Teatro Grottesco

by Thomas Ligotti

  In brief, we had always managed to adapt to the ways of each town manager who had been sent to us. The difficult part was waiting for new administrators to reveal the nature of their plans for the town and then adjusting ourselves to whatever form they might take. This was the system in which we had functioned for generations. This was the order of things into which we had been born and to which we had committed ourselves by compliance. The risk of opposing this order, of plunging into the unknown, was simply too much for us to contemplate for very long. But we did not foresee, despite having witnessed the spectacle of the shed beside the ruined farmhouse, that the town was about to enter a radically new epoch in its history.

  The first directive from the new town manager was communicated to us by a torn piece of paper that came skipping down the sidewalk of Main Street one day and was picked up by an old woman, who showed it to the rest of us. The paper was made from a pulpy stock and was brownish in color. The writing on the paper looked as if it had been made with charred wood and resembled the same hand that had written those words across the old boards of the town manager’s shed. The message was this: DUSTROY TROLY.

  While the literal sense of these words was apparent enough, we were reluctant to act upon a demand that was so obscure in its point and purpose. It was not unprecedented for a new town manager to obliterate some structure or symbol that marked the administration of the one who had come before him, so that the way might be cleared for him to erect a defining structure or symbol of his own, or simply to efface any prominent sign of the previous order and thereby display the presence of a new one. But usually some reason was offered, some excuse was made, for taking this action. This obviously was not the case with the town manager’s instruction to destroy the trolley. So we decided to do nothing until we received some enhancement regarding this matter. Ritter suggested that we might consider composing a note of our own to request further instructions. This note could be left outside the door of the town manager’s shed. Not surprisingly, there were no volunteers for this mission. And until we received a more detailed notice, the trolley would remain intact.

  The following morning the trolley came tooting down Main Street for its first run of the day. However, it made no stops for those waiting along the sidewalk. ‘Look at this,’ Leeman said to me as he stared out the front window of his barbershop. Then he went outside. I set my broom against a wall and joined him. Others were already standing on the street, watching the trolley until it finally came to rest at the other end of town. ‘There was no one at the switch,’ said Leeman, an observation that a number of persons echoed. When it seemed that the trolley was not going to make a return trip, several of us walked down the street to investigate. When we entered the vehicle, we found the naked body of Carnes the trolley driver lying on the floor. He had been severely mutilated and was dead. Burned into his chest were the words: DUSTROY TROLY.

  We spent the next few days doing exactly that. We also pulled up the tracks that ran the length of the town and tore down the electrical system that had powered the trolley. Just as we were completing these labors, someone spotted another piece of that torn, brownish paper. It was being pushed about by the wind in the sky above us, jerking about like a kite. Eventually it descended into our midst. Standing in a circle around the piece of paper, we read the scrawled words of the message. ‘GUD,’ it said. ‘NXT YUR JBS WULL CHNG.’

  Not only did our jobs change, but so did the entire face of the town. Once again, workmen came from outside with orders to perform various kinds of construction, demolition, and decoration that began along Main Street and ultimately extended into the outlying neighborhoods. We had been instructed by the usual means not to interfere with them. Throughout the deep gray winter, they worked on the interiors of the town’s buildings. With the coming of spring, they finished off the exteriors and were gone. What they left behind them was a place that did not resemble a town as much as it did a carnival funhouse. And those of us who lived there functioned as sideshow freaks once we had been notified, by the usual method, of exactly how our jobs had changed.

  For example, Ritter’s Hardware had been emptied of its traditional merchandise and restructured as an elaborate maze of lavatories. Upon entering the front door you immediately found yourself standing between a toilet and a sink. Built into one of the walls of this small room was another door that opened upon another lavatory that was somewhat larger in dimensions. This room had two doors that led to further lavatories, some of which could be reached only by ascending a spiral staircase or walking down a long, narrow corridor. Each lavatory differed somewhat in size and décor. None of the lavatories was functional. The exterior of Ritter’s Hardware was given a new façade constructed of large stone blocks and a pair of fake towers standing on either side of the building and rising some distance above it. A sign above the front door designated the former hardware store COMFORT CASTLE. Ritter’s new job was to sit in a chair on the sidewalk outside his former place of business wearing a simple uniform with the word ATTENDANT displayed in sewn lettering below the left shoulder.

  Leeman the barber was even less fortunate in the new career that had been assigned to him. His shop, renamed ‘Baby Town,’ had been refurbished into a gigantic playpen. Amid stuffed animals and an array of toys, Leeman was required to languish in infants’ clothing sized for an adult.

