Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  But as the rush hour began on the streets above, some of it spilled down onto Lower Wacker and people began to pass by on their way home. They didn't seem to notice the three Shabbies at all. Instead they focused on me, sitting pensive and alone, a very clean but ragged man on a filthy catwalk.

  I kept coming back. Soon I began to read those unsettling stares and glances of pity and revulsion on the faces of the passersby and realized that they thought I was just another homeless resident of Lower Wacker Drive. But of course I had a definite purpose. I was watching the Shabbies, watching their numbers increase slowly and steadily, watching as they came gradually into focus and began moving around, transparent and iridescent at first, but nearly solid, nearly corporeal as the weeks progressed. I walked among them, trying to follow—to imitate—their seemingly random patterns, listening to them speak to one another in those rapid, wordless whispers, and occasionally looking one in the eye and have him return my stare, and acknowledge my existence with a nod of the head or with that unsettling stretch of the facial muscles that I had seen so often in Mona, that grimace I had always told myself was a smile.

  Soon there were dozens of them, milling about a stretch of Lower Wacker Drive that was just over three blocks long. The police would drive by, sometimes lean out the windows, but they seemed incapable of seeing the Shabbies for what they really were. So did the muddled and preoccupied commuters. The transients who haunted Lower Wacker feared them too much to get close and see what the Shabbies really were, or feel the tension their presence created on the thin, wet fabric of our world. When I arrived in the morning I would feel the warm, oily hug of the membrane as it closed in on me, greasing me as though to ease my passage into the great dark otherspace where Mona hid from me, not knowing how much I needed her, missed her.

  Eventually I could no longer return home. I had to stay down there with them, knowing that they could disappear at any moment, knowing that when the time came, I would have to be there with them, ready to cross over with them, ready to face Mona again and make her understand.

  I began to think of myself as a Shabbie. I told myself that my clothes and the pallor of my skin were beginning to resemble theirs, that when I spoke to them they were no longer merely words but part of that deeper, hushed language the Shabbies used themselves, that when Mona's thousand needlepoints had pierced me just before her departure, she had passed some of that essence into me.

  But the Shabbies could not understand me and I could not understand them. And when I was hungry, I had to buy something to eat—at first with my dwindling supply of ready cash, and when that was gone, with money I could squeeze from the people on the streets above me. The Shabbies merely disappeared—only a few at a time—and would return gorged, the stripped limbs of lesser creatures dangling from their hands.

  One very cold October morning they began to migrate. I followed them as they marched toward lower Michigan Avenue, feeling the tug of the oily strands that brushed and bathed me, anointed me and, finally, held me back as the Shabbies began to disperse before my eyes, spreading out as weightless globlets of amber fluid, scattering into smaller and smaller droplets until they were no more than a mist.

  When it seemed I was all alone I turned and saw one last Shabbie, a young woman who looked not much different than Mona had on her first day. I called her Mona but she did not respond. I could already see the frayed threads of her clothes pulling apart, waving like the cilia of smaller and smaller drifting organisms, her transparent flesh and the tissues underneath softening for the final diffusion.

  I leaped at her, crying out. I caught a hot wave of the sweet smelling flesh and felt it rupture and collapse around me. I fell to the street, sobbing out that name over and over again.

  When I finally gathered myself and trudged toward the nearest stairway, I thought about my apartment, wondering whether I had been gone so long that it had been rented out from under me, whether I could even remember enough about the world up there to reintegrate myself into the margins where I’d once lived my life.

  I made it to the top of the stairs and scanned the passing crowds. I breathed in the October city gases and felt the winds slap and sting at my dry, brittle flesh and the whispers of bitter cold darkness that seeped in toward my shabby soul.

  The Big Ol’ Clown Lady

  I was negotiating my way through the crowds at my ten year high school reunion, trying to establish or avoid eye contact as the situation dictated, trying to find as many different ways as I could to say the same things about myself to everyone I met, trying not to be smug or spiteful and trying not to notice these same attitudes in those I saw and spoke to—when someone, I don't know who, mentioned her name.

