The air was close and stale. Sweeney pointed to the windows and asked, “Do those open?” Then went to check on the bedroom before Nora could answer. He found a nice four-poster with matching bureau that sported a mirror. Sitting on the bureau was what looked like a Sears catalog but turned out to be The Big Book of Logic Problems. There was a coat post in one corner of the room and a calendar nailed into the wall above the bed. The calendar featured Miss January 1973, a naked brunette kneeling on a white shag rug.
Nora came to the doorway and said to Sweeney’s back, “Let me find you a place in the city.”
Sweeney shook his head without turning around. “It’s fine,” he said. “I won’t be in here much. And I’ll be right below Danny.”
“Let’s see what we find in that refrigerator,” Nora said, “before you make any final decisions.”
LIMBO COMICS: ISSUE # 1: “Exile”
They came from the city of Maisel in the heart of Old Bohemia, land of pogroms and demonology. They became a family in the most binding way of all, through a shared and pitiless suffering. Make no mistake, the oldest truths are the most reliable: persecution ties a people together. To be different is to invite oppression. To wear your difference on your body, on your face, this is to invite eradication. Unless, of course, your difference is so grotesque that the crowds will pause to study, to celebrate, to marvel at your misfortune for a short time before they smite you. Then, and only then, will you have a chance to escape.
What does it mean to be a freak? For the Goldfaden Freaks it meant, for a time, a brief period in the beginning, that they were stars. They had been handpicked, assembled over years and miles by Tedeo Bluett, showman extraordinaire and inheritor of the Goldfaden Carnival, the premier — and, perhaps, the most notorious — of all the traveling circuses in all of Old Bohemia. The circus featured the standard fare of all the major bazaars — acrobats and aerialists, fortune-tellers and magicians, trained beasts and juggling clowns, games of chance and skill. So what was it that set the Goldfaden apart from the many other cavalcades of garish drama and comedy that patrolled the gypsy circuits? Its tents were no larger or more colorful than those of the Theatre Magika. Its rings of fire no hotter than those of Valli’s Cabaret. Its gorillas were no more savage than those of the Kabalist’s Revue and its human cannon was no braver than that of the Circus Herman Nevi.
No, the single feature that separated the Goldfaden from all the other touring spectacles was the infamous Freaks’ Promenade. Staged just before the finale of each evening’s show, this procession of unsightliness and deformity was unmatched in the history of sideshow lore. Truly, the Goldfaden Freaks were the stars of not just Tedeo Bluett’s circus but the entire carny world. Legendary monstrosities, they were the only freaks whose appearance in the flesh was more unsettling than even their most hyperbolic promotional posters. And because of this, Bluett saved their act for the climax of each performance and kept it short and simple.
Every night, after all the lions had been tamed and all the swords had been swallowed, after the clown king had chased his nemesis, the thief of hearts, around and into the rolling fountain, after one of the Flying Zhilinskis had dropped Little Sonya into the arms of Count Leonid and the Weatherman had been electrocuted and revived by his curvaceous assistant, and the Halloween Killer had lost his head to the Magic Guillotine, then, and only then, did Ringmaster Bluett unleash his freaks. And they marched around the perimeter of the center ring and then up, up, into the audience, right up close and personal, where the customers could see for themselves the horrible mistakes that nature makes on rare occasions.
Physically, it was not a tough gig. And this proved to be the freaks’ downfall. Because while their “act” consisted solely of a ten-minute nightly stroll of ogling and groping amid shrieks and curses, the freaks’ pay and accommodations rivaled those of the acrobats and lion tamers — a fact that triggered no end of jealousy among the rest of the Goldfaden performers. And nowhere was that jealousy more inflamed than in the spleen of Shoshone McGee, the infamous “Blade of Zürau,” a half-Cherokee, half-Irish, and fully psychotic knife thrower who functioned as the Goldfaden’s resident diva.
McGee lived in a state of perpetual crisis, a melodrama of alcoholism, amphetamine abuse, manic depression, and bad karma. He went through assistant-wives like sour candies and his colleagues agreed that he approached anything like happiness only in the midst of performance, throwing his blades at a human target. He was a tall, muscular man of dark, movie idol looks, except for an enormous protruding brow that was never quite mitigated by the black, luxuriant hair, which he wore long and swept back. His cheekbones caused marital discord in the towns through which he toured. He lived his life barefoot and bare-chested, though he favored expensive leather trousers, the tighter the better. The bulk of his salary from Bluett went to liquor, pills, and knives. But when the throwers of Old Bohemia talked shop, most agreed that McGee had the finest collection of steel in the business. He may or may not have been the most skilled bladesman on the circuit, but he was certainly the most daring. He fired his daggers while blindfolded and drunk and from distances that no Entertainers’ Guild would ever sanction.
All of this, however, is mere addendum to the central fact of the knife thrower’s existence: Shoshone McGee hated freaks.
No, this is too generous. Truth be told, McGee abhorred freaks. He despised freaks. He loathed them with an antipathy that seemed to grow with each new day. Freaks lay at the center of a furious rage that boiled, year after year, in the heart of the knife thrower. And though there were many legends regarding the source of the man’s fury, no one could say with any certainty which one was closest to the truth.
But as far as the Goldfaden Freaks were concerned, the reason for McGee’s hatred was an academic mystery. What mattered was staying away from the madman and his cutlery. And so a system of avoidance grew up organically within the troupe. The freaks’ trailers were always parked at the opposite end of the campsite from the knife thrower. They dined in separate mess tents. And Bluett slipped Glomo the clown an extra kroner and a bottle of schnapps each week just to make sure that McGee was absent from the big top when the Freaks’ Promenade occurred each night.
And yet, for all of these precautions, Shoshone McGee’s hatred only grew as the years went by. And, over time, that hatred slowly poisoned the rest of the Goldfaden troupe against what the knife thrower, in his inimitable way of turning bile into poetry, called the devil’s putrid afterbirth.
And so it was the fate of the freaks that, even within the liberal world of a circus clan, they became outcasts, exiled from the bosom, show dogs kept forever beyond the warmth of the family fire. Of course, it was natural that they would build their own fire, their own family, constructed of their ill-fitting parts and bound together by an empathy that knew no limits. That family was comprised of:
Fatos, the mule-faced boy, guileless and playful and dreamy despite his large and perpetually infected ears and the mange that spread across his cheek each spring;
Aziz, the human torso, the stoic of the family, swinging himself forward on his thickly callused knuckles, a fat lower lip tucked up over his mouth;
Nadja, the lobster girl, whose claws could clip a cigar neatly in two, who relished a good party and hinted, in the small hours of too many drunken nights, of love affairs with princes and opium;