Abel Quodlibet is at the circus.
It comes to him at the beckoning of his cerebral delight, serving at the pleasure of his whim. (more):
It comes to him at the beckoning of his cerebral delight, serving at the pleasure of his whim. (more):
Stilt-walkers, clowns, jugglers, elephants, tigers, lions with their tamers, aero- and acrobats reel and parade around him, performing for his exclusive amusement. He’s center ring in the biggest of the big tops, its powder blue canvas shored up by skyscraping glass and metal poles.
The fire-eater flicks his Bic before his Camel Filter, then swallows his flame. Trapeze artists work from hanging platforms, performing daring aerial feats with graceful swipes of squeegees and brushes. Though a grown man, giggles bubble out of Abel with five-year old delight.
Truck-elephants lumber in their bored gait, nose to tail. Funny yellow clown vehicles disgorge bulbous nosed buffoons, mouths yawning, spewing the blah-blah mime language mimicking real life. The hot dog vendor with his chrome cart and red umbrella is -- well -- a hot dog vendor with a chrome cart and red umbrella. What would Abel's Walter Mitty-ish circus be without a hot dog vendor? Stilt-walkers step around him, mock grimacing, muttering in theatrical annoyance. He moves among a miasma of clowns, part of the parade. Midgets, sharing his own diminutive stature, silly laugh and waggle tongues at him
His companion, Mary, chases off the clowns. She did not make it to the circus with Abel. Traveling down the street with her charge she never left her job and by the responsibility of her duties will not suffer the naïve cruelty of children confronted with someone different than they.
Abel Quodlibet is an institutionalized schizophrenic.
He tugs, strains, and yanks at Mary’s arm with an urgency to return home, to The Progressive Rehabilitation Institute. There is urgency to to feel brush, charcoal, pastel in his hand; to once again see what he sees now, only against the weave of canvas and paper. He urgently needs to give the Circus back to the world. It's as if he knows the world can't see the circus as he does, but he doesn't know that. It doesn’t matter. He can give it to the world. He has needs to do so. He needs sketch-pads, water color paper and canvas, brushes, pencils, sticks of circus-conjuring magic. The Progressive Rehabilitation Institute can hardly supply his demand. His room, the dayroom and most of the hallway walls are filled with circus bright colors, water and oils, filled with such detail that they could have only been rendered by someone who really has been to the circus.
Tongue seeping from the side of his mouth, charcoal wand in hand, Abel brings to life the Ringleader; a somber man of gray tones. Waving wands of colored ink, tattooed men appear in crisp magic. Flourishing batons of pastels, Chinese floor acrobats dance across the sketchpad ring in Abel’s circus.
He is contented for those moments, enveloped in the fugue of bringing to life the avatar of the greatest show on Earth. It’s so large. It overflows his senses, his room, the halls, the dayroom and dining room. The offices and homes of the staff are happily overwhelmed with the Circus. Some of it, that which has marched beyond Abel’s memory, is pressed into drawers. Along with pages depicting a tall man in a long coat and an umbrella who has no head, but still sports a bowler. Abel knows this man, but can not speak to whom, or what, the man might be. He is not someone of whom Abel is afraid. Mary and the other therapists have speculated. They’ve have sent pictures out to other, more degreed therapists, who delve deeper into the speculation of human behavior and relationships. Upon seeing this headless man, they too have – speculated.
Abel has captured every aspect of the circus and imbued paper leaves and taut canvases. Every aspect of a world that surrounds everyone is there, but to which only Abel is privy to see. Abel is the gatekeeper of a portal peering through the wall of sanity. By virtue of his affliction, he grants us a view of what we yearn yet shun.
Abel Quodlibet is a savant, an artist.
Abel is not a valued contributing member of society.
Being a portal to the autre-monde that surrounds us is not a valued skill. It holds little potential for that which is valued: income, revenue, money. What paltry funds are derived by the occasional sale of Abel's art barely pay for the sketch pads, water color papers and canvases that Abel constructs into windows; passageways through which the world views the invisible circus surrounding it.
"Circus Voltaire," Abel will murmur.
Everyone passes it off as schizoid ramblings. No one, not even Mary sees the savant wisdom. Mary’s mission is to see to it that this perceived lacking is rarely spoken of within Abel's presence and then only in hushed tones. Abel’s urgency defines his value to the world.
"The whole world loves a Circus," murmurs Abel, pastels smeared on his cheek.
