My living room curtains were drawn. I was sure I’d left them open. Had Kelsey closed them? I don’t know what I expected to see, but I think I would’ve felt better if Sir Thanksalot or the Raggedy Man appeared to take a bow and confirm that I’d lost my last marble.
I had gone to sleep feeling blessedly relaxed but slightly foolish, and frittered away the day quite sure that I’d merely snapped again. Who the fuck were they, anyway?
The production company that put on the show had folded in 1974; the royalty checks were dispersed from an oblique, headless equity fund; and the non-union, half-amateur show ran no technical credits. The crew and the puppeteers also wore masks. If there was anyone above Miss Iris, we never saw them.
I had only known a few of my TV classmates by name, only seen a few of them without their masks. We were sharply discouraged from fraternizing outside the classroom, and I never saw any of them after the show wrapped in June, 1973. The show lasted in reruns until 1984 in Southern California, and by all accounts was still running somewhere in Canada. A couple of my classmates had been outed, but only after death. The last was a promising TV character who had just made the jump from TV to movies. When he died of a suspicious drug interaction, his obit identified him as Tommy, the teacher’s pet. Our records were somehow sealed against press and fans alike, even against ourselves.
I tried for years to find the girl I sat next to when I wasn’t in the corner. She had bright new-penny copper hair in pigtails swept back behind the featureless white smile of her mask, and her uniform was always spotless, but her pretty lightly freckled right hand had a faint scar around the heel of her palm and the base of her thumb. Oddly whorled and shiny like a doll’s skin even after they caked it with pancake makeup, she told me once, under her breath between takes, that a dog bit her, and that her real name was Regina.
Somehow, Miss Iris heard us talking and I knew I was in real trouble, not like the pretend trouble they trapped me in every other day. I used to dream of taking her by her scarred hand and crawling under our desks and through the little door in the corner to Carcosa or anywhere they’d never find us, but we always got caught. They did things to us that I remember more vividly than anything that happened to me when I was awake. I knew the nightmares were punishment, but I knew I’d be punished no matter what I did.
A week later, I persuaded a slow kid named Richard to switch masks with me, just for the morning sing-along and the visit from Queen Camilla. I felt like I was wearing somebody else’s glasses. Halfway through the song, Richard had a seizure. Miss Iris punished him for acting up, thinking it was me. The camera was on her and not me, but all the kids laughed when I took off Richard’s mask.
The nightmares got worse. I started wetting my bed and cutting myself. Soon after that, I guess, I poisoned Miss Iris’s tea.
That night, the nightmares stopped, and the next day, Miss Iris chose me to make a wish in the Wishing Well.
~*~
A few hours after night fell, I gave up reading by flashlight and began belatedly clearing a level patch of ground to bed down on, when I heard someone stalking through the bushes. Not walking or crashing around, but stealthily picking a path, waiting in silence before taking the next step.
Rush hour traffic had thinned out, but now the night shift flew by on all sides, more than fast enough to kill a pedestrian. I played the flashlight over the shaggy walls of bottlebrush and vine-draped trees, but they still got up behind me.
I jumped back, reaching into my backpack for my knife and strewing my food at my feet.
The tall, skinny black guy in a tracksuit looked like an ashy mummy. I was sure I’d seen him on TV. A fat white lady with straw for hair brandished an axe that looked like she’d made it out of the brake assembly from a motorcycle. She crinkled noisily and snarled to drive me away from my food. She wasn’t fat, but her clothes were stuffed with plastic shopping bags. The two Mexican kids were stupefied by glue or grain alcohol. With matching Cholombian sideburns and pointy boots, they looked like they’d come to see a cockfight. Between them, they held up a guy who might somehow have been all of their offspring. Of mixed race and covered in something that stank worse than sewage, he also looked to have been run over by one or more cars.
“Who d’ye think y’are?” the woman screeched. “Can’t camp here!”
