Night of Memories

For SNFU and John Cusack

My high school reunion was scheduled on the day I’d made it back into town. Ironically enough, the circus had arrived earlier that same day. I used to love the circus. Sadness is epitomized for a child by the sight of the debris° crushed Styrofoam cups, empty potato chip bags, and waxed hamburger wrappers° that was the gold lining of the traveling land of dreams only the night before. Tears were shed just as if a favorite uncle had passed during the course of the night. That was the circus and its effects then. It hasn’t changed much in that respect, yet things have changed, which I hadn’t realized until long after I had left with the circus.

Something, a young child or animal, had fallen down the well several weeks prior. The town did not have the resources to retrieve who or whatever had been swallowed by the depths of the well. What intrigued me is that no one had bothered to ask the neighboring towns for help. No one seemed to care. Even though no one had reported a missing child, the demise of a helpless animal, I thought, would have accosted some attention and sympathy from a few of the town’s inhabitants. Perhaps they hadn’t even noticed. When a child had first fallen down a well elsewhere in America, it made national headlines, but this potentially fatal accident didn’t seem to bother any of the town’s residents in the least.

The bottomless pit had always, at least to me, smelled like beer. I was so young when I was first exposed to the well that I later thought beer smelled like the well. That was nothing new. What was new was that the child, I’m assuming it was a child that was trapped in the dried up watering hole because it made remotely human sounds, perpetually emitted weak noises, reminiscent of a radio program, a low droning. At times the faint impression of a familiar song would resonate up through the vertical tunnel. Perhaps it was just me thinking the noises sounded like a something with which I had at one time been acquainted. I first thought someone was playing a prank and had tossed a battery-powered radio in the well, but the batteries, if this had been the case, would have died after a day or so.

As sounds continued to creep from the well’s depths, townspeople, day after day, continued on their way undisturbed. This was when I arrived in town. I had entered town crammed between two tractor-trailers, one that housed the ringleader and the other a clown troupe. Caricatures of the members, replete with titles, had been painted on the sides of the caravans. An interest was rekindled in the auditory abyss when some of the nomadic entertainers had discovered the talking well. I even stopped by one afternoon to see what two large men, whom I didn’t recognize, were puzzling over while staring into the darkness of the hole. This was when I first discovered the enigmatic voice.

As I walked past the main section of town, I looked over to see who might be loitering by the well, if it might be anyone I would recognize from my past. Not in town for more than 2 hours, I had already run into a couple of high school acquaintances, one of which told me that this was the first time the town had hosted a circus in several years. When I glanced over to the old midday hangout, I saw two figures that I didn’t recognize. As I approached, they parted a little to allow me to peer into the black depths of the well. They were two large men, easily dwarfing me in comparison, one with a protruding mass of red facial hair. Both characters emitted the same staunchly masculine body odor. I attributed such a strong stench to a hormone imbalance. At first I had failed to notice that the barefaced strongman, whose role in the circus was easily recognizable, was wearing a purple leotard. The bearded character’s occupation in the show was less obvious at first. As I stood glaring into the darkness of the dried up hole in the ground, I got the vague notion that there was something amiss with the ominous individual. I turned slightly in order for my peripheral vision to capture a surer glance. He had breasts! About this time both of them made a motion to leave. I was so taken by what I had just witnessed that the two figures were half a dozen buildings away when I realized that the strongman’s stick legs left the impression, assisted by his choice in clothing, of a flower swaying in the wind. His upper body blossomed into rippled petals of violet manhood, accented by the scarlet setting sun, which he waddled off into with the Amazon.

I turned back around, thinking I’d heard something come up from the well. A surge of pain coursed through my neck at this time. It had first made its appearance around the time I had received my invitation for the reunion. A psychosomatic symptom if nothing else, tension perhaps. I rubbed the back of my neck as I peered into the well. I inhaled deeply, taking in my childhood, before realizing I was definitely hearing something, that it was not my imagination, along with my olfactory senses being simultaneously triggered, culminating into some type of sensory illusion. Though, regardless of how frequently the noise recurred, I never found an absolute pattern nor could I distinguish a single word. I was quite sure there was indeed a sound and not my fancy or paranoia inducing the effect: What other reason did two well-traveled people who had seen many a spectacle vastly more entertaining than a retired well have for wasting their time gaping into an empty hole? At ten to six, a siren alerted the town that the grand opening of the circus was about to commence.

