Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

“Ladies and gentleman,” began the barker, “swallow all capacities to shriek, for the sight forthcoming shall do more than haunt pleasant dreams. Your most pleasing noontime reveries will roil with gales of nightmare. What you are about to witness will burn across your vision when least expected. I raise expectations, knowing all hopes you have will be exceeded, for tonight we shall impress upon your memory and soul an everlasting image of horror. All those who now look toward the exit, doubting their capacity to withstand what follows, I suggest you stay in your seat or else pay an exit fee levied to discourage you from suffering regret. Yes, you heard it right, you must pay to leave before the show is over, so assured we are you will find the proceedings, if not entertaining, at least so peculiar you will never be the same. I did not coax you inside with promises of anything more than a look at the captured Leeds Devil, but we offer tonight, for only a dime admission, something unexpected. It was never our intention for the show to end as it will tonight, but it must, and other than proceeding as we have the last few nights, we herein close the most remarkable run at this theater with an unforgettable final act, one to triumph over all others and secure our names among the immortals of the stage. And without further preamble I present the beast that unleashed itself upon us for an entire week, slaughtering livestock, terrifying schoolchildren, charging every element of the world with threat, some hundred and seventy-five years after its purported birth. I present to you not only the Leeds Devil, but also its execution and death.”

In my name, some poor animal would be slaughtered for entertainment’s sake. I could neither watch as the curtain rose nor avert my eyes. I faced the decision to throw off the dress and save the beast or else forever regret. Only the real thing could save the replica. If wearing a wedding dress, who would heed my calls to rationality? Within every one of them was a capacity to choose mercy if others first were swayed. They seemed to want one voice with which to pass unanimous judgment. Yet I feared their bloodlust could only be expunged by serious threat.

The curtain rose. Instead of awestruck gasps, all I heard was laughter. It was a setup, a joke. Yet the barker didn’t give in. He quaked, mortally afraid of an enchained kangaroo covered in green paint. Quaker-buckle boots adorned its paws, makeshift leathery wings, a sorry rack of antlers. So pathetic was the sight that the laughter turned sympathetic for this out-of-place animal. It also seemed unwell, not just nervous or sick but poisoned by its coat of paint.

It was untenable to see yourself represented as an exotic animal slathered like this, a noble marsupial made to look like a lizard with antlers and wings. The wings were no better than the curtain, a hodgepodge of leather hanging off long sticks, nothing like the comparatively glorious imposters commissioned by Stearns.

My possessions were limited to the dress I wore, and even that was less owned than bequeathed, betrothed, beholden, and therefore every one in the audience was my social better. Not only was I a monster—famous apparently, imitated definitely—but compared with most, I was an ascetic, a monk wandering the city for alms, outside the system of exchange of funds for services rendered, or even theft. I distinguished myself from my fellows by cleanliness, basic civility, silence, a show of Franklin’s commandments, but each one surely thought himself my superior, not only because of the dress I wore but because the dress was all I had. Yet I laughed with them for a moment before the tenor changed as we worried for the beast. That moment of laughter was a wave above our heads that broke and submerged us in frothy soup heading for shore. I had never before laughed in a group. What other animal did that? The crow? Pigeons? Fish? Deer? Nor did they have any possessions. Birds had their nests, wolves their lairs, but none had baubles, ornaments, objects conferring status in the flock.

Forget Franklin’s thirteen commandments for moral perfection, tracking the serpentine switchbacks of consciousness, registering the existential arrhythmia of the heart, the restlessness of the soul. Perhaps seeming human only required two things: acquire possessions and lose oneself among other people. Can other people become a sort of heaven? Maybe even devils become angels when they laugh together.

Voices tangled in shouts, insults, curses:

“That’s your monster, eh fatty? Stolen from the zoo?”

“The only thing to fear is it keels before we get our money’s worth!”

“You should be the one in chains, nadscatter!”

The show was worth a dime for the rise it provoked. The barker and his half-armed dwarfish associate and two other teenagers now on stage mimed expressions of horror and desperation. They crossed themselves, kneeling, praying. All the while an animal struggled that none had ever seen up close. It was covered in paint with off-kilter antlers on its head, its wings like crusty wash left out to dry, a vicious choker of spikes around its neck attached to the deck by cords and a leash at the barker’s feet. The cords holding the animal in place made it seem like a balloon strapped to the earth—if cut, the health of the animal would return, it would elevate, and once in the air take its revenge.

The barker and his pitchfork now came behind the beast on stage as his associates got its attention with celery stalks and carrots. He held his finger to his lips again, asking for silence, and instead received a mixed reaction of encouragement and complaint. Pitchfork held with two hands like a shovel, he crouched and stalked the beast from behind on tip toes. He thrust the spears of the pitchfork into the rump of the beast, which reared forward, activating the spikes in the choke chain. Traces of blood muddied the paint as the animal hollered in protest, a sound that struck me as almost human. The barker’s associates jumped back as though struck in the sternum by the shout. Had hidden voices screamed in unison to make it sound more like a human groan, a weary guttural sigh mixed with query and complaint, a sense that the kangaroo, obviously sick, enchained, bleeding now about the neck, were a sort of Job, pleading with higher powers to respond to questions he could only articulate in a way everyone in attendance understood at once, in the universal language of suffering?

So often I had imagined myself in this position, captured and tortured and flayed, my head on the wall of someone like Stearns. No more than a trophy. Eyes replaced with multifaceted circles of glass. How much had they milked out of this poor beast, a dime per person for how many shows? Was it worth it? Did the barker not have a sick heart? Did his associates? The half-armed dwarf surely harbored some sympathy, though they all played their part, urging the crowd to provide the soundtrack, a score as violent and pathetic and guttural as the action on stage.

I had only once seen a sacrifice. Had December told Stearns about the Umbrian girls? I remembered them as innocents, but they were murderers, too young to know what they did, released into the river to bring about eternal paradise, and in a way, it had worked: order was restored and Umbria was now an overgrown archeological site awaiting excavation in the pines. But animal sacrifice was something I had never seen. Voices all around me called for it as though it were commonplace. More than ending the animal’s misery, they wanted to see it butchered. By some abstract equivalency, the more brutal the sacrifice, the more completely they would be released from their miseries. How such a sight could help them I did not understand. Maybe I was too sensitive, too weak, too concerned, too able to position myself within the animal’s body and anticipate the next blow?