His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  Thirty-one

  Philip Glass Is the Lord of the Flies

  Late spring Sunday. Hot, still air. Down to the library for CDs. Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Buck Owens: music to borrow, not to buy. Put on the Glass first. One of his oldies, post-Einstein on the Beach, pre-Koyaanisqatsi. Long, ferociously repetitive, hyperkinetic yet almost stationary. Halfway through

  the flies come.

  See them on the wall. The music is too loud, can’t hear the buzzing, but they’re swarming over the white space above the Namingha print. How did they get in? Door closed, windows open, but screens in place, no holes. There are dozens of them, more coming every minute, seeming to materialize from the wall itself. They form a pattern, a shifting amoebalike Rorschach shape, and

  it’s moving to the music.

  See where they’re coming in now. A small hole in the juncture of wall and ceiling hidden by brown molding. Dancing, the flies. Fast steps with individuals mirroring the staccato pulse of the music, the changing overall shape echoing broad harmonic shifts.

  Running outside through the back door, around the side of the house. The flies are everywhere: on the wall, sneaking in through the hole, coming from the house next door, the alley, the bushes, the trees. Can hear them out here, the buzzing. It’s the music they like, the music that’s calling to them. The stereo is cranked up, and what’s irritating the neighbors with its maddening repetition is talking to the flies, speaking to them.

  Running back inside. There’s Black Flag under the kitchen sink. Enough to kill them all or just enough to make them mad? Flies covering not just white space but frame now, bigger than half the wall, thousands of them. Does the music sound like the buzzing of flies or has the flies’ buzzing grown loud enough to be heard and now become part of the music?

  The shape shifting faster, borders and boundaries expanding and contracting. Rounded edges, no corners, almost liquid movement. Sight and sound combining to induce a trance state, a slowing of heart rate and breathing. Blissful. Relaxing. Passive. Accepting.

  And

  IIIII

  I can have anything I want, they tell me. I can order what I wish. They have powers, the flies, untapped until now, and I who have brought them the music, I who have awakened them, I who have connected them to their lord, I, I, I can make them do whatever my heart desires.

  I don’t know of how much they are capable; I don’t know why they should be capable of anything. It doesn’t make any sense, and the rationalist in me wants to turn off the stereo and see what happens. But that same rationalist knows that I could not survive an onslaught from so many.

  Must the music go on forever? Must I press the CD player’s Repeat button so that Philip Glass never ends? Must I keep them happy and tamed, soothed, lest they attack?

  I, I

  Still more flies are coming, these from farther off, a swarm of them speeding through the air, dark against the white smog sky, called to my home. See them through the window, almost like a funnel cloud, a tornado of angry insects.

  Are flies insects?

  Don’t care; it doesn’t matter. I look again, hear. The movement, the sound. Soothing.

  Anything I want.

  I want my mother dead.

  The Woman

  “If you eat my pussy, I’ll suck your cock.”

  Thorton stopped in midstride, looking around to make sure there was no one behind him on the sidewalk, then peered through the open window of the Lexus at the gorgeous blonde who had spoken. She was staring straight ahead, looking as though she hadn’t seen him at all, and he wondered whether he’d heard incorrectly. He considered asking her if she was speaking to him, considered asking her to repeat the question, but no, she couldn’t have said what he thought she’d said, and he decided to keep walking and continue on.

  “Excuse me? I said I’d suck your cock if you’d lick my pussy.”

  It was her, and she was talking to him, and now she was looking through the passenger window, smiling. He paused, then opened the car door. He got into the front seat, and saw immediately that her pants were off. Aroused, he slammed the door shut, and it was only then that he noticed her legs were not the same color as her face and hands. It was only then that he noticed the stench.

  Her legs were covered with dried smeared excrement.

  He put a hand over his nose, trying to breathe through his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me out.”

  The door locks clicked just as he tried to pull up the handle.

  “No,” she told him, and there seemed to be genuine sadness in her voice. “I can’t do that.”

  Then

  We lived for a time in the city of clowns.

  Steve couldn’t seem to finish a story. He spent as much time writing—or trying to write—as he had before, but the ideas he had went nowhere and he was unable to complete more than a page or two before his thoughts derailed completely. This had never happened to him before, and he was at a loss to understand it. What he had was writer’s block, he supposed, and the frustration he felt at not being able to produce was as maddening as any rejection letter he had ever received.

  The funny thing was that one of his stories, one of his older pieces, had just been accepted last week by the fiction editor of an in-flight magazine. He had no idea what had made him submit to such a market—desperation, probably—but the pay was impressive, and thousands of people flying the friendly skies next October would all have the opportunity to read his work. It was the largest potential audience he’d ever had.

  And he might not be able to follow up on it.

  He didn’t know what was wrong with him. From a writing standpoint, these last few months had been the most productive he’d ever had, and by all rights, that should be continuing, his life experience feeding his fiction and making it stronger. But the creative part of his brain seemed to be shutting down, and whether this was part of a natural up-and-down cycle, a necessary period of recharging or some sort of permanent intellectual realignment, he felt disconcertingly unmoored, deprived of one of the few stable aspects of his life.

