Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “He named you after the man he’d killed. He believed you were his last chance to make right.” Bo-Bo opened her eye slowly, as if waking from a dream. “Sometimes I wonder if that name wasn’t a curse on you.”

  Webern drank. The Scotch went down smoother the second time.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” he asked.

  “Raymond’s just a man, Bernie. He’s had some very bad luck.” She smiled wryly; toward the back of her mouth, silver flashed. “He had a terrible upbringing, you know.”

  “Let’s not talk about my dad anymore.”

  “Fair enough.” Bo-Bo held out her glass as Marzipan refilled it with Scotch. “There’s something I want to give you. Something I haven’t used in a very long time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Marzipan, get the box.”

  Marzipan left the room, and Bo-Bo and Webern sat quietly for a long while. With a clunka-clunka-clunk, Marzipan dragged the coffin back to the top of the stairs before her footsteps retreated beyond Webern’s hearing. Bo-Bo’s rocker creaked against the boards. Finally, the chimpanzee returned, holding a little velvety blue box about the size of a jewelry case. She handed it to Webern and he held it for a moment, imagining what could be inside: Bo-Bo’s wedding rings? His father’s silver rattle, dented with ancient tooth marks? He opened it. Inside stared a pale blue, wide open glass eye.

  “After your grandfather left us, I swore I’d never wear it again. I blamed it for drawing him in the first place.”

  “It’s beautiful.” Webern picked up her eye from the velvet. It felt like an oblong marble in his hand.

  “Don’t keep it in a drawer.” Bo-Bo finished her second Scotch, took out her teeth, and set them in the glass. Without them, her face looked like a cake fallen in on itself. “Now I’ll say goodnight. Marzipan, put some water on these.”

  Marzipan took the cup of teeth and disappeared. Webern felt a lurch inside. Bo-Bo hadn’t even smoked her pipe yet. He stood up to help her out of the rocking chair, but she shook him off. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was wheezing, and all colour had drained from her face.

  “I should call the doctor,” said Webern.

  “Nonsense, child.” Bo-Bo squeezed his arm with uncanny strength, and for a moment he felt frightened. Already she had taken out one eye and her teeth; he could imagine her nose and ears pulling out just as easily, her blue hair and her tongue, until her head was nothing but a mask of caverns. “Bed rest, bed rest, is all that man ever says. The undertaker took a greater interest in my health.”

  Webern guided her down the hall to the bedroom, where Bo-Bo turned back her covers and folded herself under them with her old deft precision. It wasn’t until she looked back at Webern that her face took on a strange expression, the changeful look of a fading dream.

  “Bo-Bo?” Webern felt very far away from her. He tried to make his voice sound manly and sure. “Bo-Bo, I’m calling the doctor right now. Are you all right?”

  “I am.” Bo-Bo drew the covers up to her chin. “Now take that monkey and get out of my house. I don’t want you to see me die.”

  Webern dressed Marzipan in the pair of old yellow overall shorts from his luggage and led her outside, first carefully through the yard, among the metal jaws, and then down the sidewalk beneath the blooming trees.

  It was a beautiful summer night, with a sky so dark blue and glowing it could have been made of stained glass. Marzipan’s fur ruffled in the breeze, and Webern thought of how Bo-Bo used to trim it with a pair of rusty, grinding scissors. He wondered who would do it now, and he felt a pressure in his chest so strong that it was like his own heart was choking to death.

  Marzipan’s feet slapped the pavement as they walked through the night-dark town. Webern played games in his mind: he imagined that he was a little boy, and that Marzipan was his kid sister; he imagined that he lived in a house with Nepenthe, that people came to his own backyard to see his circus shows. He imagined that he was a doctor and that tomorrow he was shipping off to Vietnam, where he’d be made a hero for gathering up all the blown-off limbs of his fellow soldiers and gluing them back into place.

  When he got tired of these games, Webern tried to remember the little train-car room he shared with Nepenthe, down to the very last detail. He tried to picture her lying there, her hair a mass of loose curls, her scales drinking in cool moonlight and steaming off heat. He loved her so much it twisted in him; he almost couldn’t believe that he would get to go back to her and that woozy train-world, where bottles rolled across the floor and the world slid by endlessly, too big to ever use up.

