Goldenland Past Dark

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “He’s smoking stronger stuff than you, hon,” said Venus.

  Nepenthe flopped onto the couch. “The weird thing is, he actually sounded happy about it. If I thought I was going to keep living the same thing over and over, I’d probably kill myself. Then again, he also said he came here from Mars back in dinosaur times, so I guess he’s already used to it.” She raised her voice a little. “Hey Bernie, what do you think? You think Question Mark knows what’s up?”

  Webern opened his eyes slowly. Nepenthe was stretched over the cushions, her legs crossed at the ankles, her arms folded behind her head, just like a pin-up girl. She knew exactly what she was doing, and Webern hated her for it—for all of it. He hated her for the bathing suit, for the Polaroids, for the box of scales, dead and dried out and sold to strangers. He hated her for letting another man rub her skin, for letting the giant and the skeleton gawk and prod her. But most of all, he hated her for the way she was smiling at him now, as if he were any other rube she’d seen on the midway, some stranger she could test her powers on.

  “I think he’s stupid,” he said. His voice sounded tiny and childish, even to him. “Like all these stupid bands you listen to.”

  Nepenthe’s smile faded; she tossed her hair and drew it loosely into a ponytail, then got up off the sofa. “Start the record over, Venus. I want to dance.”

  Venus raised an eyebrow, but obediently reached one foot over and moved the needle to the beginning. Nepenthe got up and began to punch the air. Her hips swivelled like a hula hooper’s. With a sidelong glance at Webern, Venus joined her, her whole body swaying in lithe, serpentine motions, her feet describing tiny circles on the rug.

  “Move around a little, shortcake.” Venus jerked her bouffant in his direction. “Might do you some good.”

  “Aw, Bernie doesn’t want to. He hates this band, remember? But you know who just might.” Nepenthe turned her back toward him and sashayed toward the desk. Marzipan saw her coming and jumped up on the chair, but Nepenthe grabbed her hands before she could get away. “C’mon and cry, cry, cry, cry,” she crooned. She moved Marzipan’s shaggy arms up and down through the air. “Let me hear you cry now.”

  “Stop it!” Webern sat up.

  “Mellow out! Look at her. She likes it.”

  Marzipan glanced desperately at Webern, her rubbery lips stretched back to expose her teeth. She twisted, but Nepenthe held on tight.

  “Leave her alone!” Webern jumped up. He grabbed Nepenthe by the elbow and tried to pull her away.

  “Let go of me.” She shook him off. “You’re freaking her out.”

  Marzipan shrieked; she yanked backward as hard as she could, and Nepenthe let go all at once.

  “Damn it!”

  The chair fell over, and Marzipan toppled onto the floor.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “What did I do? What the fuck, Bernie! You care more about that goddamn ape than you do about me. She’s fine!” Nepenthe stomped her foot. Marzipan got up and rapidly swung on her knuckles out of the boxcar. “See? She’s completely fine!”

  Webern sat down on the desk chair. As much as he tried to hold them back, the tears wouldn’t stop; there was a kind of relief in such complete humiliation. Venus glanced back and forth between him and Nepenthe, then followed the chimp outside.

  “Come find me later, sweets,” she called over one shoulder. It wasn’t clear which one of them she was talking to.

  For a long time, neither of them spoke. Webern bent over the marbled cover of his clown notebook and held his head in both hands. Finally, Nepenthe put her hand on his hump. He didn’t shake her off this time. Her fingers burned there.

  “Listen,” she said. “Venus and I are going to a party tonight. You can come if you want. I’d like you to come.”

  Webern flipped open the notebook. He imagined himself cartwheeling and tumbling into the colourful pages, vanishing into a landscape of sawdust and spotlights and painted cardboard towns. He shook his head.

  “I didn’t mean to ignore you,” she told him. “Earlier, I mean, when everyone from the Parliament came by. I just figured I’d let them all get a good look. I owe them that much, at least. It gives them—I don’t know—hope or something. If that’s not too cliché.”

  “Sure.” Webern thumbed past clowns in fire trucks, clowns sitting in front of malfunctioning typewriters or haywire hair-growing machines.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to come out with us? It might be fun. You could juggle. People love it when you juggle.”

