Damn this is long.... Sorry about that...
Ang
She began to see life as a circus, very early on. Strange noises often woke her from a half embraced sleep and made her add her own pitter patter footsteps to the melody that filled the walls of her giant, striped tent from hell. Some nights a ring master bellowed from below and other nights the animals and clowns simply roared and fussed. This night there seemed to be a mishap with the geek. She wondered what the crazy old woman had forced down her gullet that night to force such strange sounds from her trailer. Little sister had to go see. She always had to go see.
Past the distorted mirror she made her way to the door, stopping only for a moment to see the back side of the bearded lady. So beautiful from behind… The way she stood in the silent of the night, slowly brushing the length of her chestnut brown hair, always managed to captivate Angela. One long, painfully slow brush stroke after another, making her hair fall and shine. Never speaking, the bearded woman was a siren in her own right, song or none. Angela longed to reach out and touch her, but never would. Always there was lingering fear that the woman was not real at all, simply some mind’s concoction of beauty to diminish the ugliness of that place. The fear that her hand would go right through the woman if she dared to touch, forced her to continually sneak past her, breath held, praying for complete silence to never disturb the illusion.
The distraction of imaginary beauty gave way to the ugliness of reality. Into the door, two small feet carried a mind and body immediately set out on the task to evaluate the situation. Two small eyes scanned the twenty watt darkness and seemed to see no standing bodies, no objects partially ingested, no animal parts strewn about, no blood or other such body fluids that would drive a hygrophiliac or a coprophiliac mad… An overhead light hung lazily in the wall length closet and gave off a high pitched hum of electric death. The yellow flickered from behind slats in the door and gave the illusion of sideways prison cell bars, which were only more than fitting and appropriate.
Dirty, forest green carpet that might have once not looked commercial grade, lay flat beneath her feet as she moved towards the bed. Coming up along one side of the giant sleeping throne equipped with a head board of bronze columns, Angela brushed against the sand washed walls of smoke stained once white. The walls always brought her mind to bears in the wild, scratching their backs against trees. Had their circus housed bears, the geek’s chambers would have been a fine scratching ground for the animals. She dragged her small hand, as always, along the sharp, rough walls while making her way to the geeks whimpering head.
Perhaps it was the drive behind the curiosity or just becoming accustomed to smells over time, but for whatever reason, the child had failed to notice the nasal assault of the flood of emptied stomach contents which the geek released upon her and promised to drown the bed in. Vomit, fecal liquid, urine, blood, sweat and tears all ran together and painted a picture of understanding that something had gone terribly wrong. That picture was spot lighted in a morbid way from the dying light that made Angela think again how fitting and appropriate it was. She loved that light and hated it at the same time, always had and always would.
Climbing up onto the giant throne was much like climbing a mountain for the child, only to reach the summit and find a monster. Angela had never been afraid of monsters. Life had shown her that even the biggest of scaries could feel fear themselves and on more than one occasion, Angela had found herself playing scary to the scaries.
The Geek
“Inoaktaris inmudeelsare inclaynoneare’. That became her mantra. Just keep saying that and it will keep 1942 away. Just keep saying that and it will keep 1947 away. The stairs will be forced away. Pink eye will be forced away. Fear will be forced away. But as the circular cycle of repetition lived on, so did the mingling of past, present, future and chant. All worlds, times and realms bled into one as the geek laid crying and dying on her throne.
Eleven months separated her from her first younger brother. For one month each year they were the same age and as young children, they grew to not only delight this but exploit the oddness of their proximity in age. They would bet people a phosphate that they could not guess their age. The adults who humored them in their game would sport giant smiles and protest first before demanding that they must be twins. Not a farfetched guess given the history of twins and triplets in their family tree. But everyone in their small home town knew they were not twins. Furthermore, the humoring adults knew how old they were and that their mother was a fool for not only having one child so soon after marriage, but two back to back. “Catholics” they would mutter under their breath. The town knew these children lived in their mother’s parent’s home along with about twenty other children and their children. The children never knew until later that the adults bought them treats for the bet out of pity.
The geek hated her mother early on. It started when her brother grew to about eight months of age in her mother’s womb. The geek remembered being an infant, just learning to stand comfortably on her own two feet, in her grandparent’s home. There was a steep staircase set in the dark that accompanies the lack of electricity. From the top of the stairs, she believed that the steps went on forever. They terrified her. Her mother was cranky as most very pregnant women are and found she could not manage the stairs and carry her daughter at the same time. Each morning, when they woke from the night’s sleep, they walked to the stairs and mother would look at child and tell her that she had to grow up and be big now and walk on her own. The geek would protest by crying and her mother would sharply scold her and tell her to walk as she left her daughter behind in the dark to cry alone.
