Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #221 Read online

  "It's not just clowns?” Beaners asked.

  "Of course it's not just clowns. Superheroes disappear. Knights disappear. Whores disappear."

  "Where do they go?"

  Green Arrow sighed. “That's the age old question. That knight probably believes they're pulled back to their old dimension, by aftershocks of the folding, but I'm not convinced the folding has anything to do with it. Religious folks say that God takes them. Others say it's just how the world works—some people die in front of your eyes, others simply vanish. It's a mystery."

  "Well I want to know the answer to the mystery,” Beaners said, although, in the light of this new revelation, that seemed far less likely.

  Green Arrow chuckled, clapped Beaners on the shoulder, knocking him off-balance. “Answer it and you'll be the most famous clown who ever lived.” He canted his handsome blond head. “Of course you'll also be the only famous clown who ever lived.

  "But be aware,” Green Arrow continued, “many have gone on that quest. Most of them disappeared themselves."

  They crested a rise. Just beyond, a woman sat by the side of the road, next to a massive vehicle the likes of which Beaners had never seen before. It was very tall, with a pendulous hose-like appendage, like an elephant's trunk.

  The woman was Asian, but Beaners didn't know that. To him she was slim and almond-eyed, with black hair, and clothed in a shiny yellow full-body protective hazard suit.

  "Hello,” Beaners said as they approached. The woman didn't answer. She was sitting glumly, with her chin propped on her fist.

  "Are you from Sextown?” Beaners persisted. He said it as if it were a perfectly normal thing, for a clown to strike up a conversation with a Mark. It was a trick of sorts. He found that if you acted as if something were perfectly normal, others usually went along.

  The woman glanced up at him. “No,” she said without lifting her chin off of her fist.

  Green Arrow put a hand on Beaners’ neck and squeezed.

  "So what town are you from?” Beaners asked, ignoring the hint.

  "I'm not from any town. I was born outside,” the woman replied in a clipped, impatient tone that Beaners was well accustomed to.

  "Oh."

  Green Arrow grabbed Beaners’ collar and pulled him down the road. “Don't bother people, you idiot."

  It had never occurred to Beaners that there were people who were born, lived, and died outside the towns. He'd thought the in-between spaces were mostly crossings to get from one town to another, and where you dumped your trash.

  "Who is she?” Beaners asked.

  "She's obviously Management of some sort."

  Beaners snapped his head to look at Green Arrow. “I thought only Circus Town had Management."

  Green Arrow shook his head. “Every town has Management of some sort. Not the sort of Management you described, but people in charge."

  The walls of Sextown appeared wavering in the distance.

  "Can I have some pay for carrying your bags?” Beaners asked.

  Green Arrow gawked at Beaners as if he'd asked for his pants.

  "Then, can I borrow some?"

  Green Arrow smirked at Beaners. He pulled a cash card from his pocket, punched in some code, and handed it to Beaners. “That ought to be enough."

  "I'll meet you right here, in one hour.” Green Arrow pointed at the ground between his green boots. “If I'm not here, wait.” Beaners nodded understanding. Green Arrow hurried off.

  Sextown was dirty. It was run down and sleazy, the sort of town where you didn't want to rest your hand on a light post or brush your pants against a brick wall, lest it come away covered with something sticky. Lights flashed everywhere; sirens wailed. Smiling women in short skirts with perfect thighs and raccoon eyes walked nowhere in particular, competing with peep-show barkers for the attention of men with their hands stuffed in their pockets. Men looking to pay for sex try to look casual, but a tightness in their jaws gives them away.

  Beaners was simply trying to look like the men, but he had no pockets. He had striped socks, a ruffled crepe collar, a purple polka-dotted bow tie, but no pockets. Clowns have no need for pockets.

  He watched the men carefully, and the women more carefully, trying to learn the game, catch the patter that would open the gates. It seemed straightforward enough—nothing like the intricate machinations that accompanied clown-clown liaisons.

