A chuckle at first; sardonic, she thought, a sardonic chuckle. She thought she’d fake it but she didn’t have to. It was like she’d lost control of her body; she shivered, her limbs weak, her gut filled with butterflies and she laughed so hard her muscles ached.
She took to laughing at a speed which was frightening. And she laughed so hard old wounds opened, and she bled, her arms, her legs, slick with blood: she made patterns on the lino with it, dark red finger painting. Therese laughed so hard a blood vessel popped in her eyes. And that became the goal. Even the Jester took to it, bleed-ing quietly. He’d score his thighs with a sharp knife and the others did it, too.
~~~
Therese tried to watch it dispassionately, tried to understand it, and looked for physical causes for the hysteria; incense, heavy breathing, drugs, alcohol, hypnosis. She saw none of this.
She saw things she didn’t believe possible. She saw people collapse, not breathing, then wake with their fillings turned to gold. She saw this; mouths full of gold.
“People will do anything for money,” Calum said as the numbers grew, as word got out. Only Therese listened to the words; the others laughed.
“Laugh until you sweat. Until you bleed. That is how you are purified.” Daniel rolled at Calum’s feet and he did bleed, from the eyes and the ears. Therese bent and gently wiped the blood away.
After each session, sometimes days-long, a cleaning crew would go through. Therese loved the meeting hall after this cleaning. Her eyes would sting from the bleach, but the smell and the shine were all she’d ever wanted.
~~~
Calum did not remind her of her grandfather, although they were of an age.
Her grandfather had walked the streets in rags held together by bodily secretions. They drove past him every day on the school bus. He knew she was aboard, would raise his hand in greeting. His teeth were rotted in his head, his gums swollen, and he no longer called out loud.
That was where she came from, that empty poverty. He was jailed thirty-five years for spitting at a cop, because he had HIV AIDS.
Calum trembled and sat stiffly. Only Therese noticed this.
“Are you all right, Jester?” she said.
“I embrace the symptoms. They will make me pure.” But his stiffness and tremors lasted into meals, in the evenings, in quiet times when there was no laughter.
Therese went to a doctor and, while she was being examined, asked about her ‘grandfather’ and his tremors.
“It sounds like it could be Parkinson’s. You need to get him to come in for tests. There are drugs to control it. We need to be careful, though. Some of the drugs can lead to compulsive, self-rewarding behaviour. Gambling, sex, shopping.”
“Laughter?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’d say. Laughter releases the pleasure chemical, too.”
~~~
Calum did not deny it. “It’s my family’s impure blood.”
“And you use your drug on the people?”
“Sometimes, to help things along. Not always, though. It’s them-selves.”
~~~
Those who laughed themselves close to death awakened with no memory. Every moment was their first.
Calum said, “This is a good thing. Clearing your mind of the past, cleaning out bad memories, will make you happy. We are safe here from the cruelties of the world.”
They laughed. Therese watched the clear fluids leaking from them. When people first arrived they leaked cloudy stuff, muddy stuff, but soon the liquids flowed clear, like from a well-done roast chicken.
The Jester sat in a large armchair. He was a big man but he looked small in its cushions.
“You seem happy, Therese.”
Fresh from the shower, her skin still felt clean. Her clothes clean. It would be an hour or more before the dirt started to cling.
She turned around for him, her arms spread wide. “Do you like me happy?”
He smiled. “Clean and happy, you are at your most beautiful.”
He leapt about like a jester, jumping foolishly to make people laugh.
“I come from a long line of jesters. Not all of them funny like me. One dear man so upset his crowd they kicked him down the stairs. Broke his neck as if he were a chicken. My mum used to say I had the spirit of him in me. His essence.”
The audience laughed, laughed louder.
“She said that as the jester died, he laughed once, a bitter choke full of hate and regret. The basement servant stood by, and he had a small pot he’d emptied of beer that very moment. He captured that laugh which came out brown and oozy. Kept it for good, a time of need. But while there were many times of need, there never was one strong enough for the essence. This is how time passes. We wait and wait for a moment that never comes. We should make the moment, take it. That’s what we should do.”
