The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Ten: Pyromania

Wednesday was one of those bright days San Francisco gets in late September to compensate for the dreariness of July and August. The streets downtown were full, everyone taking cigarette breaks, running errands, any excuse to get outside and feel the sun and the air one last time before the chilly winds and early nightfalls of autumn. Those stuck at the office wouldn't feel much like working either, instead whiling away the hours shopping, catching up on showbiz news, handicapping the nascent NFL season, picking stocks, playing shooter games, revising their screenplays. On the warm stone pedestal of the Die-Cutter's Monument at Market and Sansome, a pigeon and a bum shared a languid crust of bread, a cart with a handful of empties parked nearby. It made me wish I was still employed, so perfect was the day for malingering. But we had a job to do.

The noon hour found a capacity crowd at Justin Herman Plaza, shirtsleeved financiers, database programmers, brand managers and admen from the flatlands of North Beach, scabby kids clambering over the hideous geometric fountain at the end of the red-brick agora. The hillside beyond shaded four or five nappers beneath deep green oaks. We left the Cutlass at a meter with the keys under the visor. Lou and Joe started unloading the trunk as I walked nonchalantly into the plaza.

This was my first time in such a crowd since my abduction, and though I'd blackened my hair with Kiwi polish and donned a pair of Barber Floyd eyeglasses I felt as conspicuous as if my hat were on fire. I expected to be recognized and mobbed at any moment. It had happened before, in grocery stores, at airports, just walking down the street.

It wasn't happening this time, though. Perhaps Digital Andy had stripped me of my celebrity along with my identity, rendering me invisible even without a disguise.

I moved through the crowd, hearing a lot about how expensive condos were getting and the latest theme restaurants, and the new roadster already on six month back order. I saw a lot of Zen Tailor Co. Dharma pants, IC's official Hot Pants of the Month for September, so called because their comfortable yet flattering construction reflected timeless truths. Klieg-lit skater kids struck provocative poses for fashion photographers, their T-shirts proclaiming allegiance to nonexistent thrash bands. There were high-tech gadgets everywhere, each smaller and more titanium than the last. Air golf swings pumped like derricks in a West Texas oilfield.

San Francisco hadn't always been this way. When I first arrived the place had been full of artists and bohemians, poets and street magicians, witches, spies, psychics, mad inventors. They glowed with strange energy, a race apart, aliens, Atlanteans. Even the solid Irish of the Sunset and the scowling Korean shopkeepers in the Mission were the oddest of their kind, having chosen to live out here on the edge of the world at the seismically treacherous tip of a mountainous peninsula. As San Franciscans they took pride in their heritage one and all. They went out of their way to celebrate it, brag about it, name alleyways after it. I wondered at its source, perhaps a mineral infused in the Hetch Hetchy reservoir or the sun's rays refracted by the surrounding seas.

Now the trees had been trimmed and retro streetlights installed to keep the nighttime at bay and the bartenders stocked souvenir shirts instead of knockout drops. The San Franciscans had become as tame as hand-fed deer at a suburban campground. People came now for the climate or the schools or to work in technology. The local color was a nice bonus when they remembered to notice it. The great collective undertaking was abandoned and forgotten; folks just painted their window trim purple and called it a day. San Francisco had become an aesthetic. How had it happened? I knew all too well.

The City had always been IC's key market, a forty-nine square mile beta site, a prototype for the America of tomorrow. And the future at the moment was particularly bright, practically blinding, lots of new roads being built to handle all the new cars of the happy, productive workers with well-rounded selves and plenty of hobbies for the weekends. ATMs glowed red hot and ratings were through the roof. Mrs. Winchester's ghosts wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell, I thought.

