The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Seventeen: All Good Things

The house on Vermont Street provided few options for refuge. The room I had chosen offered the advantage of four solid walls, floor, and ceiling, though its position suspended amid the second-floor rafters left it more exposed than I cared for. I shuttered the windows and bolted the door. Vigilance was my watchword. I took a sip from a can of Coke, then froze. I ripped open the thin aluminum and poured a severed finger onto the floor. It wore a gold wedding band, just as I'd known it would.

The front door slammed open and several voices entered. A pair of feet clomped up the steps to my room and tried the knob. "C'mon open up," said Lou. I let him in, then closed the door quickly after him.

"What a day, you should have been there. On the road at dawn. All the way I've got Roy playing books on tape at triple speed—condensed classics, philosophy, that wheelchair guy's book. Jesus ... talk about a headache. But I was on the phone the whole way back and listen to this: we've got Madonna, two out of three Tenors, the Stones, Cirque du Soleil, more professional wrestlers than you can shake a stick at, Yanni. Doing it at a natural amphitheater in Bryce that's ideal for this. It'll be a hand-picked live audience—two, three thousand tops. We'll start up at sunset. By the time the Fabulous Ontarians come on the moon will just be cresting the horizon. Unbelievable. This is going to be the greatest show on Earth before the Fabulous Ontarians even arrive. Boy, and when they do ... ."

He stopped, and looked at me as if he'd just noticed I was there. "So, hey, Andy, how are you doing? What's new on this end?" He sat back in his chair and ran his hand through his hair. "Hey, you're not mad about me doing all this stuff on my own, are you? I mean, I figured it was kind of my part of the job, like your job is coming up with the material. And man, is it some great material! This is way bigger than just the Integrated Consciousness thing. That's just the beginning."

"The beginning," I said. In Lou's eyes I saw the inferno to come. He was as impervious to flame as a salamander, but not I, far from it. I would be consumed and lost, swallowed in flame as my mother had been by water and my father the earth of his waking tomb. "No," I said, my throat dry and tight.

"Know what?" said Lou.

I swallowed painfully. "I can't do it."

Struck dumb, he stammered helplessly before finding words. "This is what you've always wanted! You're about as far from home as it's possible to get. You're through the looking glass and over the river halfway to grandma's house and you're picking up speed. You're just a little nervous, that's all, just opening night butterflies."

"It's all butterflies to you, isn't it?" I said, suddenly angry.

"I don't even know what that means," said Lou uncertainly.

I gestured at the walls of the room, indicating what lay beyond.

"Come on now," he said with a relaxed laugh. "There's nothing to be scared of."

"Don't con me," I said, rising from my seat. "I must have been crazy to let things get this far. I should have known better than to listen to you. You just don't understand—things have consequences, you know? People can get hurt. Roy. What about Roy, and all the other Roys out there? It's not right. Not in good conscience. I'm sorry, but this is where I get off."

I took the .22 from my right pocket and handed it to Lou, then did the same with the pepper spray in my left pocket and the blackjack at my feet. "Wait a minute," he said, stuffing the weapons into his pockets. "We can work something out."

"It's been nice seeing you, old buddy," I said, shouldering my way to the door. "It's brought back a lot of memories."

I crept down the stairs and out the door.

Vermont Street was deserted though it wasn't much later than nine o'clock. No cars passed as I walked slowly down the empty sidewalk. Few lights burned in the windows of the lofts and warehouses. I felt as if I were the only person on Earth as I crossed Mission Bay toward the Lefty O'Doul Bridge, the tugs and houseboats lightless in the channel. The night was clear but the stars too dim to show my way. The silence betrayed nothing of the darkness. Hour after hour I walked, somehow never drawing nearer to the black skyline before me.

A single note sounded in the darkness, too high and too clear for a misinformed foghorn. It seemed to have come from some distance.

"Hello, Andy."

"Hi, Joe," I said as the rising moon's first rays caught the chimp's form a few feet away.

Joe Bananas lowered the cornet to his lap and I took the folding chair next to his. His moist eyeballs glistened. Rusted-out shopping carts cast three-wheeled shadows across the cracked concrete apron.

