The Collected Short Fiction by Thomas Ligotti Part 30

Every time I heard one of these t.i.tles and saw the particular artwork that it named, I was always reminded of that tropical sewer of my delirious episodes. I would also feel myself on the verge of realizing what it was that had happened in this place, some wonderful or disastrous event that was intimately related to the conceptual phrase which I have given as the nightmare of the organism. Yet these artworks and their t.i.tles allowed me only a remote sense of some vile and haunting revelation. And it was simply not possible for the others to illuminate this matter fully, given that their knowledge of Severini's past history was exclusively derived from his own nonsensical or questionable a.s.sertions. As nearly as they were willing to speculate, it appeared that this deranged and all-but-incognito person known as Severini was the willing subject of what was variously referred to as an 'esoteric procedure' or an 'illicit practice.' At this point in my discoveries about the strange Severini I found it difficult to inquire about the exact nature of this procedure, or practice, while at the same time pretending a lack of interest in actually meeting the resident of that ruined shack out in the marshland backroads some distance outside the city where I used to live. It did seem, however, that this practice or procedure, as nearly as anyone could speculate, was not a medical treatment of any known variety. Rather, they thought that the procedure (or practice) in question involved occult or mystical traditions that, in their most potent form, are able to exist inconspicuously in only a few remaining parts of the world. Of course, all of this speculation could have been a cover-up orchestrated by Severini or by his disciples-for that is what they had become-or by all of them together. In fact, for some time I had suspected that Severini's disciples, despite their parade of artworks and outlandish accounts of their visits to the marshland shack, were nevertheless concealing from me some vital element of their new experiences. There seemed to be some truth of which they had knowledge and I had not. Yet they also seemed to desire that, in due course, I might share with them this truth.

My suspicions of the others' deception derived from a source that was admittedly subjective. This was my imaginative recreation, as I sat in my apartment, of the spectacle of Severini as it was related to me by those who had partic.i.p.ated in the visits to his residence in the marsh. In my mind I pictured them seated upon the floor of that small, unfurnished shack, the only illumination being the hectic light of candles that they brought with them and placed in a circle, at the center of which was the figure of Severini. This figure always spoke to them in his uniquely cryptic way, his sleeptalking voice fluctuating in its qualities and even seeming to emanate from places other than his own body, as though he were practicing a hyper-ventriloquism. Similarly, his body itself, as I was told and as I later imagined to myself in my apartment, appeared to react in concert with the fluctuations in his voice. These bodily changes, the others said, were sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic, but they were consistently ill-defined-not a matter of clear transformation as much as a breakdown of anatomical features and structures, the result being something twisted and tumorous like a living mound of diseased clay or mud, a heap of cancerous matter that slowly thrashed about in the candlelight which illuminated the old shack. These fluctuations in both Severini's voice and his body, the others explained to me, were not in any way under his own guidance but were a totally spontaneous phenomenon to which he submitted as the result of the esoteric procedure or illicit practice worked upon him in some unknown place (possibly 'in the region of the Philippines'). It was now his destiny, the others elaborated, to comply with whatever was demanded of his flesh by what could only be seen as utterly mindless and chaotic forces, and even his consciousness itself-they a.s.serted-was as amorphous and mutable as his bodily form. Yet as they spoke to me about these particulars of Severini's condition, none of them conveyed any real sense of the nightmarish quality of the images and processes they were describing. Awestruck, yes; pa.s.sionate, yes; somewhat demented, yes. But nightmarish-no. Even as I listened to their account of a given Severini meeting, I too failed to grasp fully their nightmarish qualities and aspects. They would say to me, referring to one of Severini's metamorphoses, 'The naked contours of his form writhed about like a pool of snakes, or twitched like a ma.s.s of newly hatched spiderlings.' Nevertheless, upon hearing statement after statement of this kind I sat relatively undisturbed, accepting without revulsion or outrage these revolting and outrageous remarks. Perhaps, I thought at the time, I was simply under the powerful spell of social decorum, which so often may explain otherwise incomprehensible feelings (or lack of feelings) and behaviors (or lack of behaviors). But once I was alone in my apartment, and began to imaginatively recreate what I had heard about the spectacle of Severini, I was overwhelmed by its nightmarish essence and several times lapsed into one of my delirious episodes with all of its terrible sensations of a tropical sewer and all the nightmares of exotic lifeforms breaking out everywhere like rampant pustules and suppurations. It was this discrepancy between my public response (or lack of response) to the purportedly objective data with which I was being inundated regarding the whole Severini business and my private response (or hyper-response) to this data that ultimately led me to suspect that I was being deceived, even if the deception was as much on my part as it was on the others'. Then I considered that I was not as much the victim of a deception as I was the subject of a manipulation-a process of seduction that would culminate in my entering as a full-fledged initiate into the Severini cult. In either case, it remained my conviction that some vital element had been withheld from me concerning the recluse of St Alban's Marsh until a propitious moment had arrived and I was prepared to confront the truth that was. .h.i.therto denied me, or that I was willfully denying to myself.

