JRZDVLZ

by Lee Klein

  The curtain rose. Instead of awestruck gasps, all I heard was laughter. It was a setup, a joke. Yet the barker didn’t give in. He quaked, mortally afraid of an enchained kangaroo covered in green paint. Quaker-buckle boots adorned its paws, makeshift leathery wings, a sorry rack of antlers. So pathetic was the sight that the laughter turned sympathetic for this out-of-place animal. It also seemed unwell, not just nervous or sick but poisoned by its coat of paint.

  It was untenable to see yourself represented as an exotic animal slathered like this, a noble marsupial made to look like a lizard with antlers and wings. The wings were no better than the curtain, a hodgepodge of leather hanging off long sticks, nothing like the comparatively glorious imposters commissioned by Stearns.

  My possessions were limited to the dress I wore, and even that was less owned than bequeathed, betrothed, beholden, and therefore every one in the audience was my social better. Not only was I a monster—famous apparently, imitated definitely—but compared with most, I was an ascetic, a monk wandering the city for alms, outside the system of exchange of funds for services rendered, or even theft. I distinguished myself from my fellows by cleanliness, basic civility, silence, a show of Franklin’s commandments, but each one surely thought himself my superior, not only because of the dress I wore but because the dress was all I had. Yet I laughed with them for a moment before the tenor changed as we worried for the beast. That moment of laughter was a wave above our heads that broke and submerged us in frothy soup heading for shore. I had never before laughed in a group. What other animal did that? The crow? Pigeons? Fish? Deer? Nor did they have any possessions. Birds had their nests, wolves their lairs, but none had baubles, ornaments, objects conferring status in the flock.

  Forget Franklin’s thirteen commandments for moral perfection, tracking the serpentine switchbacks of consciousness, registering the existential arrhythmia of the heart, the restlessness of the soul. Perhaps seeming human only required two things: acquire possessions and lose oneself among other people. Can other people become a sort of heaven? Maybe even devils become angels when they laugh together.

  Voices tangled in shouts, insults, curses:

  “That’s your monster, eh fatty? Stolen from the zoo?”

  “The only thing to fear is it keels before we get our money’s worth!”

  “You should be the one in chains, nadscatter!”

  The show was worth a dime for the rise it provoked. The barker and his half-armed dwarfish associate and two other teenagers now on stage mimed expressions of horror and desperation. They crossed themselves, kneeling, praying. All the while an animal struggled that none had ever seen up close. It was covered in paint with off-kilter antlers on its head, its wings like crusty wash left out to dry, a vicious choker of spikes around its neck attached to the deck by cords and a leash at the barker’s feet. The cords holding the animal in place made it seem like a balloon strapped to the earth—if cut, the health of the animal would return, it would elevate, and once in the air take its revenge.

  The barker and his pitchfork now came behind the beast on stage as his associates got its attention with celery stalks and carrots. He held his finger to his lips again, asking for silence, and instead received a mixed reaction of encouragement and complaint. Pitchfork held with two hands like a shovel, he crouched and stalked the beast from behind on tip toes. He thrust the spears of the pitchfork into the rump of the beast, which reared forward, activating the spikes in the choke chain. Traces of blood muddied the paint as the animal hollered in protest, a sound that struck me as almost human. The barker’s associates jumped back as though struck in the sternum by the shout. Had hidden voices screamed in unison to make it sound more like a human groan, a weary guttural sigh mixed with query and complaint, a sense that the kangaroo, obviously sick, enchained, bleeding now about the neck, were a sort of Job, pleading with higher powers to respond to questions he could only articulate in a way everyone in attendance understood at once, in the universal language of suffering?

  So often I had imagined myself in this position, captured and tortured and flayed, my head on the wall of someone like Stearns. No more than a trophy. Eyes replaced with multifaceted circles of glass. How much had they milked out of this poor beast, a dime per person for how many shows? Was it worth it? Did the barker not have a sick heart? Did his associates? The half-armed dwarf surely harbored some sympathy, though they all played their part, urging the crowd to provide the soundtrack, a score as violent and pathetic and guttural as the action on stage.

