Free The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio Page A

candles, tall and short, red and green and all the gradients of soft pastel, scented with the sweet and cloying flavors of guava, pomegranate, mango. Everything here was luxe, calme, and volupté, all right. In his Tahitian diary Gauguin wrote, “Life being what it is, we dream of revenge,” a phrase whose ruthlessness used to be right up my alley. But what kind of revenge did I need when last year I’d managed to enjoy three summers, two springs, and four falls—one in Moscow, another in Florence, two more in Cairo and Burma? I was a touch manic, and after I walked off the set of my last movie, winter just didn’t make it onto the itinerary. I was like a god, laughing at the weather. Who needed Gauguin and his gaudy painted paradise? For me, now, the most extreme, remote, Polynesian corner of the globe was inside the ballerina’s skull.
    She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees and the front of her dress gaped open and showed her breasts just hanging in that lovely, lovely way, guavaish and weighty, ready for plucking. I reached in and pinched a nipple. She shrank back and told me she didn’t feel like being touched tonight.
    “You don’t?”
    “Not really,” she said. “You look scared. Are you scared?”
    “Scared?” I looked up at her. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am right now. I’m all bottomed out. I’m down here with the basal ganglia and the halibuts.”
    “Did you take any of my pills?”
    “You bet.”
    “You liar! You did, too.”
    “I said I did, you goofy bitch!”
    That started the ballerina pacing, head erect, back swayed, tense. Her heels pounded the floor like a ball-peen hammer. She marched over to her dresser and rearranged some objects. I heard glass clinking and jars slamming down. She jerked a chair away from the window and set it by the door. She slapped shut a book that had been lying open beside a cereal bowl on the table. She disappeared into the kitchen alcove. She stomped back in with a cup of ice in her hand. She chewed the ice and the broken shards fell out of her mouth to the floor. She grabbed the chair at the door and returned it to its original place by the window. Her whole total animal thing took over, while for me, thanks to the downers, all memory of the upright life was gone. I would never again walk into a room and shake someone’s hand. I could barely turn my head to keep track of the ballerina. Some words came out of her mouth but I don’t know where in the room they went. I never heard them.
    Her dress dropped to the floor and she sat on the bed. Her panties were black, webby things; it looked as if a huge hairy spider had clamped itself onto her. Beside her she had a pack of cigarettes and a candle and a green knitting needle I wasn’t too crazy about. She lifted the candle and lit the cigarette and drained some of the hot wax on her thigh. All the while she watched me, and after a few minutes she had me hooked, I was mesmerized, charmed, I was down way deep into that blue pool where the fish shyly waited. She took a drag of the cigarette, exhaled, then turned the hot coal around and twirled the ash off against her nipple. Another drag, and she turned her attention to the other nipple. Pretty soon both aureoles were ashy smudges. Her eyes remained wide open and, I guess, fixed on me, but they were blue and unfocused, and the pain was miles away.
     
     
    I watched her, but something had gone wrong. Her torment wasn’t turning me on. I didn’t feel a thing. Obviously the drugs I’d snatched from her medicine cabinet weren’t elevating my mood, and the thought of all those sundries in her bathroom was bringing me down, hard. Every last sad soap in that utopian toilet was bumming me out. They were all part of a repertoire of hope I’d already lived through. I’d already washed myself with that crap. I’d taken those pills. I’d tried to feel loose and relaxed in a tub of hot water, beneath that shadowy candlelight. It all seemed