As I made my way to the big top, I thought back to the dried orifice barreling to the center of the earth. At least that is what my father had called it when I was a child. He’d said that the well never ended, just like the earth and human depravity. I didn’t understand what the last part meant but I looked at the globe at school, delving into geographic concentration while other students were busy memorizing their multiplication tables, and realized that the earth did stop. It had another side and it was China. I reasoned that the second part of what Dad had said was probably wrong too, since the first had been incorrect. Though now, if his theory is true° now that I have no doubt about the authenticity of the latter part of his claim° the sounds that I was hearing had traveled over an increasing distance, like some stars’ light, and meant the sounds had traveled a set length before reaching my ears. For whoever or whatever was making the noises, the distance would continue to grow until whoever heard the noises might be hearing them days, weeks, even years after they were originally produced. Yet, heard or not, the sound would° at least theoretically° continue to travel and resonate throughout time.

The doorman was the barefaced tourist I had seen earlier. The strongman held the iron gates of the circus’s entryway as he welcomed everyone in an alto that took many by surprise. A miniature Chihuahua, in full clown costume and paint, circled in and out of the guests as they made their way into the tent. I looked at the sign on the bigtop; it was not the circus I had known as a child. It was one that I had never heard of before. As I entered, a midget dressed in green was juggling what I assumed to be imaginary balls in the air, yet in his mind he could have been juggling balls, bowling pins, or axes. He was handing out what appeared to be handbills between catches and tosses. After I had found a seat, I read the front of the pamphlet: "A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed For All." I opened the handbill. A piece of paper pasted over the contents of the handbill concealed what I assumed to be the night’s itinerary. The insert read:

THE BOMB IS BACK IN A BIG WAY BUT DON’T FORGET ABOUT AIDS. PRETTY SOON WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO TOUCH

ONE ANOTHER WITHOUT LOSING A LIMB.

AIDS, THE NEW LEPROSY!

P.S.° THERE IS NOTHING AT THE END OF THE RAINBOW

AND THERE IS NO LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.

I had barely had time to read this before the house lights died down. A solitary spotlight came from above. I realized that the big top was packed, crowded beyond capacity, forcing some to stand in the aisles. The ringleader appeared from a far corner of the tent and approached center court, the spotlight tracing his every step as if it were an extension of his being, an iridescent third limb. He introduced the circus in a professional broadcaster’s voice with the same charm and charisma as the clairvoyance that had escorted him to the center ring.

The first act was claimed to be a descendant of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In a huge tank, which was revealed by a flip of switch, lighting a section of the first ring, an animal swam with candid naiveté, seemingly unaware of thousands of eyes upon it. Although several high-wattage bulbs illuminated the container, the animal’s form was nondescript. I cannot really explain it. The best I could hope to describe the creature is that it had a gray tint to it. Its fins, or whatever they were, seemed to be at the top of the tank. Its body tapered as one followed its form before reaching what would have been the peak of its head, which lay at the bottom of the tank. For some odd reason, the tin fish’s actions reminded me of a child at play while its parents proudly watched and complimented one another on the child’s positive characteristics, whether or not they necessarily existed.

For a moment I felt alone in the tent, similar to a trace that a well-made film produces in its viewer, giving the illusion that one is right there in the room where the action is taking place. Yet when I came back to reality, I felt paranoid, afraid that everyone was watching me watching the beast. The announcer’s crisp, reassuring voice dissipated this brief moment of senseless, infantile terror.

