On a calm, clear night beneath a wide-open sky, it was easy to spot the satellite train. The man on the ground had fallen, again, and he lay on his back looking up. Arms beside him, he felt mohawks of grass and weeds growing through the old tennis court cracks. Somewhere nearby, his unicycle, one of the pedals still spun in a whirr from the momentum of his fall. The man wondered if the satellites in the satellite train made a sound like that while they climbed through the atmosphere.
The man thought about things like that. He thought about the lights on each satellite, how none of them blinked, how none of them twinkled like the stars all around. He knew, despite appearances, that the satellites were nowhere near, and nothing like any of those stars. In fact, they would disperse and seat into position at maybe 300 or 400 miles up, a low altitude for orbiting, but high enough, he realized, to not need onboard lighting at all. They could see the sun all the time from up there. They had no light of their own. The light they shone was merely a reflection of a more magnificent, greater thing.
The satellites moved to the edge of the horizon. One by one they blinked out behind the far row of trees. They extinguished in turn like the streetlamps at dawn. The man picked himself up. The man picked up his unicycle. The first birds began chattering. Color crept into the eastern sky.
His palms were scraped up from his various falls. He was still nowhere close to being able to stay up and stay balanced for more than thirty seconds at a time. The clowns at the circus made unicycle riding look very, very easy. Given time, and with patience, he would too.
•••
A good clown has no need for hair on his face. In fact, it’s annoying and difficult to maquillage. Having explained this repeatedly to the woman named Shan, he looked up from her name tag and asked for the manager. The sun was higher now, enough to throw a glare across the salon’s waiting area. Dust motes and pet hair drifted like slime worms on the backs of closed eyelids. A hair dryer switched off, and Shan returned with the manager. Shan pointed as if he weren’t the only customer in the room.
Again, the man explained his predicament and how laser treatment was crucial. All the creams and depilatories were wrecking his skin. Then acne and rashes bloomed making it harder to shave, and the extent of it all on a day-by-day basis had become quite a chore and even the clown white, while he practiced in the mirror, had a hard time concealing the open scrapes and shorn scabs. The blood trails left pink lightning across his chin, head, and cheeks. No amount of powder could conceal or contain it. It made him a scary clown. No good clown is a scary clown.
The manager asked if maybe he might be allergic to the greasepaint. He scoffed at this and folded his arms. He looked out the window. They sat in silence for about five seconds too long. Outside, a small boat was sailing by on inlet waters.
Two thousand dollars is what the manager said, for the treatment, in sessions, over four to six weeks, eyebrows and everything, she explained. But no, hard no, on the eyelashes, get an eye doctor, infections. The man supposed he would have to pluck them himself. A fair trade if you have the money.
The man did not have the money. Payment plans were not available.
The man sat quietly in the waiting area watching more sailboats drift by for what seemed like an hour. A police officer walked in with his thumbs in his belt. He led the man out with a grip like a blood pressure cuff on the man’s arm. After that, the man was free to go anywhere else but there.
•••
At noon, the clown troupe would arrive at the same out-of-use tennis courts where the man practiced at night. They wintered in town and had a rotten reputation for wrecking the scene almost everywhere they went, these courts included. The man sat in some bleachers and surveyed the past damage. The nets had lapsed due to dry rot and mildew. Large sections of chain-link fence curled and draped away from their anchors. The lone poles stood like flag staffs at various angles. Some were dug out completely and tossed down the hill.
The tops of the poles were capped with points, not sharp points, but points, nonetheless. The man thought about that. He thought about picture books in school libraries with woodcut depictions. A clown prince named Vlad ate dinner on his castle grounds. He sat amongst body parts being collected and stewed. The other clowns he had gathered and skewered on spiked timber. He feasted and frowned in contentment. He was sad to be the last clown. He was glad to be the only clown.
The Bulgarian word for clown or joker was “smeshnik,” but it came with some negative connotations, and the man did not like that. A fool’s wisdom is only appreciated after he says goodbye.
He imagined himself in the bleachers on a throne, clown royalty looking over asphalt fields littered and lined with free-standing fence poles, pikes. He began thinking about something else too. But he pushed it back. Sometimes his thoughts came from outside his head. But no, not now, because here they came.
An unmarked white van pulled up to the courts. In true clown fashion they bailed out—one after another after another. They must have crammed at least fifteen clowns in there.
The man clasped his hands together on top of his knees. He tried not to jiggle and show the nerves of his excitement. He always watched and it never got old. They, the clown troupe, had seen him enough to ignore him.
A mass of color took over the tennis courts. Some of the clowns started stretching, twisting their necks, arms, and legs. Other clowns stood with their hands on their hips, mumbling and pointing at those warming up. One clown finished a cigarette, dropped it, and then crushed it out with his floppy shoe.
Some striped barrels and platforms were removed from the van, adding even more curiosity to how tightly they were packed. A small clown practiced tumbling on rolled-out foam rubber. A sad clown lay down on the asphalt and fell right asleep snoring. The man wanted to tell him about the satellite train. He didn’t.
By 12:30 a long line of kindergarteners catapillared single file out of the woods. The school was nearby. It wasn’t uncommon for them to come watch. The man gathered his coat closer to his neck. They too, the kindergarteners, had seen him enough to ignore him. The teachers and aides herded them into the bleachers. They all spoke in whispers. A clown did a back flip and they all oohed and elbowed one other.
The man felt the vibrations and excitement traveling down the bleacher boards from the children. He thought about how one day, after much, much more practice, he might be able to elicit that reaction on his own.