  All of the businesses along Main Street had been transformed in some manner, although their tone was not always as whimsical as Ritter’s Comfort Castle or Leeman’s Baby Town. A number of the buildings appeared simply as abandoned storefronts – until one explored the interior and discovered that the back room was actually a miniature movie theater where foreign cartoons were projected upon a bare wall or that hidden in the basement was an art gallery filled entirely with paintings and sketches of questionable taste. Sometimes these abandoned storefronts were precisely what they appeared to be, except you would find yourself locked inside once the door had closed, forcing you to exit out the back.

  Behind the stores of Main Street was a world of alleys where it was perpetually night, an effect created by tunnellike arcades enclosing this vast area. Dim lamps were strategically placed so that no stretch of alley was entirely in darkness as you wandered between high wooden fences or brick walls. Many of the alleys ended up in someone’s kitchen or living room, allowing an escape back into the town. Some of them kept growing more and more narrow until no further progress was possible and every step leading to this point needed to be retraced. Other alleys gradually altered as one walked along their length, eventually presenting a complete change of scene from that of a small town to one of a big city where screams and sirens could be heard in the distance, although these sounds were only recordings piped in through hidden speakers. It was in just such a vicinity, where painted theatrical backdrops of tall tenement buildings with zig-zagging fire escapes rose up on every side, that I worked at my own new job.

  At the terminus of an obscure alley where steam was pumped through the holes of a false sewer grating, I had been stationed in a kiosk where I sold soup in paper cups. To be more accurate, it was not actually soup that I was given to sell but something more like bouillon. Behind the counter that fronted my kiosk there was a thin mattress on the floor where I could sleep at night, or whenever I felt like sleeping, since it seemed unlikely that any customers would venture through that labyrinth of alleys so that I might serve them. I subsisted on my own bouillon and the water I used to concoct this desolate repast. It seemed to me that the new town manager would finally succeed in the task which his predecessors had but lazily pursued over the years: that of thoroughly bleeding the town of the few resources that had been left to it. I could not have been more wrong in this assessment.

  Within a matter of weeks, I had a steady stream of customers lined up outside my bouillon concession who were willing to pay an outrageous price for my watery, yellowish liquid. These were not my fellow citizens but people from outside. I noticed that nearly all of the
m carried folded brochures which either extruded from their pockets or were grasped in their hands. One of these was left behind on the counter that fronted my kiosk, and I read it as soon as business slowed down. The cover of the brochure bore the words HAVE A FUN TIME IN FUNNY TOWN. Inside were several captioned photographs of the various ‘attractions’ that our town had to offer to the curious tourist. I was in awe of the town manager’s scheme. Not only had this faceless person taken our last penny to finance the most extensive construction project the town had ever seen, from which there was no doubt a considerable amount of kickback involved, but this ingenious boondoggle had additionally brought an unprecedented flood of revenue into our town.

  Yet the only one who truly prospered was the town manager. Daily, sometimes hourly, collections were made at each of the town’s attractions and concessions. These were carried out by solemn-faced strangers who were visibly armed with an array of weapons. In addition, I noticed that spies had been integrated among the tourists, just to insure that none of us withheld more than a meager allotment of the profits that derived from the town’s new enterprise. Nonetheless, whereas we had once had reason to expect nothing less than total impoverishment under the governance of the town manager, it now appeared that we would at least survive.

  One day, however, the crowds of tourists began to thin out. In short order, the town’s new business dwindled to nothing. The solemn-faced men no longer bothered to make their collections, and we began to fear the worst. Hesitantly, we started to emerge from our places and gathered together on Main Street under a sagging banner that read WELCOME TO FUNNY TOWN.

  ‘I think that’s it,’ said Ritter, who was still wearing his bathroom attendant’s uniform.

  ‘Only one way to be sure,’ said Leeman, now back in adult clothes.

  Once again we tramped out to the countryside under a gray sky some weeks before the onset of winter. It was approaching dusk, and long before we reached the town manager’s shed we could see that no reddish light glowed inside. Nevertheless, we searched the shed. Then we searched the farmhouse. There was no town manager. There was no money. There was nothing.

  When the rest of them turned away and began to head back to town, I stayed behind. Another town manager would arrive before long, and I did not wish to see what form the new administration would take. This was the way it had always been – one town manager succeeding another, each of them exhibiting signs of greater degeneracy, as if they were festering away into who knows what. And there was no telling where it would all end. How many others would come and go, taking with them more and more of the place where I had been born and was beginning to grow old? I thought about how different that place had been when I was a child. I thought about my youthful dream of having a home in The Hill district. I thought about my old delivery business.

