• • •
She can’t sleep. That night, the air is too close in the trailer, the rain on the roof too loud. A warm rain; she knows it. Unsatisfying. Wet, and little else. On the roof of the Sportsmen, on the gravel lot they’ve parked in, the rain sounds like oil sizzling in a pan. It’s a sound that invites merciless introspection, and it seems likely she’ll spend the rest of her sleepless night immersed in her past. The unspooling images: the vat of toxic waste Sergeant Liberty had knocked her into, the green haze that fell over her eyes, the terrible screaming agony of it all.
There are nights when she does not think about it, of course, does not think about that night at the missile silo (the secret laboratory hidden deep beneath the missile itself, the barrels of toxic waste flanking one entire wall of the lab, and what kind of half-assed operation had they been running there? Who stores barrels of toxic waste underneath a missile?), the kick to her stomach that sent her reeling into the barrels with their bright yellow radiation symbols.
Madam yawns, rises from her bed. Rain sizzles. Nights, alone, mirrorless, she feels mostly whole, feels no need to trace the rippled contours of her face, or gaze upon the back of her suppurating hands. Nights alone in the trailer, where she feels not the nubs of her yellowed teeth, her smoked-char curl of tongue. Her wig unpinned hours ago, beneath a robe she hides from herself her warped, melted breasts, the burn-swathed valleys of her thighs. There are nights where she watches game shows and sitcoms on the sixteen-inch television in the Sportsmen’s kitchenette. Listens to soul records, gospel, the bitter, loving lamentations of long-dead blueswomen on her turntable, the ache of them stilling something inside her.
But tonight? No. Tonight she is awake and not alone, because even over the hiss of rain and a dim chorus of frogs somewhere—and this is a first—she can hear Two-Mouth Tina moaning in her own trailer, crying. They park the oddities (“freaks” being no longer an acceptable term in this day and age, even in a show as decrepit and nearly-rundown as Mr. Hara-Sobanza’s Good Tyme Carnival!) far away from the rest of the crew, with the trucks and trailers and the few remaining sad and bedraggled show animals as a buffer.
Madam Glass steps out of her trailer into the warm night, those three steps down to the gravel, and the rain is very loud. Wigless, in her pajamas and robe and her green galoshes with the blue raindrops on them, she walks along the gravel. The sky above is a grim, featureless blanket, a low-slung thing. Falling threads of rain are lit like spider silk from the few sodium lights that line the edge of the lot. The rain darkens her robe at the shoulders, falls warm on her scalp. (The wig, black as lacquer and resting now on her bedside table, is her one concession to her old, cold beauty.)
Two-Mouth Tina’s trailer door is dented and pocked, the trailer itself significantly older than Madam’s. The outside of it has been buffered and caulked many times, panels of siding are coming undone, and there are swaths of paint with old graffiti ghosting through. Hinges are stripped, molding busted off. A cracked window is laced in a veering roadmap of silver duck tape. The camper rests above an old tomato-red GMC, the whole setup at least a generation past new. A hand-me-down affair, she knows, from a retiring contortionist, given to Tina long before Madam’s arrival. She can hear Tina crying through the door. Her knock is clipped, precise, measured; it’s only when her plans are foiled, when she is denied her wishes at the last moment after so much hard work and plotting and calculation, that she explodes. Otherwise, she is distant and measured. And with her life the way it is now, there is nothing left to wish for. No reason to feel anything. That was the trade: give up your ways, Madam, fold on the leaders of the Viper Clan, confess, and you may live your days quietly among the monsters of the carnival. Given the way you look now, you’ll fit right in.
Madam, in her robe and galoshes and a body like half-melted plastic, has finally been culled of desire—be it vengeance or otherwise.
Tina answers the door, sniffling, holding a crumpled tissue to her nose. “Hey, doll,” she says from her upper, more dominant mouth. Tina: pink sweatpants and a T-shirt, blond hair in a lank ponytail, eyes puffy from crying. Two mouths tiered on top of each other, the lips of both knit in bloodless lines. “I’m making a lot of noise, huh?”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” Madam rasps.