He proclaimed the circus possessed the strongest human in the world’s history. A figure appeared from the recesses of the circus. A person of mammoth proportions came into the light and approached the tank, lifting the container well above what would have been shoulder level for normal sized person, and carried it offstage as if it were no heavier than a loaf of bread. No one moved, frozen by the vision they had just seen. This was not due to anticipation of the return of the grotesquely gifted character, nor, as one might expect, because of the feat just accomplished, but of who had performed the task. It had been none other than the bearded lady. Her mammoth breasts overshadowed her humongous biceps and thighs. I don’t know if I actually heard it or it was only the sound replaying itself in my head, but the noises of the well’s contents during this brief contingency pierced my brain.

Without warning or introduction, a single, solitary mime appeared in the audience, unannounced, as if divinely inspired. Unfortunately, he stumbled through the audience several times before reaching the small area, illuminated by the spotlight, which the fish had resided only moments before. At first people, especially children, laughed on cue, but after half a dozen or so instances of haphazard folly, it became apparent that it was not comic stumbles we were witnessing, but rather tragic ones. Some people continued to laugh at each fall. When the mime had managed to reach the row in which I was sitting, he took a plunge in my direction. I braced myself for the weight of the impact. His right elbow caught my eye while the other arm struck a blow to the back of my neck. I, along with those seated nearby, helped him up. He stumbled away. The stench of beer trailed behind him long after he’d found the spotlight. I rubbed the back of my neck, the pain now having increased due to the blow, while massaging my eye, hoping it would not be bruised before the reunion. A lady sitting behind me complained about the smell of the animals within the proximity, though we had yet to see one aside from the aquatic enigma that had opened the show.

As the mime started to fall, a glimpse of his profile, which resembled the appearance of a former classmate, ignited another childhood memory. I say "classmate" for I would not have considered the guy to have been a friend or acquaintance. I can’t even remember the guy’s name, only that he was plagued by a poor complexion which, not having the self-confidence to socialize with anyone, let alone the girls in school, made him the object of endless jeering, which primarily revolved around the subject of incessant masturbation, though was sometimes relieved by the theory that the exile did have one friend, an imaginary friend, which was evidenced by the outcast’s seemingly perpetual dialogue with himself.

Upon arriving at center court, the mime stared into the crowd with a look akin to that of a newborn fawn. He then seemed to come out of his daze and frantically began searching his numerous pockets for something, though whatever it was he was attempting to locate proved futile, for he uttered something in a tone of contempt under his breath before beginning to unbuckle his belt. This created the tension of potential laughter, everyone awaiting the contents of the oncoming skit. A sustained silence ensued when mothers realized what dangled from the clown’s midsection. An air of disbelief stifled the audience as the mime slowly shuffled around in a circle, stirring up dust from the circus floor, in order to display his prop to one and all.

The lights were extinguished but not before I made out the outline of the Amazon once again, silhouetted by the dying lights. She walked out to get the disrobed mime. During this time, I distinctly heard the voice from the well. Darkness consumed the crowd while noises of scurrying served as the soundtrack, the members of the circus frantically preparing for the next act. The audience reestablished themselves, attempting to gain more solid seating for whatever they might be subjected to during the remainder of the show. Surprisingly, no one had left while the mime was being escorted off stage.

For some reason, my mind raced back to my senior year when a classmate killed her ex-boyfriend one afternoon. The guy was notorious for stalking women who had rejected him. Her parents were on vacation when he showed up on her doorstep that fateful day. After dissecting him into four limbs, a midsection, and a head, she placed him in the oven. Then she went to have her hair done. She telephoned the police a week later and complained that she could not get the smell out of her house.

The spotlight dispelled the solitude as well as my recollection while prefacing the voice of the ringleader. He announced a dance troupe that, he claimed, would disappear before the audience’s very eyes. Shortly after the echo of the last detail uttered by the ringleader had been consumed by a mishmash of chattering, shuffling, and a baby’s cry, 12 dancers, effigies of one another to no discernible difference, could be seen forming a circle along the rim of the middle ring. A costume truck was placed in the center of the formation. As the music cued, the dancers began a frantic, though highly stylized, dance routine. Slowly I began to realize that the members had become fewer in number. When I counted only six I paid particular attention to the open trunk, their only means of escape. Though every few minutes, when I started to doubt the number of performers on stage, I recounted. Each time I arrived at one less from the number I had reached only moments before. When the number reached four I became disgusted with myself for I had yet to account for one dancer’s disappearance into the box. When two of the dancers leaned on opposing edges of the ring, their numbers were down to three. It was then that the pair did simultaneous back handsprings into the open container leaving one sole dancer. The remaining member issued a waist-deep bow before he nonchalantly placed one foot in the trunk, took one final bow, pulled in his remaining limb, and closed the lid.

