Bogeywoman

mental peon think behind you. Write your own book, Bogey.

“So. In Paris I write my book…” “It’s a rotten book,” I said. “Even so,” Zuk smiled. “Book gets for me fellowship at Rohring Rohring. And you know from there, yes? At Rohring Rohring, everything doesn’t turn out so good. Supervising psychiatrists don’t like my special relation with Miss Bogey-even though they admit she is getting better. I say to them, so Miss Bogey gets the idea she is something special, so what? What’s so geferlich? Then old-style dreambox analysts like Feuffer yell at me I am naif, I am careless-I yawn at this. They say, what if everybody did it? I say, what if nobody did it? But what is use of explain. To one who understands not, elephant trumpets in vain. Ach, these power-hungry Foodians, these Cossacks of mental science in Sigmund Food beards, you think if they really understand what is man they are humble like bug inside themselves, but is it so?”

“Cheese, you don’t exactly radiate self-doubt yourself,” I muttered. “Hoopla, I agree, but I am only Zuk. I don’t take any idea so dead serious like that. I don’t hang on for life. Maybe now I try something new-like they say, mouse with one hole is quick snatch”-and one of her ugly hands shot out, pounced on a thing of air and wrung its neck. “I am interested for new career, something with gorgeous clothes maybe, or real Karamistani restaurant. And you know is true, without one lover is kicked out of doors, a new lover comes not to our divan…” She turned her face to me at last and gave me a brilliant smile. Her mood seemed to have reversed. She was buoyant, even giddy. “But you’d be a beginner,” I said uneasily, “just a nobody, when now you’re famous.” “Only little famous,” she shrugged. “You must have realized my family has money-a little money-like yours. I don’t start from nowhere, from nothing.” She put her ugly hand on my hand.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

“Um, er, uh, tell me about Caramel-Creamistan. Sumpm. A little,” I stammered. “Later.” Out of the blueblack swimming dark the planes of her large face pointed this way and that like a turban of crossed scimitars, like some kind of opera headdress flashing, sumpm from Aida. My head drowned.

“First I will look at every part of you and not even touch you.”

And now my time was up, here she immaculately rearranged me, I mean I don’t know how she did it, as far as I can remember I never felt those gnarly fingers at all, but I found myself lying flat on the grimy bunk under her hands like a baby being changed, and the dim planchette of her palm drifting, floating, above me. All my beauty was the invisible tracks over desert between us, the rubbed-out thread suddenly shining with the electricity of my baffled hunger. Or was it the thin moonlight of her neglect that picked out the footpaths?

“Desert of Kyzl Kum is beautiful,” she whispered, “if you like empty. No tree, no house. Where does anybody live you ask? Nowhere, nobody, you think, then you come over hill, there is yurta same color as weeds of ground, and another, and another. Red crack sand, pink dust, gray-pink hills, soft rolling, next and next, everything empty. Maybe small bunch pines along top of hill, or little bit thorn, maybe, in fold where spring is, like hair in folds of girl of trouble age. Beautiful if you like hard, beautiful if you like empty. No house, no road, and tomorrow every yurta is vanished away, not even rag or half-burnt lump of dung in grass. And then old people say, in red desert of Kyzl Kum only bones point way to Samovarobad.”

The bones of her face-those crossed scimitars-pointed to outer space, and, I don’t know, maybe I was asleep, the turban fell apart like an eggshell and then it was the boat we rocked in. Going south.

Whereupon sumpm really queer happened, I mean I fell into a hole pitch-blueblack and I was crawling around in my own body, which I knew because of tryna get out, every nerve sat up and pulled on its burnt-out light cord and sparked, and what I saw, it was like everywhere there was some sort of unarrived light running loose in the blue vein dark, spilt skim blue milk of, or moonlight, fingers of, picking out trails up my itchy capillaries, or stringing neon beads up the nerve trunks, shooting pearlized baby-blue plastic popbeads up my privatemost, some coming together with a pop, some popping apart

All this time I’m literally under her hand, without ever landing her white palm clambers like a spy airplane over the corrugations of fat and bone drawing some kinda hot spark, good godzilla I’m lighting up all over, I’m a circuit board, a little hot and seasick I shut my eyes and the queer thing is that’s me I’m seeing, far down below lit up like the twinkling spiderweb of a desert town seen from the air at night. And then I’m prowling myself in a creaking taxi up trashy backstreets or zooming up and down my own lymphatic ducts, my golden noggin light glowing, my meter ticking like crazy

[Where are you Doctor Zuk? I don’t even see your face, just now and then your hands and even they are sumpm else, a plectrum or maybe-a knife and fork?]

