Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “That’s not it, Jack. You know it’s not.”

  (She’s right. Wish she wasn’t, but…)

  “Okay, okay. Lemme see if I can get this out…”

  And he started talking about the time in all of our lives when we lack the vocabulary to codify our experiences in terms of real words. Because before the words, there are the images and the primal sense impressions. Mommy smells Good. Daddy smells funny, but he’s still Good. The blanket is Warm. The Sun is Bright. Mr. Flip is Bad.

  (Mr. Flip. Yeah, he’s the one, all right…)

  Nemmy sat back and allowed a small smile of satisfaction to curl her magenta lips. Before leaning forward again, she signaled for yet another cappuccino.

  (Where was she pouring those things? She must have a bladder the size of a casaba melon…)

  Jack felt a sudden urge for a cigarette, as strong and vicious as if he’d just stubbed one out after a long night of drinking. He shrugged it off, trading it for the mantle of his unburdening.

  Mr. Flip came to his house when he was a very small boy. Little Randolph had his own room in the bungalow on Crescent Street in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. Situated on the second floor at the end of the hall, the room was warmed by late afternoon sunlight that streamed in through gauzy yellow curtains.

  Always warm.

  Till Mr. Flip made the scene.

  He came one day with Randolph’s Godparents—Aunt Helen and Uncle Eddie. They brought him as a birthday gift when Randolph turned four years old. He remembered the dark maroon wrapping paper from Kaufmann’s department store, and his Dad peeling it off from the box, and the cardboard flaps barn-dooring back to reveal Mr. Flip for the first time.

  Little Randolph stared at the thing called Mr. Flip for a long time. Jack could still remember what it looked like, as if he’d just torn his gaze away from it. It was a squat, homuncular little creature, wearing a clown face and stubby little arms sticking straight out. This likeness was painted on a panel of wood that hinged upward from the long end of a piece of furniture resembling a small shoemaker’s bench.

  Little Randolph didn’t know it at the time, but Mr. Flip was a child’s dressing stool-combination-clothes valet. You could flip (hence the oh-so-clever name) the panel down to make a seat, then up to hang little shirts and pants on its foreshortened, and therefore grotesque, arms.

  Whoever had painted the image of the Mr. Flip’s clown face was either a bad artist, a tortured soul, or plainly mean-spirited. Because the visage on that clothes valet was easily the most hideous, nightmarish face he’d ever seen in his life. The eyes had an almost three-dimensional quality, as they seemed to bulge off the wood like the two halves of a hard-boiled egg. But it was the mouth that captured Randolph’s attention so completely. Rimmed by a thin, white ring, warped into what passed for a smile, was actually a leering rictus. A gaping space that spoke of bad things…Randolph always found himself staring into Mr. Flip’s mouth—into that void between the parted lips where the suggestion of teeth, little pointed ones, glinted at him. The open mouth bothered him. Randolph knew even back then, that mouths opened to either speak or bite, and Mr. Flip just didn’t look the talkative kind of guy.

  But somehow, his parents and the other grown-ups didn’t see it that way. They all clapped their hands and made happy noises, and talked about how “cute” Mr. Flip was, and don’t-you-just-love-him-Randolph?-go-give-Aunt-Helen-and-Uncle-Eddie-a-kiss-and-say-thank-you.

  Why couldn’t they see him for the horror that he was? How could they let such an ugly little thing into their house? Randolph was terrified, but he had been raised even at this early age to be a little gentleman, and he knew he could never tell them how much he loathed this intruder.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  No. His mother had decided that Mr. Flip would receive a place of honor in Randolph’s room, at the foot of his bed near his door leading down the hall.

  And so began the transformation of his thoughts, of the way the little boy perceived the world. Every night, when his Dad would sit on the edge of his bed, reading him a story from the Golden Books collection, Randolph would listen half-heartedly, watching the pictures in the book with one eye, while casting a cautious glance at Mr. Flip. Admittedly, Randolph had evolved a partial solution to sharing a room with such a malformation by actually using the valet as much as possible—shrouding it with every shirt and pair of pants he could get his hands on. His mother would boast to her friends what a nice and neat boy he had become since Mr. Flip arrived.

