“What’s she doing here?”
“Well, I figured, better safe than sorry. There’s been some vandals in Tarantula—killing birds, breaking windows, even burned down a kid’s playhouse. I figured they might’ve seen the hearse.” He rubbed his eyes. “Madge’ll keep a lookout ’til we’re back.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“A man needs someone to keep him warm at night. Horse doesn’t need to be a thoroughbred to pull the cart. Seems you know that well enough.”
“I love Nepenthe. I’m not ashamed of her. I wouldn’t be with someone I was ashamed of.”
“I didn’t say I was ashamed.”
“That’s right. You didn’t say anything about her at all.”
A loud shriek came from the direction of the house. Seconds later, Marzipan appeared at the door, wearing an eyelet bonnet and carrying two suitcases. She appeared unruffled as she made her way down to the Chrysler and began strapping suitcases to its roof. Then she walked around to the passenger’s side and let herself in. She sat shotgun, directly in front of Webern, and in this new space he noticed for the first time her peculiar smell: musty and sweet, like a fur coat stored with sage leaves and rose petals.
“So, are you driving me to Little Falls or not?” Webern asked. “Because I really need to leave. Right now.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to stay for the services.”
“I figured you wouldn’t want to stay with Bo-Bo while she died. And I was right. You left that up to me.”
Raymond’s breath whistled. “I never thought a son of mine would grow up to be so cruel.”
“Maybe I learned it from you, Dad.” Webern kicked the back of the passenger seat. His tennis shoe left a scuff.
Webern tried to sleep all the way to Little Falls. But he couldn’t stop himself from waking up from time to time, and when he did it was invariably with confusion. Once he thought that Dr. Schoenberg and Nepenthe were in the front seat, navigating the vehicle down the ugly road to Lynchville. Another time, Marzipan’s quiet whimper brought to mind Fred and Ginger, growling from their cages in the jalopy. The last time Webern woke up, he thought he was in the old Studebaker with his father and mother side by side in the front seat. Even after this illusion fell away, he kept staring at his father’s craggy profile for a long time, trying to get it back.
As the road snaked through green cornfields toward the big top, it started to strike Webern as incredible that he’d lived the life he had for so long. Back in the days he’d spent manacled in a back brace, propped up at a desk in a classroom squeaking with chalk and clicking with overhead projector slides, he’d dreamed of one day travelling to a different world, full of festivals and costumes, exotic sights that could compete with the copies of National Geographic he paged through during study hall. Now here he was, about to step through the door of a boxcar into a magical room filled with forbidden herbs and growing candy, where a girl lay waiting under a Mexican blanket, naked except for her scales. Webern tried to feel relieved to be back, joyful even, but he couldn’t shake off a persistent, gnawing ache. It was as though his life at the circus, with all its pleasures and excesses, its gorgeous eccentricities, was a painting he’d never get to climb back into.
“Here we are,” said Raymond, turning the car into the patrons’ parking lot. White paint, still glistening wet, marked spaces on the dusty ground. Webern started to open his door, but before he could, Raymond cleared his throat. “I hope you get along all right. With your work, and your—lady friend.”
“You, too.” They still hadn’t talked about anything, anything, and knowing his father, they never would. Webern gripped the handle of his bag. “Listen, I know—I know this has to be hard for you, and I didn’t mean—”
“Never mind that. It’s been good seeing you again. Don’t be such a stranger.” Raymond hesitated. “I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for your posters.”
“Well, don’t hold your breath. It’s not like I’m a high wire act.” Webern looked down at his foot and willed it to stop tapping. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do, okay?”
“Come to think of it, son, there is one other thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Raymond removed his hat. He glanced significantly at Marzipan.
As the Chrysler pulled away into the warm mid-afternoon, Webern and his inherited chimpanzee walked in the direction of the freak housing, carrying their respective suitcases. Marzipan seemed to take her change in surroundings in stride, hardly glancing up as they passed a team of practicing fire eaters and the elephants getting hosed down with Fat Rhonda. None of them paid any attention to Marzipan either: it wasn’t like they’d never seen an ape in a bonnet before.
