Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2

by Holly Newstein

  As I approached the admittance window, the receptionist handed me a mask, then said, “By the way you’re walking, I’d say you have a kidney stone.” And, as it turned out, she’d been right. Three highly-trained paramedics had argued between an angry appendix and acute gas, but it took a hospital receptionist just three seconds to nail it, my uniquely crimped stride the giveaway.

  With the rickety hands of the infirm, I tied the mask around my face, then presented my ID, all the while flinching and grimacing, and apologizing for my state of indigence.

  Poised over the admitting form, she said, “On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your pain?”

  “Forty-nine,” I said.

  The receptionist looked up at me, smiled, and said (as did at least three other females throughout the rest of that debacle), “Now you know what a woman in labor feels like.”

  Taking this statement as an invitation to act accordingly, I leaned in best I could and said, very calmly, “Then why don’t you get off your sorry ass and find me some fucking morphine?”

  From what I can remember, that simple request did not engender the same kind of compassion that is customarily shown those whose water, and patience, has finally broke.

  From there my situation progressed to a draped cubicle, where I was probed and prodded, all the while enjoying an intravenous drip of narcotics for my ever-increasing pain.

  The next thing I remembered, the sun was up, and I was down. Flat.

  As I groped my way out of the anesthesia, I vaguely recall a tinny voice speaking from the edges of my bed; a female voice sounding not so unlike my own reedy thoughts—until it uttered a word that had long ago become my obsession.

  Wangari? Could that be right? Certainly not.

  I fought to regain my wits. Had she actually said what I thought she did?

  Muscling onto my elbows, I looked up at the television and became groggily aware of an attractive anchorwoman, her lips in synch with that voice; one that was coming from a portable remote attached to my bed, snaking between the rails. She was saying something about how epidemiologists from the Center for Disease Control had followed the chain of infection (what infection?) to a sandwich maker from some Bronx delicatessen, and was now considering that worker, Wangari Turay, now deceased, to be the index case, or the first detected case, of the pandemic. She went on to say that Wangari immigrated to the US from Nairobi fourteen months earlier, but a search of customs records indicated that she had visited friends in Beijing, China just days before her death.

  I’m sure the doctor who then entered the room saw me as a classic case of someone gracefully reentering consciousness: patient trying to sit up but listing terribly, eyes rolling and confused, mouth agape, drooling ever so slightly…

  He was accompanied by a woman in white. I’ll call her Nurse Viola, as she reminded me of a woman by that name who used to come in once a week and vacuum and dust my parent’s house; a gentle woman who wore a ceaseless expression I often mistook for motherly concern, at least when it was pointed in my direction. The very same expression Nurse Viola was imparting. At least, that’s what her eyes were indicating, as the rest of her face was covered by a white mask, as was the doctor’s.

  The doctor mumbled something akin to an apology as Nurse Viola reached over me and muted the television. Her eyes were kind, thoughtful, and I could tell she was trying to smile. “You appear to be coming around just fine,” she said, then raised the top third of my bed so that I could sit up without having to use my arms.

  She then pulled back the covers, lifted my gown, and inspected the sutures beneath a patch of white gauze taped to my abdomen. It was then that I vaguely recalled someone having told me the night before, while I was in a morphine fugue, that something had been found; something about exploratory surgery.

  The doctor was standing between me and a window, outside of which I could now see an adjacent section of the hospital skirted by scaffolding, whereupon dozens of workers in hard hats and white sterile suits were draping massive sheets of plastic over specific sections.

  The doctor then turned from the window and said, “That’s what they‘re affectionately calling it now, down at the CDC.” He lifted a finger and pointed it in the direction of my chest.

  “‘Wangari’.”

  He turned back to the window, the grayness outside blanching his eyes to further degrees of concern. He continued: “On May fourteenth of this year, the CDC officially named the sub-type H18N4, that information having been publicly released in a memorandum to all hospitals and healthcare officials just three days ago. Now, I never paid much credence to prophecies or those who make them, and if that tattoo you’re wearing was your only piece of evidence for such things, then my better sense would be telling me that you’d simply perpetrated a clever hoax. However…” He reached into his right smock pocket and withdrew a simple sandwich bag, which he gently placed on my chest, as if it belonged there, right atop Lisa’s divination.

