The Water-Method Man

Oh, I know you mean only the best for me, Big, but I know too that the thing with the feet is an old skier's exercise, good for the ankles. You don't fool me.

I tell you, 'I'll be right there, Big. Just let me check on Colm.'

I always watch him sleep for a while. What I mind about children is that they're so vulnerable, so fragile-looking. Colm: I get up in the night to make sure your breathing hasn't stopped.

'Honestly, Bogus, he's a very healthy child.'

'Oh, I'm sure he is, Big. But he just seems so small.'

'He's good-sized for his age, Bogus.'

'Oh, I know, Big. That's not exactly what I mean ...'

'Well, please don't wake him up, with your damn checking on him.'

And some nights, I cry out, 'Look, Big! He's dead!'

'He's sleeping, for Christ's sake ...'

'But look how he's just lying there,' I insist. 'His neck is broken!'

'You sleep like that yourself. Bogus ...'

Well, like father, like son; I'm sure I'm wholly capable of breaking my neck in my sleep.

'Come back to bed, Bogus.' I hear you calling me to your groove.

It's not really that I'm reluctant to go there. But I have to check the stove; the pilot light is always going out. And that furnace sounds funny; one day we will wake up baked. Then check the lock on the door. There's more than hogs and corn in Iowa - or there might be.

'Will you ever come to bed?' you shout.

'I'm coming! I'm on my way, Big!' I promise.

Bogus Trumper was just checking and double-checking. You may call him improvident, but never blase.

Tulpen was unimpressed with my letter for no one. 'God, you haven't changed at all,' she said.

'I've a new life,' I said. 'I'm a different man.'

'Once you worried about a mouse,' she said. 'Now it's turtles and fish.'

She sort of had me there. My silence made her smile and lift, just slightly, a breast with the back of her hand. Sometimes I could really whap her when she does that!

But it's true. I do worry about the turtles and fish. Not in the same way that I once worried about the mouse, though. That mouse lived in constant peril; it was my responsibility to keep him out of Biggie's trap. But Tulpen was already taking care of these fish and turtles when I moved in. Her bed is framed on three sides by bookcases, waist-high; we are walled in by words. And all along the tops of the cases, in a watery U around us, these gurgling aquariums sit. They bubble all night long. She keeps them lit with underwater neon rays. I'll admit that it helps when I have to get up to pee.

But the aura around the bed takes getting used to. In a half-sleep, you actually feel underwater, in spooky color, turtles and fish circling you.

She feeds the turtles with a single chunk of steak tied on a string; all night they gnash at the dangling meat; in the morning, the chunk is gray, like a dead thing, and Tulpen removes it. Thank God she feeds them only once a week.

And once I imagined that the man in the apartment above was building a bomb. (He does something electrical at night; odd hums and crackles are heard, and the lights in the aquariums dim.) If that man's bomb blew up, there's enough water in those aquariums to drown us in our sleep.

One night, with such a thought, I considered calling Dr Jean Claude Vigneron. For one thing, I have a complaint: the water method isn't quite working out. But more important, I just wanted to hear the voice of a confident man. And maybe I'd ask him how he got to be so cocksure. I think it would have pleased me more, though, to find a way to shock him, to fluster that confidence of his. I thought of calling him very late. 'Dr Vigneron?' I would say. 'My prick just fell off.' Just to see what he'd say.

I told Tulpen my plan. 'You know what he'd say?' she said. 'He'd say, "Put it in the refrigerator and make an appointment with my secretary in the morning."'

Even though I suspect she's right, I was glad she didn't doff her boob to me then. She's more sensitive than that. That once, she turned out the aquarium lights.

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