  I had only once seen a sacrifice. Had December told Stearns about the Umbrian girls? I remembered them as innocents, but they were murderers, too young to know what they did, released into the river to bring about eternal paradise, and in a way, it had worked: order was restored and Umbria was now an overgrown archeological site awaiting excavation in the pines. But animal sacrifice was something I had never seen. Voices all around me called for it as though it were commonplace. More than ending the animal’s misery, they wanted to see it butchered. By some abstract equivalency, the more brutal the sacrifice, the more completely they would be released from their miseries. How such a sight could help them I did not understand. Maybe I was too sensitive, too weak, too concerned, too able to position myself within the animal’s body and anticipate the next blow?

  They had promised horror, and after a moment of comedy, they now seemed ready to deliver something only seen in nightmares. For some of my compatriots in the audience, expectation of slaughter sent them through unbalanced states of agony and ecstasy, as though such soaring and descending were punishment for attendance.

  The set was minimal, a black velvet backdrop in front of which stalagmites and stalactites of shards of wood were painted to resemble fleshy wet cave rock. Orange-red flames of fabric jumped in response to disturbances in the theater’s atmosphere, providing an appropriately flickering setting for a devil, like the mouth of hell. Now as the beast lost blood around its neck and rump from punctures, should I intervene, hesitate, vacillate until it’s too late?

  Wharton would ride in on Olympus, mesmerize the audience, ensure abeyance of their madness. Imagine that horse on stage itself, painted, outfitted in wings, antlers, and clogs, chained, bleeding, sentenced to die for whose sins? Olympus would snort flames as it reared and all humanity would bow in apology.

  “Rear up, beast!” My shout was lost among riotous voices.

  Each in the audience improvised the show’s script, each in their mind an emperor. The animal’s fate rode on their thumb: salvation (up) or slaughter (down). In that uproar, only a sideways verdict could be heard, split fifty-fifty, each unworried of the other half.

  “Rear up and save yourself,” I said. Did it look at me then? Did an eye turn in my direction? Was some element of my voice recognized as an animal register, familiar yet not quite uncommon enough to overcome resignation to its sickness and the sense that the most merciful act would be to butcher the animal into take-home steaks for everyone?

  The barker and his merry helpers made more confident by the crowd strutted like gladiators awaiting final say. Armed with pistols and axes and the long, curving swords of a sultan, their weapons served if they chose sections of the animal to open or if the crowd rebelled to thwart them. But the crowd seemed passive, the barrier too intact between audience and stage for anyone to rush them, disarm them, overwhelm them, mortally wound them, unchain the beast, cast off its accoutrement, and slip unseen into alley and early-evening mist with this sickly green kangaroo hopping behind him.

  “Silence,” the barker said. “Silence or else we shall stay here all night!”

  The crowd settled as persistent hecklers were stifled.

