Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  Dr. Show hefted the sword up onto his shoulder and held it there, as though knighting himself. He felt its edge touch the skin just above his collar and felt the blue-green vein pulsing there. He wondered how Molara had felt dancing with the sword, if she had ever feared the sharpness of its blade. She might have believed that any misstep she took would bring her only the pain that she deserved. Any true artist would hold himself to the same standard.

  “Acta est fabula, plaudite,” Schoenberg intoned.

  He held still for a moment and watched as his breath fogged the aged metal. Then, carelessly, he let the sword clatter to the ground, turned around, and hobbled back to his cot.

  “You old fool,” he murmured.

  Because, after all, wasn’t this the final delusion, the final shred of the screen that had once shielded him—that he still had an audience now, after all these years? That he was a failure, true, but that somewhere one-time admirers looked on, mourning amongst themselves of how far he had fallen, how he had squandered his youthful promise?

  There were no lookers-on now, if indeed there ever had been. The world was not waiting for his next act. Even Bernie had forsaken him: Bernie, who had once committed grand larceny on his behalf, whose standards were so low he saw no shame in performing alongside a sick pony in a child’s backyard. Bernie, who he’d thought would be there until the end.

  Schoenberg felt his chest constrict tighter than before, and then all at once release—as if, stepping outside for the first time in years, he was at last able to exhale and breathe in fresh air. The world was not waiting for his next act. Fans were not thronging at his door. No one in Europe remembered him; there was nothing to return to, there. What he did now mattered to no one except himself.

  How had it taken him so long to see? He could adopt a new name, a new set of tricks—he could leave behind the Cadillac, with its sticky scent of spilled dried rum, and the swords that had caused so much sorrow and made a madman track him across the world. He could leave behind the circus that bore his name, the cobbled-together tents, the ridiculous red trailer and filthy cages. He could leave behind his debts. Again, he saw the clockwork carousel roll down the hill, faster and faster, its ancient gears grinding as it thundered toward vanishing, and again he laughed out loud, but this time with real joy—with relief. What freedom it gave him, what sudden exhilarating freedom it gave him, now in his obsolescence, to begin again!

  In his mind he saw the crowds. Every night the other circus would draw them by the hundreds, and every night, he would work his way through the rows, one among many with the candy men and the peanut sellers, performing simple tricks. He would call himself Caerus the Wise. He would have a dove again, silk scarves, a pack of cards, a new top hat; he saw himself delighting a simple child who, grabbing for the hat, would demand, “Where did it go?” only to feel the bird alight on her own small shoulder. So what if the vendor of funnel cakes or salt water taffy drew her attention away the next instant? He owed Bernie an apology—no, he owed him thanks. There were far worse fates for an old man than making a child smile.

  It was then he saw the shadow Mars Boulder made as he filled the doorway of the tent. Schoenberg leapt to his feet. He bent to seize the sword from the dusty ground and held it out with both hands—an offering.

  “Please,” he said. “I’ve wronged you, I confess. Take this, with my compliments—take anything at all. I won’t protest, I assure you. There’s so little that I need.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The blood, purple-black and everywhere, didn’t resemble blood, even though it was leaking out of Schoenberg’s side. Webern held two paper cups of steaming coffee as he stood in the tent’s entrance, unable to step inside or to turn away. At first he thought that the liquid was paint, and that the stabbed body lying before him wasn’t Schoenberg but merely one of his self-portraits.

  The detectives sat Webern under a naked light bulb and offered him a cigarette. It seemed like they might have a firing squad waiting just outside. They asked him for his relationship to the deceased. They asked him how come he’d found the body. They asked what kind of a show they’d been running anyway, who would come out to see a bunch of bums playacting like they were the Ringling Brothers. They asked if Schoenberg was a pervert, a fairy, a pimp, a thief, a con man, a drunk. They showed him a telephone book. They asked if he knew Schoenberg’s record was as thick as a telephone book. They asked him to go through his story from the beginning. They asked what he was hiding. They asked how come his fingerprints were all over the crime scene. They asked him why he was crying. They asked him for his relationship to the deceased. Webern sat on a metal folding chair and looked at himself in the two-way mirror. His face started to change the way it had before, on his birthday, when he’d seen his reflection in the sword. They asked him for his relationship to the deceased.

