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

so familiar. Her paisley sheets and the fan of peacock feathers above the futon and the tasseled lampshade screamed boudoir. The tiny shells and rocks and twigs italicized a special moment long ago. In the little syncretic boutiquey spiritual figurines lined up on the windowsill and the crystal prisms strung from the ceiling on threads of monofilament I saw the very same occult trinkets that had decorated every bedroom I’d ever been in. My anticipation was gone, I couldn’t lust or desire.
    All this intense specialness, along with the way she was effortfully trying to turn her pain to pleasure, was ending up as a very dull result in my brain. I heard the tindery snap, the kindling crackle of burning hair. She was burning herself, là-bas. The whole room stank. As she closed in on a climax, soot washed down her thigh like the aftermath of a calamity when the uncaring rain begins to carry it all out to sea . . .
    “Here,” she said, passing me the cigarette.
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    “Burn me.”
    I’m a screenwriter and my movies gross millions and when I write “THE CAR BLOWS UP” there’s a pretty good chance a real car will indeed blow up, but I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of roasting this woman’s cunt over a hot coal. I can’t even say the word “cunt” convincingly. The Frenchy sang-froid I’d felt leaving the psych ward was completely gone now. I wasn’t Henry Miller, I wasn’t Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin, I wasn’t any of those expat guys. My career as a sexual adventurer was about half an hour old, and it was over already. I’ve read Baudelaire but I wouldn’t want to have his big ugly forehead. I was known among my friends as a major cork dork and the wine I’d bought I wouldn’t even have cooked with at home, fricasseeing stew meat for the dog. When I left the ballerina, if I chose, I could check myself out of the hospital and into the Plaza, stay a month, order room service, conduct business through my agent, while I watched other people out the window, real lunatics, splashing in the fountain, singing holy songs, dancing and shouting hosannas into the sky until the police came and tasered them back into submission. When I squared up my tab at the p-hosp it would run me about thirty-five grand and at that rate the Plaza would be a bargain.
    I needed air. I managed to stand and make it to the window and was swinging a foot onto the fire escape when a wet gob of something hit with a splat on the back of my neck. I thought for sure it was bird shit. I looked up. A blue rain was falling through the streetlamps and at the Korean deli on the corner a crippled man leaned on a wooden cane, picking through a pyramid of oranges. An old Korean woman sat on a white bucket, cutting the stems on peonies, huge lion-headed flowers with pink petals that shook loose in the wind and were pasted to the wet sidewalk like découpage. Everything seemed to have been given a new coat of varnish sometime in the night. Every wire and railing glistened, and the air was clean and cool. Above the intersection a traffic signal turned green. Several cars went by, their sleepy wipers blinking away the drizzle. Down at the deli the cripple reached into his pocket and paid for the orange, and the old woman went back to cutting her peonies. How could so much peace and calm reign between two people? I balanced on the windowsill and looked back at the ballerina.
    She was a mess, ghoulish with a plastering of soot and ash. Her body, crisscrossed with brandings and burned by match heads, looked fully clothed. She’d never be naked again, not with the textile weave of her scars, the plaids and polka dots she’d made of her skin.
    She said, “What?”
    I hadn’t said anything. “Isn’t there anything else you like to do?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It’s raining out.”
    “Why?”
    “Why?” I said. “Why is it raining?”
    The air in the room was stale and hot as a kiln, the motion baked out of it. I opened