The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter One: An Unsettling Interview

The dream was the same every night. A clown sits before a gilt-framed mirror with a crack running across it. The reflection shows white greasepaint, red around the mouth, blue around the eyes, a red rubber ball on his nose. He turns his face this way and that. Then he takes off his little cone-shaped hat and lets it drop on the floor. The frilly collar follows. Next the red nose comes off, making a popping sound in parting. He pulls the cork from an unmarked green bottle, soaks a folded cotton cloth, and begins to wipe off his makeup, first the forehead, then the cheeks, then the mouth, and lastly the eyes. And then—nothing. I'd awake with a shock, my heart pounding in my ears, trembling like a child with my mother's name on my lips. Craving sleep but fearing its treachery, I drifted hour after long hour between the darkness of the night and the blackness of oblivion. Come morning I'd be more tired than if I'd never slept at all.

Sleep deprivation was taking its toll. I felt brittle and persecuted. The coffee that got me through the day gave me shimmering headaches, and I contemplated giving cigarettes another try. I tried to maintain appearances around the office but I could feel the inquisitive eyes of my staff as I passed. It's hard to keep a low profile when it's your face on the billboard outside. Selling peace of mind, at that. Me, I hadn't known a moment's peace in three weeks.

I jabbed the speakerphone with a toothmarked pencil. "Yes, Mr. Hunter?" came Angela's voice.

"Please, Angela, call me Andy," I said.

"Andy," she said. It was a little routine of ours I'd once enjoyed.

"Has anyone called for me this morning?"

"Not so far. I would have put them through, right? You're taking calls?"

"Of course, of course. Never mind." I lifted and dropped the receiver to break the connection. Still no word from Lou Black. I tapped the pencil annoyingly on the blotter.

It started with Subject 17. Three weeks later his image remained etched in my mind, slouching there in the rosewood armchair, the collapsed septum of his pug nose, that halfhearted comb-over. I could still smell the stale breath that would linger over my desk when he was gone. "I was a clown," he said, though he looked no different from a salesman or a plumber. His stubby hands were thick with coarse hair, the nails bitten to the quick. "You know that from my file, I guess. Does it say why I stopped?" I shook my head. "That's the thing," he said, and became self-conscious. I gestured for him to continue, a benevolent smile on my face. Although my customers invariably considered their stories unique, they followed a similar pattern: existence had been unfulfilling, but then Integrated Consciousness showed them a better way to enjoy the bounty of modern life, and they had me to thank for it. I'd smile and say it was all in a day's work.

"I was going through a rough time," Subject 17 went on. "Man." He shook his head. I waited. "It was affecting my work, you know? The kids weren't laughing. Got to where I started to have trouble getting jobs. Word of mouth, know what I'm saying? A clown's supposed to have baggy pants, not baggy eyes. Not to mention a Xanax habit. That's how I ended up here. The money." He brightened. "Kind of funny if you think about it—you straighten me out, then pay me for the privilege. This is some country."

Something about him made me uneasy. I glanced at his stat sheet. The system read him as thirty-four percent Screwball Comedy Renter, twenty-eight percent Neon Sign Romanticist, nineteen percent Repressed Toast-Giver, sixteen percent Cigar Enthusiast, traces of Fantasy Football Strategist and Weekend Aerobicizer. An odd matrix, but weren't they all? I motioned him on impatiently.

He cleared his throat. "It was the Clown's Graveyard." I jumped as if shocked. "You know the old story, right?" I nodded dumbly, hearing his words down a long, windowless corridor. "Sure, everybody does. But it's different for clowns. It runs deep. It's real, you know? For me, it was bad. It woke me up at night. What if I can't find my way there when the time comes? What if my instincts fail me? Get left behind out here with the rubes, die on some hospital ward instead of with my own kind. I spent all my time thinking about it, what I heard about it, where I figured it might be. Just in case. Because if you don't already know where it is, brother," he shook his head, "you ain't finding it."

Subject 17 stared over my shoulder, his eyes reflecting the wisps of fog rushing past the window. His face darkened in the shadow of the fear he described. He shook himself. "Then along comes Integrated Consciousness and I forget all about it. Forgot all about it like it was some crazy dream until just the other day, some guy brings it up out of nowhere. 'Clown's Graveyard?' I go. 'You got to be kidding me.'"

