Imperfections (9 page)

“Weird,” Leonard said breathlessly, sounding amazed.

A creeping, uncomfortable feeling overcame me. It was the sense of voyeurism, the crowd of people gawking. It was the Mighty Mite, seemingly oblivious, doing his job just by being stared at. It was how hard I found it not to stare at him. It was the apparent dignity with which he did his job, the apparent strength with which he ignored all the eyes and the derogatory comments. It was almost as if we, the gathered crowd, didn't belong here, like we were invisible and watching him go about his life, alone in his home. It was a complex mixture of shame, empathy and wonder. We were the ones who were out of place here, not the little man. The Plexiglas acted to keep us out more than it did to keep him in. It was almost as if we, the crowd, were caged. We were the intruders, the freaks.

I glanced at the towering shadows around me. Eyes glistened in the weak light, intent upon the Mighty Mite. Even as whispers were exchanged, fascinated eyes did not stray from the Mite. This was a human zoo.

“That's the teeniest freak I have ever seen.”

“Is all of him small?”

“Does he get ID'ed when he buys his smokes?”

The Mighty Mite looked at his wristwatch, stretched and put down his cards. He reached under the table and pulled out a sign to place on the top:
Back in 15 minutes.

The Mighty Mite stood, grabbed his cigarettes and wandered out of the circle of light. As he left, someone took a picture. The flash fired, almost audibly, blinding me in the dark.

“Hey, I tell you clowns, no pictures.” It was the carnie.

There was a scuffle in the crowd. The carnie snatched the camera from the shadow, opened the back hatch and pulled the film out.

“What the hell?” the shadow said and shoved the carnie.

“Let's move.” Leonard pulled me out of the intensifying scuffle centred on the shadowed man and the carnie.
 

The voices grew loud and angry behind us. Once we were clear of the fray, we wandered, pausing once at a wax figure, the top half a naked woman and the bottom half a big fish.

Leonard read the sign aloud, “Mermaid: this specimen was caught in a fishing net off the coast of Montserrat.” Leonard tilted his head. “She died three hours after being caught. She suffocated to death out of the water.”

“She doesn't look real,” I said.

“Oh, I'm sure she's real.” Leonard gave me a strained look before taking off toward another group of people crowded around a spotlight.

We worked our way through a forest of legs ornamented with belt buckles topped by cowboy shirts with pearly snap buttons. When we arrived at the front of the crowd, we were confronted with the most confusing mound of flesh I had ever seen: overstuffed, billowing pillows of skin, segmented by deep folds and creases, bruises on the flesh, crusted sores and sprouts of seemingly random, greasy hair. My eyes, wide in wonder, roamed the mound trying to make sense of the expanse of skin. The mound was on a slowly rotating pallet and in half a turn, it was obvious I had been staring at the ass end of the fattest man in the world. The pallet was set on an industrial weigh scale that displayed a red, illuminated,
1,021 lbs.

The fat man had a boyish face, large as a pumpkin, set in one side of his body. He smiled as he spun by slowly. It may have been a grimace, I couldn't be sure.

As his side slid by, someone reached across the rope barricade and slipped a pen in between some folds. Someone giggled. The fat man squealed with surprise and began to jiggle. His arm emerged and flailed back to extract the pen, but it was too short to work its way around all of the flesh. A few people laughed. A few, with haunted looks in their eyes, broke from the group and wandered off to other corners of the tent.

I felt revulsion at the fat man but also pity for him. It was an instinctual clenching of my stomach at the smell of unwashed flesh, the sight of the sores and bruises, and the innocent smile that spun by.

How did a human come to this?
I wondered. To care so little that he wound up a mountain of flesh, crippled and immobilized by his own weight, trapped on an industrial weigh scale by the size of his own body. The strength of the trauma to the psyche to get the fat man here, whatever caused it, would have been immense, and would have hurt worse than anything I had ever experienced. Then to be on display day after day, the jeers and pen pokings would have perpetuated that trauma. This fat man would die early and poorly. I couldn't escape the idea that I was watching a dead man flail on that pallet, in a freak show, covered in bruises and sores born from obesity, surrounded by prying eyes and poorly checked snickers, people looking in wonder at his death.
 

Not being able to extract a pen from your own fat folds is not a good place to be.

I glanced at Leonard. He was smiling, his eyes fixed on the quivering, squealing invalid on the pallet.

I pushed under the rope, put one hand on the fat man and leaned into his bulk to extract the pen.

The man stopped squealing.

I stood, instinctively wiping the hand I had touched him with on my pants, the pen in the other hand.

The spotlight blinded me to the audience so I couldn't see who said, “Stupid kid.”

“Thank you,” a muffled voice came from the fat man. His head was on the other side of the pallet. His voice was high-pitched, faraway and lonely.

The light flashed from bright to dark as I ducked back under the rope into the crowd.

“You touched him,” Leonard winced.

“I had to,” I replied, thinking Leonard was looking for an explanation. “I couldn't reach otherwise.”

“What did he feel like?” He asked.

I wiped my hand on my pant-leg again. “Like a big turkey,” I said, “before it's put in the oven.”

Leonard pursed his lips.

We wandered past a display case that was not unlike Mother's china cabinet. Instead of shelves packed with trinkets and cups, these housed jars. There was a two-headed fetus. A snake with a scorpion in its mouth swirled in a cloudy yellow fluid.

“Look close,” Leonard said, his nose pushed up against the glass. “The two-headed thing moved.”

“It did not.” I didn't want to put my face close to it.

“I guess not,” Leonard said and then he stood on his toes and pointed. “Look. You can see where someone stitched the other head on.”

“Really?”

I had questions like…

Where would someone find a spare foetus head?
 