Finally, on a rainy afternoon, as I was working alone in my apartment (making Severini notes), the buzzer signaled that someone was downstairs. The voice over the intercom belonged to a woman named Carla, who was a sculptress and whom I barely knew. When I let her in my apartment she was wet from walking in the rain without a coat or umbrella, although her straight black hair and all-black clothes looked very much the same whether wet or dry. I offered her a towel but she refused, saying she 'kind of liked feeling soggy and sickish,' and we went on from there. The reason for her visit to my apartment, she revealed, was to invite me to the first 'collective showing' of the Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. When I asked why I should be receiving this personal invitation in my apartment on a rainy afternoon, she said: 'Because the showing is going to be at his place, and you've never wanted to go there.' I said that I would think seriously about attending the showing and asked her if that was all she had to say. 'No,' she said as she dug into one of the pockets of her tight damp slacks. 'He was really the one who wanted me to invite you to the exhibit. We never told him about you, but he said that he always felt someone was missing, and for some reason we a.s.sumed it was you.' After extracting a piece of paper that had been folded several times, she opened it up and held it before her eyes. 'I wrote down what he said,' she said while holding the limp and wrinkled note close to her face with both hands. Her eyes glanced up at me for a moment over the top edge of the unfolded page (her heavy mascara was running down her cheeks in black rivulets), and then she looked down to read the words Severini had told her to write. 'He says, "You and Severini"-he always calls himself Severini, as if that were someone else-"you and Severini are sympathetic..." something-I can hardly read this. It was dark when I wrote it down. Here we go: "You and Severini are sympathetic organisms."' She paused to push away a few strands of black, rain-soaked hair that had fallen across her face. She was smiling somewhat idiotically.

'Is that it?' I asked.

'Hold on, he wanted me to get it right. Just one more thing. He said, "Tell him that the way into the nightmare is the way out."' She folded the paper once again and crammed it back into the pocket of her black slacks. 'Does any of that mean anything to you?' she asked.

I said that it meant nothing at all to me. After promising that I would most seriously consider attending the exhibit at Severini's place, I let Carla out of my apartment and back into that rainy afternoon.

I should say that I had never spoken to either Carla or the others about my delirious episodes, with their sensations of a tropical sewer and the emergent concept of the 'nightmare of the organism.' I had never told anyone. I had thought that these episodes and the concept of the nightmare of the organism were strictly a private h.e.l.l, even one that was unique. Until that rainy afternoon, I had considered it only a coincidence that the artworks inspired by Severini, as well as the t.i.tles of these works, served to call up the sensations and suggestions of my delirious episodes. Then I was sent a message by Severini, through Carla, that he and I were 'sympathetic organisms' and that 'the way into the nightmare is the way out.' For some time I had dreamed of being delivered from the suffering of my delirious episodes, and from all the suggestions and sensations that went along with them-the terrible vision that exposed all living things, including myself, as no more than a fungus or a collection of bacteria, a kind of monumental slime mold quivering across the landscape of this planet (and very likely others). Any deliverance from such a nightmare, I thought, would involve the most drastic (and esoteric) procedures, the most alien (and illicit) practices. And, ultimately, I never believed that this deliverance, or any other, was really possible. It was simply too good, or too evil, to be true-at least this is how it seemed to my mind. Yet all it took was a few words from Severini, as they reached me through Carla, and I began to dream of all kinds of possibilities. In a moment everything had changed. I now became ready to take those steps toward deliverance; in fact, not to do so seemed intolerable to me. I absolutely had to find a way out of the nightmare, it seemed, whatever procedures or practices were involved. Severini had taken those steps-I was convinced of that-and I needed to know where they had led him.

As might be imagined, I had worked myself into quite a state even before the night of the showing of the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum. But it was more than my frenzy of dreams and antic.i.p.ation that affected my experiences that night and now affects my ability to relate what occurred at the tumble-down shack on the edge of St Alban's Marsh. My delirious episodes previous to that night were nothing (that is, they were the perfection of lucidity) when compared to the delirium that overtakes me every time I attempt to sort out what happened at the marshland shack, my thoughts disintegrating little by little until I pa.s.s into a kind of sleeptalking of my own. I saw things with my own eyes and other things with other eyes. And everywhere there were voices...

It was all weedy shadows and frogs croaking in the blackness as I walked along the narrow path that, according to the directions given to me, led to Severini's place. I left my car parked alongside the road where I saw the vehicles of the others. They had all arrived before me, although I was not in the least bit late for this scheduled artistic event. But they had always been anxious, I had long before noticed, whenever a Severini visit was planned, all that day fidgeting with some restless impulse until nightfall came and they could leave the city and go out to St Alban's Marsh.