A face to my left caught my eye. My heart stopped. It was Dave Calder—and standing right next to him was Lynne Resnick—two of my old co-workers from the ad agency. We'd been pretty good friends for a while in a work-related way. The three of us would go to happy hour after work, drink until it was too late for dinner, and meet for coffee and aspirin the next morning at Arab George's store. Now and then we even got together on the weekend. I could see Dave's lips moving and I strained to make out what he was saying. Dave had been one of the funniest guys at the agency. He was a confirmed paranoiac, his mind racing, careening, but he could joke about it, and did so frequently. Lynn had always lit up around him and I'd wondered if the two of them would get together. It looked like they might have, though Lynne wasn't lit at the moment. She looked like she was wondering whether she'd left the stove on. "... if he cashes in his options," I heard Dave say in a quiet moment before nearer voices drowned him out again.

Then I made inadvertent eye contact with Lynne, whose expression registered dim recognition, and I immediately made it worse by turning away too quickly. I mapped out an escape route through the crowd, imagining Lynn pointing me out to Dave behind my back. But when I stole another look, they had their attention fixed on the fountain. More specifically, on the flag waving in the air above the fountain.

The flag looked great. It was big enough to be visible to the entire plaza, as I'd hoped. "Hey," I said to a cluster of temps picnicking on the bricks a few feet away, "what do you make of that?"

Most continued their conversation but the one nearest me looked up. "I don't know," he said, "it looks like a big black flag with a banana on it. Hey," he said to the others, "what do you make of that?" One commented that it did indeed look like a banana. Another mentioned the mark on Alcatraz.

My heart raced. "What mark?"

"Didn't you hear? There's this big mark on Alcatraz, a crescent moon or a croissant or something. It appeared this morning, like with a big explosion and smoke and stuff."

"And you think this banana had something to do with that croissant?"

"No," she said impatiently, "the croissant was a banana, maybe."

We watched the flag as the rhubarb behind us coalesced into a common query and an expectant hush. The banana flag rose higher and the hairy simian hands holding the flagpole with it. With a flourish Joe hopped up onto the fountain and waved it from side to side as if signaling a ship. Gasps sounded all around and then tense chatter: monkey, banana, Alcatraz. The plaza erupted in speculation. Rumors flashed from one end to the other and back again like a wave in a bathtub, gaining magnitude and implausibility on each pass. A few of the crowd's more skittish members started backing out of the plaza, and that's when they discovered the banana peels Lou had distributed. The chimp had pilfered a tremendous quantity of his namesake from the farmer's market, dealing courageously with the task of discarding the sweet fruit inside. But the slippery skins served admirably, transforming an orderly retreat into a sprawling melee, legs flying everywhere. Over the course of the day the same would occur at strategic points across the city. I met Lou at the car just as Joe came scurrying back. I hustled the chimp into the back seat and we were off. "So far, so good," Lou said, waiting as a stray chicken walked jerkily across the road in front of us, perhaps a stowaway from the farmer's market.

A traffic reporter had been the first to discover our nocturnal handiwork, drawn to Alcatraz at dawn by red and blue plumes from the delayed-fuse devices we'd planted. "You just gotta see this, people," we heard him say, listening on a cheap transistor radio back at the Emperor Norton. "There's all kinds of colored smoke coming off of Alcatraz. Out of the exercise yard it looks like. And on the wall there's some kind of tag or symbol, some big old ear-shaped thing. I don't know what to make of it." Police and news helicopters soon joined him, their commotion drawing further attention to the baffling manifestation. Asked for comment, the mayor responded that he was monitoring the situation, and sent his driver to check it out. Drive time DJs riffed for hours on end, some forgetting entirely to mention the previous night's celebrity meltdown. Encouraged, Lou, Joe Bananas, and I had finished our doughnuts, changed clothes, and got to work.

Our day began at a South Park cyber café so old it dated from the days before cyber became squarer to say than Frisco. I logged on and stirred Sugar-in-the-Raw into my café au lait. "Re. the thing on Alcatraz," I addressed one chat room after another,

a friend of a guy i new use to work for this company that was so in stealth mode he couldnt even say what they did. it was started by a couple of ex company guys as in cia and some isreali colonel and backed by big big money from eurpoe or mabe russia. it was big time beyond revolutionary stuff. one day he disapeared and my friend went thru his stuff and found a piece of paper with that same banana thing on it but the rest was blacked out. he never saw the guy again..

