My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (65 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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III.
Shortly before dawn, several nurses returned to the Princess’s bedside, where they adjusted the lighting in the small room so a warm glow bathed the subject. They worked with combs to untangle the knots in the subject’s hair. The head resident had entered the room as well, and kept his boyish face, so incongruous beneath his balding head, hunched toward his chest while he made notes in the subject’s chart.
It was then that the subject began to speak softly about a set of ponies she had made out of old tires. The Princess explained how she had “freed” the ponies from the rubber with a cutting implement, and that a “herd” of such ponies hung from ropes in the trees around her prefabricated housing unit, where they blew back and forth in the breeze, bumping against one another with hollow thuds. They possessed the spirit of “running things,” she explained, though they had no “legs to speak of ”; she could look at them and feel the feeling of “something wild and running away.” The subject further explained that nasally inhaling or “skin popping” (subcutaneous injection) of methamphetamine gave her relief from a feeling that “nothing important would ever happen to her” and replaced it with the sensation that she was, like the ponies fashioned from discarded tires, something “wild and running away.”
She indicated that these feelings of flight accounted for the only times that she ever truly felt like a princess.
IV.
The notes in the subject’s chart at this point become “tiny and very, very neat,” according to researchers (Plank et al., 2002). The notes themselves indicate that the subject was “an exceptionally attractive woman,” and that the medical staff found her “enchanting.” She was “like them but different—more perfect—yet at the same time more glassine and fragile.” The chart noted that the subject had become sleepy, perhaps due to the fatigue that often follows the ingestion of methamphetamine (Nintzel, 1982). It was indicated that some members of the staff wished to allow her to sleep, while others had an urgent need to “pester her; to poke her in the leg with a stick over and over,” to keep her awake.
Verbal accounts indicate that not all the members of the night staff were equally smitten with the subject. Several members demurred, in particular the phlebotomist, who commented that the subject was “a disgusting drug addict” who was “manipulative.” She added that she hated men “who fall for those poor lost creatures,” even though such “creatures” were in the process of getting “exactly what they signed up for.” The phlebotomist indicated that it was futile to try to help the subject, save medically, because the subject had freely chosen her own seedy destiny, despite her weird story of kidnapping, adding that “not everybody who suffers has a burning need to dramatize it with scarves and eyeliner.”
V.
Videotapes from the security cameras in the waiting area provide a clear visual record of the intrusion that occurred at approximately 4:12 A.M. The tapes show a clean, tiled area violently rent by the shiny chrome form of a very large motorcycle (or “hog”) piloted by the “Prince,” who gained ingress by method of riding through the glass doors, where he continued to gun his motorcycle in circles through a reception area furnished with chairs which became smashed. The “Prince” was reported to be a large, muscular male of indeterminate race sporting “a pair of sideburns as big as teacups.” He was reportedly clad in “enough black leather to denude several cows,” though naturally it has not been determined how many cows would have been needed to provide the amount of leather the Prince was wearing. Much of the hospital staff on duty also reported that the intruder had a “tail, slimy and black, sort of like the tail of a tadpole.” Careful scrutiny of security videotapes does reveal the presence of a whiplike appendage dangling from the back of the Prince’s “hog,” though the possibility that this might in fact be a literal “tail” has been discounted by researchers, who have chalked up this and several other aspects of the medical staff ’s report to group suggestibility (Johansen, 2002). (For example, the hospital staff also reported that the Prince had “eyes that glowed red like coals” and that “lizards and snakes slithered from his boots.”)
It was reported that the Prince then parked his “hog” and proceeded past the reception area, stalking the warren-like halls of the emergency treatment facility in his heavy boots, scuffing the floor, screaming that someone had taken his “woman,” and wondering aloud, in a yelling tone, where he could find his “kitten.”
At this the Princess and hospital staff fled to a supply closet, where they cowered, leaving the issue of how to properly control the “Prince” open for resolution. It was agreed that the police, as well as the hospital security guards, should be alerted; it was lamented however that there was no available phone in the supply closet and such action would require someone to dash out into the hallway where the Prince was raging and overturning carts and smashing his hammer-like hands into walls while eating candy reserved for children who were unfortunate enough to wind up in the emergency room. The Princess, whose melodic voice was muffled due to the press of bodies in the supply closet, pointed out that the Prince possessed special evil magic powers and that anyone who challenged him must be good in heart and clever both, and carry with him or her a small silver bell which the Princess kept on a chain around her neck.
As the destructive noises of the Prince’s rampage became louder, the head resident indicated that he felt he should be the one to make an effort to save himself, the staff, and the once psychotic but now quite sweet Princess. The staff was surprised to hear this, as they had never noticed any behavior related to bravery or even simple kindness on the part of the head resident. They continued to be surprised when they heard him say, in a quavering voice, that though it was true he might not be good-hearted, he certainly was
clever
enough, so why not give it a go? Everyone in the closet gave him a quiet but heartfelt round of applause. The Princess begged him to be careful and hung the bell around his neck with a trembling hand. She bestowed upon him a soft kiss as he slipped out the door.