The infection was full in them now, and they were out of their seats, roaring with laughter. Children, too, filled with pure hysteria.
“My mother came into the essence when she was born. Her father told her, save it for the end of the world.
“But along the way I was born. Born sad, I was, full of misery and despair. Do you see?”
They saw, a hundred of them screaming his name.
“I didn’t feel right in the world. It seemed so dirty and cruel. So I tried to take myself out of it.”
Screams of laughter, louder from those who’d tried themselves.
“My mother found me with the gun all ready. I wanted to be sure. She told me to wait, she was very calm, and she brought me the essence of that old jester. It was a bitter liquid, thick like cough syrup, but it filled me with a good humour which has not left me yet. Who else puts any faith in purity? Who else cares? Drinkers like their vodka pure. Holistic people like their food pure. Is food ever pure? There is damage along the way, I think.” This is what he told them. “Truth is confession. You must tell me all.”
And they did. All their secrets.
“Pain is truth, beauty and purity. Scars are pain and they tell the story of an impure life. Beauty is without scarring. Do you understand that you are not beautiful? You think you are but not at all.”
They gave him their bank details because he said that only truth, beauty and purity will give them wealth. They had mouths full of gold fillings and they had no memory.
“You are not alone, or special. Once you’re gone it’s like you were never there. All you can do is lead a pure life, worship the life you are given.”
“I was threatened with a year of ugliness if I didn’t pass on a breast cancer chain letter,” Therese said.
He laughed. “All your ugliness is on your skin and your own actions didn’t cause that. There is clear blood running in your veins, because to purify something you need to corrupt it first. Fruit rots, leaving behind a beautiful seed. Remember?” It seemed so long ago, that time in the supermarket. A lifetime ago.
She still worked there, though she brought the groceries to the Jester now. He no longer needed to shop. Sometimes Daniel would meet her, help her take the things home, and she liked those times. They would drive in the car, the groceries rattling in the back seat, and it was normal. Average. The sort of thing people did.
Then he would laugh, and she would, and they were back in that again. Daniel always slipped something into his pocket; homage to the Jester. Therese would smile, look away. It didn’t bother her.
Until the day he was caught.
He’d taken a pen, a good heavy one for the Jester. Therese didn’t see him do it, which should have helped when she was questioned later, but didn’t.
He was caught as they walked out the door. The fact he laughed at them…no security man likes being laughed at. They wouldn’t be in the job if they could deal with people laughing at them. So he was taken to the police station. He said to Therese, “Don’t let them laugh without me. Okay? Don’t let him lead a meeting.”
The Jester was furious. “How dare they take our people? How is he to laugh in there? We must
laugh as we have never laughed before.” He was quiet for a moment. “Therese, this town is so dirty. So full of pus it’s coming through the seams.”
This seemed an exaggeration to her, and she wondered if perhaps the scales were lifting from her eyes.
“Daniel will be home soon. They’ll only keep him a couple of hours. He said we should wait for him. That we should not have a meeting without him.”
“This town is filthy, Therese. We must laugh, laugh. This is for Daniel’s sake, Therese.”
“We can’t have a meeting without him.”
“We can, you know.”
That afternoon, as the meeting began, he said, “We have no control over how it will affect people. That is not our business. Our business is purity, our business is to take what has been cleansed and work with it. You must break something down before you can cleanse it. At least this way there is only one emotion out of control. Can you imagine Hatred? Or Lust? Or Anger? These things will cause damage to all around them. I have never done anything wrong. Even as a child my inner voice was very loud.
“Laugh, my friends, laugh as you have never laughed before. Let them hear your spirit, let them join us.” Pachelbel’s Canon played, soft, gentle, rhythmic.
People began to laugh. Laughed so hard their eyeballs were bloody, their bones cracked, and they couldn’t breathe.
“Laugh to purify this city, laugh for Daniel, laugh as if you have nothing to live for.”