  To call Beaners undersexed would be a vast understatement, unless you counted the occasional soul-numbing dalliance with a brother clown. The few times Beaners had dared put a hand of encouragement on a female Mark's shoulder as she readied to throw a dart at a balloon, or fire a watergun into a mechanical clown's rotating mouth, the woman had recoiled like he'd dropped a snake down the back of her dress.

  He approached a delicious woman with jet-black hair down to her waist and heels so high her calves were perpetually tensed.

  "Hi there,” he said. He flashed his cash. “I'm interested in your services."

  The woman burst out laughing as if Beaners had said something profoundly hilarious. Beaners had never been so serious. He walked away, feeling dozens of onlooker stares, her waves of laughter like a wind at his back.

  He tried again and again, adjusting his approach after each rebuff until he settled on “Please. I'll give you all the money I have."

  Outside a shingled honky-tonk on a particularly filthy street, Beaners approached a woman with red hair, freckles, and a vaguely piggy face. Like many women with this look, she appeared to be overweight, but was not.

  "Please. I'll give you all the money I have,” he said.

  She squinted at Beaners, raising his hopes that her eyesight was poor.

  "You're a clown,” she said.

  "Yes, I'd noticed. But thank you."

  "How much do you have?"

  His heart thudded hard in his narrow chest. “Forty."

  She sighed, looked him over. “Okay then. It will have to be behind the bar; they're not going to let you into a room."

  "That's fine,” Beaners said, not quite believing what he was hearing.

  She said her name was Roxy and led him down an alley, into a long, narrow space littered with rusted pots and rotting banana peels, and a steel shelf, empty save for a ragged stack of ancient-looking porn. The clatter of cooking drifted through a crack in one of the bar's frosted back windows.

  "Go easy on me, I'm sore as hell,” Roxy said as she hiked her skirt and half-leaned, half-sat on an upended steel drum. She wasn't wearing any underwear. Beaners scrabbled to unclasp the buckle on his belt; his fingers were tingly, almost numb. He licked his suddenly dry lips.

  "We have similar jobs—after a day clowning, I'm usually sore as hell too. All the falling, the bonks on the head, the tricycle collisions—I hurt all over by evening."

  "I'm usually sore in just one place, but boy am I sore,” Roxy said. With the hand that wasn't holding up her skirt, she swept her strawberry hair back out of the way. In the starlight, she was beautiful to Beaners. The freckles on her legs were flecks of gold. “I wouldn't mind spreading out the soreness to other places. It'd be a change, anyway."

  Beaners finally got his pants down around his ankles. He waddled over to her, shaking badly. Roxy angled herself and guided him inside her. Beaners moaned, began to move very gently. Roxy inhaled sharply; he froze.

  "Is that hurting you? We can stop,” he said.

  "No, it's okay,” she said. She grasped Beaners’ waist and shifted him over a bit. “There, that's better. You're fine, sweety."

  He continued, even more gently now.

  It was a thousand times better than the chocolate. He fought back tears of joy and gratitude welling in his eyes.

  "I bet you're glad that old adage about the size of a man's feet isn't true,” he said.

  Roxy burst out laughing. Her rhythmic contractions squeezed him, tugged him, massaged him into a shattering orgasm. Beaners laughed out, the loosest, easiest, most genuine laugh of his life. He laughed as on
ly a clown can laugh—a pinwheel kaleidoscope pennywhistle whoop, until the edges of his vision went grey and the alley spun like a funhouse tunnel.

  He collapsed against her, chuckling, coming—a primordial hitch that bobbed him up and down like a cork on water. Roxy wrapped her arms around Beaners’ shoulders and chuckled along with him for a moment. Beaners wished there could be a folding—a folding that would fold time into a loop and keep him there forever.

  "That was my first time,” Beaners said.

  "Really?"

  "Mm hm."

  "Well, I'm happy to be your first. You're...” She reached for the right word. “Nice. You're a nice guy."

  "Thank you,” Beaners said.

  Her feathered bangs rippled in a light breeze. Beaners wanted to touch them, feel how soft they were, but he didn't want to risk rushing her off.

  She sighed, wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

  "Do you know about the folding?” he asked.

  "The folding? Silly old knight's tale."

  "That's what I thought."