  Webern and Marzipan stopped in an all-night diner, with glossy laminated menus that showed pictures of the food. The fry cook looked askance at Marzipan until she pointed to the Denver omelet. Webern drank a glass of orange juice with ice cubes in it that chattered. Then they walked back to the house and sat on the stoop for a time.

  As the light began to grey the sky, Webern was struck by how much Marzipan’s wrinkled, malleable face resembled Bo-Bo’s. He wanted to warn the chimp that her life was about to change, but he didn’t know what words to say. So instead they sat there without speaking, completely silent except for the heavy animal sound of Marzipan’s breath. Only after morning came, really and truly, and people started coming out their front doors, did Webern and Marzipan go back inside.

  “Bo-Bo?”

  Down at the bottom of the stairs, Webern found the coffin again. This time, the lid was shut.

  When Webern opened the grave-card on the mantelpiece, he found the undertaker’s number inside. He dialed it on the heavy, clanking wheel of Bo-Bo’s rotary telephone. The undertaker sounded delighted.

  “Your grandmother was a wonderful woman. So kind-hearted to send business my way. Especially at a time like this. With all the ugly rumours that’ve been circulating about me, I was starting to think I wouldn’t break even this year.”

  “Well,” said Webern. He stared at the coffin down the hall. “I’m sure they’re unfounded.”

  “Unfounded?” The undertaker said the word like he’d never heard it before. “Oh, the rumours. Ha ha ha. Unfounded. Of course they are.”

  The undertaker was still laughing nervously when Webern hung up the receiver and went into the sunroom to wait for the hearse. Marzipan was already there, hanging from the curtain rod by one hand. Webern stopped in the doorway and looked up at her. It was the first time he’d seen her do anything so monkeylike. Marzipan gazed down at him, her face moulded into an exaggerated frown. She let out a single cry—high-pitched, lingering, and forlorn—then dropped to the ground and swung out of the room on her knuckles. Webern turned to watch her go down the hallway. She paused for a moment beside the coffin, unfastened and shucked off her yellow overalls, then draped them over the lid. Naked, she swung on past, around a corner where he couldn’t see.

  Webern had never been in the house without Bo-Bo. He opened the sunroom drapes and for the first time saw the yard in daylight. It was pitifully small, with scraggly, wheat-headed grasses, shards of skeet, and a lightning struck tree that raised its burnt black arms to the sky. A dying raccoon writhed in one of the steel traps. Webern started to shut the drapes again. As he did, something dark and shapeless fluttered near the trunk of the ruined tree. But when he turned his head to look, whatever it was had disappeared.

  Webern sat down on the davenport. He took the blue velvet box out of his pocket and opened it. The glass eye felt cool and heavy in his hand. He wondered how he could contact his father, if their phone number could possibly be the same after all these years. Webern pulled off his shoes. Maybe if he dialled home, he wouldn’t reach his father. Instead, another, equally impossible person from his history would answer: his mother, his rhyming sisters, his old friend Wags, his own scrawny, fearful, six-year-old self.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Damon Fain, excitable, pink, and plu
mp as a pork sausage, walked with a prancing gait and squeezed his moist hands together whenever he cried out the names of surgical procedures in his high, thin voice. He was first in his class at medical school and had once been the spelling bee champion of the state of Indiana, two facts he never failed to mention in quick succession. The morning after he rubbed a strong-smelling, pale blue cream all over the crackled expanse of Nepenthe’s naked body, she woke up feeling itchy, guilty, and more than a little pissed off.

  She reflected that she had not been the greatest judge of character in Webern’s absence. First she’d gone with Venus de Milo to that party thrown by Killer McVeigh from the motorcycle cage; now she’d allowed a piggy little man from South Bend to touch her all over without so much as asking for his medical license. Jesus God. She could read all the Anaïs Nin she wanted, but obviously that didn’t stop her from being naïve as hell. Who was Damon Fain anyway? Not a dermatologist, most likely. Maybe he was some kind of psycho pervert who got off on smearing poison creams on sideshow girls. Later in the day she’d go blind, or crazy. Her brains would liquefy and he’d come back to kidnap her and sign her up for some sex slave ring. Yeah right. She needed to stop flattering herself.