Laughter became pain. Therese’s guts were dagger-struck, her bones mallet-shattered, her tongue split in two, her teeth cracked, her eyes swelled out of her head, but she could not stop. She felt her breath leaving, the oxygen out of her body, as blackness filled her eyes and she knew nothing more.
~~~
Hot dragon’s breath on her face. She opened her eyes. Daniel bent over her, smiling.
“Welcome back from the dead, Therese.”
She sat up. Around her, bodies lay; bloodied, emptied, pure. She pulled herself tall and didn’t scream, though she took Daniel’s hand. She turned her head, looking for the Jester.
“I’m here, Therese.” He sat on his stool. He looked exhausted, almost bored.
“Did you die also?”
“Not this time.” He slid off the stool, leaning heavily on Daniel’s shoulder.
Daniel helped them both limp forward. His face was drawn, tears on his cheeks. “I told you not to run the meeting.” He wept as they picked their way through the dead. Sirens in the distance.
“It’s so terrible.”
“It is. He can’t control them like I do. But it is good. We have purified them all. Pain, beauty, purity. They are happy. It’s all over.”
She bent down to look at a beautiful eagle necklace around the neck of a young girl.
“Take it,” he said, spittle-voiced. “Take whatever you want. But we’ll need to hurry.”
They picked like vultures off the laughing dead; money, jewellery, iPods, phones; picked and stashed the goods into four green shopping bags.
“How do you feel?” Daniel said once they were out of the house and travelling in their air-conditioned, perfumed sedan.
“I feel dirty on the surface but within I feel cleansed.”
“Pure?”
“Pure.”
She had a gash on her forehead from falling.
“That will heal to a beautiful scar,” he said. “What does it feel like to think you are dead? To wake up among the dead?”
“I can see more sharply. Edges are clearer. I see bruises I couldn’t see before.”
“That’s emotional bruising. What you see is heartbreak, or guilt, or fear.”
“It really was like sleep. But it was much darker. Blanker. And re-birthing was like waking from a sleep supposed to last five days but you wake up after two.”
The Jester shook. He tried to sip a soft drink, chinotto, bitter, but he could not lift it to his mouth.
He took Therese’s hand. “My dear daughter.”
The comfort those words gave her were beyond anything she had known. Her own father said fuck, fuck off, fuck you, and she’d watch him bleed to death in a pub brawl. Hiding under the table with her Barbie dolls.
~~~
“I think another town beckons,” Daniel said.
She was quiet.
“A problem?”
“My mother. I hate to leave her alone in her filth. And my brother.”
“We can bring them or we can purify them where they sit.”
Could she do it? Burn the filthy house down, burn the clothes, the papers, the rotting carpet, the decades of boxes? The chocolate wrappers?
Daniel said, “It’s up to you to decide. Then we’ll spend some money. We’ll hire a cleaner to scrub as we walk, scrabble on the ground before us to make sure we step clean. We’ll buy a comedy club for you to star in.”
Therese smiled. She still hadn’t figured out what it was she would have to do for him to thank him for giving her her life back. She saw through the Jester at least; overblown, arrogant man. He was kind, though, and she admired that. And the way he could draw an audience, that was something she wanted to learn. She would walk on with him, bringing people to laughter.
~~~
At the side of the road there were dead cows, burnt, hit by lightning perhaps, direct hit. Therese thought, We are like a bushfire, coming suddenly and burning a place to the ground. Bushfires clear the land to make it ready for new growth. That is what we are doing.
There was a smell in the air, a sweet smell, which made them smile. Each smelled something different.
In the back seat, her mother hummed softly. They’d paid a nurse to clean her up and now, covered with perfume and creams, her white hair soft around her face, Therese felt like hugging her. Her brother had refused to leave, although the Jester had made him laugh.
“Better out than in,” Calum said, and they drove on to select the next town to be gifted with purity.
