Fum

by Adam Rapp

  The first few hours of the ride are relatively uneventful as they ascend through South Central Illinois, with its modest snow-dusted farmlands marked with silos, corncribs, lopsided barns, and an army of windmills so vast, it almost looks like the setting for a science fiction movie.

  Lavert sleeps in the passenger’s seat, the paperback edition of Lorcan Nutt’s The Smallest Hands in his lap. His head, which is covered with a silk do-rag and a thick wool cap, rests against the window. His oxygen mask covers his mouth, the fog of his breath clouding its surface.

  Nick was kind enough to provide a portable, battery-operated morphine cartridge. “It should be plenty for what you need,” he quietly told Corinthia.

  The red-buttoned plunger rests in Lavert’s left hand, which Corinthia keeps a keen eye on from the backseat, where she reclines on a pillow, extending her legs as comfortably as she can, though the peaks of her knees nearly graze the station wagon’s ceiling.

  It’s still dark in the early predawn, and Cloris drives with the radio quietly playing early eighties classic rock. It’s a rock block of REO Speedwagon.

  “What does he normally listen to?” she asks, finding Corinthia’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “I think he’s into Tupac.”

  Cloris scans the airwaves, lands on a hip-hop station.

  The beginning of their journey is overcome with quiet. There is the sense that they are going much further than the six hundred miles and eleven hours that was predicted by the travel website.

  Three hours into the trip, they are passing through Rockford when Cloris speaks after a long silence.

  “Do you love him?” she asks Corinthia, finding her eyes again in the rearview mirror.

  Corinthia stares back at her.

  “He’s asleep,” Cloris tells her.

  Corinthia nods.

  “Are you afraid?” Cloris asks.

  Corinthia considers her promise to Lavert, then nods again.

  When they cross the Wisconsin border, Lavert stirs in the passenger’s seat. They’ve completed almost half the trip, and after Madison they talk about food. They pull into a Wendy’s rest stop. Cloris asks Lavert if he’d like to order anything, but he says he isn’t hungry. She and Corinthia get cheeseburgers and small Frostys and eat in the parking lot. It’s barely 11 a.m. and after Cloris finishes eating, she goes inside to use the bathroom.

  Lavert is staring out the window, his oxygen mask still fogged. He seems troubled, far away.

  “You still want to do this?” Corinthia asks.

  He nods.

  “You sure?”

  He nods again.

  As Cloris is returning to the car, Lavert removes his oxygen mask and, with a voice that is at once hoarse and faint, says, “Just lemme know when we’re an hour away, and I’ll start hittin’ this plunger.”

  As they travel farther north on Highway 51, the towns are smaller and their populations begin to dwindle. It’s as if this region of the country has been besieged by some sort of plague. Snow covers everything. It almost feels as if there are no other seasons here, only winter and variations of winter.

  They stop for gas in Mercer, and just before Ironwood, a town so small it seems to exist purely for fast food, a few motels, and diesel fuel, Corinthia alerts Lavert that they’re roughly an hour away.

  He nods and begins depressing his morphine plunger every ten minutes.

  They arrive in Ashland just before 4 p.m. The sky is gray and the air contains a brutal chill that Corinthia has never experienced before. It’s the kind of weather you read about in books, like the bone-freezing damp that beleaguered sailors must endure in epic novels about whales and lunatic ship captains.

  Stretching into the horizon before them is Lake Superior: first the frozen bay, and then the storied Great Lake, which appears to extend into infinity, like an ocean.

  Cloris parks at the threshold of the small beach and helps Corinthia unload Lavert’s wheelchair from the back of the station wagon. There are no other cars. Corinthia brings the wheelchair around to the passenger’s side, and when she helps Lavert out of the car, she’s stunned at his weightlessness. His arms are slack and his legs are puppet-like. He seems even thinner than when they started their trip, some eleven hours ago.

  After Cloris closes the station wagon’s back door, she says good-bye and heads to the Northland College admissions office, where she will masquerade as Corinthia Bledsoe of southern Illinois’s Lugo Memorial High School. The fake ID that she made at the library, along with Corinthia’s Social Security card, is tucked into her back pocket.

