Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  Webern and Nepenthe had lost the others back at the ticket counter, but they’d most likely all meet up again in the sideshow. He and Nepenthe were inching closer to it by the minute. At least he thought they were. As they passed several wagons circled round in an impromptu petting zoo, Webern craned his neck to look. Llamas paced and nickered inside, and children stuck hands wrist-deep into their fur. Right after that came a hillbilly band—washboard, tub, and saw—and then more concession stands: onion rings, chicken, corn on the cob. A calliope whistled and children threw softballs at barrels and a man with a sewing machine hurriedly stitched initials onto piles and piles of green Robin Hood hats. They were already inside the sideshow’s maw when Webern got his bearings. THE PARLIAMENT OF FREAKS, read the gilded sign.

  This low, rectangular tent looked simple enough from the outside, but inside it became a dim labyrinth of platforms and partitions. Human oddities crouched at every turn, each positioned behind a different curtain. Venus de Milo, the armless girl, played a ukulele with her toes, while the Human Torso rolled and lit a cigarette using only his lips. The Elastic Man pulled the flesh of his neck up to his chin like a turtleneck sweater. The barker stuck knives into the box where Miss Twisto balled up like a fist, and Madame Butterfly, a disembodied winged head, batted her eerily long lashes from behind a pane of glass. The fat lady sold rings the size of napkin holders, the Southern preacher-dwarf hawked miniature Bibles, and the Blockhead offered handfuls of oversized nails freshly pulled from his cranium.

  The Ossified Man, the Pygmy Princess, the Pinheads and their goat . . . as the barker guided the audience along to each performer’s tiny stage, Webern appreciated the little touches more and more: the ebony combs in the albino girl’s long hair, the jungle plants surrounding the snake charmer. He wondered just what made the crowd draw nearer instead of recoiling in disgust, as they so often did at Schoenberg’s circus. It could have been the costumes: even the tawdry elements—the armless girl’s negligee, the Human Skeleton’s rakish, pencil-thin moustache—seemed high quality.

  Or maybe it was how clean the freaks looked here, how posed. Gazing at the fat lady, whose skin glowed with rosy health, Webern grew aware of the dirt under his own fingernails, the grey tinge to his skin. He imagined traveling the country in style, reclining in a train cabin with Nepenthe as snowy fields rolled by in the moonlight. He would have a trunk of costumes, made of silk and velvet, and a paint box full of makeup, glitter, powder, and paint. They would go to cities and sleep in hotels, where they would drink candy-coloured liqueurs from tiny bottles and order hot toast from room service. And he would take a bath every single day. These freaks were so lucky. Going to work here would be like going to sleep. As they left the snake charmer’s booth, Nepenthe stopped to peer at the brittle skins Serpentina had for sale. Webern reached for his wallet and bought her one with his last dollar bill.

  “Wow, Bernie. Thanks, I guess. Although more scales are literally the last thing I need.” Nepenthe wrapped the snakeskin around her neck loosely, like a second scarf. “What do you think? Does it lend a certain—je ne sais quoi?”

  “It suits you.” Serpentina stroked the head of one of her pythons with a lacquered green talon. The other audience members were making their way toward the “Egress,” and, along with a leering patron in a straw hat, Nepenthe and Webern were the last ones left in this little booth. Serpentina leaned low over the footlights to get a better look at them. “I don’t think we’ve met. Are you in the show?”

  “Not exactly,” said Webern. His self-consciousness rushed back as she scrutinized his hump. He wondered if the other freaks had noticed him as he passed. Maybe they’d even been hurt or angry that he didn’t stop to speak to them, to acknowledge he was one of their kind. He felt vaguely embarrassed, like there was an etiquette here he’d breached, and, looking down, he dug a toe in the sawdust. “We’re just visiting. You’ve got a neat set-up.”

  “How’d you get your job here, anyway?” asked Nepenthe.