  The Big Ol' Clown Lady.

  I turned around, thinking it would be an old friend of mine, but I couldn't match the voice with any that I heard in the conversational niches surrounding me. I tried to shrug it off and get back into the momentum of the proceedings. But soon I realized there was no momentum. Not for me.

  So I went out to the lobby and phoned Carla to see if she was feeling any better and to tell her what an awful time I was having without her. But even as I talked I could feel myself drifting. To Carla I probably just sounded a little drunk. After I hung up and slouched in the doorway, watching the reunion, I felt myself drawn away from this banquet hall, this body, this time. Suddenly, a memory dormant for twenty years was cracking through the plaque built up over my childhood. So I left, went back to the motel room with a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice and just let the memory break on through…

  The Big Ol' Clown Lady.

  ~ * ~

  Ours had once been a small town surrounded by a thriving patchwork of family farms. Most newcomers were drawn there by the commuter line into the city, the new housing developments, the new schools, the new mall. I was four years old when we moved there. Even at that age, so new and fresh to the town… to the world, I can remember seeing her in her layers of brown rags, shambling about the streets like some great, hulking Pliocene ground sloth, talking and singing to herself, leading a swarm of chattering insects, dragging her long canvas sacks behind her, filling the air with an aroma that to me, at that time, seemed to suggest not so much filth and decomposition and illness as it did a kind of mystery—the exotic, alien realm in which she dwelled.

  Once I entered school, I realized that everyone knew who the Big Ol' Clown Lady was, with her wide, weathered face laced with warts and always painted into a nightmarish caricature of an exotic model, lips and cheeks all red, eyes trapped in the center of deep black pits. Kids told stories about her, threw stuff at her, and referred to her in all kinds of oaths and threats.

  Off Route 31, in the long grasses that edged the forest, she lived in an old tanker. Its door was a jagged opening that twisted and stretched so far across the rust-covered cylinder that the whole place seemed ready to collapse. Surrounding it was her…I still don't know what to call it. From the road it looked like heaps of trash half-hidden amid the weeds. From behind the big rock where we used to sit sometimes and watch her, waiting to see if we might witness one of the hideous and otherwise unbelievable actions attributed to her, it looked like a garden of robust, thorned plants that were twisted into what looked almost like human figures. And the contorted forms of these plants were mirrored in the strange statues that stood among them. Built from obscurely worked bits of garbage, these figures seemed to stand watch around her rusted tanker, ready to leap into life were we to step out from behind the rock…

  Once I saw a boy strike her in the face with a thrown pop can. As she rubbed her cheek, she glared with menacing eyes at the boy and moved on. It was whispered for weeks afterward that this boy, a notorious eleven-year-old bully, would one night be dragged from his bed and minced into the Big Ol' Clown Lady's cauldron, which was rumored to sit bubbling with an unspeakable stew at all times.

  When, six months later, a different boy actually did disappear while on a Cub Scout outing, we all knew his real
fate…and whose crime he'd been made to pay for. No adult seemed astute enough to follow up on this idea, however, and in the news reports that made it to television her name was never mentioned.

  Two weeks before I began the third grade, my mother died in a head-on collision on Route 31. My father—still a very young man—was delirious with grief, and for months afterwards was subject to sudden fits of weeping. With the assistance of visiting relatives and neighbors, my father and I were separated with an almost clinical efficiency. I would go directly to our neighbor Mrs. Carver's house after school, where my Aunt Paulina would pick me up late in the evening and take me home, to find my father sitting, brittle and listless, trying to reach out to me from across the cold abyss between us but never able to do more than smile and joke feebly with me in a reedy voice that sounded less and less familiar every day. I wondered, as September darkened into October, whether any sort of normality would ever return to our lives, whether Aunt Paulina would ever go home, whether my father and I would ever be alone together again—whether my father would even live out the fall and winter.

