“Dad,” the boy said from his place in the front row. “I don’t like it.”
“Come on, son!” his dad replied, his voice full of humour. “It’s all jolly good fun!”
The words didn’t sound right, even to the Professor who didn’t know the man, who should never even have seen him, and yet Joan tightened the noose about his neck and held him steady for Mr Punch, who grasped his slapstick in both little hands and spun, and the man slid to the floor, as empty and used up as his wife.
This time there was no laughter; there was no applause. There was only a pensive little boy looking up at the stage, waiting for his mum and dad to come back.
“I need a volunteer!” said Joan.
The boy shook his head. The Professor peeked once more through the curtain and thought he saw, in the dim light, the glisten of a tear on his cheek. Don’t, he thought, don’t you do it, that’s not the way, and something in the child sagged and he pushed himself to his feet, as weary as any old lady in chintzy skirts, as any man waiting to use up his retirement, and he stepped forward.
The Professor felt his hands carry out the motions as Joan slipped the noose over the boy’s golden head. He felt it as she tightened the rope. He heard the bang and the whirr but he didn’t see the flash because his eyes were already pressed tightly closed. He realised he hadn’t felt much at all in a very long time. He wasn’t certain he ever wished to again. There was only the darkness behind his eyes and then Mr Punch said, “That’s the way to do it!” and it was so full of excitement, so full of triumph, and the Professor opened his eyes to see another little square of white, a photograph of a child’s clean smile. He knew the boy hadn’t been smiling, that he would never smile again, but Mr Punch’s camera had caught it anyway, just as it always did.
He lowered his hands, feeling the strain in his elbows and shoulders, feeling suddenly very old. He caught only disjointed words as he started to thrust puppets, without looking at them, back into their bag. Soon he would be on the road again. He would be driving somewhere else, anywhere, and he knew that it would be raining, and that the rain would smell inexplicably of dust.
Dinnertime, said Joey the Clown.
Birthday, said Joan.
Cake, said Mr Punch, and his voice was the most contented of all:
Cake.
The Professor slipped his hands under the booth’s fringe and felt for the puppets that had fallen. He grabbed Joey and the crocodile and the doctor, feeling the old, cold skin, and then he grabbed the new ones: those who had fallen. He paused when he felt their touch on his hands.
The skin was still warm, and it was supple, and smooth, and soft. He drew them towards him and picked them up, holding them to his chest, then stroking them against his cheek. He felt them and their warmth went into him. It awakened parts of him he had rather hadn’t awoken because it was wonderful, conditioned by their love, seasoned by their life. They weren’t used up and they weren’t jaded. They weren’t mad or spent or lost. They were fresh and new and something inside him stirred in response.
Cake, Punch murmured again, and the hard unyielding surface of his face pressed up close to the Professor’s. Cake.
The Professor pressed his eyes closed, though he could see everything anyway. There were beaches outside, not just rain-tossed promenades. There were hotels limned in sunlight. There were roads he had not yet taken. All he had to do was see where the Wolseley wished to go, and grip the wheel, and force it to go somewhere else. The entertainment would arrive, and he did not suppose they would welcome him in. He had a sudden image of Mr Snell, thin and bent and grey, twitching the dingy curtains of a faded boarding house and waiting, fruitlessly waiting. The Professor decided he did not care. He had tasted cake, the only kind he wanted; he had not had his dinner; and he found he was very, very hungry indeed.
One day, he supposed the devil might come and take them all. Until then, he would find them: the golden little boys and girls who did not laugh and did not clap. He would find every one of them. He whispered under his breath as he emerged from the booth into the empty and quiet bar. He began to dismantle the stage, his whisper sounding different as he slipped the swazzle into his pocket, speaking in his own voice at last the words that were always waiting there for him: That’s the way to do it.
CHAVISA WOODS
Take the Way Home that Leads Back to Sullivan Street
“Zyprexaolanzapinezydiswithfluoxetinesymbyaxothan.” She pronounced this word with familiar ease. “This drug was recalled from the pharmaceutical market, but I still have a renewable prescription. The doctor said it works best for me, regardless of the side effects.”
*
Why are smart people always so fucking crazy? Or maybe it’s not that smart people are crazy, it’s just that crazy people present themselves as being super-duper smart. She did. She clung to the notion of her genius like her life depended on it. But you know, if I pull it apart, nothing she ever said was really that smart.
“Geniuses are always considered a little crazy by their generation,” she told me. She told me she had a photographic memory, then she recited the names of the presidents in alphabetical order, then in the order of their presidencies. Then she did the same with the names of philosophers from Aristotle to Žižek.
But that’s not really genius, is it? That’s just memorizing needless shit, which I now know she probably does to keep herself from picking her toenails down till they bleed or shaving all the hair off her entire body for the third time in one day. She told me she can feel it growing.
