Futures Near and Far
by Will McIntosh
© 2015 by Will McIntosh
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Cover art: “Standing” by Emilie Leger
Also by Will McIntosh:
Soft Apocalypse
Hitchers
Love Minus Eighty
Defenders
Table of Contents
A Clown Escapes from Circus Town
The Perimeter
The New Chinese Wives
Street Hero
The Fantasy Jumper
Incompatible
Possible Monsters
A Clown Escapes from Circus Town
Beaners tied the pillowcase to the end of a fiberglass rod he’d cut from his cot, then slid the rod down the neck of his crepe-collared shirt and into the waistband of his patched, baggy pants, careful not to scrape his ass with the splintered end. The pillowcase held a change of clothes and some clown chow.
Glancing around to make sure no one from Management had wandered into the tent, he gripped a sharpened butter knife between his teeth, wrapped his arms around the massive tent post, and shimmied upward, toward the billowing folds of the tent roof, striped red and white when sunlight filtered through the silky fabric, but only grey and dark grey now. His grunts of exertion drowned the thunderous snores of his brother clowns.
From fifty feet up, the vast grid of tiny rectangles was almost beautiful. The pattern was imperfect, however, because the cots closest to the shithouse were not splashed with the bright red and blue and yellow of sleeping clowns. They were empty. They’d been full of clowns last night, but a hundred or so had disappeared around chow time, and, if the past was any gauge, they would never be heard from again.
Beaners sorely wanted to know where they went—that was why he was climbing a tent pole. Clowns shouldn’t just disappear.
If Beaners had been more introspective, he might have admitted that he also wanted to breathe fresh air, to gaze at landscapes unclotted by clowns. He was so sick of their giant eggplant feet, their chorus of rolling snores and whistled exhales, the cotton-candy stink of their unwashed armpits and sex-starved pillow ejaculations.
Clutching the post with one white-gloved hand, Beaners pulled the knife from his mouth and stabbed the tent fabric, opening an incision. The material drooped on either side, exposing a crescent of black sky and moonlight. He sighed with relief that the breach-detector, as he’d guessed, didn’t extend to the tent ceiling. He tossed the fiberglass pole up and out, then gripped the edge of the rent fabric with one hand, and swung his balloon-sized foot up through the hole, and rolled onto his back, panting.
The ride down the outside of the tent was harrowing. His rubbery face flapped in the wind as the ground hurtled toward him. He landed hard, then staggered to his feet, weaving like a punch-drunk strongman. When he had regained his wits, he vaulted over the motion detectors and ran for his life.
Beaners skidded around the corner of the Snake Charmer’s shack and paused, panting, pressed up against the wall like a knife thrower’s assistant. All was quiet. He cut through an animal tent to stay out of sight. Lions and tigers, giraffes and elephants lay sleeping in an indiscriminate tangle. From what Beaners had heard, all of them were somehow grown from pigs, all ate the same chow and had no interest in eating each other.
The whites of his face red with strain, Beaners shoved a trampoline out of the acrobatics tent and into the moonlight. He scaled a support pole on the tent, surveyed Circus Town from on high for a moment, then launched himself at the trampoline. He soared up and over the wall and its defenses, hit the ground at a bad angle. His open mouth cracked shut and he rolled backward, down a brambly ravine and over a bank, landing with a splash in a shallow stream.
* * *
A town came into view. Mounds of debris were piled against its wall, evidently tossed from inside. Even from a distance Beaners recognized what the piles were. The smell gave it away, if nothing else. And even from a distance, it was not the least bit beautiful, despite the way the steel helmets and chain mail glistened in the late afternoon sun. Beaners knew which town was behind this wall: Medieval Village.
He shifted course, planning to skirt around the pile of bodies, and maybe the entire village. Then he noticed a lone figure sitting up against a tree near the carnage. It was not a knight. In fact—Beaners squinted—it appeared to be a superhero. Judging from the bright green skin-tight outfit, a Green Arrow.
Occasionally, Marks who visited Circus Town from Superhero Cove were Green Arrows. More were Batmans, but he’d separated a few Green Arrows from their money. All the marks from Superhero Cove were thick with muscles and acted like they were hot stuff. Beaners figured that a lone person was more likely to talk to him (and less likely to kill him) than a group of people, so he decided to approach the Green Arrow.
As he drew closer he saw that the Green Arrow was eating a lunch spread around him. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?” Beaners asked as he approached under the Green Arrow’s gaze, hoping to strike a cordial note.
“A clown?” the Green Arrow said in a gravelly baritone. He had a blonde mustache and goatee. A quiver of arrows and a bow lay on the grass within his reach. His green outfit was identical to the other Green Arrows Beaners had seen, except this one was blood stained—a white, blood-soaked rag was tied around his thigh.
“Yes. Your eyes do not deceive you.”
“What are you doing here? I thought clowns were indentured.”
“I...escaped from Circus Town,” Beaners said, unable to think of a lie that was better than the truth.
Green Arrow threw back his head and laughed. “You escaped? I didn’t know clowns were bright enough to brush their teeth, let alone escape!”