  Nepenthe rolled out of bed and groped around on the floor for her cigarette case. She was wearing her pink robe, but, much to her disgust, the inside was now streaked with greyish-blue grease from her skin. She shucked it off and, naked, opened her cigarette case, which promptly slipped from her oily fingers onto the floor. So disgusting. This was worse than passing out in a frat house and waking up with your hand inside a raw chicken—something that had happened to a cousin of Venus’s once, if that tramp was to be believed. Already Nepenthe was blaming Venus for what had happened the night before. She reached for a green clove, then reconsidered and took out a banana stick instead. This was all getting way too weird for her. She needed to mellow out—way out.

  Nepenthe sat down on the couch, and, smoking the jay, leafed through the already-yellowing pages of the underground newspaper she’d bought two towns back. It was called Mindfücke, and although it wasn’t quite as good as L’Enrage or The Druid Free Press, it still had some pretty trippy poems and an interesting opinions page. Nepenthe started reading a piece about how Lyndon Johnson and his team of hairy-knuckled flunkies had planned to take out JFK with silent air-powered shoe guns until J. Edgar Hoover got to him first, but as she smoked, the article began to merge with the one in the adjacent column, about how drug cops—“the Man’s man”—had been digging through Arlo Guthrie’s fan mail for leads. Next to that was a political cartoon of an unrecognizably caricatured general hugging a fish. She ended up just staring at the boxcar ceiling to get a sense of reality back. The world was fucked, young men were exploding, and her legs really itched. Maybe she should just go back to bed.

  The whole situation with Damon Fain had started the night before, right before the sideshow closed up and the real circus under the big top began. Nepenthe had been terminally bored, as usual; she and Venus de Milo had been drinking Singapore Slings off and on between performances since three o’clock in the afternoon, so she was pretty soused, too. Damon Fain had come in with the last group. He’d stood in the back, but when everyone else cleared out of Nepenthe’s partitioned-off stage to go see “Tiny” Tina and Rhonda, the fat ladies next door, he’d lingered behind. Producing a jeweler’s eyepiece from the pocket of his seersucker suit, he introduced himself as “Damon Fain, MD,” and asked if he could take a closer look at her scales.

  “Whatever tickles your pickle,” Venus giggled, hopping from behind the curtain that separated their stages with a near-empty pitcher of Slings gripped in one pedicured foot. “We’ll brush your teeth for a dollar. And we’ll floss ’em for three.”

  “Can she speak?” asked Damon Fain while he bent over Nepenthe’s shoulder blades, magnifier securely in place.

  “Of course I can, you fascist quack. Get your filthy shoes off my Spanish moss.” Nepenthe had an elaborate set, complete with vines and an enormous artificial alligator made of foam rubber and latex paint. Earlier in the evening, she’d sat on the alligator’s back sidesaddle like she was riding a pony, but now she was stretched out on it facedown. She sat up and noticed, with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation, that Damon Fain recoiled when he saw the scales also covered her face. Nepenthe thought of the sharp-tongued heroines from old caper pictures. She added, “And if you try anything funny—I can scream, too.”

  “Oh. Well—” was all the good doctor could say.

  Damon Fain took his time staring at her back; he also looked at her scalp, her legs, and the skin between her toes.

  “They aren’t webbed, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Nepenthe yawned. “I’m a lizard, not a goddamn mermaid. Venus, can you pour me another drink?”

  “How long have you suffered from this?” asked Damon Fain.

  “I don’t call it suffering as long as I’m getting paid.”

  “It’s hard for a girl to make it in the world.” Venus placed a seductive foot on Damon Fain’s shoulder.

  Nepenthe looked away. If Venus hadn’t started turning tricks yet, it wasn’t because she was too subtle. Not that Nepenthe could really blame her for her desperation. Since Webern had left, Nepenthe had tried to picture what her own life would be if he never came back, and it looked pretty lonely—days at the sideshow, nights watching local girls do the twist with the motorbike riders—a lot of pineapple-flavoured drinks and a progressively messier boxcar. And now a strange fat finger probing the scales behind her ear. After a few months of this, a sweaty fumble behind the Tilt-a-Whirl wouldn’t sound so bad—not that anyone would ask her.