One occasion, when the tones rose above the volume of being hushed, left Abel struggling with a demon, a colorful pastel clown with huge down-turned fire-red lips trapped in a colossal aqua tear, surrounded by charcoal demonic fire eaters and whip wielding lion-, tiger-, devil-tamers. Abel lost the struggle and the demon unleashed himself through Abel’s wands of pastels and charcoal, raking and pillaging the pages of two sketchbooks. The only thing that contained the demon was his entrapment in the tear. Mary and the other therapists and the therapists that delved deeper, speculated that this to be the tear of grief, the tear of loss.
Being a schizophrenic had not shorn the desire to be valued from Abel.
Mary Hansen comes to Abel's circus regularly, spending a portion of each day gazing through Abel's windows, sharing his interest in the circus, though hers is professional. Abel smiles when she enters his room. Just at the edge of his world, she waits, sometimes waving, sometimes calling. He smiles. With the flourish of his markers, pens and brushes, he lures her beyond that line in the intellectual sand, from the cool grains of professional interest into the burning crystals of awe. She is Abel's friend, though that friendship is embodied beneath the shell of “case worker.” What she experiences through the windows to Abel’s autre-monde subdues enjoyment, molesting Abel’s world with analysis. She sees his circus as a measurement of his mental well being. Abel cares not. “Analysis” is meaningless to his world as a transistor radio is to the world of dinosaurs.
On this day, Mary bubbles. She is not alone.
“This is Jarod, Jarod Cain – my boyfriend.”
What goes unsaid bubbles out of her, Jarod, has taken time from his impossible schedule to take interest in her work, to take interest in her. She peers over her shoulder, to Jarod, drinking in his tall stature with appreciation. Jarod rocks on his heels, hands in his pockets, drinking in one of Abel’s pastels with an interest that might be polished into appreciation. Mary takes his arm.
“I promised to take him to the circus. So I brought him to you, Abel. I told him you could bring him the circus.”
Jarod’s head bobs on a skeptical spring.
“Mary makes it sound as if we’re really going to the circus.”
Jarod spends too much time toying with people’s fantasies in a calculated, quantified way, to see that Abel's art is a portal to an alternative world. Mary squeezes a smile and a girlish giggle at Jarod and softly whistles the Circus March in muted calliope puffs. She smiles at Abel, a man who can't drive, but can take people to a circus in another...what?...place?
Calliope music brings a smile to Abel. Someone has come to share the circus with him. He gazes at a woman, half-formed out of the air of his separate conscious, caught in a back flip on a horse. Mary has come, standing behind him, gazing with him at the woman. He senses Mary, though he dares not turn to look, lest the horse-acrobat dissolve from his world.
Mary circles Abel, peering over the edge of his easel, studying the circus reflected in child's eyes set in the cherubic round face of a boy-man. Some days his eyes are green and threaded with a brown terror that distorts the face into a mask of insipid angst. Today, they are brown, laced with green wonderment for the spectacle of a horse and woman. Abel’s hand raises, pastel in hand. A calliope takes shape in the fibers of the paper, behind the woman, still frozen in tumble.
“Abel. Look at me.”
Abel’s eyes raise, then once again are drawn under his cerebral Big Top. His hand gestures. A benevolent, familiar, blithe Raggedy Ann clown forms as it often does when Mary comes to him. He sees what he sees.
"Abel, can you look at me." The Raggedy clown speaks again.
Abel struggles to form words. But, it’s too difficult to manage two worlds at the same time. The woman performing a back flip on the back of a horse needs his attention. She can’t be left incomplete, suspended. His hands momentarily freeze, sensing the stranger that has slipped into his world, brought by the Raggedy Ann Clown, an intruder from that other obscure world that surrounds his; that world that flutters subliminally in and out of focus. The stranger steps around, standing beside Raggedy Ann/Mary. Pastels, extensions of Abel's fingers, are exchanged for charcoal. In that space just behind Raggedy Ann clown, a ringleader forms from grays and blacks and -- no face. Though there is a top hat.
Oh the speculation that will sure to follow.
The Raggedy Ann clown speaks.
"Jarod is in advertising."
Advertising? Juggling? Abel doesn't know? His hand sweeps the page, leaving a red, blue and green ball floating in the air above a juggler in a Harlequin costume. His mouth works, chewing out murmured words.
"Come one. Come All. Step right up."