  They shut the door of the holding pen. Through the single, high window, Webern could see a square of sky with bars on it. He imagined a little clown floating across it, holding onto a bunch of balloons. He gave the balloons names. One was Kiddo. One was Ma. One was Gram-Gram. One was Pops. One was Boss. When the door of the holding pen opened again, Mars Boulder was standing on the other side. He had on handcuffs and leg cuffs and a leash around his neck. He looked deader than Schoenberg had. He’d already confessed.

  “You stay here,” one detective told Webern. “We’ll have your paperwork through in a jiff.”

  Mars Boulder stepped inside. The door clanged shut behind him. His leash hung down his front like a joke, a giant leather necktie. Experimentally, Webern stepped up the man and punched him as hard as he could in the chest.

  “Monster,” Webern said. His voice came out low, Dr. Show’s tenor. He punched him again. Boulder’s chest felt hard, a shield of bone. “You—you—you’re not even human, are you.” He punched him again, in the abdomen this time.

  Mars Boulder coughed. He bent at the waist. Webern stared up at him defiantly. Then Mars shuffled toward one of the cell’s two wooden benches. Webern watched the leg irons drag across the concrete floor. Mars Boulder sat down heavily and folded his cuffed hands.

  “I understand,” he said. His voice was thickly accented. The metal links of the handcuffs dangled between his wrists, almost delicate, like jewelry. “You were his apprentice.”

  “Yes. I was.”

  “It is a hard thing.” Mars Boulder pitched forward. He coughed again. The bench groaned beneath his weight. “You are your own master now.”

  “They’re going to give you the electric chair.” Webern hardly knew what he was saying. “They’re going to make you eat rat poison. They’re going to light you on fire.”

  “Still, you have your trade. You must never forget that.” Mars pressed his face into his sleeves. His next words came out indistinct, muffled by the fabric.

  “What?”

  Mars Boulder lifted his head.

  “Without your trade you are master of no one,” he said.

  The two men sat across from each other for an hour, the cage full of their silence. Then the detectives sent Webern to the morgue to identify the body. Schoenberg was in an ice-cold room full of people-sized drawers. He lay on a table beneath a white sheet. A beautiful lady with thick black hair removed it with a flourish, like the conclusion of a magic trick.

  “His lovely assistant,” Webern said.

  She smiled. “How’s that?”

  The beautiful lady gave Webern a box that held the contents of Schoenberg’s pockets, along with his watch. She’d cleaned the blood off the band herself. She told Webern she’d taken a liking to Dr. Show, that it was a shame what had happened.

  “I’ve never seen such elegant hands. Not even on a woman,” she told him.

  The two detectives were waiting outside the morgue. Now that they had the killer, they looked sheepish.

  “I guess you’re free to go,” said one.

>   “But don’t cross state lines,” the other warned him. “We’ll need you to testify.”

  Webern nodded. The minute their squad car drove around a corner, he stole a child’s bike off the street and rode it to the Other Circus. By the time he got there, they were already pulling up stakes. He felt dizzy from pedaling so fast. He wandered into the sideshow, where Nepenthe and Serpentina were helping to pack up the armless girl’s booth. Nepenthe dropped the box she was holding and looked at him without saying anything for almost a whole minute, and then picked him up and carried him to their bunk.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered as she pulled the blankets up to his chin. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were passing just south of Tucson, Arizona.

  The days that followed passed in a sickness. Webern lay in the bunk he shared with Nepenthe, unable to think or talk or eat. Occasionally he forgot to breathe until the air came to him in a wrenching gasp like a sob. Sometimes Webern thought he was in his body cast again. It was the same feeling: alive but mummified. Other times, he thought he was dead and that the pain he felt came from Mars Boulder’s swords piercing the very core of him.

