Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  She clenched her jaw and looked at him hard with her head tilted resolutely. Her mother used to look that way; Lenore remembered learning it, practising in the mirror.

  “Mrs. Carmichael, you haven’t had an operation!” Dr. Halloway said. Again he looked at her chart, as if confused. “You are much more coherent than last night, however,” he said. “Dr. Beamus has put you on a new drug, thorazinol, and it appears to have had a dramatic impact. Your speech is much better, your awareness of the present moment.”

  “Young man, are you refusing me my clothes?” Lose your temper and no one will take you seriously. Daddy always said that. Lenore straightened up as much as she could – oh, but she was sore. Quite something to be on her feet after what she’d been through.

  “Your daughter is coming to get you this morning. Why don’t you just rest until she gets here?”

  “My daughter? My daughter?” Lenore said. “My daughter is eight years old!” And she turned in disbelief, in disgust – these broken people wandering the hall, the smell of this place, of disinfectant and lives coming apart. “There must be some mistake,” she said quietly, clutching the blanket around her.

  “You are doing much better than last night,” the doctor said, gently touching her arm.

  It was like a bad dream. Lenore closed her eyes, waited for it to clear, but it didn’t clear; when she opened her eyes again it was exactly the same. “May I please have my clothes?” she asked again with as much dignity as she could muster.

  “Yes. All right,” he said uncertainly.

  They walked back to the prison room. It really was like a cell, with the hulking great door, the tiny barred window. Dr. Halloway reached under the bed and pulled out a sorry-looking plastic shopping bag, like something you’d see a vagrant carrying on the streets.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  He took out a dirty, wrinkled, beige dress that obviously wouldn’t fit her, it was so large, and anyway she never wore beige, her skin was too light.

  “This is what you were wearing last night when they brought you in,” he said sadly.

  “Oh!” she said sharply and she didn’t know where to turn. “You’ve taken my clothes!”

  “This is what you were wearing -”

  “Can you imagine me in something like that? It’s a tent, for God’s sake!”

  “Your daughter will bring some better clothes, I’m sure,” he said. “How about some breakfast. Are you hungry?”

  Lenore stood for what felt like the longest moment, so still and tense she thought she might shatter. It must be a dream, she thought again. If I just wait …

  “You can put these on your feet,” the doctor said, handing her a pair of paper slippers. She’d never seen anything like it. Numbly she put them on. Her feet were marginally warmer but they made a slidey, rustling noise when she walked, and she felt as flimsy, as insubstantial as they were.

  “I think I’ll just wait,” she said. Lenore sat motionless in the tired green three-seater with the chipped wooden armrests and flattened, tired cushions. The blanket was still pulled around her. A television was on across the room but she ignored it, as did most of the other patients, it seemed; they retreated into their own separate spaces while the broadcasting noises swirled around them like so much mist. Lenore fixed her mind on this thought: Trevor is coming soon to pick me up. He will have it out with the insurance people, who will sue the hospital, and justice will be done. It wasn’t the money; she simply didn’t want this to happen to anyone else.

  He’ll be outraged, she thought. He’ll want to hit somebody. All that boarding-school boxing, you never got it out of a man, they were always doubling their fists and ready to lash out. But he’d be gentle with her, oh so gentle, he’d be loving and kind and after he got her home he’d bring her tea in bed with honey, a hot water bottle, would rub her feet and kiss her neck. Maybe it will be like that time, she thought. When she’s feeling better, when she’s completely over the operation. That one time she remembered so well. It was after Alex was born, a month or so, and Trevor had been so attentive, but there were his needs, you couldn’t get around it. He was a real gentleman, but the time comes.

  But she’d been sore still. It had hurt to pee, to walk quickly, everything was so sensitive. It was a Saturday, no, a weekday; it seemed so long ago. He was home from work, had a touch of flu or something, but that was just an excuse. The baby was asleep in the next room and Julia was playing downstairs – oh, how she would organize those dolls, they each had a separate existence and character. Trevor was lying on the bed in his blue pyjamas, the old ones he didn’t like her to wash, they were already worn so thin and smooth, he was afraid they would fall apart. She’d just had her shower, walked into the room in her robe, let it fall off her as she closed the door.

