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Harlequin Midnight
By S.E. Casey
© 2015 S.E. Casey
There are many differences between the harlequin and the clown, two very different actors. Apart from the obvious—the sleek chequered motley and mask of the harlequin versus the clumsy oversized suit of the clown—most struggle with the fundamental distinctions in these comedians. But we in Grimaldi claim no such ignorance, our expertise in enduring the Harlequin Midnight every Halloween.
The door opens and my daughter Judie stumbles in, making it through the night. I don't celebrate, however. She is only fifteen with three more Halloweens to survive. Tinsel and glitter cling to the canary-yellow paint liberally splashed over her. The paint fumes don't overwhelm the stink of alcohol, but this is no surprise, drinking common on this chaotic night. I say nothing to her as it would be pointless, she in the fugue state of the Harlequin Midnight, the same as every Grimaldian child.
The grandfather clock beside the front door reads twenty minutes to midnight, the holiday's hard deadline. My son returned home with only seven minutes to spare last year. I wanted to ground him for the rest of the year, but it wasn't his fault. From my own experiences in these blank celebrations, there is no control, the Harlequin pulling all the strings.
From front door to back door, I pace and fidget. My wife may have the better plan, she unconscious in bed, oblivious to the annual race against the clock. She has taken thirteen sleeping pills chased down with a half bottle of gin. It takes another pill and finger of gin each year to knock herself out.
Thankfully, this will be Auguste's final Harlequin Midnight as he turns nineteen next year. All children age thirteen to eighteen take part in these nights, a universal compulsion for everyone growing up in Grimaldi. Each year, exactly three do not come home, lured away by the Harlequin spirit, never to return. The Harlequin is prompt; the children lucky not to be taken always stumble back home before the city clock's first strike of twelve. There are no exceptions. No one comes back after midnight.
No one.
But the night is more excruciating for the parents than it is for the children. Remembering my adolescent years performing in the Harlequin Midnight (although that is a misnomer as no one remembers anything in the literal sense), the consciousness is cast into a euphoric dream-state, everything abstracted. It is a night for the children to look forward to, despite the potential consequence, as being young means never having to fret over long odds, the adolescent faith in their invincibility. Any fears are further eased in the liberation the night provides, adults forbidden to leave their homes until daybreak. And no one has ever dared challenge that edict.
The Harlequin Midnight coincides with Halloween, but has little connection. Without assistance from the parents, the children prepare like most in readying their costumes and guises. However, this is the lone shared Halloween tradition. Unlike elsewhere, there is no variety in Grimaldi's masquerade, everyone dressing up in the diamond patterned suit and long nose mask of the harlequin. In the preceding months, bright paints, flowing fabrics (the gaudier the better), and other colorful party favors are gathered and stored. During Halloween day, boxes and bags of these fetishes are stashed around town, no one allowed to disturb the chromatic and often alcoholic hoards.
Such is the long running theatre that has played in Grimaldi for generations. When night falls, the city's youth celebrates the same comic hero, while the town endures the same sickening toll.
The clock reads ten minutes to midnight, still no sign of my son. Goddammit Auguste! Where in the hell are you?
No strategy or bribe can swing the odds in any favor. Except for always being three, the Harlequin's abductions are random. The best costume, the worst, and the average have all been made victim. There is also no apparent discrimination between gender, intelligence, or body type. One year, both of the Abilino twins were taken. We searched for some significance, but came up with none, most likely only a statistical improbability—the stale joke of coincidence.
Despite the high cost of living here, no one leaves. We Grimaldians who have prevailed through those horrible, wondrous nights are bound by the shared experience, a rite of passage creating a fellowship between citizens. The Harlequin Midnight is a shared joyride, a triumph of youth.
There are sober probabilities to consider as well. Those loyal to the city know that the fewer the children, the greater the chance that someone else's would be part of the annual winnowing. For those raised here, there is a guilty debt owed to the other families that have risked sons and daughters making it less likely that it would be we who would have been the ones not returning.
So as Grimaldi has retained many of its historic arcades, pillars, and archways, the Harlequin Midnight continues rooted beneath the facade of modern society. We are only another city in-between destinations with a hushed tradition of no concern to outsiders. Halloween, with its disguises, sugary treats, and tomfoolery is celebrated widely, ours is only a different—a more important—holiday.
Five minutes to midnight. I peek through the curtains to view the front walkway, but this is a futile measure. All the lights in the city have been extinguished, not a lit bulb, electronic glow, or open flame allowed before dawn. Another mystery of this night is how the entranced children navigate the city in the darkness, not to mention the purpose of all those colorful props.