  Nepenthe came and went from the bed. She pressed herself close; her arms constricted his chest, her hot wet face scraped his hump. She tugged at him and pulled on his hands and cursed and rocked him back and forth. She spooned lukewarm chicken-flavoured water into his mouth and talked, soothing words that faded to nonsense by the time they reached his ears. She slid ice cubes along her scales by the dozens; one night she used a bag of ice as a pillow, and when it burst and melted she tried to change the dripping sheets, but Webern still wouldn’t move.

  Webern closed his eyes and didn’t sleep; he opened them and didn’t wake up. Inside he felt hollow. The outline was there, but with nothing inside. He was a clown-shaped hole.

  One night was very dark; the train made chopping sounds as it moved along the tracks. Webern lay bunched up against the wall. In the distance, a little golden figure was moving toward him. He got bigger and bigger as he approached: the size of a thumb, the size of doll, the size of a child, the size of an angel. A boy with golden hair, laughing; a boy almost big enough to fill the space Webern had left.

  “Jesus God, please wake up, Bernie,” Nepenthe whispered in his ear. “You stubborn fucking fool. Don’t you know I love you?”

  The golden boy waved. He turned around and retreated back the way he came: small, smaller, smallest.

  The next morning, the train had stopped. Webern climbed out of the bunk and, on shaky legs, wandered outside. The air smelled mossy; all around him, trees wept their branches to the ground. Nepenthe was sitting on a blanket, smoking a clove and reading the Encyclopedia of Psychiatric Disorders. A few yards away, two pinheads took turns shoving each other into a mud puddle. Mosquitoes swarmed in itchy clouds. Nepenthe noticed him with a little start. She pinched out the lit end of her clove before she spoke.

  “Well, it’s about time you got up. Hank quit, Brunhilde’s dead, and one of the elephants just stampeded into the swamp. It’s probably been eaten by gators by now. We lizards, you know, we don’t miss a beat.” She put the clove back in her cigarette case. Her hands were trembling. “Regular heaven on earth, right? Vacation Wonderland, that’s what the sign said a few miles ago. I swear to God, Bernie, if you’ve gone crazy too I’m going to leave this place and never come back. Even my parents weren’t this fucked up.”

  Webern sat down next to her on the blanket and tilted his head against her shoulder. After a long moment, she kissed the top of his hump.

  On the night that she died, Brunhilde unfolded the Lemon City Gazette and turned to the second page, where the murders were listed. It had been a busy week for the small town: there had been four. The first three were of local interest. The manager of the five and dime, in a jealous rage, had slain his wife and twin sons who, the article tacitly implied, might not have been his own. The other murder happened between circus people just passing through and would not have been of interest to anyone at all, had it not been for one deciding factor: the paper’s photographer had snapped a picture during the suspect’s arrest, just as the victim’s body was removed from the scene.

  The image, however sensational in its subject matter, was off-kilter in its composition and captured an instant after the real drama had effectively ceased. In the foreground, slightly out of focus, the suspect, balding and grizzled, doubled over the hood of a squad car as one officer cuffed him; the other waved a night stick, wand-like, above his massive back. In the background, a stretcher floated toward an unnecessary ambulance, draped in a sheet of ghostly white. Beneath the cloth, the vague silhouette of a man presented itself. It could have been anyone, a hero or a scoundrel, a matinee idol or a tired old man. But it was Schoenberg.

  On the night that she died, Brunhilde sat in the circus’s pie car and sipped a mug of hot weak tea as she gazed at this image. She stared for so long that the microscopic dots that composed it began to shimmer and dance on the newspaper. Then she removed her beard trimming scissors from their holster and carefully snipped the picture from its place between two columns of smudgy text. She rose and, leaving the Gazette where it lay on the table, walked back to the boxcar she now shared with Tiny Tina and Rhonda, the two fat ladies from the Parliament of Freaks.

  The circus train was not traveling that night, and the desert air felt warm and dry as she walked alongside the tracks. A breeze, scented lightly with night-blooming cactus flowers and the needles of the spiny trees—cypress—that seemed to flourish here, ruffled the long, unkempt curls of her beard.

