Futures Near and Far

by Will McIntosh

  “Where you headed?” Beaners asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Sextown, probably.” He fixed his blue eyes on Beaners. “You knew what you were doing back there, didn’t you?”

  “I told you, I can be funny when I need to be.”

  “Indeed.” Green Arrow checked the sun, probably deciding whether he could make Sextown by nightfall.

  “So you’re heading to Sextown?”

  Green Arrow nodded.

  “Mind if I join you?” Beaners wanted to go to Sextown. It would be easier for Beaners to travel with a guy carrying a quiver full of arrows.

  Green Arrow glared. “Why would I want a clown with me?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m resourceful. There are plenty of things I can do.”

  Green Arrow puffed his cheeks, allowed the air to slowly seep out between his lips. “Can you carry things?”

  “Well, that’s not what I was referring to, but yeah.”

  Without a word, Green Arrow tossed his satchel at Beaners’ feet, turned on his heel and headed down the road. “Good. Then you can join me.”

  Beaners fell into step two paces behind Green Arrow.

  He struggled to keep pace.

  “So, do you have a girlfriend back in Circus Town? Is there a Mrs. Beaners?” Green Arrow asked.

  Beaners stared at him. “A Mrs. Beaners?”

  “Yes.” He shrugged. “What?”

  “You ever seen a female clown?”

  “Come to think of it, no. Are there no female clowns?”

  “No, no female clowns.” Beaners kicked a stone down the road.

  “Really?” Green Arrow said. “Well, then what do you do when you’re not performing?”

  “Very little,” Beaners said. “I share a tent—shared a tent—with two thousand other clowns. When I’m not working or eating, I’m in the tent. You get crazy in there. The boredom. The stink. Once in a while someone can’t take it anymore and runs off, ends up where they aren’t supposed to be, maybe the acrobats’ tent, or the penny arcade. Anywhere but the clown tent. Sometimes the clown who wandered off makes it back before Management catches him, and sometimes he gets caught, and they bring him back. In pieces. They string him up in the tent. If you’re unlucky enough to be under a piece, the blood drip-drip-drips on you all night. But you’re afraid to move, because Management’s already in a bad mood.”

  Green Arrow stared at Beaners, open-mouthed.

  “But enough about me,” Beaners said.

  They walked in silence for a while.

  “What were you talking to the knight about?” Beaners asked.

  “Nothing,” Green Arrow muttered.

  “You know, I think I deserve the truth.”

  “Deserve? I don’t owe an accounting of my private life to a grubby clown.”

  Beaners shrugged. “Fine, don’t tell me.”

  Green Arrow looked off into the canopy of trees overhead. Beaners whistled a calliope tune. They walked.

  “All right,” Green Arrow said. “Anything to pass the time.” He plucked a leaf from a branch overhead, chewed it for a moment, then tossed it fluttering to the ground. “Eight days ago my wife and I were in Medieval Village, on our way to an archery tournament. We came upon a battle in a glen beside the road. We raced to the fray, eager to help the heroes defeat the villains, but we couldn’t figure out who were the heroes and who the villains.”

  Green Arrow stopped, eased himself onto a big rock to rest. Beaners took a seat on a fallen tree nearby.

  “A small group noticed us and broke off from the fight. They taunted us, made unseemly comments about my wife. Then two of them grabbed her and…” Green Arrow grimaced.

  “I killed one of them before they shot me and took her away. The knight I just spoke to said she was probably sold. Most likely in Sextown if she’s fetching, which she is.”

  “I’m sorry. Now I see why you’re heading for Sextown. I figured you were just feeling randy.”

  Beaners’ foot was killing him. He pulled off his shoe. The top of his foot was an angry red, and already badly swollen. He pressed on it; pain lanced through it like a bee sting.

  Green Arrow had gone silent. Beaners looked up. He was staring at Beaners’ foot. The ivory-white parts of Beaners’ face—that is, the parts besides the wide blue stripe around his lips, the red stars on his cheeks, and the swooping red semi-circle eyebrows—reddened. Green Arrow wasn’t looking at his foot out of concern, but in sick fascination. Beaners eased his shoe back on.

