The Funny Man

by John Warner

  “And why don’t you?” He was close enough that I could’ve.

  “I guess I don’t really want to, or maybe it’s that I don’t need to.” He stepped away, hands clasped behind his back. “Yes, you see it now. We make our own right, our own wrong. You are in charge. Wonderful, isn’t it? Now, go ahead,” he said.

  “Go ahead, what?”

  “Ask your question?”

  “What question?”

  “About Ms. Tisdale. If you did not care, you would not want to have strangled Chester.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How’s she doing?”

  Mr. Bob began pacing, like it was the movement that helped bring forth the answers. “Ms. Tisdale is an interesting case. The opposite of you in some ways. She has no lack of desire or direction in her. It may be that she simply has too much, that it is uncontainable. This is a significant power, but power that cannot be controlled is ultimately harmful.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was just wondering if she enjoyed herself last night.”

  Bob seemed pleased at this response, like I had passed some kind of test.

  “You will have the chance, I am sure,” he said, “to ask her for yourself. Enjoy your breakfast, and the rest of your stay here at the White Hot Center.”

  He bowed, pivoted, and left the bungalow. I never saw him again. What he left behind was the knowledge that for the first time in a long time I cared about something again, that I was looking forward to what was next.

  I wanted something.

  35

  IT TURNS OUT that the young reporter is beyond ambitious, a real journalistic succubus ready to drain the fame from others to feed her own and she has feasted on the remainder of the funny man’s career. It is scraps, but it is something. She recognizes that a march to the top of the mountain requires stepping over some bodies along the way and he is the first of presumably many. Turns out he does make the cover, the photo a shot from the reporter’s cell phone when the funny man had fallen asleep mid-question. His jaw hangs, insensate. One hand rests on his little belly like he’s waiting for the fetus to kick. His beard is patchy and hair greasy. The headline says WHEN WILL HE STOP FALLING? When the funny man sees it he calls his agent and manager and asks why no one told him that he looks like a destitute wreck.

  “We thought it was part of the new look,” they say. “It can be hard to tell.”

  His wife has, upon reading the article, understandably made a motion to return to court in order to modify the custody agreement to prevent any unsupervised visits with the boy. Thanks to the funny man’s increasing unreliability, she has slowly whittled down the alone time between father and son, but the wheels of justice do not turn fast enough this time and the funny man is not moved by her pleading and crying. He has some rights left and he is going to exercise them. If rights are not exercised, they get flabby. Besides, he has given her some extra time by arriving two hours behind schedule.

  He has added a patch to the pills. There are pills with the same pharmacological properties of this patch, but the patch is a superior delivery system in that it allows for a slow, steady release, and is always doing the work, whether the funny man is conscious or not. Sadly, the new thing has led to a chronic and intractable pain that only the patch can move to a rear burner (though never extinguish). There are some side effects, like how each of his eyes appears to be focused on something different, and the time losses, the inexplicable blanks in his day where he was one place and then suddenly finds himself in another. Unsettling, but manageable.

  But he is quite obviously functional. If he were not functional how could he have navigated to the godforsaken suburbs that are the likely cause of his personal rot? The roots of his marriage’s dissolution can be traced to the decision to leave the city for these suburbs. Nay, the decline of the entire nation may be lain at the feet of these suburbs. Before the exodus to the suburbs, their omnipresent space, the demands of all that emptiness.

  If he were nonfunctioning, could he carry on a civil conversation with Pilar, who holds the boy’s shoulders in her unyielding talons as the boy stands with his back to her on the doorway’s precipice? Would he shout, “I’ll have him back tomorrow by six!” into the living room where he can hear his ex-wife sobbing if he were not of sound mind and body?

  And the car seat. Would a man who, in the words of the so-called journalist, “appears willing to chuck every and anything out the window at a moment’s notice,” take the time and care necessary to transfer the car seat to the rear of his vehicle? That shit is unbearably complicated and it doesn’t really make sense to him why the boy still needs a car seat, surely he’s far too large, but no, his ex-wife says, until they’re blah-blah height, and blah-blah weight, they need a seat and you don’t ever let him sit in front, do you?