I expected to see a light ahead as I walked along that narrow path, but all I heard were frogs croaking in the blackness. The full moon in a cloudless sky revealed to me where I should next step along the path leading to the shack at the edge of the marsh. But even before I reached the clearing where the old shack supposedly stood, my sense of everything around me began to change. A warm mist drifted in from either side of the path like a curtain closing in front of my eyes, and I felt something touch my mind with images and concepts that were from elsewhere. 'We are sympathetic organisms,' I heard from the mist. 'Draw closer.' But that narrow path seemed to have no end to it, like those pa.s.sages in my delirious episodes which extended such great distances in the misty darkness of a tropical landscape, where on every side of me there were exotic forms of life sp.a.w.ning and seething without restraint. I must go to that place, I thought as if these were my own words and not the words of another voice altogether, a voice full of desperate intensity and confused aspirations. 'Calm yourself, Mr Severini, if you insist I still address you by that name. As your therapist I cannot advise you to pursue this route... chasing miracles, if that is what you imagine... this "temple," as you call it, is an escape from any authentic confrontation with...'

But he did find his way to freedom, although without properly being discharged from the inst.i.tution, and he went to that place.

'Doc.u.mentes. Pa.s.sportas! ' Looking around at those yellow-brown faces, you were finally there. You went to that jungle island, that tropical sewer, a great temple looming out of the misty darkness in your dreams. It rained in every town, the streets streaming like sewers. 'Disentaria,' p.r.o.nounced the attending physician. But he was not like any of the doctors whom you sought in that place. Amoebic dysentery-there it was, the nightmare continued, so many forms it could take. The way into the nightmare is the way out. And you were willing to follow that nightmare as far as you needed in order to find your way out, just as I was following that narrow path toward your shack on the edge of St Alban's Marsh to enter that same nightmare you had brought back with you. The Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum. Your shack was now a gallery of the nightmares you had inspired in the others with your sleeptalking and the fluctuations of your form, those outrageous miracles which had not outraged anyone. Only when I was alone in my apartment, imaginatively recreating what the others had told me, could I see those miracles as the nightmares they were. I knew this because of my delirious episodes, which none of the others had known. They were the sympathetic organisms, not I. I was antagonistic to you, not sympathetic. Because I would not go into the nightmare, as you had gone. The Temple of Tantric Medicine, this is what you dreamed you would find in that tropical sewer-a place where miracles might happen, where that sect of 'doctors' could minister with the most esoteric procedures and could carry out their illicit practices. But what did you find instead? 'Disentaria,' p.r.o.nounced the attending physician. Then a small group of those yellow-brown faces told you, told us, about that other temple which had no name. 'For the belly sickness,' they said. Amoebic dysentery, simply another version of the nightmare of the organism from which none of the doctors you had seen in the past could deliver you. 'How can the disease be cured of itself?' you asked them. 'My body-a tumor that was once delivered from the body of another tumor, a lump of disease that is always boiling with its own disease. And my mind-another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism. Where are you taking me!' you screamed (we screamed) at the yellow-brown faces. 'Fix the belly sickness. We know, we know.' They chanted these words along the way, it seemed, as the town disappeared behind the trees and the vines, behind the giant flowers that smelled like rotting meat, and the fungus and muck of that tropical sewer. They knew the disease and the nightmare because they lived in that place where the organism flourished without restraint, its forms so varied and exotic, its fate inescapable. 'Disentaria,' p.r.o.nounced the attending physician. They knew the way through the stonework pa.s.sages, the walls seeping with slime and soft with mold as they coiled toward the central chamber of the temple without a name. Inside the ruined heart of the temple there were candles burning everywhere; their flickering light revealed an array of temple art and ornamentation. Intricate murals appeared along the walls, mingling with the slime and the mold of that tropical sewer. Sculptures of every size and all shapes projected out of the damp, viscous shadows. At the center of the chamber was a large circular altar, an enormous mandala composed of countless jewels, precious stones, or simply bits of gla.s.s that gleamed in the candlelight like a pool of multi-colored slime molds.

They laid your body upon the altar; they knew what to do with you (us)-the words to say, the songs to sing, and the esoteric procedures to follow. It was almost as if I could understand the things that they chanted in voices of tortured solemnity. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. There are two faces which must never confront each other. There is only one body which must struggle to contain them both. And the phantom clutch of that sickness, that amoebic dysentery, seemed to reach me as I walked along that narrow path leading to Severini's shack at the edge of St Alban's Marsh. Inside the shack were all the Exhibits of the Imaginary Museum, the paintings lining the damp wood of the walls and the sculptures projecting out of the shadows cast by the candles which always lighted the single room of that ruined hovel. I had imaginatively recreated the interior of Severini's shack many times according to the accounts related to me by the others about this place and its incredible inhabitant. I imagined how you could forget yourself in such a place, how you could be delivered from the nightmares and delirious episodes that tortured you in other places, even becoming someone else (or something else) as you gave yourself up entirely to the fluctuations of the organism at the edge of St Alban's Marsh. You needed that marsh because it helped you to imaginatively recreate that tropical sewer (where you were taken into the nightmare), and you needed those artworks in order to make the crumbling shack into that temple (where you were supposed to find your way out of the nightmare). But most of all you needed them, the others, because they were sympathetic organisms. I, on the other hand, was now an antagonistic organism who wanted nothing more to do with your esoteric procedures and illicit practices. Deliver the self that knows the sickness from the self that does not know. The two faces... the one body. You wanted them to enter the nightmare, who did not even know the nightmare as we knew it. You needed them and their artworks to go into the nightmare of the organism to its very end, so that you could find your way out of the nightmare. But you could not go to the very end of the nightmare unless I was with you, I who was now an antagonistic organism without any hope that there was a way out of the nightmare. We were forever divided, one face from the other, struggling within the body-the organism-which we shared.

