A writer named Paynes knew how to work the gaff and he'd hit it big with his first couple of books–bestseller lists, movie deals, television, all the rest of it. He was out of his head, that much was obvious, but his timing had been perfect. They needed somebody to stir the pot again.
Paynes bought out nearly the entire city block, four or five warehouses at least, even the rubble of empty lots where the bag ladies and the zealots and the mainliners crawled among dog shit. He'd spent time in the nuthatch and had brought the asylum sensibility back home with him. From what I'd heard the space inside had now been split into a hundred separate areas, maybe more, including private suites, museums and exhibit halls.
There were even a couple of stages where circus acts trained the high- and low-wire routines, dancing French poodle performances, live theater where they played out scenes from Odets and Orton. TV and film sets where they shot children's morning programs with lots of dinosaur costumes and moon-eyed puppets, and pornos with hermaphrodites ugly as three-toed tree sloths clambering on top of double amputee toothless dwarves. It had its own irony, satire and breathless plausibility. Madhouse. Anything was possible, which I supposed was the whole point.
I watched the place engulf a Fedex carrier and two Chinese delivery kids in the course of a weekend. Anyone with a crazy burning hurt who went inside the Works never came out again.
No one except my father, Nicodemus, and he only in a dream.
Come find me, son, in the blackest heart of Babylon.
I figured this was the right place. They said Paynes had gone so far inside that he couldn't be found again. They said a bloody messiah stalked the halls, and that the devil chose his playmates carefully here. It was about time.
The Works drew in the tormented and the lost and the defeated, and even a Southern tent revival minister in a frock coat could find a home for his insanity in this dwelling. Maybe there was room for me too, but I doubted it.
Herzburg whispered, "They got her."
"What?"
"Somebody carried off the dead whore. Look up the block, you can watch her slicker swaying in the dark. He's got her over his shoulder."
"That gruesome bastard–"
"He's having trouble handling her weight." Herzburg took a few steps forward until he was out on the avenue, and he finally cleared the hair from his eyes so he could see it happening. "He's holding the top of her skull in place with one hand and dragging her away."
Juba scowled in that direction. "It's to be expected."
"Stop saying that, Juba," I told him. "Who the hell expects a murdered prostitute to be stripped clean on a street and her body stolen by some maniac?"
"We do," he said, and I bit my tongue until the coppery taste flooded down my throat because he was right.
I could see why my father had chosen the Works, and why the Works had chosen him. There was a thriving audience here that desired to be entertained. They wanted miracle and astonishment and resurrection. They wanted to fuck all the blistering hate out of their miserable bones and so did my old man. He could set up a soapbox in any corner and scream into their faces and slop up their sticky spirits. He must be having the time of his life.
Nicodemus was in there somewhere, and he had my son Jonah with him.
Police prowled the area constantly but never at the right times. They hit the cherry lights and blared the siren for two seconds at a clip, barely making a ripple in the sex action. Nobody really noticed and the rats continued floating by. The cops scooted out there without ever stepping from the car, amazed to have escaped once more. News crews from the major networks came by twice but didn't exit their vans. They shot the doorway and would use it later as file footage. Frail and frightened husbands hunched under their steering wheels. They all knew this was a borderland to stay clear from, but their peculiarities kept them coming back. I had no doubt that they'd all eventually be swallowed by the Works.
"Are we ever going in?" Hertzburg asked.
"Yes," I said.
"And you're certain Nicodemus is inside?"
"Can't you smell him?"
"I smell piety. But that could be you."
"It's all of us."
Juba grunted. He tilted that oversized head and said, "What do they do with their hurt?"
"What the hell kind of question is that?"
"A simple one. I haven't seen the doors open to let a single person out, not even to bring someone to the hospital or dispose of a body. For that matter, what of their children?"
"They can't be breeding in there," Hertzburg said.
"You sound so certain."
"Newborn life can't survive in that kind of atmosphere."
"No?" I asked.
"Absolutely not." He said it with a flat dullness, arms crossed over the Tarzan outfit, trying to hold himself in tight. "That ambiance is for dispossession. Ruin and havoc, not for nurturing."
It was the only time I'd ever heard him sound so completely inane and foolish. He talked out of shock, or maybe dread, which surprised me considering all he had seen. Jolly Nell giggled, a warm and small sound like a young thin girl would make. It almost brought a smile to my face as she threw her hands up, tired of us. "If a baby can be born to a carnival, it can blossom here as well. That's the nature of this place, I think. It's only another sideshow."
"Maybe you're right, Nell," I said. "It might explain why Nicodemus brought Jonah here." I gritted my teeth until the hinges of my jaw hurt. Blood called to blood, and the hammer of faith would have to fall one more time before we were through. "Let's see what this grift is all about. I'm going to find my son and then we're getting out of here."
"None of us will ever leave," Juba said from far above. "Are you fully prepared for that?"
He started into the street, followed closely by the others. Fishboy Lenny splashed after them, waving his tiny flippers at me. Juba's legs were so long that he made it across the avenue in three strides. The moon rushed into the rain and poured silver down onto him.
