“I don’t care,” I said. “Doctor Zuk will go along with it.”
“I’m afraid you are right,” Foofer said gravely.
I stared at him, trying to gather what this might mean. So hard and clear, so amber, so royal was the glue that stuck the royals together fast in their one big royal popcorn ball, so rare, in fact never, were the holes in it that let you see down to the nothing-but-popcorn at its core-I stared and stared and started filling up with dread like a battery with charge. “We’re not all that good buddies, me and Doctor Zuk,” I panted, afraid I had somehow ratted on her, “she wouldn’t tell me her birth date, or her country, or who she was working for, or whether she’s married or a spy or a Red Army dreambox fixer or what kind of perfume she wears or whether she’s ever been in Caracas or any of that private royal stuff.”
“Yes, but I see you have put her all these questions.”
“So what, whaddaya mean,” I said in rising panic, “we all wanna know that stuff about the royals all the time, that’s half of what we talk about in the Bug Motels, you could put out a royal gossip magazine and it would sell like hotcakes-”
“I zink very little of such talk takes place in telephone calls to private residences of psychiatrists.”
“Margaret made that part up!” I shouted.
“Perhaps. Still, plainly it has come to a question of, of far too complicated personal… interest. Perhaps you know I am z’chief of treatment at this clinic. Furzermore, I am one of a staff of fifty-seven treatment personnel including fifteen senior psychiatrists. And I am your psychiatrist. The plan of treatment for every patient in z’Adolescent Wing of Rohring Rohring is discussed regularly before zis whole body. I must tell you that Doktor Zuk has argued long and eloquently in front of zis body for your special friendship, but now, in my judgment and that of many uzzers, it is gone too far and, with my apologies, for I know zis will be difficult for you-it must end.”
“You mean we’re not supposed to talk to each other any more?”
“Nuh-zing.”
“She’ll never put up with that kinda ridiculous game, pretend you don’t know each other and all that!” I said.
“No. She has not.”
“O my godzilla she’s gone-you threw her out…”
Foofer stared at a point just past me on the wall, and his loose cheeks sagged. “For a time, a very little time, Ursula, we place you again on Accompanied status-this means, as you know, under no circumstances you leave z’hospital, I am sure you understand z’reason, and you have an escort wiz you wherever you-”
I never meant to hurt him. It’s true the suit of farts was unappetizing to me and his Buick-sized dignity provoked my mental patience to fury, but he was a gaseous nuisance, basically gaseous, and therefore not quite there. He was just a two-hundred-pound fuddy from Europe, a big bald head I could never speak to again whenever I wanted. I had no reason to hurt him.
But as every mental peon knows, these bug mechanics never close a door behind you without palming alarm buttons up their sleeves or in the kneeholes of their desks, so I had to be fast, whatever I did. I had to get to Doctor Zuk before they locked me up. And if Foofer said
But I wasn’t about to give up the forbidden love of my life. O she was scary all right. Naked she had more of the crone about her than I could look at without sweating. She might even love me, and her love was like a house fell on me. And maybe I could never have her or be her but no mere Foofer could stop me from trying.
So I never meant to hurt him but in front of me was Foofer, then his desk, then the door. The brown worsted suit of farts sat on a leather chair; he was pyramidal in shape, and had a certain comic-book dragon effect owing to the popcorn balls of white smoke rising from his lips where a pipe dangled. I leaped off the couch and in one motion pushed him and his chair over backwards. It was a pretty big chair, with lungs of soft leather on the back that softly hissed as they settled. And that had been so easy, once it was done his still-crossed feet dangled absentmindedly in the air above his head, that I pushed his desk over too. This made a great dust-billowing whump on the old wood floor that was sure to bring the nurses running and shrieking on the double. At the same time out of some secret drawer or bunghole in the desk a file marked KODERER URSULA popped and flapped onto the floor. I should have got my mitts on it and not let go, o a thousand times since then I’ve replayed this scene and made my getaway guarding it with my life, but instead I just snatched it up, wheeled and stuffed it out the window, so that hundreds of pages of me went fluttering down Broadway. Then with the superhuman strength of the mental patient I ripped open the steel door, well maybe it wasn’t locked, probably not, and there was Mursch, here came Roper and Hageboom, whipping around the two corners. I backed into Foofer’s office and holed up fast in the kneehole of the overturned desk, getting ready to spring out like a cornered rat, but the nurses just ran around me and now I saw why. Foofer hadn’t moved. He was knocked out cold, his half-closed eyes were all whites, his face why deny it was blue, his pipe was missing though there seemed to be sumpm round and dark O-ing his bloodless mouth, and his wing-tipped foot still nodded at the point of his trousers abstractly, as a butterfly pants with its wings. O my godzilla I’d probably killed the man! Now I ran and nobody stopped me, and this time when I passed Lopes at the front desk in the lobby I wasn’t even a liquid movement in the air, not quite an itch between his eyes-just a vague, exhausted feeling of having cared more once.
7
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
I ducked into her lobby around an old fuddy with a grocery cart full of clacking empties and ran up nineteen flights of steps towards Doctor Zuk. I could do that in those days without panting, on account of the superhuman strength of the mental patient, which lasted for the first twelve floors at least. On the thirteenth I slowed up, by the eighteenth I was peeking around every stairwell for guys in white coats or gumshoes of any description. On the twentieth floor, her floor, I was so near to going backwards I had to admit what it was. Cops didn’t scare me-I never had any trouble outrunning a fuddy in uniform-but Zuk was scarier. Probably she’s expecting me, I was thinking, and what if she’s naked.
But when I got there she had all her clothes back on, in fact I had never seen her looking better in duds. Course, this was beyond even her everyday beaute, this short black dress of silky stuff with a great cut-out speech balloon across the front, and a diamond choker for a collar. “What are you doing here, Miss Bogey?” she asked me, and I started to wonder how come she always looked, not like your usual Commie bureaucrat in a blue serge suit from Searsiev and Roebuckovsky and baggy cotton hose, but like a Russian spy in the movies, in clothes by Cecil Beaton. How could she dress like Paris if she was raised in an oasis in Outer Hotzeplotz? Maybe she really was top drawer, worth millions to the Kremlin, but if she was the best-dressed spy between Washington and Philadelphia, what was her interest in me?
“What are you doing here, Miss Bogey? You look red in your face like boiled Maine lobster, and what is this in your hand? Is for Zuk?” I looked down-I was still clutching Margaret’s letter. I stuffed it in my overalls. “You don’t know?” I said. She shook her head, perplexed and amused. She didn’t know. I sank onto the sofa-there was nothing in the room but a white sofa, a white coffee table with a bowl of roses on it, and long curtains of white gauze, like mosquito net, stirring at the windows.
“Godzillas sake you look like a movie star,” I said, “what are you so dressed up for?” The boiled Maine lobster was a flagrant hint. “I am engaged to dinner,” she confessed. I barked out a doomed and cynical laugh. “I already