The ringleader is given a mustache, a handlebar mustache with possible sinister points sprouting like wings in the airy space between collar and top hat. Memory gives Abel an impression, but no interest or real thought about the entity of advertising. It sits in the upper bleachers of his circus along side analysis.
The Ringleader looks at Mary, straightens. He is not accustomed to being dismissed so readily. In his world he is an important person. In the autre-monde of Abel's circus he is only a ringleader, someone who simply facilitates the presence of those who are of real interest, the clowns, the acrobats, the stilt-walkers. Jarod wanders the room looking through Abel's windows. Bubbling under the surface of his gaze is something not readily experienced by people of advertising. It's faint, nearly imperceptible, but it's there. It's awe.
This is Jarod’s first visit to the circus since childhood. His memory of it sanitized by years of adult skepticism, the doubt of the inherent magic in life.
“You’re right, Mary, we’ve come to the Circus.”
Jarod leans toward a water-color of a rabbit, just extracted from a hat, ears in the grip of a magician. Jarod leans, then blinks. pulls back as if the magician had just snapped his fingers in his face.
“This imagery really reaches out to you. I have the best artists at my disposal at the agency and they can’t do this.”
Mary smiles, hot cocoa warmed inside by her high-corporate boyfriend’s sudden appreciation of what is really important in life. Life beckons in a series of soft chimes. Mary listens. She’s being “binged.”
“Jarod, I need to run to the nurses station to take care of something. Keep Abel company for a few minutes. Just be quiet and he won’t get frightened. We let him stay in his world, because reality is often terrifying to schizophrenics.”
Jarod slowly drifts up behind Abel, intimidated by -- what? Abel’s – schizophrenia? – genius?
Acrobats flip
Horses whirl.
Jarod blinks and reels.
Chin nearly resting on Abel’s shoulder, closer than he ever would be comfortable, he seeks to see what Abel sees from where Abel see it.
"Do you ever draw anything besides the circus?"
A flaming hoop held by a dwarf dressed in a pink poodle costume with a powder blue ribbon on his head seeps out of the paper fibers. A pink poodle with a powder blue ribbon tied to its head, jumps through the hoop
"Do you ever draw airplanes?"
Abel swishes the paper with colored wands and pastel flair. An airplane forms, spreading though the paper fibers. Jarod smiles, squeezing Abel's shoulder. The airplane becomes a funny little toy straddled and driven by an orange-haired clown with a smile that spreads like wings beyond the edges of the clowns face.
"Have you ever been to the circus?"
Abel lines up his pastels in the tray of the easel in order from dark to light, reds to blues. He opens a trap door to his autre monde and pokes out his head. Words escape like bats from a cave to flutter at and about Jarod. Somewhere in that barrage is the word "yes".
Abel has been to the circus.
The same circus shared by others.
With fluttering hands and words, he brings that excursion to the Ringleader. Jarod is pressed back by the virulence of Abel’s ebullient expression. The experience escapes from Abel like air leaking from an oversized balloon.
Mary returns, halted at the door by a room filled with Abel's words. Jarod wedges a few of his own between those expanding and flattening against the walls.
"I'd like to take Abel to the rodeo."
The rodeo is brought to town on a Saturday by men who scuff the pavement with the heels of pointy-toed, snake-skin boots.
The rodeo is brought to the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute on Sunday by a "yee-haw" murmuring Abel Quodlibet.
He releases what he absorbed while bound to an arena seat by the thongs of fascination. Eyes wide and jaw slack, he weaves another world around himself, cocooning himself with paper, and canvass in an aura of broncs, chaps, saddles, steer and men in wide brim hats who spit in the dirt. Abel ptooeys, takes up his water dipped brush, whip-cracks it and dubs up dirt-brown.
“Yee-haw!”
He lays dirt around and beneath a bull, above which curls a cowboy heels above head, mid-air. That rider will need a place to fall.
“Rrrrrrr-weeeeeee.”
Abel whinnies.
By Wednesday the rodeo gallops out of Abel's room on its way down the corridor toward the day room. The circus is leaving -- more or less. A cowboy dives off of a horse, grasping longhorns, wrastling a steer to the ground. His nose is a bulbous red ball. His smile is smeared well past his lips and up the side of his pasty white face. His eyebrows are painted into points above each eye. The circus has not entirely left. Diving off the horse is the epitome of the cowboy-clown.
"Hmmmm."
