The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Five: Summit at Il Pirata

"Come on, Hunter, get your head in the game," Ed Blanston barked at me from behind the console. "This is taking all day." Next to him, Jim Feathers sighed and shook his head.

"Sorry Ed," I said, tugging on the collar of the unitard. "It's just ... why are we doing this, again?"

"It's called motion capture," Feathers said condescendingly. "The cameras follow those little white spots on your body, and feed their movements into that big computer over there—"

"I know what motion capture is, idiot," I said. I couldn't seem to defend myself against Blanston's bullying, but I was damned if I was going to take anything from Feathers, that preening Aussie gargoyle. "I mean, what's it for?"

Blanston came out from behind the console and put his hand on my shoulder, a gesture that might have passed for reassurance if not for the thumb digging under my clavicle. "I wanted it to be a surprise," he said with forced patience. "We're working on a game version of Integrated Consciousness. It'll have a little Andy Hunter who runs around helping people and so forth."

"Gosh Ed, I'm touched," I said. "Really. But that sounds kind of ... well, lame, don't you think?"

"Do I tell you how to do your job?" he shouted and stormed out of the studio. I felt bad but I had other things on my mind. Like the strains of calliope music I kept hearing at the edge of sleep, and sometimes when I was wide awake.

Lou had said it was a three-day drive from Indianapolis to San Francisco. That sounded pretty fast to me but I didn't argue. In the three days since we had spoken, my condition had continued to deteriorate. I battled sickening waves of anxiety and dread, stricken with tightness of the throat that made speech difficult. Fortunately, all the press calls scheduled for the day had somehow disappeared from my calendar during the night. I didn't do a thing all day, just stared glassy-eyed at the monitor bank on the wall, barely registering the phone-in shows, cross-promotional docutainment specials, designer scandals, and industrial boosterism crawling endlessly from one channel to the next. The current slate of up-and-comings looked vaguely familiar at best; I was painfully out of touch already, an outdated What's Hot issue from an empty waiting room. On other monitors, three-dimensional data visualizations charted the metrics of a thousand lifestyle elements: sales figures for titles currently favored by Subway Paperbackers, lipstick shades of choice for Post-Post-Feminists, the herbal supplements currently used and in what percentages by Smart Drink Regulars. My eyes lost focus and I passed ever deeper into the data until it enveloped me like an electric blanket.

Integrated Consciousness Central was abuzz, the Release less than two weeks away. Frank Carter was in my office every other minute with another demographic report hot off the wire, or his latest brainstorm on boosting our adoption among Weekend B-Schoolers and Brown Bag Early-Lunchers. My few-as-possible trips to the bathroom took me through middle-manager pandemonium, a cacophony of orders and arguments and exhortations rising from the cobalt-colored cubes, a place in the history books and a house in Los Altos on the line for all involved. I ducked as many meetings as I could until the odd stares I encountered when I did show up convinced me to skip them entirely. I came and went by way of a secret panel in the maple paneling that led to a utility closet in the stairwell, installed by an earlier tenant with powerful friends and more powerful enemies. I had little doubt he had slept better than I did. The only graveyard he was concerned with was a quiet marble forest down in Colma.

I had told Lou to meet me on the Embarcadero at seven o'clock. As of a quarter to seven the office had hardly thinned out. Angela was one of the few willing to leave before dark. "Working late, boss?" she asked, pulling on kid gloves, clutching a zebra skin purse.

"Just a little later, Angela. I've got a few things to get through before I call it a day." I gestured at my spotless desk. "What are you up to tonight?"

"Date. My roommates are throwing another of their tortured artist friends at me." She rolled her eyes, not unkindly. Her lips were rouged a shade darker than their daytime color.

"What happened to that guy you went to Menu with?"

"The consultant? He was out of his depth. He was running back to his old girlfriend before the check came." Angela was unfailingly dismissive about her romantic affairs but I suspected there was more happening than she let on. The few of her dates that I met were reverse caricatures of the losers she'd described, and after all, they were the building blocks of the active sex life I figured her to have. I wondered what it would be like to go out with her.

"Say, Angela," I said. "What's your matrix? What are the top few elements?"