His fingertips skittered up and down the side of his leg as he spoke. "The Clown's Graveyard. What is that? It's a myth. It's a joke. Showbiz superstition. It's not real—not like Integrated Consciousness." He chuckled, then coughed hard into his fist. "I don't know if I'm going to go back into clowning, but I know one thing for sure," he said hoarsely. "When my time comes, the only place I'm gonna be drawn is to bed." He nodded, and then kept on nodding. I stared at him vacantly. After a few minutes he began to redden, a strain showing in his thin smile.

I had forgotten about the Clown's Graveyard as well. Forgotten all about it.

The images had come flooding back in the days and nights since I'd seen Subject 17. The sprawling heaps of battered floppy shoes, discarded bicycle horns, used-up rubber noses, flat-tire unicycles, trick canes. The majestic big-tops rising one alongside the other like foothills as far as the eye could see. The sun that rose red and worked its way through yellow, green, and blue to a purple sunset. None of which I knew to be accurate, of course. I had imagined it differently every time, back when I was still young enough to believe in legends. Where it lay, no one knew. What would be found there, likewise. But the name itself vibrated with mystery and possibility. What nature of place do they seek out when the time comes to pass from this world? What traces do they leave when they follow in the oversized footsteps of foregoing clowns lost to memory?

When I was younger I'd been consumed with thoughts of the Clown's Graveyard, and the seemingly inevitable proposition that I would one day find it. Even after my belief in its existence had been shattered, and my dream of discovery lost, the Clown's Graveyard had lingered in my imagination like a stubborn childhood superstition, the way I still never opened umbrellas indoors, and lifted my feet when crossing railroad tracks. But no longer, I reflected, staring through smoked skyscraper glass at the rows of little houses climbing the distant Oakland Hills like ivy. When had it finally faded from my mind?

"Andy?"

I jumped. Angela smiled apologetically from the doorway. "The Consortium members are starting to get here. You know—for the meeting. I just wanted to let you know so you could get there before the muffins are all picked over."

"Thanks, Angela. Those guys, you know how they can be with the muffins, like jackals on a ..." my face went hot as I groped for a clever way to finish the thought.

"Jackals," she laughed mercifully. "You said it. But I know you can keep them in line." She hesitated, then pulled the door closed on her way out.

I cringed at the pity and concern I'd seen in her eyes. Did I seem that out of it, that I would have forgotten about the meeting? I checked my watch. Well, it was my company. Let them wait, I muttered with cowardly bravado.

I ran into the muffin man on the way to the conference room. He stopped short when he saw me and his eyes darted from my face to the framed magazine covers lining the hallway, a parade of Andy Hunter mug shots with cover lines like "He Knows What You Want" and "The Guru of Good Times" and "Life Doctor." The starstruck pastry carrier was right to be impressed. Call it a movement, a company, or a creed, Integrated Consciousness was the biggest thing since the Book of Mormon and I was the one who'd come up with it. Barely thirty years old, I commanded the respect and loyalty of tens of millions of adoring customers while masterfully orchestrating the nexus of systems and partnerships that kept the enterprise flourishing. Until recently, anyway. For the past few weeks it had been hard enough just to keep myself together, let alone administer my empire properly.

I took a deep breath and opened the conference room door. The Consortium greeted me with businesslike eyes, then returned to the muffins at hand. There had been a time when they admired me, even courted me, but it hadn't taken them long to get over it when my performance began to slip.

Collectively the fifteen Consortium members represented a formidable share of the gross national product, but they had the table manners of twelve year olds. Ben Croenauer of Infonomica was picking out his raisins and assembling them into a wall between him and Carl Angstrom, the self-made founder of American Microchip. Sally Anderson of the Preen Foundation displayed the masticatory progress of each mouthful as she yammered on about some obscure white paper she'd read, willfully ignoring her neighbors' lack of interest like a pig-tailed brat on a sugar high. Jim Feathers, chairman of EarthScape Media, busied himself smearing buttery crumbs on the keys of his text pager. Along one side of the ebony table, half a dozen money guys whispered conspiratorially in dark suits and crisp shirts with wing-pulling smiles on their faces. The thought of spending the next two hours with these people sent bands of panic across my chest and I considered fainting to escape their company. Recovering, I took a shaky breath, swallowed wrong, choked briefly. The only remaining place was next to Ed Blanston, my right-hand man. I sat, anticipating the sharp pain of his cop shoe heel in my shin when I slipped up. Blanston had taken notice of my recent lapses and had made it clear that his loyalty was to the idea, not to the man, if it came down to it.