  It wouldn’t lock, wouldn’t stay closed. They had to be so quiet.

  How he loved to look at her. You could tell in a man’s eyes. They could hear Julia singing something in the distance, stopped once because they were sure she was on her way up the stairs. But she wasn’t and they started again. It was just the way she wanted it and in the end she couldn’t keep quiet, she sobbed on him, it felt so good, and he laughed. He thought it was so funny, he laughed and hugged her, lit a cigarette, giggling, and stayed where he was, let her fall asleep on top of him.

  She almost had the feeling again. She was within smelling distance of it, somehow, it seemed so close and real. He was coming to get her and he’d be gentle again because of what she’d been through. He might even try cooking a can of soup, serve her in bed with toast and a martini glass of milk. Lenore held herself in the blanket and waited for him to arrive.

  14

  Every time a yellow taxi went by, it blurred, became a smudge of yellow, worse when Sienna opened her eyes wider. Nothing else smudged, just the yellow taxis. It was hard to tell where one ended and the others began. She was sitting stock-still on a bench by the sidewalk in front of the hotel. She had her notebook open, the bitter taste was in her mouth, and her skin was very thin, waxy; if she moved suddenly everyone would be able to see directly inside her. So she didn’t. She had her notebook, had written down “Central Heights” and “life without a remote,” had done a quick sketch of a non-smudgy, parked taxi with a long, beautiful female leg poking out, a doorman in uniform standing by, face turned away but his eyes peering down at the leg. In the margin of the page, running sideways, she’d written “Ricky knows,” and by “Ricky” she’d drawn an iris with petals opening like labia.

  She couldn’t draw without being waxy. That was the funny thing. When she wasn’t waxy her drawings were muggish. Smuggish? Druggish. They were druggish when she wasn’t waxy and crystal gone when she was. Crystagalon.

  On another page in her notebook she wrote:

  The grit in my limbs and the ache and the pull

  the letter of groceries and the slow sink of drains.

  She crossed out “drains” and wrote “blood” and looked at it.

  There was something about Bob. Sienna couldn’t put her finger on it. Something twisted and unusual and somehow attractive, if that was the word. Bob as suit. Bob’s eyes looking out. Ridiculous, wanting to be caught. Affectionate. Bob both comfortable and uneasy. Bob reaching for his lines. Bob as subject, unaware and yet self-conscious. Bob both ways. Bob the mysterious who seems to be had and then slips away after she’s already (almost) counted him. Bob the slippery fish. Not this and not that. More intriguing somehow, not what you’d expect, although he seems to be (he looks like the whole package, but he isn’t).

  The man behind the man behind the man (behind the suit).

  She wrote in her notebook: “I’m not sure who he likes, the GIM or LGQ.” Then in the margin she printed in block letters “Goddess in the Mirror” in one direction and “Little Girl Quiver” in another. It was hard to know. She hated this stage, almost more than anything. The uncertainty, her own flimsy. Who was studying whom? That sort of question. She thought Goddess, s
he wanted Goddess, but Quiver was winning. The yin side, how powerful is that?

  She smelled him first. Turpentine and blisterine. Blisterine? Neoprene. Yards and years ahead of him. It took ages for the rest of him to get there. She sat waxy still, knowing decades ahead of time what was coming. Unable to move. He could see right into her. She didn’t bother to close her notebook, he could see right through the cover. He had those eyes. He smelled like he was from another karmention. Killingly and kaustically karmonized.

  “Do you have a problem?” she asked, with some effort. He was in a filthy blue greatcoat, torn woollen pants, and battered black military-style boots, had a matted white beard, and skin that was flaking off in a kind of red snow. Not cold snow but warm, human snow. Skin snow. No two flakes the same. Each one a genetically imprinted piece of personal rot.

  A smudgy taxi went by, zoooooong, like the sun drawn in melting crayon. His fingers were red and puffy and there were blisters all over him, his face, lips, neck, wrists, every part that was visible. Some were purple welts, some red and split, some whitish, perhaps healing. His eyes were silvery and runny.

