by C M Muller
The door slams and the cat bolts from Daniel’s lap and runs into the kitchen. Mary rushes in and the hood of her coat is torn, her forehead scraped, dots of blood clotting along a ragged line like points on a graph. Her strawberry blonde curls are matted, mud-caked. Daniel starts to rise and she flutters a dismissive hand in his direction.
—Fucking things. I’m fine. Where’s the disinfectant…I’ve got it.
Off to the bathroom. The sink runs, water splashes. A door closes and music starts up and she’s in her room ignoring everything. She has been stoic, sullen since before this thing began, since the disaster with Keith, about which she refused to give any information at all—an incident, Daniel supposed, or an unresolved argument—that saw her arrive at Daniel’s unannounced with a suitcase full of clothes and unknown depths of unexpressed rage and disappointment. Now he is unwillingly cast in the role of the father who can’t do or say anything right, and all he can do is wait for her to come around. It would feel better, he thinks, to have an ally. It would feel better for her too, he knows it. Until she comes around, the feline will more than suffice for uncomplicated companionship. As though summoned by the thought, the cat saunters back into the room, tail swimming lazily behind her. She jumps to Daniel’s side and sinks into sleep.
That night, something new, something bad. Daniel awakens to voices echoing outside, unintelligible, punctuated with dark chortling and sibilant whispers. He feels for the cat but she is no longer at his side. He rises, crosses the dark room to the window, parts the curtain. The moon is high and bright, the sky cloudless. Stars glint, smug and safe up in the firmament. The emptied houses’ windows hang open, and the voices thrum within, in the dark, empty rooms. He can’t make out individual words, can’t even tell if they’re speaking English. The voices overlap, converge and declaim in unison, then part into separate streams of droning monologues. They don’t stop for breaths. Daniel turns on the fan to block out the sounds with white noise, but still he hears the percussive voices, now strident, now clandestine, now ecstatic. He falls into uneasy sleep as the cat, who has returned to his side, twitches and squeaks out complaints, her tiny teeth clicking.
In the morning Daniel dares step out onto the porch, then down to the lawn. It’s warm for November. The sun glistens off the dewy branches that crowd the quiet street. He hears birdsong, a rare sound now. They sound cautious, staccato chirps and trills and titters. The windows of the other houses are still open, but all is still. He doesn’t even see any of them. He usually sees two or three sleeping at dawn, tucked into the crook of a branch or on a housetop. They clench like wounded spiders, and they shiver and twitch. Their ribs stick out. Their sides heave. One will, on occasion, push out a loud, rattling fart. Daniel once saw one break wind, wake, and, grotesque arms pinwheeling, fall from its perch on a high telephone wire. He laughed—he could not help but laugh—but he stopped laughing when it hit the ground. He has to block his memory now of what happened when it hit the ground.
Beyond the hedge he spots Mary’s shoe on the road and his heart starts to thrum in his chest. The air seems to buzz with menace. Dark droplets on the pavement lead to the shoe, or away from it. Are they blood drops? He backs up, keeping an eye on the space between the hedges. He closes the door and latches it, heads for Mary’s room. The door is open, the bed unmade, the sheets and blankets piled at its foot.
He goes back outside, grabs his cane on the way out. A flimsy weapon, but a weapon nonetheless. The cat yowls as he passes. The shoe is still there, and now he hears something. A whimper. Holding the cane out in front of him in both hands, he advances toward the street. He braces himself, passes between the hedges. He looks at the shoe, kneels, touches a droplet and examines the tip of his finger. Brown liquid has settled into the whorls of his fingertips. He sniffs at it, wincing. Not blood. Motor oil.
Mary’s car is still in its spot. He rises and turns to go back inside.
Three of them stand sentry in front of the front door. They are emaciated. Blue veins as thick as fingers pulse in their sagging wings. The layered, drooping folds under their eyes are black and bruised. One has a skin tag the size of an apple hanging on its cheek, dark red and bleeding at its root. Its weight pulls down the skin under its eye, creating a cradle of red below the pupil in which maggots cavort in a squirming orgy. The things open their mouths, revealing purple-soiled graveyards of disarranged grey teeth, and sing a high, mournful chorus, an alien, synchronized sigh. A barbershop quartet, Daniel thinks. But where is the fourth?