  He has. He has done this, but only because it is easier to talk to the boy this way. In the back he is constantly looking in the rearview for reactions and responses, and in the front, they can actually talk. Besides, the kid gets a real kick out of it. Grown-up stuff. There’s air bags if there’s an accident, but there won’t be. When they’re at the apartment, he and the boy have mostly been playing video games where they team up to kill creatures that have been grievously harmed by a release of an uncontrollable virus that makes them drool green viscous liquid out of their grossly metamorphosed insectoid mandibles and shoot beams from plasma gun hands. What a disease this is! There’s not much to talk about in these situations beyond, “kill ‘em!” and “watch out!” so being able to talk in the car is a necessity. The boy does most of the killing, but the funny man tries to do his part. At first, the funny man had compunctions. After all, the creatures seemed to be the victims in the scenario, undeserving of such a terrible affliction, but then he noticed their deaths (by Gatling gun or missile launcher) were accompanied by a kind of sighing noise that sounded like relief. “But the air bags can kill him!” the funny man’s wife has shrieked. Who is the unreasonable one with this kind of talk? Air bags are giant pillows. Has anyone ever been killed in a pillow fight? But because Pilar is there watching, always watching, he will install the seat and cinch it down with all its buckles and straps and give two big thumbs-up, which is the signal for Pilar to release the boy from her grip so the boy can walk toward him with his sad little overnight bag clutched in both hands.

  Safely, very safely, the funny man drives his boy back to the city. This visit is going to be different than the video game and order-in dinner festivals of recent vintage. The funny man has recently begun worrying about the corrosive effect suburban life may be having on his boy. The boy is still young, but he’s beginning to get that doughy, fat-kid look. He seems uninterested in sports other than video-game killing. When they visit the judge next time, the funny man does not expect things to go well on the visitation-rules front, but he will instruct his lawyer to go fucking hard at his wife over the whole DVD-player-in-the-headrest-of-the-car issue. He will insist on a soccer league, if not something cooler, hockey or lacrosse.

  Today, the funny man is going to show him the city, the real city, put a little grit under the boy’s fingernails. The funny man was also raised in a suburb, but it was different back then. Back then kids rode their bikes without helmets and blew up dog shit with firecrackers. Nowadays a suburban kid would find a brick of unexploded ladyfingers and turn it in to the cops. He will not let his kid become one of them. He wants his kid to be a ringleader. The kids other kids look at and say, “I can’t believe he did that.” The funny man has the whole program mapped out. First, he will show him the city, bit by bit, and then when he is ready he will have his son take the subway by himself and he will see that in spite of what the suburban ninnies of the world think, there isn’t a child molester waiting on every corner to snatch you up and take your innocence, as if that’s worth anything anyway.

  The first stop is going to be a diner, a real diner, not one of the corporate chain places with the shiny and gunkless mini-jukeboxes at the booths stuffed with mu
sic that doesn’t belong on a jukebox. The funny man and his boy will sit at the counter and the funny man will explain the differences, how the yellowed porcelain of the funny man’s coffee cup reflects history and tradition, what the varicose veins on the waitress mean, why those are badges of honor, why it’s important that you can see into the kitchen if you look through the pass-through. That the boy’s mother used to work in a place like this not long after he was born, if you can believe that.

