Bogeywoman

whispered back. “Sideways… oooo,” O echoed in her spooky-flute voice; you could tell from the queer crook of her chin she was picturing Emily stuck between the third and second floors, with her head wedged at an uncomfortable angle. “Say, does it hurt to be paralyzed?” I asked.

“Aaanh, she was only fifty-three pounds away from disappearing anyhow,” Dion said, “she wants to die, ain’t it?” “She was waiting for the birds to feed her,” I said, “least that’s what she told Dolores, who told Reggie, who told me.” “That’s a very beautiful idea,” sighed O, “that Emily is a saint, I’d never think of nuttin like that.” “Ya know, certain girls love death like I love D.O.A.P.,” Bertie observed, “like O here-you can tell from the eye makeup. To her every day is a funeral.” “Just cause you have to die before you get to wear makeup, Hebrew school creepo,” sneered O, glacially. “I don’t care if I do die. That’s why I’m here,” Bertie bragged, “and I won’t be wearing makeup either, I’m getting smoked, man, cause I figure I’ll be 98 percent tetra- hydrocannabinol by then.”

“Aaay, don’t worry, da stuff looks good on you,” Dion told O, “ladylike, I mean. Koderer don’t wear no black on her eyes, and she looks like Oliver Twist. In the movie, ya know.” “Ursie’s queer,” Bertie explained. I froze and O gasped. “Get oinked,” she said loyally, for she was a friend of mine, and as I was wildly in love with her I had never even let my hand brush her hand by mistake (lemme die first).

“I wear a little Clearasil over da zits now and then,” Dion said, “but nuttin on the eyes. Nino don’t recommend it.” Nino was his tailor. “I wonder if they’ll put any makeup on Emily,” O worried-meaning on her little dead white face. “Aaanh, Emily was a strange-looking bird at best. Makeup wouldn’t do nuttin for her,” said Dion. “I think Emily was cute, in a ugly sort of way,” O almost sobbed, in her spooky-flute. [Whap!] “Ace,” she added. O had a devastating serve. We volleyed on gloomily.

We had played three whole games-by now we had just about given up on ever seeing Emily alive again-when they rolled her onto the ward on a gurney, trailing white linens like a dead infanta. It all looked like a weird dream: Dr. Hamburger and Dr. Beasley running behind like footmen, or pilgrims, in tunics of elfin green. The last of the day slanted through the tall windows of the dayroom in banks, forming six mirages in the shapes of pyramids. As her body passed through them, the dust, like shrimps and scorpions of pure light, made way for the princess in worshipful agitation. The turban of gauze on her head pushed her face up at us, her open eyes glimmered drily in death through the mashed lace of her eyelashes-but then she blinked and smiled a little.

“What happened? What happened?” everyone asked, and we ran alongside the palankeen too. “Oooo my neck. It was kind of fun. Ursie…” I bent down to her, and she whispered: “… they think I tried to kill myself…” She giggled. “So what else is new,” Bertie panted, and I jerked his ponytail and stuck out a Ked so he fell splat on his face. “… and listen, Bug Motels-bombs away,” Emily said in code, “Big Blue on three… just standing there…”

Dr. Buzzey (Emily’s friendly but useless dreambox mechanic) met Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger, the medical residents, in her doorway. Then her private room sucked in all three, along with a coupla nosy nurses, Hageboom, if I remember right, and Mursch, and the door flapped shut behind them. Fluorescence streamed from its little square window. Somebody clicked shut the louvers. We stood there staring at the nothing of it.

“Ursie,” Bertie said, tenderly pinching his nose to make sure it wasn’t broken, “get down to three before they move that thing.”

“Me!” I said. Bertie after all was my height, had subsisted on tablets, syringe squirts and aromas for five and a half years and was skinny as a Yeshiva boy from Ruthenia. “I weigh one twenty-five,” I argued pointedly, knowing his own weight couldn’t be over a hundred. Even O was fatter than he was. “But girls aren’t as noticeable for being up to sumpm,” he said, an insight which didn’t quite hold up in the bughouse, but I was pleased that he clumped me with girls, it meant my cover was working. “And if the bomb is a heavy motha,” he went on, “who else but you can carry it?” He had a point there. Now ya see how Bertie got to be a mastermind: He knew his henchwoman, just which body part was headquarters of all her vanity, and mine was my muscles.