"Oh," she said, and hesitated. I opened my mouth to tell her to forget it but she spoke first. "It's just that I don't really, well, do Integrated Consciousness that much. I really couldn't say." She smiled apologetically and I was sorry to have made her uncomfortable. It's tough to tell the boss you don't use his product. "Hey, did you ever hear from Lou Black?" she asked suddenly.

"Lou? No, should I have? Has something come up?"

"No, of course, not," she hurried. "I mean, I don't know anything about it. I just know you've been, you know, hoping to hear from him, whoever he is." She smiled.

"Right, right," I said, and let out my breath. "No, I haven't. That is to say, except for the other day—"

"—it's none of my business at all—"

"—no, not at all, it's no big deal at all," I reassured her. "He's just a guy I used to know a million years ago."

"Of course," said Angela. "That's what I figured." She held her pose for a moment longer, then melted into laughter. I joined her at once, grateful for a respite from my suffering. "I think we've both been working a little too hard lately, boss. You want to get a drink with me? Keith Galahanke can wait."

"It's Keith Galahanke you're going out with? The clothes dryer lint guy?" His New Yorker profile had fascinated me.

"I'm only doing it for the laundry. Hey, you know, I've been meaning to activate my employee subscription. I've been so busy lately but I've been dying to get that going."

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "If we could bottle you and sell it, you'd knock IC out of the park."

"Oh Andy," she laughed, shaking her head, then pulled the door closed on her way out. She waved through the side window and left.

No sooner did she turn the corner than Frank Carter appeared, animated and smiling and coming this way. My veins turned to ice. I dropped to the floor behind my desk and gave thanks I'd left my lights turned off. To my horror the doorknob clicked and a rush of air swept in. He hummed a popular song of the day as he paced the floor a couple of turns, then dropped into a leather chair and clunked his feet on my coffee table. I peered at my watch: ten minutes till seven. A bead of sweat ran down my forehead. I looked longingly at the hidden door, just five feet away but it might as well have been a mile. If I was late, Lou might start looking for me and it could be hours before we found each other. Or maybe he'd just turn around and drive back to Indianapolis.

Carter changed his tune to the Monday Night Football theme, whistling and scatting as he got into it. I had to create a diversion. I reached around the side of the desk and threw a masking tape ball at Angela's desk, hoping to spill a mug of pencils or something. I aimed wide and hit Frank Carter's mug instead, right in the center of his forehead. The next thing I knew, he and his chair were in a heap on the floor and I was darting across the floor to the secret panel. "Angela, are you out there?" I heard him yell as I stepped into the utility closet. "I think I had a stroke."

The streets were choked with Bay Bridge traffic snaking forward a foot at a time, horns and National Public Radio echoing off marble, brick, and limestone. Twenty-somethings hustled past me laden with takeout sushi, Kinko's boxes, and wireless devices, their nimble feet scurrying in and out of converted warehouses, redeveloped office plazas, live-work lofts. Not so long ago this had been a forgotten and desolate part of town, the long-disused waterfront decaying in the shadow of an earthquake-ruined overpass, the sweatshops and warehouses an arsonist's playground. Now commerce had taken root in every niche like the wild fennel that had once grown from debris in abandoned rail yards and vacant lots, through rusty shopping carts, from the cracked foundations of the long-abandoned mansions of San Francisco's first prosperity.

I thought of my temp days. I'd slip out of work at a quarter to five and trace the Embarcadero all the way from the ad agency district at the foot of Telegraph Hill to the Bay Bridge anchorage and beyond, ducking into the doorways of padlocked piers along the way to sip sickly sweet bourbon from a glass flask in a paper bag. At the water's edge ran a sagging chain-link fence hung with faded wind-blown garbage. I'd shiver against the wind blowing out the day and stare at the gulls perched on stumps of old pilings. In managing to strike a fair approximation of Jack Kerouac, I succeeded only in coming to appreciate how unhappy the guy must have been. I worked that angle pretty hard for a year or so then gradually eased up, switched from whiskey to Pinot Noir, acquiesced in the permanent job my office had been pressing me to accept.

The era of romantic desolation was long past. The zeitgeist now was Brave New World. San Francisco was building the tools of the future and dreaming visions so grand that they made the helicopter-in-every-driveway ambitions of the mid-Twentieth Century seem quaint. Wealth was to be expected in the course of such elevated work, and to be consumed faster still in acts of devotion to the good life: eco-vacations, weekend motorcycles, daily lunches at restaurants with one-word names, depression glass displayed in distressed period hutches. Who was I to be so ungrateful as to become disaffected?

