The Funny Man (29 page)

He shows it to his agent.

“Whoa,” the agent says at the end. The funny man is frowning as he tries to manipulate the foot back into proper alignment.

“What?”

“That’s weird.”

“Funny weird.”

“No, weird weird, gross weird. Cover your face and turn away and don’t even look at it through parted fingers weird.”

“Really?”

“Hell, yeah. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Not as much as you’d think.” The funny man looks down and flops his foot around a little more. He’s found that if he does it for too long, the skin starts to turn blue, which
is
a little gross, but the flopping itself, hilarious.

His agent holds his hands in front of his face, not even parting his fingers, trying to block the view. “Don’t ever do that in front of an audience.”

“But it’s good. I know it’s good. You’re reacting. Reaction is good.”

“Laughter is good. Tears can even be good. Shock and horror is not good.”

The funny man sits down and tugs his foot back into place so his agent will stop wincing. “What a wuss,” the funny man thinks. “This is it,” the funny man says. “This is the new thing. This is the comeback.”

“I don’t think so,” the agent says. “I can’t let you show that to the world.”

Normally, the funny man would simply demand what he wants from his agent and he would get it, but in this case, he doesn’t just want what he wants, he wants to be right. It is important that the agent agree, that the funny man be redeemed, not just coddled or handled. “Tell you what,” the funny man says, “one show, a test, and then you’ll see that I know what I’m talking about.”

Relieved that the funny man is not going to take more flesh from his hide, the agent agrees.

30

A
FTER ANOTHER TWO
weeks at the center, following a relatively light day of treatment and a very gentle expulsion by the goo, Chet breezed into my bungalow wearing civilian clothes, a crew-neck sweater, white linen slacks, and loafers. He looked ready for the post-regatta yacht club reception or a J. Crew cover. He held a bundle of additional clothes covered in dry-cleaner cellophane over his arm.

“You dress up nice, Chet,” I said.

“Thank you, sir, and you will too.” He held the clothes out to me. They looked like carbon copies of what I wore for the press junket on my first movie, strategically distressed jeans, white button-up shirt, blue blazer. “Now, no time to waste, we’ve got a party to go to.”

By this time I’d pretty much figured out the WHC game and I was wholly on board. If it was stock, I would’ve made it 100 percent of my portfolio. They did not
take
your memories, there was no wiping clean of the slate. Rather, they
cleansed
your memories and they returned sanitized, 99-percent free of psychic harm. The theory was that over time, the damage accrued, memories piling up like plaque in an artery and at some point the blockage is complete and well … we’re getting close to hearing about the kind of harm that can cause.

They seemed to be a custom job on each guest, though. Mitch Laver had had his ability to feel physical pain cleared, but when I banged my head on the shower door in my room, I saw stars like I would’ve any other time. I wasn’t sure if all this was a good thing, but I couldn’t deny that I was feeling better than I had in a long time, and that things I never should have forgiven myself for no longer seemed so terrible. Everything from the past was at arm’s length, like a movie I’d seen once long ago starring someone else.

Just that morning, the goo’s final question was, once again, “What do you want?” and I said, “To be with someone,” and as I said it, I realized I meant it.

T
HE FOOD WAS
familiar at the party: pureed meats on toast circles, cylinders of Parma ham skewered on toothpicks, cheese puffs. Apparently, even the Center uses the same caterers as everyone else. The faces were familiar as well since all of us were famous, and I’d seen most of them at Mr. Bob’s speech. The party was at a kind of mansion-plantation-style house with a grand entryway featuring a double-helix staircase leading upward. We were ushered into several separate drawing rooms with fireplaces and overstuffed furniture frayed at the edges that had been pushed to the walls, exposing large, ornately woven throw rugs. Soft string music came from an indeterminate place, but it sounded live rather than recorded. Everyone was in regular clothes, not a tracksuit in sight, but not everyone was dressed up. Apparently, we had been outfitted to look our best. In some cases that best meant urban-prep casual (me), while in others it meant three-days-from-their-last-shower grunge.

