Goldenland Past Dark (31 page)

The clown floats through the clear blue sky; in one hand he clutches a multicoloured bunch of balloons. Pink cotton candy clouds hang in the air beyond him; he smiles as a warm breeze drifts him to and fro. In the distance, birds chirp. It seems he could go on like this forever.

Two birds—grackles—fly toward the clown’s balloons. They duck and circle, their glossy bodies twist and dive. The clown watches them nervously. The birds shriek. They swoop toward the biggest balloon in the bunch—it’s aquamarine. One bird pecks with her beak; the other snatches at it with her talons. The balloon explodes, and the birds, frightened, soar off into the sky.

The clown dips a little, but keeps on floating. A worried look darkens his face. He scans the horizon for more invaders. His eyes widen. A whole flock of Canadian geese barrel into him. They jostle his balloons with their wings; they honk and flap, their necks extended, their eyes shiny and desperate. The clown holds on for dear life. Gunshots rend the sky, the birds scatter, and a second balloon, lavender this time, pops.

The clown is down to just three balloons now. He looks toward the ground and feels sick. It’s a long way down. But for now he’s still airborne.
Plunk. Plunk, plunk.
The clown holds out his free hand, gazes up at the rain clouds.
BOOM!
With a crash of thunder, a sudden downpour engulfs him. The balloons dip and waver in the unceasing monsoon; the clown is drenched.
CRACK!
A bolt of lightning, blue-white, zigzags into his red balloon. It bursts; electricity surges down the string. The clown’s bones flash white through his skin. He’s left charred sooty black, holding onto just two balloons.

The storm passes; the clown sighs with relief. But something is still amiss. He hangs in the air uncertainly; he sinks bit by tiny bit. Finally, it becomes clear: his white balloon has sprung a slow-but-steady leak. He gazes at it imploringly, makes puppy dog eyes, but still it loses air, deflating steadily until it sputters out its last and drops, small and useless, to the end of a dangling string.

The clown clings to his last balloon: an emerald green one, the loveliest of the collection. He wraps the string tight around his wrist and kisses it for good measure. Then the wind starts to howl. The balloon tosses in one direction; it swings him back in the other. It tugs upward, as though trying to get away. The clown shakes his fist at the balloon; he scowls. Why can’t it just stay put? It comes down and bonks him on the head. Finally, he’s had enough. He reaches into the deep pocket of his hobo jacket and pulls out a needle, silver and gigantic, gleaming at the tip. He pops the balloon himself.

For one awful moment, the clown stays suspended, knowing what he’s done. He goes pale; his mouth shrinks to a horrified
o
. Then, without further ado, he plummets.

Webern opened his eyes. Venus’s pink bedspread was twisted around his hips, and the boxcar was very dark. He looked over at the other set of bunks. Up top, the albino girl lay with her hair cascading over the edge of the mattress, a silvery curtain. Pigalle, the trapeze artist, slept beneath her, hands folded under her head like a little girl’s. Webern turned to look at Venus, who lay between him and the wall. She was fast asleep on her side with her back to him. Webern pulled the bedspread down an inch. There, protruding from her shoulder, he saw what she never showed even in the Parliament of Freaks: pale fleshy curled things, the beginnings of fingers.

Webern watched himself slide out of bed and grope in the darkness for something (a blanket? a shirt?) to drape around his waist. He watched himself slip past the pinched-in chocolates and the decaying flowers, out into the warm night. Only then, with his bare feet crunching the sun-baked dirt and dry grass, was it safe to go back inside his own skin again.

Webern walked alongside the sleeping train, past windows where monstrous shadows moved, or where dreamy cries wafted out, echoes from another world. It seemed like he might never reach his boxcar.

When he got there, all the lights were on. Webern stood at the threshold and looked slowly around the room. The unwashed Scotch glasses and crumpled papers were nowhere to be seen; Marzipan was setting up Bo-Bo’s old wooden chess set on the coffee table. Wags sat in his desk chair, his back to Webern. His golden hair shone as he bent over one of Webern’s clown notebooks, scribbling intently. When Webern closed the door, Wags spun around.

“Cheese and crackers! You’re finally back. Well, I got started without you—hope you don’t mind.”

“Started?” Webern asked. He looked down and saw that he was covering himself with the albino girl’s satin bloomers.

“Sure. Time’s a-wastin’. We’ve got lots of work to do.”

Webern sat on the boxcar floor in front of the mirror,
parting his freshly bleached hair. In the glass, a familiar boy looked back out at him. His white short-sleeved shirt was buttoned to the very top. His eyes sparkled with mischief. And the straps of his lederhosen were snapped and tightened. When Webern turned his head, so did the boy in the mirror. When he reached for the pot of rouge, the boy in the mirror also extended his hand.

“Cut that out,” said Webern.

“You’re snippy tonight, compadre.” Wags grinned. “Don’t worry so much. You’re going to break a leg.”

“Yeah, probably.” Webern adjusted one knee sock. “You’re sure I look all right?”

“Would I lie to you? It’s perfect.”