  “That’s a peach seed,” he said, “in case you weren’t sure.”

  I had already picked up the bag and was staring incredulously at the specimen within. It looked to have been freshly cleaned. “Or, nectarine,” I offered.

  He shrugged: peach, nectarine, the ass end of a gerbil… “Thing is…how can I put this…there were these nearly-microscopic strands of…fibrous tissue, these parallel fibers branching out of this seed and appearing to…to invade every organ in the vicinity…I mean, the cavity was literally saturated—” He dropped his head, shook it, then coughed a sound of strained disbelief.

  “Go ahead, Michael,” Nurse Viola said softly. “Just tell him.”

  He turned to me once again, nodded to the bag on my chest, and said, “Let’s just say that the lingering impressions of everyone in your surgical attendance are that this seed was not so much growing inside you—but rather you were growing outside of it.”

  My eyes had never left the seed. Stunned, I couldn‘t think of anything coherent to say. So, I said, “Did you save my kidney stone, too?”

  He shook his head. “You eventually passed it. After injecting you with the dye, the X-rays did show a filling defect in the ureter, your stone, but they also detected radiopaque matter—that seed—in the same vicinity. I determined this to be a wonderful opportunity to go in and take a look-see, thinking it some species of cyst, and perhaps an accomplice in creating your pain, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  The masks made it difficult to read their expressions, but there was absolutely no evidence that suggested either one was finding the situation the least bit funny.

  “What kind of bug is this H18-whatever?” I asked.

  “A sub-type of the influenza virus,” the doctor sighed. “It’s mean, and it’s very, very fast.”

  “Once infected, what are our chances?”

  He looked at Nurse Viola, as if she crunched those kinds of numbers. “There aren’t any,” he finally said, heading for the door.

  I inquired about a vaccine and received the same response. There wasn’t one.

  At the door, the doctor turned one last time and said, “I’m still curious…Why have the tattoo etched in reverse?”

  I told him that the artist was a dear friend of mine from a distant past; an eccentric little genie from Nebraska who’d popped her bottle and liked to play Edgar Cayce in cursive; and that she suffered from a bizarre fear of mirrors, personalizing her predictions to reflect that phobia; at least that was the theory, but I couldn’t yet say just why.

  I left out the magic, though the room certainly could have used some.

  He thought on this a moment, then offered, “Maybe from her point-of-view the ink was going on in a perfectly legible way.” He paused, and even behind his mask I could see that he was smiling. “That is, if her perspective had evolved on the other side of the mirror.“

  Then he turned and disappeared down the hallway, Nurse Viola in close second.

  Above me, the news ticker was indicating the Pre
sident of the United States and Congress had just agreed to begin using the military on a strictly limited basis to maintain order; specifically, to help restore it in those outbreak areas of considerable population.

  No one was calling it Martial Law just then, but it was still very early.

  Funny, just when I’d given up hope of ever finding that catastrophe, that remarkably momentous incident that would finally make sense of the prediction on my chest, it sneaked up behind me.

  I pressed the button that was to summon a nurse, any nurse, now confronted with the full realization that Lisa hadn’t met with any foul play those many years ago, nor had she just voluntarily walked clean away from a promising life as so many others allegedly do for equally inexplicable reasons.

  Nurse Viola responded to my call, those maternal eyes dulled but still hopeful. “Something I can get you?” she said while checking my IVs. “Refresh your water, perhaps?”

  “Sewing needles,” I said urgently. “I need at least seven.” I was factoring in attrition due to clumsy fingers.

  As she bent down to adjust my pillow, I rose best I could to meet her, pulled open my gown, pointed to that prescient ink, and said, “And you must hurry.”

  Within minutes she returned with a handful of those travel-size sewing kits one often finds abandoned in those covert side pockets of luggage. She placed them on the bedside table, admitting that the in-house pharmacy was full of such conveniences.