  “I just got back. I have a lot to do.” He stopped at an old drawing—the clown followed by a rain cloud he just couldn’t shake. He still hadn’t figured out how to make it work onstage. Dry ice? Lighting tricks? Some sort of projection? He traced one finger over the small, stooped figure he’d drawn in for himself. “Have a good time, okay?”

  “Okay.” Nepenthe let go. “I will.”

  That night, Webern watched the big top show from the stands. One of the acrobats sprained his wrist during a handspring—Webern saw him later, holding ice against the swelling—and the timing was off all night: the elephants had hardly finished lumbering through their tea party when a team of men wheeled out the motorcycle cage, and a pair of trapeze artists collided in midair with an audible thwack.

  Webern dreaded the clowns, but they were even more awful than he expected. Happy Herbert had replaced the Martian’s tinfoil suit with a boxy costume that made him look like a walking TV: it was ugly, but even worse, it restricted his movements, so he could only turn at right angles and couldn’t even bend his elbows. Webern fixated on that costume. He promised himself that it would be the first thing to go when he started performing with the other clowns again. He pictured himself lighting it ablaze, preferably with Happy Herbert still inside.

  He went back to the boxcar by himself. Marzipan sat on the couch, knitting. The window was ajar, and a faint breeze, along with the incredible jumble of clothes, records, clove ash, and magazines strewn on the floor, gave Webern the unpleasant sensation of walking into a home that had just been ransacked. For a minute, as he stood in the doorway, he pretended to himself that he really had been robbed—his girlfriend kidnapped, his fortune stolen!—and that, when he found Nepenthe again, tied to the railroad tracks, maybe, or shackled to a chair, she’d fall into his arms, sobbing with gratitude. But he couldn’t make the daydream come into focus: Nepenthe’s scales wouldn’t stay in place, and she kept stepping back, away from him, to link arms with her captors, a pair of broad-chested radicals whose cause she had recently joined.

  Webern shoved a few wrinkled costumes into a scarred trunk and rubbed at a sticky patch of dried Moxie with an old T-shirt until Marzipan grabbed him by the wrist. He was cursing loud enough for his neighbours to hear. It was no good anyway. The place was still a mess. He sank into his chair. After a long moment, he opened the drawer of his desk.

  Behind the box that held the Great Vermicelli was a smaller one, with pictures of individually wrapped coffeecakes printed on its top and sides. It was the box he’d gotten almost five years earlier, the day he’d gone to the Lemon City morgue to identify Dr. Show’s body. Inside were the contents of Dr. Show’s pockets. Webern set the box on his knees and opened the top. He sifted through the ticket stubs, the brightly coloured handkerchiefs, the photographs, until, down at the bottom, he found what he was looking for: Dr. Show’s watch.

  On its face, an acrobat pointed her cartwheeling arms at the min-utes and hours; on the back, the engraved words GOLDENLAND 1923 were almost rubbed away. Webern set the watch by his alarm clock, wound it, and put it on his wrist. It hung there loose and heavy, and he stared at it, thinking of the night when, like him, Dr. Show waited up for performers who were never coming back.

  Nine, ten, eleven, midnight. At quarter to one, Webern finally got up and started pacing. Marzipan looked up from her knitting with mild conce
rn.

  “Stay,” Webern told her. He pointed at the couch.

  Marzipan rolled her eyes and went back to work. Webern opened the door and stepped out into the balmy night.

  Outside, two of the fat ladies—Rhonda and Tina—staggered around the corner of a wagon, hooting, and Pigalle, the trapeze artist, stood outside her boxcar like a lanky bird with one leg bent, smoothing powder onto a fresh bruise beneath her eye. But most of the boxcar doors were shut. Arguments and laughter and the clinking sound of bottles floated from the windows.

  Webern thought about ghosts as he walked: his mother, Schoenberg, Bo-Bo. He wondered if there could be ghosts of people who were still alive. Soon, Nepenthe would be nothing but an apparition—a pink robe, thrown over the back of the chair, glimpsed in the moonlight and mistaken for something else. An empty popcorn bag tumbled along the dusty ground, and Webern froze until it passed.