“Gotta leave, man,” said the black guy. “We need this, y’know what I mean?” His head bobbed and shook like it was trying to escape. His hand shot out like he thought he was juggling something.
“Fuck off, I pay taxes.” I finally found the knife and the pepper spray, which had gone off inside my backpack. My hand burned. “Your friend needs a hospital.”
The black guy came over with his hands up. I let him approach. “He’s past that, man, he just wants to make a wish. I know why you’re here, for real, but my boy, he gonna die before the sun come up, and he just wants to settle up with the––“
The Mexican guys screamed and pointed at something in the trees. They turned and ran away, blundering through the tangled overgrowth with the dying man on their shoulders. The woman swung the axe whistling over her head, then threw a coin and spit on the concrete plug in the center of the island. Then she, too, ran off.
The black guy just looked at me, his eyes trying to set me on fire. Like he was trying to decide whether to run or drag me with him. I held out a fistful of cash, all I had left. He took it and ran away.
I turned around and tried to see what scared them, but all I saw––all I thought I saw––was a sheet blowing in the wind, a wind I couldn’t feel, that made it look like a weightless body hurled up out of the trees and wafting off over the northbound 405.
I couldn’t sleep until the sun came up, but they never came back. Around three, a car sped around the cloverleaf ramp on squealing bald tires and threw something heavy enough to break branches onto my island. Kelsey was better than anyone deserved. A canvas Whole Foods bag held a crowbar and a mallet.
In the morning, I turned my panicky mental demolition derby into action of a sort. I played detective on the phone and then read tabloids while making coffee and instant oatmeal.
I found the coin the old woman had dropped––a silver dollar with a weird mandala symbol scored into the tail side with a soldering iron. At second glance, the trash around the plugged wishing well was really scattered offerings; food, unopened liquor, little bindles of drugs, candy, votive candles filled with dried blood.
On the spot where I thought I saw the sheet, the weeds and ice plant and eucalyptus saplings had turned white, and crumbled and blew away at my touch.
Kelsey would be done with her morning support chat and working in her breakfast nook, squashing online slander with a cat on each knee.
She answered on the first ring. “You’ve been chain-smoking, haven’t you?”
“What’s it to you? You gave me the carton.”
“Your breathing sounds like somebody running in corduroy slacks.”
“Did you go back? Did you see the mask?”
“I went back, but everything was gone.”
“What? It was in the TV, which I was well within my rights to... It’s not such a big mess…”
“Listen. Everything was gone. Your apartment is cleaned out. It’s not your apartment anymore.”
I fairly screamed and ran into traffic, when she started cackling. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” I couldn’t stay angry at her when she laughed like that, and she didn’t stop until I joined in.
“I told you, didn’t I? They’re going to pluck me out of the world and bury every last trace––“
“Get your binoculars and look at your place.”
Still hyperventilating a little, I zeroed in on my window and saw her standing on my balcony, waving and drinking coffee out of my favorite mug. “Your grand delusion doesn’t hold up to much prodding. I did some research.”
“Leave them alone, they’ll get you, too…”
“Relax, I do this for a living. No
w, understand, I’m not judging you. I love you for who you are, not who you think you are.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
I probably could’ve handled that better. Without missing a beat, she carried on. “Well, I was able to find the payrolls for the production company. Your grand conspiracy is locked away in a media vault in North Hollywood. The manager let me poke around and scan documents for fifty bucks. They folded in 1974, and Golden Class was the only show they produced.”
“Nothing we don’t know…”
“I found a class list.”
“Bullshit.”
“You sat next to Regina Haglund. She was the producer’s daughter.”
My heart went on strike. In my heart, I had always wanted to believe––well, never mind that.
“Nobody who worked on the show is still alive today. Two of the children have since died…”
My throat closed up. I had to choke down a bottle of water before I could ask, “Which ones?”
“Tommy and Norma Gutierrez. She fell off a bridge and drowned, just before she turned eighteen…”
“Jumped, fell or was pushed?”