Webern frowned at the toe of one brown shoe. They had been practicing for a week, but he was still a little nervous. One part of him felt tempted to go to the Parliament dressed as usual in his frog-prince feet, to close his eyes and bask in the dull warm pain of the green-tinged lights, but Wags was so insistent, it was almost impossible not to do what he said.

Webern stood up; Wags did, too. “Would you mind if we ran through the ladder bit one more time?”

“You said it, buster.”

Before he went to Tarantula, Webern had not seen Wags, Willow, or Billow since the September when he turned twelve. In those days, Willow and Billow often disappeared for weeks at a time, leaving soiled clothing and moldering furs strewn about in acrid piles until their return. Webern’s father hardly seemed to notice their absences—he even left the same amount of lunch money piled on the counter—but Webern always became tense and vigilant, wondering if he was finally safe, if this time they really had left him forever.

Late August of that year, he finally believed that the girls were gone for good. They had been away for five weeks at that point, a record for them, and when he dared peer in through their keyhole, he saw their room was spare and empty: necklaces of animal teeth no longer dangled from the light fixture, and the stolen birds’ nests had been emptied of their eggs. Even their collection of lost pet flyers had vanished. He began to let his guard down, just a little; he still locked his bedroom door, but he was no longer afraid to go downstairs for a glass of orange juice in the middle of the night. When he found a squashed iguana in the bottom of his underwear drawer, he even dared to throw it out the window, where it landed beneath the oak tree like some ghastly parody of himself.

A week later, the ghost started to visit him. At first, he thought he was imagining things. Lying in bed, on the brink of dreaming, he sometimes saw the shadows move, or felt invisible snakes slither across his ankles, but when he sat up and turned on the lights, these phantoms always disappeared. However, the footsteps did not.

In the dim glow of his nightlight, a small lamp with the patterns of constellations poked into its black tin shade, Webern concentrated on the sound. It seemed to be coming from directly above his head, and it was slower, more deliberate than regular walking—almost as if someone were imitating footsteps, placing each foot slo-o-owly against the roof tiles:
crrrreeeeak, crrrreeeak
. Webern’s breath caught in his throat, and he swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He slid his stocking feet across the floor—sidestepped the toys and open comic books that lay scattered on the carpet. Carefully, he unlatched his window, then sat down on the sill and leaned as far back as he dared to look up at the roof.

He saw the tiles sloping up, the leaves and sticks fallen from the higher branches of the oak that grew close beside the house; he noticed a stranded softball, its white leather gleaming softly in the moonlight. No one was there.

After he switched off the constellation lamp, Webern curled up in bed and squeezed his eyes shut in a semblance of sleep. But it was no use.

The visits continued infrequently over the next week. Sometimes the ghost would fall silent for a day or two at a time. Sometimes its footsteps sounded more like waltzing—one-two
creak
, one-two
creak
. Sometimes Webern felt eyes on him, ones he couldn’t see; sometimes he heard a tune, high and faint—a familiar lullaby. But even when he dug an old Ouija board out of the pile of games in his closet, he couldn’t get the apparition to appear. One day after school, he decided to write the ghost a letter. He used a blue pen on a clean sheet of notebook paper, and drew a border of tattered roses around the edge.

Dear Mom,

I know I’m too old to believe in ghosts. But if you’re there, really there, I wish you’d let me see you. I promise I won’t be scared. You always told me I was brave. I wasn’t then, but I am now.

Love, Bernie.

Webern speared the letter on a branch of the oak tree that grew right beside his window, where it would be visible from the roof. The paper rustled there like a dry white leaf all afternoon.

That night, he lay on his elbows under the blankets with a flashlight and read all his old picture books. He remembered how the words had sounded in his mother’s shy, quiet voice, how her fingernail, pink and smooth as a tiny seashell, had traced across the glossy pages. Footsteps paced back and forth above his head in the rhythm of the words.

When he woke up, Webern found himself surrounded by a half-dozen open picture books; the handle of his flashlight had left a red imprint in the side of his face. Webern climbed out of bed and scrabbled quickly over to the window. He threw back the curtain. His note was gone. Another one hung in its place.

Webern opened the window. The ghost had written with charcoal, and the black marking smeared and rubbed off on his hands as he removed the letter from the tree branch. Webern eagerly smoothed the paper on the window sill and focused on the messy black words.

“Dear Son,” the letter read. “I will never leave you. You can see me whenever you want. You just need to close your eyes.” Beneath this was a sloppily drawn smiley face: a nose, a mouth, and two large scrawled X’s were all they’d bothered to draw in.

The letter was written on a page torn from a book; behind the charcoal writing, Webern saw blocks of printed text. He turned the page over. On the back, he saw a familiar picture. A frail boy and girl walked hand and hand through a dark forest; all around them, menacing yellow eyes peered down from the trees.

Webern slowly turned toward the picture books on his bed. One of them, the book of fairy tales, lay facedown on his comforter. He went to it and turned it over. He ran his finger down the ragged edge where the page had been torn out, then sank down on his bed.