  While not a solution, his tactic kept Mr. Flip under wraps except for Laundry Day. And on those days and nights, Dad’s stories were never long enough. When he would close the Golden Book and tuck Randolph in with a kiss and a sweet-dreams-champ-see-you-in-the-morning, the little boy would feel all his insides kind of seizing up like an old Chevy that suddenly lost its oilpan.

  Because, on those nights, Mr. Flip was free to cavort naked and revealed.

  After his Dad switched off the light with a resounding click!, he would leave the door half-open, walk down the hall and switch on the bathroom light. The thinking here was to allow a little ambient light to flow down the passage and softly lap against Randolph’s bedroom threshold. Thereby giving him some comfort against the darkness.

  (But it didn’t work that way, did it?)

  The cast of light, the positioning of the clothes valet, the angle of sight from the boy’s bed, and a certain slant of imagination all conspired to imbue Mr. Flip with a dark and living essence. Transfixed, Randolph would lie propped against his headboard like a prisoner chained to his cell wall, looking into the predatory gaze of Mr. Flip. The longer he watched, the lolling egg-yellow eyes would begin to track about the room as though searching for him…and the arms. More like flippers, really. Sticking straight out with over-sized, flat hands, Mr. Flip became the vile thalidomide mutation iconized. But the worst had been the rows of shark-teeth, folded away during the daylight, that would rise up from the impossible dimensions beneath the surface of the wood. The boy could almost hear its words falling from that mouth in a hideous whisper: Flip-time! Gonna flip you, Randy. That’s what I’m gonna do. Gonna flip you out…one night, when left naked, Randolph knew, he would shake free of his guise and gambol about the room before scaling the heights of the bed.

  An immeasurable gulf of time passed over the little boy as the Laundry Days piled up like dirty clothes, stretching into months. The terrors dispensed by Mr. Flip ran rampant through his dreams until they began to leak through, contaminating his daytime thoughts. He began seeing other images in terms of Mr. Flip. Ordinary everyday objects became as yellow or round as his eyes, as red as his nose, as flat as his hands, as dark as the vacancy of his mouth.

  Gonna flip you out…

  And it continued like that until Mr. Flip finally Went Away.

  Well, actually, he was taken away. It happened after he’d finally broken free of the wood that held him, shambling out of the hallway light and into the nourishing shadows of Randolph’s room. He danced obscenely in the moonglow, and whispered to the boy as he approached the bed. Flip time! Yes it is! Gonna flip you out! Mr. Flip’s gonna flip you out!

  Closer and closer it dragged itself, but before he could clamber up the bedclothes, the little boy had unleashed a shattered-crystal scream. A scream that yanked Daddy from his dreams of late mortgage payments and vindictive supervisors to come running down the hall.

  A click! and the room filled with light. Randolph gibbered uncontrollably, able only to point at the clothes valet which now stood rigid and idiotic by the door. The pantomime of tears and heaving, sobbing relief continued until Daddy got the message. Hey-c’mon-Champ-is-this-thing-what’s-bothering-you-well-don’t-worry-about-that-Daddy’ll-fix-that-right-now.

  Randolph could remember the hard, warm power in his Daddy’s hand as he grabbed him up from the bed, carried him up against his pajamaed chest, while in the other, he gathered up Mr. Flip and headed downstairs, through the kitchen,
and out into the backyard. Moonlight through Elm branches cross-hatched their path to a flagstone pit barbecue his father had built the previous summer. The little boy watched as his Daddy carefully stood him up and said okay-watch-it-son as he swung Mr. Flip like Willie Mays going after a high, hard one. In one incredibly rapid motion the clothes valet struck the chimney of the barbecue and simply…exploded. The pale yellow cast of the Indian Summer night captured the spectacular splintering of Mr. Flip and etched the image across time itself. Recorded in majestic slow-motion, the end of Mr. Flip would remain with Randolph forever.