I tried to figure out why nobody was paying attention to any of them. Usually the whores loved freaks and made a big sloppy scene. They smoothed Herzburg's hair, twining it between their fingers, playing with his spots.
Then I remembered.
He'd been murdered. He was dead.
They were all dead, and I was consumed by ghosts.
2
I had once been the greatest child preacher in all the South. People had come from as far as Waycross, Tipton, Nashville, Greensboro, Deep River and Gainesville to listen to me wail about heavenly fire and the downfalls of sin. The blaring prayers about saving of souls had come naturally to me. Some of us are born to judgment. I learned remorse early, but not atonement.
With a ministry that brought them bustling in across the floorboards of all-night gospel sings and tent revivals, I found I had a voice given to me by God. I never called myself a healer, nor did my father, but that didn't stop the cripples from taking pain-wracked steps across the stage. They hurled their hickory canes and sprang from their wheelchairs and flung their hearing aids into the eleventh row. I gave the imploring, inspiring sermons needed to snap bones back into place and fling cancer into remission. It was easy when backed by thousands of the devoted, everybody speaking in tongues, music swelling, arms lifted to paradise. The brain can do amazing things, even in the dying and the maimed.
There is no mystery to Christ under the Big Top. You had plenty of proof whenever you wanted it. You needed only to watch the brain-damaged come and go without undergoing any change. See the blessed who aren't susceptible to the power of placebo. Their parents hoped for the miracle of the ordinary and urged them forward toward me and my microphone. The retarded limped, as they always did, and hobbled beneath the lights and weight of the dedication, grinning before the shrieking audiences, and then hobbled off again.
My father's hands were full of cash. He accepted personal checks and money orders, and he set up a system so he could take credit card donations. He liked gaud
y jewelry and wore large but flawed diamond rings that flashed the sun back into the eyes of my parishioners.
When he had both Jesus and money he didn't need the bottle anymore. Nicodemus owned forty different silk suits and enjoyed driving through the poor sections of various towns throughout the panhandle of Florida, leaving stacks of crisp dollar bills in mailboxes and stuck inside broken screen doors. He prayed with the Baptists, cleaned house with the Methodists, and baked bread in silence at a nearby monastery. He rode on donkeys and went fishing with the governor. He danced with the snake handlers yet never got close enough to the fangs.
But a child gets tired of what he's urged to do, even if he's started out in faith and love. A love for the Word, and an incinerating love for his own father. Eventually adolescence finds us all, and it drives most of us crazy in the wonderful way it's supposed to.
For other's it's the inferno. I lost my golden voice when I discovered the moist tenderness of Becky May Horner and the raw rush of whiskey. I gave up God in the middle of a blow job.
I suspect it happens like that more often than anyone wants to tell you. The hidden mysteries of the tongue matter more than all the parables and allegory of the Bible. In that moment, you realize a girl with large pink nipples and a tall glass of 80-proof of scotch can carry you further much faster than any archangel's wings.
Becky May Horner had some God-given talent of her own, for sure. She had a way of making you hold off until streaks of light crept up from the center of your brain and lit your vision with unnamable colors. She liked to make a man cry for release, and Christ, how I wept and begged, signing over bank accounts. I sometimes wondered that if my first sexual encounter had been with someone less experienced I might not have fallen from heaven's grace to an altogether different kind.
The loss of my virginity drove Nicodemus berserk. He knew it wouldn't be only my downfall but his own as well. He prayed with me long into the heated nights while the willows draped full of misgivings and the cypress led toward Becky May's hovel. She and her mama were packing up their washboards, tubs and ladder-back chairs with money enough for greater glory. He went through receipts and bank books and stormed around the house. I'd given her more than I'd thought, and there were many other town girls as well. Some I recalled, some I had only brief images of after a couple of pints of Wild Turkey.
Once it started to go bad, he helped to ruin the rest. It was in our genetic make-up, this predilection toward self-destruction. He hung in while he could, but Nicodemus had always been at least half-crazy. It didn't take very long. A few months and we were pretty much finished, scraping bottom and whoring together, passing the bottle back and forth.
That was enough to drive me from my father's house, after the liquor turned us inside out and, smirking, he tried to kill me with a frying pan.
3
I found it easy going from one sideshow to another. At sixteen, no longer recognizable as the flaxen-haired, sweet-faced ivory boy preacher, I went to work in my first carnival. With my manner I made a perfect talker, calling in the marks to witness delights and grotesqueries never seen before. They put me on a little platform and let me run the patter. So long as I had a few shots of whiskey, I didn't mind all those flaming eyes turned on me from inside the faceless mob.
I was the Talker, who hauled them in. Rubes called us "barkers," but you could never get anybody to lay down money if you only barked in their faces. You talked, and the better you could gauge a person's appetite–what he might be after inside the carny–then the finer you could judge which attraction he'd be drawn to, and send him on his way.
It's why I was also a mentalist, a tarot and palm reader, a madball seer. I'd been raised surrounded by people in pain searching for a way to set down their burdens. I dressed the part in robes and a turban and looked into the crystal ball for effect, but all I really needed was to catch a glimpse of their anguish to know what to say in order to hustle them into the tents. I could sense the big troubles left behind, and those that were still coming.