They had left me a bran walnut.

Frank Carter, my VP of marketing, was the only one to arrive after me, tripping over his feet and spilling handouts as he mumbled apologies for being late. Blanston silenced him with a blunt wave. "Thank you all for coming," he said, commandeering the meeting without so much as a by-your-leave. I was all too happy to let the alpha dog CEO take center stage, and tried to assume a contemplative mien as befit the position of chief vision officer.

"I'll keep this brief," Blanston lied as the Consortium wadded up their wrappers and tossed them in the general direction of the wastebasket. He beamed self-importantly. "My friends, we're seventeen days out from a nucular explosion."

Seventeen days. Cold sweat trickled down the small of my back. There had been a time when October 10th had seemed as impossibly distant as the year 2000 once was. Now the Release of Integrated Consciousness 2.0 loomed only three Saturdays away.

"People are looking forward to the Release like it was Christmas, a cancer cure, and the Super Bowl all wrapped into one," Blanston went on. "This thing is going to be bigger than cigarettes. We should be able to sign up a million and a half new members the first week alone, and a hundred K every week after that. Add upgrades by the installed base and we're looking at a conservative ten million units by the end of the year. All the pieces are in place. From here on out it's just a matter of execution."

"Quit blowing smoke up our ass," growled Carl Angstrom of American Microchip. "What I want to know is, what the hell is being done about the slippage in mobile espresso maker penetration? I've got three shitloads of infusion control subsystems that ain't going anywhere until it picks up again."

Blanston looked pained. "Jesus, Carl, can't you see the bigger picture here? All right, maybe a few of the elements are taking a little longer than we thought to make the transition. Maybe a few Herbal Tea Memoirists and Uptown Brownstoners have been slow to get hip to the mobile brew lifestyle. Hell, there's a million and one adoption lags I could list if you want to get into it, and our numbers have never been better anyway. But that's all Release 1.0 crap. Once we get 2.0 out there, it's all moot. No slippage. No more lags. You'll move your infusion control systems, I promise you that."

It irritated me to hear Blanston talk about Integrated Consciousness in such crassly commercial terms, though I knew that was all the Consortium cared about.

"Can we move on here?" Ben Croenauer whined. "What's the status of the Omnicast?"

"Locked, loaded, and ready for prime time," Blanston shot back. "On the East Coast, that is. Drive time, Mountain and Pacific. Hunter will intro it live, then roll the infomercial package. Carter's got the final cut for us, right, Carter?"

It was more a threat than a question. Frank Carter nodded anxiously and fiddled with the wall switches until he managed to dim the lights and turn on the monitor.

The video opened on a head-and-shoulders shot of a brown-haired thirty-something in casual office clothes. He looked bored. The soundtrack faded in with dreary doctor's office music and the camera pulled back to show him sitting at a table in a tidy, well-appointed kitchen flipping through a slick magazine with one hand and listlessly mousing his way around the Web with the other. A TV in the background clicked from one channel to the next with chronographic regularity. "For crying out loud," the guy wailed at last, "I've got the whole world at my fingertips—why can't I find what I'm looking for?"

A wave of satisfied nods passed around the dim conference room.

A door slammed offscreen and the guy looked up. "Allie? Is that you?" he called.

A confident, together young woman came into the picture. She was carrying a briefcase, a pair of boxing gloves, and a string bag full of produce and she was all smiles. "You seem troubled, Leo," she purred as she set her things down on the counter and joined him at the table.

"Do you ever feel like you're spending your life sorting through the clutter without ever finding something worthwhile? Instead of actually enjoying your life?"

"I used to feel that way," Allie said. "But that was before I discovered Integrated Consciousness. Now every moment of the day brings me closer to my ideal lifestyle. And I've never felt better!"

"Integrated Consciousness. You mentioned that the other day."