Perhaps harsh, but her mother was nothing if she was not harsh. There was not a word for bi polar or post traumatic stress disorder in the forties. Her mother was nearly insane and the poverty coupled with the birth of child after child did nothing to better her disposition. It also helped none that the geek was frail and sickly as a child, not strong and hearty like her mother. As the oldest daughter, the geek had a standard that she failed to live up to.
When the geek was five, she got pink eye. They shut her up and shut her off to her parent’s bedroom. She lay there for what seemed an eternity while her vision grew worse and worse. The only light that forced its way through to her screaming eyes seeped in through holes worn through the ancient curtains that hung lazily in the room. Through each tiny hole a beam of light shot through and attacked her. Each hole brought agony and pain and injury. She lay alone and cried as her mother had other things to tend to. She hated those holes, that light, and her mother for leaving her alone to die.
“Inoaktaris…” she spoke without speaking. Surely her mouth said this; it had to be saying this.
Cold flooded in and static attacked her head as she felt she was spinning on a giant ferris wheel in her bed. She wondered if she was suffering some kind of seizure as she felt her body convulsing. Suddenly she was aware that she was seeing her surroundings through closed eyes. “…inmudeelsare...” She knew that she had to keep speaking in order to keep breathing, but for a moment she wondered if she was breathing. Must not think that way, cannot think that way, “…inclaynoneare…”.
The ferris wheel took her around in another giant circle and the mantra rang on. The cold ran through her body in waves of needle like frozen rain and soaked her. Somewhere in the non reality of that moment in her life, a sound from outside her head promised to bring her back to linear life. She had a body and she was in it. She had a bed and she was in it. She had a room and someone else was in it with her. “Mom?” surely she spoke that, she had to have spoken that. It could not be her mother though, something registered in her head that her mother had passed on years ago. “Who is here? Is that you Jean? Something is wrong, Jean. Call an ambulance for me, Jean, something has gone wrong and I need help.”
Ang
By all rights, the things that Angela did were impressive. The trouble was that in a family of freaks, out of the ordinary acts were nothing. Sure, she could ride a unicycle across a tiny rope from a million miles up. Sure, she could juggle whatever you threw to her while she rode. The audience expects perfection and there is always someone around who will up stage you in a second. Angela never thought what she did was all that impressive. Growing up like that, you simply do what you have to do and lah dee dah. It was not until much later in her life when she tried to walk among normal people that she ever stopped to consider how abnormal her life was or how crazy the real world was. But throughout her years, she never lost her ability to perform the most amazing of balancing acts, both of the physical, up in the air sort, and the kind that is all about maintaining some illusion of perfection in the middle of the surreal imperfections of her existence. The geek taught her that.
Atop the mountain, in the middle of the tent striped lights that exploded outward from the closet, Angela rearranged the only dry pillow so that she might have a sanitary place to sit beside the geek. She leaned back into the headboard, which was only a board in definition. Bronze columns jutted up from somewhere behind the bed and rose up towards the sky. The child regarded her reflection in the columns as she had a million times before. The roundness distorted her face and made her think that they ought to have these things in the funhouse. The funhouse was not fun. It was a scary place and the bronze columns would fit in nicely. She had always believed that the reflection that smiled back was not her own. She concocted a story about them being a window to the alternate reality or someplace where ghouls played and that the other girl on the other side was smiling at her, waiting to pull her in and never let her go. There were nights that she prayed uselessly and stupidly for that girl to do just that.
Shaking of the creeps that the bronze mirror threw up and out at her, she redirected her attention to the geek. Turning her head to the side, she regarded the woman and saw her eyes blinking rapidly, pushing out some whitish goop. The geek’s lips were quivering and drool mixed with yellow stuff dripped and flowed from the corner of her mouth in thick strands and watery drops. Her eyes traveled down the woman’s body. Her heart was beating visibly through her nightshirt which was quite stuck to her body. Her breath was irregular, but it was there. Angela extended a finger to poke the geek in the forehead, trying to assess how terrible it would be to have to touch the woman. It felt like play dough on top of skull. She wiped her finger on the pillow only to return her hand and press her palm to the geek’s clammy head. Cold. She needs a medic. This is worse than normal. She will not get over this one on her own.
The geek began to murmur louder and it startled Angela. Had she jumped back any father, she would have fallen right off the bed. Instead, her head collided with the headboard and produced a gong sound that seemed to, in return, startle the geek.
“Mom” the geek asked. Angela kind of snorted at that comment. “No. Your mother is dead…”
“Jean” the geek asked. Angela rubbed her head and responded, “No. It’s me, Ang. I’m going to go and call you an ambulance, okay? Something has gone wrong and you need help.”
