Bogeywoman

She rose on her high-heeled sandals, tilted her head and gazed at me but said nothing for some minutes. I believe she was taking in my outfit.

It was the same old office of all the royals, long as a railroad flat, with a jute doormat like a penal haircut and a gray umbrella stand, an ancient desk up front and a couch and two easy chairs in back by the windows. The windows, I could see from here, looked out over Broadway all right, down to the ayrabbers’ barn. But the office had been purged of its last resident, Dr. Dewey. (I had seen Doughy Dewey on tennis court matters once-he had owned a set of botanical etchings.) The nakedness of the place supported the foreign guest theory of Zuk-where in Outer Hotzeplotz was she from, with that accent?-as did, in a way, the desk shaggy with papers, as though she had to erupt into emptiness somewhere. O, there was one mysterious object: a pair of what looked like genuine Eskimo mukluks, fixed to a base and bronzed over, squaw-chewed leather, slumping ankles, crisscross thongs and all. This object sat in one corner like a trashcan, and as I stared at it, a cockroach the size of a Tonka toy poked its head out of the left shin and looked around.

I stared at the mukluks, Zuk stared at me and finally she asked me: “You are iceskater or bricklayer? Or fire swallower is also possible?” “Er, uh, I’m a brick swallower, if you wish to know the truth,” I said. She smiled at that, so I bumbled on: “May I please ask where the hump you’re from?” You may not. Her smile flattened to glass, she stared down at me with the remote grandeur of the pyramids until I shrank to a coolie and pretended I didn’t know myself.

“Please to roll up your sleeves, Miss Bogeywoman,” she directed. “Do I have to?” “Not at all. I telephone for medical emergency.” She placed her hand on the phone, I hastily pushed up my sleeves. She took hold of my two wrists, turned them up and surveyed their undersides, the rusty cuts furred by sweatshirt lint, with a look of mild distaste.

“For why you are drawing these pictures in blood?” she asked, pronouncing it bla-a-a-a- d, like someone in a vampire movie. “It’s a graph,” I reported sheepishly, “the columns got sorta messed up.” “Why you don’t use copybook if you are interested for mathematics?” Doctor Zuk inquired crisply, “this way three weeks go by, you have no record, nothing, well, very ugly arm of course, but nothing useful for science.” “Don’t worry, I got a record-up here,” I said, tapping my greasy forehead with my finger.

“A record of what, if you please?” Zuk asked. “A kinda debate I was having with myself and, and”-I knew better than to get poisonal-“and a higher being, so to speak-about whether a person should be, er, uh, sumpm or nuttin… that is, live or die.” “Ah. And who is win this debate?” “Well, see, that’s where I got stuck. If she wins I’m sumpm, but only if I turn into her. If I win, I stay me and then I end up nuttin. Either way I’m nuttin… It doesn’t seem right.” “Why it doesn’t seem right? You don’t feel you are nothing?” “That’s one thing about being a mess. All those slimy organs in the soup, everything sloshing around like too many matzo balls-I get the urge to spill sumpm…” “So. You spill your bla-a-a-a-d.” I nodded. “After you have spilled your bla-a-a-a- d, then what you feel?” I thought this over. “Seasick,” I said, “but lighter. And then I am the Bogeywoman.” “Seasick I understand,” Zuk said, “but help me, Bogeywoman I am not follow.” “So people just look at me and think, cheese, if she did that to herself-! Better not get her in a corner. Probably she’d eat me alive.”

“Ah.” She drew down my purple satin sleeves with a snap. I remembered her soaping O’s head, when it was stuck in the toilet pipe, in a manner roughly maternal. How much tenderness could I hope to corner for my bush league self-mutilations?

“You will have ugly scars from this.” “Cheese,” I said, “how much uglier can I get?” “Take care, your mouth to god’s ear,” Doctor Zuk said, “you should see some monsters I have seen in villages where no doctor comes, and all of them pretty children once, loved by their mothers. Besides, you are not ugly. This is rubbish and you know is rubbish. You look like, like Greek boy, perhaps.” The aspect was in the air, buzzing like the fluorescent lights. “I ain’t no fuddy boy,” I said, “lemme die first.”