Hot, damp hands grasp the back of his neck and squeeze.
The thing whips him around, dropping him onto his back and pinning him, its wings flapping wildly. Daniel’s cane flies from his hand, landing in the hedge. The thing’s feet dig into his gut below the arch of his rib cage. Its eyes betray fierce anger rimmed around the edges with profound sorrow. It pulls Daniel’s face to its own—Daniel deliberately unfocuses his eyes and lets his mouth go slack—and it kisses him gently on the lips, dry and feathery.
It loosens its grip and rolls off of Daniel onto the leaf-strewn walk. Its hands grapple uselessly at the air and it coughs, its body trembling with each concussive hack. Then the trembling quickens, its toes spread and stretch, and it dies, its eyes rolled rightward, staring through Daniel and into unknown abysses. It clenches and shoots a stream of miserable grey diarrhea onto the walk.
Daniel pushes himself into a sitting position, lurches forward, and stands. His legs are weak and shaking. The veins stand out in his arms as he puts his hand to the back of his neck to check for blood. It stings. It stings like a thousand jellyfish. The three things that had been blocking the door have flown up to the eaves, where they weep noisily, shining pendulums of yellow-green mucous swaying from their nostrils.
Daniel retrieves his cane, makes his way up the porch steps, caroms through the front doorway and into the dark living room, falls into his easy chair. He closes his eyes, listens to his own breathing as it calms. At some point the cat jumps onto the arm of the chair, then jumps back down and gallops out of the room hissing. His skin feels as though it’s shrinking, tightening in increments like a blood pressure cuff. His arms feel weak and flabby. He tries to lift one and cannot. His eyes burn and he is unable to attend to them. Am I dying? he wonders. Am I dead?
The answer comes two hours later when the creak of the door awakens him. He lifts the lid of one eye and sees Mary silhouetted in the evening light. She smells of blood, of infected flesh. Oh, Dad, she says, and she comes and kneels next to him. She touches his face with one hand, lifts his wrist with the other. Her hands are as hot as fire.
Oh my god, Dad, she says.
Pause for Laughter
José Cruz
The faces in the crowd look up to me and ask: What good is a clown at the end of the world? And if I’m not crying, I will turn to them and I will tell them. I will tell them that I am the last true residue of the human race.
They know it. Their children know it. They may shrink back from me, guard their eyes as I pass under the guttering bonfire sun of our dying city—as if afraid that my cursed hand should graze them, as if their souls should become heavy with the burden I pass onto them.
As if all of this is my fault.
Nighttime is another matter entirely.
At night the crowd comes to the theater to witness my magic. Only then can they see me for what I really am. I am not the monster. The monsters are the ones who lurk in the edges of our vision, shimmering in the periphery, spectral voyeurs at the harvest feast.
But at night when the ghost light gleams, it smiles upon me. The monsters watch the crowd; the crowd watches me; I watch them all. Everyone has a role to play in the great broken drama of the universe.
Every night the crowd comes to the theater and every night they ask themselves what I am. If they are patient they will see this in my act. If they are wise they will know it to be true.
I am their final hope.
Everything
is a modest affair during the apocalypse.
Before the world was reborn in Fire, I worked for companies of all creeds and colors: the Donovan Brothers’ Travelling Electric Show; Le Cirque de la Bête; the Invisible Crime Festival. One outfit by the name of Uncle Diddly’s Funny Farm was nothing more than a set of cages housing diseased lab animals overseen by a pack of unshaven men with angry jugular veins. The life of a clown is one of constant adaptability, and I am one of the greatest of my kind.
I am the greatest.
The gutted remains of an ice-packing factory serve as my Auditorium of Wonders now. There are no chairs, only piles of rubble I’ve stationed across the gashed concrete floor. The dozens of spectators that come at night take their seats atop the bathroom sinks and piece-meal bookcases and twisted traffic signs as if recalling from muscle memory, the association that this spot is “theirs,” a thing for them to claim in a world bereft of any real ownership. My stage is a cluster of wooden pallets covered in rocky layers of dun-colored earth. Most of the building’s corrugated tin roof has been clawed away, and in the evening the dim remembrance of stars can sometimes be seen by those who wish hard enough for them.
