The Dead Fish Museum (20 page)

“Is this like a kink or something?” Desiree asked.

“Let’s have a baby,” the bullet said.

“Fill me with your seed,” the gun said.

Ramage loaded a shell in the gun. The bullet made a satisfying click in the chamber like a key turning in a lock.

“I’m pregnant,” the gun announced.

“I’m out of here,” Desiree said.

“They got a baby. The newlyweds have a child.” Ramage jumped into bed and beckoned Desiree with the gun.

“Why don’t you give me that gun?”

“I came here to kill myself.”

“Why?”

“Why kill myself?”

“Why come here?”

She walked out, leaving the door open, and for a while Ramage lay on the bed, listening to the crashing of the ocean across the highway. His display had been grotesque. He had humiliated himself and now it disgusted him; he was mortified and filled with self-loathing and yet he watched the open door, hoping she might return. He had almost felt decent, standing with Desiree outside the spice factory, watching the quiet green dust spin through the cavernous room, but now he couldn’t stop his black ruminations. His mind went round and round, churning pitifully, and finally he pictured himself crossing the highway and wading into the sea and pulling the trigger; if he lost nerve and flinched and only managed to blast off part of his head the ocean would drown him. It wasn’t so unusual to consider these scruples; it was like a math problem one worked until there was no remainder. Regina, his friend from the hospital, had dressed ceremoniously in her grandfather’s bathrobe and soaked the terry cloth in gasoline and then struck a match, immolating herself, and what she remembered was the noise, the horrid rushing sound, the wind howling inside the flames—that was what made her want to stop it. She’d rolled herself in the garden, digging into the dirt and desperately spinning, smothering the flames not to save her life, not to end the pain, but to stop the noise. She was hideously disfigured, her mouth a dry withered hole, her eyes drooping from their melted sockets, her graphed skin puckered and glossy, red and raw, as if she’d been flayed and turned inside out, but all she ever wanted to talk about, two years after striking the match, was the noise.

Ramage gulped a yawn to clear his head; tendrils of chalky saliva hinged his mouth and alcoholic tears welled in his eyes. Breeze from an open door did little to refresh him. When Greenfield cleared the set, Ramage went out onto the fire escape and found RB sitting on a metal step, furtively turning the crank on a hand drill and boring a hole in the plywood that blocked the window. When the half-inch bit punched through, he tested the peephole, then enlarged it, carving away at the wood with a pocketknife.

“Spooky,” RB said. He stopped to pinch at a blood blister on his thumb. “You smell that smell?”

“Clove today,” Ramage said.

“I been trying to figure it out.”

“There’s a spice factory,” Ramage said.

“This town is ugly,” RB said, “but it smells good.”

“I’m all tore up,” Ramage admitted. “I got drunk with Rigo last night.”

“Harvard,” RB said, with a laugh. “He don’t like me kidding him, do he?”

“He might appreciate it if you laid off.”

“Good. Then I’ll keep on.” RB finally popped the blister, wiping the spurt of blood away on his pant leg. “Guy doesn’t know where he’s at.”

They could hear Greenfield calling for quiet as the filming was set to begin. RB peered through the hole he’d made in the plywood.

“This shit’s tame,” he said after a while. “I thought there’d be monkeys in it.” He closed his pocketknife. “Still, there’s boys and girls inside about to get their rocks off. And you out here sicker than a dog.”

“I think I’ll head home,” Ramage said.

“Have a look.”

Ramage pressed his eye to the peephole and saw Desiree naked on the bed. She was alone on the set and seemed not to know where to place her hands; she leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

“You look bored,” Greenfield was telling her. “You got a dick in your mouth but you got a face like a postal clerk.”

“Scolding me doesn’t put me in much of a mood,” Desiree said.

“You’re a professional,” Greenfield said. “You get paid to be in the mood.”

“No monkeys,” Ramage said to RB. He looked out over the town. “I think I’ll head home.”