“I don’t know, they don’t… what does it matter?”
“It matters to them,” I said. “What about Miss Iris?”
“She wrote the whole program. She and Haglund shared directing duties. She died over ten years ago.”
I clipped Miss Iris’s obituary June 12th, 1999. The local paper had fun with it. School’s Out Forever, it said over the picture of a drab old woman with an icy, empty smile. I remember feeling guilty, the first time I saw her naked face. Then it all came loose and I started laughing and crying. She wasn’t the accomplished dominatrix I’d always imagined. She looked like a retired inner city librarian, with thinning hair and huge horn-rimmed glasses that hid her eyes in twin mandalas of reflected flashburst. In accordance with her wishes, Ms. Iris Klawsen will be cremated and her ashes dispersed at sea without ceremony.
I used it as an excuse to go on a nine-day binge. I never went in the ocean again.
“There’s nobody alive, and they were nobodies. The company went under because Haglund was involved in some kind of pyramid scheme or a cult, using out-of-work actors. He committed suicide in ’75. His wife and daughter moved away, changed their names. I could find them––“
“No, please. Just believe me when I say, they’re not all gone. Somebody sent that tape––“ A shadow moved behind her, swooping out of the living room to lunge into her from behind. I stifled a scream. The curtains licked out onto the balcony.
“I couldn’t find that, either, and I looked in the trash, thank you very little.” She shaded her eyes and pointed to her chest. “Your breathing sounds even worse. What’s wrong?”
“Just go back inside, please.”
“OK, but I’m not done. You should know…”
“What?”
“You said your memory of that time was pretty hazy…”
“What?”
“Their payroll records say that you were only on the show for one week.”
“That’s a lie.”
“There’s a legal brief attached to the ledger for September, 1972. It says you were removed from the show for disciplinary problems, and cites ‘inappropriate touching’ as a reason. They replaced you with––“
“Stop!”
“––With a boy named Billy Munson who fit your general description, and he took your place for the remaining episodes. There are eight William Munsons in the 818. I could call them…”
“I was in all of them. They’re trying to disown me––“
“I believe you, sweetheart.” Her humoring voice made me want to throw a rock at her.
“––Trying to cut me out so they won’t have to answer for what they did…”
“And what did they do to you?”
“They––“ I choked up. “The last day of school, they shot another episode that never aired. They showed it to me. They must’ve been waiting for me to… crack up, and now they’re trying…”
“Is this going to make me all angry and sick? What did they––“
“They made us put on the French play.”
“The what? I’m sorry, I’m not a theater person. They made you put on a play, like a Christmas pageant?”
I didn’t want to say it over the phone, but what difference did it make? If they were listening, they already knew everything. “You’re lucky you’ve never heard of The King In Yellow.”
“The… isn’t that a Raymond Chandler story?”
“Don’t play games.”
She wanted to believe me. She’d cut off her arm and eat it, to convince me she accepted whatever I told her. It didn’t matter that I was a weirdo son of a grifter with two statch rape convictions, or that my trauma stemmed from being made to take part in a forgotten French play on an equally obscure children’s TV show.
“OK, but all of that is in the past. Nobody is looking for you. Nobody remembers––“
“Ouch.”
“That’s not what I mean. Your IMDB stock is up six percent this week, by the way.” She went inside and tripped over something. “God damn your clutter…”
I picked up the binoculars again. “How long have you been there?”
“I crashed here last night. My wi-fi is out and––“
I couldn’t seem to find my own apartment or make the binoculars focus. My eyelids were twitching. Had I taken my medication? Did I forget and take too many?
There. The curtains belled out in the morning breeze, then seemed to twist against it, curling around and delineating an enormous body. It turned and showed me a pale eyeless face that somehow seemed, across a half mile of distance, to wink.
“Get out of there, now! Someone’s in the living room!”
