A/N: I finished the story today. This is the second to last chapter.
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I stepped into the church with my hat in my hands.
The pews were tired factory workers and the whole building reeked of blue-collar gospel. It smelled of hellfire and damnation and hallelujahs and Lord Almightys. And there was dust too. It stuffed up the air like a knit handkerchief folded into a suit jacket pocket. I stood there for a while listening to the rafters creak.
The preacher came out eventually, saw me standing there, and then approached me, his hand outstretched. His skin was like tilled dirt and his smile was a crack in the sidewalk of his features: sanded down and gritty.
Shaking my hand, he asked, “What can I do for you, brother?”
“Just needed a place to think a little. Maybe pray some.”
The preacher smiled again and glanced around his empty chapel, “I dunno if you'll be able to scare up a seat, but the faithful can always manage to find room here somehow.”
“Thanks, preacher.”
“If you've got any questions, I'll be in my office behind the organ.”
“Thanks.”
The preacher left and I took a seat in the very last pew that creaked under me like a leather saddle and outside the church I could hear cars whooshing through the skirts of rain..
I sat there for a long time. Somehow, I felt strange on the inside, as if God was running me through one of those airport x-ray machines where all my sin could be viewed through my suitcases. And I wondered if he still remembered me from that time in Vietnam. I wondered if he still remembered that skinny Indian with a helmet in his lap and hair like a white man's scalp – matted and blonde with ash and concrete dust. Because I sure could remember him.
My hands were all bent up, like baseball cards, and they were so dirty. I could feel my bones worn down same as bits of chalk that naughty children use to write lines with on the chalkboard and there's this lump of coal in my stomach.
I need someone to talk to. Someone other than a doctor at the institute or a bartender.
Those hands.
I clasped them.
Locked them together, weaved them like a straw hat.
On my lips are fragile words. I'm afraid they'll slip and fall and shatter against the floor. I dunno if I can take much more breaking either.
I squeezed my eyes tight.
“God – ”
My chest seized up and my jaw turned into steel bridge cables and I couldn't get anymore of those words out. I have these hot little tears leaking out of my eyes and I shake my head. Over and over. My buddy. It's like he was sitting right next to me. It's like he was sitting there, with Charlie's pillowcase over his face, with his lips as purple as Popsicle stains.
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The ticket master is limp and gray, like a coonskin cap, as he lets us into the carnival. Hall decided it would be good for me to re-experience some childhood memories. He thinks that these fried-dough tents and apple-cheeked clowns and shag-carpet lions will inspire some words. He thinks that my voice can be so easily resurrected. Maybe if I could talk, I'd tell him that my dad and I once saw a carnival in Chicago, just a couple weeks before we all danced for rain in the streets, danced like Indians in flickering firelight.
I've been reading from Hall's poetry book.
I don't know what to think of it.
Sometimes I can relate to whatever the author's trying to say and other times the words all kind of blend together on the page, bleed together like blood pooling around the head of a lame horse, now dead. They float by like gondolas, pushing the waters of my mind aside, plowing it aside. I sit there for hours on my bed with the book in my hands and the words on my tongue, lingering.
But Amir must have stolen something else from me, too.
All my jigsaw pieces are busted up.
Hall stops at this game booth with metal milk bottles stacked on top of each other and three baseballs on a counter. The owner of the booth wears a straw hat and has a long, pale face. His hands are very still. They rest themselves on the counter and he smiles and nods at Hall.
Around me, the air is like the globs of liquid inside a lava lamp.
Thick with oil and sticky hands and gasoline and sin.
And black birds populate the ground, bending down in the sun like Chinese workers on rice paddys. I watch them. They gossip.
Hall throws the baseballs one after another and all of them miss the three milk bottles.
He asks me if I want to try.
I just stand there.
Just stand there.
Stand there patiently, stand there like those big electricity pylons that give naked, grey hills spines. Stand there, child. Stand there and take the words. Absorb them. Suck them up like Jello and digest them until they're nothing more than memories. No longer painful. No longer thorny. Hall is a bramble bush. His tongue crowns me with thorns. I just need to take it and ignore it and father forgive them for they know not what they do.
Hall shrugs.
“OK. Let's move on.”