“What I should do with boygirl like you, eh? so young, so reckless, unbranded like donkey who knows not the world-so silly, so never-from-home-so shayn.”

Whereupon sumpm even queerer happened, now I’m mining my own tunnels, tracking inside myself for the lost chunkagunk, I’m blipping out of my own miner’s hat, lozenges of light torpedoing down and up the personal plumbing, so many melting pills of exploratory, medicinal light, surging up the gut gutters into the armbone legbone headbone like in the old aspirin ads and now I’m mining myself with baby-blue gunpowder, creepy-crawling up the gulley, pouring a trail out of the chewed-off corner of the TNT sack, and now the little fin of flame hisses over the rocks into the mine anyone still in there o my godzilla I wait BLAM I rain down sizzling

How to get out, follow the lost chunkagunk, track the blue moldy crumb of, through the black woods on my scalp, between my legs, peck them out of the hairy roots shudder of horrified pleasure until all completely hopelessly lost pitch blue black

“Poor dear, you have learned what I know, love is calamity to the head,” Madame Zuk whispers.

You are a leviathan, even your kiss is like a house fell on me

“By the lover’s reckoning,” she hisses, “Samovarobad is not far.”

Who are you, who made you, what do you want with me

“All the same, my dear, love is a command and the heart is khan. Finally I am not spoon of your mouth. But I follow this to end of this. Open your eyes.”

I OPENED THEM. And I guess by the book if there is a book I shoulda made love to her now, I mean she was the scary love of my scary life and I never let on I was yellow if I could help it. So I made up my mind to unbutton her-but what happens is her Foofer suit flops open and whaddaya know she’s opened it all up in there herself. Her gnomy whitegreen hands are spreading out the wings of white shirt and under there she’s naked. I lie there looking up at her, wondering what do I do with this, what do I do now

This isn’t a comic book but kreeech, right then I heard a sickening scrape. Bone on bone. It was our bottom, I mean the bottom of the People’s Ship Jenghiz Khan. “Idiot! donkey!” Zuk exploded, “outcast! What they send me for pestilence, this runaway of wormy camels and sheep’s eyeball soup who knows no more of sea than I know of taxidermy…” I watched Zuk’s soccer player’s calves storm up the gangway stairs two at a time, she pulled her shirt flaps together and buttoned her pants as she went, and there followed more terrible curses-I couldn’t understand a word of course but I stole up the stairs behind her, the better to take this in.

She stomped up and down with her hands on her hips, yelling bloody murder. What a swashbuckler she was with her glinting slaver’s eye, her rose cravat tied for a sweatband around her brow, and the jagged decolletage of her misbuttoned shirt! One word she sneered over and over-fazool, fazool, fazool, as in pasta? I realized the word must mean sumpm disgusting in Caramel-Creamistani-then it dawned on me it was the fellow’s name. He stood at pathetic attention with his mouth fixed in that same tooth- baring grin, then suddenly jumped overboard as if to kill himself, one last obedience to her command.

He came up gasping in black water to his chin, bent to the hull and grunted with all his might, but nothing happened. We were stuck. Run aground. I could see one red glowing channel marker a few feet off our stern, just behind us, and a green one like a cartoon serpent’s eye on a pole just in front of us, and then I put it together. We were smack in the middle of the two, right where we oughta be. It was low water-not even the poor drudge’s fault.

Zuk came up and curled her craggy hand around my shoulder-stood cheerfully beside me, panting a bit from all that theatrical wrath. “Kinda hard on that shnook, aren’tcha?” I whispered. “So what you want, Bogey, maybe we too should jump in water, with frogs and snakes, and push?” she loudly whispered back.

What frogs and snakes did she mean? I looked again at the cartoon serpent’s eye on the channel marker and saw it was no cartoon. A viper, real as my foot, hulaed down the pole and splashed into the wet. I saw its bald little