  “Practice, practice, practice.” There was something oddly fang-like about Serpentina’s smile. She stepped down from her platform and, without shyness or the least hesitation, did what Webern never would have dared. With one deft movement, she reached her long manicured nails toward Nepenthe’s face and pulled loose her linen scarf. It fluttered down around her shoulders.

  “Hey!” Nepenthe’s hands flew to cover her face.

  “Leave her alone!” Webern tried to help Nepenthe put her scarf back on; she slapped his hands away.

  But Serpentina had already seen and she stood back, appraising.

  “What do you think, Frank?” she asked the man in the straw hat.

  “Very nice, very nice,” said the leering man, stepping out of the shadows. The skin around his mouth had wrinkles shaped like quotation marks, as if he was always grinning. He even grinned while he spoke. “You live up to expectations, hon, and that’s no joke. Your friends told us all about you.”

  “My friends?” Nepenthe turned away from him as she struggled with the folds of linen. “You don’t know my friends.”

  “Sure I do. What were their names?” Frank snapped, as if he’d just summoned the memory back up. “Your lovely lady friend, Brunhilde. And of course the twins. Vlad and Fydor, isn’t that right?”

  “What did they say?” Nepenthe stopped trying to wrap the scarf around her head. She looked suspiciously through splayed fingers, her hands pressed to her face.

  “They told us you were extraordinary,” said the snake charmer.

  “What’s going on here, anyway?” Webern looked back and forth between them. “How did you meet our friends?”

  “How could we miss them?” asked Frank. He turned back to Nepenthe and reached into his jacket pocket. “Here, take my card, and feel free to stop by my office after the performance. If you and your little companion are interested, I’m sure we could all do some beautiful acts together.”

  When they emerged, blinking, from the dark tunnel of the sideshow, Webern thought of a picture book of Greek myths his mother used to read to him when he was small. He remembered pictures of strange creatures—half-man, half-bull, a boy with wings—and the ornate splendor of the Underworld. Once you ate the food there, you were destined always to return.

  “Bernie?” Nepenthe waved a wax paper bag in front of his face. She’d wrapped her scarf back around her head, but looser this time. Webern could glimpse some grey scales through the eyeholes. “You in there, kiddo?”

  Webern took a handful of peanuts, still warm and greasy from the machine. “Sorry, I’m just thinking.”

  “Oh, I bet you are.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I just think it’s cute, that’s all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That you’re jealous.”

  Blood rose from his neck. “I am not.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Nepenthe, cut it out. I’m not jealous. What would I be jealous of?”

  “Hey, don’t snap at me. I guess there’s no joking with you today, is there?”

  “You can joke. Just don’t say things that aren’t true.”

  “Okay, okay. But listen, there’s nothing wrong with being jealous. I was a little jealous too, when we saw that girl with the legs.”

  “With the legs?”

  “Or without the arms, rather. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice. She was giving you the eye.” He could tell from her voice that she was smiling. “Bet you never thought we’d be in such big demand, huh?”

  Webern followed Nepenthe into the big top. They scanned the crowd for their friends and when they didn’t find them, he followed her to a pair of empty seats deep in the heart of a curving row of spectators. But though she spoke to him, he could hardly hear her over the noise of the audience.

 
“I think Hank’s up that way. There’s some guy in a pith helmet, anyway.” Nepenthe squinted. “I had no idea this place was so huge, did you?”

  Webern glanced around. Huge was an understatement. In the centre of the arena hung a tangle of nets, loose-woven and ropey as the rigging of a ship, and dozens of slender metallic poles spiked out of the ground, leaning beneath the weight of canvas. An unseen generator rumbled beneath the seats, and everywhere he looked, white-suited candymen moved industriously through the aisles. Finally, Webern and Nepenthe took a seat by a little girl who had just gotten cat whiskers painted on her face. The child’s mother glared at them, moved herself and the child down one seat, then returned to her conversation with a bouffant-headed schoolmarm in the row ahead of her. They didn’t stop chattering until the lights went down.