  Maybe Webern himself was a ghost—the spectre of the man his father killed, the man whose name he had inherited. Or he could be the ghost of the perfect child who shattered beneath the treehouse that afternoon. After the accident, when he was still very young, he often looked into mirrors to find his old friend Wags staring back out at him. Something about the way the glass shone, the sharpness of his friend’s small face, made Webern wonder if he himself was just the reflection, and Wags was the one being doubled.

  Wags had always seemed more alive than Webern. He had popped up everywhere back in those days: in the empty hallway after classes in the elementary school, pratfalling down waxed hallways dusted with chalk; hanging by his knees in the backyard oak long past midnight. He was always performing. It was tough to know what he was thinking, because to him everything was a joke, a hook, a lead into his routine; even his clumsiness was choreographed. The first person Webern knew who was like that in Real Life—funny he felt a need to qualify it that way, “Real Life”—was Dr. Schoenberg. And even with him, the seams sometimes showed: the strain in his smile, his salesman’s overeagerness to close. With Wags, there was no difference, no line that separated the character he played from the character he was. There was no Real Him.

  “The person in the mirror is me,” Webern murmured. The words sounded like nonsense to him. He paused to grip the rusty bars of a wagon cage, just to make sure he could still feel the cool iron against his hands. He hardly noticed the sleeping tiger that lay on the straw inside.

  “Say there, fella. Better watch where you’re putting them paws.”

  Webern’s lips moved involuntarily. He took a giant step backward and looked up. Sometimes the animal wranglers slept on top of the wagons when they got tired of bunking with the roustabouts. But this didn’t sound like an animal wrangler’s voice.

  “Aren’t you gonna say hello?” The tiger stirred in its cage. “What, cat got your tongue?”

  Webern shook his head. “I just can’t believe it’s you.”

  “Keep trying. It gets easier with practice.”

  Wags sat down on the edge of the wagon and dangled his legs off the side. His hair shone faintly in the moonlight, like spun gold or fallen stars, and his face was as much like Webern’s as ever—maybe even more so. He snapped the straps of his lederhosen and laughed out loud.

  “How long have you been sitting there, watching me?”

  “Too long. You’re a nice guy and all, but I’ve known figurines with more pep.”

  “Thanks.”

  Wags held out his arms like a child asking to be picked up. “Catch me. If anybody knows how to break a fall, it’s you.”

  Webern obediently outstretched his arms, and Wags jumped down. But when he landed he was no taller than a thumb, standing on the palm of Webern’s left hand.

  “How’d you get so small?” Webern asked.

  “Change of perspective, old buddy. It’s an art.” He danced a little jig. “Always was a particular talent of mine. Remember how I used to run around the clock with the second hand? It was a race against time.”

  “No, but I do remember when you ran face first into a slingshot.”

  “I bounced back from that one pretty quick. Hey, remember the time I got trapped inside your family’s telephone?”

  “That rings a bell.”

  “Of course, all of that was nothing compared to the day I got thrown in the laundry.” He clucked his tongue. “If it hadn’t been for the Life Saver in your pants pocket, I would’ve been all washed up.”

  “You know, I thought I was going to have to handle this all by myself,” Webern said, laughing. He thought of his empty boxcar, the monkey hair on the couch. “But it’s just like Mom said. You came back when I needed you.”

  “Hey, I’m glad to be of service.” Wags took a bow. “But don’t think I’m just the pit crew here to pull you from a wreck.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I may be a saviour, but I ain’t no angel.” Wags grinned; even though his face was the size of a nickel, his smile seemed much larger than that. “Buck up, pal. We’re going to have some fun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The alley house was crooked-shaped to fit the gap between two storefronts. Stairs zigzagged up the side, steep and backless as rungs on tilted ladders: six flights to the top. Wanda and Betsy spoke prayers as they climbed. Each step that squeaked was the alley house’s amen.

  “Lord Christ please make our bones like thine, clubs upon a sinner’s pride.”

