The Seahorse

back to Issue 16

by Pia Quintano

 

The morning burned through the double windows, and he became aware, as he tried to button his collar, of the coarse ridges in his two-day beard. After a night in the hospital, there was always some new category of discomfort, not even counting the dry-tongued hangover which came with his release. He almost welcomed it as the first bit of penance, though it didn’t keep the other stuff from coming: the nightmare process of waking up, mesmerized by the ceiling fans as they whirled across the heavy air and sliced up the ghosts from the night before. The memories came back in bits and pieces, except they all had teeth, promised to take bites out of him as the day went on.  

He gave up on his collar, left the cold room he’d shared with a dozen men, and walked out into the stone hallway. His footsteps felt strangely muted and for once there were no other men walking near him, keeping close to the walls as if they feared they’d fall. 

They had all sorts of fancy names for it now, the dry-out tank, but essentially it was the same as it had always been, in his father’s time and the time before that, when his grandfather stumbled down the parched roads of Iowa, yellow bible pages blowing in the dusty breeze.  

When he came to the glass-enclosed office marked Departures—as if he were a plane about to take off—a receptionist handed him his wallet and house keys inside a paper bag.

“Better put them in your pocket right away so you don’t lose them.”

Then he had to go through three more doors. He passed a room where they had the AA meetings, the literature in blown-up letters tacked to the wall—Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the Serenity Prayer. There was only one sentence from the only AA meeting he ever attended that refused to dissolve from his mind: People turned to drink because human solutions had failed them.  

*

A routine now, a couple of nights a week in the hospital to dry out. Lucky for him he worked only four days a week.

He headed west, the only choice. The hospital was so far east it was just a few steps dry of the river, and it was a cold day, the water sending arctic, cabbage-tinged blasts from the garbage scows. 

He wondered sometimes what, if anything, he meant to the police officers who loaded him into their squad car like an overstuffed laundry bag, or the male nurses clasping their hands under his arms and leading him down the hall, not allowing him to fall over and roll himself around, which is what he wanted to do. The party was over at whatever bar he’d been to; now a new kind of party began, each guest bringing his own brand of the DTs, moaning, shivering, crawling men he’d travel the night with, the broad shoulders of the nurses as they came with their sideburns and plastic bayonets, then fastened the leather straps around his wrists. Fasten your belts. You’re in for a bumpy night. 

There was no cruelty in their faces, but no kindness either, only the look of those who have seen everything and not found any of it worthwhile, just another foregone conclusion on the colorless road to cirrhosis. Yet as they passed down the aisles, he felt the impulse to reach out, pull on a sleeve and ask, if only for this night, if they couldn’t spend a little extra time with him.  

And then it would happen again, strapped into the bed, his head in that doomed territory between saturation and the slow receding of the alcohol like a departing shoreline. He’d be taken over by some vision, dispensed as a dream that would hurt him all the way to his soul.

He wondered if his mother, gone now for so many years, had ever stationed herself at the foot of his dreams, held him back for a while from the terrors of his subconscious, like he wanted the nurses to do.  

“Don’t challenge God’s will,” she used to tell him, when he complained about something, maybe only the runny eggs on his plate. “That’s how people get sick. They try to fight, and they fail. Look at them—you can see it in their faces—they’re ruined.”

Whenever he was sprung from the hospital, it took a while again to feel his freedom. He would run his hand along the grainy walls of buildings, tug at the branches of the bare trees that lined the streets, to make certain that the world around him was independent of the visions he’d conjured during the night. 

He had turned fifty. Just like that. 

Twenty years working in a museum, passing like a ghost through the evidence of other people’s achievements, and he’d finally had enough. What had paintings originally meant to him anyway? Color, light, order, precision, a safe beauty he could never hope to penetrate. And which ultimately could not console him in his isolation.

*

He had begun to hate his face, the coarsening with age, the rubbery nose that had a ball of cartilage at the tip, the spider veins crawling over his pitted cheeks—all shameful to him somehow, as if his optimism had failed, then thrown its corpse over his features.

He turned a corner onto 78th Street. The wind felt like steel pins against his face.

A few hours passed. The light thinned, the wind grew heavier. At seven o’clock he was in a bar on Amsterdam and 94th Street. He wouldn’t have been able to say what he’d done during the hours between 12 and 5, other than wade through them like a debris-ridden channel in the Gowanus Canal.  He was at the bar, watching a young girl from the corner of his eye. Her cheekbones formed with her chin a perfect heart. He hadn’t seen a face like that in years. She moved through the bar in a black turtleneck and pleated skirt, her slightly bowed legs as thin as fish bones. The bar had a sea theme, one he had visited many times before: plastic seahorse stirrers, wooden anchors and pictures of barrier reefs on the walls.

