My Little Blue Dress (22 page)

That final phrase stuck with me:
“Adios, mon capitaine.”
I couldn't stop thinking about it. Two different foreign languages thrown together in the same short phrase . . . an exuberant thrusting together of farflung verbal artifacts, like a scuba diver's flippers worn with an old suit of armor . . .

And suddenly I knew in my gut who Theo was. He must have been up on the roof of the
come hither
building that luminous breakthrough evening. He must have been one of Bruno's fellow Future People who had welcomed him into their number.

Thank you, Theo Bakula
, I pulsed into the air as Bruno stepped whistling out of the shower.
Thank you for midwifing the spiritual rebirth of a young man about whom I care deeply.

Bruno was back here at 8
P
.
M
., kissed by the sun after a day spent shopping with Hayley Iskender and with a plastic bag at his side from a place called The End of the World Is Nylon. After briefly ducking next door he reemerged wearing literally one of the best shirts I had ever seen: a tight black nylon number, silk-screened with whimsical barnyard scenes such as you might find in a child's alphabet book: there was a smiling horse poking its head over a stable door;
a smiling sow being suckled by piglets; a rooster on a patch of grass . . . It was a funny, clever shirt and Bruno looked very handsome in it. Radiating contentment the young man sank into the armchair, reached for the 'phone book and in a move that surprised me, used it to call that guy Mark Clark whom he invited to join himself, Theo Bakula, and Hayley Iskender at Magma
*
that evening also. Clark seemed slightly bowled over by the invitation but Bruno assured him he was serious. “We need to stick together, we N! guys . . .” he said. “See you there in half an hour. Just tell the people on the door that you're with me.”

Bruno replaced the telephone handset in its cradle, sighed happily . . . at which precise moment my torso reared up off the electric bed and my chest gave a sound like a ream of paper being ripped in half by a strongman.

I blacked out.

When I came to I was looking at the ceiling, the embossed tin ceiling with the slug-shaped gray patches where the paint has peeled off and I was conscious of a sound in the air like an idling engine,
uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr-uhr
, and a flicking sound as well, like pages being turned. My head fell to the side and there was Bruno Maddox, knees pulled up to his chest in the nasty armchair, and, reader, he did not look good. He looked bad. His hair was fluffed crazily out on
either side of his head like cat whiskers and he was staring with round white eyes down into the pages of
The Caregiver's Bible
. “Blood-blood-blood-blood,” he was muttering, flipping aimlessly through that volume. “Blood-blood-blood-blood-blood.”

What?
I wondered, glancing down at my smock.

Oh.

From my hip to the bottom of my rib cage lay a lake of pale gray phlegm overlaid with a web of red filaments, like long threads of saffron.
Red
filaments, reader. For the first time ever I had just coughed up blood.

I was about to offer up a short prayer of thanks to whatever deity it was when I heard a
bonk
and looked over. The
Caregiver's Bible
had fallen from Bruno's hands, and now he was frantically dividing his gaze between the lake of bloody phlegm, my face, my neck and my chest as it rose and fell lopsidedly. He was whimpering, under his breath, looking utterly insane.
Utterly
insane, reader. Not one trace was left of the last few weeks' good feeling.

Okay, now, calm down,
I pulsed him reassuringly.
You're overreacting. You lose that much blood wiping your face with one of those hot towels in a Japanese restaurant. Plus I'm not even coughing any more . . . Bruno you can't let this derail your recovery. You have to go out.

He didn't though. Instead he sort of tumbled forward off the chair in a semi-controlled manner and disappeared from my view beneath the side of the electric bed.

It was a crucial, make-or-break moment, I suddenly knew in my gut.

This was like that moment in a Greek Tragedy when the hero is forced to make a difficult choice that affects his entire future. Was Bruno going to go out into the city and live?
Or stay here with me and merely, as they say on the talk shows, exist?

Get up, boy!
I pulsed as hard as I could.
Get up, get up. For the love of Pete!

Nothing.

And
still
nothing.

And then do you know what happened, reader?

Can you guess?

Bruno Maddox stood up
.

The boy's face was as white as cod but his jaw was set like concrete and he was unmistakably on his feet. “Look,” he mumbled, not looking at me, fumbling for his jacket. “I have to go out, but I'll be back as soon as I can.”

Don't come back at all,
I pulsed ecstatically as he staggered out into the night.
You've had a nasty shock. Stay out with Hayley until you feel completely better.

And that's what he did. He left me here with my joy and my phlegm, which retained its sheen all evening in the humid air, and didn't return until way past midnight.

I couldn't tell if he was pleased to find me still alive (I certainly wouldn't have been in his shoes). In fact, he didn't seem to care. Just wiped up the phlegm like it didn't have blood in it and escorted me back to bed, seeming fine.

So all in all an extremely heartening day. Bruno Maddox bent, reader, but he did not break!

July 4th—Sunday

Oh God.

I think I may be too depressed to even tell you what's happened today, reader . . . oh reader, it's
awful
.

Deep breath. (Lungs are fine, by the way. Completely recovered.)

Okay.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes this morning was a man's head and shoulders, over in the main room, framed against the window. I couldn't quite make out the facial features . . . but then came the voice.

“You're awake,” said Bruno Maddox, rising to come get me. With forearms that felt to me like bowling pins he manhandled me in silence to the bathroom. Not until I was mounted on the electric bed with my cereal and Bruno had toppled backward into the nasty armchair did I get a proper look at him.