  They made slow progress, both of them limping, but eventually came to a wide, open road. Green Arrow led them West, toward the setting sun.

  “Have you ever seen big groups of clowns outside Circus Town?”

  “No,” Green Arrow said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Clowns are disappearing from Circus Town. Big bunches of them, every three, four months.”

  Green Arrow threw back his head and howled with laughter.

  “What? You think it’s funny that clowns are vanishing into thin air?”

  “How can you be so wily, yet so ignorant?”

  Beaners put his hands on his hips. “Well, I haven’t been getting out much. What am I ignorant about this time?”

  Green Arrow threw up his hands. “People disappear all the time.”

  Beaners stopped walking. The road ahead reeled and bulged, like an image in a funhouse mirror. He dropped to one knee.

  “Whoa, steady clown.” Green Arrow grasped his arm.

  “It’s not just clowns?” Beaners asked.

  “Of course it’s not just clowns. Superheroes disappear. Knights disappear. Whores disappear.”

  “Where do they go?”

  Green Arrow sighed. “That’s the age old question. That knight probably believes they’re pulled back to their old dimension, by aftershocks of the folding, but I’m not convinced the folding has anything to do with it. Religious folks say that God takes them. Others say it’s just how the world works—some people die in front of your eyes, others simply vanish. It’s a mystery.”

  “Well I want to know the answer to the mystery.” Although, in the light of this new revelation, that seemed far less likely.

  Green Arrow chuckled, clapped Beaners on the shoulder, knocking him off-balance. “Answer it and you’ll be the most famous clown who ever lived.” He canted his handsome blonde head. “Of course you’ll also be the only famous clown who ever lived.”

  “But be aware,” Green Arrow continued. “Many have gone on that quest. Most of them disappeared themselves.”

  They crested a rise. Just beyond, a woman sat by the side of the road, next to a massive vehicle the likes of which Beaners had never seen before. It was very tall, with a pendulous hose-like appendage, like an elephant’s trunk.

  The woman was Asian, but Beaners didn’t know that. To him she was slim and almond-eyed, with black hair, and clothed in a shiny yellow full-body protective hazard suit.

  “Hello,” Beaners said as they approached. The woman didn’t answer. She was sitting glumly, with her chin propped on her fist.

  “Are you from Sextown?” Beaners persisted. He said it as if it were a perfectly normal thing, for a clown to strike up a conversation with a Mark. It was a trick of sorts. He found that if you acted as if something were perfectly normal, others usually went along.

  The woman glanced up at him. “No,” she said without lifting her chin off of her fist.

  Green Arrow put a hand on Beaners’ neck and squeezed.

  “So what town are you from?” Beaners asked, ignoring the hint.

  “I’m not from any town. I was born outside,” the woman replied in a clipped, impatient tone that Beaners was well accustomed to.

  “Oh.”

  Green Arrow grabbed Beaners’ collar and pulled him down the road. “Don’t bother people, you idiot.”

  It had never occurred to Beaners that there were people who were born, lived, and died outside the towns. He’d thought the in-between s
paces were mostly crossings to get from one town to another, and where you dumped your trash.

  “Who is she?” Beaners asked.

  “She’s obviously Management of some sort.”

  Beaners snapped his head to look at Green Arrow. “I thought only Circus Town had Management.”

  Green Arrow shook his head. “Every town has Management. Not the sort of Management you described, but people in charge.”

  The walls of Sextown appeared wavering in the distance.

  “Can I have some pay for carrying your bags?” Beaners asked.

  Green Arrow gawked at Beaners as if he’d asked for his pants.

  “Then, can I borrow some?”

  Green Arrow smirked at Beaners. He pulled a cash card from his pocket, punched in some code, and handed it to Beaners. “That ought to be enough.”

  “I’ll meet you right here, in one hour.” Green Arrow pointed at the ground between his green boots. “If I’m not here, wait.” Beaners nodded understanding. Green Arrow hurried off.

