The OK End of Funny Town

by Mark Polanzak

  “No. It’s not something tangible. It’s not screws and mayonnaise jars and stuff. It’s not something you touch, but something you feel. And it’s real and true and broken. It’s unfixable. You have to go.”

  The little robot stopped knitting. “You want me to go,” he stated.

  I marched into the room, pulling the backpack with the yarn and books and cash in it from behind my back. “I got you really nice yarn. You remember when you said that you always wanted Icelandic wool? I got it for you. And I have some money to get you started. And. And. And I don’t know. I want you to take it and go make a life for yourself.”

  I held out the offering for a moment while he examined it. He whirred forward and touched the backpack. He looked up at me. Then I dropped it on the floor and ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, speed walking down the block.

  I found a bar that afternoon and drank until the sun set and my brain came back to normal. He was just a robot, for crying out loud. It didn’t work out. At least I didn’t just return him like every other dissatisfied customer. I gave it a shot. He wasn’t for me. I wasn’t for him. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. And I was giving him a whole ’nother chance. Jesus! He was just a little robot.

  When I returned home, I tried my best to enter slowly and quietly, but tumbled in drunkenly. After clanging through the doorway, I steadied myself and whispered, “Hello?” I waited to hear the whirring of his gears or the monotone of his robot voice or the clacking of knitting needles. There was silence. I shouted, “Little robot thing?” But there was nothing.

  In his bedroom I found a printed note: “I made this for you. Maybe we will see each other again. Sorry I was not good enough.” It was resting on a kind-of nice scarf in the center of the otherwise empty space.

  I picked up the scarf and wrapped it around my neck. It was sad. His farewell gesture was an article of clothing I had specifically told him I didn’t care for. We weren’t meant to be.

  For weeks, I reveled in his absence. I loosened the screws in the banister. The pots and pans became a cluttered mess in the cabinet in no time. I swiped crumbs off my lap and onto the rug. I put beer bottles down on the coffee table next to coasters. I threw a jar of pickles into the trash, unable to open it. I tried balancing Monopoly’s thimble token on the tip of my finger.

  I pictured that little robot wheeling around the streets with a knit cap on his metal head, mittens, and the child’s backpack. I pictured him huddled up in alcoves, reading the books I’d given him. I wondered how he was doing, where he’d wind up. Some afternoons, I wondered if it was him knocking on my door.

  Months later, I ran into the little robot at the supermarket. He was zipping along with a tiny cart and a list in his little metal hand. I shouted before he rounded the corner to aisle four, “Oh my god, hey!”

  He stopped suddenly and turned around. After a second, he whirred slowly my way.

  “Hello,” he said or asked.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I kicked the floor. He looked down, then back up to me.

  “You look the same,” I told him.

  “You look good,” he said.

  “So, you’re still here in the city?”

  “Yes. I am living on Union now.”

  “Oh. Nice,” I said.

  “Yes. Really nice,” he said.

  “With someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s good?”

  “Extremely,” he said.

  I sensed it. I sensed that he wanted to hurt me. “You know that I spared you, right?”

  “What?”

  “Did you not hear or did you not understand?”

  He was so smart. I knew he knew. He paused, then said, “Well. I suppose I should thank you.”

  “No need.” My confidence came back.

  “It was nice to see you again.”

  “Yeah. Nice seeing you.” We turned to part ways. But I stiffened and spun back around. “Do you have a number? Maybe we could get together sometime. I don’t know … for Monopoly or something?”

  He just stared at me with those little square red eyes for a minute. “No,” he said. “I do not think that is a good idea.”

  “You’re probably right. Better to make a clean break.”

  “Yes.”

  And then we nodded awkwardly and waved.

  I dropped my basket by the registers and began to walk out without anything I had come for. But I turned around. I ran down the aisles, scanning the space between linoleum and shoppers’ knees until I spotted him again, reaching up for a box of angel hair.

  I shouted to him and he turned his head. “You aren’t even a real thing!” As soon as the words escaped my mouth I felt everyone’s eyes on me.

  A moment passed.