Turning from the geek and climbing back down the throne, Angela was immediately assaulted by the light she had been ignoring. Her small feet carried her along the rough wall that her hand had to touch. Her small feet carried out quickly past the bearded woman who may or may not have been real and back into her own chambers where the only phone around there lived. Static met her while she fussed with the cord to make it connect. Dial tone present, she dialed 911 and when prompted to discuss what emergency she might be having, the child said that she was not sure, but someone needed to come quickly before a woman died. There was not much else to say. She did not know what had gone on. She made sure that the address was given and informed the operator that she was going to go back to sit with the geek until the medical men arrived. She thanked the voice on the line and hung up the crackling phone. She made her way back and rubbed her head again while thinking that things were to become very chaotic very quickly and that she ought to enjoy the stillness of it all while she still had the chance.
The Geek
The ferris wheel ride went on. It was as though the spokes ran through her body, spinning from her abdomen and out her nose only to hit her in the abdomen again. “I think my seat is wobbly, Jean” she spoke and shattered her mantra for the time being.
Through closed lids she saw her shade covered window. Light peeked through and lit it like a picture frame. She became fixated on this. It looked holy. Holiness was never a thing that the geek embraced. If you were to ask her about god, she would respond that spirituality is more important than god and church. Her mother had destroyed Christianity for her. At the grand old age of seventeen, the geek had decided that she needed to escape the hell of her mother’s home. Too many mornings of waking to hear her mother screaming and throwing pots and pans around the kitchen had convinced her that the best thing to do was to go. Too many violent attacks and verbal assaults had left her craving some kind of attention that was more than injury. Her father was no help. No matter what her mother did or said to her, the man never spoke. He was silent and gentle and busied himself with things like painting one side of the house, time and time again, so that he never had to see what was going on. In her life, the geek maybe heard five words fall from the man’s lips. She believed him to be mute until she had turned fifteen and heard him tell Lo how much he loved her when the car came and hit her.
Shortly before senior prom time, the geek met a man with a job. He played music on a radio station by day and flashed young girls in the park by night. She found that out two months into their marriage when the police came and she found herself unable to make rent or go home. Her mother found out about their secret marriage and beat her bloody before chasing her out of the house with a broom. She was ex-communicated. Abandoned by the faith that caused her to be an outcast in school, and abandoned by a family which had scarred her for life, she found herself alone and lost for what to do. A man at the radio station offered to help her, but when his help came with strings attached, she ran far away, hoping to be fine and never go home again. She ran from her life, her morals and her god. The geek would soon take just about anything into her body, perhaps in some feeble attempt to feel whole.
The light surrounded the focus of all. Within the comforting dark of the center, she believed that she saw god. Varying shades of black swirled together and formed an outline of a face, which gave way to eyes, then a mouth and finally a nose. It must be god. It has to be god. The face seemed to be coming forward to her, stretching up off the dark center and closer to where she was. “Are you coming to take me to hell?” she asked. She searched for an answer, but none was to come. The face would come so close she could nearly see inside the mouth which was slightly open, only to pull back away from her, keeping whatever it might have said to itself. Just out of reach. Always out of reach. “I do not want you now”
Ang
Ambulance calling was nothing new. Emergencies were nothing new. By this time, she had already grown to hate the medical men. They would come bursting through the door and the sudden burst of whirlwind activity left her head spinning every time. She saw them as military men coming in to take over a situation in need of immediate quarantine. She resented them. They just shoved you out of the way and dismissed you like you were nothing more than some stupid thing in their way. Had she not deemed them absolutely necessary, she would have just tended to the situation on her own…again. Sitting on the pillow, waiting, glaring at the closet, her anger turned towards the geek’s husband. He had been there at some point during the night and he had gone as well. The closet light always came on when he left. He never turned the over head light on to pack, only the close light. He said he did that so as not to disturb the geeks slumber. How that noise was not disturbing was beyond Angela, but she always left it that way, perhaps to fuel her own upset.
She thought he should be the one here dealing with this. He should have not gone. Angela was often annoyed that being the youngest in the middle of this, she seemed to be the only adult. No one else took care of things and tended to people and made things right. The selfish needs of the selves of others compelled them to do as they would with no regard for anything else. The geek was included in this train of thought. She was not thinking of all that needed to be done the next day or how her actions might put a giant wrench in the workings of daily life. While Angela had no idea what the woman was thinking when she had done whatever it was she had done, she knew for sure that she had not taken her into consideration. Angela eyed the geek for a moment and recalled her telling a story of her second husband and how she hit him on the head with a cast iron frying pan and then freaked out thinking she had killed him. “We have a cast iron frying pan”, she mumbled.