"That's right," said Allie. "Integrated Consciousness is the technology-enhanced lifestyle that takes the guesswork out of good times. And it was developed by none other than Andy Hunter, the author of Finding Happiness in Haystacks, Listening to Your Lifestyle, Look No Further, and other million-sellers."

"I know who Andy Hunter is," Leo said, stroking his chin. "I've seen him on Good Morning America, Larry King, and the Sam Romero Show. But a technology-enhanced lifestyle ... isn't that kind of complicated?"

Allie laughed. "Boy, have you got a lot to learn. Integrated Consciousness is about streamlining your life, not complicating it. And with the Release of IC 2.0 just two weeks away, it's about to get even better!"

"That's right," said Andy Hunter, and the camera pulled back to show him—me—perched jauntily atop the butcher block. The person on the screen, myself only a few weeks ago, seemed a stranger to me now. I envied his supreme self-assurance and the unequivocal success within his grasp. He slept soundly at night. "When you get right down to it," he continued, "it's as simple as this: you tell us what you're looking for, and we'll tell you where to find it."

"We can't ask for better than that!" Leo and Allie chirped in unison.

Andy Hunter hopped off the butcher block and walked over to the table. "You see, Leo, sometimes living in the modern world can be like ... well, like eating at a restaurant with too many items on the menu. How can you be sure to order the meal that's right for you? The waiter can give you his recommendation, but that's based on his taste buds, not yours. You could sample every dish, but at this establishment you'd be an old man before you'd even reached the main course."

On and on he spoke in the folksy, engaging manner that had made Andy Hunter a rich man. I looked around the table and saw in the eyes of the Consortium the esteem and love they'd once held for me. This was the Andy Hunter of their dreams, not the erratic shell I'd become. How could I have fallen so far so quickly?

I took advantage of the darkness to close my eyes. Try as I might, I found it impossible to concentrate on the infomercial, the meeting, or even the Release itself. I laughed bitterly at the thought that I should be so distracted now of all times, with my moment of triumph so close at hand. The Release would be the ultimate realization of my vision for Integrated Consciousness, the culmination of years of hard work. Yet the harder I struggled to focus, the more elusive it became, like a dream turning to mist in the morning sun, while my recurring nightmares remained all too vivid.

Integrated Consciousness had begun simply enough. I'd had the idea shortly after my arrival in San Francisco, a bright young Midwesterner with an abiding curiosity about the world around me and a gift for persuasion. Watching my fellow Americans going about their business, it struck me that the pursuit of happiness is an inexact science at best. Everyone knows what they want, or they think they do, but they have a devil of a time getting it. As they assemble the components of their lives, the jobs, faiths, relationships, hobbies, opinions, and so forth, the world they create for themselves always seems just a little off, not quite what they had in mind, like a can of paint that's just a shade too yellow or a bit too green. It makes them anxious, confused, vulnerable.

It was my premise that designing your own lifestyle should be no more taken for granted than changing your own oil, filling your own cavities, or prescribing your own medication. Some things are better left to experts. Applying science and technology to the pursuit of happiness, we would gather data on the activities, attitudes, and beliefs of massive numbers of people, break out the individual components of which their lifestyles were composed, and assemble a periodic table of these fundamental elements, cataloguing their unique existential properties. Using this knowledge, we would distill the crude home-brewed lifestyle of each of our customers, then feed the recipe back to them in purified form, an aesthetic approximation of meaning guaranteed to satisfy.

Being a temp I didn't have the capital to put it together myself, so I wrote a white paper presenting a blueprint for the perfect psycho-industrial machine. Data mining, psychology, theology, and semiotics went in one end; pinpoint marketing came out the other. Investors, volunteer executives, and would-be strategic partners beat a path to my door before I'd even drafted a business plan.

It took three years to build Integrated Consciousness 1.0. We put everything into it but the kitchen sink: TV ratings, magazine subscriptions, demographics, census forms, every membership and parishioner list available and a few that weren't, Web traffic, tax returns, class reunion reports, credit ratings, advertising case studies, purchase histories, medical records, all cross-referenced to deliver insight at a population granularity of one. Once we opened for business, we often knew all we needed to know about a customer before he walked in the door.