I got to the Embarcadero at two minutes past seven. There was no sign of him. The marina at the foot of Townsend Street was bordered by a tidy bayside park, the old piers having been knocked into the Bay. I sat on a cedar slat bench and watched the home-bound officeworkers and joggers and strollering moms. A trio of businessmen walked by juggling briefcases, cell phones, and forty-ouncers in paper bags, clutching at oversized Brooks Brothers slacks and peppering their speech with "nigga" and "mack" and "bust a cap." They'd read my book. Gangsta management ... what had I been thinking? Magazine clubs, the taco salad diet, the New Swedenborgianism—had I ever really believed that life could be assembled like a do-it-yourself credenza from such banal materials?

The traffic thinned out as the twilight deepened and the Ferry Building clock bonged seven-thirty. The slender Art Deco streetlamps began one by one to glow orange along the Embarcadero as an old sedan passed beneath them, an early seventies powder-blue Cutlass with a once-white vinyl landau roof. It looked like it got four miles to the gallon. It slowed to a crawl, then stopped in front of me. The driver leaned over and pushed open the passenger side door. "Come on."

"Hey," I said as I got in the car.

Lou said nothing as he pulled away from the curb and continued along the Embarcadero to Third Street. The radio played low volume static pierced now and then by a Southern accent. Lou's clothes were worn but reasonably clean, a flannel shirt with the cuffs rolled down and buttoned and faded chinos. He seemed unaware of the plumes of smoke that curled from his cigarette into his eyes so that mine smarted sympathetically. The lines on his face, the wiry tension of his frame, the fast food wrappers and dirty laundry packed into the back seat footwells suggested that he spent a lot of time at the wheel. The inside of the windshield was glazed with nicotine. As we made a left to cross the Lefty O'Doul Bridge over Mission Creek, downtown San Francisco fell away behind us, a honeycomb of high-rise windows glowing yellow in the fading light. To the West, Twin Peaks was crested by a wall of fog that blocked the sunset. We crossed the flats of Mission Bay and headed East to the water's edge.

Lou neither asked for directions nor commented on our destination. I had no idea where he was driving, or if he even had anything specific in mind. Back in Indy we used to drive around aimlessly for hours on end, working our way through a case of beer and a brace of stories until fate intervened and we were drawn into yet another adventure. It had felt romantic then, but now seemed no better than a foolhardy waste of time. We were lucky not to have been killed, arrested, or both, only the invulnerability of youth to thank for our survival.

All day long I'd been tense with anticipation, certain that salvation was near, but now that he was actually here I couldn't have said what I expected from Lou, what kind of help I thought he'd be able to provide. In my desperation I'd fallen prey to the delusion that Lou would somehow ride up and save the day, a notion rooted in some heroic legend of antiquity but with no basis in reality. The guy driving the car could have been plucked at random from any bus station or barber shop in the land and he was a stranger to me now. And yet here we were. I hadn't slept in days and I was fresh out of ideas. It's not like I had a lot of alternatives.

We drove to the last remaining parcel of decay on the Bay, the squatter colony at Mission Rock. Lou parked a short distance from a pickup with a camper top and turned off the engine. He opened the glove compartment and took out a six-pack still slick with condensation. I misjudged the can and inhaled my first sip, choking surreptitiously until my eyes ran.

I couldn't think of a good way to open. More than once I was at the point of asking how it was going before catching myself. Finally he spoke up. "I see you've been keeping busy."

"What, you mean this stuff? Yeah, I guess so. You know, you gotta keep busy." I laughed twice.

"I know a few things about keeping busy," he said. "Indianapolis has heated up a lot since," he shook a cigarette from the pack and lit it, "lately."

I decided to clear the air right off the bat. "Look Lou, about that business at the end. At the Club."

"Hey, forget it," he interrupted. "Sometimes it's just time to move on. And we've both done well enough since. Everybody wins." He made a summary gesture and the matter was closed. "Hey, it's good to see you, man." His eyes lagged his voice in sincerity.

"Yeah, you too," I said.

"All right, let's get this moving. I know you didn't get me all the way out here to talk about the weather. What's the story?"