He looked like shit and when he spoke his voice sounded just like mine did back in February; just air and flapping throat parts. “I . . .” he wheezed. “I'm having a problem with my brain and I . . . I don't know what to do about it.”

What happened?
I pulsed him, fighting despair.
Calm down and tell me what happened
.

Coincidentally, that is exactly what he did do. In the croaking sentimental tones of a mortally wounded soldier recalling the smell of his mother's apple dumplings and the way the sunflowers would wave beyond the kitchen window, blah blah blah now never to be reexperienced . . . Bruno told me what happened at Magma.

“So,” he began, closing his eyes, “I went out last night . . .”

And suddenly, reader, my own eyes may as well have been closed because instead of Bruno's haggard features and the appalling interior of my vile apartment . . .

 

. . . I am seeing pictures again, just like I did the other day . . . when Bruno came back from his walk
.

I'm seeing pictures of Bruno Maddox clambering out of a taxi and dawdling confusedly on the sidewalk outside Magma. The sky is dark, the lights of the city are bright, and he is still upset by the blood from my lungs. His eyes will not settle down. Traumatized, they flit from gutter to street lamp to the faces of the revelers queuing to get into Magma, as if old woman lung-blood might suddenly well from any spot . . .

 

“to meet Hayley . . .”

 

Yeah, I see that too. I see Hayley Iskender approaching from the rear.

“Hey.”

Bruno Maddox spins around.

There is Hayley Iskender. She is there right behind him, in her cardigan. Her smile is drawn but warm.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Fucking excellent.” He kisses her again.

“Shall we go in . . .”

“. . . at some place, some . . . nightclub . . .”

 

Yes
.

I see Magma.

The great white volcano.

I see Bruno and Hayley enter with no trouble, for they are on the list, but I can feel the young man's distress holding steady. The nightclub is meant to be white; that is the joke of the place, if you will, but everything he looks at, everything he sees, is overlaid with the same lattice of red threads as overlaid the pool of phlegm I disgorged.

The place is very crowded, and what a crowd it is! Every last man-jack is a Citizen of the Future, exuberantly dressed to the eclectic nines, talking fast . . . phrases from about ten languages whizz past the boy like bullets as he shoulders between nonathletes in athletic clothing. . . nonscientists in white lab coats . . . a non-Hindu woman with the largest forehead dot you have ever seen . . .

Bruno starts to feel better.

He is away from that nasty old bleeding woman.

He is among his people
.

 

“. . . and this guy, Mark Clark . . .”

 

Mm hmm. I see him too.

I see Mark Clark through the lattice of red in Bruno's vision. The diminutive earpiece- and microphone-technician is seated in a carved-out niche.

Bruno tugs the sleeve of Hayley's cardigan. They push through the crowd . . .

“Clark, this is Hayley Iskender, my . . .” he turns to Hayley with a smile that is sly . . . “are you my girlfriend? Officially?”

Hayley smiles, extends a hand to Clark. “Good to meet you.”

“Hayley, Clark,” Bruno finishes up.

Clark is short, and he is hairy, sitting there in his little rocky sconce, knees pressed tightly together, looking up at them like a baby, with big round guileless eyes, as wide and simple as a lake up in Canada, but not as deep. I examine those eyes for a soul . . . and find only an ambition to one day write a small weekly column for a provincial newspaper entitled “News to Me . . . by Mark Clark.”

His clothes too are wrong. With the possible exception of Hayley Iskender, whose cardigan defies all categories, Mark Clark is the only person in the place not dressed like a Future Person. In getting dressed he has not surveyed all of History like a god and playfully selected items from multiple different eras . . . no, he is in some rumpled brown trousers, a gray checked shirt and a scuffed old leather jacket. There is no joke to his clothing. All the pieces fit together . . .

And suddenly I know what Bruno will tell me next . . .

 

“. . . and . . .” Bruno rubbed his face with his hand. “I don't know . . . I just suddenly started to lose it really badly. Clark began to
really
bother me . . . just his very presence. I was getting . . . angry. It made no sense . . .”

 

Yes it does
.

Because Clark is
dead weight.

He is in cahoots with the blood from my lungs: both of them are trying to slow Bruno down, trying to stop him having fun, trying to drag him back to the bad old days of caregiving . . .

 

“. . . and so I went off to get some drinks . . .”

 

“Time to access a little drinkorama,” Bruno is rubbing his hands. “I see beverages on the horizon. Clark? Drinksie?”

“Gee . . .” says Clark, thinking.

“Hayley?” Bruno says to Hayley. “Would you like some alcohol?”

She nods. “Beer please.”

“Clark?”

His round eyes blink, then he nods. “Beer please.”

Bruno nods . . . and is off, pumping through the crowd trying to regain a little verve . . . a little momentum . . .

He succeeds. He makes it to the serving window marked Pinatubo, orders two beers and a whisky, is observed by a girl in a Native American headdress alone on a stool. She watches him slide a twenty across the bar to pay for the drinks.

“There's more where that came from,” he purrs to her, feeling almost fully restored . . .and is off again, back through the crowd, past a quintet of Japanese youths in matching white suits, one of whom is leaning his head into the stomach of another and pinwheeling his arms while all five of them laugh . . .

Bruno smiles at the spectacle . . .

 

“. . . and I was feeling slightly better. But then I got back and Clark was talking to Hayley about his dead mother . . .”

 

Yes
.

Even out of earshot Bruno can see Clark's lips making the double
muh
sound of “my mother”
 . . . Muh muh . . . Muh-Muh.