They Had Goat Heads

FUNAMBULISM





I insisted they replace the tightrope with a two-foot wide plank before walking across it. I also wanted the plank bolstered from the underside by a series of pillars and support beams. In addition, I wanted three nets set up—one near the ground, one halfway between the ground and me, one just a few feet beneath me, all made of spidersteel and reinforced with a Tungsten nanocomposite—and a strongman waiting to catch me beneath the third and lowest net in case I fell through them all. “Secure my path with handrailings, too,” I added, and then I realized there was no reason to walk across the plank when I could glide across it. I ordered them to construct an airport walkalator instead of a plank. “Make it four—no, five feet wide,” I said, putting on a sumo suit in case I fell down. I put on another sumo suit for good measure. And I decided that, instead of pillars and support beams, they should fill the circus tent with sand, fill it all the way up here to the tightrope platform, and then we can simply lay the walkalator on top, but since we’re on the subject, why use sand when we can use concrete? I barked, “Fill the tent with concrete!” and began to gesticulate as if my hair had caught fire. I quickly checked myself, however, and demanded that they not only fill the tent with concrete, but the whole city. Frenzied, they assembled a mountain of gravel bags and water barrels and loaded up a battalion of cement trucks. As they leapt into the trucks and revved the engines, I reneged. “Forget about the concrete. Forget about the sand. Just make sure that walkalator is stabilized. Please wrap it in cellophane as well. I don’t want to get any germs on my feet.” I took off the second sumo suit. I took off the first one. I thought twice and put them both back on. I added a third. I took all three suits off and put all three back on again as they erected pillars and set up nets and hired a strongman and designed and assembled a walkalator, which they summarily laid atop the pillars from one platform to the other, sealing it in place with miniature blowtorches, and they even ran a series of copper wires from the walkalator’s handrailings to the ceiling, ensuring that it wouldn’t budge. “A brontosaurus could fall on this walkalator from the roof of a tall building,” the foreman said, “and it still wouldn’t budge.” I thanked him. He climbed down the ladder and left me alone. The spotlights came on. The crowd grew quiet and stared up at me. Beneath the nets, the strongman flexed his pectoral muscles and exclaimed, “Don’t worry! I’ll catch you if you fall!” I waved at him. I waved at the crowd. I took a series of deep breaths, waved at the crowd again, smoothed out my eyebrows, cleared my throat, scratched one of my earlobes . . . Finally I stepped onto the walkalator. It ushered me from one platform to the other without incident. Halfway across I did a masterful cartwheel. The crowd cheered.

BALLOON





It wouldn’t deflate. In fact, it had grown larger and more buoyant. I purchased it over three months ago and it continued to float there, adamant, proud, its string tied to an armrest and taut as a guitar’s. The balloon was daring me. I decided to stick it with a knife. It absorbed the blow, as if expecting it, and the balloon dimpled and wrinkled as it sunk to the floor. My daughter thought it was dead. She insisted that we bury the carcass in the back yard, near the garden. We invited guests, my daughter and I. There was a long ceremony followed by a catered lunch. Everybody talked about the balloon, remembering the good times. Nobody talked about how I had gotten away with murder.

THE HUIS CLOS HOTEL





Marionette puppet in the corner. Long strings rose into an obscure grill in the ceiling and I couldn’t see who was manipulating them. I heard heavy breathing up there. Sometimes sharp curses.

The puppet stood eight feet tall with long shoulders and piercing features. It wore a gray suit and held a paperthin paddle in a wooden hand. Imprinted on the paddle was a photographic headshot of itself, or rather the man who had served as a blueprint for the puppet. At random intervals, the puppet raised the paddle to its face and repeated the same mantra in an electric monotone: “No strings attached.”

I opened an umbrella as more and more guests strode through the lobby. A bellhop sneered at me. He conferred with another bellhop who conferred with a doorman. The doorman pointed at a check-in clerk and gestured at me. The check-in clerk blew a whistle and a concierge appeared at my side, chin upturned.

“Today I met the man who will take out my gall bladder,” I said, tilting the umbrella to one side. “He seems like a good man.”