  Part of the problem was a question of identity. He knew who he was but was not exactly sure what he was. A corporate researcher and journalist who wrote fiction on the side and happened to kill people? A killer who masqueraded as a newsletter editor and also happened to write fiction? A fiction writer who lived to kill but maintained a regular job to pay the bills and keep up appearances? The lines were blurred, and he didn’t know which was his vocation, which was his avocation, which he did out of enjoyment, which he did out of need.

  He’d had his mother cremated—against her wishes—and her ashes still sat in a corner of his office in the generic box the mortuary had given him. He had no idea what to do with them. There was no specific spot she really loved, and he wasn’t sure he would scatter her ashes there even if there were. He was half tempted to just throw the box away or flush her ashes down the toilet, but there was no way he could explain the reasoning behind that to Sherry, so he did nothing and there the box sat.

  He had not gone back to his mother’s house since he’d “found” her body and called the police. He’d been there for hours, answering all questions, being the distraught yet dutiful son, but he had not wanted to return. He’d been too afraid. It wasn’t logical, but it was real, and a lot of it had to do with that vision of his father disappearing into the gloom of the room at the end of the hall.

  That was also about the time that his writer’s block had kicked in, and he was sure the two were connected. He even felt on some irrational superstitious level that if he could go back to the house, he could break the spell and the problem would be over.

  But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Sitting in front of his PC, he looked at his clown story—or the single sentence of it that he had written—and deleted it. He deleted all of the other fragments as well. If he couldn’t write a full short story, he wasn’t going to write at all.

  He dreamed
that night of a clown. It was the same clown he always seemed to dream about, only this time the painted man was running on a treadmill in a zebra-striped room. He was naked, and his entire body was made up like his face, his stomach red, his chest green, his nipples blue, his penis yellow.

  The looping treadmill belt on which he ran was made from human skin.

  The black-and-white room had two doorways, one at each end, and Steve was standing in the center of one, wondering how he could reach the other without being seen by the clown. He knew he had to make it through that doorway, though he didn’t know why, and he also knew that if the clown caught him before he did so, he would be skinned alive, his body parted out and used to make exercise equipment for other circus performers.

  The clown looked down at the treadmill controls to see how fast he was running or how far he had gone, and Steve made a dash for it, speeding past the painted man as fast as he could go. He was a step away from the doorway when a big white hand clamped down on his shoulder. He was still trying to run, but he was like a cartoon character, his feet spinning furiously as he remained in place. He looked up, and the clown had grown. The room had grown. The zebra-striped ceiling was a good three stories above his head, and the clown was twice the size of a regular man. His yellow penis, fully erect, hit the side of Steve’s shoulder, and Steve’s skin burned at the touch.

  Through the doorway right in front of him, he could see a land of blue skies and green grass where fathers and sons were fishing and playing Frisbee and having picnic lunches, a land he would never reach.

  He awoke when the alarm rang.

  And his face was wet with tears.

  Thirty-two

  Steve knew something was up the second he awoke. He was not psychic—was not sure he even believed in such a thing—but he felt strange, anxious, as though he knew ahead of time that this was going to be an important day.

  A bad day.

  He took a shower, got dressed, ate a breakfast of cereal and coffee. The feeling of dread did not leave. If anything, it grew stronger, and all the way to the office he was careful to signal when he changed lanes and to slow down as he approached yellow traffic lights, hyperaware that injury and death were but a poor decision away.

  He made it safely to work and, once there, decided to take the stairs rather than the elevator, just in case. He knew he was behaving in an extremely foolish and superstitious manner, but he had never experienced anything like this before, and he was filled with the certainty that something major and horrific was about to happen.

  What could it be? An earthquake? A disgruntled employee with an AK-47? Was he about to be fired? Was the company bankrupt? What?

  He didn’t know, but this was one of those walking-on-eggshells situations, and though he dreaded whatever was coming, he wished it would just hurry up and happen, because this waiting and worrying was sheer agony.

  Jerry Tortaglia had been named acting department head, and shortly after eight, he called Steve and some of the senior members of each division into the conference room for a meeting. They had a new client, a different kind of client, and Jerry said it was very exciting because it could mark the beginning of AlumniMedia’s expansion into other areas of private business. “Schools aren’t the only organizations who have alumni,” Jerry said. “Employees who retire from a company or who depart on an amicable basis to pursue other interests can also be considered alumni.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ron said dismissively. No one had much respect for Jerry Tortaglia, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he was lobbying hard to keep the department head position permanently. “Who’s the new client?”

  Jerry cleared his throat. “Well, in this instance,” he said, “the client does happen to be a school. But it’s a different kind of school,” he added quickly, “and, like I said, could lead us to branch out more in the future.” He paused dramatically. “We’re going to be putting together a booklet and directory for Entertainment Opportunities’ Clown College.”

  There were smirks and chuckles all around.

  “I’m not joking,” Jerry said. “This is serious business. They are paying us a hefty price to produce a unique product that could be our calling card for the future.”

  Steve wasn’t laughing. In fact, he felt cold.