Webern was marveling at her resilience as he climbed up the steps to his cabin and pushed open the door. But as soon as he stepped inside, all his other thoughts fell away. Because there on the rug stood a beautiful young stranger, wearing only a pair of underpants and a beaded necklace, looking herself up and down in the mirror.
She was standing with one arm outstretched, snapping Polaroids of herself. A pile of shiny photographs in various states of development lay scattered at her feet.
“Bernie,” she said, turning to look at him. Her voice sounded light and breathless—the voice of someone who’d just arrived. Before Webern could answer her, the flash snapped again. A permanent likeness of her expression—eyes wide, lips slightly parted—seared itself onto a square of paper. She popped it out of the camera’s back and tossed it down to the floor.
“Hi,” said Webern. He stared at her skin, pink and unblemished as a mermaid’s newly formed legs, and for an instant he knew he had to be in the wrong boxcar. Then a feeling crept over him, a feeling he’d known since childhood, a feeling he thought of as the opposite of recognition. It was the feeling he’d had when he’d woken up in his room back home, then realized he couldn’t move because of the body cast; the feeling he’d had when he called his mother’s name in the night, then remembered she would never answer him again. It was the feeling that nothing was familiar anymore. Webern thought of the way Nepenthe had looked just before he’d left: naked, sated, her eyes glowing the dim soft green of the ocean floor. The eyes staring at him now were the same, but all wrong.
“So, what do you think?” she asked. “I guess this is what you miss when you leave for a couple days, huh?”
She stepped back, as if that would help him take her in all at once. But the longer Webern looked at her, the more she began breaking into shapes: the hollow of her neck, the knob of her ankle, the curve of her hip, the whorl of her ear. He couldn’t hold her together in his mind.
“Bernie, are you okay?”
“I just need to be alone for a minute.” He sat down on the floor.
“What’re you talking about? You just got home! I’ve got so much to tell you.” Nepenthe walked over to him and unceremoniously yanked him up by the hands. Her palms felt smooth and slightly greasy; once he was on his feet, they slipped away easily. “Look at me!”
Webern tried to, but it was hard to keep his eyes focused. Nepenthe’s face floated above him.
“I mean, you haven’t even asked me what happened yet!”
Webern picked up a record sleeve from the couch; unreal psychedelic patterns swirled up at him. Count Five, Cartesian Jetstream. “Okay, what happened?”
“Thank you. Finally. So, Venus and I met this guy, this dermatologist. A classic oral character, this guy. Anyway, he had this whole bag of lotions and he asked me—”
But Webern wasn’t listening anymore. He had dropped the album cover and was staring at the Polaroids on the floor. In them, Nepenthe was mugging for the camera: leaning against the wall, a clove dangling from her lips; lying on the bed wearing nothing but a pair of high heels; sitting cross-legged on the couch with a white feather boa around her shoulders—a boa he’d used in one short-lived sketch where he�
��d played a chicken learning how to fly. If Nepenthe herself was impossible to take in all at once, these pictures encapsulated her beautifully. She was a voluptuous girl with the pouty, pillowy lips they used to call a Cupid’s bow, a girl with the body of a nightclub singer who lies on the piano lid and whispers into a microphone. Her breasts were just big enough to make other girls call her easy without knowing her name. At least, they would have at his high school.
He reached down and peeled back the negative paper from one photograph that still lay shrouded on the floor. In it, Nepenthe leaned over his desk, her bosom pressed against his clown notebook, her soft mouth slightly ajar. He felt a surge of arousal tinged with guilt before he remembered he was looking at a picture of his girl. His girl. She was still talking.
“—but I guess it worked,” Nepenthe was saying. “Wait. Let me show you something.”
Nepenthe hurried over to the bed and pulled a cardboard box out from underneath. In the open carton, Webern almost expected to find the real Nepenthe, crumpled and folded with dead, glassy eyes. But instead, he saw the box was half-filled with her scales. They looked pitifully small without her body inside them. Webern picked up a scale and held it between his thumb and forefinger. It was already brittle, turning translucent; through it filtered only the palest, most diffuse kind of light.
“Gross, right? But I figured I could sell them at Parliament. Souvenirs, you know? Like Brunhilde used to do with her beard hairs.”
