Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  He left me there. I looked again and I could still see the clown, tucked into a fetal position, sleeping underneath my window. I looked back and forth between my open door and my open window and then I closed them both and went back to bed.

  At breakfast my parents had an argument about whether kangaroos were mammals or not. Evan would not meet my eyes.

  “Evan, stand up against the wall. I want to measure you,” my mother said. She had a peculiar look on her face. I noticed as Evan stood that his shirt was tight and the legs of his pants were inches from the floor. He stood against the doorframe and my mother put a book on his head and marked the spot with a pencil. She measured the distance from that mark to the floor with a measuring tape and frowned. Then she smiled and said, “Evan you’ve grown five inches since we got here.”

  “That’s not possible,” my father said and he checked the distance himself twice before he tossed the tape measure on the counter and said again, “That’s not possible.”

  “It is possible,” squeaked Evan. “I’m tall! I’m tall. I’m as tall as the other kids.”

  He looked at me with a weird sort of appreciation as if I had done something to make this happen.

  “We should walk Pocket,” he said and he took my hand and squeezed.

  I still remember that warm grip bending my fingers. When I look now at the hand I used to have I wriggle those bands of light and I feel myself as if I am still defined by that little embrace.

  Out of deference to Evan I left the Magic 8 Ball behind while we walked Pocket along the shore. The water of the great lake was completely flat and reflected the sky back in minute detail. I had never seen the lake so flat nor heard it so silent. Evan’s step was so light with happiness he seemed to float beside me. He chattered as we walked, saying all the things that he could do now that he was the same size as the other boys. It made me realize how he had nursed sadness and hurt for a long time. Thinking of him being bullied, being left out, being lonely made my chest ache.

  Halfway along our usual route he stopped and took my hands and looked into my eyes, a weirdly romantic intensity in his expression.

  “I think you should get rid of it now,” he pled.

  When we returned to the house our mother was weeping on the steps. Her whole body shuddered and her face was soaked and her hands were soaked from wiping her face. Her shirt was spattered with tears. There were tears on her knees and running down her legs. She looked at me and opened her mouth and tried to say something, but it was so garbled by crying I couldn’t understand. Evan ran over and hugged her. I stood there watching them. Evan started to cry and she cried harder holding him. Our father appeared in the doorway and his face contorted. He covered his mouth and turned back into the house.

  “What is it?” I said. “What happened?”

  They ignored me. Pocket lay down on the ground at their feet and started to whimper.

  IT WAS SOME TIME BEFORE I understood that they couldn’t see or hear me anymore. Much of the time my eyes were unable to focus and I saw them through a cross-eyed haze. I heard their voices as if they were carried across the lake to me by the wind. What they said was always muffled and incomplete. Much of the time I heard their three voices sobbing. At times I would look down on my body and see wounds there. My thumbs disappeared and reappeared at inconsistent intervals. A black hole in my stomach opened and closed, threatening at times to topple me by cutting me in half.

  At times I could see clearly through a shifting tunnel in my vision, a circle of clarity. When that happened I ran to the mirror to see myself. Each time I saw a different specter of my potential death. Once there was a stick through my eye and once my arm was ripped off and spouting blood like some knight in a Monty Python film. Once my jaw was missing and once there were enormous pieces bitten out of my torso. The worst was when I was just naked and bruised and wet. At first I thought I would never get used to it. I imagine most dead people feel that way. I felt so angry I split apart and fell apart and still I was totally dead.

  I ran up to my parents and yelled, “I’m here! I’m here! Do something!” Then it was like a hard nut of resistance formed in my chest or like there was a little me constantly screaming, No! inside my head. Then I was sure I could figure out some way to make myself alive again. Maybe I could do a good deed or negotiate with someone. I kept waiting for someone to show up and explain my situation. I planned speeches and I practiced my arguments. I tried to remember what I could about Heaven Can Wait and what Warren Beatty did when he found out he was dead. Then I cried because I watched that movie with my mother one afternoon when I was home from school with the chicken pox. And she made popcorn and told me about how Warren Beatty was a louse and had affairs and his sister was crazy and I loved sitting there listening to my mother gossip, hearing about an adult world so far beyond me. But no one came. No God or angel or spirit or anyone. I felt the most alone that I ever felt. But after a while I wondered how long I had been dead and if it was now longer than I had been alive. And I healed from my own death the way you heal from someone else’s. Death goes on, you might say.

  I spied on my family. I didn’t know what else to do with myself and I missed them so much. My brother was muscular and playing sports and my parents changed course and began sleeping together again. I tried to connect with them. They kept coming back to the same house every summer and it was like I disappeared while they were elsewhere and then they arrived and I awoke from a terrible sleep, shook it off and remembered that I was dead. I didn’t get any older, but I matured somehow. Still Evan surpassed me, turning nine, ten, eleven. He became so beautiful. His hair went curly and grew long and his eyelashes swept his cheeks. He bronzed so lovely in the summer as he played with Pocket in the sand. Pocket grew up too and filled out and even went a bit gray. I told myself that time was no longer my concern.