  A clown college.

  The very idea of such a place chilled him to the bone, and he could not help thinking that this was a puzzle piece in a larger picture, a picture he was in and that surrounded him on all sides.

  “I want two of you to go to the college,” Jerry continued. “I want you to talk to Herb Slivitz, our contact there, and try to get a feel for exactly what they want, what they expect, and how we can adapt our resources to meet their needs. I need someone from PR and someone from editorial.” He glanced around the table. “Let me see. Bob and, uh . . . Steve. I want you two to head over and learn what you can, put together a presentation of where you think this project should be headed, and then we’ll discuss it and take it from there.”

  Bob Mattacks perked up. “Clown college? Where’s it at? Orlando? Do we get a free trip?”

  “It’s in Los Angeles,” Jerry said. “And you get gas mileage.”

  Steve didn’t want to go at all, but he could hardly refuse, and the reason for his apprehension was unclear even to himself. “Okay,” he said quietly.

  “That’s the kind of attitude I like,” Jerry announced.

  “What an asshole,” Bob said as they left the conference room moments later. “If he thinks he’s going to get that job, he’s crazy. They never promote from within; they always hire from outside. Come next quarter, he’s back in the trenches.” Bob shook his head. “Really makes you miss McColl, doesn’t it?”

  Steve smiled tightly, saying nothing.

  He wasn’t quite sure what he’d expected, but the word “college” implied a campus and buildings with classrooms, so it was with some surprise that they pulled up in front of what appeared to be a large warehouse inappropriately situated on a street of small boutique shops. It was painted a garish pink, and the oversize sign on the roof featured rainbow-colored letters designed to resemble balloons. Two sets of frosted windows were positioned above and to either side of the arched doorway. Steve didn’t know whether it was intentional, but from this angle, the windows and door looked like two eyes and a mouth.

  A man walked out of the building angrily pulling a green wig off his head. He had the shaved scalp and rough features of an ex-con, and he was carrying in his hand a long-barreled pistol that Steve hoped to hell was a water gun.

  Bob got out of the car, slammed his door and took a deep breath. “Just keep repeating to yourself: ‘It’s a living. It’s a living.’ ”

  Steve smiled, but the truth was that he didn’t feel very amused. Creeped out was more like it, and he approached the building hesitantly. Another man opened the door and emerged onto the sidewalk, but this one was fully made up and practicing mime moves. He walked past them, waving silently, then pretending to pick a flower and hand it to them. Both Steve and Bob ignored him.

  Steve opened the door, and they walked inside.

  The ham-fisted attempts at whimsy that characterized the outside of the “college” were nowhere in evidence within the building. Instead, a narrow hallway led to a series of shabby offices, the first three of which were empty. Steve saw kitschy paintings of clowns on the walls of small rooms carpeted with worn shag and furnished with beat-up metal desks, cheap lamps and dented folding tables.

  The fourth such room contained an empty desk like the previous offices, but seated on a sagging couch against the opposite wall was an anorexic goth girl who was smoking a cigarette and writing something on a form attached to a clipboard.

  Steve knocked on the doorframe. “Hello?” he said.

  The girl looked up. “Yeah?” Either she was older than she looked or she had recently dropped out of high school.

  “Do you work here?”

  “Yeah.”

  �
��We’re looking for Herb Slivitz,” Bob said. “We’re from AlumniMedia. He should be expecting us.”

  There was no change to the girl’s bored tone of voice. “I think he’s still in the classroom. Come on.” She stood, dropping her clipboard on the couch, and led the way out of the office and down the corridor to a much bigger room, this one filled with juggling paraphernalia: balls and bowling pins, boxes and metal rings. A William Frawley lookalike was piling red floor mats against the far wall. “Herb!” the girl called out. “Visitors!”

  “Thanks . . .” Steve started to say, but the girl was already gone.

  Herb had left the mats and was walking over.

  Bob, always the salesman, greeted him, hand extended. “Bob Mattacks,” he introduced himself. “AlumniMedia. This is my associate, Steve Nye.”

  Steve nodded, tried to smile. He thought he detected the residue of greasepaint around the older man’s eyes, as though he’d been wearing clown makeup but hadn’t been able to completely wash it off.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Bob lied, looking around the huge room in fake admiration.

  “We have eight classrooms, three practice rooms, a staff of twelve and twenty new students admitted each semester from all over the world. Enrollment right now is at a record peak of fifty-eight.”

  “Impressive,” Bob said.

  Herb nodded proudly. “We’ve placed clowns in top circuses all over the world for the past thirty years. This is our thirtieth year in business.”

  “Which is why you’ve decided to compile a book of all your graduates,” Bob said.

  “Exactly.”

  Steve stepped in. “I’m sure either you or one of your associates has seen examples of our work. I’m a senior editor,” he added.

  “Yes, we have. In fact, you put together a memory book and directory for our chairman, Ted Thackery’s fortieth high school reunion, and that’s where we got the idea to hire you for this project. You see, we’d like to put together a listing of all of our graduates and where they worked or are working, with maybe a phone book-type section with their current e-mail addresses and phone numbers.”