  “Okay,” said the little robot, then he turned back and extracted the pasta before whirring away.

  Outside, the sun shone on a clear blue day. A seagull shrieked by the big green dumpster. I leaned on the chalky, rough brick wall of the supermarket for a moment, regaining my balance, letting my heartbeat slow down. Then, I took some deep breaths and began walking steadily to where I lived.

  GENIE

  The genie is still floating there. His translucent red manlike naked torso tapers down to the lip of the bronze lamp’s spout. He’s enormous. He has had his neck crooked the whole time he’s been out, his head pinned to the four by fours on the basement’s ceiling. He pushes down with giant wispy red hands from time to time to bend his head back and forth, side to side, around and around, but then when he lets go, he floats right back up and has to crane his neck again.

  I am sitting on the bottom step, smoking a cigarette, and carefully tapping ashes through the mouth of the empty Miller can as if needing to keep the basement floor clean. The genie pushes down, stretches his neck, lets himself back up. I exhale and watch for the line of smoke to break when it reaches the genie’s wispy see-through form. He can be touched. He can feel.

  I haven’t made any wishes yet. It’s been three days since I released him. He is not a kind being. He is not a vengeful being, either. He is just a being who appears, sometimes, to be upset. I know he doesn’t like his head hitting the ceiling. He wouldn’t stretch if it didn’t matter. So, when he’s looking down from up there, he looks like he’s in discomfort. But he’s never asked to be moved. He’s never said a word about it. Although I know the lamp is now too heavy for me to budge, I could maybe think of some way to help. I haven’t dedicated any part of my brain to a solution, though.

  “Are you uncomfortable?” I finally ask.

  “I. Am. Fine.”

  His voice is so deep that you feel it in your chest. It comes with a force that is startling, scary even. But the frequencies vibrate your muscles in a calming way. He is very loud. Each syllable takes him one full breath, so he speaks slowly. It’s wonderful to be shaken by the booming of his words, remembering that he will never want to hurt me. His voice is beautiful. I love listening to him.

  My mother died months ago, and this week I began to go through her things. Digging through forty years of basement-worthy items and memories of my parents will take longer than my typical resolve. I found the genie’s lamp in a cardboard box along with bottles of spray paint, warped old textbooks from my mother’s nursing school, and spools of rope. The lamp stood out, so I removed it from the box, wanting to take it upstairs to a room I was filling with stuff to maybe not trash. After two strides, the lamp was ripped from my hands, slamming down into and cracking the concrete floor. I ran to the stairs and turned back to see the thing jerking back and forth. What I imagined to be red poisonous gas shrieked out through the lamp’s lip in erratic bursts. The genie’s emergence took a full day—first a gold-braceleted red wispy arm shot out from the spout and struggled for leverage, more shrieks and blasts of red vapor, then another arm, then, after hours of a terrible battle, the genie finally pulled his head and torso up into the world of my parents’ basement. The process was lon
g enough for me to become curious more than terrified. It was a horrible, painful birth to witness.

  When I’m on the bottom step, I’m out of his reach. He is not strong enough to move the lamp either.

  “Did you meet my mother?” I ask him, dropping the cigarette into the can and hearing the last gulp of beer kill the ember with a tick.

  “No,” he booms, the sound filling the entire basement, thick, rattling windows and throwing open dusty books, sputtering their pages.

  “I haven’t told you about myself,” I tell him and wait to see if he cares to hear anything. He pushes himself down and cracks his neck. He lets himself up and folds his red tree trunk arms over his massive red chest. “This is my mother’s house,” I continue. “She died five months ago, and I was down here, going through everything. Everything she and my father accumulated in their lives. I was going to throw a lot of stuff away, to maybe clean it all and sell the place.” I realize I want to talk about my mother and father. I want to show him a photo or something. This impulse comes with guilt. I feel I must acknowledge my parents’ lives, really care for the memories now. Before I can move on.

  “Do you know everything?” I ask him.

  “No,” he booms.