"Is that all there is to that Internet thing?" Lou asked me.

Next we traced the constellation of cab depots, distribution centers, and bike-messenger corrals that dot the outer mission, seeding each cluster of pre-shift drivers with a different explanation of the bizarre apparition—a video shoot, an anarchist plot, Canadian vandals, druids—before releasing them on their rounds. We stopped by the Moscone Center and found a food-and-wine trade event in full swing. I almost couldn't pull Lou away from the sample trays before our stink bombs detonated. "Vegan fundamentalists," I told a gawking passerby as panicked restaurateurs came streaming out of the lobby. "They released some kind of tear gas in there. They're on a crusade or something."

By morning's end the normal order of things had been suspended as by blackout or blizzard along with the rest of the day's work. Even focusing productively about the banana event itself proved impossible as people digressed compulsively into unrelated odd occurrences and phenomena too obscure or ridiculous to mention before, only to be brought back to the topic at hand by the peel-related downfall of yet another pedestrian.

We sowed speculation from the bayshore to the sea. It was like touching a match to kindling. Each piece caught and spread and by afternoon the whole city was in flames. Debates raged on every streetcorner. "WHAT DOES IT MEAN?" asked the early edition of the Examiner over a four-color photo of the mysterious mark.

By mid-afternoon, cracks were appearing in the city's composure. Distracted motorists ignored lights and signs while trying to read cramped pager displays, knocked over equally oblivious jaywalkers, and kept on going. Crowds filtered out of office buildings and pooled around opinionated shoeshine men and dissenting belt vendors passing rumors like ribbons around a maypole. The streets teemed with roving packs of concerned citizens, sweatered academicians, ambitious graphic artists, scooter-riding executive vice presidents, who as they crossed paths intermingled and interbred to form new and different mobs. A naked man came running toward us as we sat in traffic on Van Ness, his hands fluttering over his head like pink birds, and after him came two men in white coats, one carrying an oversized butterfly net. Even the wind was deranged.

Things were going even better than I'd hoped. Perhaps the fabric of order was flimsier than I'd thought, liable to stretch or tear at the lightest tug.

Everywhere we went, plastered on construction fences, bus stops, and phone booths, I saw posters for the Gathering. It was a regular event for Integrated Consciousness customers, a networking party-user group-twelve step meeting where they could thrill in the presence of the Great Man himself. We held them the second Wednesday of every month, as today was, at Club 451, a warehouse with original artwork on the walls and four dollar bottled water at the bar. It was the place to be seen for the people that kind of thing mattered to. These were our most ardent followers, the early adopters. They mingled effortlessly trading plot points and laugh lines, their personalities as clearly defined as a focus-grouped sitcom. I was immeasurably relieved that I would miss this evening's event.

The sight of my airbrushed mug on the posters made me think of Digital Andy and I wondered what was going on back at IC Central. I wondered if they knew what was going on, or if they were on to us. I proposed a reconnaissance mission to check it out. Lou drew the assignment, having a far better chance of going unrecognized. He fashioned a fake mustache from a piece of Cutlass carpeting and pulled the brim of a golf visor low over his eyes. He fished a red plastic watering can out of the trunk. "I'll tell them I'm there to water the plants," he said. "It works every time."

Joe and I parked in an alley nearby and waited. We passed the time thumb wrestling but I couldn't focus, and fall after fall he snared my tender digit under his meaty thumb.

Finally Lou returned. "Man, that Angela is a cutie," he said.

"Hey, keep away from her. She's a nice girl."

"She tells me you're very busy these days. I'd observed how glum the office was and she said it was because you weren't around enough lately to boost morale."

"It's nice to be missed," I said.

Lou rolled down his window and lit a cigarette. The air in the alleyway smelled like dryer lint and glue. "And Blanston's on to us."

"He is? What did he say?"

"I came in, he was on the phone. 'Hunter's lost his mind, he's faked his own kidnapping and he's playing havoc out there. I want him taken care of.'"