  Corinthia watches the station wagon pull away. Once she gets Lavert seated comfortably in the wheelchair, she arranges a few blankets over his lap, secures his oxygen mask, and checks to see that his morphine unit is still properly inserted into the port in his upper arm.

  “You good?” she asks him.

  He nods, his eyes sunken and enormous.

  She pulls his knit hat a little lower on his head and begins wheeling him across the parking lot, past a stand of tall, ancient, snow-heaped evergreen trees, and then onto a gravel path, which leads to the beach.

  The sky looks iron, Superior an expanse of slate. Beyond the bay, far out in the depths of the Great Lake, there is only the slightest hint of moving water. It ripples like the troubled hide of some prehistoric sleeping beast.

  When they reach the frozen beach, pushing the wheelchair becomes cumbersome, but Corinthia presses on. Lavert keeps his chin tucked into his chest, his oxygen mask snug over his face.

  Improbably, a gull arcs toward the shore and lands on the ice. It trots around, wings tucked, all skinny legs and clumsy, like an old man looking for a lost coin, and then flies off.

  Corinthia parks the chair some twenty feet from the water.

  “It’s cold,” she says.

  Lavert nods, his oxygen mask still fogging up, his eyes peeking out from under his hat.

  “You warm enough?”

  He nods again.

  They stare out at the Great Lake. It feels like the end of the earth, as if there’s nothing beyond where the water meets the cloudless, colorless horizon.

  Lavert gestures with his hand, pointing toward the lake.

  “You want to get up?” Corinthia asks.

  He nods.

  Corinthia comes around to his front and removes the two blankets from his lap. Lavert reaches inside his parka and disconnects the morphine cartridge from its port, then hands it to Corinthia, who puts it in her coat pocket.

  He then motions to Corinthia in a manner suggesting that he’d like to stand, so she helps him out of the wheelchair. She offers her forearm for support and he uses it to pull himself up. Once on his feet, he teeters a bit but then bends his knees a few times. After a moment, he lets go of Corinthia’s forearm. She drops down to her knees, as if looking after a toddler, ready to catch him if he falls, but he shoos her away, determined to prove that he’s able to stand on his own.

  They take each other in.

  The same hungry gull returns, unleashing a screech as it wheels overhead. Its cry is almost human in its desperation.

  Corinthia nods to Lavert, and he returns the nod and then removes his oxygen mask and hands it to her. He pivots toward Lake Superior. Corinthia places the disconnected oxygen mask in her other coat pocket and starts to follow him, but Lavert turns back to her and shakes his head.

  “Okay,” Corinthia says. “Go, then.”

  Lavert stands on the frozen beach, hunched, holding his side with one hand, his knee with the other, like a much older version of himself considering the shape of the simple moment he’s arrived at.

  He then pivots again and starts to walk.

  When he reaches the edge of the frozen bay, he stops for a moment and takes in the enormous expanse before him, and then he eases himself onto the ice, moving very carefully.

  Although she has an impulse to go to him, Corinthia stays where she is, still on her knees.

  Lavert shuffl
es out a few more feet and then starts to lift his arms high in the air. He slides to and fro, a few feet to his left, a few feet to his right. He slips a bit, his arms jerk out. He almost falls backward, but somehow he regains his balance. He has to go to a knee.

  Corinthia can hear the wind whistling through the evergreen trees behind her. She arranges one of the blankets on the frozen beach, folds it into a square, then sits on it, with her legs crossed.

  Lavert rests for a bit, still looking toward the horizon, and then manages to get to his feet and slowly walk back to the beach.

  The light is starting to fade. Corinthia studies his thinned silhouette as he approaches. Each step is careful, intensely considered. His winter boots look huge, too heavy for his legs.

  When Lavert finally reaches her, he is winded. His body is racked with fatigue, but his face is joyous. Although it seems to be getting darker by the moment, Corinthia can see that his eyes are bright and filled with a boyish wonder.

  Lavert manages to lower himself to his knees and then leans toward Corinthia. She gently pulls his body into hers, his head and neck and shoulders easing into her torso, his legs bent at the knees, his feet tucked under his seat, the whole of him held in the bowl of her legs.

  Corinthia closes her arms around him.

