Teatro Grottesco

by Thomas Ligotti

  Only later did I ask myself where I would live out the rest of my life if not in that backroad landscape, that remote paradise in which a house had been erected that seemed perfectly designed for me. But this same place, a true resting place in which I should have been able to live out the rest of my life in some kind of peace, was now only one more thing that I had to fear.

  AFTERWORD

  In addition to the five stories presented here, I also found notes, mostly in the form of unconnected phrases, for a sixth story with the apparent working title of ‘Sideshow.’ Following the manner of the other pieces, this story similarly seemed destined to be no more than a dreamlike vignette, an episode of ‘peculiar and ridiculous show business,’ to quote from the author’s notes. There were other unique phrases or ideas that appeared in these notes which had also emerged in my conversations with the author as we sat in the corner booth of that coffee shop throughout the course of several nights. For example, such phrases as ‘the volatility of things’ and ‘unexpected mutations’ appeared repeatedly, as if these were to serve as the guiding principles of this presumably abandoned narrative.

  I suppose I should not have been surprised to find that the author of the aborted narrative had made references to myself, since he had clearly characterized his work to me as ‘autobiographical wretchedness.’ In these notes I am fairly designated as the ‘other man in the coffee shop’ and as a ‘pitiful insomniac who manufactures artistic conundrums for himself in order to distract his mind from the sideshow town in which he has spent his life.’ The words ‘sideshow town’ appear earlier in what seems to be the intended opening sentence of the aborted, or perhaps deliberately abandoned, story. This particular sentence is interesting in that it directly suggests a continuity with one of the other stories, something that, in my notice, is otherwise absent among these feverish, apparently deranged fragments. ‘After failing to find a house in which I might live out the rest of my life,’ the sentence begins, ‘I began to travel frantically from one sideshow town to another, each of them descending further than the one before it into the depths of a show-business world.’

  Given the incomplete nature of the notes for the story called ‘Sideshow,’ not to mention the highly elliptical quality that was conspicuous even in the author’s completed works which I had read, I did not search very long for the modicum of ‘coherence and continuity’ that he claimed to assign to the ‘senseless episodes’ forming the fundamental stratum of both his writings and his experience of the world. And at some point these notes ceased to resemble a rough outline for a work-in-progress and took on the tone of a journal or private confession. ‘Told X [a reference to myself, I assumed] that I wrote when I was prompted,’ he wrote.

  ‘Didn’t mention what might constitue such a prompt, and he didn’t ask. Very strange, since he seemed to display all the subtle qualities of a highly receptive temperament, not to mention those far less subtle traits which were evident from our first meeting. Like gazing into a funhouse mirror: the glaring likeness of our literary pursuits, our shared insomnia, even the brand of cigarette which we both smoked, often lighting up at the same time. I wasn’t going to draw attention to these details, but why didn’t he?’

  I recalled that one night I had questioned the meaning of my companion’s statement that everything (in a ‘sideshow world,’ that is) was ‘ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.’ In his notes, or confession, he wrote: ‘No standard exists for the peculiarity and ridiculousness of things, not even one that is unspeakable or unknowable, words which are merely a front or a subterfuge. These qualities – the peculiar and the ridiculous – are immanent and absolute in all existence and would be in any conceivable existent order . . .’ This last sentence is transcribed thus from the author’s notes, truncated by ellipsis so that he could immediately jump to his next thought, which was written on the same line. ‘Why didn’t X challenge this assertion? Why did he allow so many things to remain on the surface that might easily have gone so much deeper?’ And on the line directly below that, he wrote: ‘Some peculiar and ridiculous fate in a sideshow town.’