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That Girl
St Martin’s was clean, you could say that at least. Apart from the fine mist of leg hair, that is. I watched as Sangeeta (“You know me. I am Sangeeta.”) crawled through the women’s legs, a long piece of thread hanging from between her teeth. She stroked a shin, a knee, looking for hairs to pluck.
“Come on, Sangeeta. All the ladies are bald, now. You’ll have to find a dog.” The head nurse was very kind when there were visitors, the inmates told me.
They sat along the wide verandah that wrapped around their dorm. Like many verandahs in Fiji, it acted as their social centre. It was the only place in the hospital with comfortable chairs. The dining hall, in a collapsing once-white building behind the dorm, had hard chairs designed to make you eat quickly: the art therapy room, across the loosely-pebbled driveway, had stools. This was one of the things I wanted to change; put comfy chairs in so the women could sit and stitch, or paint, or weave. At present they made small pandanus fans and carved turtles from soap, to be sold at the annual bazaar. My funding covered a month, and came from a wealthy Australian woman who’d visited St Martin’s and been depressed at the state of the art therapy room, with paintings so old there was more dust than paint. They had no supplies at all. My benefactor hired me to sort out the physical therapy room, perhaps train the nurses in some art techniques. The nurses loved the sessions with me and used them to gossip, mostly.
Sangeeta dragged herself up using the band of my skirt. “You’ve got too many hairs in your eyebrows. And your lip is like a hairy worm.”
I turned a stare on her and she shrank.
The head-nurse said, “You comment on our guest’s appearance? Are you perfect? There are things you will need to learn, Sangeeta. If you want to return to your life in Suva.”
Sangeeta primped her hair. “I am a beauty therapist. Of course I am beautiful.” Her face was deeply scarred by acne. Open wounds went septic so easily in the tropics. There was a red slash across her throat, vivid shiny skin, and two of her fing
ers were bent sideways. The fingernails were painted and chipped, bitten to the quick. “I studied in Australia. I married an Australian man but he went mad every full moon.”
“Of course he did,” the head nurse said. “He was cursed on your honeymoon at Raki Raki.”
“He upset the witches. He didn’t believe they were witches and took a photo of me kissing one of their pigs. Then he said I smelled like bacon and could not make love to me.”
“You are blessed,” one of the other inmates said. “You will die untouched.”
“My second husband turned out to be gay,” Sangeeta said, all the time the thread hanging from her mouth. She held the thread taut. “Can I pluck your hairs? Make you smooth?”
The other women set up a clamor, all wanting to do something for me. To me.
Only the old lady at the end of the verandah sat quietly, her lips moving. I walked over to her and bent my head down. “What is it, dear?” I said.
“I am that girl,” she said. “I am that girl.”
She was very thin. Her skin was wrinkled, looking like folds of brown velvet—a hand-made soft toy for an ungrateful child.
“I am that girl,” the old woman said. Not much else. She would demand more porridge if it were on, and sometimes sing if the prayer was in Hindi. I would learn all this in the next few days.
She grabbed at me with sharp fingernails. They should have been clean; everything else was here, but I saw a dark red ridge I didn’t like. If she was a painter I would have guessed at Russet Red, but she was not a painter. A strong smell of bleach filled the air. I suspected it was their only cleaning fluid.
“What girl does she mean?”
The head nurse shook her head. “We don’t know. Malvika has been saying that for a long time now. She’s been here since she was a teenager. Appeared one night, they say. Filthy, torn up, you’ve never seen such a thing, the old nurse told me. Nobody wanted her. Her family said no thank you. She’s not our worst, though.” She put her hand on a mess of a girl curled in a chair. “This one here came out of the womb this way. Her family kept her in a small bure at the back of their house until she got pregnant. No one knows who the father was but they say it was a dog.” The poor girl looked like she’d been grown in a jar. She was twisted and folded over herself and she chewed her lip as if it were food. My fingers itched to draw her, and the old woman, too. Not as part of my funding, but for pleasure. I paint the daily details of life, to make sense of the world and here the details were vast and many layered.
The Gate Theory Page 2