I never arrived at the shack that night; I never entered it. As I walked along that narrow path in the mist I became feverish. ('Amoebic dysentery,' p.r.o.nounced the doctor whom I visited the following day.) The face of Severini appeared at the shack that night, not mine. It was always his face that the others saw on such nights when they came to visit. But I was not there with them; that is, my face was not there. His face was the one they saw as they sat among all the Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. But it was my face which returned to the city; it was my body which I now fully possessed as an organism that belonged to my face alone. But the others never returned from the shack on the edge of St Alban's Marsh. I never saw them again after that night, because on that night he took them with him into the nightmare, with the candle flames flickering upon those artworks and the fluctuations of form which to the others appeared as a pool of twisting snakes or a ma.s.s of spiderlings newly hatched. He showed them the way into the nightmare, but he could not show them the way out. There is no way out of the nightmare once you have gone so far into its depths. That is where he is lost forever, he and the others he has taken with him.

But he did not take me into the marsh with him to exist as a fungus exists or as a foam of multi-colored slime mold exists. That is how I see it in my new delirious episodes. Only at these times when I suffer from a physical disease or excessive psychic turmoil do I see how he exists now, he and the others. Because I never looked directly into the pools of oozing life when I stopped at the shack on the edge of St Alban's Marsh. I was on my way out of the city the night I stopped, and I was only there long enough to douse the place in gasoline and set it ablaze. It burned with all the brilliance of the nightmares that were still exhibited inside, casting its illumination upon the marsh and leaving the most obscure image of what was back there-a vast and vague impression of that great black life from which we have all emerged and of which we are all made.

Gas Station Carnivals (1996).

First published in The Nightmare Factory, 1996.

Also published in: Teatro Grottesco.

Outside the walls of the Crimson Cabaret was a world of rain and darkness. At intervals, whenever someone entered or exited through the front door of the club, one could actually see the steady rain and was allowed a brief glimpse of the darkness. Inside it was all amber light, tobacco smoke, and the sound of the raindrops. .h.i.tting the windows, which were all painted black. On such nights, as I sat at one of the tables in that drab little place, I was always filled with an infernal merriment, as if I were waiting out the apocalypse and could not care less about it. I also liked to imagine that I was in the cabin of an old ship during a really vicious storm at sea or in the club car of a luxury pa.s.senger train that was being rocked on its rails by ferocious winds and hammered by a demonic rain. Sometimes, when I was sitting in the Crimson Cabaret on a rainy night, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my gla.s.s of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion.

However, on that particular rainy November night I was not feeling very well. My stomach was slightly queasy, as if signalling the onset of a virus or even food poisoning. Another source for my malaise, I thought to myself, might well have been my longstanding nervous condition, which fluctuated from day to day but was always with me in some form and manifested itself in a variety of symptoms both physical and psychic. I was in fact experiencing a faint sensation of panic, although this in no way ruled out the possibility that the queasiness of my stomach was due to a strictly physical cause, either viral or toxic. Neither did it rule out a third possibility which I was trying to ignore at that point in the evening. Whatever the etiology of my stomach disorder, I felt the need to be in a public place that night, so that if I should collapse-an eventuality I often feared-there would be people around who might attend to me, or at least shuttle my body off to the hospital. At the same time I was not seeking close contact with any of these people, and I would have been bad company in any case, sitting there in the corner of the club drinking mint tea and smoking mild cigarettes out of respect for my ailing stomach. For all these reasons I had brought my notebook with me that night and had it lying open on the table before me, as if to say that I wanted to be left alone to mull over some literary matters. But when Stuart Quisser entered the club at approximately ten o'clock, the sight of me sitting at a corner table with my open notebook, drinking mint tea and smoking mild cigarettes so that I might stay on top of the situation with my queasy stomach, did not in the least discourage him from walking directly to my table and taking the seat across from me. A waitress came over to us. Quisser ordered some kind of white wine, while I asked for another cup of mint tea.

'So now it's mint tea,' Quisser said as the girl left us.

'I'm surprised you're showing your face around here,' I said by way of reply.

'I thought I might try to make up with the old crimson woman.'

'Make up? That doesn't sound like you.'

'Nevertheless, have you seen her tonight?'

'No, I haven't. You humiliated her at that party. I haven't seen her since, not even in her own club. I don't know if you're aware of this, but she's not someone you want to have as an enemy.'

'Meaning what?' he asked.

'Meaning that she has connections you know absolutely nothing about.'

