Read Online The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charles D'Ambrosio
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took up my station on the sofa, I felt certain I wouldn’t rise again until some angel came by and blew a trumpet.
It was maybe a couple weeks later, and I was no longer on Maximum Observation. Bob was gone and I was on my own. My window was open and little things stirred as they had in my childhood, so that the clothes scattered on the floor were once again the bodies of dead men. When I was a boy, my father and his six brothers seined for salmon out of Ilwaco, Washington, and every couple years one or another of them would wash up in the frog water around Chehalis Slough, drowned. The funerals seemed to last days, weeks, even months, as the remaining brothers gathered nightly in the Riptide bar and stared drunkenly into each other’s eyes like dazed, speechless toads. Left at home, sleepless and alone—I have a mother somewhere, but I never knew her—I imagined that each shirt on the floor was a dead uncle and I could not leave the tipsy life raft of my bed, waiting out those long nights when the ocean fog was cool and full of premonitions and the beacon at the end of the breakwater threw green shadows against the walls of my room. Now I drew the blanket over my head. “Our Father who art in heaven . . . etc. . . . etc. . . . now and at the hour of our death amen!” When the coffin thing didn’t put me to sleep I peeked over the satiny selvage of my blanket and stared at the ceiling and listened to the tedious complaints of patients as they wept into the pay phone across the hall: (8:02) . . . My parents had a bad marriage, then divorced and married worse people . . . (8:07) . . . I’ll show you what’s the matter with me. Then I get my razor. I cut down sharp and quick. I scream and go out onto the court and bleed all over . . . (8:47) . . . It’s hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time . . .
This kind of serial conversation went on night after night, a litany of complaint and outrage, right outside my door. People were hospitalized when their feelings reached an acute phase, but if you eavesdropped on all the jabbering, all the lonely, late-night calls, the whole long history of pain and madness fused into a single humdrum story, without much drama. It went flat. I’d been revolving in and out of various mental wards my whole life and previously had always considered myself touched and unique. I was kind of snobby about it—like a war vet, bitter and proud—but now I flipped the covers to the floor and queued up with all the other lunatics, waiting my turn.
“Look,” I said, “can I come see you?”
“You can get out?” the ballerina asked.
“What’re you saying?”
“Are you better?”
“No,” I said. “Not really. But I’m off MO.”
She didn’t say anything. On the p-ward you often found the phone swaying from the end of its metal cord like the pendulum of a clock, no one in sight. People just drifted away from conversations, too frazzled and forgetful to end the call or maybe too medicated and lethargic to hang up. That’s what I was imagining when the ballerina went silent, the dangling phone.
“Okay?” I said, finally.
“Okay,” she said.
I hung up and crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling and listened: (9:31) . . . I swear I spent sixty percent of my life puking . . . (9:33) . . . Then can you explain to me why every time I got in my car to go somewhere “Mr. Bojangles” was playing? . . . (9:45) . . . I started keeping a journal almost two years ago. I used to write only when I was happy. Then I realized that I’d look back and think that my whole life was happy, so I started only writing when I was depressed. And I realized that I wasn’t always depressed, so I started to write every day. Now I calculate I’m fifty percent happy and fifty percent depressed so I don’t see the point of writing at all anymore . . . (10:07) . . . It hurts.
I used my very first pass to visit the ballerina.
It was maybe a couple weeks later, and I was no longer on Maximum Observation. Bob was gone and I was on my own. My window was open and little things stirred as they had in my childhood, so that the clothes scattered on the floor were once again the bodies of dead men. When I was a boy, my father and his six brothers seined for salmon out of Ilwaco, Washington, and every couple years one or another of them would wash up in the frog water around Chehalis Slough, drowned. The funerals seemed to last days, weeks, even months, as the remaining brothers gathered nightly in the Riptide bar and stared drunkenly into each other’s eyes like dazed, speechless toads. Left at home, sleepless and alone—I have a mother somewhere, but I never knew her—I imagined that each shirt on the floor was a dead uncle and I could not leave the tipsy life raft of my bed, waiting out those long nights when the ocean fog was cool and full of premonitions and the beacon at the end of the breakwater threw green shadows against the walls of my room. Now I drew the blanket over my head. “Our Father who art in heaven . . . etc. . . . etc. . . . now and at the hour of our death amen!” When the coffin thing didn’t put me to sleep I peeked over the satiny selvage of my blanket and stared at the ceiling and listened to the tedious complaints of patients as they wept into the pay phone across the hall: (8:02) . . . My parents had a bad marriage, then divorced and married worse people . . . (8:07) . . . I’ll show you what’s the matter with me. Then I get my razor. I cut down sharp and quick. I scream and go out onto the court and bleed all over . . . (8:47) . . . It’s hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time . . .
This kind of serial conversation went on night after night, a litany of complaint and outrage, right outside my door. People were hospitalized when their feelings reached an acute phase, but if you eavesdropped on all the jabbering, all the lonely, late-night calls, the whole long history of pain and madness fused into a single humdrum story, without much drama. It went flat. I’d been revolving in and out of various mental wards my whole life and previously had always considered myself touched and unique. I was kind of snobby about it—like a war vet, bitter and proud—but now I flipped the covers to the floor and queued up with all the other lunatics, waiting my turn.
“Look,” I said, “can I come see you?”
“You can get out?” the ballerina asked.
“What’re you saying?”
“Are you better?”
“No,” I said. “Not really. But I’m off MO.”
She didn’t say anything. On the p-ward you often found the phone swaying from the end of its metal cord like the pendulum of a clock, no one in sight. People just drifted away from conversations, too frazzled and forgetful to end the call or maybe too medicated and lethargic to hang up. That’s what I was imagining when the ballerina went silent, the dangling phone.
“Okay?” I said, finally.
“Okay,” she said.
I hung up and crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling and listened: (9:31) . . . I swear I spent sixty percent of my life puking . . . (9:33) . . . Then can you explain to me why every time I got in my car to go somewhere “Mr. Bojangles” was playing? . . . (9:45) . . . I started keeping a journal almost two years ago. I used to write only when I was happy. Then I realized that I’d look back and think that my whole life was happy, so I started only writing when I was depressed. And I realized that I wasn’t always depressed, so I started to write every day. Now I calculate I’m fifty percent happy and fifty percent depressed so I don’t see the point of writing at all anymore . . . (10:07) . . . It hurts.
I used my very first pass to visit the ballerina.
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