Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “What’s this?” he asked, touching the letters.

  “Nothing. Doesn’t matter. Maybe I got them in a hospital or something.”

  Webern scrambled across the floor to his suitcase, then returned with the Napoleons. He kicked off his jeans, then crawled back toward Nepenthe.

  “Oh, no you don’t. If I’m naked, you’re naked, too.”

  Webern took a deep breath, then pulled off the shirt. Nepenthe touched his hump, feeling the jagged scar there.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Maybe I got it in a hospital or something.”

  “Okay, okay, explain it later.” She put her fingers in his mouth.

  Afterwards, he did explain, about the accident, how they rushed him to the hospital after the fall and stuck him back together the best they knew how. About how they saved his spinal cord, but made some mistakes; with his back, of course, but maybe also with his growing, because they never figured out exactly why he stopped at three foot ten and just stayed there. He told her about how he’d been a mess of blood and splintered bone; how he’d hit the ground flat on his back, and woke up in a body cast covered with the signatures of strangers. He tried to show Nepenthe the star-shaped scar at the base of his skull, faded now but still visible beneath the crew cut, but then he realized she was asleep, for the first time asleep right there beside him. At the time, he felt happy, but later, much later, he would wonder if she heard his story, if she understood he had been normal once—if she knew that like her, he’d never expected to turn out this way.

  The clown stands in the centre of the ring, awash in the white glow of the spotlight. He wears his checkered harlequin suit with the soft silk collar, and beneath one eye hovers a single bright blue tear. As the clown stands there, waiting, romantic music begins to play, lovely but warped and strangely distant. It is a waltz, but a waltz echoing faintly from a faraway window, a waltz played on a child’s piano left to dust in an attic.

  Before too long, the dance partner arrives. She is seven feet tall, hirsute, lumbering on paws that thump like great overturned tom-toms, but this bear is gentle, and she embraces the clown softly, almost demurely. As the two move together, always in the washed-out glow of the spotlight, the audience does not gasp at the danger, nor do they laugh at the unlikely pair, one towering, the other hunched. Rather, they watch with tenderness, nostalgia even, remembering, perhaps, an improbable dance that they once shared, awash in the softening glow of moonbeam white.

  Clown and bear part ways at last, slowly; the harlequin bows deep to his lady as she leaves. But still the distant music waltzes on, and, there in the ring alone, the clown does, too. Arms raised to embrace an invisible partner, his feet slide—hesitantly at first, then with confidence—through the half-forgotten, too-familiar steps.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The first night they spent in Lemon City, California, Webern couldn’t get to sleep. He finally got up and left Nepenthe’s tent a little before five in the morning. He’d always thought of California as a bright and sunny place, but in the half-dawn light, this beach was misty and dank, with hollow green-black crab shells littered everywhere he looked. Webern started walking over toward the big top. He might as well start building the bleachers while it was still cool outside.

  On his way up the beach, he heard a sound and looked back over his shoulder at the campsite. Al was coming out of Dr. Show’s tent, and he carried a black suitcase the size of a coffin. Webern looked away immediately and kept moving quickly toward the big top, trying not to let Al know he’d seen him. He wished he hadn’t.

  The bleachers consisted of long wooden slats and metal supports, and Webern usually hated the loud sweaty work of fitting the swinging, clattering parts together. It suited him today, though; it felt like slamming dozens of doors shut.

  Webern worked for about an hour. All around him, the orange canvas filled with sunset-coloured light. Finally he sat down on one of the benches he’d built and looked down at the ring, marked by a rope laid in the sand. Webern stared at it, trying to see the clown acts he’d performed there, Nepenthe pale green and writhing, Schoenberg directing the spotlight with an elegant motion of his hand, but all he could see was how small it was. It seemed to shrink before his eyes, tightening like the loop of a noose. He shook his head and went to get some breakfast.

  When Webern got to the campfire, only a few of the others were up. Nepenthe, still in pyjamas but wearing a bandana around the lower half of her face like a cowgirl, sat on a hunk of driftwood, gazing out at the crashing waves. Explorer Hank was morosely stroking Ginger, who’d developed a patchy rash on her stomach, and Eng was moving slowly through the exercises he’d taken to doing each morning, a kind of full-body meditation that made him look like he was karate-chopping ghosts. Webern slunk over to Nepenthe. She didn’t notice him until he sat down right next to her.