The concierge didn’t say anything. I noticed a small, inconspicuous fishhook protruding from the close-shaven flesh of his chin. Its line rose into an obscure grill in the ceiling.

“They say that the Huis Clos Hotel is where everything happens,” uttered the concierge through tight lips. “I regret to inform you that an important part of everything is death.”

I closed the umbrella and eyeballed the puppet. Its puppeteer yanked on the strings attached to its shoulders, producing a vulgar shrug.

I looked at the concierge. His head jerked up and down and he turned toward an elevator, toes dragging across the carpet.

Reaching for a chandelier and striking an aggrieved pose, I faded out of the narrative like a nosferatu at dawn . . .

. . . All of the elevators in the hotel dinged at the same time and the doors slid open and a troop of boy scouts in hunter green knee socks and hunter green shorts and khaki shortsleeve shirts with red neckerchiefs exited and got into formation and marched through the lobby citing their Law in unison: “A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” They repeated the Law until the last scout had exited one of eight revolving doors, the hotel’s only entranceways. Staff and guests alike acknowledged the procession with three-fingered salutes.

A woodpecker flew into the lobby through an open skylight. It landed on the puppet’s nose and began to jackhammer its forehead. It pecked a quick hole and ruptured a pipeline; glowing antifreeze exploded from the wound. The puppet staggered backwards into the wall, shooing away the bird with pinwheel swats, trying to plug the wound with its fingers, but the antifreeze kept coming, spurting across the lobby. Guests slipped and fell. Staff members tried to help them up and they slipped and fell, too, waving their arms in awkward circles even after they had hit the floor, stranded on the paisley carpet.

Commotion in the ceiling. Like a stampede of tap shoes and cowboy boots moving across an old, rickety stage. It shifted all over the lobby, erratically, with no apparent direction or purpose. The puppet followed the commotion, wigwagging and hemorrhaging, as if being jabbed with broom handles from multiple angles. He trampled the concierge. He trampled a family of four. Outcries, accusations. Everybody threw up their arms in feigned slow motion. All the while the puppet continued to put the paddle to its face and articulate its mantra . . .

The puppet collapsed in a revolving door, jamming all eight of them—the entranceways functioned as a hive mind—and its marionette strings snapped. The puppeteer blew a hole in the ceiling with a shotgun, dropped a thick rope through the hole, and rappelled down it. On his head he wore a small cardboard box with rectangular eye-slits. Seven or eight men wearing the same boxes followed him down the rope. All of them wore gray suits. As more and more people struggled to get inside the hotel, congealing on the sidewalk into an elastic riot, they piled onto the eight-foot obstruction and scrambled to set it free.

A fire started.

Arson. The guilty party slipped onto a fire escape and bolted the door behind him. Nobody could get out. Everybody caught fire.

Final images: . . . The burning face of a man with long shoulders and piercing features turned to ashes. The roof caved in. Suns and moons timelapsed across the sky . . . The ashes blew away, revealing a large, herbaceous pinecone with scales that twitched and glistened in the ruins.

THE KEROSENE LANTERN TOUR





The kerosene lantern tour lasted for eighty-six days. They showed us the wick. They discussed the lantern’s agricultural application. They compared its candela of light to a firefly’s mating call.

When the tour guides ran out of material, they escorted us to a cliff and ordered us to leap off. We used plastic garbage bags for parachutes.

At the bottom of the cliff, a morbidly obese woman contemplated an abortion. She leaned against a rock, folds of bruised fat expanding from her core. “I’m three hundred and one and a half months pregnant,” she groused. Her jaw hung open like a laundry chute. “This is a big one. I don’t eat much. It’s genetic. I will explode with baby flesh if somebody doesn’t help me.”

Somebody began to beat her with a horsewhip. The woman sighed convulsively with each lash. We watched for awhile, commenting on the whipper’s skill, acuity, and experience as a corporeal instrument of torture. Then we jumped on the whipper and wrestled the horsewhip away from him.