"Well, as coincidence would have it, it's about the Clown's Graveyard."

"Really."

I thought for a moment about the weakness my tale would reflect in me. Here I was, the highly successful entrepreneur, brought low by something as childish as a bad dream. But I was thoroughly disoriented by the strangeness of the situation, as if watching from a distance, and I spilled my story as effortlessly as the waves washing the graveled bayshore a dozen feet away. Lou's face was inscrutable as I described the shadowy interior of the canvas dressing room and the little pots of greasepaint that lined the bottom of the mirror. "It's all I can think about," I said.

"They run out of shrinks in this town?" He turned and looked at something I couldn't see off to the left.

"I haven't got that kind of time," I said. "I've got this Integrated Consciousness thing going on—"

"Yeah, you mentioned that."

I didn't think I had. "Anyway, I've got to get my shit together or I'm going to blow it."

For a long while he said nothing. A thousand things could have been going through his mind, or nothing at all. All I could do was wait. Finally he turned to face me, looking me over as if for the first time. "You don't look so good, I'll grant you that," he said. "You're not going to last long at this rate. Are you prepared to do what it takes to get well?"

"I'd do just about anything," I said, throat dry. "All I want is to get some rest, just a little peace of mind. That's all I want."

Lou pulled another couple of beers from the glove compartment and handed me one. "All right then. You've got to pull the plug on Integrated Consciousness."

I recoiled. "What does that have to do with anything? That would defeat the purpose entirely. What the hell are you talking about?"

He opened his beer and took a long first drink. "You say this Subject 17 guy first mentioned the Clown's Graveyard to you a couple of weeks ago, right? Did you think about it much before that?"

"Not at all," I said. "Not for years."

"Funny how it slipped your mind, isn't it?"

"How do you figure?"

Lou let me wait while he lit a fresh cigarette and tossed the match out the window. He scanned the surface of the Bay. A tug bobbed slowly past, a light on in the wheel house. "Let me ask you a question. Where do you think the Clown's Graveyard comes from? The story?"

"I don't know, it's a myth. It's just something some people believe in with no basis in reality."

"Why would people believe in something that doesn't exist?"

"Ignorance," I said.

"Exactly my point," he said. I was having a hard time keeping track of the conversation. The beer, the smoke, and the darkness were bringing on vertigo and I struggled for clarity as if resisting a hypnotist's patter.

"What is?"

"Well," said Lou, clearly enjoying having the upper hand, "it's very simple. Things like the Clown's Graveyard exist in the unknown places. They're what people use to fill in the blank spaces on the map. Still, for all intents and purposes they're just as real as the rest of the world. I mean, you're never going to go to the moon, right? So what does it matter to you whether it exists or not?"

"The moon? What?"

"That's the problem. It's not just you that forgot about the Clown's Graveyard, see. This thing you invented, it fills in all those spaces itself. It makes sense of things. Well, a kind of sense. It gives people all the answers they need so their minds stop wandering. They don't need those crazy stories and superstitions anymore. You know the one about the tree falling in the forest? What do you suppose happens to a myth that no one remembers anymore?"

As I struggled to follow Lou, the implications of his words began to sink in. He was trying to convince me to commit professional suicide. Destroy everything I'd worked so long and hard to build. Walk away from Andy Hunter as the world knew him. "I see what's happening here," I said, confusion turning to anger. "You just want to bring me down, don't you? You just can't stand to see how well I've done."

"Yep, Andy, you're right. That's exactly what's going on. Why shouldn't I be envious? Look at this sweet racket you've got going for yourself. My only consolation is that I taught you well. Where do you want to be dropped off?"

"All right wait a minute." My vertigo had worsened. I stared at the lights of the Bay Bridge in the distance and wished I was in bed, then shuddered to recall what that really meant, the tortuous hornpipes of a calliope already winding in my ears. "Keep talking."

Lou took his hand off the shift lever and sat back. "So you've got this Integrated Consciousness thing going on and you figure you're all done with that other stuff, right? The tall tales, mysterious monsters, crazy superstitions? But it's not that simple. That world is still a part of you, and it's fighting back for its life. You know what Honest Abe said: A house divided against itself cannot stand."

"Honest Abe?"

"Only thing you can do. Pull the plug."

"You're nuts."