"A fork in the road," he said.

"It's the way it has to be, Joe. I was crazy to have gone this way in the first place. What was I thinking?"

"And Lou?" The wind picked up, carrying the cool scent of skunked beer and bad meat from the recycling depot.

"Lou. Well, it was an adventure while it lasted. It was nice to see him again." The chimp was emptying the horn's spit valve onto the asphalt. When he reached the end of the slender saliva rope, he unscrewed the mouthpiece and placed it in a cardboard case lined with red crushed velvet. "It's not like when we were kids. Lou was my hero. I thought we'd conquer the world. It made me part of something big, something important. But that buddies-forever thing, that blood brothers thing, it's just another one of those myths I always fell for. It served its purpose when I was young but I'm all grown up now. I know where lightning and thunder really come from, and Lou, he's just ... he's just this guy I used to know." Joe Bananas closed and clasped the cornet case. "We're better off going our own way," I said.

Joe Bananas nodded, holding my gaze a moment longer than I preferred. "I wish you the best of luck," he said. "I would leave you with a last word of advice. In seeking obvious answers, one must not overlook obvious questions." He tucked the cornet case under his arm, tipped an imaginary cap, and walked off into the moonlit distance.

Good old Bananas. Enigmatic to the bitter end. I thought of the hours I'd spent at his cage before his disappearance from IC Labs, playing catch with a hard rubber ball, watching his meticulous grooming routines, feeding him treats between the bars. He was one of a kind, Joe Bananas. No dog or cat would ever be his equal. I was going to miss that monkey.

Mission Bay was serene in the moonlight. The alternating rows of mustard and rust-colored condos looked warm and inviting, the merry lights of their televisions sparking through the faux-leaded windows. Each car sleeping out front had its own little personality, the German sedan and the English roadster and the Japanese luxury car. They looked like their owners the way dogs do, I thought to myself, and chuckled. It was a nice night for walking.

"I was starting to think you'd never get here."

The room glowed dimly with the cold light of the monitor. I closed the secret panel and took a seat at the desk. Digital Andy was lounging in a quilted smoking jacket in a well-appointed private library. He looked well.

"You're looking well," I said. "Sitting there with your digital martini and your digital Morocco slippers. When did we start liking martinis, anyway?"

"If you'd made any effort at all you would have discovered that already. It's just a matter of getting past the first three or four. They're quite pleasing to our palate, and they have a nice Jazz Age connotation."

"I'll have to remember that." I wondered if this was what twin-speak felt like. Somehow I knew what he was about to say the moment after he said it.

"You shouldn't feel awkward coming here," said Digital Andy. "Where else would you go?"

"Nowhere, I guess. I built this place. I should have known better than to leave it."

He looked at me indulgently. "I knew you'd come to your senses—meaning me, of course."

"You're so smart, aren't you. All the answers."

"Don't be that way. I've had advantages. And fewer distractions."

In the dark areas of the monitor I saw the reflection of my face, illuminated in turn by Digital Andy's. "So are you going to enlighten me or not?" I said at last.

He refreshed his martini from a crystal beaker and skewered another pair of olives on a sterling toothpick, then resettled in his armchair. "That was some childhood we had, wasn't it?" he began as the computer's screen blurred, then cleared to reveal a familiar scene: Cornsilk Academy's lower school recess yard thronged with laughing, shouting children, all caught up in the camaraderie of youth—all except for one solitary lad off to one side, hands thrust in his pockets, staring intently at a bug's slow progress across a wall. "We knew what it was supposed to be like. Games of tag and kick-the-can that go all the way to firefly time. Red pop and stolen kisses. Broken-in mitts, treehouse gangs, pool parties. But we saw it all from the outside, fingers laced through the chain-link fence. Uncoordinated, unathletic, shy around the other kids. Hard to make friends, always saying the wrong thing. Alone every afternoon, weekend, and summer break. It's no accident that a fantasy world would have been more appealing than the real one."