  That was clarity for you. It came in a little tinfoil packet and tasted like it might burn a hole in your tongue if you left it there too long. So you didn’t, and except for the blurry taxis everything else was lined in precise silver etchings. Even when they weren’t silver. Or etchings. It was lined and exact.

  “You’re a model, right?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m Cindy Crawford,” she said. “Don’t tell anybody.” She kept her head very still, didn’t want the wax to crack and fall. Just barely moved her lips, saw him out of the edges of her eyes. He grinned, showed three brownish teeth. He was very fluid, looked like he might wash away any moment, as soon as his surface tension was disrupted.

  “No,” the man said. “You are somebody though. I know you!”

  “I told you. I’m Yoko Ono.”

  “I saw Yoko Ono. You are not Yoko Ono.”

  “I had the surgery, you know,” she said. “I can afford it. Nobody recognizes me any more.”

  “Oh shit,” the man said and put his hand on her knee. She slapped it off but didn’t get up. He was the whole history of New York, every bit of smudge on the street. He was immigrants on Ellis Island and Joe DiMaggio kissing Babe Ruth, kissing Marilyn. He was Dillinger blowing cover to see Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama and getting shot; he was King Kong and Fay Wray and her dad slicing ginger root and pouring tea; some grimy back street in the Bowery and Donald Trump’s erection and haywire graffiti; he was a wandering soul oozing on the sidewalk, smelling like chemical death, like dry-cleaning solution, like Sid and Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel. He was all of it at once and the wax was very brittle. She had to melt it before she could move very far. There was only one way to do it.

  “I want you to show me what’s in your bags,” she said, going on the offensive. The only way to melt the wax.

  “No,” he said abruptly and turned his head away as if she’d slapped him there.

  “Was it before Lennon was shot?” she asked, and he took a moment to follow her. When he saw Yoko, of course. One little prick and he’d flood away, wash into the sewer.

  “No,” he said. “After.”

  “Did you ever see Marilyn?”

  “Three times!”

  “Bullshit,” she said. Her head so still. Like a mannequin.

  “I saw her when her dress went over her fucking head.”

  “You did not,” Sienna said.

  “I did! She was naked. They surprised her. I was right there.”

  “What’s in your bags?”

  “I saw Reggie Jackson,” the man said. “I saw him with Wilt the Stilt and Muhammad Ali. They were walking along Fifth Avenue.”

  “I want you to show me what’s in your bags.”

  She was doing him. She knew it and she couldn’t help it. It was self-defence. One little prick.

  “I saw Reggie Jackson hit four home runs in the World Series.”

  Sienna stopped talking, looked at him the way she could if she kept very still. If she didn’t move a muscle, just looked. Pure yin.

  “I saw Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle one time. I saw -”

  She just looked. Yinned him.

  The man stopped, rubbed his leg, turned his gaze away, made a snorting noise in his nose. The words died in his throat. He was etched in silver, like everything else except the taxis. He sighed, seemed to be about to get up and move along. Finally he pulled one of the shopping bags out of his cart.

  “This is my bed,” he said, and gently took out an orange-and-red polyester sleeping bag, neatly rolled, but ripped, stained in spots. It was waxy but it wasn’t. She could do both better than anyone she knew. Be here and there. Have the taxis go zooooong but stay with it, play both sides.

  “What else?” she asked, doing him.

  He took out another bag that had an ancient, dog-eared copy of GQ magazine, a metallic green flashlight, a plastic mug, several batteries, a filthy T-shirt, some letters, a can of Lysol, a lone sock, a cracked radio, a book with a torn cover.

  “What’s the book?” she asked. He hesitated, then handed it over. Jaws.

  “Who are the letters from?”

  “No,” he said, and grabbed back the book, started returning things to his bag. But he left the letters till last. She stared at him until he gave in.

  “They’re from my daughter,” he said.

  “Read one of them.”

  “No,” he said and stood up, made as if he was going to leave.

  “Please,” she said. She didn’t want to but she reached out anyway, touched his puffy hand. She was getting meltier anyway.