  One night I sat in the armchair by the window in the room where my parents lay in bed and I listened to their conversation.

  “Sometimes it’s like she was never here. Am I a terrible person?”

  “No.”

  “I called to make a reservation at the steakhouse and I said two adults one child and I thought, that’s right, that’s the truth; I wasn’t upset.”

  “I know.”

  I saw my mother naked in the bed with my father, hanging onto him and whispering.

  “Why did we have to go on? When she was born do you remember how we went in to stare at her all the time and we talked about how we couldn’t believe that there was ever a point when she wasn’t part of us? And when I was pregnant with Evan I worried that I couldn’t love another baby as much as I loved her. And now, I mean we had reached the end. I think we would have broken up within the year. But she died. She died and we got back to life. I didn’t think that I could live without her. How could we have saved ourselves?”

  “We needed to not fall apart, maybe for Evan or for her, for her memory. We, I remembered how it all was when we were pregnant waiting for her and when we had one baby and the money was enough and I still thought I was going to get some great job and you still thought I was a great dad and a great husband. I used to think about her all day. I just wondered idly like, what kind of job would she have when she grew up and what kind of pizza would she like and I imagined golfing with her and going to the movies. I used to wonder if she would be gay and I thought about how cool I would be with that and how she would tell all her friends that I was great. We would hang out together and her friends would like me and we’d all go to Pride together.”

  “You thought she was gay?”

  “No. I just thought I wouldn’t care. That it might be cool. Her friends would be cool.”

  “Do you think gay people are cooler than straight people?”

  “Well, maybe. Is that bad?”

  “Did you think about Evan that way?”

  “No. I didn’t want either of them dating boys.
”

  “When she was three she used to tell a story about how when she grew up she would have a baby and she would rock the baby and kiss the baby and say, Shhh, sweetheart. And she told me I would come to visit and see her baby.”

  “She used to stand on the picnic table and sing and dance.”

  “She used to come up to me and say, I like you, Daddy.”

  “Why do we come here every summer?”

  “It’s like I remember her best when we’re here.”

  If they stopped coming I would disappear. I started to try to reach them. I couldn’t move anything or make any noise or change the temperature in the room. I was the most useless kind of ghost. I tried standing on my dad’s feet and holding him around the waist when he walked. I tried breathing in Evan’s ear and tickling him and licking his face. I clutched my mother, sitting in her lap, stroking her face.

  “I’m here,” I told her. “I’m here with you. Please don’t leave me.”

  I kissed her and a look crossed her face. I thought she had felt my kiss.

  “Mommy, I’m here. Please see me.”

  She sneezed. It’s impossible, I thought.

  That afternoon my dad left to drive into the city for work. I decided to go with him just to see if I could leave the house. I climbed through his door and climbed over him in the car. I waited to see if the car would leave me behind or if I would change in some way when we left the driveway. But nothing happened. We drove along the quiet roads and he fiddled with the radio. When he found a Beatles song he stopped scanning and began to sing along. His voice was so awful and he was really belting it out, tapping his hands on the steering wheel and imagining himself as a paperback writer, it made me laugh until I was doubled over. I could smell the residue of shaving cream on his skin. It was a long beautiful uninterrupted drive.

  We took the elevator up to the floor and he farted when the doors closed. I dodged his dithering secretary as she handed him mail and walked in a circle around him talking about calls and memos. In his office he sat down in his big leather chair and he spun around twice, like a kid in a barber chair, before he opened his briefcase on his desk. On top of his papers beside his laptop was the Magic 8 Ball. Of course, I thought. My mother and Evan hated the ball, but my father kept it. It was one of the last things we talked about. It was one of the last things he saw me touch. He put it on his desk and I peered over it into the little window. It read: Definitely not. A tiny movement behind the letters, like a curtain billowing behind a window, made me look more closely. Some angle of the light allowed me to see inside the ball. Behind the floating letters I saw a room with a bed, a sectional couch, and a television set. Against the black wall a curved bookshelf held books. The floor was decorated with a rug. A reading lamp lit the space on one side of the sectional. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have a body and I had been imagining myself the size that I was used to being. I touched the window and found myself in the room.

  I tell you all this for a reason. I really feel that it should have been explained to me by the clown I saw sleeping outside our house that morning. A lot became clear to me once I entered the ball. For one thing, the previous occupants had left behind journals. I would have kept them and published them as the Genii Diaries except the lives of geniis are repetitive and dull. But those journals contained the musings of people who suddenly found themselves in a state they presumed to be death. And then they discovered that they were contracted to answer questions. There was no expectation of good or useful answers; there were few expectations at all. I figured out that each one had been inside the ball for about five to seven years. The ball was a kind of time-share situation, professional housing.