  There were other recollections since faded—till now—the cool, wet grass under his feet; the warm rush of joy that surged through him; Mommy yelling at Daddy to get-back-in-the-house-it-was-the-middle-of-the-night-you-maniac…

  But the good stuff remained. Somewhere in the dredged up muck of that early terror was the tarnished crucible in which a child’s terror had been transformed from base metal into gold. The place where Jack’s headspring had been wound up tight—full of the chimeras and hydras that would for a lifetime chase him through invention’s maze.

  (Well, almost a lifetime.)

  He had never imagined the spring would run so slack, that the tension would be lost. And there was no longer a Mr. Flip around to twist the key.

  “Pretty cool, Jack,” said Nemmy. She tilted back the rest of her cup. “I like it. Told from the heart…or the gut…or whatever. I believe you.”

  “Believe me? I didn’t know I was under oath.”

  She grinned. “Only to yourself.”

  The sun had westered into Jersey and beyond, and their waiter hovered nearby. If Jack didn’t order some dinner, they would be expected to make room for some paying customers.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You have to go back and get Mr. Flip—wherever he is.”

  A little jolt tensed through him. Some sort of somatic response to the idea of what she was suggesting.

  “What?”

  The waiter was looking at him, and Jack numbly signaled for the check. Nemmy was leaning forward, her eyes bulleting him.

  “You can’t be this dense, Jack. You need Mr. Flip. Now go find him.”

  The waiter passed the table, pausing only long enough to drop his check on a little tray. Jack covered it with a stray fifty from his pocket, and nodded slowly. Nemmy had whanged him with a psychic tuning fork and he was still resonating from the tone so struck. The very notion of needing Mr. Flip, even symbolically, withered him. He must have been turning this idea over for an extended time, not speaking, not even seeing anything, until he was aware of a touch at his sleeve.

  “…earth to Jack…you still with us, man?”

  “What am I supposed to do?” he said with a half-hearted chuckle. “Go back to Bethel Park?”

  Nemmy looked at him with an expression of amused tolerance. “Of course, Jack! That’s exactly what you must do.”

  “But why?”

  Nemmy was clearly disappointed in him. “What do I have to do?—connect all the dots for you? Jack, you’re displaying all the signs of a severely atrophied imagination. And that’s the problem. Even if only unconsciously, you gotta realize Mr. Flip was the boss moment, the big-deal catalyst in your life. He taught you how to be scared, he taught you that this is a fucking scary place. And once you discovered that, there was no turning back. Monsters from the id, Jack. That’s what it’s all about. You know it, and I know it.”

  She paused for dramatic effect. Her eyes lasered violet light into him.

  “You’ve got your money and your automatic rave reviews and your guaranteed million sales, so what do you need with motivation, with any galvanic fear response from the time that shaped you? That’s the problem, Jack—you don’t think you need it anymore and the fact is you need it more than ever. So yeah, go back to Bethel Park and get whatever you left there. Go get that little shit.”

  He thought about that for an unspoken moment while he looked at this wacky-looking young woman, who in the space of a few hours had discovered more about him than the last ten years’ worth of girlfriends. He knew already their relationship had somehow transcended, or at least stumbled past, the physical, and oddly enough, that was fine with him. He was not, in the final encoding of this encounter, attracted to her; but he still felt he needed her in his life. Of all the ways he’d tried to find a solution to his personal terrors, only Nemmy O. Brand had offered up any counsel of possible worth.

  Again the urge for a big old nasty Marlboro laced through him. He exhaled, watched his breath defined by the now cold air.

  “Okay,” said Jack. “You’re right. I only have one more question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Will you come with me?”

  ⟡

  (Not on your fucking life.)

  Jack recalled Nemmy’s reply as he guided his gun-metal blue Lexus across the winding treachery called the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  That’s what she’d said to him.

  And pretty soon after that, he’d put her in a cab and had never seen her again. No phone calls, no keep-those-cards-and-letters-coming-folks. Nothing.

  (No, that wasn’t completely true.)