The air was now thick with magic, the static tingle still coursing through the audience’s veins. No one blinked, never permitting even a millisecond of what they had just witnessed to be obstructed, as they replayed the scene again and again in their minds, hoping to retain every vivid detail. A loud crash dispelled the crowd’s visual utopia as a dilapidated Volkswagen Rabbit peddled out into the spotlight, which still illuminated the costume trunk that, theoretically, still contained a dozen dancers. The little white car had collided head first with the trunk. The entire audience winched back in vicarious pain for the box of dancers. The clowns packed within the car attempted escape, but the doors seemed to be locked. I attempted to concentrate on the show, doing my utmost to ignore the sound of the well, which now echoed through my mind like waves resounding in a seashell.

The driver was none other than the mime who had been carried off stage by the bearded lady earlier in the night. He was now dressed as a clown and seemed to be fatter than I had remembered him during his first routine. He continued to manhandle the gearshift even though the car was stationary. It might have been the haze° dust had been scattered during the wreck, creating a skin of pale fog that suffocated the car and its contents for the next few minutes.

A clown whose face was buried in a book, seemingly oblivious to the shuffling and crowding within his personal space, remained determined to stay in his own little world. Even though he was forced to pick up his book numerous times, it being perpetually knocked out of his hands due to the chaos inside the car, he patiently thumbed back to the page he had been reading. The perpetrator responsible for knocking the book from the reader’s hand a majority of the time was a clown who seemed to be preoccupied with the radio. He was folded up atop the dashboard, frantically turning and twisting the various knobs and dials. Then I noticed a baby clown with tears painted on its cheeks making desperate gestures of insufferable pain while it banged its little fists upon the window. I could not tell for sure, but the baby clown looked to be about the same size as the midget usher who’d been juggling at the gates of the circus earlier that evening. No sound was heard because the windows remained rolled up, sealing the passengers from the outside world.

Another clown stared patiently ahead, as if the car were still moving. He made to scratch his massive forehead before he realized he had a stump for a hand. His arm merely ceased at the end of his rainbow-lined sleeve. He also had what looked to be a large cyst projecting from the front of his throat, further elongating his Adam’s apple, which his makeup failed to hide. Another passenger, a female clown, silently yelled. She would periodically turn around and slap the baby clown, to no effective ends, the baby diligently rebounding from each blow and proceeding to rotely attempt escape. Every time the woman clown turned to her right she was confronted by the cyst, which she recoiled in fear before pointing to in disgust. No one in the car, aside from her and the one-handed clown, seemed to take note of the existence of the sore. It was then I realized what was so peculiar in relation to the girl clown. It was the strongman wearing a wig and clown makeup!

The clown immediately to her left, the driver previously mentioned, would also periodically move. His timing seemed somewhat synchronized with the girl clown, always preceding her attempts at sedating the baby clown. He would place his right arm on the headrest of the passenger seat, swing around, and yell something over his shoulder before turning back around, resuming his stagnant shifting of gears. Tempers begun to slowly flare, the bibliophile even began to brandish a look of annoyance. The clown in charge of the radio erupted when one knob dislodged itself, then the other, evenly dispensing themselves into his hands. A scream of utter helpless desperation was quietly released from the dj, igniting a chain reaction of fury within the car. A red high heel of the female clown came into view as she somehow managed to spill into the backseat, after a missed attempt to slap the baby clown. This forced a shift of all the car’s passengers, the radio tuner slid into the floorboard° his support now upturned in the backseat, the book reader now faced backward yet still remained reading, while the baby disappeared into the middle of the vehicle. Ironically enough, the driver remained undisturbed in his imaginary navigation of the landlocked Rabbit. The sardine can on wheels seemed as if its mental compression was going to propel the contents of the automobile in every direction at any second. By this time, the dust had settled enough that I noticed the doors had been welded shut from the outside. Though, from the inside, the passengers hadn’t a clue that their efforts of escape would all give way to futility.