Doctor Zuk suddenly held out to me my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter. I took it and put it in my pocket. “Why you have run away?” she asked. I shrugged. Life will go on without you she had kindly pointed out, and offing myself had lost its charm for another day. Anyhow if I croaked I might have to lie in the hospital morgue next to Emily, which would scare a person to death if they weren’t dead already. I thought of Emily’s drinking-water-blue, unaccusing eyes, not quite closed but fixed forever in disappointment because Ursie never came back-“It’s just I thought I’d killed her,” I muttered. “You will be glad to hear it: Miss Peabody is not good, but life,” Zuk said, in a clucking, practical tone that almost made me laugh. “This is most I can tell you. Anyhow we have something else to talk, yes?” “We do?” I wished to get it over with so I said: “I guess you mean what I did to Emily.” “No. Not Miss Peabody.” Zuk was patient; her gnarled fingers moved like a spider over every inch of her pale throat as if counting the tiny wrinkles. She wanted me to guess again, but I was stumped. “Miss Bogeywoman-you like if I call you Miss Bogeywoman?” “Just Bogeywoman,” I said, but that was too democratic for her.

“Miss Bogeywoman, I want you should explain me something. Let us sit down.” She led me to the chairs in the back of the room. She lit a Gitane. “Now. Why you want I should be your psychiatrist?” she asked in a gravelly voice. “What put this idea in your head?”

So that was it. How had I ever had the nerve to ask? “You look like somebody who’d be interesting to talk to, that’s all,” I mumbled. “I think you are saying you want to talk. Yes? That is what I hear?” “Well, not to just anybody,” I said. Didn’t she see the pressure I was under? If I had a claim to fame in this dump it was my one year, seven months and eight days of silence-going on nine. And my dreambox mechanic was Foofer, the world-famous diagnostician-probably the best known doc in the place. Word of this had gotten around, we all knew the royals had case supervisions and case retreats, case manhattans, case hardenings and case bakeoffs, case jousts, summits, progresses and councils of war. I narrowed my eyes at her: Could she be Foofer’s Injun scout? The thought that they might be in cahoots, that her special interest in me might be for Foofer’s sake, filled me with such bilious jealousy I almost puked.

“I’m never going to talk to Foofer, in case that’s what you’re after. You might as well forget it, I ain’t talking to that fuddy till I buy my frozen Milky Ways in hell. In other words never ever.” “Good. Okay. Then please, Miss Bogeywoman, you will explain me the difference between somebody you want for talk and somebody you will never ever talk?”

I curled a chunk of oily hair on a finger. “Ahem. I got certain private business which I would never discuss with a fuddy dreambox mechanic. Hey, it’s none of his beeswax, he’d just tell Merlin and don’t tell me he wouldn’t, I know he would. Merlin chose him and I know these famous fuddies, they’re all in the same club.” “So it is nothing that Dr. Feuffer has done or said, but whom he will tell?” “It’s nuttin he said cause he hardly says nuttin.” “Maybe you are angry at him he doesn’t say more?” I just shrugged. “What you would like him to say?” I glared at her. “I have get the feel,” Zuk said, “you don’t like Dr. Feuffer no matter what he says. Is fair to call this a pree-judice?” I stared at Zuk and suddenly I saw straight into her dreambox, as through the peephole of a diorama. I wouldn’t talk to Foofer cause Foofer was a fuddy-that’s what she was driving at-cause Foofer was a hairy-onions, a grizzle- bearded, frog-dangled male. She was right of course, but I wasn’t telling them that- lemme die first.

“You think it’s cause he’s a fuddy-well you’re wrong. Even if he was Margaret Meat I wouldn’t like him,” I sneered, “under the circumstances.” “Ah! Not even… Margaret…!” she exploded softly, as if she knew Margaret Meat poisonally. (Suddenly I was sure-my heart drowned-she did know Margaret Meat poisonally.) “Why do we have to talk about Foofer, anyway?” I muttered, “like I said, all these famous fuddies play in the same band, and speaking of bands, that’s the main reason: Even if I wanted to say sumpm to Foofer, now I never could, because my rock band, I mean the Bug Motels, is watching me. I’m famous for not talking to my dreambox mechanic. So now the only way I can talk is if I get a brand-new dreambox mechanic. And soon’s I saw you I knew it oughta be you.”

Doctor Zuk sank her fingers into her spiky hair and scratched energetically. “So-is important for you to be famous for something, like your father is famous,” she said. “How do you know he’s famous?” Her eyebrows flew up. “You have just said so!” “Yeah well I thought you might at least have to ask who the hump Merlin is…” “I can ask, if you wish me…?” I narrowed my eyes at her. Of course she knew who Merlin was, they all did: wasn’t he one of Baltimore’s three television ambassadors to the world, along with Miss Sally of Romper Room and Doctor Tom the chimpanzee from This Is Your Zoo? Of course she knew! Even in the steaming borscht jungles of Russian Costa Rica, the village TV