  About a week after she’d faded into the Soho evening traffic, Jack found a little package mixed in with the day’s bag-o-mail. It was wrapped in brown paper, had a New Orleans postmark, and no return address. Inside, Jack found a charm or amulet attached to a small silver necklace chain. He was not familiar with the design although it resembled any number of mandala-like designs he’d seen. A handwritten note said:

  This is the talisman of my namesake. Wear it during your quest and you will succeed, but only if you believe in its power.

  N.

  Jack smiled as he remembered his reaction the first time he’d read her words.

  (Yeah, and don’t forget to click your heels three times. And a pair a red shoes wouldn’t hurt…)

  Funny thing was, Jack realized, until he’d received that little charm, he hadn’t decided he would actually go back to Bethel Park.

  A green and white sign slipped past him. Pittsburgh 15 miles. He would be getting off at the Monroeville exit, which was coming up fast. Another half hour or so and he’d be home.

  And yeah, he knew all about Thomas Wolfe and the going home shtick. But that guy wrote standing up using the top of his refrigerator as his desktop…so what the hell could he know about anything? Besides, Jack was pretty damned sure that Look Homeward Angel wasn’t the result of a close encounter with a clothes valet.

  (I’m going home, all right. You bet your ass, Tom.)

  Jack tried not to anticipate anything. Not having been back to his hometown for almost twenty years, he had no idea what to expect other than lots of changes. Experience had taught him a few things, including the folly of trying to figure out ahead of time how a particular scenario might run down and how to deal with it. His up-and-down life as a writer had schooled him well: take everything as it comes; don’t try to plan anything, and don’t lose sleep over things beyond your control.

  Half an hour since leaving the Turnpike, he realized he was probably lost. After a stint on the Parkway and more turns and stops than he’d remembered, he realized he was closing in on the old neighborhood. It was incredible how little had changed in all these years. There was a part of him that hadn’t wanted his return to be so easy, and he was just discovering this.

  (Weird how the mind works…my mind, anyway.)

  He turned a corner and there was something about the configuration of the tall trees, that barn-red clapboard house on the corner, the curving tracks of the trolley. Tapping the accelerator, Jack surged forward two more blocks.

  Crescent Street.

  As he slowly guided the Lexus into its turn, entering the long shady block, he felt everything hitching up—his breathing, the fluids in his throat, his fingers gripping the wheel, tears in his eyes. For the first time since that morning, he rememb
ered Nemmy’s talisman hanging about his neck beneath his L. L. Bean shirt. Fumbling around his button-down collar, he felt the thin silver touch his fingertips.

  (Why am I doing this? Just get on with it.)

  Crescent Street lay in wait for him, enshrouded by gigantic chestnuts and oaks. Over the encampment of two-stories, they formed an impenetrable canopy of Fall color. Jack stopped the car, escaped its leather womb, and stood looking up the street. The houses had remained unchanged and without thinking about it, he found himself ticking off the names of the families who’d lived in each of them during the chrome and Formica Fifties: the Edmonds and the Ottenheimers, the Geatings, the Paseks, and of course the big Victorian on the corner where old lady Howard passed her days behind drawn windowshades.

  Jack walked slowly up the block. Still no sidewalks and still no need. Crescent was off the beaten track; the only traffic had always been its residents and the occasional delivery van. There were a few yardheads out raking and pruning and trimming, a kid on his bike; otherwise the street was very quiet. His target lay hunched among the shadows of two immense trees, its white aluminum siding accented by black shutters and awning over the front steps. Jack remembered the day he helped his Dad install that awning; it was an Autumn Saturday very much like this one when he wanted to be off to his high school’s football game. But not until he finished his detail as no.1 tool-handler and garage-gofer. Dad was forever showing him how to use another esoteric tool; and even now Jack knew his coping saws from his calipers.

  The awning still protected the steps—a testament to Dad’s skill. As he reached the front walk, Jack felt a sudden attack of disequilibrium, as if he’d jumped up from a chair too soon. Only dimly sensed, forces swirled around him.

  (You’re just getting emotional. Go on. Get going…)

  Advancing up the walk, Jack shook off the impression of passing through a long tunnel. When he stood under the awning, he could almost hear Dad calling the self-tapping metal screw a little whore for not turning properly. He smiled at the memory and knocked on the door.