“You said that.”

Ramage stood, steadying himself with the handrail. The gray overcast sky tumbled and spun and his stomach heaved. He buckled and was seated again, throwing up between his legs. He propped his arms on his knees and spat chunks through the grated metal landing. RB closed his hand over Ramage’s, and Ramage slowly turned his palm up and clasped hold of RB, weaving their fingers together, holding on tighter as each new wave of nausea hit.

“Spooky?”

“Yeah?”

“I could give a rat’s ass where you been. Crazy or whatever, locked up, I don’t mind. It’s nothing to me.”

“Thanks.”

“But you’re different. You changed.”

“Different?”

“You used to be somebody else.”

He woke with a parched mouth and put his head under the faucet and desperately lapped at the water like a poisoned animal. He undressed and was asleep again when a knock on the door woke him. He wound a sheet over his shoulders and slipped the chain off and found Desiree standing under the walkway light. Night had fallen; he had to ask what time it was.

“Ten-thirty,” she said.

“Man alive,” Ramage said.

Desiree wore jeans and a white T-shirt. She’d let her hair loose from its usual hard, lapidary style, and an archaeology of treatments showed, strata of blond and silver, a bedrock of dark brown at the roots.

Ramage asked, “How was work?”

“Greenfield’s got notions,” she said.

“I heard him go off.”

“There wasn’t any call for him to humiliate me in front of everybody.”

She slipped off her sandals and walked barefoot across the gold carpet. She poured rum into a plastic cup and sipped from her drink, then tipped out a little more rum and sat on the bed beside Ramage, her legs raised. Their knees touched. Ramage felt the faint pressure and in silence he ran his finger back and forth along her pants seam, tracing the outline of her leg as it rose and fell from her hip to her ankle. She primped the flat airless pillows beneath her head; she ran her tongue over her lips and her mouth settled into a pout as she stared at the ceiling. Ramage wished for ice but he was too tired to dress and search for some. Desiree balanced the plastic cup on her stomach, over her belly button. Ramage kissed her woodenly and touched her breasts; he faked the kiss a moment longer and slipped his hand under her shirt. Beneath her breasts, two faint surgical scars, like the twin curved lines of a cartoon bust, were clearly visible. He traced his finger along the pink welted tissue. The cakey foundation she had applied to cover the scars for the shoot came off on Ramage’s finger in a kind of powdery dust the color of putty. He looked at his finger; he wiped it clean on the bedsheet. She reached for his crotch. His penis curled like a burnt match between his legs.

“I knew a guy killed himself,” she said, sitting up. “I always wondered why.”

“It’s not that interesting.”

“Come on, if we hung out tonight, and then you were dead tomorrow, you wouldn’t want me to feel anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even weird? You wouldn’t want me to feel a little weird?”

“I don’t know.”

“That guy used to come to our shows. I had this rock band. I was sixteen. He was a fan. He shot himself in the parking lot. He had some kind of drama. I wrote a song about it but the song stank.”

The light that had been leaking into the room was briefly eclipsed and someone knocked on the door. Ramage pulled the sheet around his shoulders and answered. Rigo held a six-pack in one hand and Ramage’s tool sack in the other.

“You are not at the bar,” he said. Without the past tense he could only protest pointlessly against the present; his eyes shifted, staring into the room. Nothing was happening but Ramage felt awkward and compelled to account for himself.

“I see,” Rigo said. Red and black paint spotted his face and sand crystals flashed in his hair. He set Ramage’s tools inside. “You forget, I bring.” He opened one of the bottles from the sixpack and offered it to Desiree, who declined. Ramage turned down the offer, too, and Rigo drank the beer in one long hard swallow. When he was finished, he knocked the empty bottle against his knee, waiting. “I see,” he said again.