“Here we go.” Beaners examined a scraped elbow he’d received when he went over the Circus Town wall. “Let’s get it all out. Clowns are morons. Clowns are made from pigs, just like the other animals at the circus.”
“Aren’t they?” Green Arrow asked, frowning.
“Sure. Whatever you say,” Beaners said. He pulled a little flap of skin off his elbow, blotted a drop of oozing blood, stared at the bloodstained fingertip of his white glove.
“So what will you do, now that you’ve escaped?” The Green Arrow retrieved a loaf of dark brown bread, spread butter on it.
“I don’t know. Maybe find work?”
Green Arrow waved dismissively. “Who’s going to hire a clown? What can you do, fall down for a living? Deliver cupcakes on a tiny bicycle?”
“I can work.” Beaners thought of all the shithouses he’d cleaned in his miserable life.
Green Arrow only shook his head, considered Beaners from the shade of the scrub pine, his injured leg stretched out, his good one bent. He took a bite of the bread, his brow knotted in obvious pain.
Beaners settled near him in a strip of shade.
“What happened to your leg?” Beaners poured some clown chow into his palm. If this guy was going to eat, Beaners might as well join him.
Green Arrow looked at Beaners’ chow-filled palm, frowning. “What is that? It looks like duck droppings.”
“Hey, that bread don’t look all that tantalizing either,” Beaners shot back.
Green Arrow grinned, held up a finger. He pulled a hunk of chocolate from his satchel and held it up. “How about t
his, clown? Does this look tantalizing?” He sank his pearly whites into the chocolate and chewed with gusto.
Beaners chewed the clown chow more slowly, studying Green Arrow. The truth was, Beaners didn’t know if he should be tantalized or not. Clowns caught eating Mark food were ground up and fed to the seals.
Green Arrow glanced up, meeting Beaners’ gaze. He sighed theatrically. “It’s a heavy burden, to be a hero.” He broke off a square of chocolate and tossed it into Beaners’ lap. Beaners sniffed the chocolate, took a tentative bite.
His vision went black. The stars were in his mouth, the whole universe. He started to cry.
Green Arrow roared with laughter.
“Don’t laugh at me!” Beaners scrabbled behind the pine with the rest of the chocolate, suckling it, the mother’s milk he’d never known.
“You know, you’re not very funny,” Green Arrow called to him.
“I’m not trying to be funny. When I want to be funny, I’m hilarious.”
“Well, any time you want to start being funny, I’d welcome the change,” Green Arrow said.
Beaners studied the rest of the chocolate in his palm, looked at it closely, deeply, astonished that a brown, slightly melted lump could hold so much pleasure. He’d never known what a magical place the world was.
“Are you really smart enough to work?” Green Arrow asked.
“Why?” Beaners asked.
“I may have a job for you.”
Beaners stood, brushed the back of his baggy pants. “Name it.”
“Go out into this—” he gestured toward the piles of dead knights “—mess, and search for men who aren’t quite dead yet. Call me when you find one.”
Beaners studied Green Arrow’s face, trying to tell if it was a joke. It didn’t seem to be. It wasn’t what Beaners had expected, but Green Arrow appeared to have more chocolate in his sack. He ventured in among the dead, treading carefully so as not to trip (which clowns often did).
“The smell is terrible!” Beaners called, his voice muffled because he was covering his mouth with a white-gloved hand.
“You’ll get used to it.”
He didn’t get used to it. The bodies were fresh, bloody with mortal battle wounds, their pants stained with piss and shit. There were thousands of them, the grass soaked red around them. Dozens of bodies had rolled off the pile and were scattered among trees. Flies buzzed around his head as he searched their faces for signs of life, occasionally tugging a body off a pile to show Green Arrow that he was doing a thorough job.
Soon enough he found a man with a horrible belly wound whose chest was rising and falling, and whose eyes followed Beaners as he walked.
“Found one,” Beaners called, waving his arms.
Green Arrow eased himself to his feet. “Good man. Go on, keep looking.” Beaners moved on.
Shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun, Beaners watched Green Arrow limp among the carnage with an arrow notched to his bow, his handsome blonde face crunched in a sour expression. When he reached the dying man, Green Arrow had a brief conversation with him, then he shot an arrow into him. Beaners started in surprise, but went on searching when Green Arrow looked up.
He waved a hand in front of his face in a futile attempt to shoo the flies that were buzzing all around him. This wasn’t exactly where he imagined he’d be when he vaulted the wall of Circus Town. Beaners wished Green Arrow was a woman. He’d like to see a woman.
“Clown!” Green Arrow shouted urgently. “Come here, quickly.”
From the opposite direction, Beaners spied the source of Green Arrow’s agitation: a dozen knights on horseback, brandishing weapons, thumped down a switchback on a ridge, heading toward them. Beaners hurried to Green Arrow’s side.
“Don’t say anything. I’ll do the talking,” Green Arrow said.
A rising rattle and clank of steel lit the air as the knights approached. They stopped a dozen feet away, their horses pacing side to side, pawing the grass and making wet horse sounds.
“What are ye doing?” the biggest knight, who had a bushy black bear, said, waving at the bodies.