So I said yes but I stuck at going downstairs in a canvas laundry cart as long as some unknown unbribed nurse’s aide was still on the loose on three, zealously dumping the laundry bins down the chute without even checking them for mental patients. “And besides, we got no cart,” Dion reminded us. It was true, Emily had been launched from the one laundry bin we’d purloined. We were stuck. But all at once Emily’s door opened a brilliant crack-I caught sight of Dr. Beasley leaning down to her face like a strangler-and the empty gurney popped out. The linens on top of it had been whipped into peaks and gulleys, alarming as a meringue pie. Forty seconds later we had a new plan. Big Blue… just standing there, Emily had said, which sounded like that H, big as ya motha (Bertie’s charred old doper’s eyes glowed like furnace doors), wasn’t even on a cart-so we needed all the muscle we could get.

Bertie faded around the corner, came back in a minute with two surgeon’s tops he had pinched during some other caper, two pale green blouses with only a few smears of sumpm liverbrown and crusty down the front. He handed one to Dion. “Cheese, cool,” Dion said, and waltzed off down the hall with the thing. “No, man, keep away from that mirror!” Bertie called after him but Dion was already turning into his own room. “That’s the last we’ll see of him,” Bertie sighed, and it was. “Hey, what the hump, I guess I can push the thing by myself, it’s got wheels. Okay, girls, climb aboard.” O and I stared at each other while Bertie pulled his own green top over his head. It was big as a bank lobby on him but the smears of ancient gore and baggy fit looked touching on his haggardness, as though he were in med school at the age of twelve, a boy genius whom dissection of dead bodies had shocked out of his growth. I mean he looked plausible in a certain way. Fact was even Dr. Beasley and Dr. Hamburger looked kinda babyish, big-eared and simian in those green smocks. And by the way, what were they doing in there with Emily so long, I wondered. Bertie must have had the same thought. “Is she stand-up?” he asked, squinting at her blank door. “As a fuk in a phone booth,” O replied, in the voice of vast experience. She and I still stared at each other and I saw her heart beating fast in the faint blue fork under her temple. Climb aboard, Bertie had said. Did that mean-lie down together on top?

“Okay, you two, lie down together on top and I’ll wrap you.” To my amazement, she nodded. She was wearing a pilly pink orlon V-neck sweater, sumpm only a drapette would wear, and a black bra you could see through the pink, and the V-neck almost down to her pupik. And so it came about that O and me, the Bogeywoman, lay body to body, or more specifically her lovely head stuck out the top and my bulby nose was pressed to the washboard of bone between her momps, so that I almost swooned for real from hyperventilating while Bertie tucked and patted and sculpted us, under that froth of used sheets, into one improbably thick beauty. “How do we look,” I muttered, for an excuse to move my lips. “Don’t talk, it tickles,” O spooky-fluted. But at least she didn’t say don’t breathe. I turned my chin up a little so my breath was mossing her throat. “Calm,” said Bertie, “you look calm,” for O always did, and down we went to the third floor landing with Bertie pushing.

Of course every hair of me waved like a sailor at the nearness of her. She was the shikseh oxymoron personified, she was the highest girl and the lowest girl and nothing in between: She was a drapette but also Mary Hartline of Super Circus, she had that public gorgeosity, she could be famous right now, a star, a TV star at least, and at the same time she was that sullen teenage underbitch calling you a jew, goading you in her peroxide hair and trashy clothes, then beating you up for looking at her funny. She reeked of the last cheap perfume tester she had boosted from Read’s, probably My Sin. I felt my heart budge against her and knew she could feel it too-like a mole under a tent floor. But then, was I right? she swiveled the tiniest bit, toward me not away, and my lips were quivering like a rabbit’s in the gulley between her momps, kinda folded into the dunes that swelled out of her bra and actually quivering, I would just need to stick out my tongue-and all would be lost lost lost! She might even knife me. I pulled myself together. I stayed where I was. I was almost happy: I was on mission, but at the same time I was a snouty cub who’d fallen asleep at the teat and woken up again in sweet milky darkness. Then suddenly her hand pressed the back of my head, her nuzzy pressed my lips and I knew she’d let me do whatever I

The elevator doors shuffled open and Bertie sang, “Oink me, it is an H. Holy godzilla, look at that motha.”

And I peeked out of our sheets at the thing. It sat on a stainless steel dolly in a row of dowdy linen bins, a Nike among Miss Muffets. It had been many times slicked over with paint but still had a rough, psoriatic crumb to its blue enamel that made me loath to touch it. It was like sumpm left to rust in a marine junkyard because it might explode-and yet it did resemble somebody’s mother: five feet high, all the power in the bosom and shoulders, some sort of undersized glass-faced gauge where the head should be-a meter instead of a dreambox, isn’t that just like a mother? Well what do I know, never having had one since I was two.

“Come on, Ursie. O, you stay put-make like you’re paralyzed or sumpm. Perfect.” Bertie and I stood side by