The ringleader’s voice forecasted yet another spotlight, which reimbursed his position as anchor of the circus. The light on the wooden box and metal car slowly died down as the ringleader begun to tell a story. This made me think that something had indeed gone wrong during the last act. Amid the chaos of the last few moments, I had managed to dispel the well’s voice, yet it now impregnated my mind once more. The Amazon’s shadow once again could be faintly traced during the opening of the tale. The subtle distraction drew more attention than if the lights had remained lit. She first lifted the car then deliberated upon carrying the costume trunk under her left arm. She slowly crouched down and edged the case under her arm. When she made to move toward the back of the circus, the trunk slipped and fell to the ground, stirring more dust which slowly made its way to the spotlight which created the illusion that the announcer was dissolving in a cloud of smoke. She then carried the car backstage before coming back to retrieve the upturned box of performers.

The ringleader’s story was of a second grader who had fallen in love with his teacher. After half a dozen love letters, all of which proclaimed his undying affection for her, she sent him to the counselor. The teacher suggested that his misdirected adoration was due, in part perhaps, to his being mute as well as deaf, rendering him unable to effectively communicate with his impatient, unsympathetic schoolmates. During recess the lovelorn boy’s schoolmates continually contributed to his psychosis, creating a paranoia within him because he was unable to hear what they might or might not be saying about him.

The letters were not actually love letters, per se, but love pictures. The child had an aptitude to draw and relied on pictures to express his emotions. This was also suspect in the teacher; her citing that his pictures replaced the words that doggedly failed him, further adding to his complex. A week later yet another picture arrived, crayon on recycled Manila paper, lined with an ironic blue grid that, by metaphorical default, imprisoned the lines drawn on the paper. Though this time it was not a private letter for the teacher’s eyes only. The smitten child proudly displayed his newest muse-inspired masterpiece to one and all during show-and-tell. However, the picture did not depict a scene involving love but one of hate. It was a self-caricature of the stick boy holding his own one-dimensional heart in both hands, having removed it by means of a stick axe.

Years later, after the boy had graduated and his teacher had grown old enough to be admitted to the local nursing home, he returned to pay her one last visit. The second grade teacher had long since gone senile, sporadically projecting tightly packed photons of nonsensical word phrases, in order to reassure herself of her own existence via the sound of her own voice, for she was the only person who would speak to her. No one treated the teacher as anything more than a mere object to be maintained on a semi regular basis. The potted plant that sat on her windowsill garnered more attention from the staff than the teacher. She would ejaculate thousands of words at a time, like a disheveled dictionary, before lapsing once again into silence. The evening of the boy’s visit, during the first round of room checks after supper, the old woman was found gutted, her heart having been removed. The killer was found on the elementary school playground staring silently at the ground. He was cradling a binder while rocking back and forth on his haunches. When the nurses on the floor during the killer’s visit were questioned, they remarked that they had heard nothing, not even conversation between the two. In court, exhibit A was the binder that had contained the teacher’s neatly pressed heart.

No one blinked, awestruck by the mental picture the story had evoked. People began to talk amongst themselves in a subconscious attempt at distraction, hoping to deter the images from imprinting themselves in their minds for any considerable length of time. I was not sure if it was the end of the tale. An eerie silence reigned before the diverting chatter began to rise. I suppose we had anticipated comedy to relieve the earlier mishap, yet no one could be sure of the intention behind the telling of the tale because the pasted announcement which veiled the night’s itinerary. After the story was over, I thought to myself that I hadn’t really gained anything from it: the story had not been funny, entertaining, or even educational. I was merely several minutes closer to death.