The Fever Men keep to the edges of the theater throughout the performance. The greasy flames from the trashcan fires reveal the jaundiced nest of epidermal tubing under their ragged shrouds that links their jaws and chests, the amber light swirling like drainwater in the infinite patience of their vacant, staring eyes. The crowd never acknowledges the Fever Men but they know that they’re there all the same, just like they know when the Fever Men curl up next to them in the night to whisper loveliness in their ears and kiss their life away with the shriveled mouths of their claws.
Legends will breed in any time. It has been said that the Fever Men were men once, long ago, before their bodies were warped by flame and driven to infernal hunger from their trials. Others claim that they arrived during the Fire with all the others like them, doomsday riders without horses. If one were to journey to the ruins of the city’s former ghetto, they would see this origin story splayed across the bared backs of fallen buildings in Neolithic shades of mud and bile, an unsavory pictorial record for the hoped-for generations of the future to read and understand from whence they came.
Not that a picture makes any of it true. The only thing that is certain is that there are less people in the crowd and more shadows along the walls every night.
As a boy I was bequeathed a fine moplah sword by a blind fakir who saw more than he told. It is never far from my reach during the nightly performances, its broad curve of steel always primed and freshly-whetted should the hooded shadows ever glide too close to the stage. Many people in the crowd have weapons of their own—crude newspaper shanks, nail-spangled baseball bats, gaping handsaws with rusted teeth—but none wield them with any real precision or efficiency, only a kind of infantile mania. I have never been forced to bring the sword out during a performance, but the world is always becoming a different place these days. You can count on this and nothing else.
It is no secret that the crowd fears me more than the Fever Men. I can see it in their eyes, see it as their tear-gummed lids fight back against their own instinctual terror and open wide to take in the full breadth of my works. The crowd knows they will die at the hands of the Fever Men, but death has always been the great inevitable. I am the great unknowable. What I do on stage—how I do it—remains a mystery borne of their own flesh. To the crowd this is sacrilege; my magic is indefinable, intangible, a hand of uncertainty robbing them of their last remaining crumbs of security.
And yet: here they are. Chalk it up as another mystery of the universe. Or just an old joke.
Perhaps they understand my purpose here after all. Perhaps there is hope for us just yet.
A cloud of dust announces my entrance upon the stage, hangs in the cloying darkness like a lover’s expectant breath. I clap, and the sound echoes across the frozen room.
The show begins.
Spreading my arms wide I grow my shadow for the crowd until it looms across the walls and reaches the tops of the smoke-crusted rafters. I flex my fingers like poisoned spiders, commanding the shadow to dance, a charcoal Cyclops twirling to the soundless music of the void. The crowd watches in a silence that would be reverent were it not for the bloodless clenching of their hands and lips.
Taking my cue, I step out of my Father’s coat and leave my head resting on its frayed collar. I walk to the other end of the stage, clap twice, leap into the air as the empty arms of Father’s coat tosses it into my hands. I twist the head back onto my neck and look out into the crowd’s pinched, sooty faces, wondering if this will be the night that I finally see it: the blue spark of amusement, a flashing grin, the shaky birthing of a laugh…
But it isn’t. It never is.
After I regale my public with further displays of Sights Never Before Seen and Other Comical Didos, I finish the performance by placing the water-stained cigar box labeled zeppo upon the stage and climb down into its fragrant brown gloom, waving my blue silk handkerchief in fond farewell as I descend. When I climb back out, I look upon an empty room. The crowd has left. Not even the shadows remain.
There are no roses left for me in tribute, no standing ovation to welcome my return. The only sound in the abandoned theater is the fanfare of dead leaves sighing down wayward aisles.
Hope is a dangerous thing to harbor in a world where nothing good can grow. And yet: here I am. Chalk it up as another mystery of the universe. Or just an old joke.
