XVIII
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we bring to you the wonder of the omniverse, unravelled in grand mystique over the next three fantabulous hours, or if you prefer, one hundred billion trillion, fractions of a second.”
Rex paused. He had his face pressed against a huge funnel that was built into the bottom of the stage, and which wound around and around, and then split into four smaller funnels, which then ran up the sides of The Big Top and extended out over the audience’s heads.
‘Await rapturous applause’ it said, on his cue card.
Beneath the stage, a small mouse watched with curious wonder as Rex, the human mammoth with shrunken appendages, hung onto his last breath, waiting for any sound at all – a clap, a boo, anything. What the mouse didn’t notice was the ginger cat creeping up behind it, set on curing the famine in its belly.
And like the previous day, out in the bleachers, the townsfolk sat still and stupid, their hands anchored to their legs. They looked as if they were awaiting a command, as if they couldn’t command one of their own.
“I have an idea,” said The Tiny Tattooed Man.
Rex turned to the little man, whose pectorals danced up and down hypnotically as if to say, “Yes, yes, yes.”
“No,” said Rex.
“Trust me,” said The Tiny Tattooed Man, and again with the pectorals.
Rex stared at the cue card.
“Await rapturous applause,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Just watch,” said The Tiny Tattooed Man.
Though his better judgement pleaded, “No, this is not the place,” his irrationality, which, like an itch in an inappropriate part of his body, said otherwise.
“Fine,” he said, “go, do it.”
The tiny man scampered backstage, jumping over this and that, and generally knocking over anyone or anything that got in his way. In a second or two he was out in front of the audience, out of the spotlight, but just visible, standing on a wooden box.
“Start over,” he whispered, turning to the stage.
Rex had no intention of starting over, especially a live performance.
“Amateur,” he thought, thinking of the little man.
But the whole troupe stood there, nodding their heads with stupid grins on their faces as if this, of all things, was a good idea. Rex knew better. Though he had never directed a show per se, he had studied a great many, and he had never seen, in the thousands of hours of his theatrical preparation, a single performance blunder, however mildly conspicuous or magnificently obvious, and then start over. He knew it was wrong. And he knew that he should just ride with it, and to let it pass, and let it slide. He knew not to make a deal of it. This would only make it worse. He knew he should ignore it, but for whatever reason, be it the pressure of the first show, or the thought of the master livid, sitting high on his perch, awaiting his grand entrance, and feeling sad and disappointed, whatever the reason, he turned back to the giant funnel and he started over.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with not a nerve in his voice. He was a goddamn professional. “Tonight we bring to you the wonder of the omniverse, unravelled in grand mystique over the next three fantabulous hours, or if you prefer, one hundred billion trillion, fractions of a second.”
Again, silence.
“Clap” shouted The Tiny Tattooed Man.
“That was his great idea?” thought Rex, painfully in his mind.
“Clap,” shouted The Tiny Tattooed Man again, “or I’ll punch ya!”
The audience immediately went mad with enthusiasm; ear ringing, rapturous applause. The noise alone could squash a hand full of crickets and lady bugs. And it might have been the fear of being punched that had sparked them into such a blaze of excitement, or it might have been from something as simple as a direct order; something literal that they did not have to decipher. They clapped and whistled, and stomped their feet on the bleachers, almost to the point of splitting the old wooden beams. And along with the clapping, whistling and rhythmical stomping came roaring and cheering. And there was laughter too, but not as if someone had said something clever or witty, or as if someone had fallen face-first into an elephant’s arse. It was as if all this cheering and roaring felt especially good.
Simply that.
“Genius,” said a member one of the workers, to The Tiny Tattooed Man.
“It’s just my job,” said Rex, fanning off the compliment and quickly throwing a hundred hand cues to the dozens of strong armed women and men, anchored to pulleys and ropes, and to a dozen or so men and women who were dressed in bright, flashy spandex and keeled over stationary, silver bicycles, which were cabled and wired like a madman’s vest, and tied to bulking generators, which then fed the coloured lights on the stage, and the giant spotlights beneath the bleachers, which were now aimed up at the highest point of The Big Top, awaiting the grand entrance.