'And of course you know all about it. I've read your stories. You're a confessed paranoid, so what's your point?'

'My point,' I said, 'is that there's h.e.l.l in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.'

'I had too much to drink, that's all.'

'You called her a deluded no-talent.'

Quisser looked up at the waitress as she approached with our drinks, and he made a hasty hand-signal to me for silence. When she was gone he said, 'I happen to know that our waitress is very loyal to the crimson woman. She will very probably inform her about my visiting the club tonight. I wonder if she would be willing to act as a go-between with her boss and deliver a second-hand apology from me.'

'Look around at the walls,' I said.

Quisser set down his gla.s.s of wine and scanned the room.

'Hmm,' he said when he had finished looking. 'This is more serious than I thought. She's taken down all her old paintings. And the new ones don't look like her work at all.'

'They're not. You humiliated her.'

'And yet she seems to have done up the stage since I last saw it. New paint job or something.'

The so-called stage to which Quisser referred was a small platform in the opposite corner of the club. This area was entirely framed by four long panels, each of them painted with black and gold sigils against a glossy red background. Various events occurred on this stage: poetry readings, tableaux vivants, playlets of sundry types, puppet shows, artistic slideshows, musical performances, and so on. That night, which was a Tuesday, the stage was dark. I observed nothing different about it and asked Quisser what he imagined he thought was new.

'I can't say exactly, but something seems to have been done. Maybe it's those black and gold ideographs or whatever they're supposed to be. The whole thing looks like the cover of a menu in a Chinese restaurant.'

'You're quoting yourself,' I said.

'What do you mean?'

'The Chinese menu remark. You used that in your review of the Marsha Corker exhibit last month.'

'Did I? I don't remember.'

'Are you just saying you don't remember, or do you really not remember?' I asked this question in the spirit of trivial curiosity, my queasy stomach discouraging the strain of any real antagonism on my part.

'I remember, all right? Which reminds me, there's something I wanted to talk to you about. It came to me the other day, and I immediately thought of you and your... stuff,' he said, gesturing toward my notebook of writings open on the table between us. 'I can't believe it's never come up before. You of all people should know about them. No one else seems to. It was years ago, but you're old enough to remember them. You've got to remember them.'

'Remember what?' I asked, and after the briefest pause he replied: 'The gas station carnivals.'

And he said these words as if he were someone delivering a punchline to a joke, the proud bringer of a surprising and profound hilarity. I was supposed to express an astonished recognition, that much I knew. It was not a phenomenon of which I was entirely ignorant, and memory is such a tricky thing. This, at least, is what I told Quisser. But as Quisser told me his memories, trying to arouse mine, I gradually realized the true nature and purpose of the so-called gas station carnivals. During this time it was all I could do to conceal how badly my stomach was acting up on me, queasy and burning. I kept telling myself, as Quisser was talking about his memories of the gas station carnivals, that I was certainly experiencing the onset of a virus, if in fact I had not been the victim of food poisoning. Quisser, nevertheless, was so caught up in his story that he seemed not to notice my agony.

Quisser said that his recollections of the gas station carnivals derived from his early childhood. His family, meaning his parents and himself, would go on long vacations by car, often driving great distances, to a variety of destinations. Along the way, naturally, they would need to stop at any number of gas stations that were located in towns and cities, as well as those that they came upon in more isolated, rural locales. These were the places, Quisser said, where one was most likely to discover those hybrid enterprises which he called gas station carnivals.

Quisser did not claim to know when or how these specialized carnivals, or perhaps specialized gas stations, came into existence, nor how widespread they might have been. His father, whom Quisser believed would be able to answer such questions, had died some years ago, while his mother was no longer mentally competent, having suffered a series of psychic catastrophes not long after the death of Quisser's father. Thus, all that remained to Quisser was the memory of these childhood excursions with his parents, during which they would find themselves in some rural area, perhaps at the crossroads of two highways (and often, he seemed to recall, around sunset), and discover in this isolated location one of those curiosities which he described to me as gas station carnivals.

They were invariably filling stations, Quisser emphasized, and not service stations, which might have facilities for doing extensive repairs on cars and other vehicles. There would be, in those days, four gas pumps at most, often only two, and some kind of modest building which usually had so many signs and advertis.e.m.e.nts applied to its exterior that no one could say if anything actually stood beneath them. Quisser said that as a child he always took special notice of the signs that advertised chewing tobacco, and that as an adult, in his capacity as an art critic, he still found the sight of chewing-tobacco packages very appealing, and he could not understand why some artist had not successfully exploited their visual and imaginative qualities. It seemed to me, as we sat that night in the Crimson Cabaret, that this chewing-tobacco material was intended to lend greater credence to Quisser's story. This detail was so vivid to him. But when I asked Quisser if he recalled any particular brands of chewing tobacco being advertised at these filling stations which had carnivals attached to them, he became slightly defensive, as if my question were intended to challenge the accuracy of his childhood recollection. He then shifted the focus of the issue I had raised by a.s.serting that the carnival aspect of these places was not exactly attached to the gas station aspect, but that they were never very far away from each other and there was definitely a commercial liaison between them. His impression, which had been instilled in him like some founding principle of a dream, was that a substantial purchase of gasoline allowed the driver and pa.s.sengers of a given vehicle free access to the nearby carnival.