“We’ve merely stopped for lunch,” Green Arrow said. He pointed in the direction of his pack, but none of the knights looked. Each of them had a broadsword slung across his back, and many carried spears and nasty-looking flails—spiked balls on the ends of chains. All of them also had guns tucked into thick leather belts.
“Ye were merely having lunch,” the knight said skeptically. “Yet your arrows were not merely having lunch, were they? Not a moment ago one entered the still-beating heart of my brother-in-arms in a most definite not-merely-having-lunch fashion.”
“I was putting him out of his misery.”
“Is that what you call it? Out of his misery?” the knight barked, drawing his gun. His companions followed suit. “Well allow me to put you out of your misery.”
In the blink of an eye there was a fresh arrow notched to Green Arrow’s bow, but there were nine of them, and they had guns.
“Hold on!” Beaners cried. He rifled through the detritus at his feet, chose a massive flail, pulled a gigantic helmet over his head. He could see very little. He cast his long thin field of vision left and right, getting nothing but foliage before finally spotting the knight. He stepped forward. “Come on!” he howled, closing the distance, dragging the flail behind him. “I’ll fight the lot of you. I’m the new sheriff in town! Avast ye varlets!” He gripped the flail in both hands and, with great effort, got it rolling in the grass, and then swinging in a wobbly arc that sent him spinning like a top. “Whoah!” he shouted as the world melted in a horizontal smear. He released the flail; it sailed over the heads of the knights. Beaners landed hard on his big rump with an “Oof.” The knights pointed and laughed, laughed and pointed.
Beaners struggled to his feet, took a few dizzy steps and fell again. “Who’s first?” He regained his feet with exaggerated effort, retrieved a sword from the bloody grass. “Come on, you maidens!” He tripped over a corpse and fell a third time. The knights laughed harder.
Few things become funnier with repetition. Self-inflicted pain is one of those few. When Beaners performed the hammering-a-nail routine, the audience laughed harder with each missed strike that found his thumb. In all likelihood there was a point at which the comic value of injury finally began to decline, but Beaners had never found it.
His yellow teeth flashing in laughter, the big knight stepped up and swung his sword, wacking Beaners on the side of the helmet. A deafening clang raked Beaners’ eardrums. He struck Beaners on the other side of his head, sending him wheeling. Then, with the flat of his sword, he hit the target crying out to be hit: one of Beaners’ enormous feet.
Beaners yelped in pain, hopped around clutching his throbbing foot. The knights roared with laughter. The dark-haired knight booted him in the ass, knocking him to the turf. He stayed down. His job was done.
“Ye’re a long way from Circus Town, aren’t ye, little clown?” the knight asked, sniffing back tear-induced nasal mucous.
“I left to seek worthy opponents,” Beaners said, setting off another round of laughter. He tossed the helmet.
“Ye’re fortunate then, that the folding has brought ye face to face with Sir Clarke of the Tytus clan.”
“The folding?” Beaners said.
“Aye.”
“What’s the folding?”
“You don’t know about the folding?” Sir Clarke asked, frowning.
“No,” Beaners admitted.
Sir Clarke was incredulous. “How can ye not know about the folding?” He waited, as if Beaners could explain how he didn’t know something.
“How did ye think things got the way they are, if not the folding?” Sir Clarke asked, spreading his arms.
“What do you mean? How else would things be?” Beaners asked.
“A town of knights and damsels? Another full of fetching whores and wenches and harlots, but no portly matrons? Jesters and fire-eaters in a third, wit
h not a superhero among them? That never struck thee as odd?”
Beaners had never heard such nonsense. Why wouldn’t Circus Town be populated with circus people, and Medieval Village with knights and damsels? Should Santas live in sextown, and naked ladies make toys in Santas’ workshops?
“It’s because of the folding!” Sir Clarke insisted. Beaners just shook his head, eliciting a huff from the knight. “Ten score years ago, things folded. Places were pulled from all over time and dimension and folded into one place. This place.”
“That’s why we no longer have super powers. They don’t work in this dimension,” Green Arrow said.
“Super powers?” Beaners said.
“Yes, super powers. Extraordinary abilities,” Green Arrow said. “In our home dimension superheroes have powers. Nothing can pierce a Superman’s skin. A Spiderman can climb walls without rope.”
Beaners watched Green Arrow closely, searching for a telltale smirk. He suspected they were trying to pull one over on the clown. “What were things like here before the folding?”
“People were mixed. Towns were mixed. Most of the people were just plain,” the knight said.
Beaners didn’t know what to say. And his foot was throbbing.
Sir Clarke sniffed, looked off toward the horizon. “Well, we’d best be returning to the castle.” He motioned to his men.
“Good knight,” Green Arrow said, approaching Sir Clarke and putting a hand across his shoulder. “May I have a word with you first?”
The two walked a few paces, Green Arrow speaking low, and the knight answering in kind. Just minutes after nearly fighting to the death, they now resembled long time friends. Such is the transformative power of a good laugh.
Beaners couldn’t hear what they were saying. Sir Clarke pointed once, shaking his head. After a moment, Green Arrow bade farewell to the knight and turned to gather up his meager belongings.
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