Nepenthe grinned. Then she did something Webern had never seen her do before. Her hair was falling into her eyes, and she raked it back, away from her face. An unveiling. He’d never noticed it before, but she had a slight widow’s peak. Her face was heart-shaped.
“Are you going to stay like this?” Webern asked.
“Fuckin’ A! He gave me a lifetime prescription. Weren’t you listening?”
Webern sat down on the bed. His mind was racing. As Nepenthe flung herself down beside him, he thought of the first time he’d undressed her, the way she’d yielded, as if he’d been prizing away the last of her secrets. But he hadn’t been. Nepenthe had this skin all along, just beneath the scales she’d shown him. Webern felt tricked. He began to remember the old necessity of hiding his body: the lumpy sweaters, the tight-closed blinds. When Nepenthe ran her hand over his hump, he shrank away. She glared at him accusingly. A small line appeared between her eyebrows. She had a tiny mole, a freckle really, high on one temple.
“You’re not even happy for me,” she said. “The best day of my life, and you’re not even happy for me.” She held the camera at arm’s length and snapped another picture. This time, both of them were in the shot. Nepenthe popped it out of the camera, then flapped it back and forth in the air, to make it develop faster. “The happy couple. Jesus God. Say something, won’t you? Don’t just sit there like a zombie.”
“I’m sorry.” Webern covered his face with his hands.
“Hey, how’d that thing get in here?”
Webern looked up. Marzipan had finally come inside, carrying their suitcases.
“Just put them anywhere,” Webern told her.
Marzipan dropped them where she stood. She folded her arms.
“Whose is it?” Nepenthe wrinkled her nose. “Wow, it smells like mothballs.”
“She’s my grandma’s. Her name’s Marzipan.” He plucked at the Mexican blanket. “I guess I’m taking care of her now.”
“For real?” Then Nepenthe realized what he meant. “Oh. Shit. I’m sorry, Bernie. No, I really am. I can’t believe you didn’t tell—well, whatever. I’m a bitch.” She paused, as if waiting for his grief to pass. Then she added lightly, “Does it—does she do tricks? Maybe you can use her in your act.”
“I don’t really think she’s that kind of monkey.”
“Maybe she is. Look, she’s smiling.”
Across the room, Marzipan was baring her teeth.
“No, she isn’t.”
“Yes, she is.” Nepenthe spoke with authority: “This is a trained ape.”
Webern shut his eyes. Hesitantly, he touched Nepenthe’s back. It was smooth, smooth, smooth—except for the one scale she’d missed, a brittle husk still clinging to her left shoulder blade. It came loose as soon as his hand touched it, but Webern held it in place against her skin for a long moment before finally letting it drop.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The stilt walkers moved precariously above the midway. They sidestepped an exotic dancer, a half-dozen tame peacocks, and a little girl carrying a basket of piglets. They teetered by a pair of mechanics who bent over a dissected clown car, fingers blackened with grease, and three equestrians who were washing their tights in a vat of pink lemonade. As they balanced on their stilts, they juggled: one tossed batons, another bowling pins, a third casaba melons. They wore fringed jackets and armbands with fluttering ribbons, and impossibly long seersucker pants, and enormous papier-mâché heads with eyes that moved and mouths that opened and top hats that sprouted real flowers. It was a brand new act. Even some of the vendors stopped pulling taffy or frying corndogs to gawk. But when Webern passed them, he didn’t even slow his pace.
When he pushed past the animal trainers and the roustabouts, the strongmen and the acrobats, he saw only one thing: the broad, straight shoulders, the muscles and the height, of the men who worked alongside him in the circus. Webern wondered if Nepenthe had been outside since her transformation, if any of these men, catching a whiff of her perfume, had turned their heads in her direction, if they’d whistled or nudged each other, or, worst of all, stood with mouths ajar in respectful silence until she disappeared. He thought of her, in an angora sweater and a tennis skirt, eating an ice cream on the midway, and the thought struck him as obscene. Now that she’d shed her scales, along with the gloves and scarves she’d worn to conceal them, it was like she was walking around naked for everyone else to see. Smells of hay and excrement, fresh paint and old candy, filled the air as Webern stepped under the big top’s awning into the hot, sawdusty shade. The other clowns were there already, practicing in the farthest ring. Webern passed the elephants Stanley and Hortense, who were rehearsing for the daintiest tea party they could manage, and climbed up into the empty stands. As he moved among the bleachers, he looked down, seeing, for the first time in a long while, what the audience saw: the sheer size of the arena, the weathered red and yellow canvas stretching forever upwards like the wind-worn dome of a hot air balloon.