I wonder when the crowd will realize that destiny has brought me here to help them. That laughter is medicine. That it’s all that we have left. That it’s the only thing keeping us human.
The world is ending, but it isn’t over yet. Yet I know that come the day I look out into the crowd and see a congregation of hungry, yellow faces staring back at me, it will be.
My first memory was the thundering of elephants.
I was born into the circus a small wormish thing, fish-belly white on a bed of hay laden with dung. Already I was the color of the clown, my destiny foretold in the shattered faces of the Tarot and heralded by the stamp of the gray mountains roaring wild-eyed in their chains.
The hermaphrodite who delivered me said I never cried once during the birth. After opening my eyes, all I did was laugh. My path was clear from the beginning.
Father was a fool and Mother was a joke. We lived in one of the listing, mold-devoured wagons that encircled the fairgrounds. Ours was said to be haunted by the spirit of the gypsy dwarf who last owned it, the victim of some foul marriage plot. Father feared these rumors because he came from a country where fairy tales were still real, so he’d drown his apprehensions in bitter blackberry wine until he was past the point of caring about ghosts or anything else that lived in the wagon.
And Mother. Mother was a joke.
One night during my fifteenth year Father beckoned me come over. He was still in the faded makeup and patched costume trousers of the weeping hobo. The stubble on his face was a livid blue scar. Mother stayed in her corner, moaning a lullaby and tapping at the spiders dancing across the window.
“So,” Father said. “You want to be clown. Is that what clown looks like?”
He pointed to the leotard clinging to me like a second skin of dark matter, to the kohl-lined eyes popping out from under the mat of my rumpled hair.
“It’s from a film,” I told him.
I had spied the freaks watching it after-hours. Normally my eyes would cringe whenever I was forced to look upon their stumped, half-finished forms, but that night my attention was elsewhere. I watched from my hiding place as a flickering play was cast upon a wrinkled tent flap, the sharp licorice breath of absinthe cutting through the air like a green blade. In the film, a tall thin man held a knife over a sleeping woman. She awoke suddenly, screaming and writhing away before the man took her up in his arms and carried her across a maze of drunken roofs. The man never took the
woman’s clothes off, like in the other films. The line of Tarot that had been laid out at my birth was given its final player.
“Ay?” Father asked. “And who are you supposed to be?”
The film had told me what to do. It had given me the face of my destiny and then shouted my new name to me in silence from the glimmering prism of the makeshift screen, a name dank with the fungal taste of decaying books and forbidden fruit:
— I Must Become Caligari —
“Shit name for clown,” Father muttered. His rosy frown curled into a lopsided grin. “So show me what you do then.”
Hurriedly, I grasped the dark puddle at my feet and proceeded to grow my shadow for him. In those days I could only make my shadow as tall as Father. Not like now. Father shifted uncomfortably in his chair, trying to look away.
Taking my cue, I snatched one of the mice nibbling on our dinner bread from the table and dropped it down my sleeve, opening my mouth wide-wide so Father could hear the frightened squeals that were echoing up from the pit of my stomach.
Father’s throat quivered and he waved his hand impatiently, erasing me from his sight. “Dirty tricks,” he said, and spat.
I cast my eyes to the floor and lifted my toeless shoe. The shivering mouse quickly fled back to the safety of its hole. I wrapped my arms around my chest and squeezed. I felt cold without it.
“Clown has only one true act,” Father said. “Drum snare. Clown fall down. Everybody laugh.” He scratched at his mouth and looked towards the mouse hole. “Everything else is just variation.”
Mother giggled as she plucked one of the spiders off the window.
“You spend whole life try to make crowd smile,” Father said. He held up his tremoring hand and contemplated his new, bloody fingers. “But where are your smiles?”
He snatched up the bottle of wine from the table. “It’s like you keep them to yourself in big bottle, for rainy days. But the crowd comes and waves their cups at you, shouting—‘Pour!’ So you give, because you are good, and they drink. But then cups flash back. ‘Pour!’ they shout. Crowd is always thirsty, even on sunny days. So you keep pouring, and pouring. Finally crowd leaves, all happy, smacking lips. Toss empty cups at you like coins. Then you go fill your cup…”