  After I finished reading the five completed stories and the notes-cum-journal or confession relating to a sixth tale, I left the coffee shop, eager not to allow even the faintest touch of the approaching dawn to catch me sitting in that corner booth, a circumstance that I always found intensely depressing for some reason. I followed my usual course of backstreets and alleys home, pausing every so often to admire the suggestive glow in the window of a little store or the network of sagging wires that was everywhere strung above me, the power surging within them seeming to pull me along and put each of my steps in place. This was indeed a sideshow town in every way, peculiar and ridiculous in its essence, though no more so than any other place. I think that my coffee-shop companion might at one time have had a profound appreciation for this state of affairs but had somehow lost it. In the end it seemed that he could not attain even an attitude of resignation, let alone the strength to let himself be carried along by the immanent and absolute realities, the great inescapable matters which he had been privileged to glimpse, so to speak, at the bottom of a dim and empty stairwell.

  I was almost home when I heard a commotion in a pile of debris beneath the silvery-blue luminescence of a streetlight in an alley. Looking deep into the mound of empty paint cans, bicycle wheels stripped of their tires, rusty curtain rods, and the like, I saw the little creature. It was something that might have come from a jar in a museum exhibit or a carnival sideshow. What I most clearly remember is the impression made on me by its pale gray eyes, which I had already guessed were a family trait and which had looked at me numerous times from the other side of a corner booth in a coffee shop. These eyes now stared at me accusingly over a bundled stack of old newspapers, those heaping chronicles of the sideshow world. As I began to walk away, the shrunken creature tried to call out to me, but the only sound it managed to make was a coarse raspy noise that briefly echoed down the alley. ‘No,’ he had written in his notes to the unfinished sixth story. ‘I refuse to be a scribe for this show-business phenomenon any longer.’ I, on the other hand, had triumphed over my literary crisis and wanted nothing more than to get back to my desk, my brain practically vibrating with an unwonted energy in spite of passing another night without any sleep.

  THE CLOWN PUPPET

  It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. As long as I can remember, every incident and every impulse of my existence has served only to perpetrate one episode after another of conspicuous nonsense, each completely outrageous in its nonsensicality. Considered from whatever point of view – intimately close, infinitely remote, or any position in between – the whole thing has always seemed to be nothing more than some freak accident occurring at a painfully slow rate of speed. At times I have been rendered breathless by the impeccable chaoticism, the absolutely perfect nonsense of some spectacle taking place outside myself, or, on the other hand, some spectacle of equally senseless outrageousness taking place within me. Images of densely twisted shapes and lines arise in my brain. Scribbles of a mentally deranged epileptic, I have often said to myself. If I may allow any exception to the outrageously nonsensical condition I have described – and I will allow none – this single exception would involve those visits which I experienced at scattered intervals throughout my existence, and especially one particular visit that took place in Mr Vizniak’s medicine shop.

  I was stationed behind the counter at Mr Vizniak’s modest establishment very late one night. At that hour there was practically no business at all, none really, given the backstreet location of the shop and its closet-like dimensions, as well as the fact that I kept the place in almost complete darkness both outside and inside. Mr Vizniak lived in a small apartment above the medicine shop, and he gave me permission to keep the place open or close it up as I liked after a certain hour. It seemed that he knew that being stationed b
ehind the counter of his medicine shop at all hours of the night, and in almost complete darkness except for a few lighting fixtures on the walls, provided my mind with some distraction from the outrageous nonsense which might otherwise occupy it. Later events more or less proved that Mr Vizniak indeed possessed a special knowledge and that there existed, in fact, a peculiar sympathy between the old man and myself. Since Mr Vizniak’s shop was located on an obscure backstreet, the neighborhood outside was profoundly inactive during the later hours of the night. And since most of the streetlamps in the neighborhood were either broken or defective in some way, the only thing I could see through the small front window of the shop was the neon lettering in the window of the meat store directly across the street. These pale neon letters remained lit throughout the night in the window of the meat store, spelling out three words: beef, pork, goat. Sometimes I would stare at these words and contemplate them until my head became so full of meat nonsense, of beef and pork and goat nonsense, that I had to turn away and find something to occupy myself in the back room of the medicine shop, where there were no windows and thus no possibility of meat-store visions. But once I was in the back room I would become preoccupied with all the medicines which were stored there, all the bottles and jars and boxes upon boxes stacked from floor to ceiling in an extremely cramped area. I had learned quite a bit about these medicines from Mr Vizniak, although I did not have a license to prepare and dispense them to customers without his supervision. I knew which medicines could be used to most easily cause death in someone who had ingested them in the proper amount and proper manner. Thus, whenever I went into the back room to relieve my mind from the meat nonsense brought on by excessive contemplation of the beef-pork-and-goat store, I almost immediately became preoccupied with fatal medicines; in other words, I would then become obsessed with death nonsense, which is one of the worst and most outrageous forms of all nonsense. Usually I would end up retreating to the small lavatory in the back room, where I could collect myself and clear my head before returning to my station behind the counter of Mr Vizniak’s medicine shop.