“Come on in,” she says, and Madam hoists herself up into the tiny camper. “You want a beer? I got soda too, but that’ll probably keep you up.”
“I’ll have a beer, Tina,” and then, like dislodging a stone from the ground, like working a strange new muscle: “Thank you.”
Tina walks to her tiny kitchen, just a few steps away. She opens the half-fridge and pulls out a Budweiser. Hands it to Madam, gets one of her own. They sit on opposite sides of the narrow space, Tina folding her legs under her on a loveseat built into the wheel well, Madam Glass on the other. She coils, unconsciously, her damp robe around her like a cloak. Her boots look ridiculous in here, and she asks if she can take them off.
“Totally,” Tina says mid-swallow, the word glottal and strange as one throat simultaneously does the work of two mouths.
Madam sets her galoshes at her feet. Out the open door she can see the rain falling. The beer is chilled and metallic—terrible in taste and yet strangely thrilling for the camaraderie it implies. This is, of course, a different kind of fellowship than she is used to. She and Tina have seen each other almost daily in the two years since Madam was placed in the Good Tyme Carnival as part of her plea deal with the Department of Justice. They have parked their campers next to each other on a hundred different lots, used the same picnic tables and rest stops, sat for hours in the same tent as the townies shuffled by and stared. But never once has she been in the woman’s camper, her home.
The walls are faux-wood, the carpet is worn to tread in the middle. There’s a warped circle on the small wedge of kitchen counter where a hot pan was once placed. But it’s homier than her own place: Two-Mouth Tina has actual pictures on her shelves, for one. Above Madam’s head rests a photo of a pair of smiling blond children, a boy and a girl in swimsuits, sunburned and squinting at the camera. On another wall, there is a poor painting of a desert, cactus and lizard and turquoise sky, the brushmarks blunt and brutal and joyous, Tina’s name at the bottom. Her own home is antiseptic in comparison.
They watch television with the sound down low. An action film, men in blood-smeared shirts shooting at each other. Mayhem and cursing and smoke, the slow-motion architecture of bodies being dismantled in graphic detail. If there’s a plot, Madam can’t discern it. She still, after all this time, understands little about the machinations of supposed “evil.” Rage seems so frequently to be at its root, but rage has been burned out of her. The thirst for power was always there, always the bedrock of her plans, but she still cannot reconcile the notion that she was truly evil.
After a while, Tina says, “As far as me crying goes, I was just mad.” She looks over at the picture above Madam’s head. “I just get so mad, and then that always turns into a crying-type situation, you know?”
“I know,” Madam says in her coarse whisper, her vocal cords atrophied from her acid bath, though of course she has never cried, not once, not even after Sergeant Liberty pulled her howling and smoking from the laboratory floor, and some military stooge knocked her unconscious with his rifle butt. Not even after all that was done to her afterwards. Fourteen rivets surround each lens, driven into bone. Her powers robbed of her, and a dark veil thrown over her world. Even on the brightest days, her world is dim.
Tina says, “Some customer flicked a cigarette at me today. A lit cigarette. You believe it? It’s cruel is what it is. People are shitty, ain’t they?”
Madam looks at her, but Tina’s gaze is locked on the TV again, the screen’s movement reflected in her eyes.
Madam says, “You should tell Mr. Hara-Sobanza.”
“Ha,” Tina says dryly. “Like that’ll happen.”
“They aren’t even supposed to be smoking in the ten
ts.”
And now Tina looks at her, and there’s a flat, languid challenge there in her eyes—not toward Madam herself, but toward the notion that she would even bring up the idea of fairness here, the two of them being who they are.
“Doll,” Tina says, “if I put my foot down every time someone did something they weren’t supposed to, I wouldn’t ever get to move a damn inch.” And then she laughs, bitterly, and from both mouths.
• • •
Is evil born or cultivated?
