Futile Efforts (40 page)

Most of the rooms appeared to be holding classes.
 
Small gatherings of twenty or thirty people, in folding chairs taking notes.
 
Discussions ranged from Jane Austen novels to quantum mechanics to the correct way for a matador to sever a bull's spinal column.

Everyone enticed and taken in from the outside, together but doing their own thing, divided yet uniform in their division.
 
I waited to hear some laughter and I kept right on waiting.
 
People were everywhere, moving in their secured orbits, thrumming with constant activity and maneuvering.

I looked down and watched
Fishboy
Lenny's back flippers flapping wildly as he squirmed through the halls and circled back to us.
 
His flopping, tiny body heaved against my ankle and he stared up at me, making quiet but gruesome sounds from deep in his bulbous abdominal cavity.
 
"
Mwaop
mwaopp
,
ffftteeee
,
mwwoop
,
fffteeee
."
 
The inchoate, extraneous gashes of gills opened and closed, sucking air with a coarse popping noise.

Nell cooed, too hefty to bend and reach for him.
 
She said, "There,
shhh
, Lenny, it's all right, calm down."

Fishboy
Lenny went into a caricature of speech, sputtering through the minuscule abscess of a mouth.
 
"
Mwaopp
ffftteeee
."

"It's going to be fine.
 
We'll be on our way soon.
 
And then we'll go back to the carnival."

"
Mwoop
."

"Go play.
 
It's wonderful that you want to make friends."

"
Mwoop
."

Nicodemus was waiting somewhere close by, with his frying pan and worn verses.
 
He'd have a Bible in the pocket of his frock coat, well-read but misremembered.
 
Onion-skin pages would crinkle from his fetid breath.
 
He was the only person I ever knew who actually underlined passages and check-marked chapters.
 
You could go through and see which stories appealed to him the most.

Genesis 4:2-8
had been entirely underlined.
 
Cain offers the fruit of the ground to God while Abel sacrifices the firstborn of his flocks.
 
Lamentations 2:20
had a couple of check marks and a large flamboyant asterisk.
 
Wherein one of the prophets dares to say to God, "Shall the women eat their fruit and children of a span long?"
 
Nicodemus had been thinking of sacrificing his kid long before we ever got around to it.

2 Chronicles 36:15-17
was highlighted with a yellow marker.
 
After God's prophets are mocked, the Almighty sends an army to Jerusalem to destroy the city "and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand."
 
Psalms 144:1
had a check mark slashed so deeply into the paper it cut through fifteen pages.
 
God is praised for being the one that teaches hands how to conduct war and fingers how to fight and shed blood.

My father had a real thing about hands.

I started walking faster, slipping between couples, skimming past a troupe of jugglers who tossed sharpened objects along with eggs and a bowling ball on fire.
 
I knew how to work through a crowd.
 
Nobody touched me.

A few rooms had drapes or beads hanging in the doorways, but almost none of them had any doors.
 
I found one that did and turned the knob: it was a rest home, with about forty eighty-year-olds sucking their gums and shivering in wheelchairs.
  
The smell of shit and gruel grew more distinct and I went into a coughing fit.

Shifting forces clashed, and the noise of the midway bloomed.

Just like in the
carny
there was a sense of history and foundation, but also the possibility of tear-down.
 
As if it could all be folded up and carried off in a couple of hours, everything gone tomorrow.
 
It felt as if time was running out, but I didn't see how.
 
Even if Nicodemus could leave whenever he wanted, he wouldn't until I found him.
 
He wasn't hiding any longer, if he'd ever been.
 
Maybe he stood just inside the next shadow, holding his skillet
.

4

W
e were throwbacks, my father most of all.
 
You couldn't find a real freak show in the United States anymore, not even in the South where life still hasn't been as homogenized as the rest of the country.
 
Now the only freaks you were likely to come across were the sadomasochists bent on changing themselves into something different.
 
They dreamed of becoming lizards, birds, or fiends that were
other
.
 
It might not be any better, but at least it would be startling and distinct.
 
That counted.

Their shows were inhabited by the tattooed, the pierced, the perforated, and the glorified geeks.
 
The kids who got off on hanging bricks off their pricks, the blockheads who ate glass and nails because their uncles fondled them at six.
 
Self-recreation.
 
The bearded women who took hormones because they wanted the muscle mass, the shriveled tits and that look of terror in the eyes of the audience.
 
It wasn't fouled genetics.
 
It was simply a way to embrace the monstrosity under your skin and still get out alive.

Timeless and resilient, yet comprised of cracked cement and chipped paint, the Works lived with a slow and steady throb.
 
Decades of Manhattan echoes passed through and kept going.
 
Dust rose and dissipated and resettled, all part of the same current.
 
It was relentless yet full of mourning, I thought.
 