At this point in his story Quisser became anxious to explain that these gas station carnivals were by no means elaborate-quite the opposite, in fact. Situated on some empty stretch of land that stood alongside, or sometimes behind, a rural filling station, they consisted of only the remnants of fully fledged carnivals, the bare bones of much larger and grander entertainments. There was usually a tall, arched entranceway with colored lightbulbs that provided an eerie contrast to the vast and barren landscape surrounding it. Especially around sunset, which was usually, or possibly always, when Quisser and his parents found themselves in one of these remote locales, the colorful illumination of a carnival entranceway created an effect that was both festive and sinister. But once a visitor had gained admittance to the actual grounds of the carnival, there came a moment of letdown at the thing itself-that spare a.s.semblage of equipment that appeared to have been left behind by a travelling amus.e.m.e.nt park in the distant past.

There were always only a few carnival rides, Quisser said, and these were very seldom in actual operation. He supposed that at some time they had been in functioning order, probably when they were first installed as an annex to the gas stations. But this period, he speculated, could not have lasted long. And no doubt at the earliest sign of malfunction each of the rides had been shut down. Quisser said that he himself had never been on a single ride at a gas station carnival, though he insisted that his father once allowed him to sit atop one of the wooden horses on a defunct merry-go-round. 'It was a miniature merry-go-round,' Quisser told me, as if that gave his recollected experience an aura of meaning or substance. All the rides, it seemed, were miniature, he a.s.serted-small-scale versions of carnival rides he had elsewhere known and had actually ridden upon. Beside the miniature merry-go-round, which never moved an inch and always stood dark and silent in a remote rural landscape, there would be a miniature ferris wheel (no taller than a bungalow-style house, Quisser said), and sometimes a miniature tilt-a-whirl or a miniature roller coaster. And they were always closed down because once they had malfunctioned, if in fact any of them were ever in operation, they were never subsequently repaired. Possibly they never could be repaired, Quisser thought, given the antiquated parts and mechanisms of these miniature carnival rides.

Yet there was a single, quite crucial amus.e.m.e.nt that one could almost always expect to see open to the public, or at least to those whose car had been filled with the requisite amount of gasoline and who were therefore free to pa.s.s through the brightly lit entranceway upon which the word carnival was emblazoned in colored lights against a vast and haunting sky at sundown somewhere out in a rural wasteland. Quisser posed to me a question: how could a place advertise itself as a carnival, even a gas station carnival, if it did not include that most vital carnivalesque feature-a sideshow? Perhaps there was some special law or ordinance regulating such matters, Quisser imagined out loud, an old statute of some kind that would have particular force in remote areas where certain traditions have an endurance unknown to urban centers. This would account for the fact that, except under extraordinary circ.u.mstances (such as dangerously bad weather), there was always some type of sideshow performance at these gas station carnivals, even though everything else on the grounds stood dark and damaged.

Of course these sideshows, as Quisser described them, were not terribly sophisticated, even by the standards of the average carnival, let alone those that served as commercial enticements for some out-of-the-way gas station. There would be only a single sideshow attraction at a given site, and outwardly they each presented the same image to the carnival's patrons: a small tent of torn and filthy canvas. At some point along the perimeter of the tent would be a loose flap of material through which Quisser and his parents, though sometimes only Quisser himself, would gain entrance to the sideshow. Inside the tent were a few wooden benches that had sunk a little bit into the hard dirt beneath them and, some distance away, a small stage area that was raised perhaps just a foot or so above ground level. Illumination was provided by two ordinary floor lamps-one on either side of the stage-that were without lampshades or any other kind of covering, so that their bare lightbulbs burned harshly and cast dramatic shadows throughout the interior of the tent. Quisser said that he always noticed the frayed electrical cords that trailed off from the base of each lamp and, by means of several extension cords, ultimately found a source of power at the gas station-that is, from within the small brick building which was obscured by so many signs advertising chewing tobacco and other products.

When visitors to a gas station carnival entered the sideshow tent and took their places on one of the benches in front of the stage, they were not usually alerted to the particular nature of the performance or spectacle that they would witness. Quisser remarked that there was no marquee or billboard of any type that might offer such a notice to the carnival-goers either before they entered the sideshow tent or after they were inside and seated on one of the old wooden benches. However, with one important exception, each of the performances, or spectacles, was much the same rigmarole. The audience would settle itself on the wooden benches, most of which were about to collapse or (as Quisser observed) were so unevenly sunk into the ground that it was impossible to sit on them, and the show would begin.