Rex turned back to the giant funnel.
“Welcome,” he said, “to The Grand Spectacular.”
The spotlights shone, high up into the air, and every smiling face followed.
“Our time has come,” said The Ringmaster.
He stood on the edge of the platform, staring out over the audience below.
“You are the most important person that has ever existed,” he said to himself.
The whore behind him blushed. As she stood behind the man she loved, with her outstretched hands just an inch from his teetering balance, she didn’t know whether to hug him or to push him off.
The little monkey squealed and The Ringmaster turned quickly to see his furry companion holding up the portrait that he had been working on tirelessly this while time. The Ringmaster smiled. It was nothing but a mash of circles and what looked like exclamation marks, or attempts to stab the paper. But for a monkey, it was magnificent.
“I love you, my master,” said The Fifth Whore, pushing him over the ledge.
There was a momentous explosion. It turned the still evening into some kind of reckoning. And it was followed quickly by the crackling of cheap fireworks. In his garden, The Father sat in a mound of dirt, cradling his wife’s severed head and watching the strange bursts of colour and sound that burst sporadically into the night sky.
“I tried,” he said, wiping the fringe from his wife’s cold, skeletal face. “I really tried. But I can’t continue this way. I can’t, not anymore.”
His wife’s severed head didn’t speak, not even in his maddened thoughts. It wasn’t as if he expected it to either. He held it and spoke to it as if it were a microphone, or a wishing well. He addressed it, as an astronaut might, the world that he or she once knew, expressing his concern over his slow descent into silent abandon, but expecting not a single message or sign in return. The Father merely stroked, what little clumps of hair remained, and stared at the bright flashing colours in the sky.
“It’s just a matter of time before they come for him,” he said, thinking not of his boy, but of the door which imprisoned him. “I can’t let that happen. They all know, though. I’m sure of it. Busy bodies. Inconvenient bastards. If they find him, I don’t know what’ll happen. I wish you were here. I wish you could tell me what to do.”
He stared down at his wife’s severed head, curling the clumps of hair around his fingers lightly, as he would do when they lay in bed, helping her to fall asleep. And though it was a guilty pleasure that she always asked of him, regardless of the hour or how tired they were, it was the one thing that he needed, more than she, to quiet the echoes of discontent in his thoughts.
And the hair that he now curled and twisted in his fingers, the small clumps that were now glued and stapled to the round of her skull, was all that he could muster together from what had fallen out, on that dreaded second day. Some of it, he kept in a sealed bag that he stored in his freezer. And every other day, he would wash and condition the hair so that it was as soft and shiny as when she wore it herself. And when the hair that was crudely affixed to her rotted skull decayed, or
stiffened, or merely became too filthy and dry to touch, he would replace it with a small strand or two from his freezer.
This had sufficed for so long, but the strands in his hands now were the last.
There were no more.
“That stupid bitch came round today. I hate her. You used to hate her so much. She’s still so fucking pious you know? Nothing’s changed. Even in all of this, all this disease and death, nothing’s really changed. Nobody’s any better. Nothing’s been learned. There’s nothing to take away. And nobody’s any worse either. They pry, just as they always did. And they want to know things like it’s some goddamn right. You’d hate it here. You would. You’d hate how it is now, and whose here. All the better halves died,” he said, as in the sky, there came four loud bursts, and the darkness lit up first in orange, and then blue, and then yellow, and then pink. And each explosion of colour settled into a letter of its own.
L. O. V. E.
Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.
The letters formed and vanished, and then seconds later, the silence rippled with glittering eruption as burst after burst, the letters were brought back again. And that goddamn word lit up the sky.
“What am I supposed to do? I can’t treat the boy like this forever, just to keep him alive. This is torture. Worse even than what you and our little girl went through. And with you both, watching, what I went through. It’s worse, it is, for him, and for me. I can’t live with this hate that I have to feel. Especially when I forget, and when I start to love him again, and having to think of new ways to despise him, and to blame him for the way that I feel, just so that I can hate him some more. All of this hate, just to protect him. This isn’t right, I know. But I can’t think of any other way. What should I do? What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
The sky was a ring of fire, and at its centre, the word ‘Love’.