Lou tipped his ash on the floor mat. "You know I'm right. So I can help you do this thing, or I can turn this car around and drive right back to Indianapolis. Your call."

I wanted desperately to believe that Lou was wrong, that the solution lay elsewhere and I could preserve my well-ordered empire. But a sickening realization untwisted itself in the pit of my stomach. "This is a fine kettle of fish," I said at last.

"I won't argue with you," said Lou. "This won't easy, but you never know, it could end up being interesting."

You never know.

If Lou had asked, I could have recommended any number of suitable bars. Instead he drove up Seventeenth Street and stopped at the first one we came to, Il Pirata. I'd driven past it a thousand times without ever stepping inside, assuming it to be equivalent to Bottom of the Hill a block away. I couldn't have been more mistaken.

It took our eyes a moment to adjust to the harsh red light. The bar was to the left, ringed with heavy black stools and topped with a back bar long on colored liqueurs and cheap whiskey. The bartender, a tall Hispanic man with pockmarked cheeks and a stiff pompadour, wasn't smiling. The room was a funhouse mirror of oiled hair and flashing gold. The air was thick with smoke, perfume, and musk with notes of blood and industrial solvent. I didn't recognize the music but it sounded like one of those Mexican songs that celebrate the assassination of DEA agents. Although no one had turned to greet us, I felt the hostile glare of every last person in the room. It seemed both loud and terribly quiet.

"This is fine, this is fine," Lou said under his breath, sensing my reservations. We stepped up to the bar.

"What," said the taciturn bartender.

"Two Buds, paisano," said Lou, slapping his hand on the bar. He turned to survey the room and manifest his confidence, leaving me to witness the brusque, brutal gestures used to fill our order. A table had opened up in the back not far from a row of booths stuffed with swollen flesh, toothpicks, and tattoos the color of bruises. The men were more menacing still. We tipped well on a second round, kept our eyes to ourselves, and tried to come up with a plan.

"Whatever it is, it's got to happen before the Release," I told Lou. "Once people get hard-wired into Integrated Consciousness it's only a short time before they don't even need the earpieces anymore. Their brain waves get locked into the algorithm."

"Boy, I'm in no position to judge another person's ethics," Lou began, then trailed off. He stared at the ashtray for a moment, shaking his head. "Quite an operation you put together. I'm impressed."

"All too impressive," I said. "I don't see how two guys stand much of a chance against it."

"Not with that attitude," he said. "Although it would sure help if we had a man on the inside." He pretended to ponder it, then slapped the table, not appearing to notice the attention this drew. "Oh, wait a minute—you run the place. So here's a thought: why don't you just shut it down? Go on television and tell everyone to never mind?"

"I wish it was that simple," I said in a low voice. "The Consortium would just lock me up in a padded room and go on without me. At this point, they don't care whether I live or die as long as the Release stays on schedule."

"All right then, how about a scandal?" Lou said. "We destroy the good name of Andy Hunter. Expose you as a Nazi. No, a pervert—even better. Nobody's going to trust their brains to a pervert."

"Keep thinking," I said.

"Those two guys are looking at us," said Lou in the same conversational voice. "Don't look at them yet."

"Why? Who are they? They probably recognize me."

"These guys don't look like your customers."

"Are they still staring?"

"Yeah. Don't worry about it, though." He started to rise.

"Wait, which ones are they?"

"Be right back," he said.

He seemed to take an unusually long time. A couple of times I thought about going in to check on him, but was afraid of how that might look. Instead I tried to maintain a casual air as I scanned the tables and booths in search of my surveillants. There were several strong candidates. I tapped one of Lou's cigarettes on the table and studied the fight cards affixed to the walls.

"We fake your kidnapping," Lou said matter-of-factly when he finally got back.

"What? You've been watching too much Colombo. That's insane."

"Maybe your company doesn't care what happens to Andy Hunter, but your fans sure do. So here's the plan." He looked around confidentially. "We stage it somewhere that a lot of people will see it. Some big public spectacle. Then we put out a statement that it's a political act of some kind. You're our hostage, and we're going to kill you unless they put the kibosh on the Release. The public outcry will tie their hands—how can they move ahead with the Release and risk the neck of the beloved Andy Hunter? Meanwhile, you and I go on the lam, issue demands, make statements, whatever. It's the perfect plan. It can't possibly fail."

