This is how it felt. He had moved from slapstick to satire, and from satire to tragedy, and from tragedy to horror and from there it was something new. He no longer recognized it, it was a big face tied to a string, floating in the air. And he held the bottom of the string, staring up at this massive face as it swayed back and forth in the breeze. Sometimes the face would smile, but not at him. Sometimes it would look around, at the sun, the ground, or at the trees. Sometimes it would sleep. Meanwhile he was stuck standing on the ground, gripping the string. He knew that there was no option but to stand and to watch this thing and to play chess.
Sometimes he played chess against himself, but usually he played against a clown named Dennis, who would come around and bring his little dog Martha. At first Dennis was quiet, reserved, he only said, “Want to play chess?” and then he would say “Check” and sometimes “Checkmate.” But as their meetings became regular and as they became more comfortable with each other, he and Dennis realized they both had a talent for accents. For whole games they would experiment with accent combinations. He would talk in a deep Russian accent and Dennis would speak in cockney British.
“Your moofs are treeky, but I begin to sense a pattern, my Breettush comrade.”
“Just when you fink you know me, presto chango checkmate, love.”
Sometimes they would talk to each other in heavy Brooklyn accents, obscenities laid out like slabs of corned beef.
“Check, huh?”
“Fuckin’ guy.”
Focused in on a strategy, he could banter without much thought. But the days started to get colder, and he knew that Martha the dog was a weak old thing, which meant Dennis would be staying inside with her wherever they lived together.
So, alone, he stood without a clown or its dog. He watched the sky sometimes, noting the white streaks left by airplanes. Sometimes he would hear the breathy whistle of a plane as it flew above, but he never actually saw any planes. As the leaves fell around his courtyard, he grew less connected to the present. That face floated above him, and he held onto the string and simply waited for it to change.
One day as it grew dark at around 4pm as it had been starting to do lately, a stranger walked into the courtyard. She was a petite girl of Korean ancestry wearing an oversized gray striped shirt. She stopped and looked at him and her eyes wandered up the string to the face swaying and bouncing in the breeze. The face looked down and met the girl’s gaze. He watched as the girl and the face maintained eye contact, and he felt like a third wheel. The girl and the face continued to look into each other’s eyes, reading and challenging each other silently. This lasted five minutes. Ten minutes. He coughed, but neither looked away from the other. He held the string and waited while the girl and the face looked into each other’s eyes. After what seemed to be about two hours, the girl closed her eyes and sighed. She looked at him then, for the first time. She said, “Want a stick of gum?”
“Sure,” he said. She handed him a stick of gum wrapped in tin foil and he took it and unwrapped it and put it in his mouth. When he tasted it, he was glad. It was a taste so strong and good and sweet that his eyebrows arched. A heavy pounding in his chest told him this was the change he had waited for, and then the girl giggled. She was looking up. He looked up too, and saw that he had let go of the string without realizing it, and that the face was floating up into the sky. The face looked down at him as it soared away, met his eyes, and smiled. He turned back to the girl, but she was gone. He felt that life was a circus.