  “What stands before you is the Leeds Devil, brought into this world when our country was a federation of subjugated colonies, with no notion of what was in store, independence after victory over the Crown, the wrenching war with the Confederacy that decimated a generation. The beast, according to legend, emerged into th
e world and devoured its family. Ever since it has been reclusive, yet commonly before the arrival of fearsome nor’easters or first shots of war it appears to murder and traumatize, as though the evil in the land releases this beast from far below to alert us of imminent calamity so we can prepare. Throughout time, throughout the region, despite so many accounts of this monster, it has never been captured or held responsible for all it has done. For devouring its family, it deserves to die. For so many grave acts and minor nuisances, attacks on livestock and related lost property, it deserves to die. For its recent appearance throughout the land, frightening children and full-grown men alike, consuming more than its share of canines and felines, interrupting the proceedings of industry, inciting panic and fury and charging all with wrath, it deserves to die. Further—why it now must meet the justice it deserves—it is guilty and accountable as a representative of evil in this world ... We are God-fearing people, peaceful, whether Quaker or Catholic, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, observant or not, we believe in the goodness of God. Why might He afflict us so often with miseries derived from His hand? Storms, floods, drought, pestilence, sickness, murder, war, death, the list of miseries is long and varied and none among us are exempt from suffering. Even if all has gone well, if you account yourself blessed in health and riches and family and occupation, miseries must come or else you have not lived a proper life. As those immortal men wrote when founding our country blocks from where we now stand, we hold these truths to be self-evident. And yet, despite these truths and the storehouse of evidence accumulated every year of each of our lives and every decade and century of our country’s existence as a nation, some malevolent force must be accountable for sickness, murder, perversion, callowness, violence, aggression, madness, foul luck, sudden death, all the horrors visited upon the people of this city and region and country, each of us born innocent yet in time so misshapen by circumstances. Our original cherubic state, so like the angels of heaven, deforms until we are aged, bloated, broken, miserable, shuffling through this world of despair into death, our release from horrors into a better place. But why do these horrors exist? Why do we endure them, and if we had a chance to end them, or at least take vengeance and stand for justice and do what we must to uphold all we know is right, would we not take it upon ourselves to hold accountable a representative, an obviously hideous beast far more odious in appearance than any of us, if it meant the opportunity to limit suffering thereafter in this world and ease the spirits of all who have suffered in this country? I say it is our duty. Today we have an opportunity. Justice is in our hands. Do any disagree? If so, let your voices be heard so your better-headed neighbors might throttle some sense into you.”

  He made it seem less like sport or sensationalist entertainment than something altogether human and common throughout time from Abraham to tropical island shamans tossing virgins into steaming abysses to ensure the harvest. No other animal harbored a belief that such violence might please their gods and set things straight. No other animal believed an offer of death preserved life. No wolf pack sacrificed rabbits to wolf gods. No river trout sacrificed tadpoles so more eggs hatched this year than last. Imagine the noblest multipointed buck spearing chipmunks and maybe a badger with its antlers to appease the spirit its herd worshipped. This seemed more like vigilante justice. The barker had incited random passersby to pay a dime and now they gathered into a unified whole seated in pews by torchlight won over by an unexpected burst of elocution from someone who at first had seemed like a blockhead at best.

  I tasted my tears, felt them thick and strong, and through tear-filtered eyes I saw that others also cried. What was this but imitation of Christ? Sacrifice a poor animal for our sins, chief among them our compulsion to turn poor animals—kangaroo or human— into scapegoats. My legs resembled those of the crane, my feet looked like donkey hooves, but I never blamed the heron or the donkey for my appearance. Each part was distinct and essential to the whole.

  In tears, I was unsure if I could intervene without sacrificing all in attendance, even those moved by the necessary slaughter of an innocent burdened with the weight of a nation’s sins. The green paint symbolized layers of corrosion, like oxidized copper superficially corrupted by the forces of nature. To intervene might be unnatural.

  The barker once again asked for a dissenting opinion as his associates smiled with knives in hand. It would be so much easier if someone told me what to do. Or if there were guidelines beyond those ten from Moses and thirteen from Franklin. Predetermined, failsafe directions for every situation including those as uncommon as the current one: a man in a wedding dress, a unique beast, watches on stage a kangaroo in danger of being murdered for everyone’s sins, a beast that is not the beast as advertised but good enough to stand in and bear the brunt of whatever unbearable burden must be placed on its bewinged back. What ought a man/beast do?

  It is always the same question, to act or not, to watch or be watched, to enter into life in such a way after which there is no return and no guarantee of success.

  “Should we save it?”

  A voice whispered in my ear, a young man about the age my body now seemed, someone able to act, morally obligated to set what he saw was right, with adequate strength and endurance to possibly achieve it. He seemed to be gathering a counter force. I looked at him but did not speak. Something was startled about him, aghast, as though this night had truly revealed a devil. His face reflected it, all goodness in him keeping the evil on the surface of his skin, disallowing further entry.

  “What can we do?” I said.