  Then I walked in the opposite direction from the town. I walked until I came to a road. And I walked down that road until I came to another town. I passed through many towns, as well as large cities, doing clean-up work and odd jobs to keep myself going. All of them were managed according to the same principles as my old home town, although I came upon none that had reached such an advanced stage of degeneracy. I had fled that place in hopes of finding another that had been founded upon different principles and operated under a different order. But there was no such place, or none that I could find. It seemed the only course of action left to me was to make an end of it.

  Not long after realizing the aforementioned facts of my existence, I was sitting at the counter of a crummy little coffee shop. It was late at night, and I was eating soup. I was also thinking about how I might make an end of it. The coffee shop may have been in a small town or a large city. Now that I think of it, the place stood beneath a highway overpass, so it must have been the latter. The only other customer in the place was a well-dressed man sitting at the other end of the counter. He was drinking a cup of coffee and, I noted, directing a sidelong glance at me every so often. I turned my head toward him and gave him a protracted stare. He smiled and asked if he could join me at my end of the counter.

  ‘You can do whatever you like. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Not just yet,’ he said as he sat down at the counter stool next to mine. ‘What business are you in?’

  ‘None in particular. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. You just seem like someone who knows his way around. You’ve been some places, am I right?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘I thought as much. Look, I’m not just interested in chit-chat here. I work on commission finding people like you. And I think you’ve got what it takes.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked.

  ‘Town management,’ he replied.

  I finished off the last few spoonfuls of my soup. I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Tell me more,’ I said.

  It was either that or make an end of it.

  SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES

  FOREWORD

  At the time I met the man who authored the stories that follow, I had reached a crisis point in my own work as a writer of fiction. This gentleman, who was considerably older than I, was several steps ahead of me along the same path. ‘I have always desired to escape,’ he said, ‘from the grip of show business.’ He said these words to me across the table in a corner booth of the coffee shop where all our meetings took place in the late hours of the night.

  We had been first introduced by a waitress working the night shift who noticed we were both insomniacs who came into the coffee shop and sat for many hours smoking cigarettes (the same brand), drinking the terrible decaffeinated coffee they served in that place, and every so often jotting something in the respective notebooks which we both kept at hand. ‘All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,’ the other man said to me during our initial meeting. ‘Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by – whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans – all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires – show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there –’ he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, ‘show business, show business, show business.’ ‘And what about dreams?’ I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. ‘You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we’re fortunate enough to sleep?’ I told him his point was well taken and withdrew my challenge, having only half-heartedly advanced it in the first place. The conversation nevertheless proceeded along the same course – he submitting one example after another of show business phenomena; I attempting to propose plausible exceptions to the idiosyncratic doctrine with which he seemed hopelessly obsessed – until we went our separate ways just before dawn.

  That first meeting set the tone and fixed the subject matter of my subsequent encounters in the coffee shop with the gentleman I would come to regard as my lost literary father. I should say that I deliberately encouraged the gentleman’s mania and did all I could to keep our conversations focused on it, since I felt that his show-business obsession related in the most intimate way with my own quandary, or crisis, as a writer of fiction. What exactly did he mean by ‘show business’? Why did he find the ‘essentially show-business nature’ of all phenomena to be problematic? How did his work as an author coincide with, or perhaps oppose, what he called the ‘show-business world’?

  ‘I make no claims for my writing, nor have any hopes for it as a means for escaping the grip of show business,’ he said. ‘Writing is simply another action I perform on cue. I order this terrible coffee because I’m in a second-rate coffee shop. I smoke another cigarette because my body tells me it’s time to do so. Likewise, I write because I’m prompted to write, nothing more.’

  Seeing an entrance to a matter more closely related to my own immediate i
nterest, or quandary or crisis, I asked him about his writing and specifically about what focus it might be said to have, what ‘center of interest,’ as I put it.

  ‘My focus, or center of interest,’ he said, ‘has always been the wretched show business of my own life – an autobiographical wretchedness that is not even first-rate show business but more like a series of sideshows, senseless episodes without continuity or coherence except that which, by virtue of my being the ringmaster of this miserable circus of sideshows, I assign to it in the most bogus and show-businesslike fashion, which of course fails to maintain any genuine effect of continuity or coherence, inevitably so. But this, I’ve found, is the very essence of show business, all of which in fact is no more than sideshow business. The unexpected mutations, the sheer baselessness of beings, the volatility of things . . . By necessity we live in a world, a sideshow world, where everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.’

  ‘By what standard?’ I interjected before his words – which had arrived at the very heart of the crisis, quandary, and suffocating cul-de-sac of my existence as a writer of fiction – veered away. ‘I said by what standard,’ I repeated, ‘do you consider everything peculiar and ridiculous?’