The Funny Man (31 page)
These vivid dreams are still another side benefit of the pills that no one explained to him before.
When it is the funny man’s turn to go on stage, he takes his place behind the audience and as the previous performer introduces him he can hear the catch in the guy’s throat. It’s probably the biggest thing that ever happened to him, introducing the funny man. The funny man has timed the ingestion of the pills perfectly. His head is both soft and clear, his gaze warm and sharp. His performance is sure to be enhanced. There will be piper paying later, usually in the form of sweating and the shits, but the funny man is all about sacrifice, now that he knows what you get for it.
The welcoming applause is eager, aggressive, the claps a little slow, but loud. They have a “you better show us something” quality, and boy, will he. He’s shown them a lot in his life and miracle of miracles, he has even more. How is this possible? It is possible because everything is possible … for him.
Before the funny man even says thanks for his welcome, he quickly fakes shoving his hand in his mouth and then gives his widest smile and shakes his finger and there’s a lot of laughter because everyone is in on that particular joke. It’s a good start, just as he planned.
Most of the jokes are oblique references to his recent troubles, self-deprecating and they land with some force and regularity. Often the setups get bigger laughs than the punchlines.
I haven’t been up to much lately …
The jokes themselves aren’t particularly important, though. They are merely the setup for the new thing. It is like a boxing match. No one expects to knock a guy out with body blows, but you need to throw some shots there to get him to drop his hands.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” the funny man says, “that this comedy business just isn’t for me.” He pauses to allow the audience to boo. “No, seriously, I’m done with it, that’s what I’ve come here tonight to tell you all. For me, the joke’s over.” More booing, only lighter this time. He seems very serious, like he’s deciding to pack it in right in front of them.
“However!” the funny man shouts, lifting a finger into the air to signal attention. “What I am going to do, is dance!” At this cue, the music starts over the public address system and the funny man kicks into his routine where he shakes only one part of his body at a given time. With practice he’s gotten really good at it, his whole body entirely still, save his arm from the elbow down, or his head from the neck up. He can even wiggle his ears and move his hair back and forth in such a way that he looks like he’s wearing a wig. That took some practice.
At first, the laughter is tentative, but it progressively grows in volume and intensity and some are even clapping along with the music and whooping and the funny man feels fucking great, remembering what it’s like to bask in such love. Colors swirl in his vision as he now whips his head back and forth like he might unhinge his skull, which is not planned, but sometime the greatest comedy comes from accidents.
He knows now is the time to strike, now is the time to show them what he has, and he goes still except for his leg, which begins to twitch wildly, and with a practiced flick he is able to disengage the tendons and ligaments that hold his foot at the ankle and he flops that fucker around like nobody’s business, really flaps it around better than he ever has before, bouncing it off the stage as it twirls almost 360 degrees, and that’s when the cheering turns to horrified screaming.
A woman in the front row yells, “Oh, my god!” and points at the foot and this causes everyone else to look, which is what the funny man was going for, but soon there is the sound of glass breaking as the woman in the front row falls into a dead faint and takes out the cocktail table with her. From somewhere in the back a keening wail like a harpooned seal rises in intensity. Other people appear to be fainting as well, or holding back their hurl with hands over mouths, and still others scramble for the exits. His last image is of a young couple about the age he was when he first met his now ex-wife. They are at a table, a couple of rows deep and all around them is chaos, a panicky stampede, but the young man has wrapped his arm around the young woman’s shoulder and with his free hand, he covers her face by pulling it to his chest. “They’re going to make it,” the funny man thinks.
As the music track ends, the funny man stands on stage under the spotlight, his foot canted almost backwards. In front of him is wreckage. He hurts, but not from the foot.
L
UCKY FOR HIM,
I did not see Chet the next day, because my breakfast tray was brought in by Mr. Bob himself, the first time I’d seen him since the welcoming reception. He wore the same pristine white tracksuit and as he placed my tray on the table next to my bed a couple of splashes of juice hit it but appeared to vaporize on contact.