"What makes you think—"

"Wait, wait, this is the best part," he said, appearing to think of it just then. "When we've milked it for a while, I'll release you and you can tell people that you've come around to the views of your captors—that Integrated Consciousness is a monstrous fraud perpetrated on the American people by a cabal of money-crazed corporations. Man, this is going to be huge." His eyes glowed with evil intent and I almost believed he knew what he was doing. "We'll need a helicopter."

"Wait. Better idea. There's an Omnicast scheduled tomorrow. I'm going to be live on TV, radio, and streaming video tomorrow. Millions of people will be watching."

"Then we'd better put on a good show," said Lou. "Here they come."

"What?"

A pair of fists like leather stretched over granite came down on the table between Lou and me. "Que pasa," said a massive Filipino in a wife-beater. Next to him stood a sepulchral hulk in a sunken leisure suit with pale, veiny fingers.

"Doc, I think we've found our first customers," Lou said to me, affecting a different voice. If he was speaking in code I was helpless to decipher it, so I smiled at the two newcomers as sincerely as I could. They didn't reciprocate.

"You look like a couple a guys that like the cocks," said Lou, again in the voice, a blend of Kentucky trash and Chico Marx. I was flabbergasted. I hadn't realized how much Lou had changed over the past twelve years and this was a particularly inconvenient time to find out. "Am I right? You got a pit near here? Probably a couple in a happening part of town like this."

"What of it," hissed the shadow-man, shooting his cuffs with a jerk of the head.

"Just gaffs is all," said Lou. "So sharp they can cut leather. Cut the leg clean off a bantam. Interested? I thought so." They pulled a couple of chairs over and signaled for shots. "My friend the doctor here is a metallurgist. Metalhurgheesta, you saben? Works with alloys. He's come up with a metal you can grind so sharp you can see right through the blade. With spurs like these, a day-old pullet could take down Foghorn Leghorn."

"Let me see one," the shadow-man rasped.

Lou acted surprised. "Oh, we don't have them here with us," he said, and looked at me.

"No, we don't," I said, and cleared my throat. "But I can get you some information if you're interested. Do you have a pen?"

"Or you could come out to the workshop with us," added Lou. "It's not far from here at all." I kicked his leg.

"I have business to attend to here in this bar," said the shadow-man.

"That's too bad," I said.

"But my friend would be happy to accompany you. I am sure he will bring back a favorable report." He flashed a smile that sent cold water down the small of my back, and began whispering to the teak bruiser, who smiled.

"Are you fucking nuts?" I said under my breath. "What the hell are we supposed to do with this guy?"

"I'm sure we'll come up with something. How about we get him to take us to a cockfight? The ones out here are legendary."

"Excuse me, aren't you Andy Hunter?" came a voice behind me.

I turned and saw a thirtyish idiot in tasseled loafers and a wrinkled rayon shirt with a smug smile on his face. He looked even more out of place than I did. I couldn't imagine where he had come from. "You're mistaken," I said.

"No I'm not," he laughed and punched me in the shoulder harder than his inebriation justified. "You're Andy Hunter, the head of Integrated Consciousness. Sheri? Honey, come over here and meet Andy Hunter."

"Hello," gushed a teetering bottle blond in a retro cocktail dress. "Your books have changed our lives," she said.

"We're just as excited as hell about the Release, we really are," the guy said. "I hope you make a million dollars on that thing."

"A million dollars?" the woman shrieked. "He makes that much drinking that beer!" She howled, then stopped abruptly and draped her arm around me. "But nobody deserves it more. You're the one that turned me on to Borderline Bar-Slumming. What a fucking gas, I love it! You should see the looks we get from our friends. Would you look at this place? What a riot."

I couldn't get rid of them without autographing a stack of bar napkins. I found one of them later in the parking lot, and used it to dab at the blood at the corner of my mouth, the result, I hoped, of a split lip rather than an internal injury.

"You've really let yourself go," Lou said as we crawled to the car, glancing over our shoulders for renewed interest from our assailants. "You'd better get in shape quick or this could be a short ride."

"I'll see what I can do," I said, gingerly fingering the robin's egg swelling from my scalp. I made a note to watch Lou for freelancing.

Chapter Six: Enter the Chimp