Lou did an uncanny Blanston, that alto bassoon voice of his, and I burst out laughing. "Taken care of, huh? That's about what I would have expected." Blanston's menace seemed very remote at the time. "Could you tell who he was talking to?"

Lou shook his head. "He got off the phone in a hurry when this other guy came into the office so he could tear him a new asshole. 'How the Hell do we go from full traction to complete distraction in a single God-damned day! Nobody's with the program out there—no one! Traffic has gone haywire. They've got ants in their pants. It's completely irrational.' How does he know who's doing what?"

"Are you kidding? We knew when, how often, and to what our customers jerked off," I said. "You'd be amazed how much people will tell you in exchange for a little personalized service."

" 'I want this fixed. I don't care what it takes. I don't want to hear about any bananas or monkeys or cults. If this affects our share price or poisons any partnerships I will personally kill you myself with my own bare hands.'"

"The madder he is, the happier it makes me," I said. "Who was he talking to?"

"Brown hair, big nose," Lou said, indicating just how big, "dressed more hip than he could really pull off."

Poor Frank Carter, I thought. Everybody blames marketing when things get ugly.

Lou suggested we take a breather and regroup so we dropped off the chimp at the Emperor Norton and stopped by the Toronado in lower Haight. The place had its usual four p.m. crowd of grease monkeys and speedheads but there were also a few guys in chinos and button-down shirts bellied up to the bar, a handful of old people in old clothes, a mousy girl Friday in pedal pushers and glasses drinking a lemonade-looking drink with a straw. I ordered a couple of pints of IPA and we sat down to eavesdrop.

The room was electric. Everyone had a story to tell or a hypothesis to propose and they were on the edge of their seats, eager to speak their piece yet rapt in attention to each other's. A brash she-yuppie in a wool skirt described the odd behavior of her cats just that morning. An old guy with liver spots on his head told the rest about a place down in Santa Cruz County where the mysterious was commonplace and the laws of nature and science held no sway. The bartender broke his silence about the disturbing events of the previous afternoon. It was like hearing a song we'd written on the radio.

"These people seem promisingly unhinged," I said to Lou. "I can't imagine any of them are thinking much about their recommended programming right now."

Lou's songs came on the jukebox. First was a Johnny Cash number from the Folsom Prison record. Next was one I didn't recognize with a woman singer and a lot of distortion. By then we were talking about the old days, or rather about the stuff we used to talk about in the old days, sitting in Lou's dad's den in the middle of the night practicing smoking with the old man's unlit pipes, like how we'd get jobs in the merchant marine when we graduated Cornsilk Academy, or write a movie for me to direct and him to produce, whatever that meant. How we'd explore the Amazon basin and find a tribe of people no one else had ever seen before. We spoke as if we'd already done those things, creating an alternate past more real and fitting than the one from which we'd emerged.

At the end of the final song, Coltrane's "Summertime," the lack of conversation around us drew our attention. People stood two deep at the bar, eyes on the TV above. It looked to be a press conference. "That's right," the speaker said to a cluster of microphones in response to a question I didn't catch, and blinked against a barrage of flashbulbs. I took him to be Native American. "The canoe that has appeared on Alcatraz Island is a manifestation of the spirits of our ancestors, who hunted in these hills and swam in these rivers for generations before the white man took our land and encased it in concrete and steel. It stands for the spirit of our brothers who reclaimed Alcatraz Island for the American Indian Movement twenty-five years ago, and its appearance today is a call to our nations to come together and renew the struggle. The canoe will carry our people into a future where the land breathes once again, where birds fill the skies and fish fill the waters."

"But why is the canoe up on one end?" a voice asked from off camera. "Won't it sink?"

Without warning the television jumped straight up about four inches and a sharp concussion knocked me off my feet. The TV, still mid-air, showed the Indian bracing himself against his podium. The shaking continued amid a raucous rattling sound.

"It's an earthquake," I heard someone say.

"It's that banana thing again," said the bartender.