“Neat, huh?” Mr. Bob said, smiling. He moved to the French doors that led out on to a veranda and threw the curtains open. Like every other day at the WHC, perfect sunlight streamed through. “Want to try something else?” Mr. Bob gestured at the tray. I picked up a small jar of raspberry jam and twisted off the top. Mr. Bob nodded, giving assent. I spooned out some jam and flicked it toward Mr. Bob’s chest. It should’ve been a direct hit, but the fabric was as brilliantly white as ever.
“I bet that saves on dry cleaning,” I said.
Mr. Bob laughed way louder than anyone should have. “Ha! Ha! Ha! You
are
a funny man, just like they said.”
I was about to say, “To what do I owe the pleasure?” when he made his way over to the side of my bed and sat like he was going to read me a nighttime story. “You owe the pleasure to the fact that it is time for your progress report and diagnosis.”
“Diagnosis?” I said. “I didn’t know I was sick.”
“Of course you did,” Mr. Bob said, “but we all agree you’re getting better.”
“That’s good,” I replied. I squirmed under the sheets; he’d semitrapped me with his weight.
“It’s very good,” he said, “and now that we know what’s going on, we’ll do even better. Would you like to hear what we’re thinking?”
“Sure, of course.”
“Wonderful,” he said, smiling with his lips, but not his eyes. “You’ve had some truly remarkable successes in your career, amazing things, but one trend we have noticed is that they have just sort of happened. Now, I’m not saying they would have happened to anybody, but to some degree it seems like they
could
have happened to anybody. This is not unusual in the grand scheme of things, but for someone so famous as you, it’s very, very rare. We think this probably also explains your reversal of fortunes. You are simply prone to being buffeted around, if you will. Sometimes the buffeting nudges you skyward, while other times it hurls you to the ground.”
He stood up and I took advantage to throw off the covers and sit on the side of the bed. “But you are changing here, that is clear,” he continued. “You are coming to understand the power of desire, true desire, focused desire. For instance, I believe last night you had some unpleasant thoughts towards Chester.”
“I wanted to kick his teeth in.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“It didn’t seem like the right thing to do.”
“Ah!” Mr. Bob said, pointing at the ceiling like he’d made a big discovery. “This all depends on what your definition of ‘right’ is, does it not?”
“I suppose,” I said.
Mr. Bob came over and removed the covering from my plate on the tray, revealing a perfect egg-white omelet, fresh fruit, and synthetic bacon. “And right now, you’re thinking that you might like to take a poke at me, even, yes?”
I wasn’t thinking that, or at least I didn’t know I was thinking that until he said something, at which point an image of me flattening his pointed nose popped into my head. “Yes.”
“And why don’t you?” He was close enough that I could’ve.
“I guess I don’t really want to, or maybe it’s that I don’t need to.” He stepped away, hands clasped behind his back. “Yes, you see it now. We make our own right, our own wrong. You are in charge. Wonderful, isn’t it? Now, go ahead,” he said.
“Go ahead, what?”
“Ask your question?”
“What question?”
“About Ms. Tisdale. If you did not care, you would not want to have strangled Chester.”
“Okay,” I said. “How’s she doing?”
Mr. Bob began pacing, like it was the movement that helped bring forth the answers. “Ms. Tisdale is an interesting case. The opposite of you in some ways. She has no lack of desire or direction in her. It may be that she simply has too much, that it is uncontainable. This is a significant power, but power that cannot be controlled is ultimately harmful.”
“Actually,” I said, “I was just wondering if she enjoyed herself last night.”
Bob seemed pleased at this response, like I had passed some kind of test.
“You will have the chance, I am sure,” he said, “to ask her for yourself. Enjoy your breakfast, and the rest of your stay here at the White Hot Center.”
He bowed, pivoted, and left the bungalow. I never saw him again. What he left behind was the knowledge that for the first time in a long time I cared about something again, that I was looking forward to what was next.
I wanted something.