The attractions varied from sideshow to sideshow, and Quisser said he was unable to remember all of the ones he had seen. He did recall what he described as the Human Spider. This was a very brief spectacle during which someone in a clumsy costume scuttled from one side of the stage to the other and back again, exiting through a slit at the back of the tent. The person wearing the costume, Quisser added, was presumably the attendant who pumped gas, washed windows, and performed various services around the filling station. In many sideshow performances, such as that of the Hypnotist, Quisser remembered that a gas station attendant's uniform (greasy gray or blue coveralls) was quite visible beneath the performer's stage clothes. Quisser did admit that he was unsure why he designated this particular sideshow act the 'Hypnotist,' since there was no hypnotism involved in the performance, and of course no marquee or billboard existed either outside the tent or within it that might lead the public to expect any kind of mesmeric routines. The performer was simply clothed in a long, loose overcoat and wore a plastic mask, which was a plain, very pale replica of a human face, with the exception that instead of eyes (or eyeholes) there were two large discs with spiral designs painted upon them. The Hypnotist would gesticulate chaotically in front of the audience for some moments, no doubt because his vision was obscured by the spiral-patterned discs over the eyes of his mask, and then stumble offstage.

There were numerous other sideshow acts that Quisser claimed to have seen, including the Dancing Puppet, the Worm, the Hunchback, and Dr Fingers. With one important exception, the routine was always the same: Quisser and his parents would enter the sideshow tent and sit upon one of the rotted benches, soon after which some performer would appear briefly on the small stage that was lit up by two ordinary floor lamps. The single deviation from this routine was an attraction that Quisser called the Showman.

Whereas every other sideshow act began and ended after Quisser and his parents had entered the special tent and seated themselves, the one called the Showman always seemed to be in progress. As soon as Quisser stepped inside the tent-invariably preceding his parents, he claimed-he saw the figure standing perfectly still upon the small stage with his back to the audience. For whatever reason, there were never any other patrons when Quisser and his parents stopped at twilight and visited one of these gas station carnivals-with their second-hand, defective amus.e.m.e.nts-eventually making their way into the sideshow tent. This situation did not seem strange or troubling to the young Quisser except on those occasions when he entered the sideshow tent and saw that it was the Showman onstage with his back to a few rows of empty benches that looked as if they might break up altogether if one attempted to sit on them. Whenever faced with this scene, Quisser immediately wanted to turn around and leave the place. But then his parents would come pushing into the tent behind him, he said, and before he knew it they would all be sitting on one of the benches in the very first row looking at the Showman. His parents never knew how terrified he was of this peculiar sideshow figure, Quisser repeated several times. Furthermore, visiting these gas station carnivals, and especially taking in the sideshows, was all done for Quisser's benefit, since his father and mother would have preferred simply filling up the family car with gasoline and moving on toward whatever vacation spot was next on their itinerary.

Quisser contended that his parents actually enjoyed watching him sit in terror before the Showman, until he could not stand it any longer and asked to go back to the car. At the same time he was quite transfixed by the sight of this sideshow character, who was unlike any other he could remember. There he was, Quisser said, standing with his back to the audience and wearing an old top hat and a long cape that touched the dirty floor of the small stage on which he stood. Sticking out from beneath the top hat were the dense and lengthy shocks of the Showman's stiff red hair, Quisser said, which looked like some kind of sickening vermin's nest. When I asked Quisser if this hair might actually have been a wig, deliberately testing his memory and imagination, he gave me a contemptuous look, as if to stress that I was not the one who had seen the stiff red hair; he was the one who had seen it sticking out from beneath the Showman's old top hat. The only other features that were visible to the audience, Quisser continued, were the fingers of the Showman which grasped the edges of his long cape. These fingers appeared to Quisser to be somehow deformed, curling together into little claws, and were a pale greenish color. Apparently, as Quisser viewed it, the entire stance of the figure was calculated to suggest that at any moment he might twirl about and confront the audience full-face, his moldy fingers lifting up the edges of his cape, reaching to the height of his stiff red hair. Yet the figure never budged. Sometimes it did seem to Quisser that the Showman was moving his head a little to the left or a little to the right, threatening to reveal one side of his face or the other, playing a horrible game of peek-a-boo. But ultimately Quisser concluded that these perceived movements were illusory and that the Showman was always posed in perfect stillness, a nightmarish mannikin that invited all kinds of imaginings by its very forbearance of any gesture.

'It was all a nasty pretense,' Quisser said to me and then paused to finish off his gla.s.s of wine.

'But what if he had turned around to face the audience?' I asked. While awaiting his response, I sipped some of my mint tea, which did not seem to be doing much good for my queasy stomach, yet at the same time was causing no harm either. I lit one of the mild cigarettes that I was smoking on that occasion. 'Did you hear what I said?' I said to Quisser, who had been looking toward the stage located in the opposite corner of the Crimson Cabaret. 'The stage is the same,' I said to Quisser quite sternly, attracting some glances from persons sitting at the other tables in the club. 'The panels are the same and the designs on them are also the same.'

Quisser played nervously with his empty wine gla.s.s. 'When I was very young,' he said, 'there were certain occasions on which I would see the Showman, but he wasn't in his natural habitat, so to speak, of the sideshow tent.'