Jean-Baptiste Devereaux had been a French physicist, a drunkard, a womanizer, an eventual double-agent for the Axis, and one of the spearheads of the Infinity Project, which after the end of World War II would ultimately—and here was irony—provide Sergeant Liberty with his powers and near-immortality. This, of course, was after Jean-Baptiste had been detained by the Americans after the fall of the Nazis, and after he was found guilty at his Nuremberg trial, and after the Office of Strategic Services—the CIA before it was the CIA—offered him a deal: work for us or die by the sword.
Jean-Baptiste, a fan of drink and women and a continuing heartbeat, took the deal.
The Infinity Project took countless lives before it was smoothed out, successful. By the time Madam Glass was born—she could think of herself as Simone Devereaux in only the most distant, self-conscious way—the project was going well, on its way to converting dozens of young test subjects into super soldiers. Jean-Baptiste, old by then, had fathered her with the same offhanded contemptuousness he held for physics, the government, his long-lost France, for everything save the bottle. Her mother had been a lab assistant, one who was quickly shuttled away to another laboratory after Madam’s birth, and her father became little more than a cipher for her as she grew. He took his own life the day of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a man intimately familiar with the velocity of war.
But Madam often wondered—had he been evil? He had worked for fascists, certainly, but it had been under threat of death, yes? She herself had vied for world domination, the power inherent in it. Granted, her attempts were haphazard, frayed, half-mad. But the intent had been there—might through chaos.
Had her father been evil, his face lit in strobing flashes, experimenting on poor, frightened boys, lights curling along the walls of his lab, machines humming and groaning? Or had he merely been an opportunist? More importantly, was evil transitory? Was it inherited, like her double-jointedness?
Had she grown up not knowing her father’s history, would her own story have been different? Would she have formed the Viper Clan? Would she have released the nanobots in the Prime Minister’s nightcap? Orchestrated the Seoul Blackout? Lashed the President’s son to the warhead? Would she have freed the Tornado Feet Gang out of prison and loosed them on the streets of New York?
It was not an issue of vying for her father’s love—God, no, the man was long dead and she hardly knew him to begin with—but had she felt that it was the only avenue afforded her?
Was evil, in this case, just a matter of a girl being diminished by her own expectations? Her lack of self-worth?
And now that she was here, among the other oddities, in this cruelest of guises—who was she now?
Was she, like her father at the end of his life, simply exhausted?
Was there anything left of her to reclaim?
• • •
Indiana to Missouri to Kansas. The oddities making up their own condensed convoy along the highway. In a little town called Burnt Grass, right between Topeka and Kansas City, the carnival stops, breaks ground, builds itself up. The Ferris wheel climbs the sky, screams echo from the Demon House, the children wail and chortle in their teacups, their hair fanning out behind them. Romance blooms, fights erupt and calm, up and down the midway. The oddities sit alone in their roped-off squares, and now that Tina has mentioned it, Madam can’t avoid seeing the way they are treated. The gagging noises the townies make when they see her, the leering taunts they make at Tina. The jeers at the Raptor, and one day someone threw salt on Ernie the Lizard Man, as if he were a slug. Madam feels some old vestige stirring inside her, something long-buried. Like seaweed wavering in an underwater current. Like sparks whirling in a funnel. It’s a dangerous feeling, she knows, but she welcomes it anyway.
• • •
Dusk in the badlands. Prairie grass and the plains stretched out, the limned spikes of power lines the only thing vertical out there in the twilight. The days lasting longer, getting warmer. They are in Tina’s trailer; she has made soup and sandwiches, and they are watching a rom-com DVD on her television, their plates in their laps.
When the two characters kiss, they both busy themselves with their sandwiches. Had they expected something different? Madam is still so awkward around people. There is a world of difference between talking to someone in a room and ordering a Clan squad to storm a laboratory. Madam smiles down at her plate. Then, grown brave with their closeness, she nods toward the photo on Tina’s shelf and says, “Your kids look sweet.”
Tina nods, chewing, a cigarette parked in the lips of her bottom mouth. “I miss those guys so bad. Oh man, do I.”