  Once they are comfortable, they simply sit there, staring out at everything: at Lake Superior, at the fading endless horizon, at the stand of evergreen trees off to the left, at the snowy gusts skirling across the beach.

  “How was that?” Corinthia asks.

  “It was good,” Lavert says. “Real good.”

  His voice is faint, dreamy.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  As his breathing slows, it starts to snow. The wind causes the flakes to tumble in many directions. It seems odd that it would snow on a beach, like it’s one of the world’s cruel secrets.

  It is a brief, fitful snow, not even a minute long.

  Corinthia lowers her face to Lavert, who is turned into her now. She adjusts his head, turns his face toward hers, hopes to feel his breath on her cheek, her eyes, the skin on her lips . . . but there is nothing.

  They stay this way for a few more minutes — Lavert cradled in her lap — warming each other on the cold beach.

  Eventually Corinthia rises and hoists Lavert into the wheelchair. She folds the two blankets, places them on his lap, tucks his hands underneath them. Then she gently closes his eyes with a fingertip.

  As she wheels him along the gravel path toward the parking lot, she can see that Cloris has returned with the station wagon. She is standing beside it, next to the driver’s seat. They wave at each other.

  At the station wagon, Corinthia wheels Lavert to the passenger’s side, and Cloris slides in and helps her arrange his body in the front seat and secure his seat belt. Cloris then scoots over to the driver’s side and starts the car and puts the heat on.

  The headlights of the station wagon shoot out over the short beach, new gusts of snow swirling through their beams.

  Three months later, Brill Bledsoe, traveling alone in his wife’s Hyundai, pulls into a parking lot in the town square of Venus, Texas, a small hamlet in Johnson County, thirty miles south of Dallas, just below the state’s panhandle. He has traveled some seven hundred miles in the middle of February — it’s the only time he could take off from work at the meatpacking plant — so he can witness firsthand a nomadic freak show known as The Beautiful Apocalypse, specifically its newest attraction, a soothsaying giantess billed as “Fräulein Feffi Fum: Seer of Dread.”

  As outlined in the four-color brochure, which also features an alligator-skinned child called Gator Gary; a young woman covered in thick simian-like fur called Weird Wendy, who rides a unicycle while playing the flute; and some creature altogether surreal called Plato the Potato Boy, for a mere five dollars, you can sit with clairvoyant phenom Fräulein Fum, and if you simply allow her to take one of your hands in hers, within sixty seconds, she will tell you a terrible thing that will happen to you. The brochure promises it to be a one-on-one encounter like no other.

  Brill parks the Hyundai just below the Venus water tower, which is quite similar to the one in Lugo, with its white block letters inset in a baby-blue band. It’s 72 degrees, with bright, clear skies, but Brill expected it to be hotter. Nonetheless, it’s a far cry from the frigid temperatures of southern Illinois. Last week, an ice storm felled several branches of the older trees on Stained Glass Drive. Since mid-November, Lugo has been impacted in a crusty hide of snow, so, as he weaves his way through the hundreds of cars in the parking lot, it’s nice to be able to walk around wearing only a knit shirt and his Bazoo Meatpacking Windbreaker.

  An enormous white big top has been erected on a park green. The tent is so large, it almost dwarfs the lawn, whose discernible fringe of grass is dry and faded. Hundreds of people mill about food trucks, merchandise tables stacked high with T-shirts and trucker hats, and a fleet of portable bathrooms that has been set up around the tent’s perimeter. A banner with THE BEAUTIFUL APOCALYPSE has been draped across the entrance. As Brill stands in line to purchase a twenty-dollar admissions ticket, he is surprised to see how many parents have brought their children. The website images alone are the stuff of nightmares: humans with spired teeth and cloven feet and donkey tails and extra limbs. Although they update their web content regularly, they have done a good job to keep Fräulein Feffi Fum an enigma, as the description of her attraction is limited to a field of mysterious text floating in an hourglass.

  CLAIRVOYANT GIANTESS!

  SEER OF DREAD!

  At the box office, as the very normal-looking young woman with the ponytail protruding from the back of her Houston Astros baseball cap runs Brill’s bank card, he asks her where he might find the giantess.

