phone rings. I pick it up. I hear nothing, just that faint wild sizzle, deep in the earpiece, of the electrical cosmos brooding on itself—but I listen, I listen, and there comes, in due course, that small sedate roll of surf which is human breath. I know who it is.
It’s you, isn’t it
, I say,
you, you
—I don’t call her by name, but then I never knew what name to call her. And what the hump would her name be now? Godzilla knows. Madame Doctor? Commissar? Prisoner X? She never says a word, never hangs up, and once I even laid the phone down, ran to T-Bone’s trailer and dialed her old number in Baltimore. Needless to say—life is a dream—it was busy.

In the cobwebby, dusty old Winnebago, hearing the munching of beasts in the dark through the open portholes, holding the cool receiver in my hand, I felt the small hairs wave on the back of my neck. Then I told myself: this is one last favor she does me, to visit me in this ghostly way, so that I will never want to be with her—to show me, instead of her beautiful face, her other face, deformed, fearful, old—so I’ll be glad I’m on my own. All the same I have her, I am her.

Finally I hang up the phone and think: It can’t be Zuk. Even if she’s alive, how could she possibly know where I am? Where did she get my number? What could she have to say to me?