  It was there – behind the medicine shop counter, that is – that I experienced one of those visits, which I might have allowed as the sole exception to the intensely outrageous nonsense of my existence, but which in fact, I must say, were the nadir of the nonsensical. This was my medicine-shop visit, so called because I have always experienced only a single visitation in any given place – after which I begin looking for a new situation, however similar it may actually be to my old one. Each of my situations prior to Mr Vizniak’s medicine shop was essentially a medicine-shop situation, whether it was a situation working as a night watchman who patrolled some desolate property, or a situation as a groundskeeper for a cemetery in some remote town, or a situation in which I spent endless gray afternoons sitting in a useless library or shuffling up and down the cloisters of a useless monastery. All of them were essentially medicine-shop situations, and each of them sooner or later involved a visit – either a monastery visit or a library visit, a cemetery visit or a visit while I was delivering packages from one part of town to another in the dead of the night. At the same time there were certain aspects to the medicine-shop visit that were unlike any of the other visits, certain new and unprecedented elements which made this visit unique.

  It began with an already familiar routine of nonsense. Gradually, as I stood behind the counter late one night at the medicine shop, the light radiated by the fixtures along the walls changed from a dim yellow to a rich reddish-gold. I have never developed an intuition that would allow me to anticipate when this is going to happen, so that I might say to myself: ‘This will be the night when the light changes to reddish-gold. This will be the night of another visit.’ In the new light (the rich reddish-gold illumination) the interior of the medicine shop took on the strange opulence of an old oil painting; everything became transformed beneath a thick veneer of gleaming obscurity. And I have always wondered how my own face appears in this new light, but at the time I can never think about such things because I know what is about to happen, and all I can do is hope that it will soon be over.

  After the business with the tinted illumination, only a few moments pass before there is an appearance, which means that the visit itself has begun. First the light changes to reddish-gold, then the visit begins. I have never been able to figure out the reason for this sequence, as if there might be a reason for such nonsense as these visits or any particular phase of these visits. Certainly when the light changes to a reddish-gold tint I am being forewarned that an appearance is about to occur, but this has never enabled me to witness the actual manifestation, and I had given up trying by the time of the medicine-shop visit. I knew that if I looked to my left, the appearance would take place in the field of vision to my right; conversely, if I focused on the field of vision to my right, the appearance would take place, in no time at all, on my left. And of course if I simply gazed straight ahead, the appearance would take place just beyond the edges of my left or right fields of vision, silently and instantaneously. Only after it had appeared would it begin to make any sound, clattering as it moved directly in front of my eyes, and then, as always happened, I would be looking at a creature that I might say had all the appearances of an antiquated marionette, a puppet figure of some archaic type.