“Is it for us to live and suffer, or to bear the consequence of love?”
His wife’s severed head slipped from his hands, into the hole from whence it came.
In the camp, by the kindling fire, The Young Boy nursed a sick and dying woman. He sat near her, gently stroking her temple, and brushing off, as if it were a bit of powder from a cake or a sweet, the clumps of hair that pulled from her scalp, without any effort whatsoever. The woman’s convulsing had stopped, and her chattering teeth were no longer a threat to her own tongue, but this didn’t mean that her illness had waned.
The Young Boy hummed a song that he heard his mother humming to his sister when she nursed her through her first day; when her trembling and convulsing also stopped, and was beset upon by deranged and schizophrenic rambling, and promises of threat and violence. Already the woman was nearly bald. The Young Boy gathered the strands that stuck to her shoulders, and without her noticing, he tossed them into the fire.
“Have you seen my child?” she said, nearly a hundred times, in nearly half the amount of second.
“Yes,” said The Young Boy.
“He’s in heaven, or so I’ve been told. Have you seen it? Have you seen heaven?”
“Yes,” said The Young Boy, though he had no idea what she meant.
“Have you seen my child?” she said, another hundred times.
The Young Boy kept stroking her temple.
“Yes,” he said again.
“He’s in heaven, or so I’ve been told,” she said. “Do you know it? Is it far? Do you think he’ll ever come back?”
The Young Boy didn’t respond.
The Grieving Mother turned. Her eyes were wide and looked as if they might fall out of her face at any second. Her mouth too was demented. Her tongue poked on all sides of her gums, and then into the backs of her teeth, pushing so hard that one after the other, they popped right out and dropped onto the fire. And with a few licks and lashes of her prodding tongue, her mouth was little more than bloodied gums.
“I know you, boy,” she said, more alert than she had ever been. “I know your family. How are you not sick?”
The Young Boy thought of his castigating father, and how much he pitied him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Lucky I suppose.”
The dying woman laughed.
“Lucky are those that are already dead,” she said. “A young boy, somebody’s child, having gone abandoned, that is not luck. That is unfortunate. Better to have never been born,” she said, almost choking on a molar, “than have to have lived a life unloved.”
The Grieving Mother turned away and started gnawing on her tongue with her bloodied gums. Her convulsions returned, and her body thrust about like a suffocating fish. The Young Boy had to fight and struggle, to keep her from rolling onto the fire. He thought about his mother and how she had asked both he and his father, “If I left, would you be mad?” All this time, his father had thought that she was talking about her death when in fact, she loved somebody else.
He wanted to hate her, as his father hated him. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. He sympathized with her. Not with her betrayal, for wanting to leave, for having an affair, or for getting sick and dying, as she did. He sympathized with her, for the way she must have felt, for he felt it himself; an overwhelming desire and urge to be with someone, irrespective of what that meant, or what harm it might do.
The Young Boy thought of The Young Cripple. She had only been gone minutes or barely an hour, and yet, he missed her, as is she were on the other side of the world. He missed her as if he might never see her again. He missed her, as The Grieving Mother missed, her dead child. And he missed her, just as his father missed, loving and then being loved in return.
The urge within him was overwhelming. He shut his eyes and still, all he could see was her. He shut his ears, and he could hear no more than the sound of her voice. He shut his mouth, and the palm of his hand felt as if his lips were nervously and lightly kissing her cheek.
His blood felt warm, even though it was freezing outside, and he was barely dressed. And his body felt charged, in a way that he had never felt it before. He felt like he could push the heaviest boulder up the highest mountain, for an eternity even, if that was what The Young Cripple wanted or needed of him.
He had a power within him that he had never had before. His heart felt like it had grown, stretched and expanded. He thought about the girl in loving kindness. He thought about her also, in gut-wrenching fear. He thought about being near her, and he thought about never seeing her again, in the very same moment. He felt relief, and at the same time, torturous heartache.
He was in love.
And then, at that exact second, his nose started to bleed.