Teatro Grottesco

by Thomas Ligotti

  ‘So now it’s mint tea,’ Quisser said as the girl left us.

  ‘I’m surprised you’re showing your face around here,’ I said by way of reply.

  ‘I thought I might try to make up with the old crimson woman.’

  ‘Make up? That doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘Nevertheless, have you seen her tonight?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. You humiliated her at that party. I haven’t seen her since, not even in her own club. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but she’s not someone you want to have as an enemy.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ he asked.

  ‘Meaning that she has connections you know absolutely nothing about.’

  ‘And of course you know all about it. I’ve read your stories. You’re a confessed paranoid, so what’s your point?’

  ‘My point,’ I said, ‘is that there’s hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.’

  ‘I had too much to drink, that’s all.’

  ‘You called her a deluded no-talent.’

  Quisser looked up at the waitress as she approached with our drinks, and he made a hasty hand-signal to me for silence. When she was gone he said, ‘I happen to know that our waitress is very loyal to the crimson woman. She will very probably inform her about my visiting the club tonight. I wonder if she would be willing to act as a go-between with her boss and deliver a second-hand apology from me.’

  ‘Look around at the walls,’ I said.

  Quisser set down his glass of wine and scanned the room.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said when he had finished looking. ‘This is more serious than I thought. She’s taken down all her old paintings. And the new ones don’t look like her work at all.’

  ‘They’re not. You humiliated her.’

  ‘And yet she seems to have done up the stage since I last saw it. New paint job or something.’

  The so-called stage to which Quisser referred was a small platform in the opposite corner of the club. This area was entirely framed by four long panels, each of them painted with black and gold sigils against a glossy red background. Various events occurred on this stage: poetry readings, tableaux vivants, playlets of sundry types, puppet shows, artistic slideshows, musical performances, and so on. That night, which was a Tuesday, the stage was dark. I observed nothing different about it and asked Quisser what he imagined he thought was new.

  ‘I can’t say exactly, but something seems to have been done. Maybe it’s those black and gold ideographs or whatever they’re supposed to be. The whole thing looks like the cover of a menu in a Chinese restaurant.’

  ‘You’re quoting yourself,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Chinese menu remark. You used that in your review of the Marsha Corker exhibit last month.’

  ‘Did I? I don’t remember.’

  ‘Are you just saying you don’t remember, or do you really not remember?’ I asked this question in the spirit of trivial curiosity, my queasy stomach discouraging the strain of any real antagonism on my part.

  ‘I remember, all right? Which reminds me, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. It came to me the other day, and I immediately thought of you and your . . . stuff,’ he said, gesturing toward my notebook of writings open on the table between us. ‘I can’t believe it’s never come up before. You of all people should know about them. No one else seems to. It was years ago, but you’re old enough to remember them. You’ve got to remember them.’

  ‘Remember what?’ I asked, and after the briefest pause he replied:

  ‘The gas station carnivals.’

  And he said these words as if he were someone delivering a punchline to a joke, the proud bringer of a surprising and profound hilarity. I was supposed to express an astonished recognition, that much I knew. It was not a phenomenon of which I was entirely ignorant, and memory is such a tricky thing. This, at least, is what I told Quisser. But as Quisser told me his memories, trying to arouse mine, I gradually realized the true nature and purpose of the so-called gas station carnivals. During this time it was all I could do to conceal how badly my stomach was acting up on me, queasy and burning. I kept telling myself, as Quisser was talking about his memories of the gas station carnivals, that I was certainly experiencing the onset of a virus, if in fact I had not been the victim of food poisoning. Quisser, nevertheless, was so caught up in his story that he seemed not to notice my agony.

  Quisser said that his recollections of the gas station carnivals derived from his early childhood. His family, meaning his parents and himself, would go on long vacations by car, often driving great distances, to a variety of destinations. Along the way, naturally, they would need to stop at any number of gas stations that were located in towns and cities, as well as those that they came upon in more isolated, rural locales. These were the places, Quisser said, where one was most likely to discover those hybrid enterprises which he called gas station carnivals.

  Quisser did not claim to know when or how these specialized carnivals, or perhaps specialized gas stations, came into existence, nor how widespread they might have been. His father, whom Quisser believed would be able to answer such questions, had died some years ago, while his mother was no longer mentally competent, having suffered a series of psychic catastrophes not long after the death of Quisser’s father. Thus, all that remained to Quisser was the memory of these childhood excursions with his parents, during which they would find themselves in some rural area, perhaps at the crossroads of two highways (and often, he seemed to recall, around sunset), and discover in this isolated location one of those curiosities which he described to me as gas station carnivals.