  Because the boy is in the back and hard to see, the conversation as they head toward the city is mediocre to poor, monosyllabic answers to the funny man’s closed-ended questions about the status of school, his friends, his history diorama. The funny man apologizes for being late and in the rearview he can see the boy shrug. The funny man was late because it took a few stops to find a pharmacy that would fill a script. His work on the slip’s effective refill date was pretty fucking convincing, so he had to take the first three places at their words that their supplies were out, none of which would have been a problem if the doctor had just accepted the fact that he’d accidentally flushed his whole supply of patches down the toilet. At the fourth place a cop was browsing in the magazine aisle, so that was out. At the fifth place a teenager with a hoop pierced through her nose like a bull’s ring, chewing on a fist-sized wad of gum, barely glanced at the thing before shuffling back to the aisles to look for the stuff. The funny man stared back at himself from the magazine cover in a wire rack on the counter. He was counting the days until the next issue when that wouldn’t happen anymore. He would’ve applied the fresh patch immediately upon getting back to the car, but he was already late and he’d found that if he waited some, until the pain began to near its peak, the relief from the patch, the warmth and goodness that spread through his body, was quite wonderful. He wasn’t going to slap one on in front of Pilar, that’s for sure, and he pretty much figured they could get back to the city before it really became dire.

  But the fucking traffic in the tunnel. It must be a parade, always a parade, one ethnicity or another deciding to announce their unique specialness by snarling traffic for hours. The funny man accepts people of all creeds and colors, so why can’t they accept themselves and stop marching around demanding things, declaring how proud of themselves they are? Pride goeth before the fall, he wants to shout, and maybe he does, because the boy flinches.

  The pain is starting to spike with the feeling that the funny man would just as soon saw his foot off with a vegetable peeler as keep it around and this traffic isn’t going to loosen any time soon. Fortunately, he’s got his little pal who shares half his DNA with him.

  “Hey, buddy,” the funny man says. “See that bag back there somewhere?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could you hand it to Daddy?”

  “It’s on the floor.”

  “Fantastic, pal. Reach down and grab it and hand it to Daddy.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can, pal. Just unbuckle and grab it.”

  “I’m not allowed.”

  “I’m saying it’s okay, so just go ahead and unbuckle and grab it. Look, we’re hardly moving, it’ll be fine.”

  “No, Mom says.”

  Someday he will remind the boy of this conversation, of the depth of betrayal to all of manhood in general and his father in particular, but right now, he just needs that bag, so spotting a sliver of an opening he jets from the middle lane to the right and then to the shoulder, which is no shoulder at all, but half a lane for the ’tards who walk or bicycle.

  The funnyman unbuckles his belt and turns and reaches blindly for the floor on the backseat, but his hand brushes only carpet. The boy looks out the window at the angry faces of the drivers of the cars that must weave around them.

  “Am I close?” the funny man asks.

  “I don’t see it anymore,” the boy says.

  The funny man sits forward and gropes under the front seat and he feels like he can sense the plastic bag just past his reach but he cannot contort himself enough to reach it and the ankle/foot is really screaming now. It is like in the horror movies where the demon’s jaw becomes unhinged and its screams really bellow before it swallows its victim entirely. The ankle/foot is threatening to engulf him. Getting out the driver’s side is a no-go because the cars are passing millimeters from the door and he wouldn’t actually blame them if they tried to take him out, so he crawls across the front and wedges the door open maybe eight inches since he’s so close to the barrier, and after much painful effort manages to wriggle out, face first and to the ground.

  He crawls. He crawls past the rear door and opens it and tries to reach inside, draping himself across the boy who is still strapped in his seat in the middle and it’s impossible to reach to even the floor, let alone under the seat.

  “Out,” he says to the boy, flicking the buckles open.

  “What?”

  “Out. Out. Get out, I need to get in there and I can’t, so get out.”

  The boy looks at the gap in the door doubtfully. As the boy unbuckles fully, the funny man grabs him under the arms and puts him on the car’s roof.

