“Had a friend and didn’t even know it,” he whispered at a re-run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
At eleven, he went in to brush his teeth and wash up, then Ethel came out with his evening medications—the ones designed to knock you on your ass inside of fifteen minutes.
Christ, he wished he didn’t have to take these.
Ethel handed him a cup of water and his cup of pills, Martin tossed the pills into his mouth, and then—once again—Amber was confronted with some crisis in the nurses’ station she couldn’t deal with, so Ethel went back to check on it. Martin turned his head and spit the pills into his hand, then quickly put them in his pocket. Ethel never came back out to check with her penlight. And so Martin went to bed, wide awake and anxious.
* * *
He didn’t have to wait long. At 11:20 (according to his watch), something tapped against his window from outside. He rose from bed, crossed to the window, and found himself staring into the face on an Onlooker. It stared back at him for a few moments, then jerked its head to the left; twice. “What?” said Martin. Again, it jerked its head to the left.
“To the left is a wall and a door—this isn’t one of those Lady or the Tiger things, is it?”
The Onlooker turned slightly to the side, opening one of its eyes and projecting an image into the middle of the room: a basketball. Martin almost laughed. “The gym? You want me to go to the gym?” The Onlooker nodded. “And how, exactly, am I supposed to get past the Better Mental Health Squad?” The Onlooker made a small, slumping movement that could only have been a sigh of exasperation. A few seconds later, the door to Martin’s room swung slowly open. “Did you do that?” Once more, the Onlooker jerked its head to the left. Martin walked over to the doorway, leaned out to have a look in the hall—
—except he wasn’t looking into the hall alongside the nurses’ station; not unless they’d put up a backboard and hoop in the last half-hour.
“Nice trick,” he said, but the Onlooker was gone.
You were right, Jerry; this just got real interesting.
5
Martin slowly descended the four steps leading down into the gym—why the architect who’d designed this building had thought it was a good idea to put the light switch at the bottom of the steps was beyond him, but at least the light spilling in from the upper window offered enough illumination that he didn’t fall and break his neck.
It struck him as funny that he was suddenly concerned for his own well-being, all things considered.
As soon as his feet hit the basketball court, the light from the window shrank into a single silver beam, focusing on a spot in the middle of the floor. From the shadows behind the beam, someone coughed.
Martin froze. “That had better be you, Jerry . . .”
“I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t make fun of me. I’m very sensitive.”
Jerry stepped into the light. He wore a harlequin’s patchwork costume of blue, red, and yellow triangles, a white half-mask covering the upper part of his face, a mock sword at his side, and a semi-squared hat from which protruded a huge ostrich feather. Martin stared, swallowing the urge to laugh. “Well, don’t you look . . . different.” Jerry folded his plume-sleeved arms across his chest. “Nothing escapes Mr. Perceptive, does it?” “Why are you dressed like that?” “Because Gash is, for the moment, sated and sleeping. And I’ve been instructed to give you a present.” “Okay . . . ?”
Jerry pulled a whistle from his pocket and blew a long, shrill but not unpleasant note, and the light spilling in from the window snapped off as easily as that from a desk lamp.
But some light remained; golden, it was, scattered and slitted . . . but widening.
Perched atop the folded bleachers, crouched on the backboard, standing in the corners, and hanging like bats from the darkened light fixtures on the ceiling, dozens of the Onlookers began opening their brass half-sphere eyes, the golden beams crisscrossing to form a web with a pulsating center. “Don’t be afraid,” said Jerry. “Easy for you to say.” “Shhh . . . watch now.” The center of the web grew wider, the intensity of its light almost too painful to look at, so Martin began to close his eyes. “Don’t,” said Jerry. “It’s important that you see this. Otherwise you might talk yourself out of believing it later.”
The glow spread farther, a bit less intense now, flowing across the floor, over the ceiling, and down the walls, swallowing the image of the gym like a slow cross-fade in a movie, and a few moments later Martin found himself standing in the center of a great structure whose interior dimensions were circumscribed by a roof and walls made from brightly-colored tarpaulin—a traditional circus tent, held upright by seven massive wood beams placed at evenly-spaced intervals around the gigantic center pole. The sawdust-thick three-ring floor was surrounded by bleachers that reached so far upward and back Martin couldn’t see the top rows.
The interior of this tent was easily ten times the size of the gym—hell, it was probably five times the size of The Center itself.
“What is all this?”
Jerry shook his head. “Man, you really do have to be slammed in the skull with a sledgehammer sometimes, don’t you? This is—duh!—a circus, Einstein! You told Bob that you’d never been to one, remember?”
Martin shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, but . . . no.”
“That’s all right, you probably don’t remember much about that day except buying the watercolor from him; but he remembered every detail of the twenty minutes he spent in your company: the things you said about his work, the hot dog and soda you bought for him from the street vendor, you’re talking to him about wanting to be a writer, the stories you exchanged about DeVito’s, but most of all, he remembered your kindness. He was not a man accustomed to being shown kindness, odd little fellow that he was. But that day meant everything to him. Everything. This is his way of thanking you . . . and of showing you what’s about to be lost, if you don’t help us.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to help him? I can’t even hold my own life together.”
“Says you.”
“Goddamn right, says me.”
“And now,” said Jerry, ignoring Martin’s protests and removing his hat with a flourish, then taking a deep bow, “allow me to introduce our performers; they are all that remain of the painter’s imagination—and don’t think it was easy gathering them all back from the ether. Now sit your ass down and enjoy the show.”
Martin stumbled back to the bleachers and sat in the first row. An elegant woman with the head of a horse, vapor jutting from the nostrils, glided by, handing him a cone of cotton candy and a paper plate bearing a funnel cake.
Martin bit into the cotton candy, reveling in its thick, sugary texture and sweet taste, then took a bite from the funnel cake and actually groaned, it was so delicious.
The air erupted with music from calliopes and steam organs and colorful Orchestmelochors puffing out a steady, rhythmic melody—oompah-pah, oompah-pah, oompah-pah-PAH—that Martin thought was as close as any sound ever came to capturing the essence of childhood in a few simple tones; under this sound emerged the thrum of tympani, the boom of drum, the crash of symbols and the ping of triangles wrapping their merriment around the silver gaiety of bell and chime; sunburst steel gongs resounded percussive laughter as swirling songs from whistle and reed were joined by cithara, syrinx, and flute; the brassy calls of horns and tuba flanked the bluster of bag-pipes whose five-drone bellow was a call to celebration, gathering the sounds into a wide, warm pair of hands that affectionately cupped Martin’s face and said, “C’mon, let’s have a grin.”
Jerry moved to the front of the Center Ring. “I give you the Grand Entrance Parade of the Circus of the Mind and the Heart.”