  “Triple F is all the way in the back of the tent,” the woman says.

  “‘Triple F’?”

  “Fräulein Feffi Fum,” she says. “You won’t miss it. There’s a long line. She’s become our main attraction since Tulsa. She has her own wigwam now.”

  “Wow,” Brill says.

  “It’s an additional five dollars to see her, and they accept only cash in there. Do you have cash?”

  “I have cash,” Brill assures her.

  When she hands his bank card back to him, Brill realizes that her right hand is shaped like a lobster claw. It’s a shocking image, but Brill manages to maintain his composure. He thanks her and makes his way through the big top’s entrance.

  Inside, it smells like popcorn and human breath and mosquito repellent and deodorant spray, and hundreds of fellow ticket buyers walk slowly through the various installations with stunned expressions on their faces.

  Not even ten feet inside the tent, he’s approached by an armless woman in a red gingham dress who is pulling a Radio Flyer wagon filled with pink blobs of cotton candy. The wagon is attached to a chain that’s been belted around her waist.

  “Cotton candy?” she says to Brill, who finds her voice almost as beautiful as her face. She wears her dark hair in French braids, and her eyes are stunningly green.

  “How are you able to serve it?” he asks, surprising himself with the uncharacteristically potentially insensitive question.

  “With my hands,” the young woman replies.

  In a swift move, she hops onto one leg and grabs a long cone of cotton candy with what at first appears to be her left foot, but it turns out to be a hand, complete with an opposable thumb. Brill Bledsoe is dumbstruck, to say the least. It’s not an ugly hand by any means. In fact, it looks to be a hand worthy of her beauty. Her fingers are long — delicate, even — and their nails are painted red to match the color of the woven plaid in her dress.

  It’s the hand of a pianist, he thinks.

  The young woman offers him the cotton candy and says, “I can make change, too. I even do foreign currency.”

  “No, thank you,” Brill says, and she deftly returns the cone of cotton candy to its slot in the wagon.
<
br />   He can’t help noticing the other hand, connected to the bottom of her other leg. It, too, boasts attractive, fluted fingers and red fingernails.

  Brill wants to ask this young woman so many questions, such as “Do you like doing this job?” and “Do you have a family somewhere?” and “Doesn’t being gawked at all day make you sad?” and “What do they pay you?” and “Do you browse the Internet with your feet — I mean hands?” and “Does your condition force you to contend with all sorts of personal hygiene issues?” But the words are lodged in his throat, so he simply thanks her again and moves on.

  It’s hot in the tent. Or maybe Brill’s just incredibly nervous. He’s always prided himself on maintaining his composure. His entire life he’s been praised by doctors and nurses for his low distance-runner’s pulse. But now he can feel himself sweating through his knit shirt, so he removes his Windbreaker, folds it over his arm, and continues on.

  Moments later, he happens upon a small group of five or six people peering down into a large white box. On a post that’s been pounded into the earth, a small placard reads THE TEN-INCH MAN. A woman moves away from the gathering of people, and Brill steps into the vacancy.

  Inside the box, dressed in a white tuxedo and holding a walking cane, is a miniature man, perhaps no taller than the coffee thermos that Brill takes with him to work every morning. The little man seems to be deeply recessed in the box, several feet down.

  It has to be an illusion, Brill thinks. They must have dug out several feet of earth to achieve the effect. It’s a trick of forced perspective.

  But when Brill really looks, the Ten-Inch Man doesn’t seem far away at all. In fact, his features are distinct. The man is old, perhaps sixty, with slicked-back gray hair and light-blue baggy eyes.

  The Ten-Inch Man simply stares back up at his small audience. At one point, the Ten-Inch Man waves up at them, and a few of them wave back. “Hello,” a heavyset woman in a Dallas Mavericks jersey calls to him, waving. It troubles Brill to think that this poor man’s life has been relegated to spending untold hours in a white box, staring up at normal-size people’s stunned faces. Brill is overwhelmed with the impulse to reach down and grab him and put him in the pocket of his Windbreaker and take him back to Illinois. But then what? Would he drop him off in the center of town? Would he set him free at the edge of a cornfield? Keep him in the basement? Would the Ten-Inch Man insist on living in another box?