  “I don’t read those,” he said, eyes on the ground.

  “You read one for me,” she said. “You can tell your friends. You saw Yoko Ono.” She smiled and he couldn’t resist, she knew he couldn’t. It was almost too easy. He stayed standing but pulled out one of the letters.

  “ ‘Dear Snakehead,’ ” he read. Then he looked up and said, “That’s kind of like her pet name for me.” He looked at the letter again, then read: “ ‘I am in a laundromat in a shithole town somewhere in Louisiana. Conrad still has your boots, he’s sorry about the rug, he told me. So now I’m telling you. We heard about a place down the road so we’re going to try there. Just wanted to let you know how fucking brilliant everything is. See you, Deb.’ ”

  The man put the letter away. Sienna held out her hand and at first he tried to ignore her, but finally he relented and handed it to her.

  “Why does she call you Snakehead?” she asked.

  “It’s on account of a tattoo,” the man said.

  “That you have?”

  “No, it’s one I did for a man who wanted a snake running up his neck and around the top of his head. So some people started calling me Snakehead.”

  Sienna asked him if he had any tattoos on his own body, but he said no, his mother taught him never to get one. “I just do other people.”

  “Could you give me a tattoo?” she asked.

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Of course,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I want a naked woman in chains,” she said. “I want you to put her on my right cheek.” The man looked at her face and she laughed, everything melty now, it was fine. She said, “Not there.” Then he blushed suddenly. His face was already red, now it looked purple. Just for a moment. “In a black hood and high heels. Can you do that?”

  He nodded his head. “I’ve done worse,” he said.

  “Where’s your shop? Can we go there now?”

  The man paused to consider, finally said, “All right.”

  “First you have to tell me about Deb,” she said, and she waved the letter, which was still in her hands.

  He sat down again. He didn’t want to do it so she yinned him till he had to start talking.

  “Deb’s my daughter,” he said. “She’s a singer, you should hear her. Fucking beautiful voice. I wa
s a businessman, you know, I wasn’t always like this.”

  “What was your business? Tattooing?”

  “All kinds of stuff. I did moving concerns, I was in catering, I was a technician for the Rolling Stones.”

  “For the Stones?”

  “Mick Fucking Jagger. He hired me himself. I did all the lighting, everything. I knew people. My God. Everybody came to see us.”

  “What about your daughter?”

  He was studying the ground. “She got into some bad shit,” he said. “You know, the way it happens. But I’m going to hear her on the radio someday. You can’t keep some people back. Not with a voice like that. She does that song, amazing, like nobody else. Fantastic.”

  “What song?”

  “That Nancy Sinatra song. Everybody knows it.”

  “ ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Just like Nancy Fucking Sinatra.” And he started singing, right there on the sidewalk. People crossed the street to avoid him, but Sienna laughed, it was the right thing to do. She laughed and clapped and so he sang louder, stood up and did a little dance step, started showing off his old boots.

  “What else do you do?” she asked. People were stopping to look at them now, some near the entrance of the hotel across the street, and on this side by the Indian restaurant and the deli and the takeout sushi place. She knew how odd it appeared but she stayed very still, poised – very yin. “What else do you do?” she asked again.

  He did “New York, New York” and “The Impossible Dream” and “Blue Velvet.” He did “Feelings” and “Mandy” and the theme from Cats. Sienna watched and prodded and goaded until the crowd was all around them, pressing in, and the man was Topol singing “If I Were a Rich Man,” and people were tossing coins into his bag, laughing, cheering, singing along, and Topol was drunk with himself, with this moment.

  Then she slipped away, kept the letter in her notebook because she could.

  She walked quietly into the auditorium, sat in the back by herself with her notebook on her lap because there were no little writing surfaces attached to the seats. The wax was gone now, there was no more blurriness, everything was becoming unjuiced. Still hyper-clear, but without clarity. Clarity was drifting away, the way it can so suddenly. She’d been back to her hotel room, had changed into jeans and a white turtleneck sweater, kept her jacket on her shoulders because she was chilled from the walk. There’d been no messages from him.