The “rescue” of women by handsome, effeminate men is a staple of old folktales, engineered to reconcile a young woman’s inclination toward feckless independence with the prevailing custom of marriage by casting the potential husband as really nice and sort of harmless and at the very least a whole lot better than the alternative of living with her fucked-up family (cf.
Cinderella
, Grimm, 1812). Despite the tradition of the effeminate male triumphing over the more sexual, “animal” challenger, it seemed uncertain to all present that the head resident could defeat the “Prince” using the tools at his disposal—a stethoscope, some pens, and a pager. It’s difficult to determine, though, what kind of damage the resident may have been capable of inflicting with these devices, since, according to his own account, when confronted with the fierce and gruesome “Prince,” who “smelled like burning rubber and had white stuff hanging off his beard,” he froze, then mutely raised a traitorous arm to point to the supply closet where the Princess and the rest of the staff were hiding.
The Prince wrenched open the door with a huge paw, and out popped the Princess.
According to the staff, the Princess screamed with a high-pitched yelp when the Prince grabbed her, smearing her lovely Renaissance-style dress with grease. The records note that the Prince and the Princess together presented quite an odd picture, one that brought to mind “a nightmare creature clawing a plate of petit fours” (Petix, 2002). The Princess is reported to have said, “It’s okay,” and, “No, but I want to go with him, really,” and, “He’s my old man!” in a tone of tense brightness, but the staff plainly did not believe her and theorized that she was simply trying to “appease her oppressor” in order to minimize the likelihood of domestic violence. Before the staff was able to contact the authorities, the “Prince” settled himself astride his hog and pulled the Princess up behind him.
The Prince and Princess roared out of the building and vanished into the night in a cloud of exhaust.
CONCLUSION
After the Prince and Princess had departed, the staff grumbled that the head resident had behaved “most cowardly,” and complained that the Princess had been “sacrificed,” to be “whisked off to a prefabricated house where everything is always fast and tinged with madness, or else dark and sad and falling asleep.” Much of the staff argued that
something
should have been done to help the girl, though some felt it was the curse of the phylum
Princess
to be always at the mercy of one prince-type or another, and that her best chance was to save herself, which seemed unlikely. The resident, for his part, quickly aligned himself with the phlebotomist, agreeing that the Princess was “just an addict” who had come in “exhibiting drug-seeking behavior anyway,” and implying, in word and action, that drug addicts were by nature less than human and so deserved whatever nasty fate they got. Then he skulked off down a fluorescent-lit hallway with his hands shoved into his pockets.
Though he wore the silver bell around his neck to the end of his days.
At the same time that I wrote this story for my friend, the poet Richard Siken, I was doing a lot of research into the production of crystal meth (I wish I could say I was setting up a clandestine lab, but it was a writing project). This was back when the Internet was not the rich vein of drug information it is today, so I was forced to actually go to the library and browse the stacks. Deep within the university’s compact shelving units, I found a pile of sociology journals that dealt with the subject of methamphetamine abusers. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant sociologists doing trenchant work on the mores of drug use, but what I found was a deposit of dry, heavily footnoted prose about tweakers. These papers were so good. I was so happy. It’s probably always inadvertently funny when sex, drugs, and rock and roll are subjected to rigorous academic study, but the articles I found were so funny, and so credulous, that it was sort of moving. Beneath the footnotes and citations, the naiveté of the researchers shone through with touching clarity.
Though this wasn’t the information I needed, I was so fascinated that I took notes in the library all afternoon. I could see the researchers sitting at plastic tables, interviewing a series of addled, strung-out dirtbags who bounced their knees and fiddled their pencils while they answered questions. And as I read, I began to notice that some of the facts didn’t ring true. It began to dawn on me that a lot of this information wasn’t very accurate. And really, why would it be? I’d guess that meth heads are not a particularly truthful bunch. I was especially taken by the unlikely drug slang they’d concocted, presented in heartbreaking italics, probably verbatim—so stupid, so obvious and colorful. I wondered if the researchers were really so easily fleeced, or just so desperate to publish that they didn’t care? (I was hoping fleeced.) I used some of these terms in the story and made up a few more of my own. Now I’m not sure which is which, an indication of how absurd the slang was.
I hadn’t planned to write a story based on these academic articles, but when I began to write a fairy tale for Richard Siken, I found myself considering the natural intersection between fairy tales, drug-induced psychosis, and gullible scientists. After all, we may think we know the world as it is, but most of our human experiences suffer from a lack of empirical data. The truth is useful, but half-truths have the allure of the shadows on the edge of sleep, or the swirl of a chemical high. This is the only place where most of us get to meet mythical beings such as witches, fairies, monsters, princesses, and trustworthy drug addicts. Maybe we all only believe what we want to believe in the end.
—SR
NEIL GAIMAN

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