  They were invariably filling stations, Quisser emphasized, and not service stations, which might have facilities for doing extensive repairs on cars and other vehicles. There would be, in those days, four gas pumps at most, often only two, and some kind of modest building which usually had so many signs and advertisements applied to its exterior that no one could say if anything actually stood beneath them. Quisser said that as a child he always took special notice of the signs that advertised chewing tobacco, and that as an adult, in his capacity as an art critic, he still found the sight of chewing-tobacco packages very appealing, and he could not understand why some artist had not successfully exploited their visual and imaginative qualities. It seemed to me, as we sat that night in the Crimson Cabaret, that this chewing-tobacco material was intended to lend greater credence to Quisser’s story. This detail was so vivid to him. But when I asked Quisser if he recalled any particular brands of chewing tobacco being advertised at these filling stations which had carnivals attached to them, he became slightly defensive, as if my question were intended to challenge the accuracy of his childhood recollection. He then shifted the focus of the issue I had raised by asserting that the carnival aspect of these places was not exactly attached to the gas station aspect, but that they were never very far away from each other and there was definitely a commercial liaison between them. His impression, which had been instilled in him like some founding principle of a dream, was that a substantial purchase of gasoline allowed the driver and passengers of a given vehicle free access to the nearby carnival.

  At this point in his story Quisser became anxious to explain that these gas station carnivals were by no means elaborate – quite the opposite, in fact. Situated on some empty stretch of land that stood alongside, or sometimes behind, a rural filling station, they consisted of only the remnants of fully fledged carnivals, the bare bones of much larger and grander entertainments. There was usually a tall, arched entranceway with colored lightbulbs that provided an eerie contrast to the vast and barren landscape surrounding it. Especially around sunset, which was usually, or possibly always, when Quisser and his parents found themselves in one of these remote locales, the colorful illumination of a carnival entranceway created an effect that was both festive and sinister. But once a visitor had gained admittance to the actual grounds of the carniva
l, there came a moment of letdown at the thing itself – that spare assemblage of equipment that appeared to have been left behind by a travelling amusement park in the distant past.

  There were always only a few carnival rides, Quisser said, and these were very seldom in actual operation. He supposed that at some time they had been in functioning order, probably when they were first installed as an annex to the gas stations. But this period, he speculated, could not have lasted long. And no doubt at the earliest sign of malfunction each of the rides had been shut down. Quisser said that he himself had never been on a single ride at a gas station carnival, though he insisted that his father once allowed him to sit atop one of the wooden horses on a defunct merry-go-round. ‘It was a miniature merry-go-round,’ Quisser told me, as if that gave his recollected experience an aura of meaning or substance. All the rides, it seemed, were miniature, he asserted – small-scale versions of carnival rides he had elsewhere known and had actually ridden upon. Beside the miniature merry-go-round, which never moved an inch and always stood dark and silent in a remote rural landscape, there would be a miniature ferris wheel (no taller than a bungalow-style house, Quisser said), and sometimes a miniature tilt-a-whirl or a miniature roller coaster. And they were always closed down because once they had malfunctioned, if in fact any of them were ever in operation, they were never subsequently repaired. Possibly they never could be repaired, Quisser thought, given the antiquated parts and mechanisms of these miniature carnival rides.

  Yet there was a single, quite crucial amusement that one could almost always expect to see open to the public, or at least to those whose car had been filled with the requisite amount of gasoline and who were therefore free to pass through the brightly lit entranceway upon which the word carnival was emblazoned in colored lights against a vast and haunting sky at sundown somewhere out in a rural wasteland. Quisser posed to me a question: how could a place advertise itself as a carnival, even a gas station carnival, if it did not include that most vital carnivalesque feature – a sideshow? Perhaps there was some special law or ordinance regulating such matters, Quisser imagined out loud, an old statute of some kind that would have particular force in remote areas where certain traditions have an endurance unknown to urban centers. This would account for the fact that, except under extraordinary circumstances (such as dangerously bad weather), there was always some type of sideshow performance at these gas station carnivals, even though everything else on the grounds stood dark and damaged.

  Of course these sideshows, as Quisser described them, were not terribly sophisticated, even by the standards of the average carnival, let alone those that served as commercial enticements for some out-of-the-way gas station. There would be only a single sideshow attraction at a given site, and outwardly they each presented the same image to the carnival’s patrons: a small tent of torn and filthy canvas. At some point along the perimeter of the tent would be a loose flap of material through which Quisser and his parents, though sometimes only Quisser himself, would gain entrance to the sideshow. Inside the tent were a few wooden benches that had sunk a little bit into the hard dirt beneath them and, some distance away, a small stage area that was raised perhaps just a foot or so above ground level. Illumination was provided by two ordinary floor lamps – one on either side of the stage – that were without lampshades or any other kind of covering, so that their bare lightbulbs burned harshly and cast dramatic shadows throughout the interior of the tent. Quisser said that he always noticed the frayed electrical cords that trailed off from the base of each lamp and, by means of several extension cords, ultimately found a source of power at the gas station – that is, from within the small brick building which was obscured by so many signs advertising chewing tobacco and other products.