  It was funny: before Webern left, she had this idea that he was holding her back, keeping her from being part of the new generation she read about on record sleeves and in the rock-and-roll magazines she sought out on their trips into town. But now that he was gone, she realized that without him in her life, she’d be a total recluse—a virgin in a beekeeper’s suit. When the signs for concerts and be-ins said, “FREAKS WELCOME,” she wasn’t the kind they meant.

  “Listen, pal,” Nepenthe said, leaning over to take her cigarette case out of the fake alligator’s mouth. “Let’s cut to the chase. What can we do for you here?”

  Damon Fain cleared his throat. “I guess,” he said, “I’m more interested—heh heh—in what I can do for you.”

  “Please. Enlighten us, Herr Doktor.”

  “I’m an expert in rare conditions of the skin.” He pressed his hands together. “Scleredema—Vitiligo—Xeroderma Pigmentosum.”

  Nepenthe lit a clove. His words reminded her of the abracadabra Dr. Show used to intone before performing one of his magic tricks.

  “So which one have I got?” she asked, taking a new Singapore Sling from Venus’s outstretched foot. Her friend’s long toes uncurled from the glass.

  “It looks like lamellar ichthyosis—but not a classic case, especially if you weren’t born with it. I wouldn’t presume to diagnose without a complete medical workup.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get a—‘complete workup.’” Nepenthe exhaled; her smoke broke in waves on Damon’s face. Venus giggled. “So I don’t see what you can do for me.”

  “Just because I haven’t made a conclusive diagnosis doesn’t mean I can’t treat the symptoms. Wait.” Damon Fain hopped down from the stage and trotted over to a corner of the sideshow tent, where he’d parked an old-fashioned doctor’s bag. Jesus God. He had all the accoutrements, that was for sure. Which, if anything, could be more evidence that he was a phony. Nepenthe half expected him to put on an inflatable stethoscope and squeal, “Let’s play doctor!” but when he opened the case, she saw it was actually full of jars with prescription labels glued to their lids. All three of them peered inside.

  “Got anything in that bag for me, Doc?” asked Venus.

  It was then that Damon Fain ma
de his proposition: he’d try Nepenthe on one of his creams, and if she didn’t see a change in twenty-four hours, she’d never have to talk to him again. But if it worked, he’d get to use her name and picture in a study he was doing—plus she’d get a lifetime prescription for the medicine that cured her.

  “Wait a second. When you do a study, don’t you have to use the negative results too? You know, the patients where it doesn’t work out?”

  “Sure. But we kind of gloss over that part, you know?”

  Nepenthe thought of all the dermatologists she’d visited with her mother—the teen fashion magazines in the waiting room filled with toothpaste advertisements and prom dress patterns. Those doctors, used to a parade of shiny-haired princesses whose clogged pores or ingrown hairs were barely visible under a microscope, whose only flaking skin came from a sunburn at the Cape, had waited for her with dread. This one had come looking for her.

  “You should do it, Nepenthe,” Venus whispered. “He’s a rich people’s doctor, you can tell by his shoes.”

  Nepenthe looked down at Fain’s feet. He was wearing spats.

  So he’d followed her back to the boxcar, she’d shimmied out of her artificial snakeskin miniskirt, and after snapping on some rubber gloves, he’d kneaded her like dough. It had been the most disgusting experience of her entire life. Halfway through, she’d put down some newspapers on the floor because the thick bluish cream kept glopping onto the rug. Damon Fain’s hands were hot and alien-feeling inside the latex; he whistled songs from The Duchess of Idaho and related anecdotes about the world of competitive spelling while Nepenthe took shots from a whiskey bottle she’d found under the couch. At first she was worried about being alone with Fain, but after awhile she was glad Venus had headed out for her date with Zeus Masters—no witnesses would make this easier to forget. It felt like it took hours. All that Nepenthe could remember now was that it had been well past midnight when she’d finally shoved Fain out the door and barricaded it with a chair behind him. Then she’d wadded up the gooey newspapers from the floor and thrown them out the window at his head.