But no. The medical men are coming. “God does not want you now” Angela said and sighed. She did not let her die so she could not go and kill her. That made no sense. Besides, if she were to be taken off to jail, who would tend to her sisters. Some sense of responsibility took up residence where compassion should have lived in the girl. While it kept her in line, it did little more than that. At the old age of nine, Angela was a cold, little woman.
Somewhere a radio sang a song instructing everybody to have fun and wang chung tonight. Angela snorted and looked to the door, waiting. The last time the medical men came, the situation was similar. She sat on the same pillow in the same bed with the same light screaming death while she dangled her legs in waiting. The time before that the geek had actually screamed for her to come quickly, she did not have to walk out of sleep and into the room with a sense of wrong. That time violent screams pulled her out of her head and ended peaceful sleep as she knew it. She just knew that if she drifted off deeply, sharp screams would wake her and waking like that was worse than anything else on earth. Before that, the ambulance call was not for the geek, rather, for the organ player. Angela was sitting on the bench with the elderly woman, eating a roll covered in thick, sweet honey, just listening to her play when the stroke hit and knocked the woman half out of herself and onto the floor. It was the nicest thing to her, the way the woman sweetly and calmly held together for her benefit. Angela could hear her, “Can you call 911 for me, darling?” The organ player had died a few years ago, shortly after the stroke. Angela missed her. She was the only adult who ever behaved like one. She fed her, put on a brave face for her, played songs for her…
But she was gone. Her little day dream of the old woman went away and the sight of the pitiful wreck of another old woman in her own filth remained. Something deep within Angela screamed. Where fear should be, another thing had moved in. In what could not have been more than two minutes, a lifetime flashed before her eyes in a series of still snapshots that had been seared on the inside of her eye lids so that every time she blinked she was forced to see what had been again and again. She could not stop the blinking and she screamed at Charlotte for this, she was the tantrum thrower not Angela, as she was assaulted by her past and present in alternating seconds only to return to the other. Waking alone and wandering the halls… Woman covered in vomit…Scrounging the cupboards for more than vodka to eat…Woman barely breathing…Having bottles come flying towards her head…Heart beat moving crusty clothes in the yellow light…Boys covered in blood…It would not end and she spun her head to the bronze column and started to demand that they take her away that she could not take anymore. She started to scream at the geek to stop it and behave and do what she was supposed to do and not be so awful. She screamed at the man who was long gone that he had no right to put her through this. She screamed at the radio and demanded someone shut it up.
In the middle of demanding death for the wang chung boys, the medical men came bursting through the door and proceeded to shove Angela to the side. The hustle and bustle of the busy, drone like men in what she fancied to be army fatigues pushed Angela’s tantrum to a quick halt. The chatter from the immediate men and the men on the other side of the world where the other walkie talkies lived, filled the space where her screams had been and left no room for any other sounds. In her oversized t-shirt, Angela backed up against the sharp wall. For a moment she moved and embraced her inner bear. The medical men used a million words she did not know and clamored about in a systematic manner that made no sense to her. It was some morbid ballet set to give chaos and impending doom praise in her mind. She wondered how one hundred men could fit in here and how the noise had not made her head explode yet.
The medic men seemed to have lights on their persons, as the room seemed brighter, though no other light turned on. Perhaps it was theatrical lighting. She was momentarily confused by this and then her head snapped to the geek, where they forced little flashlights into her face to inspect her better. Angela blinked and the geek was on a stretcher being hoisted up and away. The company in the room had gone that quickly from one hundred down to only ten. She blinked again and the stretcher with the geek was gone and only one man remained. She cocked her head to the side and looked up at him suspiciously. He asked her if there was someone there to look after her. She bit on her tongue to ensure that she would not ask him if he was ‘f*****g serious’. She politely let the man with a kind face know that she was not alone and that she would be fine. He returned the suspicious glance and hurried off. Angela watched his backside as he left and snorted about how stupid adults were. Well, maybe not stupid, just too busy living their own lives to think anything might be wrong when a child behaves well.
She pitter pattered her way back into her room and took off her shirt. It was one of those horrible air port shirts that the geek’s husband had brought her from one of his stupid trips. This one sported the Eiffel Tower and beside it the word, Paris. Under the tower was a beautiful little coliseum beside the word, Rome. Under Rome was Big Ben and London. Under that were a sickly cactus and the word, Scottsdale. She sat in her underwear on the cold floor and ripped the shirt into one hundred pieces.
17 Sep 2009, 12:51 am