  When he finally came into full form in the basement, I realized I had been gripping the banister since running from the terrible lamp. He pushed down and slithered his torso around the space, his head and neck slowly scanning the room. His eyes, awesome black rotating globes, finally found me and he slid his great red head even with mine.

  He boomed: “You. Have. Three. Wish-shez.”

  Then he drifted back up to the ceiling.

  I clutched the banister. I waited. “How long do I have?”

  “For-ev-vor.”

  I don’t know what to wish for. I leave the genie and the basement to get perspective. I drink tall glasses of water and cans of beer, silently, while studying the woodgrain of the kitchen table. I pace on the back deck of my childhood home, thoughts swirling in my head. I smoke contemplative cigarettes. I stare out to the woods, down to the grass, up to the sky, for signs. Day and night. I think about all the times I’ve made wishes. It was easy in the past, because they wouldn’t come true. I didn’t truly believe, so it was always possible to think of something. Eyes closed before the faint warm glow of birthday cake candles. Always a throwaway wish before blowing an eyelash or tossing a penny into a fountain. A shooting star. In those split seconds I was able to think of precisely what I wanted. Because I knew what I wanted couldn’t possibly come true.

  Now, I am coming up empty. I think of benevolent wishes, selfless wishes. I go down to the basement and ask the genie if they are in his power. They are not. Peace on earth he cannot do. Ending poverty. Eradicating diseases. Feeding all the hungry. These are impossible for him. My wish has to happen to me. I think of clever ways to achieve these grand wishes. I search for loopholes. But he cannot grant me the power to create peace on earth. He cannot give me more food than only I could want. He cannot give me will power.

  So I continue to sit on the deck and look at the moon as it changes shape, and drink cans of Miller, thinking about the perfect wishes. Three things I won’t ever regret. There is an opportunity here that is impossible to miss and impossible to take. I go down to experience the genie’s great spinning black eyes and enormous translucent red form and thunderclap of syllables. I lie awake in my childhood bedroom where I used to do so much wishing, for toys, for superpowers, for bicycles, for A’s on report cards, for making sports teams, for winning, for girls, for acceptance. I watch TV. I read books. I clean out the other rooms of this house. I replace light bulbs. I go down to stare at the genie, sometimes with a wish on the tip of my tongue, life-long health and wellness or success in my career, or sometimes for someone else to have discovered the lamp. But I force myself to give it more thought. I smoke and try to relax on the deck. I think it all through. I think everything over. And over.

  I do not rush. I go to work. I take lunch breaks. I meet up with friends at the bar and talk about their hopes and dreams and jobs and complaints and girlfriends. I play my guitar and write lyrics. I meet a girl and fall in love. A friend dies. I get married. We have children. We have successes and failures. We watch our friends grow. I raise my son and daughter. I travel to Paris and South America. I go to the movies. I go to graduations and weddings. Celebrate birthdays and ring in new years. I come home and sit on the deck and think about what to wish for. I go down to the basement, time after time, but it’s too much pressure. I will never be able to go back on my wishes, revise them. I putter around and think. I stare at the night sky and wonder what they should be. But I just can’t pick. I cannot choose. But he’s always down there, under my home, in the cool dark basement, among the boxes of my family’s stuff I never sorted or removed, craning his neck, folding his arms over chest, full of unimaginable power, waiting.

  THE MIME

  Posters

  Posters were everywhere in the morning. During the previous night, shadows must have run about under the streetlamps of our small, empty town, slapping posters to brick walls in dark alleys, with the ease of wind blowing paper down the block. We began to find posters in familiar places that were made strange. On the backs of park benches, way up above our heads on the fifth floor of a building—impossible to reach and unreadable—behind boxes of tissue paper on the shelves of our market, on the roofs of overpasses, on the undersides of manhole covers. In all these now new places, the posters sprouted, appeared to us. Some of us found posters inside our medicine cabinets.