He had a pair of mirrored sunshades. He put them on and disappeared where he sat. The reflection of a magnificent, greater thing shone in his eyes. He scratched at a pimple making it bleed down his neck. He wiped it with his knuckles and pulled his coat back up over it.
•••
The clown troupe carried on with their practice. Some played off the others. Some played on their own, tumbling and somersaults, pratfalls and mime gags. A juggler kept adding more pins as he juggled. Four, then five, then a sixth, but no, they all came down bouncing and clopping like cartoon horses. Then he said “fuck.”
Then he said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
The kindergarteners tittered. The teachers tsked. It was definitely time to go. Someone would be receiving an email about this. The children lined up and wove single file back into the woods.
The man thought about this. The best clowns kept quiet. The best clowns wouldn’t say anything at all. The best clowns know how important practice is. The best clowns respect the process.
Then the man heard it again.
“Fuck.”
Not the clown. A child’s voice.
The man looked over at the empty bleachers. One little fellow had stowed away underneath. The little fellow peeked out between the planks. He said it again, “fuck.” He smiled wide. He looked at the man. He looked at the clowns. Some of them had come to the edge of the courts. Others were starting to surround the bleachers.
The small clown said, “Hey, little man, you got a dirty mouth.”
The sleepy clown said, “Leave ‘im alone.”
The scary clown said, “Ooh, what’ll we do now?”
The little fellow wasn’t smiling anymore. Some clowns were up on the bleachers reaching down for the boy. One extended a white-gloved hand, pinched the child’s neck with a twist, then let go. The little fellow yipped like a puppy. He tried to get away. He was surrounded. The clowns laughed.
The man thought about the way that they laughed. It wasn’t clown laughter. One of the clowns looked at the man, gestured toward the child, looked away. Their faces were painted in grins and surprise. Blue triangles, red circles, high-arching eyebrows, but underneath it, if one looked closely, the real faces were mean. The teeth were rotten. The cheeks were wrinkled. And hair, lots of it, everywhere—noses, ears, chins, eyelashes.
The man looked down at his hands. They trembled. His knuckles had thin smears of blood on them from wiping the pimple earlier. He turned his hands over, and then opened them. He studied the strawberry scrapes on his palms from all of the falls he had taken while learning to ride his unicycle. The man stood up. He removed his coat. He removed his mirrored sunshades.
•••
The man had taken the time to apply a full makeup at some point. He did not remember when. He felt the greasepaint streaking down the sides of his face. He scratched at an irritation under his chin. The man thought about the thoughts that had come from outside him. He wondered if they came from the woodcut pictures of the mountain prince clown. He wondered if they were beamed from the satellite train.
He lay in the night on the asphalt again, on purpose this time. He felt his back spasm, and he wondered if the pain was from practicing his unicycle or from all the hoisting he had done to get the clowns up on the pikes.
The little fellow was safe now. He had made a break for it during the commotion. He was probably home with his mother telling the story with tears streaking his face like lighting strikes. He would not sleep well tonight. Maybe not for a while. Maybe not ever. But the clowns had not harmed him. They never had a chance.
Those clowns that the man had rendered unconscious were tied and gagged by the clowns in slightly better shape. They wiped the blood from their noses and mouths. The others just bled out in gouts and gushes. The man supervised their work, kicking them when they lost focus. They used the torn bits of tennis court netting to secure the hands and feet of their friends. As they finished, one by one, the man himself secured their own hands and feet with wires he had pulled from the chain link fence.
The cigarette smoking clown handed over his lighter without fuss. Too late for that clown now, the man thought. Too late to be the good clown.
The man remembered a time in his youth. An infestation of rats had taken up in a flower bed. Having poisoned each hole, he sat by in a lawn chair with a shovel across his knees. A dying rat would crawl out, he would scoop it, then walk it away, before catapulting it into some trees beyond a stream. One rat fell off his shovel while he walked. One looked at the other. The other looked back. The rat hissed, a noise bigger than such a small thing should make. The man remembered the sound in his bones. He remembered an impulse beyond his control, a thought from somewhere else telling him to slam that shovel down, slam it down hard like a hammer, and shatter to pieces that dirty rat’s soul. He did. He scooped it back up. He flung it with the others far away. The best rats would keep quiet. There was a code beyond codes for all living things only knowable after that thing has said its goodbye.
From his place on the ground he could see the stars nodding off to daylight, a few at a time. He hoped all the satellites had made it safely to orbit. He wondered if they still shined up there, reflecting the sun, yet hard to distinguish from their much distant brethren. To most, to many, a star is a star, twinkle or not. They would all burn out one day. Everyone would know something magnificent had happened. And then they would know something magnificent was lost.
He watched the fires flickering out all around him. All the clowns on the poles, they shined brightly for a while having been ignited by lighter flame on their pant cuff or shirt sleeve. Some made sounds while they died. Some only popped and fizzled away, tiny grease balloons bulging and hissing on their exposed skin. The embers of their souls glowed like lava flumes in the cracks and fissures on their twitching corpses. Tiny hairs on their heads, cheeks, and chins ignited like pine straw then curled down to nothing.
The man was sad to be the only clown. He was glad to be the last clown.
He picked himself up, looking back only once at the rows of charred bodies snuffing out on the horizon. He was walking to town. His makeup, his clown face, was spoiled in his efforts. All the dirt, the sweat, the blood from reopened wounds, he imagined himself as an awful fright. Not looking anywhere near what a good clown should be. He thought about all the makeup applicators he’d devour with such a stubbly face. It ate them like sandpaper, steel wool, or the like. It left clumps of purple sponge in the layers of the maquillage. It would not do. The man was going to go tell Shan and her manager at the salon about it. For the last time. They would have to do the eyelashes too.