I jumped in my seat. The playground montage had cross-faded to a shot of my mother, a pale nimbus encircling her head, gazing into a crib. "She knew from day one that we'd have a hard time," Digital Andy said gently. "All she wanted was to make us feel better. But she was too tender-hearted for our own good. Instead of comforting us with tales of the Clown's Graveyard, she should have dried our tears and told us to get back out there and figure it out—how to get along with the others kids, play by their rules, laugh at their jokes, live in their world. It would have saved us a lot of heartache in the long run." She reached out and set a circus-themed mobile slowly turning above the crib. "But boy, did we love her for it. She made everything make sense. Except one thing."

Now the monitor showed my father, pale, eyes swollen, peering closely into my face to see how I was taking the news. "It was the worst thing that could ever have happened," Digital Andy said. "Now we had a bigger, better reason than ever to feel different: dead mom, shattered dad. Not to mention a big new load of pain and confusion to carry around. How did we deal with it? How else? By retreating a few more miles into la-la land. Which is the last thing she would have wanted for us, of course—to grow up a misfit dreamer with no hope of making it in the real world. It's a good thing Lou turned up to knock a little sense into our head. Until he started to lose his own, that is."

A phone rang and I reached instinctively for the receiver on the desk before realizing it was the phone in my old house, its bell ringing while my father and I were enjoying a melancholy bowl of soup on a rainy October evening. "My god, little Andy," said Bob Clampett when I picked up the living room extension. "I haven't seen you since your folks split up."

"The truth can be hard to take when you've grown attached to the lie," said Digital Andy. "If she loved little Andy, how could she have left? And if she didn't, well .... But I'll tell you something. The world's a more complicated place than a six-year-old could hope to understand. That's why Dad tried to shield us from the truth. I don't know the real answer any more than you do, but I've got a pretty good idea. She was a good woman, Andy, but she wasn't cut out for domestic life. She was a gypsy, a vagabond, a vaudevillian, anything but a wife and mother. Marrying Dad was a detour, but she could never have gone the distance. It's only because of us that she stuck around as long as she did. Nothing bad or scary happened to her. She just moved on down the line, that's all. It didn't mean she didn't love us. It doesn't mean that at all."

I nodded slowly as Digital Andy came back into view. The martini beaker was nearly empty and he looked tired. "So there you have it," he said. "Not so mysterious after all, is it?"

"It all makes sense," I said. "The shit works."

"You gave up too soon," said Digital Andy. "There was a lot to process. Made the beta tests look like child's play. But it's all sorted out now."

"Are you happy?"

He laughed. "I'm just an avatar, remember? It's not for me to be happy or unhappy. You're the one that needs to be happy. Though I will say I've been looking forward to getting out of this cramped server and into a real self. Closure is a two-way street, you know."

He motioned with his eyes to the top right desk drawer. I slid it open. Nestled amid the paper clips and business cards inside was a small suede pouch. I loosened the drawstring and shook the cashew-sized tortoiseshell device onto the blotter. "I'm all packed and ready to go whenever you are," said Digital Andy. "I'll take care of the configuration from this end. You just make yourself comfortable."

The device fit snugly behind my ear. I took a deep breath, reclined my chair a few degrees, propped my feet on the window sill, and folded my hands on my chest.

The experience was odd, but not in an unsettling way. More like a resettling way. It was like having every thought in my head re-thought a little more coherently, without all those erroneous conclusions, false impressions, and absurd inclinations. Bright halogen beams exposed the ghosts and monsters lurking in dark corners; blinking in the glare, they hurried to the exits, tails between their legs. Incomplete patterns were redrawn with bold lines—or, if unproductive, erased and reconfigured. No indecision, suspicion, or doubt could escape the process. No clowns, either.

Outside, a thousand little lights traced streets and lanes winding up the foothills of Berkeley and Piedmont. The Bay Bridge, strung with light bulbs from one end to the other, carried a stream of white headlights into the city for late dinners or live music. On the lower deck, red taillights ferried late-workers home to the kids and dinner and a video, or a magazine in bed with the dog curled up in the corner. The moon had risen high in the sky. Impact craters and irregular discolorations scarred its airless, rocky surface.

Chapter Eighteen: The Story of Your Life