Bunny leaves Dr. Fuckherself’s office to find Activities in full swing. The dining room is busy with severely depressed people putting together a jigsaw puzzle, which could raise the question about the chicken or the egg. At another table, three of them are playing Go Fish with a deck with forty-seven cards, a painfully obvious metaphor. But all Bunny can think about is the pressing urgency for solitude, the way it is pressing when you need to find a bathroom fast, or else. Bunny needs a place to cry, to hear herself cry without some woman with a messed-up face telling her it’s going to be okay, without some nurse giving her a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She hurries past the living room where a handful of crazy people doing their daily exercises try to touch their toes.
Yet, she stops and pauses outside the Music Room. A social worker is playing the piano while seven or eight loonies sing about someone or other who’s a singular sensation. Bunny knows it is a song from an old Broadway musical, but she is unable recall which one. If she were to hear more of the song, perhaps she’d be able to identify it, and because all her efforts of concentration are focused on that, on listening to the song, she is unaware that someone else is there, standing alongside her until, in a voice that is neither quite speaking nor quite singing, but with a hint of a tune, he says, “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar, Oh, don’t ask why.”
Bertolt Brecht, Bunny knows, and she brightens at the recollection. Bertolt Brecht, but is it a song from Threepenny Opera or Mother Courage, and then she is unable to remember if Mother Courage is a musical, at which point she is certain that “musical” is the wrong word. Unable to locate the right word, panic sets in, which must show on her face because the man, who is clearly one of the loons—it takes one to know one—says, “I’m sorry.” Tall and lanky, his hair is dark brown, and his countenance is heavy with sorrow so deep as to seem ancient, which makes it difficult to determine his age. Wearing a faded Yale T-shirt tucked into gray sweatpants with a thick elastic waistband, he is dressed for the basketball court, for a game of one-on-one, except that his black Converse high-tops are without laces.
Bunny ignores his apology and she says only, “I know that I know, but I can’t remember. Is it Threepenny Opera?”
He tells her that he, too, doesn’t remember, that he can remember only the lyrics, and even then, only the first three lines. If either of them were capable of laughing, they would laugh. But they are not, and so they don’t.