“Where are they?”
Tina sighs, rolls her eyes at the ceiling. “With their dad. It was a, you know—it was a freak show every time I left the house. No pun intended. We were broke. Like bad broke. Nobody would hire me.” She ashes her cigarette into a Coke can and smiles, but it’s a private smile, rueful and closed off. “Reporters camped out everywhere, coming out of the bushes, peeking in the windows, taking pictures for those newspapers. People calling all the time, saying awful things. It was real hard for them.”
“That’s terrible.”
Tina shrugs, long inured to the cruelty of her situation. It’s only Madam that is wounded, only Madam that is new to the repercussions of otherness extending beyond the body, the self.
“I’m pretty used to it,” Tina says. “I was born like this, so I’ve never . . . you know. This is how it’s always been.”
Madam thinks, I was beautiful once, beautiful and merciless, but realizes how this would make Tina feel if she spoke it aloud, and simply nods.
“Hey, listen,” Tina says. “I’ve been meaning to ask. I don’t—I don’t really know what to call you.”
It’s true: Only Mr. Hara-Sobanza himself knows Madam’s true identity, having accepted a significant cash payment from the Department of Justice to allow her to join the carnival. The other oddities are civilians themselves, though she supposed a few of them—the Raptor, perhaps, and certainly Mister Fog—could’ve made a decent go as supervillains. Hara-Sobanza, a wizened, happy man of eighty-four who still traveled with the carnival, had asked her during her first week on the crew, and somewhat apologetically, if they could bill her as Toxic Girl. Numb to her new situation, she’d allowed it.
“Simone,” she says now, her voice hoarse. “Call me Simone.”
“Ah, that’s pretty. That’s real nice.”
“Thank you,” she says, her eyes on her plate again, suddenly bashful. “This is a good sandwich.” Her heart flutters like a bird loosed in her chest.
A friend, she thinks. I have a friend.
• • •
The foothills of the Rockies now. Summer in full bloom, hot, depthless blue skies and the bright coin of the sun hanging above them all. The tent is a tinderbox, Madam sweat-slicked in her sequined outfit.
It’s unclear how long he has been there—she has been staring at that familiar spot on the far wall above the heads of the customers— but she looks down, and there he is. Gaunt and pale and hollow-eyed, packed between two families, a beanpole among summer squash. He nods and nods at her, presumably unsure if she is looking at him through her dark lenses. His smile is a dark, curling thing. When her posture stiffens, when her hands grip the armrests of her throne so hard some distant part of her can hear the sinews creak, he salutes her. It is a movement rich, she thinks, with contempt.
She recognizes his face, but can’t place it. Jutting cheekbone
s, purple bags beneath the eyes. Wearing a pale yellow T-shirt dark at the armpits. Where does she know him from? They are on the outskirts of a town called Dumbell, in Wyoming. It has been over two years since Sergeant Liberty and the arrest, the operation, since this new brutal chapter of her life began. And where does she know this man from? Is he a member of the Viper Clan? From some other crew, out to seek revenge? If only she could look at him without these lenses, she would demand he tell her everything.
He winks at her and moves past the others, farther down the line, out of her sight.
• • •
That night Tina invites her over for dinner and a movie, but Madam begs off, claiming illness. Her eyes are hidden, and Tina can’t see her confusion, the apprehension at play there. Today’s events unfolding again and again behind her eyes.
She sits at the table in her little kitchenette, Simone Devereaux and Madam Glass and Toxic Girl, all of her lives enveloped in the slow crackling burn of old torch songs from Etta James and Edith Piaf spinning on the turntable.
And so she is alone when the knock comes at the door. The inevitable knock.
Weaponless, powerless, Madam rises and opens the door of her camper in the only armor afforded her: her wig, her robe, her blue galoshes.
It’s the gaunt man, though she sees that even under the harsh illumination of the lot lights he looks more a boy. The moment unfolds in silence.
Behind the Mask Page 24