  He began to rise, as did half the crowd, those whose legs and spirits responded to the backstroke of scimitars on stage. Larner once told me that before God had said let there be light, a breath had been taken before the words that brought about creation. Before that spark, an influx of air was needed to make the first sound. And now as those on stage hauled back curved swords, the beast did not think of the moment of creation. It turned its head to the side, exposing more of its neck, brave martyr with chest expanded in defiance of the firing squad. All protest came then but not soon enough. Surrounding the animal, they made deep cuts. Swathes opened in the paint to reveal striated flesh now exposed to a torch-lit, theatrical, cruel atmosphere, exhilarating but more sin than sacrifice forgiving all transgression.

  The hacked animal held its eyes open toward the audience, as though it were the intention of an unseen director, some sadist interested in silencing the crowd, transferring the animal’s guilt for everything personal and political to everyone in the crowd. Each hack of the long curving blades opened spaces in those watching, whole segments of midsection exposed. What impatience! A sort of purely human mode of thinking, the only species that believed in magic words. Alakazaam! Open sesame! All the world’s an oyster if the right words open the shell. The original scapegoat outcasted, the Roman practice of stoning and heckling and driving a select poor soul out of the city into the wilderness to bring about good luck. And now the one meant to bear the burden was gone, the burden dispersed onto all shoulders, or just mine, though I believed that the silenced crowd understood what had happened.

  The show was over, and once returned to urban wilderness, all guilt transferred from its temporary position in a green kangaroo to everyone who was there. Not bad for a dime. I looked the animal in the eye as the crowd trailed out, overcome, assured that infinite space inside itself was all the beast could see.

  IV

  A slushy night, early February 1909. The air seemed thick as though there would soon be sleet. A little thicker, everyone would be blinded by it. Thicker still, it would suffocate, like airborne cotton. Cobblestones were slick. Shops were shuttered. The prevalent scent was horseshit.

  A chill entered my body. My feet bare, hands and head exposed except for the light veil, I needed to wear a fur, a cape, or maybe even a rug, some burlap.

  I wandered east past Independence Hall and toward the river until, on Second Street, I came upon a tavern, lit with electricity,
radiating human warmth. The separation between myself and those inside could not be more clear. Frosty extremities and clouds of breath emphasized the difference in temperature. Those in there only wore shirt sleeves. Stearns’s people no doubt, or those who aspired to his state, enjoying themselves as though Misery, Starvation, Infirmity, and Death pursued no one nearby.

  An alley led around the tavern, a freestanding structure, a meeting house more than a hole in the wall, a place restricted by price and an air of solidity that might scare off anyone without the means or ability to affect them. All structures offered some architectural deviance to exploit. In narrow spaces concealed by shadows, this was the natural habitat of thieves, and with nothing more than all worldly sin upon my cold human shoulders, I might as well steal some clothes.

  The kitchen entrance was unlocked. Potatoes, garlic, onions, carrots, turnips, cloves, a storeroom for stock ingredients. How easy when hungry to find what’s necessary. Foxes take advantage of the open coop. But tonight was different, the target was disguise and warmth. Hat and coat should not be a trouble, gloves and shoes that fit would be more difficult. There was spirited music on guitar, flute, tambourine, plus some singing, not the worst way to pass an evening sheltered from the elements.

  I made my way toward the merriment. I told myself I am not a beast. I am a burglar, a man in need. Someone pushed past me, a teen moving too fast to worry if the wedding-dress wearer were woman or not. I heard him muttering in the storeroom as he chopped vegetables and tossed them in a tin bowl. The cold in my extremities was now replaced by nerves. Just a swinging door between where I stood and what must be the main room. No way around it. The same boy pushed by with a tin of whatever he’d needed. I followed him through the door, riding the slipstream of his movements. I was either invisible or thought a peculiar element of the evening’s help.

  This was the room I had seen from the street. Nothing ostentatious about it. Electric candelabra emitted an even, odorless light. Gathered around a table a group played and sang, as others leaned close at other tables, chatting, arguing, reveling. All that could be seen in the windows was the reflection of the room. All that happened here was all there was in the world.