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.When I squared up my tab at the p-hosp it would run me about thirty-five grand and at that rate the Plaza would be a bargain.I needed air.I managed to stand and make it to the window and was swinging a foot onto the fire escape when a wet gob of something hit with a splat on the back of my neck.I thought for sure it was bird shit.I looked up.A blue rain was falling through the streetlamps and at the Korean deli on the corner a crippled man leaned on a wooden cane, picking through a pyramid of oranges.An old Korean woman sat on a white bucket, cutting the stems on peonies, huge lion-headed flowers with pink petals that shook loose in the wind and were pasted to the wet sidewalk like découpage.Everything seemed to have been given a new coat of varnish sometime in the night.Every wire and railing glistened, and the air was clean and cool.Above the intersection a traffic signal turned green.Several cars went by, their sleepy wipers blinking away the drizzle.Down at the deli the cripple reached into his pocket and paid for the orange, and the old woman went back to cutting her peonies.How could so much peace and calm reign between two people? I balanced on the windowsill and looked back at the ballerina.She was a mess, ghoulish with a plastering of soot and ash.Her body, crisscrossed with brandings and burned by match heads, looked fully clothed.She’d never be naked again, not with the textile weave of her scars, the plaids and polka dots she’d made of her skin.She said, “What?”I hadn’t said anything.“Isn’t there anything else you like to do?”“I don’t know.”“It’s raining out.”“Why?”“Why?” I said.“Why is it raining?”The air in the room was stale and hot as a kiln, the motion baked out of it.I opened another window in the kitchen alcove.Instantly a sort of pulmonary breeze blew a green curtain into the room, expanding the space.I saw a forgotten slice of bread in the chrome slot of her toaster and a used tea bag set to rest on the edge of her sink, the stub of a cigarette going soggy inside it.When I returned to the bedroom the ballerina hadn’t moved.She’d sleep in these ashes, like some black-feathered bird.Her back was to me, and I went to her, but the burns covering her body—how would you even hold such a woman? Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere? I stopped short.I’d never seen her back before, and it was pristine.The skin was flawless, a cold hibernal blue where her blood flowed beneath.I blew on my fingers, warming them, and then laid my hand between her shoulder blades, lightly, as though to press too hard would leave a print.“How about cleaning up?” I said.“Oh,” she sniffled.“I don’t know.”In the bathroom I plugged the drain with a dry cracked stopper and dialed the spigots until the water running over my wrist was hot and tropical.I looked around at all the ingredients.The stuff in jars looked like penny candy, and I spilled some of that in.The beaded things were especially pretty, and I tossed a combination of yellow and green gelcaps in the tub, followed by a pill that effervesced and changed the color of the water to a pale Caribbean blue.I gave up on any idea of alchemy and just went wild.Pine Forest, Prairie Grass, Mountain Snow, Ocean Breeze.Once I got into it, I saw no reason to stop—juniper, vanilla, cranberry.A capful of almond oil, a splash of bain moussant, some pink and blue flakes from a box that turned out to be ordinary bubble bath.“Okay,” I said, closing the bathroom door to trap the steam.She hadn’t budged from her place on the bed.I hooked her arm over my shoulder.For a ballerina she had pretty much zero ballon at this point.Her feet dragged across the floor like the last two dodoes.I was afraid that when I lowered her into the tub she’d sink to the bottom.I made her sit upright.With steam curling down from above and a heady lather of bubble bath rising over the edge of the tub, the bathroom was now one massive cumulus cloud.“A candle,” she said.I snapped the chain on a bare bulb above the sink.“No more candles tonight.”I grabbed a soft white cloth from the shelf and sat beside the tub, in a pillow of suds.“My life is so simple a one-year-old could live it,” she said.“You’re just having one of those days,” I said.I wrung the washcloth and let the warm water dribble down her chest.“What’s up with those old people? Your grandparents?”“They emigrated here after my mom died.”“Where’d they come from?”“Yugoslavia,” she said.“Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, that whole thing.”“You speak their language?”“Mala koli(breve)cina.”I soaped her shoulders and neck, rinsed the cloth and ran it slowly along the length of her arm, studying the scars [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]