Kali also told me she has two alternate personalities: a man whose name she doesn’t know, and he is very shy, and a woman named Rose, who is a very horrible person, who slugged her first boyfriend in the face once. But she never remembers anything Rose does.
She said when she becomes these other, more horrible people, it’s like a door closes in front of her and she can sometimes peek though the keyhole and see the blurred images of Rose doing things to people she knows, and she hears the muffled noises from outside, but she can’t quite make out anything clearly, and she certainly can’t control anything they (she) do(es).
She told me she was terrified of worms, and that at night she had dreams that copper worms were eating their way through her skin. That’s why, Kali said, she could never make it through Dune—because of the worms. I said that probably wasn’t the only reason.
Kali told me she could talk to turtles and smell architecture. She tried to make me register Libertarian. She told me she had a feeling about me. The first time we made love, she told me that a blinking red light named Alganon had been visiting her in the night. Alganon blinked to her from the upper corners of the bedroom as a means of communication. Alganon said that I should move in with her.
*
It’s not like no one told me to stay away from her. Everyone who knew her, and come to think of it, even my friends upon first meeting her, told me I should run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. But Kali knew this would happen. She’d warned me.
“People don’t like me,” she told me. “People think I’m crazy.”
“Are you?”
*
I guess her eyes were always a little dilated and her mouth was always smiling, especially when she was upset. She was thinner than a skeleton and cold. I don’t know what that feeling was that I had for her. Was it love? Was I just mesmerized? Maybe I wanted to save her from something. Or maybe, most likely, I, like everyone else who let themselves get close to her, believed her insanity was some kind of genius. Her family sure did. They all thought of themselves as geniuses. I guess that’s a big part of why it was so important to her. I guess that’s why her whole identity depended on it.
*
Jesus. Now I’m picking my nails. My bags are all packed in the backseat. She didn’t hear me leave, I don’t think. It’s three in the morning. I’m just driving around East St. Louis, aimlessly. There’s a line of whores waving at me from the side of the road. They all
have really impressive jewelry that glints in my headlights as I pass. I’m just sort of circling this strip. It’s disgusting. There’s like a little mini-mall of peep shows and porn stores and strip clubs I keep passing, right before or after I get to the whores, depending on my direction. The peepshow mini-mall wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t placed directly beside what is obviously a grade school, which shares a playground with the parking lot of the sex strip mall.
I guess I could go live in my dorm. I can’t go there tonight, though. It’s late and my roommate is scared enough of me as it is, even though she’s only met me four times.
I have a dorm at a university in Southern Illinois. It’s part of my package. I haven’t even spent one night in it. I got this college package before I met Kali, when my family was still going to help me pay. They already knew I was a dyke. But when I put a face on it, her face anyway, they stopped helping me pay for anything. Not that they had it to give at all, anyhow. So now I have this stupid dorm I never used that I probably won’t ever be able to pay for, or that I’ll be paying for forever. God. Just crossing the river from St. Louis to Illinois: East St. Louis, what a shithole. And she’s still there, freaking out in our fancy apartment in the West End, the one I lived in but never paid for.
Funny, I’m paying for the crappy dorm I never lived in and not paying for the fancy place I’ve actually been living in for the past year. I should have known, when she asked me to move in with her and I told her I couldn’t afford it because of college and the dorm and all, and she said, “Don’t worry about the rent,” I should have known she needed me too much. Why else would a rich, straight girl overlook the three major facts that (a) I’m a dyke, (b) I’m poor as hell, and (c) I have a small drug problem?
*
Her parents have lots of money and a fancy house in the city, and she has a fancy apartment in a neighborhood too hip for her. Her mother is a failed actress with stock in Walmart and a permanent glass of red wine attached to her right hand. She’s the spitting image of Shirley MacLaine.
When her mother met me, she asked me if anyone had ever told me that I was also the spitting image of Shirley MacLaine; a young Shirley MacLaine. I said yes, that I had heard that a lot.
She said, “Oh yes, well, women always seek out women like their mothers. Isn’t that what they say? Or is it something else they say?” She asked me this with a resentful grin blooming on her face and a sarcastic lilt in her voice. She’s a little passive-aggressive about her daughter’s newfound lesbianism.
*
The first time I met her parents, they were hosting a Mensa party in their home. Mensa is a club for people with high IQs. They take a test, pay a due, and then hang around upper-middle-class dinner parties with a bunch of academic liberals who have no social skills. It’s great.
Her mother and father are both members of Mensa. The first time I came to one of their dinner parties, I found fifteen middle-aged frumpies sitting in a circle passing around a helium balloon and reciting dirty limericks in high-pitched voices. Ahh-ha! I thought, This is why she’s terrified of worms and drinks soap.
*
When we moved in together, she told me two things. One: she told me there was a headless woman in our kitchen who paced back and forth swinging her own head by its hair (which she always sees in kitchens, but only ever in kitchens), and Two: she told me she didn’t want to take her medication anymore because she didn’t need it. “I probably just needed to come out as a lesbian,” she told me. “Denying that big of a part of yourself can cause serious problems,” she told me.
