Chapter 18

"DID THE DONKEY COME?"

"Couldn't you get a private room?" Mimosa complained. "How can I talk to you in the middle of the ward?"

She was sitting by Leo's bedside. A nurse had brought an enamel chair for her to sit on, cautioning her explicitly not to sit on the bed itself.

"Mr. Green has had a rear-end collision," explained the nurse, "and that area of his anatomy needs to be swaddled and greased with care. The doctor prescribed no undue motion of the bed, so I'd prefer if you sat on the chair."

What was worse for Mimosa was the absolute lack of privacy. Leo was not in a private room as she had expected. He was in the middle of a ward-almost exactly in the middle. Ten beds flanked him to the left and fourteen extended to his right.

Fifty men were in the ward in all. She was the only girl.

"They're all looking at me!"

Leo shrugged. "Of course they're all looking at you, Mimosa. It's not every day in their humdrum lives that a thirteen-year-old bare-ass pussy comes trotting into the ward wearing a yellow leather mini-skirt and lemon suede boots."

"Is that all you're interested in?" Mimosa snorted. "Clothes?"

"We could talk about the weather," Leo suggested "I like to think in the rain."

"You're a pig!"

"And you're such a lovely visitor," Leo replied. "You're here three minutes and you have insulted me twelve times!"

"Why don't you have a private room?"

"Because I'm poor."

Mimosa snorted. "Who told you to be a genius in the first place? Especially in the theatre.

That's ridiculous! Look what happens. You wind up a charity case in this lousy ward."

"Still," Leo said, "there are compensations. Your smiling face has appeared above the horizon, lighting my lamp of life. Mimosa, I've thought about it, you should go on TV instead of Billy. Queen of the soap operas!"

"Fuck you!"

He shrugged. "We can't."

"Who would want to fuck you anyway?" she jeered. "A donkey!"

Leo moaned. "I've been expecting that from the moment you walked in the door. All morning I tried to evade giving your brother a direct answer on the phone. Anyone but an imbecile would have known you'd be listening on the extension."

Mimosa laughed. "Billy's very naive when it comes to me."

"He's seen too many movies," Leo explained. "He doesn't realize that you're not part of the script."

"What do you mean?"

"What did I say?"

"That I wasn't part of the script."

Leo shrugged. "How should I know? I can't be expected to repeat myself forever Damn you, child, the only words that make sense to me are those that come out of a script! A play! The theatre! Shakespeare! Ibsen! Shaw! Pinter! And

"That's my life. Far be it for me to inhabit the dreams of reality when I can trod the stage of imagination to the tune of musical spheres!"

"And get your ass fucked by a donkey?"

"That was an accident."

"I never heard of anyone having an accident like that before!"

"You're only thirteen years old!"

"I've lived a lot!"

"Why are you here?" Leo shouted. "Don't I have enough guilt without you to hound me? C'mon, Mimosa, do what you're supposed to! Go back to school! I didn't need to see your little cynical face showing up in this place in person to suspect that it must have been you listening in on the extension! I heard it click!"

"Hah-hah," Mimosa laughed. "I don't believe you! You're probably queer to begin with, and only bought that donkey so it'd stick its big fat dong right up the crack of your ass!"

Leo blushed, glancing apologetically from side to side.

Mimosa's voice had risen. She was prattling on in glee. Due to the hour of the morning, none of the other forty-nine patients had received any visitors as yet. Only Leo.

Doctors and nurses scuttled about on their busy bedpan chores bringing the total figure of the audience present in the ward to sixty-three-all of them listening with rapt interest to Mimosa making a speech.

"Fucked in the ass by a donkey?" Mimosa asked shrewdly. "How as it done? What were you doing? How come you didn't see this donkey before it was able to get its dong stuck in your ass? You were looking the other way, I suppose, thinking some very theatrical thoughts."

"Maybe the donkey is innocent," she went on, "whose word do we have that what you say is true? No one I know ever heard of a donkey raping a fat genius before! Unless, of course, you had a carrot stuck in your ass and the donkey came over to eat it. Now that I'd believe! According to reputation, that's the sort of thing that only fat geniuses do-stick carrots up their things! And then they pretend they're human!"

"Mimosa," Leo swore, "if I ever recover, I swear by all that is holy that I will rip your neck in two and shove your head through your nose!"

"Did the donkey come?"