  Each kit contained two needles, more than enough. All I needed was four, as I had finally realized that that sequence of dots did not represent any letter or number in Braille, any genealogical diagram or ancient Mayan symbol, but was quite simply a template. A guide, if you will, for the correct placement of four needles into the pit, into the fissures of the endocarp. Into the very seed that had been taken from inside me.

  My ticket to get back on the train I once rode with Miss Tangerine.

  But I wondered: is the correct placement to correspond to the real image on my chest, or to its virtual one in the mirror?

  I chose the real image, and have been relentlessly working that sequence.

  So far, I’m still here—all the while reminding myself that patience is a virtue.

  It’s been three days since my release from the hospital, and I write this for those few who might be left wandering in Wangari’s wake. Just know that gods do indeed exist, and that in the course of their mysterious ways they, like us, often forget what their children are doing.

  It was just that fear that Lisa had for mirrors: afraid that someone behind those silver depths was looking for her. And they had been, because she’d gone way past curfew.

  And, finally, that there exists in the very back of my refrigerator, second shelf from the top, a large Tupperware bowl containing a pin-riddled seed. Should Wangari advance to every niche and corner, and to states of such unimaginable pain and suffering that the collective cry is for an immediate and global release, then simply remove one or more of those protruding needles from that seed.

  That should have the desired effect.

  And if I’m still here when Wangari comes knocking, then I’ll do us all.

  Simon McCaffery’s gifts as a storyteller never cease to amaze me, and I’m beyond thrilled to present you with this staggering feast.

  What we have here is a present-tense narrative that, almost impossibly, moves through time at breakneck speed. An ambitious feat for any author, to be sure, but McCaffery’s eloquent mastery of the language matched to his seemingly effortless ability to juggle narrative threads with precision and concision, never missing an emotional beat, make “Vanishing Act” more than the sum of its engaging parts.

  In short, this is a story that everyone needs to read now, lest it vanish uncelebrated through the many unnoticed cracks of our worldly, and alternately otherworldly, existence.

  Vanishing Act

  Simon McCaffery

  Max Beckman’s final visitation occurs on the last night of March while gray wisps of cloud slide beneath a beaming moon like windblown skiffs. Eighteen years have passed since the last such night, enough time for the lucid mind to dismiss the authenticity of those memories, to render them childish confabulations, but what remains of the harrowed eleven-year-old boy inside Max has always been waiting.

  Throughout Max’s adult life these manifestations have arrived with no recognizable interval or significant anniversary. The experience is always the same. A limbic tingle of presence summons him up from the ultramarine depths of non-REM sleep; a primal sensation of someone else in the room displacing air molecules. Of being watched. His eyes slide open and he quietly rolls over to check the bedside clock’s faint blue digits. It’s 2:13, the absolute dead of night.

  Max stares at the water stains and veins in the plaster ceiling, blinking, pulling musty air in through his nose. His heart rate slows and his breathing relaxes. He suppresses the urgency to sit up, the eagerness to flail loose from the bed sheets and blanket. He once kept one of those tall, high-intensity metal flashlights between the nightstand and foot of the bed. In the years before cancer ended his marriage, he told Linda it was for emergencies, in case a Gloucester norther blew the lights out or another pitiful addict tried to break into the cluttered garage. How many times did he frighten away Daniel when he felt that tickle in the back of his skull? Children and many young adults can sense when they’re being watched. Homo sapiens attained this sixth sensory skill ages ago on the migration up from the African veldt, and parapsychologists and neurobiologists are still searching the older folds of the brain to isolate it. Perhaps it’s morphic fields and global consciousness, or the quantum mind immersed in the planet’s magnetic shroud. Max doesn’t know how it works, but the phenomenon is real.

  His eyes adjust to the gloom. He slowly sits up, hoping his spine won’t pop like a cork. Yes, the bedroom closet door is open—the irrational Max leaves it ajar every night from habit. Now it appears to be open a fraction wider. Modern homes built from particleboard and Sheetrock invariably include colossal walk-in master closets larger than many of the bedrooms Daniel and Max shared as boys. This solid old Gloucester house was built when Truman was running the country, and the closets are modest affairs.