  "My mama told me how this world really got started. I'll tell you, if you want to hear. Do you want to?"

  "I do,” Beaners said. “I do want to hear.” He almost didn't recognize his own voice, because it was soft, almost sweet. He leaned his head against Roxy's shoulder, and she let him.

  "Okay then,” she said. She closed her eyes, and took a breath. “Once upon a time, all the towns were mixed. The townfolk did all sorts of different jobs. But in a lot of the towns, all the jobs were going to Texico."

  "What's Texico?” Beaners asked.

  "I don't know. Don't interrupt."

  "There was one small town, though, that had a very big heart. The townfolk hired a gunslinger to help them save their town, and the gunslinger came up with an ingenious plan: make their town into a place for people to go on vacation. But the town wasn't near a pretty lake, or a beach, and no one famous had ever died there, so how could they get people to travel all the way to their small town for a vacation? The gunslinger had the perfect plan: turn their town into a superhero town. Superheroes were only in books then, they weren't real people.

  "So the townfolk dressed as their favorite superheroes, and people started to come to their town for vacation with their children."

  "Their children? They owned children?"

  "Don't interrupt. The townsfolk took their roles very seriously, playing their parts even when the vacationers weren't around, until they were living their parts all the time.

  "Now, other nearby towns saw what was happening, so they hired the gunslinger to help them save their towns, too, and he turned them all into vacation towns: Santa Land, Circus Town, Wild West Range, Bible Village, Hobbitown. It spread on and on, first because it was a way for the townfolk to survive, then a way for them to get rich, and finally, it became a way of life—it became a badge of pride for a town to have a theme. And that's how things got to be the way they are."

  Beaners’ head hurt, trying to get the gist of the explanation. He thought he understood. Towns used to be mixed, mostly filled with plain people, just as the knight had said. But there was no folding—that was just something people had made up because they'd forgotten what really happened.

  It was difficult for Beaners to imagine a mixed town. What were they, if they had no themes? How did the people who lived there think about the place where they lived? And what did they do there? It was like a person with no face. Yet this story rang true in a way the knight's did not. Beaners was skeptical when explanations involved spells or trolls or folding time.

  He left the alley three inches taller, looked up and down the street, spotted Green Arrow, legs spread, fists on hips, casting about impatiently. Beaners stuck two fingers between his lips and whistled.

  "Let's go, move your big ass!” Green Arrow said. He headed toward the gate at a brisk clip.

  Beaners hustled and fell into step behind him. He imagined that if he had a wife and knew she was at this very moment being banged in a whorehouse, he'd be testy too.

  "What did you find out?” Beaners asked, trying to keep up.

  "Diana wasn't very cooperative. One of her prospective clients may never walk again.” Green Arrow flashed a ‘that's my girl’ sort of grin. “So they sold her."

  "Where to?"

  "Circus Town.” Green Arrow paused to let it sink in. “What would Circus Town want with Diana?"

  Beaners didn't want to answer. No one wants to hear bad news from a clown. “No one works in Circus Town who wasn't born in Circus Town. It's an incestuous place."

  "Well, evidently some people do."

  He swallowed. “People have seen women being taken underground."

  Green Arrow stopped walking. Underground, where Management operates. Where no one who isn't Management, not even a superhero with a quiver of arrows, could ever reach.

  "What would she be doing there?” Green Arrow said.

  Beaners shrugged. Entertaining Management was his guess, but he didn't volunteer that. “That's where clowns come from,” he finally said.

  "That's where everyone comes from. What does that have to do with Diana?"

  "Nothing. I was just saying.” He hadn't known that superheroes came from underground, too. No one at Circus Town ever told him anything, except other clowns, and they didn't know anything.

  A working girl approached them. She started to say something to Green Arrow. He cut her off with a slashing hand gesture and a curse. She hurried away.

  "In any case, Diana is underground, that I'm sure of,” Beaners said.

  "Then that's where we're going."

  "You know we can't do that,” Beaners said. “We'd need an army to get in there."

  "Damn it!” Green Arrow said, pounding his fist into his palm.