  It was almost life-sized and hovered just far enough above the floor of the medicine shop that its face was at the same level as my own. I am describing the puppet creature as it appeared during the medicine-shop visit, but it always took the form of the same antiquated marionette hovering before me in a reddish-gold haze. Its design was that of a clown puppet in pale pantaloons overdraped by a kind of pale smock, thin and pale hands emerging from the ruffled cuffs of its sleeves, and a powder-pale head rising above a ruffled collar. I always found it difficult at first to look directly at the face of the puppet creature whenever it appeared, because the expression which had been created for that face was so simple and bland, yet at the same time so intensely evil and perverse. In the observation of at least one commentator on puppet theater, the expressiveness of a puppet or marionette resides in its arms, hands, and legs, never in its face or head, as is the case with a human actor. But in the case of the puppet thing hovering before me in the medicine shop, this was not true. Its expressiveness was all in that face with its pale and pitted complexion, its slightly pointed nose and delicate lips, and its dead puppet eyes – eyes that did not seem able to fix or focus themselves upon anything but only gazed with an unchanging expression of dreamy malignance, an utterly nonsensical expression of stupefied viciousness and cruelty. So whenever this puppet creature first appeared I avoided looking at its face and instead looked at its tiny feet which were covered by a pair of pale slippers and dangled just above the floor. Then I always looked at the wires which were attached to the body of the puppet thing, and I tried to follow those wires to see where they led. But at some point my vision failed me; I could visually trace the wires only so far along their neat vertical path . . . and then they became lost in a thick blur, a ceiling of distorted light and shadow that always formed some distance above the puppet creature’s head – and my own – beyond which my eyes could perceive no clear image, nothing at all except a vague sluggish movement, like a layer of dense clouds seen from far away through a gloomy reddish-gold twilight. This phenomenon of the wires disappearing into a blur supported my observation over the years that the puppet thing did not have a life of its own. It was solely by means of these wires, in my view, that the creature was able to proceed through its familiar motions. (The term ‘motions,’ as I bothered myself to discover in the course of my useless research into the subject, was commonly employed at one time, long ago, to refer to various types of puppets, as in the statement: ‘The motions recently viewed at St Bartholomew’s Fair were engaged in antics of a questionable probity before an audience which might have better profited by deep contemplation of the fragile and uncertain destiny of their immorta
l souls.’) The puppet swung forward toward the counter of the medicine shop behind which I stood. Its body parts rattled loosely and noisily in the late-night quiet before coming to rest. One of its hands was held out to me, its fingers barely grasping a crumpled slip of paper.

  Of course I took the tiny page, which appeared to have been torn from an old pad used for writing pharmaceutical prescriptions. I had learned through the years to follow the puppet creature’s cues obediently. At one time, years before the visit at the medicine shop, I was crazy or foolish enough to call the puppet and its visits exactly what they were – outrageous nonsense. Right to the face of that clown puppet I said, ‘Take your nonsense somewhere else,’ or possibly, ‘I’m sick of this contemptible and disgusting nonsense.’ But this outburst counted for nothing. The puppet simply waited until my foolhardy craziness had passed and then continued through the motions which had been prepared for that particular visit. So I examined the prescription form the creature had passed across the counter to me, and I noticed immediately that what was written upon it was nothing but a chaos of scrawls and scribbles, which was precisely the sort of nonsense I should have expected during the medicine-shop visit. I knew that it was my part to play along with the clown puppet, although I was never precisely certain what was expected of me. From previous experience I had learned that it was futile to guess what would eventually transpire during a particular visit, because the puppet creature was capable of almost anything. For example, once it visited me when I was working through the night at a skid-row pawn shop. I told the thing that it was wasting my time unless it could produce an exquisitely cut diamond the size of a yo-yo. Then it reached under its pale smocklike garment and rummaged about, its hand seeking deep within its pantaloons. ‘Well, let’s see it,’ I shouted at the clown puppet. ‘As big as a yo-yo,’ I repeated. Not only did it come up with an exquisitely cut diamond that was, generally speaking, as large as a yo-yo, but the object that the puppet thing flashed before my eyes – brilliant in the pawn-shop dimness – was also made in the form of a yo-yo . . . and the creature began to lazily play with the yo-yo diamond right in front of me, spinning it slowly on the string that was looped about one of those pale puppet-fingers, throwing it down and pulling it up over and over while the facets of that exquisitely cut diamond cast a pyrotechnic brilliance into every corner of the pawn shop.