Who would think to stitch it to the body of another?

“It's so fake,” Leonard said.

Apparently he didn't think about the things I did.

“The fat guy was real,” I said.

“Look, over there. Come on.” Leonard was off.

I caught a glimpse of the carnie with the rusty nail in his mouth out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be watching us. Then a few dark figures broke my view. For a moment, I feared I lost Leonard in the shadowy crowd. Then I saw him, waving me forward. The crowd around this spotlight was not as thick as the Mighty Mite or the fat man.

“Look,” Leonard said, “Teen Wolf.” He pointed.

I looked. My stomach seized.

Mother's voice: “He's not going to turn into one of those Mexican wolf-men, is he?”

Standing in the light was a boy my age. He was wearing only a pair of white boxer shorts and what looked like a fur suit. Head to toe, he was covered with shag-length hair. His eyes seemed particularly bright, framed by dark hair; they stood out in sharp contrast. The black dots of his irises scanned the boundary of the spotlight. His eyes did not betray feelings of shame or fear; they were very lonely. When he saw Leonard and me among the gawkers, his eyes lit up. He smiled and waved.

“He looks like an excited monkey,” Leonard mumbled and shied away. The wave had drawn people's attention to us.

I waved back.

The wolf-boy let out a grunt.

“You're going to get us kicked out,” Leonard hissed.

“Well, aren't that sweet,” the carnie drifted out of the darkness, seemingly floating more than walking toward us. “You gone done made a friend of Esteban there. I ain't seen him that tickled in months. Regularly though, it's only the grown-up folks in here he sees. You wanna meet 'im? He speaks Mexican mostly, but he knows some English.”

“It's all right,” Leonard said. “I don't want to.”

“Sure,” I said.

I thought of the patch of hair on my stomach, the dent in my head where the haemangioma had once been. I thought of my mother's finger wagging. Her voice saying, “What's that?” It made me want to know the wolf-boy Esteban.

“You're all right, kid,” the carnie said and tucked his bottom lip under his teeth to give a sharp whistle. He rolled his hand in a motion beckoning Esteban to come over.

Esteban glanced around before making his way over. The crowd dispersed to other corners of the tent, into the darkness, as the freak approached us.

“Qué?” Esteban asked the carnie.

“These here boys is wantin' to say hi,” the carnie spoke, his lips moving lewdly around the nail in his mouth.

Esteban smiled and beamed, “Hola. I am Esteban.”

“Hola,” I said. “I'm Richard.”

Leonard didn't say anything and shifted from one foot to the other, then back again.

Nurse's voice: “That is an anomalous patch of terminal hair.”

“And this,” I gestured, “is Leonard.”

“I was so happy to see you,” Esteban spoke with a thick accent. “There are no niños here.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“I am from Divisaderos, in Sonora,” Esteban replied. “In Mexico,” he added. His voice happy, the bristles around his mouth shook with each word.

“We bought Esteban for two thousand bucks,” the carnie laughed. “That's like a million dollars in that backwater. His folks're now the richest folks there, happy to be rid of 'im they was. Now back to work ya li'l bastard.” The carnie was still laughing, making his insult seem like a pet name.

Esteban nodded and said, “It was nice to meet you.” His shadow worked its way back to the spotlight.

I thought about what it must be like to travel far from home, to be in a place where everyone spoke a different language, and rarely see another kid your age. A lonely pit opened in my stomach. Esteban had seemed so thrilled to meet us.

There was a spark as the carnie fired a cigarette. For that moment, his pockmarked face glowed like a demon's, each line and scar and wrinkle was thrown into sharp contrast from below. Then his face fell into shadow, except for the orange glow from the cigarette tip.

“You boys oughta see one more thing before ya go,” the carnie said. The orange dot bounced in the dark.

I stifled a cough brought on by inhaling a gout of cigarette smoke. “We should get back to our parents,” I said to Leonard.

Leonard looked at me for a second, a slight frown on his face. “What else do we need to see?” he asked the carnie.

The carnie pointed at a gap in the curtains that made up the wall of the tent. “Why,” he said, “y'all should see Razor's Blades of Doom.” The carnie checked his watch, tilting his wrist to make the most of the poor light. “Show starts in five minutes,” he said tapping his watch.

Leonard went.

I followed.
 

I wish I hadn't—that whole adventure had been a mistake.

The gap in the curtains was black, threatening and made the big tent we left feel warm and comfortable by comparison. My heart pounded in my ears as Leonard's figure slowly dimmed from my sight when he passed the threshold and walked deeper into the darkness.

I paused, paralysed. Leonard was gone. My eyes darted for an escape route. They jumped from the Wolf-boy to the crowd around the Mighty Mite. I caught a glimpse of the fat man though I couldn't tell which bloated body part I saw, a leg maybe, before the gap in the crowd filled in. I couldn't tell where we had entered the tent. The flap leading to the outside had fallen, caging the area in. My eyes jumped, looking for any difference in the tent wall, any slight change of colour or line of light that would betray the exit and lead to the safety of the crowds outside. The midway seemed so safe and so far away. I spied the cabinet full of jars. The snake with the scorpion in its mouth and the two-headed fetus, drowned in yellow formaldehyde, trapped in jars, the outside sounds muted and aqueous.

The smell of cigarette smoke and a clasped hand on my shoulder prompted a squeak. I wriggled free and darted through the gap in the curtains, into the dark, into the unknown. The carnie cackled and coughed somewhere close by. I strained to see but couldn't. I heard noises, feral animal noises all around me: grunts, whispers, shuffles, the rustle of clothes and feet on the dirt and hay-covered floor. The air reeked of people.

Something big was going to happen.