We climbed back up the cliff on the rungs of exposed roots and tree branches. By the time we had reached the top, twenty-three days later, the tour guides had thought of something else to tell us about the kerosene lantern. “Observe the curvature of its porcelain trunk.” They moved their hands in a synchronized arc. “If you confiscate the glass housing, one might easily mistake the contraption for a vase. One might attempt to arrange flowers in such a contraption.”

An ant bit me on the foot. My pupils engulfed my eyeballs. “I am the flesh-bot through which the ant speaks,” I said. “I can turn this flesh-bot into a GIANT ME if I like.” I fell to the ground and scuttled toward a pile of dirt. They captured me in a burlap sack, hung me on a tree branch, hit me with golf clubs, injected me with something cold, and cut me loose. I felt better.

“And now we shall communicate entirely by way of interesting aphorisms and twice-told tales,” said a stranger.

Dazed, I didn’t see who had spoken. Everybody looked at me as if I were the culprit.

Then everybody commenced trading aphorisms and twice-told tales . . .

The end of human machinery is the beginning of timeless lint blizzards.

A cautious man always eats the bait before he catches the fishes.

Timeless lint blizzards should be wrangled and punished with the same efficiency and enthusiasm as cautious men. The fact is . . .

. . . Lithuanian tourists cannot be trusted. Nonetheless he survived. His subsequent epiphany produced a fiery mean-on. Figuratively and literally. He buttered up the natives with a few Molotov cocktails, then razed them with a flamethrower. Their ashes floated across the water like decayed barcodes. The end . . . Lithuanian tourists cannot be trusted. Nonetheless he survived. His subsequent epiphany produced a fiery mean-on. Figuratively and literally. Thus he buttered up the natives with a few Molotov cocktails, then razed them with a flamethrower. Their ashes floated across the water like decayed barcodes. The end . . .

They passed around a bowl of string cheese. We were instructed to take no more than two servings apiece under the penalty of excommunication from the kerosene lantern tour.

The gears of the clock tower looming over the reservation slowly rusted and died. Nobody fixed them.

We killed an elk. Nobody ate it.

We wrote a play and tried to perform it. Nobody could remember their lines.

We observed a group member’s bald spot with magnifying glasses, speculating about its origin and future. Some of the children began to cry; they had to be timeouted. Music emanated from a broken Victrola. Voices disambiguated. The arrows pointed NNW. The color turquoise went extinct. A man’s navel exploded. Kaiju emerged from the surf. Gunfire. Extended lectures on pedagogy. Ultraviolent Amerikan Dreams. They wanted to sell the land and build a suburb, but protestors egged the developers and yanked down their trousers. Conversation oscillated between guttural squawks and heated meditations on beef eating. 1001 nights in Bangkok. Antennae. Pulp morality. Darkness.

The whipper cracked his knuckles and said, “It is time for bed. Hence we must lie down. No man owns the right to remain erect and awake when bedtime has come to pass.”

. . . At sunup, we rolled off our cots and shuffled around the kerosene lantern like drowsy penguins. The tour guides didn’t get up until noon. They negated their hangovers with makeshift IVs. They smoked cigarettes. They did calisthenics, screaming at each other to go faster.

Pulsing swaths of clouds contaminated the sky . . .

They instructed us in the realm of nomenclature. “Some users call it paraffin,” said a tour guide, “whereas others simply refer to it as The Wet Substance that Bursts Aflame When One Touches It with Fire . . . ”