  ~*~

  It was a warm Friday afternoon in late October when two friends and I went to a gas station on the edge of the old downtown to buy bottles of pop out of the machine in front. It was a weekly ritual carried over from the summer idyll. We sat on the curb and listened to the foul-mouthed banter of the two farm boys who manned the gas pumps. On this day I was haunted by a dream I'd had the night before in which my father—withered into a leathery corpse—took me out on an ominous sea in a rickety boat. He told me that my mother was one of the birds of prey that circled and squawked over our boat, and that if we couldn't find a way to trick her back into her grave, she would surely devour us.

  I dreaded the sight of old Mrs. Carver, Aunt Paulina, and today—especially today— my father, so when my friends got up to leave I just sat there, thinking, trying to wedge something opaque between me and my dreams.

  When one of the farm boys kicked my leg and told me I better be moving on, I sulked away with head down and hands in pockets, still trying to drive two images out of my head: the slight glimmer deep within the empty eye sockets of my father's face and the hideous grin on that bird face that kept swooping down at us in my dream.

  It was an abrupt collision. She didn't see me and I hadn't seen her. I seemed to sink deep into the soft, dank layers of rags before I bounced back and fell on my butt, palms slapping the pavement. There, on her knees, staring at me from behind the caked and crackling fields of red and black make-up, was the Big Ol' Clown Lady, sputtering a stream of indecipherable curses. As she rose to her feet she feigned a lunge at me, cackling with laughter when I jumped back with a yelp. Then she stopped to pick up the garbage that had spilled out of her canvas sack in our collision. I just stood there, watching the gigantic brown back bobbing and the fat, scarred and warted hands pulling together the rags, bundled book pages, bottles and cans. She gave me one last look—surprised that I should still be standing there, then she limped on, away from downtown and out towards Route 31.

  When I stepped away, I kicked something into the street. It was a twisted, rusted scrap of metal that I realized must have fallen out of her sack. I picked it up and discovered that, in its intricate patterns, with its soft, membranous patches hidden deep within those patterns, it was far more than the rusted old can I had taken it for. As I held it close I heard a high-pitched fluttering from within.

  I turned and saw the hulking back of the Big Ol' Clown Lady turning onto Route 31. But as I watched her, I felt something wet slither and shiver in my palm. When I looked at the thing in my hand it had somehow changed its shape. Moisture was condensing along the thickest of its strands. Beads of water lined up in single file along each wrinkle. And now it felt less like rusted metal as it seemed to be dripping, leaking into my palm, soft and limp like a soaked chamois.

  When I turned back to the retreating old woman, the fluttering whistle dropped into a mournful sigh. Without a thought, I began to follow her.

  I was half a mile from the gas station when I first thought of Mrs. Carver and Aunt Paulina and how worried they would be if I didn’t show up at Mrs. Carver’s. But why was I following the Big Ol’ Clown Lady? It would have been no use asking me—better instead to ask the sweating, restless thing in my hand, a thing I now refused to look at. There was no doubt that it was homing in with a desperate urgency along the same course as the Big Ol' Clown Lady. As long as I held it in my hand I was no more than its mode of transport. I held it as tightly as it held on to me.

  Because of her slow, shambling gait and because I ran part of the way, I caught up to within twenty paces behind her. If she knew I was there she took no notice. She never turned or hurried or hesitated. When she veered off the gravel and onto the weed-lined path and I came to grips with my destination, I hesitated, standing along the edge of the road and watching as she passed by the rock beyond which none of us had ever dared to venture. But the thing in my hand hugged and pinched at me, and I was forced to take a step, and then another, down onto the path, beyond the shelter of the rock, out to where the weeds stood about like tall, twisted sentinals. The tortured stature of these guards was echoed by the mounds of trash that seemed to be impaled by and cemented onto thin rusted armatures, scarecrows that lured swarms of the biggest flies I had ever seen. When I stepped too close to one of these figures, an insect slapped my cheek, shrieking as it bounced away.