She pushed through the curtain to stand on the balcony. “There’s nobody here but me. God only knows why I’ve tried to help you, Arthur. You want to make everyone who tries to help you an accessory in your suicide.”
“Who said anything about suicide?” And then it hit me. I thought I had no more reason to lie. I had a huge card in my hand, and foolishly, I played it. “I know why you’re spinning me round like this, why you said no and then dropped that other package––“
“What other package?”
“I know you’re one of them… Norma.”
A shocked inhalation sucked all the air out of the connection. “I don’t know what you’re,” she started, but then gave up. “How long…?”
“I never had any reason to try, before today. You never told me who your father was, but you dropped more than enough hints. I made some calls. Your day job company is run by the same equity fund that holds the Golden Class syndication rights. I realized Him Who Must Not Be Named was originally named Gutierrez, it only made sense. And I forgive you.”
“For what?”
“For hiding in plain sight. For lying about your age. For trying to snow me when…”
Kelsey––Norma––leaned out over the railing, raging into the setting sun as if it were my face. “You don’t understand me. You think I wanted to get forced out my life when I was a teenager? I was acting out, and my father’s agent thought he would be up for an Oscar that year. So when I jumped into the canal, they lied and said I got swept out to sea. Nobody connected me to my father, and I couldn’t prove it in court. But it had nothing to do with the goddamned show…”
“What about the things they did to us?”
“What things? They didn’t molest us, they didn’t drug us… They made us put on a dumb little show! And other kids watched it, and then they grew up and forgot us, and whatever they were trying to do––“
“What were they trying to do, with us, Norma?”
She had to think about that one. “To teach kids what the world really was, behind its mask. Strange games and arbitrary punishments, and a scapegoat staked out in every yard. ‘The cleanest hands, washed only in blood…’ You remember, it was one
of her lines.”
Her voice was like a fuse almost forty years long, burning down in seconds. Short of breath, scalded by her own tears, she rushed to get it out. “I thought I was an accident, but it was worse. Those people who get everything they want in life. Somebody has to pay for it…”
“You remember the play.”
She sniffed, hiccupped and sobbed. “I remember everything.”
“Do you remember what happened to me… in the play?”
“If you know so much, then you probably figured this out already. One the group must stone to death, and one must die by their own hand, to take away all the sin of the golden class, and leave them pure to enter Carcosa and rule. Those are the rules, that was the game. One must die by their own hand. That was supposed to be you, Tardy Artie. All those times I tried to off myself… I was trying to save you.”
“Don’t, Norma, please,” I begged. “I love you.”
“That’s nice…” She bowed her head and smiled. Behind her, the curtain swelled and became a hooded shape. “But we’re still puppets. They can make you say anything.” And then she jumped off my balcony.
~*~
In all the tinsel and glitter make-believe of the show, there were two things we kids believed in utterly. One was the Wishing Well. The other was the puppet strings.
They didn’t have to direct us. Miss Iris held us in thrall without the constant barrage of orders and aphorisms that rasped from the mouth of her mask. When a puppet tapped you on the shoulder, whether it was Lord Tanglewood or Lady Greenteeth, Haita the Shepherd or the Raggedy Man, you didn’t know what you would do, only that you had been chosen, and then you watched yourself do it. Some of us stood up from penmanship lessons to utter haunting and beautiful, wordless songs, others were driven to paint unearthly pictures or recite strange lines of nonsense verse, or, like me, they spilled ink or stole school supplies or sodomized another child in the coatroom…
When Kelsey disappeared from view over the railing of my seventh story apartment overlooking Sepulveda and Valley Vista, I felt the strings pull taut. I did not run screaming to the police. I did not call 911. I went looking for the bag lady’s axe and started ripping down the wild cucumber vines, chopping down the ailanthus and castor bean and stranger weeds and parasites, until my island resembled once more a manicured paradise, a child’s dream of a better world.
A Season In Carcosa Page 23