The blood of the city dried here, and continued to congeal.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art spans centuries, millennia," Jolly Nell said.
 
It sort of surprised me that she knew a word like "millennia," though it really shouldn't have.
 
"And this place is even larger."

"It's devoted to more gods," Juba said.
 
"Different, warring."

Nell frowned and waved him off.
 
"I don't know about that, but you can feel them taking the years off, adding them on, in every order here.
 
You need to step back to see the entire picture."

"How far?" I asked.

"Too far.
 
That's why it doesn't work."

"Perhaps you need only to step in," Juba said.

"It's still too far," she told him.
 
"They're not getting anywhere.
 
It collapses in on itself and crumbles away."

"Hm."

"I was wrong, this isn't the real sideshow yet.
 
I don't think you'll be able to find your father here."

"Yes, I will," I said.
 
"Juba, what's the view like form up there?"

"Sickening."

Herzburg
let out a small laugh, the kind he made when somebody in the audience tried to rush him.
 
"I find it stimulating."

And it was, in a fashion, like the midway at noon in the heart of a jasmine summer.
 
The power came through, it bled into the air.
 
You didn't have to partake of it or act on it or find pleasure here–you only had to be enfolded.
 
Whether a willing participant, a victim or only a person open to suggestion.

The placebo effect was already working.
 
The crippled could wander through the Works.
 
Pain could be suppressed, even feasted upon, for a time.
 
Then, the collapse.
 
I looked into faces and wondered what would happen when all their agony came crashing back in.
 
Would it only make them love and need the place more?

Hertzburg
was already in the zone, letting it get good to him, feeding off that static charge.
 
The hair on his shoulders stood on end, veins dark and bulging along his thick forearms.

Some kids were strumming ukuleles, gagging on "By the Light of the Silvery Moon."
 
I could imagine
Hertzburg
going over and grabbing the boys by their throats, holding them out at arm's length so they couldn't touch the floor even on tip-toe.
 
Faces going red, then purple, then black as their swollen tongues unfurled.
 
And the wild man almost gleeful through it all, but also a bit puzzled, trying to study the situation but being too near to see the whole thing.
 
Bringing the dead eyes closer so he could inspect them for something new or forgotten.

"This is just a front, we're only touching on the surface," Jolly Nell told us.
 
She said it as someone who knew a great deal about surfaces.
 
No one ever looked beyond the obesity, seeing the corpulent flesh and being completely mesmerized by it.
 
The only questions she ever got from the audience were how could she let herself get that way, why didn't she lose the pounds, and didn't she fear heart disease and stroke?
 
Even though she received at least three or four marriage proposals a month, no one ever asked her about anything except what they saw on the soft, fat surface.

Juba, taking strides that carried him over three people at a time, wriggled his fingers as if trying to part the air.
 
"I agree, this is the
blly
.
 
The sideshow is always much deeper within the
carny
."

"Of course,"
Hertzburg
said.
 
The edges of his beard seemed to be alive with sparks, and you could smell the searing ozone in the air.
 
"But the draw is already tugging us onward."

"You can fight it," Nell told me.

"You think so?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Eh, why bother?"

My father's fragile beliefs couldn't survive intact here.
 
The nudity and drugs and stupidity of youth itself would have scraped against Nicodemus's tender underside and made him want to break his teeth.
 
He'd be ravaging his Bible with red pens and dog-earing the pages about eating your kids.

He couldn't exist without a place of safety, and that meant either the bottle or Jesus.

I stopped in front of a young couple, my age or so, when I am this age.
 
Early twenties but already tired of what it was all about.
 
They sat at the base of a small cardboard set that looked like a little girl's tea room or playhouse, but there weren't any children around.
 
The windows had been drawn on with colored magic markers and could be opened by tugging on a piece of string.

She had plastic flowers in her hair and was coaching him on how to play Stanley in
Streetcar
without sounding so much like Brando.
 
It wasn't going to help and she knew it.
 
The guy wore a tight T-shirt and tried to seem sensitive without pouting, but his bottom lip hung down too far and he kind of sucked on his teeth the way Brando used to.
 
Way too much of the American icon there to ever do it any differently.
 
No one could play
Rebel
without doing Dean, either.

The girl kept trying to get him to forget the movie, and the more she pushed him, the more he started doing Colonel Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now
.
 
I could picture him getting to the "Stella!' part and muttering "The horror, the horror," instead.
 
I sort of wanted to see that.

They both appeared to be on the gaunt side, faces thin and sallow.
 
He hadn't shaved for a couple of weeks, but his wispy mustache still didn't reach the peach fuzz on his chin.
 
She had warm but uncompromising eyes, and she was at least six months pregnant.

I couldn't figure out a way to frame my question without sounding stupid, so I just let it out.
 
"Is there a church here?"