  When visitors to a gas station carnival entered the sideshow tent and took their places on one of the benches in front of the stage, they were not usually alerted to the particular nature of the performance or spectacle that they would witness. Quisser remarked that there was no marquee or billboard of any type that might offer such a notice to the carnival-goers either before they entered the sideshow tent or after they were inside and seated on one of the old wooden benches. However, with one important exception, each of the performances, or spectacles, was much the same rigmarole. The audience would settle itself on the wooden benches, most of which were about to collapse or (as Quisser observed) were so unevenly sunk into the ground that it was impossible to sit on them, and the show would begin.

  The attractions varied from sideshow to sideshow, and Quisser said he was unable to remember all of the ones he had seen. He did recall what he described as the Human Spider. This was a very brief spectacle during which someone in a clumsy costume scuttled from one side of the stage to the other and back again, exiting through a slit at the back of the tent. The person wearing the costume, Quisser added, was presumably the attendant who pumped gas, washed windows, and performed various services around the filling station. In many sideshow performances, such as that of the Hypnotist, Quisser remembered that a gas station attendant’s uniform (greasy gray or blue coveralls) was quite visible beneath the performer’s stage clothes. Quisser did admit that he was unsure why he designated this particular sideshow act the ‘Hypnotist,’ since there was no hypnotism involved in the performance, and of course no marquee or billboard existed either outside the tent or within it that might lead the public to expect any kind of mesmeric routines. The performer was simply clothed in a long, loose overcoat and wore a plastic mask, which was a plain, very pale replica of a human face, with the exception that instead of eyes (or eyeholes) there were two large discs with spiral designs painted upon them. The Hypnotist would gesticulate chaotically in front of the audience for some moments, no doubt because his vision was obscured by the spiral-patterned discs over the eyes of his mask, and then stumble offstage.

  There were numerous other sideshow acts that Quisser claimed to have seen, including the Dancing Puppet, the Worm, the Hunchback, and Dr Fingers. With one important exception, the routine was always the same: Quisser and his parents would enter the sideshow tent and sit upon one of the rotted benches, soon after which some performer would appear briefly on the small stage that was lit up by two ordinary floor lamps. The single deviation from this routine was an attraction that Quisser called the Showman.

  Whereas every other sideshow act began and ended after Quisser and his parents had entered the special tent and seated themselves, the one called the Showman always seemed to be in progress. As soon as Quisser stepped inside the tent – invariably preceding his parents, he claimed – he saw the figure standing perfectly still upon the small stage with his back to the audience. For whatever reason, there were never any other patrons when Quisser and his parents stopped at twilight and visited one of these gas station carnivals – with their second-hand, defective amusements – eventually making their way into the sideshow tent. This situation did not seem strange or troubling to the young Quisser except on those occasions when he entered the sideshow tent and saw that it was the Showman onstage with his back to a few rows of empty benches that looked as if they might break up altogether if one attempted to sit on them. Whenever faced with this scene, Quisser immediately wanted to turn around and leave the place. But then his parents would come pushing into the tent behind him, he said, and before he knew it they would all be sitting on one of the benches in the very first row looking at the Showman. His parents never knew how terrified he was of this peculiar sideshow figure, Quisser repeated several times. Furthermore, visiting these gas station carnivals, and especially taking in the sideshows, was all done for Quisser’s benefit, since his father and mother would have preferred simply filling up the family car with gasoline and moving on toward whatever vacation spot was next on their itinerary.

  Quisser contended that his parents actually enjoyed watching him sit in terror before the Showman, until he could not stand it any longer and asked to go back to the car. At the same time he was quite transf
ixed by the sight of this sideshow character, who was unlike any other he could remember. There he was, Quisser said, standing with his back to the audience and wearing an old top hat and a long cape that touched the dirty floor of the small stage on which he stood. Sticking out from beneath the top hat were the dense and lengthy shocks of the Showman’s stiff red hair, Quisser said, which looked like some kind of sickening vermin’s nest. When I asked Quisser if this hair might actually have been a wig, deliberately testing his memory and imagination, he gave me a contemptuous look, as if to stress that I was not the one who had seen the stiff red hair; he was the one who had seen it sticking out from beneath the Showman’s old top hat. The only other features that were visible to the audience, Quisser continued, were the fingers of the Showman which grasped the edges of his long cape. These fingers appeared to Quisser to be somehow deformed, curling together into little claws, and were a pale greenish color. Apparently, as Quisser viewed it, the entire stance of the figure was calculated to suggest that at any moment he might twirl about and confront the audience full-face, his moldy fingers lifting up the edges of his cape, reaching to the height of his stiff red hair. Yet the figure never budged. Sometimes it did seem to Quisser that the Showman was moving his head a little to the left or a little to the right, threatening to reveal one side of his face or the other, playing a horrible game of peek-a-boo. But ultimately Quisser concluded that these perceived movements were illusory and that the Showman was always posed in perfect stillness, a nightmarish mannikin that invited all kinds of imaginings by its very forbearance of any gesture.