The Funny Man

by John Warner

  When they arrive home, hours past the expected time, dinner congealing on the stove, both his wife and Pilar look at the funny man disapprovingly, but the funny man waves them off, a fresh confidence to his bearing. “It took awhile to get the right thing,” he says. The boy stops to show the women his choice while the funny man exits the room, leaving the women’s mouths hanging and because he is enjoying the drama of the gesture, he goes to the massage chair and with a mighty, sweating effort shoves it toward the door and out into the yard and to the curb, slapping his hands together as if to say, “that’s enough of that.”

  The funny man marches back inside and tucks into dinner and even though it is well past prime, he eats quickly and ravenously, plunging a fork into the spaghetti while the opposite hand grips a large wedge of garlic bread that he periodically chomps from, chewing with his mouth open because he is smiling at every other person at the table in turn.

  Pilar and his wife aren’t talking, so the funny man converses with his son, though the dialogue is more like a monologue, punctuated only by the boy’s nodding agreement and the sound of the funny man’s own chewing.

  “We killed that store, didn’t we, buddy? I mean, we laid that place to waste. There was nothing left when we got out of there. We crushed that mother.” (Turning to his wife now.) “You wouldn’t have believed it, honey. I think we took a look at every last toy and game and action figure and puzzle and doll in the entire place and this boy here,” (gestures at son) “this magnificent little shit—sorry, hon, I’m just so goddamned proud—he found the best choice. Nico likes cars and he picked out cars. Damn. And I want to tell you something.” (Here he raised his fork and used it to point at his wife and then Pilar.) “I realized something today, something important, which is that I am a fucking good father. There’s some real maniacs in this world, some real monsters and I’m. Not. One. Of. Them.” That night, for the first time in what seemed like forever, the funny man gives it to his wife, hard, and because in those moments he has the intellectual capacity of Australopithecus, as he climaxes he shouts, “Making babies!”

  After the toy outing, the funny man inserts himself more aggressively into the day-to-day household goings-on and upon close inspection, he finds some things lacking. Much of Pilar’s day consists of talking to the funny man’s wife or drinking coffee while watching telenovelas in the kitchen. Yes, the boy loves her, his face lights up when he comes home from his half day of school, and no doubt, her food is good, she’s got a real flair for spices, and no, he does not know how much Pilar costs because his wife had commandeered the finances after some unfortunate lapses on the funny man’s part, so maybe as a housekeeper-nanny-buddy she is a bargain, but the general slow pace of Pilar’s work rate, the deliberate, methodical way she folds the laundry or wipes down the counter or vacuums bothers the funny man. “This is sloth disguised as industry,” he thinks.

  For a week he begins preempting her tasks, intercepting the towels out of the dryer just before cycle’s end, or having the boy’s snack prepared and stashed in the fridge for his return home, pulling it out with a flourish even as the child disengages from his hug with Pilar. The pills have both clarified and energized his brain and in the sessions with the therapist the funny man has raised the possibility of cure, even suggesting that nothing had ever ailed him. Pilar circles behind him, inspecting his work, re-tucking a corner on a perfectly straightened sheet or swiping at some nonexistent dust. The language barrier keeps them from having a direct confrontation, but he can tell Pilar gets the subtext, she is no dummy. He is trying to derail her gravy train. To rub it in her face, one afternoon he goes outside and reseals the fence and then spreads a mound of ground cover over the dirt around the bushes, work normally reserved not even for Pilar, but the lawn service. Pilar watches him through the front picture window and he strips off his shirt as he works and each shovelful says, “You can’t touch this, bitch.”

  He does not want to overplay his hand, so in bed with his wife one night several months into his reemergence he suggests a vacation for Pilar.

  “Let’s send Pilar on a cruise,” he says. “Or home, I’m sure she doesn’t get home enough. On me, I mean … us, we’ll pay.”

