Free The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio

With three hours before lockdown, I caught a cab, stopped for a bottle of wine, then hustled over to her place, a small apartment just off Varick. She showed me around with exactly three gestures. “Kitchen,” she said. “Bedroom. Bathroom.” We uncorked the wine and toasted my new freedom.
    After being abstemious for so long, I was drunk in no time. I bent and gave the ballerina a kiss on the tip of her big old nose and crossed the room in that deliberate way of drunks. Her bathroom was a frilly gift that one girl might give to another, an assortment of powders, soaps, oils, lotions, perfumes, sea sponges, lava stones, and so on. There were yellow candles set at the corners of the tub. Bath beads in translucent capsules sat in jars like sapphires. A fragrant potpourri filled a blue glass bottle and there was a bar of brown soap with chunks of something abrasive, like sawdust, embedded in it. The whole place was stockpiled with not just your boring brand-name products but all these totally recherché and esoteric potions searched out in faraway quarters of the city. I opened the medicine cabinet and fingered through the shelves, reading. A jar of astringent lotion said that it would rid your skin of the toxins that are an inescapable part of modern life. I didn’t believe it, of course, and yet who doesn’t want to “revive” and “replenish,” who doesn’t love the words “pure” and “essential”? My p-doc hadn’t been using any of this uplifting language, and after a couple months on the ward the exotica listed on the backs of these bottles—olive, kukui, Saint-John’s-wort, wild yam—sounded good to me, sounded like the fruits of some heavenly place, an island off somewhere in the blue future. Hadn’t Columbus set sail in search of these very ingredients?
    Mixed in with all that humbug were the serious amber bottles of medication: Effexor, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Prozac, Zoloft, the whole starting roster of antidepressants. The ballerina couldn’t have been taking them in combination, so what was the history here? I lined the bottles up according to the date the script had been filled at the pharmacy but the time line gave out about a month before she entered the psych ward. No refill for Manerix in sight. What was the deal? In a back row of the medicine chest she kept the scrubs and utility players, and I popped a few Tuinals, washing them down with water from the faucet, and then tapped a couple Xanax and Valium into my palm, to save for a rainy day. I took a leak and flushed the toilet and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were dark pits and my gums had turned a pulpy red. I seemed to be looking at the portrait of a man who hadn’t eaten a piece of fruit in years.
    When I came out she said, “Lots of medications, huh?”
    “You got the whole library in there,” I said.
    “You were snooping around, trying to get a read on me. I know, so don’t even bother saying you weren’t.”
    “I said I was looking.”
    “I don’t care. I always look, too. It’s okay.”
    I shrugged. “What’s up with the Manerix?”
    “That new antidepressant that’s supposed to depress my depression better than the old antidepressants did?”
    “Yeah, that one.”
    “I ditched it.”
    “Is that a good idea? How’s it going, without meds?”
    “I feel like burning myself, if that’s what you mean.”
    For ten years I’d been dutiful and hardworking, cranking out those big-time Hollywood screenplays in order to bankroll a lifestyle that broke the sillymeter. Now it was like, Bring on the degradation! Let’s break through the bullshit and get real! I wished I’d brought another bottle of wine, to help lower me back into the bohemian hopes I’d had at twenty-five—literature and pussy. Baudelaire and women that stank like Gruyère! I’d never really wanted to write screenplays. I’d wanted to be a poet. And here I was, in poetry central. There were candles on the shelves, on the floor, fat and thin