Behind the counter, the bartender was chain-smoking Merit Menthols. 

Something about that struck him as odd.

Often, in the early drinks, he was still alive to his environment. He sat at the counter, on a stool with a torn cushion, the broken leather cutting across the seat of his pants, and watched the girl. She was flitting around the bar, going back and forth to the jukebox, and gracefully blowing bubbles through a plastic hoop as if she were being paid to create an atmosphere. He knew his nose was red, he’d felt the blush as soon as he’d taken the first sip of his gin and tonic. Now, he was on his eighth drink. There were only a handful of other people there, all men, with eyes like washed stones. Billie Holliday warbled on the jukebox. 

He was wearing his best tweed jacket and a black polo shirt, his impersonation of a curator even though he was, in fact, an office manager. He noticed that the suit was wrinkled and gave off a scent like ironed seaweed. His legs were too bloated to comfortably cross. He felt like a tenant in someone else’s body.  

He looked up at the mirror that was tacked on the wall in front of him, reflecting the clientele like voyagers in a ship bound for skid row. Their faces were flushed in the harsh light, some of them seemed to have their eyes closed and their heads were floating back, receding from him as he watched them, as if they were being carried by a retreating tide. He saw the girl’s reflection. She was looking at him, as if from the other side of the glass, curiosity plain on her face. 

What must he look like to her? 

Could she have a charitable side?

He wondered what frozen childhood dream had defrosted suddenly and given her life.  He thought of his early world in rural Iowa, the dry plains, the shrunken oaks. Everything looked like it had been pressed down by a giant hand from heaven, flattened and then dispersed, so nobody could find what had originally been of value. People leashed their imagination and held onto small thoughts like a locust to a wheat stalk. All that space-without the outlet of water, nor the depth which would come with a high building or two or at least a hill. That was why he’d come to New York—to get relief from the mathematical certainty of Flatland. 

But the problem was he’d had no plan of who he was going to be. When he arrived in the city and understood the reaching toward heaven of the buildings and people, he wondered how he could insert himself, exist in a place that left him alone to decide his own fate in his railroad apartment on Second Avenue. 

He didn’t move and made no more significant contacts than the occasional roommate who split the rent with him when the cost of beverages got out of hand. Women passed in and out of his life in a gin-toned haze; to him they all felt like outcasts, not even worth a trip to Brooklyn or The Bronx or wherever they sprang from.

When he was on the first few drinks anything seemed possible—he might feel the weight of his whole life on the bar stool, but his mind was dashing madly in hope.

He finished his drink, keeping the last swallow in his mouth as long as possible. The girl turned her head away.  

He ordered a refill and the bartender, without his asking, offered him a light. He found he had a cigarette in his hand.

“First time here?”

“No.”

The man had a horse-like face, with furrowed pink brows, wrinkles that formed crescents when he brought his lips up in the spasm of a smile. His face wouldn’t have been forgotten.

“We’ve done some tests and things are starting to look bad for you,” the bartender said. “Kidneys. Spleen. Liver. Your enzymes are elevated. That pain in your left side last week was pancreatitis.”

“I guess it’s not a busy night.”

“Not in this weather. See that man in the corner? All his organs are gone. Nothing we can do for him anymore. He’s on his way to a bleed-out.” The man was hunched over the elbow of the bar, his hands shaking so violently he couldn’t bring his glass to his lips. “We’re moving him to ICU.”

His mind flashed on it: beds lined up like Potter’s Field, the beeping of machines and smell of ammonia, so vivid it made him queasy.

“Work here long?”

“Too long. It starts to feel hopeless after a while.”

He could see how that would be. They were a hopeless crew. No one looked like they’d shaved in days, and they were sweating profusely, except for the girl, who was holding an ice cube in her hand, examining its jagged rainbow under the ceiling light.

“There’s a storm coming,” the bartender said. “Got to close the hatch.” He moved from behind the bar and closed and bolted the door.

This seemed to go with a logic he had sensed from the moment he set foot in the bar that evening. And then the storm hit: in the middle of drink number nine.