  “Hey, you snuck up on me, kiddo.” Their married-couple phase had ended a few days earlier. “Isn’t this ocean incredible? I was going to write a poem about it, but the whole subject’s riddled with clichés.”

  Webern laid his head against her shoulder. The waves were bigger here than they’d been at Paradise Beach—bigger and colder, too. The colour of iron.

  “Al quit,” he murmured.

  “Really? How do you know?”

  “Saw him. It was his turn for spotlights tonight, too, the jerk. Ten bucks says I’ll wind up having to do them tonight.”

  Nepenthe lifted her bandana to sip thoughtfully from a chipped Donald Duck mug. “Well, I can’t say I blame him. Maybe he got a better offer. If I had someplace else to go, I sure as hell wouldn’t be eating cat food out of cans Dr. Show found on the beach.”

  “It was tuna.”

  “So he said. It was kind of hard to know for sure with the labels all peeled off like that.” The water reflected metallic in Nepenthe’s eyes. “You know, Brunhilde’s been saying we should unionize. It probably wouldn’t make that much difference, but I know what she means. Things can’t go on like this for much longer. It’s not healthy.” She took a peach pit out of her pouch and held it up to the light. “I can’t even remember the last time I had one of these with fruit on it.”

  Hank scratched Ginger under the chin.

  “What the heck’s going on, baby girl? You’ve lost a whisker now,” he said to the cat. “And that isn’t good, oh no. You need your whiskers the way lil’ Bernie there needs his glasses. So you’ve gotta stop pulling your hair out, oh yes you do.”

  Webern took Nepenthe’s hand in both of his and kissed the softer part, between the fingers. Some distance out from shore, a white sail billowed in the wind.

  Webern pushed and elbowed and sidled his way to an empty seat in the middle of the most crowded row of bleachers. His floppy shoes slapped the ground, and his loosened tie swung wildly to and fro. He held an enormous bucket of popcorn with both hands; with every step he took, he managed to douse the audience with another fistful of kernels. By the time he reached his seat, the bucket was completely empty; in lieu of discarding it, he turned it upside down and dropped it over the head of a middle-aged man sitting directly in front of him. Inside, he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d been using this same batch of popcorn for over a week, and it was getting incredibly stale. Now he was finally out.

  Instead of performing his whole routine, Webern had agreed to warm up the crowd before the evening’s show began, but except for a few titters here and there, he wasn’t sure he was making too much of an impression. The middle aged man pulled the bucket off his head and tossed it away without so much as glancing at him. Somewhere behind him, Webern heard the unmistakable, and terrifying, sound of a child’s yawn. He turned around and, rubbing his eyes sleepily, yawned right back. Time to make himself comfortable. He pulled off his floppy shoes, revealing a pair of red and white striped socks with a noticeable holes in the toe, then stretched his legs as far as he could and s
macked the middle-aged man with his heel. Served him right. Scowling, the guy turned around—finally!—and, murmuring gravely, Webern mimed elaborate apologies. He removed his oversized, limp-brimmed fedora. Beneath that was a straw porkpie hat, a piece of wheat stuck jauntily in its red, white, and blue band. Webern shook his head, continuing to murmur, and with a flourish removed the second hat. Beneath that was a baby’s bonnet.

  A high pitched whistle trilled offstage. Webern pulled on his shoes and hats and, with deep bows to the crowd, sidled his way back out of the bleachers, leading with his hump. He made a show of moving unsteadily, clumsily, down to the ground, but as soon as he was out of sight, he scrambled to his post at the top of the ladder. It was just as he’d predicted: tonight he was working the lights.

  The splintery wood creaked beneath him as he carefully took his seat on the narrow top rung. He tried to keep his mind off the twelve feet between him and the hard dirt ground—more than triple his height. Perched there, high above the top row of bleachers, he had a god’s view of the audience, but there wasn’t much to see this evening. Two tow-headed boys took turns snapping each other with a broken rubber band; a sad looking old lady knitted a shawl that was already unraveling around her narrow shoulders. The middle-aged man, who Webern now noticed wore some vaguely institutional coveralls, still sat speckled with popcorn kernels. Webern couldn’t imagine how they felt, squirming on the hard benches he’d helped to build; he couldn’t guess what had brought them there. He snapped off the houselights and waited a long moment in the smoky dark.