  His wife wears just a T-shirt and panties, a look he finds far sexier than any bustier or lingerie. She is sitting up, her legs straight in front of her, reading a magazine focused on exotic travel, picking out somewhere they will go together now that he has come out of his alleged “crisis,” and equilibrium has been regained. The funny man squeezes her leg just above the knee, making sure he has her attention.

  “Who will take care of the house? You know the big fund-raiser is coming up and I’ll be pretty tied up for the next few weeks. I’m even staying in the city two nights,” she replies.

  The funny man is a little hurt that she does not get it, but he plows on. “Me. I will take care of the house.”

  His wife snorts from behind her magazine.

  “What?” The hurt in his voice is now on full display. “Seems like way back when, I did it fine.”

  She tents the magazine over her thighs and touches him on the cheek and he sees love in her eyes, but it is a patronizing kind of love, a you-poor-delusional-sucker kind of love. He knows that the “breakdown” (if they want to call it that) after the movie scared her, but his recovery is impressive, even the therapist says so (though he gave the funny man a similar patronizing look—sans the love— when the funny man brought up the idea of being “cured”) and the funny man thinks this deserves some recognition.

  “I’ve been practically doing everything already, anyway,” he says. Her look changes only slightly, the eyes narrowing as if to say, it’s your funeral, pal. “Sure,” she says. “We owe her some time off, knock yourself out.”

  HERE’S THE THING: The child gets sick.

  For awhile, with Pilar gone, everything was great, just two pals hanging out, playing games, watching some television, running through the big house in their tube socks, playing tag and hide-and-go-seek and a game of their own invention called “pillow grenade” that’s too complicated to explain, mostly because the rules seem to change constantly in the boy’s favor. It was like old times, except even better because now the boy could talk and run and shout and had a full head of hair and spontaneously says, “I love you, Daddy.” Every time the funny man catches or finds his boy he grabs him up and turns him upside down and tickles him and the boy squeals and it is the best.

  While she is home, the wife looks on approvingly. Nights his wife leaves out her diaphragm, and after rough, athletic sex followed by a session of sweet and tender love they talk about whether or not the seed for another one has been successfully planted.

  “I wonder if Pilar is enjoying herself,” the funny man says over perfect flapjacks prepared by him that he flips in the pan without the aid of a spatula, by which he means: She does not need to come back. We don’t need her here. He thinks he may see agreement in his wife’s eyes, along with the love and admiration for a man who has been so successful, yet remains truly grounded, a rock, just like his father before him, but with a larger bank account and the ability to do domestic duties that his father wouldn’t have even considered.

  When she prepares to leave for her overnights to administer the final preparations for the charity event, he quizzes her on what she’s packed, making sure she is properly outfitted and accoutremented, and she says she wishes he could be there with her and he says, “I’ll be there in spirit,” and before she leaves they do it one last time on top of the clothes that haven’t yet made it into the suitcase.

  Under previous circumstances, the boy becoming ill had not been a problem. Back when they still lived in the apartment and the funny man had significant caregiving responsibilities, he had dealt with child sickness often, as for a time the boy had an undiagnosed food allergy that produced projectile vomiting as reliable as Old Faithful, which was followed by several hours of inconsolable crying from the pain of cramps and an empty stoma
ch.

  But back then, it was shift work, handing the boy back and forth as one of them would head for the bed and a blissful couple of hours of rest and sleep. The knowledge that it was a team effort, that there was relief coming, made it seem possible, even as the boy’s screams turned his face from red to purple and the doctors in the emergency room swore that they could offer no solution but were pretty sure the child was not in any serious danger. Some children just “fuss,” they claimed.

  Oh, what a load of bullshit that was! What a crock of slimy horseshit these jerkoffs with their degrees and their white coats with the pen protectors were trying to feed them! And the funny man said so, making a spectacle, pointing his finger and overturning some equipment as they stormed out with yet another prescription for baby Pepto. As he and his wife returned home, the boy hugged between them in the back of a taxi, the funny man looked at his wife and he could tell that she saw him as he was, a warrior, a tiger who would not relent when it comes to the well-being of his child.