He couldn’t make a sound. He couldn’t move. He could hardly think. A single thought just repeated in his mind, over and over:
They were here. In my room. They were here. In my room.

The world was dark, but it was not haunted. There was no ghost—there never had been. When a person died, she stayed dead. He had always known that, but now the knowledge moved through him like a poison. His mother wasn’t on the roof. She was in the ground. He lay on his bed, perfectly still, for a long time. In the house below, he heard his father eat breakfast and leave for work. Then he heard the house’s stillness.

When Webern got up again, the sun was setting, and his room burned orange-red. His head hurt, and his hands felt limp and sweaty. But he knew what he had to do now. He knew he had to be brave. Webern took off his pyjamas and dressed himself in the darkest clothes he had—his hands shook as he did up the buttons—then went downstairs and sat on the sofa to wait. As soon as twilight had dimmed into night, he went into the garage. He found the gallon jug of gasoline and carried it to the back yard. If Willow and Billow thought they could make a game out of his grief, they were wrong. He would not be haunted like this.

Webern stood in the shadows beneath the oak tree; its branches spread in a dark canopy above him, like India ink spilled on the sky. From where he stood, he could just barely see them crouching up there in the treehouse. In the darkness, the twins’ eyes glowed like cats’ eyes, sly and golden.

Willow and Billow had been living up there for weeks, amongst cicada shells and rusted nails and rotten knotholes, coming out only at night to move like ghosts through their own house or across its tilted roof.
They were there. In my room
. He imagined them standing over his bed like two bad fairies delivering a curse—saw their spindly fingers moving like insects, like the wind, toward his neck, and he knew what he had to do. He had to drive them out. He didn’t care if it was cruel.

Webern moved toward the trunk of the tree and awkwardly, nervously, splashed the bark with gasoline. Up above, he heard the twins stir. Maybe they could smell the diesel. He certainly could.

For a moment after he doused the tree trunk, Webern stood in silence. The empty gasoline jug hung heavy in his hand. His father would be home within the hour. But there was nothing the old man could do to stop him now.

Webern reached into his pocket for the match.

The orange flames whooshed up the oak, and the whole backyard flickered with a hellish red light. Webern backed up. He wanted to run away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off what was happening to the treehouse.

He could see Willow and Billow clearly now. They danced in quick circles on the uneven planks, and for a horrible moment, Webern thought that they wouldn’t leave the treehouse at all—that they would just swirl faster and faster until they merged with the flames. But then, at the last possible moment, the twins flew out the window; they leapt up onto the roof of the house just as the wooden treehouse walls caught ablaze. The girls tore away like shadows fleeing from the light; they scaled the sloping roof and disappeared over the other side.

Webern turned his eyes back to the treehouse, which now burned with a steady, rushing brilliance, like a comet descending through the sky. As a fire engine’s siren wailed in the distance, Webern glimpsed Wags, framed in the treehouse window. For the first time since Webern’s sixth birthday party, the little boy in lederhosen was the size of a normal child.

“Wags!” Webern screamed. His heart pounded in his ears. “Wags!
Wags
! Jump!”

But Wags just grinned. He saluted, snapped the straps of his lederhosen, and in a shower of sparks, vanished into the consuming fire.

All of Wags’s acts had to do with falling—falling or flying, which were really just two halves of the same thing. Wags had concocted a routine with a stepladder, which Webern fell down
bump bump bump
, hitting his head on each rung, and together they had rigged up an elaborate system of wires and pulleys above his freak show stage, so he could glide, Peter Pan style, up one side and down the other. A swing hung over the little stage now too, and they planned to add a basket, like the ones beneath hot air balloons, that could be raised and lowered with a nearly invisible clothesline.

Wags incorporated Webern’s old unicycle in the show, and Webern cleaned the chain and patched the tire, which he hadn’t done for years. In one version of the routine, the unicycle bucked forward to throw Webern in a slow motion trajectory (assisted by the pulleys) out over the heads of the audience; in another, he pedaled absentmindedly even as he floated higher and higher above the newly shined seat. Unlike most of his fellow clowns under the big top, Webern had always hated falls, even the ones that sent him thumping onto a padded mat or splashing into a tank of water. But as he trained with Wags, falling unfolded for him, in all its permutations. He learned the classic clown fall—catching one toe behind the other heel—and the best way to dive from a height into a handspring on the ground. He learned to lean too far backwards and circle his outstretched arms in the air—“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”

Webern’s skin was dotted with bruises, a harlequin checkerboard of black and blue. But as Wags he was indestructible.

That night, Webern performed perfectly. He split his act into five minute segments, and as the bored crowds filed past his little booth, he took great pride in the startled looks that rippled their unshockable faces. He climbed and tumbled and climbed again and now and then he floated, and even flew. Even after the show under the big top began, people still packed into the space in front of his stage. Their laughs were flabbergasted at first, incredulous—what was this guy supposed to be, the Wingless Soaring Wonder? But as the act went on, the cynicism fell away. The laughs deepened, the crowds stayed longer, despite the barker waving them on. Sometimes a child yelled encouragement, or a lady covered her eyes in disbelief.