  I saw her disappear into the jagged tear that served as a door on her oil tanker. I stopped again. A stream of foul air rushed out from that black interior. The dread within me exploded out of my mouth and eyes as I looked at the rusted patches and streaks that stretched over the surface of that tanker. I turned away, trying to move my legs back in the direction from which they'd come. My hand and then my whole arm were raised against my will, and with my face averted, I was led by the thing on the end of that arm. We stepped through the rusty, jagged lips and stood in the black stench within. It was nothing like I had imagined it to be—no cauldron, no children's skulls. It was a claustrophobic enclosure that reflected no light whatsoever, as though the tear had sealed shut behind me. I looked behind me, and the light that had delineated the edges of the tear was gone. When I turned back there was another, smaller tear in the metal, and through this opening shone an ominous, brown-red light. The sky was the wrong color.

  We decided to step through this tear.

  As I stood now in this new realm, I saw pools of vapor and fluid float along the wrinkled surface of the canopied sky. I saw a panoply of crimson-tinted weeds lining the path and the grimaces formed by the petals of their flowers. Above and around me flew things that may have been birds or may have been large insects, or may have been something else entirely.

  Lost within this riotous foliage were the armatures, covered with garbage and muscle—like twisted human figures, reduced to foodstuff for the things that swarmed on them.

  I began to see patches of bone and meat, scattered remnants of humans and other animals, and the reflective carapaces of thousands of tiny creatures feeding on that meat, chattering away as they dug their faces boneward.

  The path I was following led up an incline, a hill on which sat a single regal figure—the Big Ol' Clown Lady—her rags now glimmering, the frayed threads alive and alert and waving from their fabric beds like a swarm of aquatic worms.

  She was feeding as I approached her. As I climbed the hill I saw a metal armature peering over her shoulder. The iridescent carapaces of thousands of flies created the illusion that flesh was bubbling to life and spreading over the rusted skeleton.

  She was eating an arm, a small arm with a Band-Aid over the knuckle of the middle finger, a Band-Aid with an oil smudge on it, where I had brushed it on the pavement in my fall in front of the gas station. I looked at my free arm and hand, then at the arm from which she fed, identical in every way except that the one she was holding was torn away at the elbow, and beneath the skin there was not me,
my mind, my immortal soul, only meager strands of raw meat.

  She looked at me with tiny, sunken eyes, folds deepening over them as her face contorted, flashing her crooked, bloody teeth and hissing. She threw the arm down and reached for a thatch of hair that was connected to the severed head of a boy. I looked at that face and thought, so this is what I look like with my eyes shut. And in the instant I thought that, the eyes opened and looked straight at me, as two rows of crooked teeth sank into the cheek and pulled at it. As she tugged, the skin tore and I saw a line running up towards one of those open eyes, and I thought: no, please God, not my eyelids…

  I shrieked when I saw her head jerk back, pulling the skin free. She smiled at me through her painted, bloodied face and held the head for me to see.

  The thing wrapped around my hand squeezed my wrist. I had actually forgotten about it. Now I held it out to her. It went limp in my hand, a blood-dripping mass of flesh.

  She looked at it, shocked, and then back at me, her whole expression changed, as though reading every thought, every memory out of me. She set the head down gently and reached with slow, trembling fingers as the thing stretched away from my hand and towards hers.

  The transfer of that flesh, from my hand to hers, left me trembling in inexplicable ecstasy. She laughed to watch me quiver, and I saw, beneath all that paint, the blood and madness, a flicker of tenderness. These two—my orgasm and her glimmer of recognition afterwards, were to take me years to identify and understand, to a time when the event was no more than a dim, dreamlike half-memory.

  She took that dripping slab I handed her and tossed it over her shoulder, where it smacked into and wrapped around the top of the armature. The flies all dropped or flew away, and the armature pulsed into motion as the slab took on the shape of a face.

  Its eyes opened, looked down at me, stealing my attention.