'I think I've heard enough tonight,' I interjected, my hand pressing against my queasy stomach.

'What are you saying?' asked Quisser. 'You remember them, don't you? The gas station carnivals. Maybe just a faint memory. I was sure you would be the one to know about them.'

'I think I can say,' I said to Quisser, 'I've heard enough of your gas station carnival story to know what it's all about.'

'What do you mean, "what it's all about"?' asked Quisser, who was still looking over at the small stage across the room.

'Well, for one thing, your later memories, your purported memories, of that Showman character. You were about to tell me that throughout your childhood you repeatedly saw this figure at various times and in various places. Perhaps you saw him in the distance of a schoolyard, standing with his back to you. Or you saw him on the other side of a busy street, but when you crossed the street he wasn't there any longer.'

'Something like that, yes.'

'And you were then going to tell me that lately you've been seeing this figure, or faint suggestions of this figure-sketchy reflections in store windows along the sidewalk, flashing glimpses in the rear-view mirror of your car.'

'It's very much like one of your stories.'

'In some ways it is,' I said, 'and in some ways it isn't. You feel that if you ever see the Showman figure turn his head around to look at you... that something terrible will happen, most likely that you'll perish on the spot from some kind of monumental shock.'

'Yes,' agreed Quisser. 'An unsustainable horror. But I haven't told you the strangest part. You're right that lately I have had glimpses of... that figure, and I did see him during my childhood, outside of the sideshow tent, I mean. But the strangest part is that I remember seeing him in other places even before I first saw him at the gas station carnivals.'

'This is just my point,' I said.

'What is?'

'That there are no gas station carnivals. There never were any gas station carnivals. n.o.body remembers them because they never existed. The whole idea is preposterous.'

'But my parents were there with me.'

'Exactly-your dead father and your mentally incompetent mother. Do you remember ever discussing with them your vacation experiences at these special gas stations with the carnivals supposedly annexed to them?'

'No, I don't.'

'That's because you never went to any such places with them. Think about how ludicrous it all sounds. That there should be filling stations out in the sticks that entice customers with free admission to broken-down carnivals-it's all so ridiculous. Miniature carnival rides? Gas station attendants doubling as sideshow performers?'

'Not the Showman,' interrupted Quisser. 'He was never a gas station attendant.'

'No, of course he wasn't a gas station attendant, because he was a delusion. The whole thing is an outrageous delusion, but it's also a very particular type of delusion.'

'And what type would that be?' asked Quisser, who was still sneaking glances at the stage area across the room of the Crimson Cabaret.

'It's not some type of common psychological delusion, if that's what you were thinking I was about to say. I have no interest at all in such things. But I am very interested when someone is suffering from a magical delusion. Even more precisely, I am interested in delusions that are a result of art-magic. And do you know how long you've been under the influence of this art-magic delusion?'

'You've lost me,' said Quisser.

'It's simple,' I said. 'How long have you imagined all this nonsense about the gas station carnivals, and specifically about this character you describe as the Showman?'

'I guess it would be more or less absurd at this point to insist to you that I've seen this figure since childhood, even if that's exactly how it seems and that's exactly what I remember.'

'Of course it would be absurd, because you're definitely delusional.'

'So I'm delusional about the Showman, but you're not delusional about... what do you call it?'

'Art-magic. For as long as you've been a victim of this particular art-magic, this is how long you've been delusional about the gas station carnivals and all related phenomena.'

'And how long is that?' asked Quisser.

'Since you humiliated the crimson woman by calling her a deluded no-talent. I told you that she had connections you knew absolutely nothing about.'

'I'm talking about something from my childhood, something I've remembered my entire life. You're talking about a matter of days.'

'That's because a matter of days is exactly the term that you've been delusional. Don't you see that through her art-magic she has caused you to suffer from the worst kind of delusion, which might be called a retroactive delusion. And it's not only you who's been afflicted in the past days and weeks and even months. Everyone around here has sensed the threat of this art-magic for some time now. I'm beginning to think that I've found out about it too late myself, much too late. You know what it is to suffer from a delusion of the retroactive type, but do you know what it's like to be the victim of a severe stomach disorder? I've been sitting here in the crimson woman's club drinking mint tea served by a waitress who is the crimson woman's friend, thinking that mint tea is just the thing for my stomach when it very well may be aggravating my condition or even causing it to transform, in accordance with the principles of art-magic, into something more serious and more strange. But the crimson woman is not the only one practicing this art-magic. It's happening everywhere around here. It drifted in unexpectedly like a fog at sea, and so many of us are becoming lost in it. Look at the faces in this room and then tell me that you alone are the victim of a horrible art-magic. The crimson woman has quite a few adversaries, just as she is connected with powerful allies. How can I say exactly who they are-some group specializing in art-magic, no doubt, but I can't just say, with a fatuous certainty, "Yes, it must be some particular gang of illuminati," or esoteric scientists, as so many have begun styling themselves these days.'

'But it all sounds like one of your stories,' Quisser protested.