I
T TURNS OUT
that the young reporter is beyond ambitious, a real journalistic succubus ready to drain the fame from others to feed her own and she has feasted on the remainder of the funny man’s career. It is scraps, but it is something. She recognizes that a march to the top of the mountain requires stepping over some bodies along the way and he is the first of presumably many. Turns out he does make the cover, the photo a shot from the reporter’s cell phone when the funny man had fallen asleep mid-question. His jaw hangs, insensate. One hand rests on his little belly like he’s waiting for the fetus to kick. His beard is patchy and hair greasy. The headline says W
HEN
W
ILL
H
E
S
TOP
F
ALLING?
When the funny man sees it he calls his agent and manager and asks why no one told him that he looks like a destitute wreck.
“We thought it was part of the new look,” they say. “It can be hard to tell.”
His wife has, upon reading the article, understandably made a motion to return to court in order to modify the custody agreement to prevent any unsupervised visits with the boy. Thanks to the funny man’s increasing unreliability, she has slowly whittled down the alone time between father and son, but the wheels of justice do not turn fast enough this time and the funny man is not moved by her pleading and crying. He has some rights left and he is going to exercise them. If rights are not exercised, they get flabby. Besides, he has given her some extra time by arriving two hours behind schedule.
He has added a patch to the pills. There are pills with the same pharmacological properties of this patch, but the patch is a superior delivery system in that it allows for a slow, steady release, and is always doing the work, whether the funny man is conscious or not. Sadly, the new thing has led to a chronic and intractable pain that only the patch can move to a rear burner (though never extinguish). There are some side effects, like how each of his eyes appears to be focused on something different, and the time losses, the inexplicable blanks in his day where he was one place and then suddenly finds himself in another. Unsettling, but manageable.
But he is quite obviously functional. If he were not functional how could he have navigated to the godforsaken suburbs that are the likely cause of his personal rot? The roots of his marriage’s dissolution can be traced to the decision to leave the city for these suburbs. Nay, the decline of the entire nation may be lain at the feet of these suburbs. Before the exodus to the suburbs, their omnipresent space, the demands of all that emptiness.
If he were nonfunctioning, could he carry on a civil conversation with Pilar, who holds the boy’s shoulders in her unyielding talons as the boy stands with his back to her on the doorway’s precipice? Would he shout, “I’ll have him back tomorrow by six!” into the living room where he can hear his ex-wife sobbing if he were not of sound mind and body?
And the car seat. Would a man who, in the words of the so-called journalist, “appears willing to chuck every and anything out the window at a moment’s notice,” take the time and care necessary to transfer the car seat to the rear of his vehicle? That shit is unbearably complicated and it doesn’t really make sense to him why the boy still needs a car seat, surely he’s far too large, but no, his ex-wife says, until they’re blah-blah height, and blah-blah weight, they need a seat and you don’t ever let him sit in front, do you?
He has. He has done this, but only because it is easier to talk to the boy this way. In the back he is constantly looking in the rearview for reactions and responses, and in the front, they can actually talk. Besides, the kid gets a real kick out of it. Grown-up stuff. There’s air bags if there’s an accident, but there won’t be. When they’re at the apartment, he and the boy have mostly been playing video games where they team up to kill creatures that have been grievously harmed by a release of an uncontrollable virus that makes them drool green viscous liquid out of their grossly metamorphosed insectoid mandibles and shoot beams from plasma gun hands. What a disease this is! There’s not much to talk about in these situations beyond, “kill ‘em!” and “watch out!” so being able to talk in the car is a necessity. The boy does most of the killing, but the funny man tries to do his part. At first, the funny man had compunctions. After all, the creatures seemed to be the victims in the scenario, undeserving of such a terrible affliction, but then he noticed their deaths (by Gatling gun or missile launcher) were accompanied by a kind of sighing noise that sounded like relief. “But the air bags can kill him!” the funny man’s wife has shrieked. Who is the unreasonable one with this kind of talk? Air bags are giant pillows. Has anyone ever been killed in a pillow fight? But because Pilar is there watching, always watching, he will install the seat and cinch it down with all its buckles and straps and give two big thumbs-up, which is the signal for Pilar to release the boy from her grip so the boy can walk toward him with his sad little overnight bag clutched in both hands.