  “Holy Ghost please turn our blood to wine and wake the corpses who have died.”

  Their landlady was a Christian who forbade fornication and hot pots. Their room was attic-shaped, with tilted eaves, unpainted wood, and cobwebs. Wanda and Betsy didn’t mind. They were Christians, too. The home was a vessel for the spirit and if that was pure the home would be also, all appearances aside. Like them, their neighbours below came from the institution, and the grunts and curses that rose up through the vents reminded Wanda and Betsy they were living righteously.

  Back when Willow and Billow lived in the treehouse, they had nest-slept, wrapped together in pillows, grey insulation, a tattered coat. In those days, they had woken nights uncertain whose elbow, whose knee, whose fingerbone was whose. It had mattered exactly none, there in the jumble that they made. Now Wanda and Betsy slept in twin beds like dolls in boxes under portraits of the saints. Sometimes, though, they woke in the night under low splintery beams of the alley house, and though their eyes were open they went on dreaming of the treehouse. A trapdoor opened the floor of the attic room; beneath it lay the past. Wanda and Betsy never spoke of it, lying side by side, seeing treehouse in the dark. There was no need. They both still had the same dreams.

  They parked their van out front. Gunmetal grey, it had four doors. On its side was written in stenciled letters PROPERTY OF MUNICIPAL ANIMAL IMPOUNDMENT CENTRE. Cages lined the back. Fur tufts and dog shit snagged the bars. It smelled like dogs even when there were no dogs. The van air had a memory.

  Wanda was left-handed. Betsy was a lefty, too. When one drove the other shifted gears. Each morning when they drove to report in, the cages shuddered and rattled in the space behind where they sat. Each morning they remembered when a van had come for Willow and Billow. The back of that van had been one dark cage. They lay down there together; Willow lit a match. Later, they learned the sulfur smell of that match had been the reason everyone believed they burned down the treehouse. The van had taken them to the institution, where they lived six years.

  The institution wasn’t a hospital or a church. It was a Retreat, the doctors said. For Willow and Billow, it was Surrender. They had no weapons there, no bones and stones and snakes to throw. They had no fog to vanish in, no trees to climb, no birds to catch. No wind and storm howled to them. Together at meals, they could not eat; kept separate at night, they could not sleep. What the doctors asked them, they would not tell. Pills made their minds like cool clay. They sat side by side, indif
ferent.

  Nuns crept through the institution from time to time, footless in their hoods of black. They left marks on nothing they touched with their bloodless hands. When they laughed it was with no sound. Willow and Billow began to follow them through the halls. They followed one to chapel. It was there they became schooled in the ways of faith.

  Bible study was four to six. Chapel light came through stained glass, barred up like all the windows in the place. There were no Bibles, only pews, and Sister, who spoke in a swaying, uneven voice, like melody. The other patients left right away, but Willow and Billow understood her words. They were sisters, too.

  Sister taught them Revelations, and of the demons that would come, of the lamb with seven glittering eyes, and how the Father appeared as cloud and fire. She taught the mysteries of the soul, how the Father marked creatures as his own. Sister didn’t feed them pills or ask for them to speak or eat. She called them by their Christian names and told them that on the last day, Lord Christ would do the same. She taught them charity, piety, perseverance, gratitude. Sister taught them they were two, with different souls in different skins. They were sinners now and as such, condemned. Only with Christ could they be as one, not consigned to separate flames.

  Wanda and Betsy became warriors for Christ; they sang anthems for his glory, even while the TV played and others profaned his name. They confessed their sins to a skittish priest, who kept one finger on the NURSE CALL button: they had disobeyed their mother, they had coveted their brother’s treehouse, they had huffed glue and pretended to be ghosts. Their necks swung heavy with rosaries; each night they prayed over grey meat and plastic knives. They gave up scratching walls for Lent, then gave it up altogether. One day the doctors declared that they were well, and cast them out into the world.

  Sister’s brother worked at the pound, so God’s provenance found them vocation there. Called to this work, they learned their trade. The Holy Ghost helped them know where the lost dogs hid. Sometimes the Holy Ghost spoke through the men around the oil drum fire.