  The image showed a heavy red velvet curtain draped before a black stage, and a lone white candle beginning to ignite the fabric. The words read: “NIKLAUS ALSEUR: MIME / WEST END THEATER / OCTOBER 13TH / ONE SHOW ONLY.” This was the most common poster. But we all heard tell of small differences, changes, anomalies, possible errors, dissimilarities. On one there was no candle. Another showed a candle but no flame. Yet another showed a thin gray line of smoke rising from the wick. One had no curtain but merely blackness surrounding a small fire. One was said to have a headless man in a white suit, and where his head should have been, the creature held the candle, lighting the golden tassel of the red velvet curtain.

  As the posters were discovered, their discoverers removed them. We took them to remember the date and time of the show. We took them while glancing over our shoulders. We took them because they could be for our eyes alone. And we carried them under our sport jackets, folded behind our purses. We brought them to our homes and hid them behind suitcases in the closet, under trunks in our attics, inside our great-grandfathers’ snuff boxes on our desks, behind loose stones in our cellars. We did not dare tell anyone where. And just like that, the posters were nowhere, and yet everywhere in our town. Taken. Gone. Hidden. But always here.

  Research

  Many of us did not tell the truth when asked what we were looking for in the subterranean levels of the library. In the stacks with old newspapers and microfilm machines, we casually glanced about, pulled glasses from our coat pockets or lifted them from around our necks, and squinted at pages, dragging fingers over ink, mouthing the words … born … trained … Eze … Cairo … Information about the mime. We closed the books, sending up dust puffs, and slid the texts back into shelves that we had not visited since childhood, when the library was a quiet labyrinth of sweet-moldy halls. It was pleasant and gratifying to research in our fine library. Some of us brought the books and clippings home. What were we holding there, as we were entering into our foyers? Oh, nothing. It was nothing. And we poured over the articles in our dark studies, late into the night.

  Louise’s Cellar

  A growing number of the women, the wives and sisters and mothers and daughters of our town, began gathering in Louise’s cellar at midnight. Louise was an unmarried woman who had traveled to New York and Chicago pursuing a career on stage. She was somewhat of a celebrity, somewhat of a mystery in our town. She kept to herself. She was a tall
woman with long, straight, black hair that hung halfway down her back and obscured her pale face. Her lips were like two red worms. She wore emerald dresses. And she taught our town’s women to describe. Louise described a box, placing her arms straight out from her sides, head back, eyes sealed, pressing on the invisible walls without moving her hands, placing her long pale arms above her dark head, trying to break through an invisible lid. Our women and girls described the boxes. They learned the craft. They dragged themselves across Louise’s earthen cellar floor by invisible ropes. They dusted off and donned invisible sun hats, pulled on invisible, silk stockings, lit long, white, invisible cigarettes. Louise inspected their technique, peering through an invisible monocle, limping between them with an invisible, ivory cane. And our wives, sisters, mothers, daughters were nowhere, doing nothing at all when they returned to our houses, beds, and breakfast tables. They were not doing a thing. No. And none of them recalled and spoke of these nights to one another. Because there was nothing to remember.

  Rumor

  At our dinner tables, our sons and brothers regaled us with what they had heard at school, in the cafeteria, by their lockers, at the back of the bus, or on the fields at recess. The mime was actually a mute, they whispered. The mime could not talk, and as a boy he learned to communicate without speaking, by describing items, actions, needs, his desires, his thoughts, all with his hands, his body, his facial expressions, and gestures alone. Eventually, he became so deft at pantomiming that he no longer required the material world. He could brush his teeth by simply miming the act. The mime had been a twin of a blind boy, who killed himself. The mime, after gaining notoriety, found his brother dead in their home with a typed letter pinned onto his coat. His brother could never have seen the mime’s act, and decided he could not bear to go on living. The mime went into hiding about this time, setting off rumors inside rumors. The mime had disappeared. Some thought that he, too, had committed suicide. Others believed he was practicing his pantomime, day and night, in a pitch-black, windowless cell, developing and honing a performance the world would never forget. The rumors went on. The mime had actually killed his twin brother and faked the suicide. More. Deeper. Darker. He shot his brother with an invisible gun while rehearsing his show. After that, the mime described a river in the middle of the Gobi Desert and floated away to where no one else could travel, erasing the currents in his wake.