For a little while me move from booth to booth, from cage to cage, from tent to tent, but nothing holds our attention. Hall doesn't speak to me for a while either. And so I let my legs become a pair Seeing Eye dogs guiding me like a blind man as I let a harbor-full of fog roll into the carnival around me and hides me from all the voices. In the mist, I see outlines of figures, paper cutouts. They are sad shadows slipping by like mourners passing by an open coffin, slipping by a waxy corpse.
I think of Heather.
She is clothed. She is staring at me from across the street. Her eyes. Her eyes are like those behind barbed wire fences, behind Auschwitz gates. They poke fingers through the mesh between us in an attempt to touch. Touch. I have never touched her. I wish now that I had taken the risk, the chance, to at least feel her milk skin once. Dip my fingers into it like some kind of warm broth.
Now she is gone.
There is no chance of that.
Hall's voice clangs a little in the distance, like rust-faced buoys riding the ocean.
And then one of the shadows bump into me and all the fog scatters and I trip and fall to the ground. Sounds flood into my ears and I help myself up. Hall is gone. My hands are skinned. There is only the false, forced sound of carousel music and gagged cheerfulness. I turn around in a circle, shaking my hands, blinking, looking for Hall.
But.
I stop.
I stop when I see a pinstripe tent, propped up like a zoot suit, and wearing a sign that says, House of Freaks.
Inside there are laughs and screams and hisses. People are throwing things. People are squeezing a little entertainment out of someone else's face. (A boy standing there only in his boxers with a silly putty face and a back hunched over and fingers all spread out in front of his face, like seed packets at the end of vegetable rows. The crowd wants. The crowd wants a little human suffering. They want to hear prayers, for God's sake!)
“Hey, Charlie!”
Hall runs up behind me, panting.
“Geez, kid. Keep closer to me, OK?”
I feel this weird sensation in my chest and my tongue is dry and salty, like airline peanuts, just from seeing this tent. I lick my lips. I feel half like going inside, inside the House of Freaks and I feel half like a little kid holding his daddy's hand. With cotton candy lips. And saying, “what's this”? What's this curiosity in a human body? What's he doing saying human words? Saying:
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”
“What?” says Hall.
“Blessed art thou among women.”
Hall can't speak. He's all frozen up, like a feather in a Hopi headband.
Behold!
The Elephant Boy!
Behold his alien saucer eyes and his Anglerfish fingertips. He glows! He speaks!
I,
I can't take this anymore.
***
Outside the sky is gray, like a buttoned up confederate army uniform.
I'm sitting at the desk in my room with before a blank sheet of paper. The book of poetry is beside me and that same weird sensation is in my chest, as if all of my ribs are xylophone keys being struck by mallet heads. My head spins a little and I can't get that prayer out of my mind. And those frantic whispers! Wet concrete faces! Noses pressed against the glass, fogging it up, spreading doily condensation!
All in my head.
All trapped.
I can't let any of them go. They move around as sluggishly as lobsters in a restaurant aquarium with their claws clamped with rubber bands. I wish I could open myself up and let them go. I wish that I could turn some kind of faucet and all these unwanted thoughts would come spilling out, dripping out. The paper. The paper is my last resort. I've just gotta write something down or I'll bust, I swear I will!
My pen hovers.
But I can't concentrate because the guy in the next room over is moaning and the Elephant Boy is crawling around in my head like flies clustering around the edges of horse's eyes and:
Hail Mary.
Full of Grace.
The Lord.
The Lord is with thee.
My hands are trembling like maracas (shooka-shooka). I bite my lip and plug my ears. I bite it so hard that blood comes out. All these bull-horn voices! All these whispers, buzzing and clipping like electric hair trimmers right in your ear. Where is the silence? Where is the peace?
I write one word on the sheet of paper:
Amen.
And then I sweep the paper off my desk, I take the book of poetry, I open it up and I rip page one, page two, page three right out of the book, like babies being stripped out of the arms of slaves at Arkansas auctions. Then I take a whole handful and rip them out and I throw the book as hard as I can against the wall.
My floor is strewn with paper.
Dead doves.
Dead gloves.
***
I'm shaking.
I'm shivering.