Webern sat down on the bleachers. When he’d left, Nepenthe had been digging through her trunk, searching for the scantiest clothing she could find. Her face had flushed pink with exertion as she tossed muumuus and trench coats over her shoulders. She’d cursed when her clove had burned a hole in a rumpled tie dye T-shirt, but she’d pounded out the flames with a clown shoe and kept on searching for some long-forgotten halter top. Now, here in the dusty ring, Webern felt a kind of relief. At least he still could escape into this.
Even though they weren’t in costume, Webern saw right away that the clowns were practicing a version of his Martian act. Happy Herbert, playing the lead, moved stiffly, robotically; he held his arms as straight as rocket launchers and kept his eyes wide and glassy and fixed forward, mechanically swivelling his whole head when he turned to look at something. It was a typical performance for him: at the first sign of strangeness, Herbert always turned his character into a cartoon, an instantly recognizable grotesque that mimicked the minor characters of TV sitcoms. When Herbert played a clown policeman, he became all swagger and billy club; when playing a drunk, he continually stumbled and hiccupped, never colouring his portrait with the various shades of rage, sorrow, and merriment he so vividly displayed most nights at the Clown HQ. Now, as a spaceman, he was no different. The tin soldier walk, the blank expression, had been stolen from a million mediocre sci-fi movies—movies that Herbert had no doubt glimpsed on drive-in screens over the tops of fences Friday nights when he an
d his hometown buddies rode on the back of a pickup truck to the empty field where they would huff paint thinner and tip over cows.
Much as he wanted to, Webern couldn’t look away. It was almost impressive how completely Herbert had missed the point. The Martian was supposed to be like a child, seeing everything on Earth for the first time; his wonder and curiosity were meant to reveal the strangeness of ordinary objects—a telephone, a lamp post, an umbrella. Herbert had only seen the spaceman’s strangeness, and had turned him into a figure of ridicule. It made Webern sick, but in a way it was comforting, too. It would have been humiliating to see Herbert outdo him at something.
The other clowns wrapped up the rehearsal with the usual backslaps, friendly insults, and idle horseplay around the scenery. It wasn’t until they began to part ways that Pipsqueak spotted Webern in the stands.
“Hey guys, look who’s back.” Pipsqueak bounded over. Up close, Webern could see he still had on eyeliner from the last night’s show. “Heya, Bump! How’s tricks?”
Webern tried to smile. Pipsqueak’s grin faded.
“My condolences.” Silly Billy strode up with his hand extended for Webern to shake. Webern wondered how he had heard about Nepenthe until Billy added, “I lost my grandma a few years back—she keeled over, sitting right next to me in church. Now there’s a shocker, I’ll tell you. Boy, you shoulda seen my face.”
“See, it wasn’t that bad. With Bo-Bo, I mean. She was in her coffin with the lid shut when it happened. But I’ll probably have nightmares about it anyway, you know?”
Webern realized he was still shaking Silly Billy’s hand. Hurriedly, he dropped it and wiped his moist palm on his pants.
“Sounds like you kinda jumped the gun on those funeral arrangements.” Pipsqueak exchanged glances with Silly Billy.
“You okay, man? You need a cup of joe or anything?” Silly Billy stepped aside as Happy Herbert blustered up to give his regards. The trio of clowns, all scrutinizing him so closely, reminded Webern of the doctors who once stood over his hospital bed, alternately prodding him and holding X-rays of his hump up to the light. The illusion held until the short, pudgy doctor in the middle suddenly squeezed Webern’s hand in his two fists and began to pump it aggressively. Webern blinked and yanked his fingers away from Happy Herbert’s.
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