  Inside her boxcar, Brunhilde carefully lifted her only suitcase from its hiding place on her upper berth. She flipped it open and unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the floor. Bending, she retrieved a small jar of paste from where it lay amidst the jumble of her clothing and trinkets, then sat down on Rhonda’s concave mattress. Every inch of the suitcase’s lining was shellacked with images of the burned or burning city, and it took a moment for her to find the perfect position for her new clipping in the collage. She finally fit it inside the lid, in one corner just beside a row of smoking bodies and the Zwinger Palace in flames. After pasting it in place, she shut the empty suitcase and walked outside.

  Brunhilde often doubted that it was the same sun that shone on her here as it had been during her girlhood in Dresden, that the same moon that once had floated in the sky like a white paper lantern was the one that now, here in America, shone as yellow and glaring as a neon sign. But tonight, the stars emerging from the darkening sky looked oddly familiar, landmarks on the way to somewhere she once knew.

  Brunhilde paused surreptitiously near where the roustabouts tugged and shouted at one another across the expanse of brightly coloured canvas that, come morning, would rise into the towering dome of the big top. A toolbox, a mallet, a pair of iron spikes lay on the dusty earth. Brunhilde leaned forward to grasp a coil of rope that rested beside them, then continued on her way. The empty suitcase swung lightly in her hand.

  The boxcar where Webern slept with Nepenthe was packed with bunks, floor to ceiling; between eight and ten other new circus people slept there at night, depending on who was sleeping alone. A big sliding door opened out onto the night air, and sometimes it got so hot one of the roustabouts pulled it open with a gravelly screech while the train was in motion, filling the car with a rushing wind that pulled loose blankets. It was all men and freaks in the boxcar, with the exception of a lady sword-swallower who hated the double entendres associated with her profession, who drank with the strongest of them, and who rolled out the open boxcar door one night when the train was crossing the Florida panhandle, never to be heard from again.

  It didn’t take Webern long to realize that there were two circuses. One circus faced the parking lot; it was the circus of midway games and steam calliopes, ticket booths, smiles and prizes. This circus was the dream of the real circus,
which lay facing the railroad tracks.

  At the real circus, Webern stepped over craters left by elephant feet, ducked through underwear that hung on crooked clotheslines. He stood at the window of the pie car, watching men drop quarters from their wages into a slot machine with one broken reel. He washed himself under a spigot in the open-air showers and helped Nepenthe into the costume they had her wear, a ruffled iguana head that left her hair sweaty and limp, plastered to her scalp.

  There were no children here. These performers got divorced, cashed their paycheques, talked about joining the army or quitting the sauce or going back to school. They visited the doctor, an old man who’d once botched a nose job and now worked out of a seedy bunk with a 1958 calendar on the wall and a trash can full of bloody gauze; they went to the funeral for the guy from the motorcycle cage, who’d died not from a burst tire but from diabetes. Even on sunny days, walking around this circus gave Webern the feeling of being inside a thin grey cloud.

  When he saw Vlad and Fydor, or Eng, as he seldom did those days, a look passed between them that was the opposite of recognition, as though whatever they’d endured together was rapidly being erased. Vlad and Fydor were big stars in the Parliament, glamorous and removed; they wore a sequined jumpsuit with a red lightning bolt that zigzagged between them and rarely spoke in English, or to anyone besides each other. A few months later, when a talent agent from Hollywood cast them in a Red Menace episode called “Sideshow Spies,” no one was surprised that they never came back. As for Eng, he disappeared into his new troupe of contortionists, who formed M. C. Escher patterns with their bodies on brightly coloured gym mats during slow points in the show.

  Webern didn’t start working right away. He needed time to think. He felt like he was searching, but he didn’t know for what. When Nepenthe was performing, he wandered all over, from the gilded gates at the midway’s entrance to the Parliament barker’s tilted stage, from the Laff House corridors, all glass and tinted mirrors, to the bales of hay in the elephant corral. He lingered in Clown Alley, where the jokers all bunked together, and strained to eavesdrop on plans for acts, rehearsal strategies, but usually he only overheard pinochle games and the occasional dirty joke.