  “Pull your legs up,” he says to the boy. “I need to get in there.” Face pressed deep into the scratchy car carpet is no place the funny man wants to be. He’s been negligent in the upkeep and crusty bits of the boy’s road snacks leave imprints on his cheek. But he perseveres. The funny man jams his shoulder into the seat back, inching it millimeters forward until there is enough room and his hand closes around one of the bag’s loops. Carefully, carefully, so as not to spill the contents, he hauls it back. When the bag is fully freed from under the seat he pauses for a moment and smiles and focuses on the pain. It is at a crescendo, the woodwinds and brass and percussion sections all working at maximum intensity, total cacophony, but one of the best parts, almost better than the moment of salvation, is to know that salvation is at hand, and it is, right under his hand. Above the traffic noise and honking and shouting, and the fog of carbon dioxide exhaust, music fills the funny man’s head, a marching band playing just for him.

  36

  I FEEL SORRY for the sheriff’s deputy who must testify about the incident in the tunnel. I think we all do. In many ways he is the headliner, the one we’ve all been waiting for, and he appears temperamentally unsuited to the task, out of his element and shy. Since my plan has formed and taken shape and I’ve begun the implementation, I’ve been viewing my trial differently, half-a-step removed, not divorced from my reality, not like the pills, or how I felt at the Center and prior to the shooting and my arrest, but not a full part of it either. Maybe it’s me remembering the teachings from the Center, temporarily abandoned in the postarrest-and-start-of-the-trial panic, but I tend to think it’s because I now believe that what I intend to do, what I most desire, is going to come true.

  Bonnie is fulfilling her part of the equation. After the coded messages started to arrive, her game soared out of its lovesick trough, as she slid through the clay at Roland Garros for her first major ever. The sports weekly called her a champion, and I flushed with pride. In the pictures she never looked too pleased. Wimbledon is next and if all goes well there, we are on target.

  The sheriff’s deputy holds his wide-brimmed hat in his hands as he takes the stand. His hair is cut so close he looks bald. He looks solid in his formal uniform, reassuring, the kind of law enforcement you’d be glad to see if you were in trouble, yet not too intimidating when he pulls you over for that broken taillight. As he tells us at the outset of his testimony, it was a fluke that he was even there that day, not being part of the city or even county police. He plies his trade where the roads are two lanes and bracketed by wheat and soybeans. He was going to a regional conference, a chance to exchange techniques and strategies with other law enforcers and eat some rubber chicken dinners. They had discount tickets to some midweek theater. The sheriff’s deputy drove his cruiser rather than flying because he wasn’t keen on planes and it would save a little money. The county
he worked for was the kind of place where sheriff’s deputies take their cruisers home with them because even when they’re not on duty, they’re on duty. He wasn’t even going to go this time, but changed his mind because he was scheduled to get a citation at the conference for his organizing a youth basketball program in the town where he worked. The chain of choices that led him to that moment is almost endless.

  Clearly, he never expected this to happen to him, and on the stand he looks a little shell-shocked. Barry is as impassive as ever, and the prosecutor jitters, but without purpose or focus. From his perspective, there’s apparently nothing to object to since the sum total of our defense has been to demonstrate the bottomless depths of my horribleness. If he has worked out Barry’s angle, he must be resigned to whatever is going to happen.

  First we see the video in its uncut, grainy, black-and-white glory. Out of instinct the deputy flicked his dash camera on, and as he hit his flashers and weaved closer, the horror of the moment became apparent. It’s likely that everyone in the jury has seen it before, but in the courtroom it takes on a different gravity. The screen is large, the video enhanced as much as possible. Superimposed circles and pointers direct attention to the relevant figures. After the first showing, the deputy goes through it again, scene by scene, narrating, coached by Barry the whole way, explaining why he did what he did, speeding forward, the sirens and lights, then the gestures, drawing his gun, firing. Jurors hold their hands over their mouths and shake their heads. I may owe them an apology letter as well.

  I got a surprise call this morning before I left for court. I was heading out and the phone started ringing and I decided to let the machine pick it up, but as I was about to close the door I heard my ex-wife’s voice.

  Oh, hey, I guess you left already. I just wanted to say that … you know … I know this is probably going to be a bad day for you and I’ve been thinking that …