  My father never asked a question and I was grateful for that. I think he didn’t want to erase the answer I had gotten for a question he would never hear. He stared at the ball and read the words out loud and I loved to see his dear face up close. I stood by the window and I talked to him. I thought about trying to communicate that I was in there. But he never asked a question and, when I thought about putting my name in the window, I was afraid he would be frightened or repelled and would get rid of me.

  My father never took the risk of changing the answer but he left me on his desk sometimes and cleaning staff or his secretary or passersby shook me. You learn about people, about what the central questions are. I always gave the answer Definitely Not, to protect my father. That was my answer to the questions they all asked. Should I go back to school? Should I leave my husband? Should I confront my daughter? Should I have this affair? Should I travel to India? Should I go on a diet? Will I get the promotion? Will I ever find someone? Will I be okay? Will I win the contract? Will I be forgiven?

  And you were one of those people. I know you must resent me but I didn’t design what we are going through. I’m trying to give you some information to make it easier for you. I’ll always be as grateful to you as you must be the opposite. Ask me anything. Ask me any question you have no matter how weird it seems to you. I’m going back into the world when we finish here and you won’t speak to anyone directly again for years and probably never again to someone who knows what you are talking about. I’m going as fast as I can to walk in the door back into my parents’ lives. I’ll tell them the truth about what happened and they won’t believe me. But they won’t care. They won’t care that I am wearing the same clothes and I look like I will turn nine in a month when I should be a teenager. They won’t care how or why I came back, they won’t even question it too much. I will be theirs again. Ask me what you want to ask me quickly because I am going home.

  This Is the Story of a Good Mother. This Is Her Picture

  I KNOW; SHE LOOKS LIKE Mary. I did that on purpose. There must be many more mothers out there, who love their kids no matter how crazy they get. This is her story, the one that didn’t make it into the book. This is the story of how as a teenager he leaves her, and takes up with forces she can’t understand, starts wearing clothes and shoes that are completely impractical, and she keeps on loving him. When he comes home for dinner she gives him all the meat even if she’ll have to eat grain for weeks. She listens to him complain about things that no one can change and she listens to all his fancy self-important dreams. She squints and sees the baby that he was, even under all that scraggly hair.

  She hears terrible stories from her friends that he says his father isn’t his father, that she never made him the way that other babies were made from bits of her and him and the best moments of a whole difficult marriage. She feels torn between loyalty to his father who is still with her, and to him who left her for another Mary — a whore by everyone’s account. He consorts with lepers and so she worries endlessly about his health. His hubris, she thinks on her worst days, is the only thing about him that is of godly proportions.

  She scans the gossip for real news, always anticipating the thing that finally arrives on her door. He is arrested. He is convicted. He will be killed. Only a child still although she will always think he is a child until the day that he outlives her. But this one won’t outlive her. The other children rally for her attention, but she is drained of love. She becomes a madwoman rushing suddenly to his defense. She doesn’t remember the exact night he was conceived: he could be right, he could be the son of someone better than her faithless husband who tells her to just let him go.

  She travels in his shadow trying to walk beside him. Maybe she can still help him maybe she can still offer him her faith. But when she arrives at his side he is already on the cross. No mother ever imagined seeing that precious body stabbed through and hung among thieves in the desert.

  She talks to him to keep him company. She hears his feet crack around the nail. What can she do to make him better now? What can she say to make this easier? She finds herself reciting empty verses. She tells him boring news about old friends. She can’t believe she is the only family member at his broken feet. Your father would be he
re, she says, and makes excuses. Your brother is having a baby of his own — he has to stay with his wife. They all love you. I love you. She prays, even though — well, why not? She sees that he is fading. She feels a miserable fondness for the other Mary kneeling there beside her.

  And when he begins to die she thinks, so this is it, the whole thing? These are the last minutes of you and me. Oh dear God, I will give you every ounce of my brain if you stop this. My dear son, do you know how much I love you? I love you until it screams in me.

  She helps them take her son down and she washes his body slowly, as slowly as possible because after this she will never touch him again. She combs his hair. (What is it about our children’s hair?) She helps them to bury him in the cave, reasoning that they will send her away if she doesn’t. At least she knows where he is and he is out of pain and safe and they can’t do anything more to him now. She lives in a tent made from her clothes and sleeps by the doorway for as long as she can bear it. She lays feathers at his gravesite every day. She takes them from a peacock some foolish local man keeps. Keeping a peacock out here is as foolish as keeping an elephant. All she can tell her other children is that it would be the same for any of them.

  When she goes home she cooks without spice. She cannot listen to any condolences. She asks herself what she might have done differently when she was pregnant. Was it that night she danced or the work or the wine? She asks herself about his childhood: did he know that he was precious just as he was? She asks herself if she should have tracked him down and dragged him home when he first started all this. Should she have said, stop it, stop it, you’re no Messiah. You’re the boy I made, you may not want to hear it, but I had sex with your father. Get a job. Find a girl. Stay near me. I’ll pay your debts. I’ll be your audience. What happens to you out there happens to me in here — right inside of me. Don’t you know I love you? Every imagined conversation ends this way.