“Hold on everyone!” The bartender was waving his apron like a flag. There was a rumble and the room pitched, he felt it rising as if they were on a great wave. At the same time, he experienced a tide rising in his throat and a familiar sour taste —maybe he had mistakenly swallowed a lime? His eyes stung, as if the bar and the room were flooded with too much light. He was in trouble again, losing count, or the changeover had been too swift—eighth drink all right. Ninth drink and they were out to sea, as if sucked through a drainpipe. 

The girl appeared, hunched over on the floor beside him. She lifted her head, the long strands of black hair sticking to her mouth, her freckles glowing out at him like tiny pearls.

“Do you need a hand?”  

He realized he was next to her, having slipped off the bar stool without realizing it. He was on all fours. Her voice was gentle, like silk against his cheeks, distracting, at least for a moment, from the heaving waves that threatened continuously to wash over him, beat him down. 

“This place is jumping around.”

“Let me help you up.” She tugged at his arm, and he tried to get a hold of her waist, but his hand kept slipping down her as if she were a slippery root. The bartender appeared in front of them, and he was half-lifted onto the bar stool.

“That’s better,” she said.

“Everything looks different in here,” he said, wondering where his drink had gotten to. Then he saw it—drink 10, a mirage in a desert.

She smiled. “Yes, not very pretty, but they must fix the lights—too yellow. I don’t like fluorescent lights—they should do something with pink but then again maybe you would think you were seeing pink elephants—right?”   

He was mesmerized by her pointed fingers. And her nearness seemed to steady the room again, dry it out.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” he said. 

“But I’ve been here. I’ve seen you.”     

“You saw me here before and remembered?”

Again hope was spinning in his head. His face was turning red. He felt the flush of warmth as if he were a teenager. 

“You were asleep.”

“I fall asleep sometimes.”

“I’ve seen you many times. You are not from New York, are you?” 

“No,” he said. “Tenth planet out, just to the left of Vulcan. Also known as Iowa.”

“Why did you land here?”

“Water. New York City has rivers east and west. Thought I could breathe better. Just shows you have to be careful what you wish for.”

“We can turn up the oxygen.”

Something in her tone of voice reminded him of the waiters who used to serve him at Howard Johnson’s in Des Moines. We want to make your time with us as happy and comfortable as possible.

“My father was a drunk.”

“That’s not unusual. It could be in the genes.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out my life,” he said. “It has dots and lines, points that intersect that should be kept at a distance from each other.” He remembered his father shooting at crows, pushing him roughly away when he tried to stop him. His mother in her airtight smiles, shielding her eyes against the sun as she watched them go down. Later he’d find the exploded bodies between the stalks and secretly bury them. He developed a fear of looking up, panicked at the sound of beating wings because he knew what would come next. When his parents died, he felt that the continent had finally rid itself of a cancerous organ. There was no reason to go back but he felt a longing sometimes to visit the graves, not of his parents, but of the crows, which he had marked with Popsicle sticks. 

*

“You’re pretty, in a way I’ve forgotten.”

“Maybe I remind you of someone.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Is that true?”

“Sadly, yes.”

She laughed in a funny way, like the gentle buzzing of insects against a screen door. He loved that sound when he was a kid—he imagined them contentedly multiplying in a swamp: the evidence of moisture, of somewhere else, an idea that brought him out of the dust. 

“Don’t you want to ask me about my homesickness?”

“I want to know everything about you.”

“When I was a little boy, we went on a trip to the Mink River up in Wisconsin. An estuary, filled with lilac-colored wildflowers, wet on their petals as if they were tearing up. Ponds. Pink water lilies. A whole world of color and water. We didn’t go back again but I never forgot it. I saw the world differently after that. Knew there existed places with more than just dry earth.”

Was she smiling? Or was he so drunk that the room was bringing its corners together?

“You have to make new connections. Let people inspire you.”

“Yes,” he said. “God bless you.”

Why hadn’t she come earlier when he was still sober, and the edges of reality were not so arbitrary?

“Could you give me a cup of coffee please?” he shouted to the bartender,. who didn’t even bother to turn around in response, but was laughing—he could see his shoulders shaking.

“They don’t serve coffee here. But I’m going to give you something anyway that’s going to warm you up,” she said.

“Yes, I’m cold.”

She passed her arm over his shoulders.

“Is that better? They should really have more blankets but as it is there are more patients than there are beds.”

He looked at the other customers. Odd to see them shooting pool in the thickness of the air, the balls falling through space into everything but the holes. The pool cues were like the great pointing bayonets of the syringes, when the doctors held down their beating arms to get a drug into them. 