Amid the faint sound of the random chatter during this brief interlude, I distinctly heard the voice. Now I had no doubt. The show was growing more and more disappointing. It was nothing like the shows I remembered having seen as a child. The voice kept resonating through the tent yet no one else seemed to notice. I suppose the visual spectacles still continued to consume their attention over such a subtle auditory preoccupation. Perhaps the ringleader’s tale had struck a vile cord with the masses. That, or they just didn’t hear the impassioned cries from the well. The show continued on, my eyes recognizing movement but my mind failed to register exactly what was occurring a few rows in front of me. The sound became the great mind eraser, slowly eliminating the contents of my mind in order to make itself the main attraction by procession of elimination, being the last man standing by the end of the night.

I got up, quite unconsciously, and made my way through the rows of mesmerized fans. The remnants of an upturned soda clung to the sole of my right foot. Layers of moist dirt slowly began to collect as I made my way through the aisles and toward the center of town. The sounds of the circus had long since vanished, even before I had gotten up from my seat. All I could hear was the voice. I could not tell if it was mere resonation of memory or if the sound was indeed authentic. Regardless, what I was hearing was crystal clear, as if its source were standing right next to me, shaking my hand. As I made my way through the rows, I could see, out of the corner of my eye, a spherical metal grid. A figure stood underneath the globe, supporting its weight and contents upon its shoulders. I have no doubt it was the bearded lady once again. Every few seconds an image would blur past within the ball. I assumed this to be the essences of two or three motorcyclists in circular rotation, propelling themselves at high rates of speed in order to remain alive. By this time enough dirt had congealed onto my shoe that I now walked with a definite limp. I rubbed the back of my neck, the pain somehow still persisting amid all my personal tribulation. Between the pain in my neck, my emerging black eye, and my new handicap, I momentarily came out of my daze, yet never forgot my agenda of the well. I limped through the now unguarded iron gates, not able to look back one last time due to utter disappointment and disillusionment.

When I had reached the dehydrated hole in the ground, nothing stirred. Everyone was at the circus, apparently even the feral animals, the ones that had dictated the streets of my childhood. The thought that perhaps they had all died out was interrupted by the sound impressing itself upon me.

For some reason the image of a childhood friend who I had witnessed suffering an epileptic fit which, ironically, resulted in death, come flooding back. It was as if I was watching it again in slow motion. Most of the seizure took place while he was prostrate, though I remember it as him standing upright. Pulsations coursed through his body, forcing a ripple and counter-ripple for every thriving undulation he produced. An echoing image of his outer limbs cast a trailing fog behind each movement, weaving a silken cocoon in its wake. Then everything suddenly stopped. He was dead. Blood delicately ran from his sweat-laden nostril as the saliva along his lips glistened, accentuating his red tongue in the dark recesses of his mouth. A bruise started to rise where he’d hit his cheek upon the floor during the convulsions. I don’t remember him having uttered a single sound during his final episode. I glanced back down at him. Petals of blood crept from behind his head, serving as a backdrop to the now obvious iris of a violet bruise.

The local church bell chimed. I had completely forgotten about the church bells that had kept track of my childhood. The same bells were once again ringing, that much I was sure. It was then that I realized I had missed my reunion, my reason for coming back. Then another epiphany transpired: the voice or sound, whatever it was, vanished instantaneously, leaving with the evaporating echo of the ninth chime. I looked all around. The town was vacant. I peered into the well one last time. It was empty. I decided to go home, I’d had enough.

I later received two newspaper clippings from an anonymous sender, postmarked with my hometown address. One was a journalist’s report of the town’s apathy toward whatever had been in the well, which still remained unidentified and no plans had been made to excavate its contents. It disclosed the entire history of the noise, from its conception several months ago to its silence the night of the circus’ performance. The other slip of paper disclosed that the circus left the night of my departure. It had been a success yet, unlike the circus I had remembered as a child, it did not stay for an entire week, or even another night. What a child would view as an indefinitely long period when the circus first arrived, the end of the week charting what seemed to be a lifetime, was whisked away in a passing evening. It had packed up its belongings as well as its members and disappeared into the night, taking a lifetime of childhood memories along with it.

© Michael Gurnow 2001