"It's God's judgment," barked one of the old people from the other end of the room. "Verily there shall appear on the Rock the Mark of Judgment so sayeth the Lord!"

The shaking subsided and the dust settled. Much of it had settled into our beers, along with a few chunks of plaster. We paid up and left. The buildings up and down the street didn't look much the worse for wear, a crack here, a small fire there. People on the sidewalk were talking about how all day long they'd been saying it looked like earthquake weather and it only figured, what with all that had been going on.

The radio said the quake had been a 5.2, not a blockbuster but enough to break some dishes and sprain a few ankles. After a couple of remotes from around town, they took calls from listeners. We heard about the gorilla in leather jacket and buttless chaps menacing Justin Herman Plaza, and the hostages being held at Moscone Center, and the strange electronic noises heard all over town just before the earthquake, and what it all had to do with the thing painted on Alcatraz.

"Hold everything folks, hold everything," the announcer said, dropping a caller mid-sentence, "my producer tells me—we need to take this call. Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Yes, hello sir."

"Hello?"

"Sir, hello, please turn down your radio. Sir?"

"There, that's it. Hello?"

"Yes, go ahead."

"I'm on the ferry, the Red and White to Tiburon, and there's a mermaid out here! She's been swimming alongside the ferry for the last twenty minutes just below the surface. I'm looking at her tail right now!"

"Can you describe the mermaid's upper body?"

"Well, she looks like she's got dark hair ... I can't tell if she's wearing anything ... she might have scallop shells over her boobs, I can't quite make it out. I—"

"Hello?" a new voice cut in. "Hey, I'm on the ferry too," it said as the original caller protested in the background. "Listen, you know what? The earthquake we just had? And the thing on Alcatraz? It's Atlantis, man. It's rising from the depths. The mermaid, that's where she came from."

"If you're just turning on your radio, we're on the line with a man reporting a mermaid swimming in the Bay. She appears to be headed for Tiburon."

On the way back to the Emperor Norton, Lou drove slowly past Club 451. The sidewalk was deserted save for a quartet of red-jacketed valets pitching pennies against the side of the building. A doorman sat reading a paperback in the doorway. The usual second-Wednesday crowd of IC aficionados was nowhere to be seen. The Gathering had neglected to gather.

The day's success called for a victory banquet. Lou and I picked up a couple of buckets of KFC and a case of tall boys on our back to the Emperor Norton. Lou low-fived Joe Bananas on the way in the door.

"Now that's what I'd call opening big," said Lou, unpacking the biscuits and green beans. He passed around three beers and opened the chicken with a salty gasp of steam. "Poetry in motion." Joe Bananas unwrapped his spork and started on the beans, lifting them one by one to his long, nimble lips.

I was pleasantly spent and collapsed on the bed within easy reach of more food than I could eat. Lou, on the other hand, was the most animated I'd seen him. He jiggled his foot on the windowsill while he ate, throwing one bone after another into the night air. Eventually satiated, he eased back in his chair, lit a cigarette—he'd been smoking as if he were in a contest all day long—and waxed philosophical about our return to glory. "I knew it was just a matter of time," he said. "Sometimes you've just got to bide your time and wait for the right opportunity to present itself. What a comeback." He threw back his head and laughed without a trace of irony.

"We shook them up pretty good," I said. But I was already thinking of what lay ahead. It was too much to hope that the day's events would reverberate much further than Berkeley or Pacifica; even if they did, no one out there took the Bay Area seriously anyway. You could raise the dead and teach them to play banjoes, and the national media would say In another only-in-San-Francisco story and close with a chuckle and a shake of the head. We had a whole country to cover and we'd started with the easiest part. "I mean, San Francisco—these people got here by way of Death Valley and Donner Summit just to sift sand in a stream. Luring them away from sensibility is like shooting fish in a barrel."

"You gotta start somewhere," said Lou, gesturing with his cigarette. "We're just warming up and we're red-hot already. That earthquake? That was beautiful, man."

"We can hardly take credit for that."

"I don't see why not," he said.

"Whatever you say. So what next?"