  Sextown was dirty. It was run down and sleazy, the sort of town where you didn’t want to rest your hand on a light post or brush your pants against a brick wall, lest it come away covered with something sticky. Lights flashed everywhere; sirens wailed. Smiling women in short skirts with perfect thighs and raccoon eyes walked nowhere in particular, competing with peep-show barkers for the attention of men with their hands stuffed in their pockets. Men looking to pay for sex try to look casual, but a tightness in their jaws gives them away.

  Beaners was simply trying to look like the men, but he had no pockets. He had striped socks, a ruffled crepe collar, a purple polka-dotted bow tie, but no pockets. Clowns have no need for pockets.

  He watched the men carefully, and the women more carefully, trying to learn the game, catch the patter that would open the gates. It seemed straightforward enough—nothing like the intricate machinations that accompanied clown-clown liaisons.

  To call Beaners undersexed would be a vast understatement, unless you counted the occasional soul-numbing dalliance with a brother clown. The few times Beaners had dared put a hand of encouragement on a female Mark’s shoulder as she readied to throw a dart at a balloon, or fire a watergun into a mechanical clown’s rotating mouth, the woman had recoiled like he’d dropped a snake down the back of her dress.

  He approached a delicious woman with jet-black hair down to her waist and heels so high her calves were perpetually tensed.

  “Hi there.” He flashed his cash. “I’m interested in your services.”

  The woman burst out laughing as if Beaners had said something profoundly hilarious. Beaners had never been so serious. He walked away, feeling dozens of onlooker stares, her waves of laughter like a wind at his back.

  He tried again and again, adjusting his approach after each rebuff until he settled on, “Please. I’ll give you all the money I have.”

  Outside a shingled honky-tonk on a particularly filthy street, Beaners approached a woman with red hair, freckles, and a vaguely piggy face. Like many women with this look, she appeared to be overweight, but was not.

  “Please. I’ll give you all the money I have.”

  She squinted at Beaners, raising his hopes that her eyesight was poor.

  “You’re a clown,” she said.

  “Yes, I’d noticed. But thank you.”

  “How much do you have?”

  His heart thudded hard in his narrow chest. “Forty.”

  She sighed, looked him over. “Okay then. It will have to be behind the bar; they’re not going to let you into a room.”

  “That’s fine,” Beaners said, not quite believing what he was hearing.

  She said her name was Roxy and led him down an alley, into a long, narrow space littered with rusted pots, rotting banana peels, and a steel shelf, empty save for a ragged stack of ancient-looking porn. The clatter of cooking drifted through a crack in one of the bar’s frosted back windows.

  “Go easy on me, I’m sore as hell.” Roxy hiked her skirt and half-leaned, half-sat on an upended steel drum. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. Beaners scrabbled to unclasp the buckle on his belt; his fingers were tingly, almost numb. He licked his suddenly dry lips.

  “We have similar jobs—after a day clowning, I’m usually sore as hell too. All the falling, the bonks on the head, the tricycle collisions—I hurt all over by evening.”

  “I’m usually sore in just one place, but boy am I sore.” With the hand that wasn’t holding up her skirt, Roxy swept her strawberry hair back out of the way. In the starlight, she was beautiful to Beaners. The freckles on her legs were flecks of gold. “I wouldn’t mind spreading out the soreness to other places. It’d be a change, anyway.”

  Beaners finally got his pants down around his ankles. He waddled over to her, shaking badly. Roxy angled herself and guided him inside her. Beaners moaned, began to move very gently. Roxy inhaled sharply.

  Beaners froze. “Is that hurting you? We can stop.”

  “No, it’s okay.” She grasped Beaner’s waist and shifted him over a bit. “There, that’s better. You’re fine, sweety.”

  He continued, even more gently now.

  It was a thousand times better than the chocolate. He fought back tears of joy and gratitude.

  “I bet you’re glad that old adage about the size of a man’s feet isn’t true,” he said.