Integrated Consciousness 2.0 would achieve the ultimate level of automation, efficiency, and convenience by eliminating entirely the customer's conscious involvement. A wee apparatus encased in tortoiseshell Bakelite was tucked behind the customer's ear to collect information on the person's activities and state of mind and upload it to IC Central. On the return trip, the earpiece whispered subconscious suggestions and recommendations to guide its wearer to a better life. Another satisfied customer.

Our subscribers naturally loved Integrated Consciousness and the media hailed my contributions to the cause of material happiness, but I wasn't doing it for altruistic reasons. I wasn't in it for the money, either, though I didn't mind getting rich. I wasn't just the chief vision officer of Integrated Consciousness; I was also an avid customer, first in line for each new version. And it had seemed to be working. I was free of the questions that had once haunted me. I was having the time of my life. Until Subject 17 showed up, that is. And the clown at the mirror, with the bloodshot eyes and the trembling hands, and the turpentine-soaked rags to wipe away the greasepaint and reveal—

My body jerked awake and I found myself alone in the conference room, the lights on, the chairs in disarray.

Not quite alone. Blanston was there.

"I enjoyed your presentation," I said.

"I didn't make one," he said, feet planted between me and the door. He stood about five ten, more stout than stocky. He wore ironed bluejeans and penny loafers to the office and dress shirts on weekends. He could probably give a mean wedgie. In a schoolyard Blanston would have been kneeling on my chest, but in this field he served under me, awed by the power of my ideas. He wasn't in it for the money either; he just loved the thought of redeeming the national economy from nagging externalities like consumer indecision and sales-dragging ennui. My words had shown him the light. If he'd had the imagination to think in metaphors outside the marketplace, he would have considered himself my St. Paul. Until recently, anyway.

"So here's the deal," he said impassively. "You've brought us a long way. You've delivered the goods, there's no question about that. Shoppertainment, African chic, tartare bars, downtown sweat lodges—one success after another. But the time has come to take it to the next level. It has to happen. It's meant to happen. It's what we're here for. And that's bigger than any of us." He walked slowly toward me. "I hate to see you like this, Andy, I really do," he said. When he got to my chair, he leaned on the arms and spoke humidly in my face. "You're not going to fuck this up. I don't know where your head has been but it doesn't matter. Try concentrating on this: there is always a contingency plan. If the value of a corporate asset is being undermined, measures will be taken. And we consider Andy Hunter to be a very, very important asset." I trembled in spite of myself and smelled my own fear.

"Don't worry about me, Ed," I said, pulling myself up in the chair. "I'll hit my mark. You just take a seat and watch."

He gave me a moment to contemplate his unimpressed corneas, then stalked off to the executive bathroom to spatter on the floor in front of the urinal.

I poured three fingers of single-malt in a sticky mug and pondered the hills across the Bay, the late afternoon sun blazing in a thousand windows. I welcomed the evening and dreaded the night, when I would spend dark hours slouched in a club chair in a haze of alcohol and muted television, now and then glancing over my shoulder at the faces reflected in the night sky, fighting sleep to forestall a while longer the dream I knew would come.

The phone chirped. I fumbled it out of the cradle and held it to my ear. No one there—just a dial tone. I hung up, my hand resting on the receiver.

I had hoped it would be Lou Black, but that was a longshot. I had tried everything to track him down. Private investigators, classified ads, bribed bartenders—nothing. The trail had gone cold in twelve years. I'd thought I was done with Lou forever after what happened in Indianapolis but it seemed urgent now that I find him.

I was cracking up.

Lou would know what to do. He knew what made me tick, and he'd set me straight about a few things when we were kids. I had a feeling that only he could help me now. Though I had no reason to think he'd want to. And it was a moot point if I couldn't find the guy. I sat and stared at the phone and my thoughts trailed off into despair.

My amazement at what happened next would come to seem quaint in retrospect.

I heard a voice. It was quiet, just barely audible, and it was coming from the phone I had only a moment ago returned to its cradle, dead. I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear. "Look, if this is one of Castleton's goons ..." the voice was saying.

"Hello?"

"Andy?"

"Who's this?" I asked.

I heard a radio in the background. It sounded like a baseball game. After a few seconds I heard the pop of a match, then a slow exhale. "It's Lou. What's up?"

Chapter Two: The Adventure Begins