  Beaners barely noticed this; most of his attention was turned inward, where the wheels were turning. He had an idea—the sort of insane idea people sometimes get and then quickly discard, because as soon as they consider it at any length, a dozen flaws quickly become evident, exposing the idea as an absurd impossibility. But this idea, as staggering and insane as it was, still held together after Beaners picked at it for a while, during which time Green Arrow had resumed walking.

  "Wait. I may have an idea,” Beaners said.

  Green Arrow went on walking.

  "Hey!” Beaners said, clutching at the end of his jerkin. “I have an idea."

  Green Arrow glanced at Beaners, but didn't slow. “I'm listening."

  "We go to the King of Mediaeval Village, and convince him to invade Circus Town."

  "Invade it?” He stopped, spun on Beaners with wide, incredulous eyes.

  "Invade it,” Beaners said. “We tell the King that the clowns are ready to rise up, that we can take out the security measures for the walls and open the gates from the inside. In exchange, he agrees that your wife and any other women underground go free. And so do the clowns."

  "The clowns are ready to rise up?” Green Arrow asked.

  "Let me worry about that,” Beaners said.

  Green Arrow stared hard at Beaners. “Can you really do this, clown? Are you serious?"

  "Do I look serious?"

  Green Arrow searched Beaners’ face. He nodded.

  * * * *

  Beaners was sure that if he looked down at his chest, he would see his heart thudding underneath the purple suit jacket he was wearing. He approached the entry turnstiles to Circus Town on wobbly legs. “This can't possibly work,” he said.

  "This is the only part of the plan that I have confidence in,” Green Arrow said. He looked Beaners up and down. “You're the spitting image of The Joker."

  Beaners had seen a few Jokers in Circus Town, and they did resemble clowns. There were not nearly as many Jokers as there were Batmans and Spidermans, so he and Green Arrow were banking on no one in Circus Town noticing that Beaners was awfully short, and had awfully big feet, for a Joker. He touched his forehead and looked at his finger, reassu
ring himself once again that the white grease paint covering the red and blue parts of his face was not sweating off. The green hair dye would take weeks to grow out, but the greasepaint left him one smudge from disaster.

  "Oh, by the way, I never asked how your own quest in Sextown went,” Green Arrow said as they moved along in line.

  Beaners said nothing, but his eyes spoke volumes. They were the eyes of a clown who has glimpsed the infinite.

  "I'm sure she took a hot shower immediately afterward. And scrubbed her skin with lye."

  Beaners chuckled but didn't laugh. His laugh would give him away. “She said I was the best clown she'd ever had."

  Green Arrow swiped his cash card at the turnstile, and they cruised into Circus Town, just two superheroes on a jaunt.

  As planned, they separated at the Ferris wheel. Green Arrow doubled back to set up in a sheltered spot near the gates. If all went well, he would open them as soon as Security was distracted putting down the insurrection. He'd serve as a sniper once the siege began.

  Beaners headed to the clowns’ tent.

  "Slinky, it's me,” Beaners said, grabbing a friend's shoulders. “Beaners,” he added when Slinky continued to stare blankly.

  "Beaners?” Slinky said. “Beaners!” He rubbed the tufts of green hair on the sides of Beaners’ head.

  "Beaners?” another clown named Gonzo said, turning. “Where the hell have you been?"

  "Outside,” Beaners said. “Outside the town.” Others gathered round, many of them clowns he'd known all his life. He could hear his words being passed through the tent, muttered from one cluster of clowns to the next. Beaners had been out of the town.

  "Here, help me with this,” Beaners said, grabbing one end of a cot. Slinky grabbed the other, and they stacked one cot on top of another, and then a third on top of that. Beaners climbed atop the wobbly dais. He looked into the sea of colorful faces, trying to think of what to say.

  "I've seen things,” he finally shouted to the quieting, colorfully dressed crowd. “You would not believe the things I've seen.” Beaners paused, giving them time to imagine.

  "I talked to all sorts of people.” A buzz went through the crowd.

  "I ate Mark food.” The buzz got louder, peppered with exclamations of alarm.