  The show began with a woman dressed as Cleopatra riding an elephant, closely followed by three medieval knights. Nepenthe leaned forward in her seat. A painted lady gyrated at the end of a rope she held by her teeth; a man leapt from the back of a pure white horse. A tightrope walker strolled high above, champagne flutes balanced on the palm of each hand; down below, a pyramid of lithe acrobats tumbled, then re-formed. And even with Frank still eerily grinning in the back of his mind, Webern had to admit it was all perfect, perfect, perfect. Dr. Show always declared that circuses like this one had sold out, that they allowed money and success to soil their glittering dreams with reality, but watching this, Webern thought of Fred and Ginger, with their patchy hair, the single spotlight’s quivering beam, Vlad and Fydor forgetting their lines in the middle of a performance, his own stale popcorn and smudgy face. He let himself admit the truth: Schoenberg’s circus was actually the flawed one, the one that allowed grim fact to taint and limit it.

  A man juggled torches in the dark, Roman chariots came and went, springboards creaked, a bear rode a tricycle. By the time the clowns came out to perform their hapless fire brigade, Webern was only half-watching the action in the ring. The circus worked on him like a drug. As the buffoons smacked each another with rubber axes and squirted hoses full of seltzer down one another’s pants, he let his eyes drift shut, dreaming. In his mind, the ring filled with clowns dressed as spacemen, quack doctors, toy soldiers, Indian chiefs, racecar drivers, mad scientists, tuba players, horse-shy cowboys, Napoleon Bonapartes. It was only when he felt Nepenthe touching his arm that he looked up and realized the performance was over.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dr. Schoenberg sat on the edge of his cot, smoking. His black cigarette holder looked like a magician’s wand, but it didn’t conjure much, just vague, grey forms that hung in the air a second before disappearing. He refilled his glass with bourbon, then dropped the empty bottle and kicked it across the floor. It rolled to a stop beside the painting that lay facedown at the base of his easel.

  After his players had left him that afternoon, Schoenberg had come out from his tent and stared in the direction of the Other Circus for what seemed like hours. The sunlight made his eyes water, as they did so often these days, but still he stood there looking for as long as he could stand it. He could think of a million names to curse the performers, a million words to describe their perfidy and betrayal, but he couldn’t think of a single condemnation that didn’t also apply to himself. In the end, he’d been a fool, and that was far worse than being a villain. At least villains delivered fine speeches now and then, and their death scenes were always memorable.

  He removed the cigarette end from his holder and crushed it beneath his shoe, then took a long sip from his drink. The corners of his moustache dragged in the bourbon, but he didn’t care. Once, years ago, he’d had a moustache cup, a teacup with a ledge of porcelain inside the rim to keep one’s whiskers dry, but it had met its untimely end when a spiteful baggage handler in Marseilles dropped his suitcase down a flight of stairs. No matter. It wasn’t as though he’d be receiving visitors tonight, or indeed any time soon. The performers were gone. They’d already returned to camp—though they’d tried to sneak back on foot, his sense of hearing was keener than an ordinary man’s—and left again, off to join that obscene spectacle, no doubt. He’d heard every suitcase click shut, every tent flap zip and unzip, and though he had not gone back outside since nightfall, he could see the deserted camp vividly inside his mind: tent stakes still stuck in the ground here and there, a pair of three-legged pants rumpled in the dirt, an empty tub of Nepenthe’s skin lotion, lidless, collecting rain. For though it was not raining outside, a dry sky just felt ill-suited to the scene. He stirred a finger slowly in his drink. How could they have done such a thing? He had not been the best of masters, it was true—he still recalled with shame the incident of Brunhilde and the cashbox, and he would be the first to admit his grooming had been abominable the last several days—but really, such treachery was beyond the pale of his experience.

  “That was the unkindest cut of all,” he murmured, thinking of Webern. Just then, as if on cue, he heard a quiet scrabbling outside of his tent.

  “Who goes there?” he called.

  “It’s just me.” Webern peeked between the curtains. “Did I wake you up?”

