Read Online The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio - Free Book Online

million dollars each of the last four years running and never felt worse in my life. I’m not whining—I’m not one of those whiners. One of those affluent crybabies. But I’d lost the plot and was afraid that if my life improved any more I’d vanish. By contrast a woman setting herself on fire seemed very real; on doctor’s orders, she was strapped in at nine o’clock sharp, pinned to the flat board of her bed like a specimen. At first it was unnerving to talk to a woman who was lashed to her bed with a contraption of leather belts and heavy brass buckles, so I angled my seat away from her face and spoke to her knees, which looked, in the faint blue light, as though they’d been carved by water from a bar of soap.
    “How are you?” I said.
    She seesawed her wrist, comme ci, comme ça, beneath a band of heavy saddle leather. The leather was burnished to a rich gloss by the straining of a thousand sweaty wrists on a thousand other agonized nights.
    “Would you grab me an orange?”
    I fetched an orange from a basket and peeled it; it was especially fragrant in the semidark. Bob was sitting in a chair in the hallway and I could hear the dry scratch of his pencil as he took notes. I didn’t care. The ballerina’s window was open and in the breeze the heavy curtains swept aside and the hospital courtyard, with its scalloped pattern of cobblestones, its wet bare trees and February emptiness, seemed like a scene recollected from an expatriate life in Paris that I’d never lived, a moment out of some tawdry romance I’d never had in my youth.
    “Make sure you peel as much of the yuck off as possible,” she said. “I hate the yuck.”
    “I hate the yuck, too,” I said, and held a jeweled segment over her mouth. Her lips spread and her tongue slid forward. It had been ages since I’d fed anyone. It was excellent the way, when I held the crescent of orange there, poised above her blue lips, her mouth just opened. I dangled another piece and watched her mouth open like a little starveling bird’s and then I pulled the piece away and watched her mouth close. Then I gave it to her.
    “You don’t have a match, do you?” I put a cigarette in my mouth. “A pyro like yourself.”
    “I’d love a smoke.”
    “I bet you would. Why do you burn yourself?”
    “My doctor’s theory is it puts the pain in a place I can find it. On the outside.”
    “I know exactly what he means. I thought making movies was going to be that way. Now I’d just rather be crucified.”
    “I don’t like your mind.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m not here for a pedicure.”
    “Untie me,” she whispered.
    “No can do,” I said.
    “Please.”
    “Can’t.”
    “We’ll just smoke that cig and then you can buckle me right back up.”
    “I don’t have any matches.”
    She smiled. “I do.”
    She told me to lift the table lamp and underneath it I found a cache of contraband matches. Each individual match had been ripped from the book and mustered in a neat, soldierly line, and the strip of striking was there, too, the whole kit flat enough to hide beneath the green felt base.
    “Great, but I’ll just hold the cig to your lips. I’m going to leave you strapped in for now.”
    We worked the cig down to a nub, fanning the smoke out the window, and then she yanked at the sides of her gown. A couple of the snaps popped open, and she pulled aside the paper. It made a rustling like the thin parchment pages of a Bible.
    “This was the first time, after an audition for the Albany Ballet,” she said, using her finger to trace a faint cicatrix the size of a postage stamp. “I wanted a sharp blade, I just had the idea. I had a disposable razor for shaving my legs, so I put that in my mouth. I bit down on it real hard, trying to crack the plastic so I could get the blade free. But I couldn’t get it. It wouldn’t come out. I was so frustrated. I started crying. I lit a cigarette. I had no idea what that hand with the cigarette would do—it was