LORD BYRON CIRCUS





Polar bears inundated the Midwest, walking on hind legs and willing to work for below minimum wage . . . The penguins shed their tuxedos and picketed until dusk. The migrant workers went home and ate breakfast. The pterodactyl men pulled up their pantaloons and ran to the DMV, shrieking like moths and requesting dire audiences with the Secretary of Hate . . . Something happened to the parataxis man. He slipped and fell from a cliff and landed on his head but he was all right and he got up and dusted himself off and looked both ways and a steel-eyed bull nailed him in the tailbone. He flipped end over end back onto the lip of the cliff in a casual standing position. Meanwhile the polar bears were stealing everybody’s jobs. They operated at the very pinnacle of efficiency, pausing only to use the Men’s Room and devour the odd assistant manager . . . “The technology of the mechanized retroflesh,” said a backyard fetishist in response to an organ donor who asked him for the time and directions to the cafeteria . . . (NOTE: The connections don’t work. A work ethic isn’t enough to excel in the postcapitalist scheme of intelligent design.) . . . Down the hallway Judge Schreber slipped out of a straight jacket, snuck up behind a sunflower, and strapped the jacket onto the perennial beast’s green limbs. The sunflower resisted, seeds and florets erupting from its oversized head like sparks. Just last night Judge Schreber sentenced a Venus flytrap to two years in Auschwitz for eating more than its lawful share—EIGHT FLIES PER TRAP PER DAY OR ELSE, say the Rules of the Game—and now here he stood oppressing yet another member of the plant family. A wildly anabolic sense of guilt induced an epileptic seizure. He hit the floor and vibrated and clanked like a rusty turbine. Clock springs exploded from his ears and nostrils and then his flesh gave way to the Machine, sharp follicles of metal growing from his pores in fasttime until he became a porcupine of conductivity and industrial panic, a tetsuo through and through. “That’s unwise,” said a hole in the blackface of the sunflower. A polar bear said the same thing when it discovered its boss making love to the candy bar dispenser in the break room. It didn’t know what to do. Quit? Or ride this gig to the end? It cleared its mind and searched for an answer . . . nothing. Best consult the I Ching. The polar bear dumped a bag of yarrow stalks onto the table, carefully arranged them according to the schiz-flows of its psyche, then consulted an out-of-date translation of Lao-tzu’s New York Times bestseller. This is what the book told the animal:



When taxes are too high,

people go hungry.

When the government is too intrusive,

people lose their spirit.



Act for the people’s benefit.

Trust them; leave them alone.



The candy bar dispenser groaned as the polar bear’s lips flared with gray blood . . . Life as nothing more than the struggle not to shout expletives at Black Tie Luncheons. Life as nothing more than the shouting of expletives at Red Lobster when the food comes out and the depressed-emaciated-browbeaten waitress breaks down and cries mascara-stained tears all over your Seaside Shrimp Trio because her husband’s in the clink and her snaggletoothed kids have low self- esteem and too many VDs . . . Breakfast at Tiffany Texarkana’s. George Peppard is there and so is the rest of the A-Team. After the gangbang a machinegunfight breaks out. No blood. Nobody gets shot and everybody dies . . . “Don’t forget to boil that nipple!” exclaimed Mother as she tiptoed across the balance beam. Father saluted and thought: Who serves a perfectly healthy infant a cold nipple? Then the acrobats began to spill out of the ceiling ducts in a somersaulting tsunami of hard-boiled aggression. The gymnasium filled up quickly. Mother and Father escaped through an emergency exit. Infant was left behind and grew up to be a comic book villain . . . (NOTE: Don’t forget about the polar bears.) . . . Neglect is the fundament of psychopathy. Schreber’ll tell you. Freud, too . . . Consider Freud’s analysis of Schreber via his memoirs: “The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of this libido was probably from the very first his physician, who enjoyed masquerading around the asylum in various polar bear costumes.” . . . That’s when everybody started goosing and trying to f*ck the animals. Bestiality became the apple of the working man’s eye, but humanality wasn’t the polar bears’ bag. They clocked out, collected payment for services rendered, dropped back onto all fours, and returned to the North Pole where the sun raced around the horizon like a tangerine in a blue, blue toilet bowl . . . In their wake, the gears and girders of existence fell into an abrupt Romantic stupor. Pistons, cogs, engines sang in the cornfield breeze as the Lord Byron Circus emerged from the dust and tore across the landscape of the Midwest going 120 mph. Celebratory terrazzos of gore hung out the windows of the mechanical centipede that served as the circus’s caboose. Taking the lead was a virgin mime who had yet to officially parody the wiles of men in the public sphere. His vast goosesteps progressed forward in a deafening, technologized blur . . .