Smear Frame (1992)
The night I got home from the hospital, we had peas and squash and good chicken. Nobody spoke. The radio spoke for us: vitamin deficiencies, lights spotted across Vegas, another building demolition. The first couple of days, I stayed in my room throwing a ball against the wall, doing long division in my head. The television played a documentary about squid brains. On the third night, mama asked what I was planning to do.
You can be a thing in the world, she told me.
We were in the kitchen, the evening light staining the windows above the sink.
You do have a choice, she continued, but you choose to suffer like an idiot. Even the rabbit knows better than to follow the wolf.
Learn something, Jane.
And she left the room. I held her words in the belly of my chest, going over them again and again. That night, I got dressed in my trench coat and went out to the middle of town. The lights were buoyant and fresh, amazing slashes, amazing range. The moon was pinned against the skies like a cop’s badge. I stepped into Lousy’s which was a bar I had been to before. I liked it because it was dark and cold. I often pretended I was in a cave or some sort of comet, minutes away from approaching the quiet tendrils of earth.
I ordered a Shirley Temple and sat at the bar watching the bartender spin and shake and serve drinks.
What’s the drink with the longest name? I asked.
A terrible, unearthed bitter and lame dirt tonic, he said.
I mused on this for a while and, eventually, someone spoke to me. An older woman wearing red and large earrings asked me what time it was. I shrugged.
Maybe sometime around midnight, I said.
Don’t you have a watch? She asked. What kinda man doesn’t have a watch?
The question of my masculinity continues to come under fire, I laughed.
So, what’s your problem? She asked. Why are you here at maybe sometime around midnight?
I got out of the loony bin last weekend, I said. I’m trying to map out the world again.
How long were you in there for?
Six weeks, I said.
Do they zap your brain? She asked. I had a cousin like that, always in and out of those places.
How is he doing? I asked.
On the side of the road, she said, begging for cash, not hiding the bad time he’s having.
That’s admirable. But no, they didn’t zap my brain.
Did they strangle you with Valium?
I was never sedated, I said.
Who put you there?
My parents, I said, I was seeing the holes in the plot, the failing strings in the fabric of the universe, the whole picture. I stopped eating, stopped sleeping. All I did was play chess with spirits and paint my nails over and over again. I showed the woman my hands. See? They’re clean.
The woman was quiet, sipped on her drink. I continued.
It was sorta nice, I admitted, not speaking to anyone but sounding out the idea.
Being taken care of like an infant who can’t speak, I continued. You get medication in the morning, and you moan about the news. Someone starts screaming. Someone stops screaming. You go into a dreamless, milky sleep. Your roommate mumbles in his sleep, sweet robotic poems. And you don’t have a pencil so you commit them to memory: a fog roars, abstain, chapel, chapel, chapel. And you disappear from the world. Headlines float around every day, and you wander around the unit making funny faces to entertain yourself, and someone calls you, and they ask how you are, and you tell them you can’t wait to go home. And then you get home, and the world is indifferent.
Cheers, the woman said, and we clinked our glasses.
Around three, the woman stood up and gave me her number and shook my hand and left. I kept the slip of paper in my coat pocket. I went out to walk by the river-end, watching the rising of the waters, the night reflected on the surface, dark rivulets. A sort of vile peace.
A couple of months afterward, I found work at a fish market: slicing trout in half and packaging swordfish into white papers. The work was mindless, bleeding work. Nobody spoke to me. I smoked cigarettes. When I got home, the house smelled of blood.
A while later, I called the woman. I was on my way home from work. I had not spoken to another human being in ten hours. I had forgotten what my voice sounded like. I could see myself getting slower by the minute. Words died in my head like vermin. The woman answered within four rings. I explained who I was: the boy in the trench coat. It was nighttime, and we spoke for a while. You were drinking a tall martini and, every so often, would dive into your purse to fix your lipstick.
You sound different, she said.
I feel different, I said. I feel like an aspirin. I feel like a headache that won’t resolve.
Where are you? She asked.
By the river, I said. I like seeing the water enunciate. Where are you?
She told me she was making tea for her husband.
He’s not feeling well, she said. I’m doing what people say to do; ginger and saltines and warm baths. But he’s persistent with his pain.
Some people are, I said.
The clouds are fragrant tonight, I continued.
It’s getting late. I can see my mother checking the time, fidgeting in the kitchen then checking again. It’s something I relish—getting home late. The worry she must feel. The worst things happen in your brain. Perhaps I fell down a flight of stairs. Perhaps I cut my hand open on a knife, and I’m in the hospital bleeding out beneath the fluorescent lights. She has a feeling but doesn’t want to endorse the feeling in case it becomes a truth. And when I arrive at last, the feeling subsides and, instead, is replaced with a mute disappointment. I am the one she loves but not the one she missed.
I began to call the woman—whose name I never bothered to ask for as I wanted to name her myself—often. When I was on my lunch break barely eating a tuna sandwich. When I was smoking cigarettes. When I was in my room reading the newspaper and playing with myself. When I was half asleep.
Once, I was naked in bed with the radio on, and there was a sullen exasperation in my stomach. I felt as though I knew when I was going to die, and if I focused long enough, the date would come to me, would emerge from the foggy brain matter, and I would be freed. I had been thinking of death for weeks. Death was my babe, my habit. I had visions of my own death: struck by a moving car and being stuck in the tire. An aneurysm so I’m alive one moment and exploding the next. Stunned by a bullet and feeling my cells gasp in unison.
Death is an orgasm, I told the woman one night. Death is a great, wondrous love. You go into the light. You feel peace for the first time in your pathetic silly little life.
You sound twisted, the woman said. Death is what you avoid; everything you do, you do to put death out. Your bravado is not going to protect you from what will happen or what has happened.
That winter, I was sleepless. I slept for thirty minutes at a time, watched the sunrise slur into my windows, made tea for my parents and gutted samurai fish and wrapped tuna and walked around town, dreaming of poisonous gas. Sometimes, I choked on my visions.
One afternoon, I felt a pop in the back of my head and walked out of work during my lunch break and straight home. When my mother saw me, she led me to the couch and pointed a flashlight in my eyes and placed a cold towel on my forehead. I mumbled for the angels.
I had been in the hospital for two weeks when I called the woman, I had been blotted out and cast into a week of sleep. I was feeling alright.
What kind of dreams have you been having? The woman asked,
I don’t dream, I told her. I stumble in and out of sleep like a newly-born calf. I feel like I’m full of milk, a white calmness in my arteries, a saline stillness.
Come see me, I said. Come see my blue scrubs and bandaged fingers and dirty acne and limp, sedated gait.
I will, she said.
It was New Year’s Eve when she came. The nurses had hung garland, and the television played the ball drop in New York City—that mirage a thousand light-years away.
We were given virgin champagne, and the nurses counted down with us, and the woman was there, her hand on my back.
Focus on living one breath at a time, she said. Count the breaths until you forget you’re even counting.
The year turned over onto her stomach. That night, I laid down and recounted the poem again.
Chapel. Chapel. Chapel.
Jasmine Ledesma is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in places such as Crazyhorse, Rattle, and [PANK], among others. Her work has been nominated twice for Best of The Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Patricia Clearly Miller Award while in the psychiatric hospital. Her debut novella, Shrine, has been released by Junk Press and shortlisted for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.