Four minutes. I want to wake up my wife in case she knows some plan in bringing our son home, but I know she can't be roused. Where are you Auguste? Please, will you just come home one more time!
Touring the house again, I check that both front and back doors are unlocked although I know they are. Could I have missed his arrival somehow? I race upstairs, but his bed is empty. The bathroom door is open and the light is on, but it is yellow Judie throwing up in the toilet. Auguste isn't here, still out among the mindless revelers.
I dash back to the front door averting my eyes from the bastard clock, dreading its bad news. Putting my ear to the keyhole, I listen for the familiar footfalls on the front steps, but the stress causing the roar of blood rushing through my ears is deafening. I can hear nothing.
I jump at the first strike of the city clock tower's bell, my heart falling though my stomach. Despite the rules, I throw open the door and spill out down the front steps intending to yank my lollygagging son inside. However, the yard is deserted. I venture into the sidewalk and then the road, but they are also empty, not a soul there to answer my calls.
The street is unfamiliar with the lamplights extinguished. The bell rings again, it too transformed, now a death knell. Its heavy toll echoes through the city, bouncing off the soft stone and weathered wood of the city's architecture at odd angles so not to give away location. My bearings are scrambled, I can't even be sure of the way back home. The moon's glow and the stars are my only guide, but theirs is a light both faint and old. However, they provide strong reminders of performing in those past Harlequin Midnights, a glimmer of the amusing terror...
Every tragedy a comedy here.
Suddenly, the moon is cut in half, and then disappears completely. Something about the peculiar sight is familiar, but I can't place the stilted motion. Before the riddle can be solved, the moon is resurrected in the same sharp angles that it had vanished.
Another strike of the bell pushes me forward. I cut through an unknown backyard and scale a fence in pursuit of the winking sphere. The trees thin in the adjacent street giving me a full view of the moon being sliced into a triangle, and then disappearing. Again, it begs a familiar movement, almost as if were being cut from the sky with scissors.
But it reappears, trimmed back to life, the stars before it extinguished in a stead
y wave. For Auguste's sake, I continue my chase, drawn forward by this celestial phenomenon.
In the clearing of a war memorial, under a maximum of allowable light, I see them for the first time. Caught high in the trees, partly obscured by the foliage and branches, are the abducted children. It is too murky to make out their features, which, as they are camouflaged with paint and cloth, make any identification impossible. They may burst with color, but at night, everything is grey. The ashen faces render them the same, no suggestion of the individual underneath. I wonder how they climbed the trees, but there are no trees near the war memorial. Even odder, the children who seem stuck and themselves don't move, drift away as if being carried.
Stars disappear ahead of the retreating children and different stars reappear behind. I recognize the motion. I couldn't see it before because he is too large, too grand, but that is his most clever disguise. The sky lights aren't being chopped from the heavens, but are blocked from sight by the bulk of the massive Harlequin. My eye level was too low and focused too narrowly to see this Titan, my assumptions and expectations deceiving me to what looms in plain sight. The scissoring of his legs, stories tall, cleave the moon and stars caught in-between his graceful stride from my view. I look farther up at him, but I can't see his mask, so high it is out of eye range.
The children's many bodies, both past and present, aren't hidden behind leaves or branches, but are fused into Harlequin's frame. Like crude fabric swatches, Grimaldi's patronage to the arts are stitched into the great rustic fool. It is too dark to determine exactly how Harlequin and child are conjoined, as there seems no distinction between costume and body, that is, what is material and what is flesh. The pitfall of any dedicated actor, had Harlequin played this role so long that the mask now wears him, he and his costume one and the same?
The clock strikes again, a far away and long ago chime. I have lost count, but somehow know it to be the final toll.
The skyline of a distant Grimaldi is a stain on the nighttime canvas. It is the first time seeing the city like this, all of its artificial lights extinguished, a black silhouette of spire, tower, and minaret against an inky backlight. From this vantage, I see Grimaldi's elegant vertical design that I had walked under my entire life, blind to its dignified charisma.
The great comedian steps in front of the moon again, choking off its reflected light. I lose sight of the assimilating children without this illumination. I turn my back on the city, struggling to keep up with his giant strides, making sure to keep Harlequin between the moon and myself lest I have to see those doomed faces again. Lest I could pick out a familiar one among them…
Tethered by this rope of darkness, there is no choice but to follow the farcical servant into his far away theater, a grotesque stage where unsuspecting demon meets unwitting man—the first comedy.
In the end, this is the role we are all destined to play. And the more we deny, the more we fight to avoid this fate, the funnier the scene.