  Dr. Show scrutinized him. Webern could hold no secrets in his face—it was this transparency that made him so appealing as a clown—but tonight his expression had a strangeness about it that Schoenberg couldn’t place. Around the mouth, Webern looked cautious, reserved, but his eyes danced with light, as they only did on evenings when he came up with a new routine for the show.

  “What troubles you, my boy?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”

  “Ah. Well, let’s hope it isn’t about your salary.” Schoenberg reached under his cot and pulled out a brand new bottle of green Chartreuse. “In that case, I’d be forced to confess a slight misappropriation of funds. Care for a glass?”

  Webern nodded and sat down on the floor. Schoenberg gave Webern the glass he’d used for bourbon; he poured his own Chartreuse into a clean cup. For a while the two men drank in silence. Webern wrinkled his forehead after each small sip; he couldn’t figure out exactly what he tasted. Dr. Show drank deeply, inhaling at the same time, like a man underwater trying to drown. Finally he spoke.

  “Did you know,” he asked, “that the recipe for Chartreuse is nearly seven hundred years old? It was concocted by an order of Carthusian monks. They persist into the present age, a mad anachronism, dedicating their lives to solitude and contemplation. They spend their days crouched in wooden huts, listening for the voice of God, deep in the Desert of Chartreuse. They chew herbs by the mouthful. And at night, they see terrible visions.”

  He chuckled.

  “Only two monks know the recipe, and they are sworn to secrecy. They sign oaths written in blood and holy water. But before they die, they must pass their formula on, lest it be lost forever, like so much ash upon the wind.”

  Dr. Show ran a finger around the rim of his glass, and for a moment Webern saw the slope of his own father’s disappointed shoulders, the sag of his loosened tie. He found himself wondering where the old man was tonight—slumped in front of the TV, maybe, or at the Barrel Head, drinking alone and eating peanuts for dinner. He looked down at his drink. “I’ve never had Chartreuse before.”

  “You can have the bottle when I’m through.” Schoenberg lifted it thoughtfully; green liquid sloshed inside. “It will make a lovely vase.”

  For some reason, this made both men laugh, Schoenberg with a loud theatrical booming, Webern bent forward as if trying to hold it inside.

  “Bernie, have I ever told you about my voyage to the Old World?”

  “Not really.”

  “I was just a youth at the time, but the experiences I had there were to forever change my art.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, Europeans have a flair for spectacle, you see. When I arrived, my notions of theatre came primarily from the vaudeville houses of my yout
h. But in Europe, theatre is everywhere. Mimes perform on street corners, puppet theatres dot the marketplace, and Shakespeare’s words echo in the public square.” Dr. Show swallowed some more Chartreuse. “I must admit, sometimes I wish I’d stayed.

  “I first visited London and the British Isles, then traveled onto the continent. In the Basque country, I joined a clan of gypsies, posing as a marriageable suitor for their daughter. But though she was a lovely creature, I had given my heart to showmanship long before. From her father, I learned the secrets of legerdemain; with her mother, I studied the reading of cards and the telling of riddles. Her cousin kept the accounts; her two brothers were acrobats, who spent the days oiling their golden bodies and wrestling the lions they had tamed from infancy. In the Old Country, the circus is not a shrine of commerce, beholden to the forces of market and the highest bidder—no. It is a sacrament, a tradition, passed down with tender care from one generation to the next. A family, bound not by money but by blood.

  “I slept in the wagon they kept filled with holy relics, some thousands of years old: the fingerbone of John the Baptist, a lock of Mary Magdalene’s hair. And older remnants still: a point of Neptune’s trident, a drop from Bacchus’ cup, a shard of the eggshell from which Helen hatched. Sometimes Molara would join me there. Molara.” He savoured the word. “I believe that was her name.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  “Oh, you know how these things go, my boy. No matter how idyllic it may seem at first, it always turns sour in the end. Nothing gold can stay.” He tossed off the rest of his drink in a single angry swallow, then refilled his glass. “Allow me tell you something, Bernie. Something I have not yet revealed to another living soul.” With one trembling finger, he pointed at the crossed blades that hung against the wall of his tent. “Do you know how I came to own those swords?”