horrible attack, really.”
I imagined a gang of them jumping on her, pinning her to the bed while they buckled the straps. It was a grade-Z horror film, and I was the only one in the audience. I lowered my head a little. I shoved my hands under my thighs. He started talking again, but someone had turned off the sound. I noted in the silence that everything was going downhill.
“… and it would be going out on a limb to say that one day she will completely regain her senses. No, we mustn’t hold out too much hope.”
This sentence, however, I heard loud and clear. It had a particular color to it-bronze, I’d say. It writhed like a rattlesnake. It squirmed right under my skin.
“We’ll look after her, though,” he went on. “You know, there have been some remarkable advances in chemistry. We still get fairly good results with electroshock treatment. And don’t listen to what they tell you about it-it’s perfectly safe.”
I bent forward to lean all my weight on my hands. I fixed my eyes between my feet, on a spot on the floor.
“I’m going to go get her,” I said. “I’m going to go get her and take her away with me.”
I heard him laugh.
“Look, young man, don’t be ridiculous. Maybe you haven’t completely understood. I’m telling you that the girl is insane, my friend. Strait-jacket insane.”
At this I coiled like a spring and hopped up onto his desk with both feet. Before he could make a move, I kicked him in the face. That’s when I noticed he wore dentures-they flew out of his mouth like flying fish. Thank you, God, I thought. He fell over backward in his chair, spitting up a small geyser of blood. The sound of breaking glass was his feet going through the windows of his bookcase. He started screaming. I jumped on top of him, pulling like a madman on his tie. I lifted him up. I got him in a figure-four grapevine hold, or something in the same family-rolling him over backward with his one hundred sixty pounds on my legs, then letting him loose just at the moment of takeoff. The wall shook.
I was barely back on my feet when three orderlies came in, single-file. The first one got an elbow in the kisser, the second one tackled me, and the third one sat on top of me-he was the fattest. He squeezed all the breath out of me and grabbed me by the hair. I squealed with rage. I saw the doctor getting back up on his feet, holding onto the wall. The first orderly bent over and drove his fist into my ear. I had a hot flash.
“I’m calling the cops,” he said. “They’ll put him away.”
The doctor sat down in a chair, a handkerchief over his mouth. He was missing one of his shoes, among other things.
“No,” he said. “Not the police. It’s bad for public relations. Throw him outside. And he’d better not try to set foot inside this hospital again!”
They picked me up. The one who wanted to call the cops slapped me across the face.
“You hear that?” he said.
My shoe found his nuts-I actually knocked him off his feet, which surprised everybody. I took advantage of the pause to get loose. I dove again at the doctor-I wanted to strangle him, obliterate him. He fell out of his chair, me on top of him.
The orderlies all came down on me. I heard the nurses screaming. Before I could push my fingers into the doctor’s throat, I felt myself being lifted by an incalculable number of hands and thrown out of the office. They bashed me a little going down the hall, but nothing too serious-they were all pretty embarrassed; in the end I suppose they didn’t really want to kill me.
We went through the lobby at a sprint. One of them had me in a hammerlock, another one had a handful of my hair, and an ear-this hurt most. They opened the doors and threw me down the steps.
“If we see you around here again, you’ve had it!” one of them shouted.
Those fuckers. They almost got me to cry. A tear fell onto the steps. It steamed like a drop of hydrochloric acid.
So I’d struck out. Moreover, I’d gotten myself banished from the hospital forever. The next few days were the worst of my life. I couldn’t go back and see her again, and my memory of what I’d seen was intolerable. All the zen I knew came to no good-I was overcome with despair. I suffered like the most foolish of fools. Without doubt, it was during this period that I did my best writing. Later I would be referred to as an “unsung stylist.” It wasn’t my fault that I wrote well and knew it, though. During this period I filled up half a notebook.
I probably would have written even more, but I couldn’t sit still during the day. I took many a shower, downed quantities of beer, miles of sausage, and paced hundreds of thousands of miles on the carpet. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I’d take a walk outside. I often found myself near the hospital. I knew better than to get too close-they once hit me with a beer can from fifty yards. Yes, they kept their eyes peeled. I stayed on the far side of the street and contented myself with looking at her window. Once in a while I’d see the curtain move.
When night started falling, I’d go have a drink at Bob’s. It was the long slide into sundown at day’s end that was the most abominable, for a guy who’d had his baby taken away from him and isn’t sure he still knows how to swim. I’d spend about an hour with them. Bob acted like nothing had ever happened, and Annie always found some excuse to show me her pussy-it got me through the evening. Once it was dark, I could handle going home. I’d turn on the lights. I did most of my writing at night. Sometimes I even felt good-it made me feel like she was still there with me. Betty was the one thing that made me realize I was alive. Writing was tantamount to the same thing.
One morning I took the car and drove all day, aimlessly, my arm flung over the door, my eyes squinting in the wind. Toward evening I stopped at the seaside. I had no idea where I was. All I’d seen for the whole trip were the faces of gas station attendants I bought a couple of sandwiches at a neighborhood bar and went to eat them on the beach.
It was deserted. The sun had gone down below the horizon. It was so beautiful that I dropped a pickle in the sand. The sound of the waves, the same for millions of years, relaxed me-encouraged me, reassured me, stunned me. My little blue planet, O my little blue planet. May God bless you, goddamn it.
I sat there for a while, getting to know solitude again, meditating on my pain. I rose. So did the moon. I took my shoes off and started walking along the shore, thinking of nothing. The sand was still warm-the perfect temperature for an apple pie.
Along my way I came across a big fish, washed up on the sand. All that was left of it was a decomposed carcass, yet enough remained to see what a magnificent fish it must have been once- nothing less than a silver lightning bolt with a pearl belly, a sort of moving diamond. All that was over now. Beauty had taken a hard kick in the teeth. There were scarcely any scales left to glimmer in the moonlight-two or three hopeless little scales. To find yourself rotting away like that, after having once been the equal of the stars-wasn’t this the worst thing that could happen to you? Wouldn’t you rather just swim away into the darkness with a final flick of your tail to the sun? If it were me, I wouldn’t have to think twice.
Since no one was around to see, I buried the fish. I dug the hole with my hands. I felt a little ridiculous, but if I hadn’t done it, I couldn’t have lived with myself, and now was not the moment for that.
So that’s how it came to me. I thought it over and over and over-I tossed and turned all night, trying to get the idea out of my head, but by dawn I knew it was the only thing to do. All right, fine, I told myself. It was a Sunday. There would be too many people on Sunday. I put it off till the next day. All day long I dragged my ass. It looked like it was going to storm. Impossible to write-no use kidding myself. Impossible to do anything. Days like that are shittier than anything.
I woke up rather late the next day, around noon. Without thinking, I’d made a huge mess of the house. I started putting things away. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of a full-scale cleanup. I don’t know what came over me, I even dusted the curtains. After that I showered, shaved, and ate. While I was doing the dishes I noticed a few flashes of lightning. The thunder started to rumble. The sky was as dry as powdered milk. Clouds gathered in the burning air.
I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in front of the TV, my legs stretched out on the couch, a pitcher of water in my hand. I relaxed. The house was so clean it was a pleasure to see; from time to time it does you good to know everything is in its place.
At around five o’clock, I put my makeup on, then charged out onto the street, disguised as Josephine. The storm that had been coming since the night before still hadn’t come-the sky was holding its breath. Through my