*
For a while, I thought maybe she was right. When she stopped taking her medication, at first she seemed better. She didn’t mention the headless woman again. She didn’t vomit in the mornings. She stopped shaving every day. She even started talking to people her own age, making some friends at her college and hanging out in the radio station after classes. For a while there, yeah, when we went out, I enjoyed having fairly normal conversations that didn’t involve detailed global statistics, the sniffing of old buildings, or cryptic discussions of the possible repercussions of her having been named after an ancient god.
Maybe, I thought, the medication was the problem after all. But something did bother me about the fact of her diagnosis. I hadn’t really ever heard anyone complaining that schizophrenia was an overdiagnosed disorder. And there were still moments, even during those peaceful times, I noticed her staring intently at nothing, moving her lips softly, or squeezing her wrist till it bruised. Once, I asked her if she was really feeling more mentally stable, or if she was still seeing and hearing things, but trying to hide it. She snapped out of it, held my hand too hard and explained to me that this (I) was her first real relationship, and she wasn’t going to fuck it up. She wasn’t going to let me get away by being crazy. She didn’t want me to get away at all. She never wanted me to go anywhere actually, and if I did, not without her.
*
My sort of unyielding urge for danger was probably what attracted me to her in the first place. Our codependent, peaceful life wasn’t enough excitement for me. After five months of living with her in close-quarter domesticity, I started going out with my friends again. I think it was spurred by the big Y2K party. Everyone was sure it was going to be the end of the world. So we all totally obliterated ourselves. It felt like the end of the world that night. But other than everybody getting obliterated, nothing happened.
I took massive amounts of hallucinogens, stayed out partying until the sun came up and returned home smelling like Vicks VapoRub. She hated it. She wanted me with her all the time. She said she didn’t understand why I wanted to go to parties with my dumb friends, who, incidentally, think she’s too dorky for words. And she thinks they are not intelligent enough to have the privilege of my presence.
*
That’s the other thing she started doing when she stopped taking her medication, obsessing over calculable intelligence levels, namely, her IQ. She’d been dragging me to at least one Mensa dinner a week, most of which are held at her parents’ house. She started threatening to take the Mensa entrance test a few weeks ago. But then, she ruminated that she didn’t need to take the test because she’s already an unofficial member. The truth is, she was terrified to take the test … terrified she might fail. Everyone just assumes she is an out-of-the-ballpark genius. Her parents excuse her schizophrenic tendencies, which mostly show up as small moments of quirky darkness or anxiety in their presence, as side effects of her genius. If she took the test and failed, her insanity would no longer be viewed as the residue of a great mind at work, but just what it was—crazy for the sake of crazy. And I knew being exposed in this way would totally unhinge her.
I never encouraged her one way or another. She could take the stupid test or not. I openly found the whole idea completely dull.
Yesterday morning, Kali asked me to go to a Mensa party with her, but I had other plans.
“Please,” she begged. “It’ll be different this time. It’s gonna be wild.”
“It’s never been wild, honey, come on. The wildest it’s ever gotten was when they decided to play strip Trivial Pursuit, and that was really just kind of uncomfortable.”
“No,” she said, “I promise, it’s gonna be wild. The guy at the radio station gave me something. I’ve been saving it for tonight.”
“What did he give you?”
“It’s a surprise. I’ve been saving it for tonight. Please. Just this once? I promise you, this thing he gave me will make the conversations much more interesting.”
I guess she thought she needed to make her life more interesting to me in order to keep me in it. I was sure she had some coke or maybe pot or something, trying to lure me away from my drugged-up friends by becoming my drugged-up girlfriend. But hey, it worked. I thought it might be kinda funny to interact with the Mensans high. So I went with her.
I grabbed a hitter and a mirror just in case Kali didn’t have the foresight, and we drove to
her parents’ house.
The party was already under way when we pulled up. A few of the Mensans were still filing into the small, near-mansion, colonial-style house, which she said smelled like grapes (colonial architecture, that is). The lights were all lit up and I could hear the sound of drinking songs coming from the living room. They were singing, “A ghost that’s meshugenah makes Mendelssohn go drown.”
She turned to me and held out her tiny, closed fist. “You ready?”
“I brought a mirror, and a hitter,” I told her. “Which is it?”
She opened her hand. Sitting in her palm was a small, folded piece of tin foil.
“Oh my God, you’re not serious.”
She opened the tinfoil. Inside were two little stamps bearing images of the pink elephants from Dumbo, which smiled up at me.
“Acid? You want to do acid at your parents’ dinner party?”
She smiled excitedly at me. “Yeah. What? You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I’ve done it a lot. Enough to know you shouldn’t do it at your parents’ dinner party.”
“Oh, but cocaine would have been all right?”
“Yeah, somehow, it would. I mean, it’s very different. Have you ever even done acid?”
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 22