  Together, they got through it, thanks to a new pediatrician who diagnosed the allergy in minutes, and once they were on the other side of the exhaustion and worry, both the funny man and his wife saw it as strengthening. A real trial-by-fire bit of survival. Forged steel.

  But even with his recent flurry of domestic activity, the funny man is rusty and the boy is larger than before, which means a greater volume of sickness that is coming out both ends and it’s fucking impossible to keep up with the laundry like this, and goddamn if the little guy doesn’t look like he’s suffering, wriggling around the bed, not even wanting to watch a video. The temperature is only 101.5, high, but tolerable, not dangerous in any real sense, but he’s just so miserable. The incidents when he was a baby come back to the funny man not as a source of strength and experience, but more like post-traumatic stress disorder, distant memories reawakening in him, feeling like they happened minutes, rather than years before, and Pilar is whale watching in Alaska and his wife is in the city. His wife would race home in less than a heartbeat, fuck all those victims of whatever it is she’s volunteering for, let them find their own cure for dysentery/clubfoot/malnourishment/sickle-cell/drought/nonspecific ennui/school bullying/eczema/media bias, but the funny man is not ready to admit defeat.

  The pink, ovoid pills seem to be helping—not the boy, who has the flu—only time and the body’s natural defenses can help the boy. The pills help the funny man, so he takes a couple extra. Even when the boy’s insides are out of ammo he sweats through his pj’s and whimpers in his sleep. Any time not spent washing and folding is at the child’s bedside, urging him to take spoonfuls of broth or sip juice through a bendy straw.

  When his wife calls in to check how things are going he is nonchalant, describing the boy as “peaked,” but okay. She asks right away if she should come back, but he says, “No, of course not.”

  And okay, he was unfamiliar with some of the nuances of the front-loading washer. Perhaps Pilar has been a kind of safety net there, coming in behind and averting disaster. She could have told him that he was doing it wrong. This is sabotage. The front loaders are supposed to be superior to the traditional top loaders that the funny man knows from the coin-op models in the basement of the old apartment. Such a great place, that apartment, where magazines didn’t fit in the tiny lobby mailboxes, so if you were home first, or just often (as in the case of the funny man) it was like a well-stocked lending library. Oh, and they’d laughed so many times over the stairs, how the landlord had carpeted each one in a different colored remnant, one more nauseating than another. The machines in the basement were big, Laundromat-sized, and if they overflowed (which happened once when the funny man used too much detergent) it just went to the drain in the middle of the concrete floor, no harm done.

  Should the front-loading washer even turn on if the door is not shut and latched? Shouldn’t there be some sort of fail-safe there? Isn’t that a design flaw? Yes, he could have noticed the water streaming down the hallway sooner, but the boy had mercifully gone down for some semi-peaceful rest, and the funny man was trying to snatch some sleep for himself and why wouldn’t such a high-end machine know when enough water has been pumped, rather than having some sort of fill trigger that will never get triggered if the door is left just barely ajar, allowing the water to escape. Just barely.

  It takes longer than it should to recognize that using a push broom to sort of schuss the water out of the front door and into the yard is better than trying to sop it up with paper towels. Sure, finding the shutoff valve for the water first would’ve been a better call as well, but hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that. Not thoroughly drying his hands before making sure the 115-volt dryer plug had not been compromised by the mini-flood also was not well thought out either, but at least the child—even through his sickness haze—got a kick out of how the funny man’s hair stood on end.

  Running while the wood floor is still slick with soapy residue is a mistake as well. The funny man knows that the pink, ovoid pills are not designed specifically for the muscle spasms that radiate the length of his spine with occasional forays to his rib cage in order to constrict his breathing and drop him to his knees, fetaled over and crying, but they are the only ones he has, save the round blue ones that look like they have a poorly rendered heart carved out of their middles that the therapist gave him after the first session and said to take “only if things get unbearable.”

  Well, things are pretty damn near unbearable, so the funny man crawls to the bathroom and yanks out drawers in the vanity until he finds them and swallows them dry, followed by three aspirin and one more of the pink, ovoid jobbies just for good measure.