  Finally, he switched on the spotlight and swung its beam in a slow arc to Dr. Schoenberg, who had just entered the ring through the flaps at the opposite end of the tent. The big top wasn’t big enough to conceal the performers offstage, so the troupe stood just outside, huddled near the makeshift entrance, whispering to each other and listening for their cues. In the first few weeks after he had joined the circus, Webern had liked those times best, had savored the anticipation, the tenseness he felt before unicycling or tumbling or dancing into the light. Those moments had a kind of ritual significance to him, as though, when he stepped through the dirty canvas, he would come out transformed, painted a shade too resplendent for even him to imagine. And, despite their grumbling and gossip, their yawns and last minute smokes, he had always suspected that deep down, the other performers felt the same. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was better to be up here, with the hot metal of the bulbs’ casing burning his hands, than out there in the night, surrounded by a crew of players who, come morning, might well disappear down the road, making their short journey back to the land of strangers.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Schoenberg intoned, “boys and girls, tonight I present for your approval a wondrous exhibition. In my travels around the globe, I have assembled a collection of human oddities which reveal the darker side of our Maker’s genius. This evening, for your elucidation, I will introduce the malformed, the twisted, the shrunken, contorted, gifted and strange—anomalies that lie beyond the understanding of medical science, creatures whose existence may lead you to question the very tenets of your cherished philosophy. Once visited by these spectres, you may find yourself forever changed, haunted by what no man was meant to see with waking eyes. I urge you to turn back now—make your way to the exits—for the horrors that lie ahead are not for the faint of heart. But a single word of warning: should you choose to stay, please remain seated for the duration of the performance. Once brought before you, some of my creatures become petulant—and difficult to restrain.”

  An explosion of blue-white smoke engulfed Dr. Show, and Webern snapped the spotlight off—too abruptly, probably. He’d only done the lighting a couple of times before; up until Lynchville it had been Enrique’s job, and the others had taken turns covering for him while he was onstage. Tonight, though, it wasn’t just inexperience that made Webern switch off the beam so soon. Dr. Show had looked terrible out there, his eyes sleepless and hooded, his bow tie crooked and drooping. He almost did look like a man haunted by the things he’d seen. Webern quickly fitted the first coloured gel onto the light—yellow—then snapped the bulb back on.

  Eng’s act was first, and he was already out there, clad in his leotard, waiting, when the spotlight hit him. Quickly, with a dexterity that still made Webern flinch, Eng stood on his hands, bent his legs over his back until his feet rested on his shoulder blades, and began to dart around the ring. He was out of sorts, though, a bit too perfunctory and quick, and the audience clapped dully, unamazed. Only later, if at all, would they realize the impossibility of what they’d seen. Eng sprang back to his feet and twisted around at the waist till facing almost backwards. His pained smile showed the strain. Over the coughs and crackling candy wrappers of the audience, Webern heard Eng’s vertebrae pop.

  Vlad and Fydor had taken the night off, complaining of not one but two debilitating headaches, so Webern was thankfully spared their hokey patter. Instead, Brunhilde was next. Webern fixed a pink gel on the light. Brunhilde always complained that it made her look tawdry; in fact, it lent her a feminine softness, accentuating the suppleness of her strong bare arms, the smoothness of her towering pillar-like legs. But tonight, as Webern turned the beam back on, he realized that Brunhilde’s appearance was beyond salvaging. Ignoring the advice of the other performers, who always urged her to let her long gold hair go free, she’d done it up in two braids that hung, heavy and unappealing as coils of rope, down to her ample bosom. Worse yet, she’d managed to find her Viking horn helmet—Webern would have sworn he’d hidden it deep in the Cadillac’s trunk somewhere. The result was that she looked more like a Wagnerian transvestite than a bearded lady. As she opened her lips to sing the first lines of a German folk song, peals of laughter predictably silenced her. For a moment, Webern wondered if she had intentionally sabotaged her own performance, but Brunhilde’s gaze to the audience, a dagger of pure hatred, was enough to set him straight. The fact was, she still believed after everything that she looked better that way.