  Roxy burst out laughing. Her rhythmic contractions squeezed him, tugged him, massaged him into a shattering orgasm. Beaners laughed the loosest, easiest, most genuine laugh of his life. He laughed as only a clown can laugh—a pinwheel kaleidoscope pennywhistle whoop, until the edges of his vision went grey and the alley spun like a funhouse tunnel.

  He collapsed against her, chuckling, coming—a primordial hitch that bobbed him up and down like a cork on water. Roxy wrapped her arms around Beaners’ shoulders and chuckled along with him for a moment. Beaners wished there could be a folding—a folding that would fold time into a loop and keep him there forever.

  “That was my first time.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm hm.”

  “Well, I’m happy to be your first. You’re…” She reached for the right word. “Nice. You’re a nice guy.”

  “Thank you,” Beaners said.

  Her feathered bangs rippled in a light breeze. Beaners wanted to touch them, feel how soft they were, but he didn’t want to risk rushing her off.

  She sighed, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “Do you know about the folding?” he asked.

  “The folding? Silly old knight’s tale.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “My mama told me how this world really got started. I’ll tell you, if you want to hear. Do you want to?”

  “I do,” Beaners said. “I do want to hear.” He almost didn’t recognize his own voice, because it was soft, almost sweet. He leaned his head against Roxy’s shoulder, and she let him.

  “Okay then.” She closed her eyes, and took a breath. “Once upon a time, all the towns were mixed. The townfolk did all sorts of different jobs. But in a lot of the towns, all the jobs were going to Texico.”

  “What’s Texico?” Beaners asked.

  “I don’t know. Don’t interrupt.”

  “There was one small town, though, that had a very big heart. The townfolk hired a gunslinger to help them save their town, and the gunslinger came up with an ingenious plan: make their town into a place for people to go on vacation. But the town wasn’t near a pretty lake, or a beach, and no one famous had ever died there, so how could they get people to travel all the way to their small town for a vacation? The gunslinger had the perfect plan: turn their town into a superhero town. Superheroes were only in books then, they weren’t real people.

  “So the townfolk dressed as their favorite superheroes, and people started to come to their town for vacation with their children.”

  “Their children? They owned children?”

  “Don’t inte
rrupt. The townsfolk took their roles very seriously, playing their parts even when the vacationers weren’t around, until they were living their parts all the time.

  “Now, other nearby towns saw what was happening, so they hired the gunslinger to help them save their towns, too, and he turned them all into vacation towns: Santa Land, Circus Town, Wild West Range, Bible Village, Hobbitown. It spread on and on, first because it was a way for the townfolk to survive, then a way for them to get rich, and finally, it became a way of life—it became a badge of pride for a town to have a theme. And that’s how things got to be the way they are.”

  Beaners’ head hurt, trying to get the gist of the explanation. He thought he understood. Towns used to be mixed, mostly filled with plain people, just as the knight had said. But there was no folding—that was just something people had made up because they’d forgotten what really happened.

  It was difficult for Beaners to imagine a mixed town. What were they, if they had no themes? How did the people who lived there think about the place where they lived? And what did they do there? It was like a person with no face. Yet this story rang true in a way the knight’s did not. Beaners was skeptical when explanations involved spells or trolls or folding time.

  He left the alley three inches taller, looked up and down the street, spotted Green Arrow, legs spread, fists on hips, casting about impatiently. Beaners stuck two fingers between his lips and whistled.

  “Let’s go, move your big ass!” Green Arrow said. He headed toward the gate at a brisk clip.

  Beaners hustled and fell into step behind him. He imagined that if he had a wife and knew she was at this very moment being banged in a whorehouse, he’d be testy too.

  “What did you find out?” Beaners asked, trying to keep up.

  “Diana wasn’t very cooperative. One of her prospective clients may never walk again.” Green Arrow flashed a ‘that’s my girl’ sort of grin. “So they sold her.”

  “Where to?”

  “Circus Town.” Green Arrow paused to let it sink in. “What would Circus Town want with Diana?”

  Beaners didn’t want to answer. No one wants to hear bad news from a clown. “No one works in Circus Town who wasn’t born in Circus Town. It’s an incestuous place.”

  “Well, evidently some people do.”