Mingling was at a minimum and if they’d been as isolated as me, I understood why. The only person I’d spoken to on a semi-casual basis since I’d arrived was Chet. The unfamiliar faces were obviously the handlers, the handler/celebrity ratio pretty much being one to one. Without explanation, Chet had left me alone to nibble my canapé and sip from my goblet. (At the Center, the only glasses are goblets.) We all drank the omnipresent Center mead.

As I was about to go in search of a goblet refill, Chet reappeared with one in his hand. With his other hand, he was steering a very recognizable face toward me.

“I believe you two are acquainted,” Chet said, exchanging my empty goblet for the full one.

“We got toasted together,” I said, and she smiled.

“Wonderful,” Chet said. “Perhaps you’d like to spend some time getting to better know each other.” He disappeared as quickly as he’d arrived.

I took a good look at her for the first time. Of course I’d seen her face a million times before. She was in my magazines, on my television. Her face looked at me from my box of cereal and I could chew and stare at her like we were having breakfast together. A breakfast for champions. Like the rest of the world I’d followed her path from child athletic prodigy, in a grand slam final at age fourteen, to an early adulthood of as-yet-to-be-fulfilled promise. She was nineteen now, maybe twenty, and she looked it; fresh, healthy, unspoiled. She wore a sheer white top pulled just off her shoulders that emphasized the broadness of her back and straight black pants that emphasized the length of her legs. I remembered she was tall, but being close again, I saw she had a half inch on me. Her hair was down from its usual ponytail, which softened her face from the competitive mask we were all used to. She looked both beautiful and powerful. I felt like a used-up brute next to her, even with all my good work with the goo behind me.

I had no idea what to say. I knew everything about her already, didn’t I? She’d arrived fully constructed, fully understood.

“Those are some shoulders you have there.”

“Thank you,” she replied, half twirling and smiling shyly. “They’re what allow me to have such a devastating arsenal from both sides.”

“You don’t say.”

“I did. I did say.”

“Yeah, well, my material is killer,” I said.

“My serve is a howitzer, the forehand a rifle.”

“I’ve slayed entire audiences before.”

“I also have a slice backhand that I sometimes use to drive a dagger into my opponents’ hopes for victory.”

“When I murder my jokes, I bomb.”

“Does that happen often?” she asked.

“It didn’t used to.”

“When I’m tired, my serve occasionally misfires,” she said.

“Does that happen often?” I said.

“Too often, apparently,” she replied. She held out her hand. “I’m Bonnie, but everyone calls me Bunny, which I hate with a burning, passionate intensity of a thousand suns.”

“Most everyone calls me a washed-up hack.”

“Nice to meet you, Hack,” she said, smiling.

“You too, Bunny.”

We were starting to get to know each other, but I already felt out of words. We weren’t allowed to ask, “What brings you here?” And besides, I pretty much already knew. She couldn’t manage to win the big one. At a tour stop in Minsk she would be raising the trophy above her head at the end of a fortnight, but in the majors she would devastate her opponents as she moved through the draw until the finals, when she would fold in on herself and lose, often to obviously inferior players. One of the sports weeklies had put her on the cover, a crown askew on her head with the caption M
ISS
R
UNNER
-U
P.

Just as I was about to say, “nice meeting you” and go looking for my Chet life preserver, she placed her cool, dry hand in my sweaty one and said, “I think I saw a pool in the back.”

31

I
AM DEBATING
whether or not to tell my therapist that this will be my final session. On the one hand, it will be a delicious feeling to let him know I am leaving. On the other, our relationship has been changed by his testimony, and even though I am assured that any fresh sessions are re-covered by the privileges of confidentiality, now that I have born witness to how he sees me, it can’t help but color our present. The White Hot Center managed to hit my reset button, but I don’t seem perfectly immune from fresh wounds.

Sitting in front of him this final time, I realize that I can’t not talk about what I want to talk about.

“This is our last session, I’m afraid,” I say.