And all the while I was growing more insane.
I found myself dissipating as I walked through the rain. I hadn't had a drink in three years but now I felt the way I used to after about a half bottle of 1521 rum, when my head was just starting to ease aside from the rest of my body. It still happened like that from time to time even without the booze.
The Fedex guy who'd been swallowed by the Works stood just inside the doorway, staring forlornly at the rest of the world beyond the entrance. He might've been crying or it might have only been mist on his face, I couldn't be certain. He was still holding his package, whatever it was.
As I stepped past he whispered, "Don't come in. This is hell. I'm way deep down inside of hell."
"Man," I told him, "this isn't even close, believe me."
"Then you understand?"
"Oh yeah."
"But I–"
"It's an old story. Really."
"The agony, it's...it's...my spirit–"
He didn't have the words. It always terrified me that one day I'd lose the Talk and forget the words and be exactly like him, waving my hands about my face and stuttering in my grief.
"Get used to it," I said.
"My spirit's in pieces!" he whined. "Listen–listen you said you understood, but I think you made a mistake. I...I...listen–"
Suddenly the rage rose in me and I grabbed him by the neck. He made a soft gkk sound and started to go a nice shade of purple while I tightened my grip. He never let go of the package, though.
"Has your own father ever tried to cave in your skull with an iron skillet? You ever have your kid stolen from you? Has God ever reached down into your throat and yanked out your voice with a blazing fist?"
I eased up and he sputtered, gasping. "I–n-no, hey, I've just got to tell you this, you don't–"
"Give it a rest."
"You don't grasp what it's like, no matter what you think. You don't have any idea."
His eyes were heavy with all his commonplace secrets and I considered his sorrow. I could read his woe as clearly as if it had been swabbed across his forehead with Day-glo paint. There wasn't much, really, when you got down to it. "Go back home to your lackluster job and indifferent cunt of a wife and your three sneering children. They all want you dead."
"I know," He sobbed.
I dragged him to the door and booted his ass back out in the rain. He screamed as if I'd tossed him into an electric fence, and I wondered if the shock of freedom would stop his heart. I turned and moved through the Works, gliding, wishing myself a little further gone with each step.
"How old am I?" I asked.
"You're no longer a child," Juba said as if I were a child.
"You're twenty-five years old. Your hair is already going gray. You've squinted too hard for too long and have deeply set wrinkles around your eyes."
I hadn't looked in a mirror in months. "Yes."
"Regret is an incomparable motivation."
"You ain't kidding, Bubba."
"You're at the end of your life."
"Am I? Finally?"
Juba nodded his oblong head and it wagged wildly in all the wrong directions. "Yes, but you've more to do."
"Okay."
"There is much to atone for, and you mustn't fail at this hour. We won't allow that."
"You wouldn't, would you?"
"No."
"Thank Christ."
"Leave him alone, Juba," Jolly Nell said. "He's here. We're all here to get it done. Let's go."
I kept wandering.
Sex, humanity and delusion clambered side by side with the painfreaks and broken-hearted inside the Works. This was a school, a museum, a storehouse, a rent-controlled apartment building where nobody ever managed to leave. Oils and dyes splattered the floor, walls draped with speckled blood. Piles of clay and ash sat like ancient cairns and altars.
There were dozens of separate areas, all under the same big top. Private quarters, showrooms, lecture halls
, and sound rooms where musicians played harpsichords and bashed gongs. Pages of poetry lay strewn in the corridors, air currents causing a drift and tide, sweeping opera scores and pornographic cartoon faxes along. There was a time when I really could've gotten into this.
Scattered in the darkened halls and corners people were arguing, napping, drawing charcoal sketches, reading Plath and Thoreau and Lovecraft, getting high colonic cleansings, piercings, dialysis, and scratching each other's eyes out. It took a while to take it all in. There was a parlor where they received slowly spun glyph tattoos in nasty places, 3-D body art where the plastic jutted out of their flesh. I dug some of it. Whispers of adoration, vengeance, and admonition floated by–death threats, suicide notes, French horns blaring out of tune, and a chorus of soft sobbing that made the pulse in my throat tick harder.
I was again struck by how this type of artistic coalition hadn't been seen since Warhol's Factory, and the Works reeked of the same posturing. They were all here in their numbers, waiting for something huge to happen. I recognized them as I did any mob. A fusion of the restless and unfulfilled, the unfortunate travelers and prying voyeurs, geniuses with and without talent, and the remarkably well-off and the utterly damned. I kept waiting for somebody to go by in a platinum blond wig. Jolly Nell was right, it was just another sideshow.
"Nice digs," Hertzburg said, enjoying the action, his hair on end. He eyed the many ladies, and perhaps they eyed him as well. People laughed and pointed, maybe at me. His leopard-spotted getup wasn't out of place, and he kept hitting poses, showing off his muscles. "I'm not sure if this is the blackest heart of Babylon, but it's probably close enough."
"I thought it might be too tame for you," I said.
He sniffed the air. "They've been killing each other in here for years and stacking the bodies like cordwood."
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