  After Brunhilde, it was generally Al’s turn to go. Privately, Webern never thought the big guy had been used quite right in the show. If Webern had been planning things, he would have capitalized on the otherworldly quality of giants. He might have dressed Al in animal skins and given him a rock to sit on, perhaps even powdered his face and hands and tried to pass him off as a creature who lived, solitary and thoughtful, deep in an ice cave at the very top of the world. Al’s enormous hands, long and bony and double-jointed, his stretched-out funhouse face, fascinated people, made them shiver: Webern had seen it happen. But instead of casting Al as a Norse God, Dr. Show had made a gaffed strongman out of him. Al lifted barbells made out of balloons and flexed the negligible muscles in his spindly arms, and his strength had convinced no one. Maybe it was the meagre applause that had finally driven him back out onto the road.

  Dr. Show returned to the stage. Webern could tell by the way he moved that he’d had a few swigs of something since he last appeared; he gestured grandly but less precisely now, swinging his arm back toward the entrance that no one was supposed to see, his voice rich with the kind of merriment that leads easily to tears.

  “Such horrifying visions! But now, I offer some respite. This next performance will warm the cockles of your hearts, my beloved audience. In it, you will see the lion lie down with the lamb, as it were; the amity of man and ferocious beast. Oh yes, for there is still tenderness in this world. Despite appearances to the contrary. . . . Yes indeed, oh yes indeed. At any rate, I present, Explorer Hank and his jungle cats!”

  Chuckling, Schoenberg wandered offstage. Webern switched the gel to orange and counted to one hundred before turning the lights back on. Explorer Hank took a few minutes to set up, and the clangs and thuds of his equipment filled the dark big top. Normally, Schoenberg played his concertina at this point to cover the noise, but apparently this time he’d forgotten.

  Explorer Hank was a favourite of audiences, or a
t least of children, who cooed with wonder anytime the baby tigers came onstage. Once, at a particularly successful performance, a little girl had bravely slipped from the front row when Hank’s back was turned to stroke Ginger’s humming throat, her flicking toylike tail. They had all felt the danger that night, huddled outside the tent’s back door—though small, Ginger still had teeth and claws far fiercer than an ordinary kitten’s—but the audience had trusted her completely, had even rippled the bleachers with spontaneous applause.

  Now, though, that had all changed. Fred, perched on the bottom of an upside-down trash can, looked half-grown and feral, despite the bow tied around his neck; when the lights came up he was bent double, one leg in the air, licking himself. Ginger, still small as a bobcat, was a patchwork of thinning fur and angry, irritated areas of skin. The light caught Explorer Hank still setting up a steel hoop between the cats, and he looked out at the audience blinking in surprise for several seconds before he spoke.

  “Well, hi there guys and gals, let me start out by saying that me and Ginger and Freddy here’re real glad you all came out for the show tonight. Before we came on stage, the kids were saying to me, ‘Boy, we sure hope that we get to show off our tricks tonight, Hank!’ and I was saying, ‘Gee, I do too, because otherwise I’m out of a job!’ Ha ha. We like to joke a little, the kids and me. But anyhoo, how many of you have seen a real live tiger before?”

  Whenever Explorer Hank came onstage, some part of Webern shrivelled inside. Hank was folksy, ingratiating, but he was also desperate for approval, and the need shone on his face like sweat. He was struggling now, losing ground. The two cats, trained to bat a beach ball back and forth, balked tonight; Hank tossed it at Fred, who batted it off stage, hopped down from his trash can, and slunk away in the opposite direction. As Hank ran to scoop up Fred and return him to his post, Ginger jumped down from hers and began rubbing the abraded skin of her back on the tent’s dirt floor. All the while, Hank kept up a stream of patter that sank from self-deprecation to apology to muttering to himself: “There you go, now stay, if I can just get these guys to stay put a minute—oh no you don’t—okay, then I’ll—” By the time he finally got the two cats ensconced again, the crowd was so restless he had to raise his voice to be heard.