  Max hears the faintest sound of breathing, feather-light, and feels that intense, weightless gaze.

  With infinite care he folds back the bedding and swings his tired old feet over the edge of the bed, toes probing slowly for the cold wooden floor.

  ***

  Max’s younger brother, Daniel, undeniably inherits his talent for vanishing from their parents, Lawrence and Barbara Beckman. He acquires from Hobie Peters his phobic dread of whatever does or doesn’t wait for us beyond that last flutter of the heart and blackout of the mind.

  In 1961 Lawrence is fired from his job at a Rocketdyne missile engine plant in north Texas. It’s the start of a nomadic childhood tour of the Midwest and South, Max and Daniel making and discarding successive sets of neighborhood and classroom friends. Hobie Peters lives with his family near the corner of Eighth and Empire Avenue, one street north of the Beckman’s rented home in Logan, a small Missouri town with tidy streets lined with beautiful maple and oak trees and a charming limestone county courthouse. Hobie is three years older than Max, tall and gangly with reddish hair, a big gap-toothed grin and a love for daredevil mischief. Hobie’s pride and joy is his Schwinn Deluxe Wasp bicycle, gloss black and white with twenty-six inch balloon tires and low-raked handles. The catalog calls it “the news boy’s special,” and Hobie mowed a lot of lawns and tramped through miles of culverts for returnable bottles to save the fifty-six dollars that it cost. Hobie loves the bike but he doesn’t baby it. He sets new land speed records from the courthouse to Spring River, where boys risk paralysis on a rope swing, and he’s always up for a race. And six years before a former big-game poacher and motocross rider from Butte, Montana, decides to jump the fountain at Caesar’s Palace on television, Hobie builds a set of ramps from scrap plywood and lumbe
r he hauls from the city dump and pinches from construction sites.

  A dozen neighborhood boys are invited to the show. It’s a spectacular Saturday afternoon in June, school is out, and Max thinks this explains why attendance is light. The brothers have front-row seats on the Peters’s front lawn. For a warm-up, Hobie positions the ramps four feet apart on the sloping sidewalk and backs the Wasp up fifteen yards. He’s wearing blue jeans, his best red and blue-checkered shirt, and his Davy Crocket fake coonskin cap. Hobie counts down from five and stands on the pedals. He picks up speed fast on the incline, legs pumping. He hits the ramp and lands squarely on the receiving ramp, skidding to a stop. The younger kids whistle and clap, Daniel among them.

  Hobie grins and takes a modest bow. He walks the Wasp uphill and parks it by an oak tree, then drags the launch ramp farther up the pavement toward his neighbor’s lawn. He carefully eyes it from both sides to check alignment.

  The younger kids murmur and ahhhh. Max guesses the distance between the wooden ramps is now at least a dozen feet. He notices a chalk mark on the sidewalk between them next to a lolling dandelion. That little blue X on the cement haunts him for a long time. Hobie has practiced the jump from those marks, but he is feeling fine on this blazing blue day, young and invincible, and he decides on the spur of the moment to ratchet his show up a notch. The kids who have skipped his daredevil exhibition to play sandlot ball, shoot marbles, or hang outside the drugstore that stocks comics and pulp paperbacks will be sorry. By the time school resumes in the fall, Hobie Peters will be a tall tale, a hometown legend.

  Hobie rolls the Wasp all the way up the block and counts down from ten, like a rocket launch. Daniel hasn’t looked this excited since Mom took them to see a trick-shooter at a down-on-its-heels circus when they lived for a brief time in Tulsa.

  Hobie finishes his count and zooms down the sidewalk like a Lockheed Starfighter, the sun winking off the Wasp’s chromed handlebars. Hobie’s hunched over them, eyes slitted in concentration, pedaling like a madman, the coon’s tail flapping behind his head like a furry pennant. He’s a blur, like The Flash, when the Wasp’s front tire hits the launch ramp.