Lou rubbed his hands as he paced. "Money. Gotta get our hands on some seed money. And reinforcements. We're not going to be able to do shit with two guys. Sorry—three guys, Joe."

"Sounds reasonable," I said, gaining strength as the chicken grease reached my bloodstream. "Here's an idea for the first step. Does your colorful past include any experience with blackmail?"

"Well, there was this cocktail waitress who started sending me compromising photos, but of course I'd asked for those—oh, you mean blackmailing somebody else." He slapped his knee as he laughed.

Back in the days when Blanston still thought I hung the moon he would curry favor by screwing the Consortium on joint venture contracts. It had gone on so long it was part of our corporate culture and no small part of our financial success. Between my charm and his cunning our partners had never suspected a thing. I was sure they'd find it interesting now, though.

We painstakingly assembled a note from words cut out of a baseball magazine that Lou had been carrying around.

Blanston,

know all about stolen teammate money. Major League trouble. time to play ball or will blow your cover and get you thrown out. deliver $29,000 cash today October 23 noon. put it in Red bag and pitch it in alley out back and go home. commit no errors or you are out of there.

regards

the bat

"The bat?"

"You think he's going to go for it?" Lou said.

"I think he'll pay the money," I told him. "He loses that much on a rainy day on Nasdaq. Then he'll hunt us down and kill us."

It was quiet outside and the little lights of the city rolled up and down the hills, a million little worlds surging like phosphorescent algae in the shallows.

The night was fading to morning when Lou and I delivered Blanston's letter. I waited in the car while Lou bribed Holliday the security guard, as it happens a blood relation of Doc Holliday, with our last twenty to slip the envelope under Blanston's door. When he got back he reported with glee that Blanston was at work already, cursing up a storm.

Integrated Consciousness was in bad disarray in the San Francisco market. Local magazine clubs had switched from perfect-bound ad catalogs to underground comics, Soldier of Fortune, the quarterly of the Nabokov Society. The new beef buzz had gone bizarrely awry, spawning tartare bars and talk of bullfights in public arenas. Southern Chic had taken a decidedly redneck turn. The homburgs of the latest urban attorney fad had sprouted long, slender ostrich feathers that fluttered after them down the halls of justice. Our little gambit had jammed the rational machinery that Integrated Consciousness depended on to function. Rudderless, people drifted according to their natural inclinations. They listened to the voices in their heads and gave free rein to their suggestions. As finely tuned an instrument as is the human intellect, it remains highly susceptible to the absurd.

On returning to the Emperor Norton we lingered a while out front to feel the warmth of the early sun's rays. The streets were quiet save the odd bus or streetcar. Winos in discount storefronts blinked in the light like morning glories. Pigeons formed flocks and flew cooing circles around Civic Center Plaza. People poked their heads out of doors, windows, BART tunnels, stepped tentatively out into the world. The city awoke unsure what to expect, yesterday's madness lying around like spent confetti. The breeze carried the scent of straw, greasepaint, and elephant manure.

The awareness of perfection crept through me, of the world in equipoise. Here was Lou after so many years and we were hatching a scheme bigger than anything we could have dreamed of back then, and it was working beautifully. At this precise moment things couldn't be any better, the past, the present, and the future in perfect alignment. The moment resonated harmonically with every other perfect moment I would ever have, with opening night at the Explorer's Club, with my mother alive and breathing, all at once, right now. My consciousness of the moment's perfection made it suddenly too precious to bear, the heartbreak of its inevitable end too much to stand. I hated the world for its infinite possibilities and hated myself for believing, just for the moment, that anything was possible.

A siren wailed in the distance. It grew louder and louder until a bright red hook-and-ladder appeared flashing down Market street and careened past us onto Eighth Street without slowing swinging wildly as it rounded the corner, a fireman hanging off the back with one hand gripping the ladder and the other clutching his helmet to his head. A Dalmatian followed, loping down the middle of the street with long, powerful strides. The ringing of the brass bell lingered long after the truck and the dog were gone.

Chapter Eleven: Anything Can Happen