There was nothing Ramage could do, and his guilt gave way to anger. “Thanks for the tools,” he said. He abruptly said goodbye and shut the door. Turning back to face the room, he was conscious of the tableau from Rigo’s vantage, the poisoned scene, tawdry and familiar: the twisted sheets, the tangle of clothes, the uncapped bottle of rum on the table.

“He gives me the creeps,” Desiree said. “You know the way you can look at somebody just for a second, and that’s one thing, but if you look longer, that’s something else? That’s him—he just keeps staring. He doesn’t know when’s enough.”

She reached for Ramage again, but gave up quickly.

“I’m getting this feeling of familiarity around you,” Desiree said. “I don’t mean cozy. I mean like a past life, like we’ve been here before. Not way back in history or anything. We weren’t Roman emperors together. I mean a past life like maybe a couple weeks ago.”

After the second day of shooting, Greenfield told Ramage to stay late and dismantle the sets, all except the black room. The weather had turned cooler; a light rain tapped against the plywood windows. Space heaters had been spread around the warehouse after some of the actors complained of cold. Ramage sent Rigo to the store for beer; he waited with RB, the warm air blowing over them.

RB looked out from the set to the tangle of equipment.

“All these people watching,” he said. “You forget there’s all these people looking on.”

“This is some job,” Ramage said.

“We’ve had lots worse.”

“That we have, my friend.”

Knocking down what they had only recently built hollowed their desire and didn’t make either man inclined to work. When Rigo returned with the beer, they loafed on the bed and drank.

RB said, “What side were you on, Rigo?”

“Side?”

“A good guy? A bad guy?”

“He was in the military,” Ramage said.

“No side,” Rigo said.

“I seen you looking through my peephole,” RB said. “I should charge admission. I’d make some money off you, boy. You like these bitches.”

“I am married,” Rigo said.

“You can look, Harvard,” RB said. “It’s okay. Looking don’t hurt nobody.”

Rigo flipped a bottle cap at RB, hitting him in the face.

“Lighten up,” Ramage said.

“Spooky, he just threw a bottle cap at me.”

“Wah wah, let’s get back to work.”

“Back to work, you niggers!” RB laughed, his dark lips rolling back, exposing a gate of white teeth. “That includes you, Rigoberto.”

“Go get my claw hammer, RB.”

“You know about black men, right, Rigo?” RB said, as he rose from the bed. He lifted a two-by-four off the floor and duckwalked the length of the warehouse with the stud crotched and angled up between his legs. “You’re definitely some kind a nignog,” he said. He stuffed the board in one of the galvanized cans they were using to haul refuse. He laughed to himself as he searched in Ramage’s tool sack. He found the hammer and beneath it the gun. “Hey Spooky, man, what the hell?” He held the gun delicately like a small wounded bird in the palm of his hand.

“Put it back,” Ramage said.

“Is it loaded?”

“No,” Ramage said. “Are my smokes in there?”

The kerosene heaters burned orange and warmed the hue of Rigo’s olive skin. His cheeks flared up and Ramage watched his wide black silent eyes track RB’s movement across the room.

“You want a world where you have to choose sides?” RB said. “Go to prison, man.”

He offered Ramage the handle end of the hammer.

“It’s prison now, is it?” Ramage said.

“What?”

“First it was reform school, now it’s prison. Which is it?”

“It’s all the same,” RB said. “You’d know that if you’d been where I’ve been.”

“Let’s strike these rooms.”

Rigo walked over to the lockbox and grabbed a small sledge and began pounding away the supports that held the room together. Gypsum shook loose as the Sheetrock buckled and white dust sifted into the air. The back wall caved in and the others folded over like shuffled cards. A stud broke free and whacked against RB’s leg. Ramage turned and calmly waited for things to surface. RB closed his hand around Rigo’s neck and shoved his face to the floor.

RB said, “You got to be very careful. People get fucked up on jobs.”

RB let go and picked up a pry bar and began to rip nails loose from the discarded studs. Each nail screeched like a gull. Rigo was still lying on the floor.