“This atmosphere is strange tonight—do you notice?”

“No stranger than usual.” She seemed to have elliptical edges, the only thing in the environment with that kind of clarity. Maybe that was what beauty was—clarity? 

“But that’s all right. People get upset about things because they can’t see out the other side. But there is always a morning—there is always the good.” 

“I wanted to find something beautiful. I used to care about that, so much that I went to work in a museum.”   

“And did you find it?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at her. “But I don’t know if it’s real.”

He moved his hand away from drink ten and placed it tentatively over her thin white hand as it rested, spread like a drowned lily on the counter.

There was no warmth, yet it felt familiar.

“You’re very kind to talk to me,” he said.  

He held his hand over hers for a few seconds and then brought it back to his glass.

*

There was no fixed point, no way to know if they had pall-beared the evening into night or the night into morning, but at a certain point after he had finished still another drink, she took his hand and told him it was time to go.  He had almost forgotten she was next to him because it made no sense that she would have stayed but he looked up and smelled her. She was like fresh verbena leaves.  He had to use the bathroom, so he left her and let into the toilet a stream of browns and reds, the kind of nightmare urine he usually expelled into steel pans at the hospital.

“I can see that you are a warm person with a very strong heart,” she said when he came back out. He followed her out of the bar, as if she were a black leaf swirling into the pre-dawn snow of Amsterdam Avenue; cars and buildings muted by the icy surfaces, the night gray turning into silver, crossing the sky, like the fast drift of a season. The streets were covered in the watery slush he’d let run over his dreams, and he was weaving, barely keeping himself from crashing against the walls of the buildings, their canopies spread out like sheets under the cold moon. She wore only a light jacket, but her cheeks didn’t blush in the cold, and he couldn’t keep up with her. His hands hurt but hers were as cool and soft as petals in a morgue. 

She took him into a gray tenement building, opening a wooden door to a small foyer with stripped metal mailboxes. It was his own building. He knew the rancid smell. 

She placed his heavy hand against her face. Her cheek felt watery and soft, and her drenched hair spun away from her as he kissed her, yet she seemed at the same time to be flying just above him, buzzing and vibrating in his hands, as if someone lost a soul. If he could hold her still, he knew the problem would be solved, but he couldn’t settle her against his coat, his buttons seemed in danger of ripping her. 

“It’s going to be a beautiful morning,” she said, her voice thinning out into a mere vibration. “Just when the night seems like something horrible is about to happen it gives us a dawn like this.” His hands felt brutal next to her, as if they had been tilled from the soil, dirty and misshapen like turnip bulbs. Yet he wanted to break the magnetic forces keeping them apart, which he saw as a failure of his will. 

She circled round him, making him dizzy.

Stop it, he thought. The hallway was spinning with her. She left him then, flying up the stairs and hanging suspended over the landing like a seahorse. 

With sudden clarity it came to him that he was inside the hospital, in the long room, staring up at the gentle whirling of the ceiling fan, the dark tones of a male nurse murmuring to someone in the next bed. He looked at the rows of beds around him, the leaking, drying bodies put out like catch on a wharf. The alcohol was retreating inside of him, leaving him beached and fighting for his breath.

“Easy, easy!” It was one of the male nurses. “If you break the bed you’ve got to pay for it.” He tightened the straps over his wrists.

“I need a drink.”

“I bet.”

Didn’t they understand he only wanted water?

“I was talking to someone—a girl. Why did she go?”

“I don’t know, friend. You’ve been muttering for the last couple of hours. Maybe you bored her.” 

A girl who still had the dew on her. She reminded him of the flowers he tried to grow as a child. How jealously he guarded the seedlings in the soil-filled milk cartons. Yet they rarely survived past their brittle stems.

Beauty could only come from life. Isn’t that what the girl was trying to tell him? He was more than the place he came from, because he had inside him the ability to recognize someone real. Not just pretty paintings contained within wooden frames.

If only he could reach her.

“Maybe I’ll see her again.”

“I expect you will.”

Then, with unexpected kindness, the nurse took a cigarette out of the pack in his jacket pocket and placed it between his lips. 

 


Pia Quintano is a New York-based writer and painter who often writes about characters whose lives fall short of their plans. She received a 5-week MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship in fiction, and her short stories have recently appeared in Havik, Lunch Ticket, Atlas & Alice, Hoxie Gorge, and The Willesden Herald.