“Are you fearing the outcome of the trial?” We are close to a verdict, close enough that it may come between now and our next scheduled session. It’s just that I won’t be around to hear it.

“Not at all.”

“Then how could you know that this will be our last session?”

“Because I’m leaving.”

“And where are you going?”

“I’m going back. She and I are going to be together.” I think that I hear a sigh start to leak out of him, but he’s too much of a pro to give in to that temptation. He knows that if he sighs there will be a fight over the sigh and that if he’s doing his job we shouldn’t be fighting over a sigh.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. I believe I do. Having seen him on the stand I now know how he takes what I tell him in therapy and filters it into what he calls the patient’s “overall personal gestalt,” in short, my modus operandi.

“And what’s that?” he replies.

“You’re thinking that I’m crazy.”

“We’ve talked about this before,” he says. There’s an extra wrist flick at the end of the gesture, a dismissal.

When I returned from the White Hot Center, I told him everything. I thought, just maybe, as the therapist to fallen stars that he might have had other clients who had spent time at the WHC. We had one session between my return and the shooting, and I explained how I had been transformed, how I had been washed clean, how I had met someone and that from that moment forward I would be getting what I wanted, that I had been temporarily deflected, detoured by some failures, but that was over, my eyes were firmly fixed back on the prize, which was a lifetime of soul mating with an amazingly sensitive and nubile young woman and that after everything I’d been through, that maybe, just maybe, I deserved it.

I didn’t necessarily yet believe that last part at the time, but he pushed my buttons.

“And where is this place?” he says.

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“And how did you get there?”

“I told you before, two male models kidnapped me.”

He responds with the gesture. He is testing me for consistency in my story.

“Two male models kidnapped me, they tranquilized me and when I woke up I was on a boat. For several weeks I spent my days encased in goo sharing all of my memories, many of the same things I’ve told you over the last several years, the only difference being after I told these things to the goo I felt better, whereas when I tell them to you, I feel like I might be the lowliest shit on the planet, and if you don’t wipe that look off your face, I may leap across the room and smack you.”

He doesn’t flinch. He knows I’m not going to do anything. I hate him for knowing these things. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says.

“And what’s that?”

“I see somebody who should be working to integrate his life but instead remains rooted in a fantasy.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, for one, we both know you didn’t go anywhere.”

“And how do we know that?” I say.

“Because you are the sort of person who is kept track of and no one saw you leave your apartment. Because there is no such place like the one you describe. Because people can’t be hit in the face with a baseball and not experience broken bones. Because when people die, they stay dead. I could go on, but why should we bother?”

“If I didn’t go anywhere, how did I kick the drugs?”

“Is that what you think happened?”

There is a long silence at the end of which I say, “I’m not going to miss you.”

“I have to ask,” he says, “are you going to do something foolish?”

“I’m sure you’d think so.”

He shakes his head like a pitcher waving off the catcher’s signs. “That was my fault. I should’ve been more clear. You’re not going to harm yourself, are you?”

“Of course not.”

He stands up from his chair. Our time is up. Somehow he knows, even though he never looks at a watch or a clock. “Then I look forward to seeing you next week.”

Maybe it’s better this way. He’ll be as surprised as anyone, my little bit of revenge for him believing he knows me so well. We shake and on the way out I nod at the receptionist and she tells me to have a wonderful day as she picks up the phone to place the call that will give me exactly twenty-four minutes to be back inside my apartment. I hit the streets and put on my sunglasses and pull a cap out of my pocket and yank it down over my head and even though everybody knows me, as I walk home, nobody recognizes me.

32

T
HERE WAS A
pool in the back, with a patio empty of people and a view that went straight to the ocean. The pool was shaped like a dolphin with blue tiles lining the sides and bottom. The water was perfectly clear. As she approached the ledge she dropped her slacks and stripped off her top, revealing the athletic underwear beneath. With three skips and a double-footed jump she launched herself gracefully into the water at the dorsal fin before swimming underwater to the snout and surfacing, her hair parted perfectly down the middle and slicked to the sides of her head.