  LATER, HE WISHES that his wife could’ve seen the effort it took to rise as the boy’s cries wash through the halls down to the funny man’s ears as he lays curled on the bathmat.

  “Daddy?” Faint, questioning.

  “Daddy?” Louder, more insistent, a tinge of urgency and worry.

  “Daddy!” A demand. A tractor beam pulling the funny man upright, knuckles white on the bathroom counter, arms trembling, spine screaming, but now, thanks to those blue ones, feeling like the pain is coming from a distance. It is loud, undeniably powerful, but it is not all that near, a thunderstorm already passed. Each step toward the boy is easier than the last, floating on love, compelled by duty, lubricated by pills. In the apartment, he would’ve been with the boy long ago, no more than six or seven steps necessary to get from one room to another; so tidy, so perfect, a masterpiece of efficiency in design.

  He should have moving walkways installed, like they have in the airports. He can afford that, you know.

  “I need to go, Daddy.” Of course, the child has been “going” on his own for some time now. No assistance needed, other than the occasional reminder to wipe thoroughly, but the child is sick, scared, a reversion to something smaller, helpless.

  “Sure, buddy, let’s go.”

  He looks better, his skin dry, eyes clearer. As the boy sits on the toilet, the funny man touches his forehead and finds it cool. The worst has clearly passed, but back in the boy’s room, as he climbs under the covers, the elephants from the circus-themed wallpaper lift free and begin to dance on their thick hind legs. The boy seems unbothered by this development, so the funny man plays it casual, tucking the comforter under his son’s chin and giving his boy a reassuring smile.

  But why are the elephants playing jazz out of their trunks? And are the stars shooting from their eyes dangerous to him or the boy? Have the clowns always had those fangs? Should walls really undulate like that?

  WHEN THE FUNNY man’s wife arrives home, the boy is fine. The sickness has passed and as she breezes in, dropping her suitcase at the door, she finds her son in the kitchen trying to retrieve the gallon container of orange juice from the refrigerator, arms stretched overhead, grasping blindly for an upper shelf. She swoops in and rescues the boy before he dumps it over his own head. There is a bit of a musty smell in the air and no sign of h
er husband, the funny man. “Where’s Daddy?” she says.

  The boy shrugs and she takes the juice from the boy’s hands and bends to kiss him on the forehead. “You need a bath, pal.” The boy nods in agreement, which is unusual.

  The funny man’s wife installs the boy at the counter with his juice and some dry cereal and goes in search of her husband, calling his name. The carpet in the living room squishes under her feet, foam rising to the surface. She tries different tones with her calls—laughing, urgent, bemused, angry—all with no response. She searches everywhere on the first and second floors, yells into the multicar garage, scans the yard, and still, no husband.

  She is pissed. She is terrified. Her husband had been erratic for a time, but that is done with, and even at his most erratic he would never jeopardize the boy.

  Surely not the basement. The basement is unfinished, a concrete slab used exclusively for storage. There is talk of tricking it out once the boy is older, if they still live here, as a place for him and his pals to hang, play video games, shoot pool, karaoke if they don’t think that’s too dumb. The funny man and his wife have the resources to make it the coolest spot in the neighborhood.

  But now, months pass without either of them having occasion to go into the basement. More often than not when they go down, whatever they thought was there wasn’t anyway, likely having been discarded as they moved from one house to the other.

  All the reasons an erratic-acting person may go into a basement flash through the funny man’s wife’s head as she descends the stairs, plain pine boards, unsanded at the edges, purely utilitarian. She feels as though she should rush but cannot will herself to do more than tiptoe into the gloom. The single bulb with the dangling chain is on, 60 watts, and she knows he must be here somewhere, and she begins trembling and she gasps when she sees a body, huddled in the corner on its side, its back to her, curled in on itself. Perfectly still. She is about to run upstairs and dial 911 when the body raises its arm and she gasps and runs to the funny man and uncurls him and turns him over on to his back, which makes him tense and moan.