Jarod's hmm is drawn out with the introspection of a scientist reviewing test data.
"We'll have to work on this."
Jarod reaches to dab a finger on the cowboy clown. Abel pushes Jarod’s hand away. Though Jarod has became one of the regular straw-bosses and ringleaders in Abel’s rodeo-circus, he is not yet allowed to touch Abel’s world, only to gaze upon it. Still, Mary gushes at Jarod’s appreciation. Jarod beams at Mary’s gush. His romantic liaison with Mary has been recently enhanced as her gratitude is expressed via a physical outpouring.
Jarod squints, assessing the cowboy-clown as a concept.
It’s insane.
He glances sidelong, using the periphery of his sanity
Maybe it's genius.
He sets his hand on Abel's shoulder.
"Can I take this picture with me?"
"Giddyap."
Abel psychically gallops past Jarod's reality, cerebral lariat looping above his head, lassoing a rotwieler-steer from the previous day's excursion when he and his rodeo had accompanied Mary to the park to watch the kids and the dogs. He nods a satisfied nod that the rodeo is complete, ready to go on the road. Jarod can take the Cowboy-Clown.
Lacing fingers around Jarod’s arm, Mary stands at the fringes of both men's worlds, two mutually exclusive domains overlapping just beyond her comprehension. Consideration for the possibilities enfolded in the portfolio case in which Jarod slips Abel’s cowboy-clown is quashed by trust.
"I'd like to take Abel to the auto races."
Jarod zips his intentions into his portfolio case, along with the Cowboy-Clown. Mary's gratitude flies out from its place beside her heart, white-dove-angel wings beating around Jarod with the rhythm of her heart, driving Jarod from the room.
On Sunday, the races zoomed around the track and on Monday they zoomed corridors of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute. Red, yellow and red-yellow streaks of automobiles roar out of the paper and canvas fiber crew pits, onto the track of Abel's newest disparate reality. The rodeo is gone, but the circus lingers. Sleek cheetah-esque and tiger-like racecars streak for the finish line.
Two weeks later, the rodeo returns to Mary, jumping out at her, as it does to thirty thousand others from the glossy page of a magazine. Diving at her, grasping for the longhorns of a steer Abel’s Cowboy-Clown lands on her dragging her to the dirt. Her jaw, slack with surprise, moves with the text inscribed next to the cowboy.
Not just any clown can take today’s bucking
world of business by the horns.
The words beat on Mary with disdained familiarity. She's seen those same words etched into the fibers of cheap copy paper lying on Jarod's dining room table. She crumples the magazine. Her coffee cup is dropped, pouring over the table. The phone is in hand.
“How could you!
“He’s a ….
“You just used him…
“I trusted….
“I thought…
“Advertising is all you ever….
Words huffed into the receiver are etched into the micro-chips of Jarod-by-proxy, his answering machine.
The phone dangles from the kitchen table, lynched by her anger. Her door is ajar, left open in deference to rescue the frail psyche of her schizophrenic charge.
In the dayroom, Jarod molly-coddles his newest artistic resource.
Mary axe-head wedges herself between Jarod and her charge, protecting Abel like a lioness, protecting cub. She draws in her breath, making ready to roar
"Look! I earned it."
Abel cuts off her thunder.
Floating before Mary is a flag of Abel's pride, a check with a number printed on it that is sizeable in its representational concept, not in the amount of paper required to print it. Behind the check is a glow.
Abel Quodlibet gleams with the gold sheen of value to society. His illumination is not restricted to his world. He is shining and present in the same world as Mary and Jarod.
"I did this!"
Abel holds up another copy of the same magazine that lies crumpled on Mary’s kitchen table soaking up coffee. Her anger goes nova, too bright for her to see any other illumination.
“Get out!”
Words explode, breaking the bounds of mental health professionalism.
“You’re using him! All this time, I thought you cared about Abel, but you just wanted him for your own profitable gain!’
“Look at him, Mary.”
Jarod moves closer, stopping when Mary’s body language flares at him, threatening to consume him in her anger.
“Have you ever seen him this happy? Has ever had such a sense of self worth?”
Jarod opens his hand as if to scoop up Abel.
“He’s not being used any more than the rest of us who take pride in the value of what we accomplish.”
Jarod circles Mary.
Mary circles Jarod.
Both circle Abel
Abel has a front row seat at the circus-rodeo. The Raggedy Ann fire-eater wields a torch, sucking in it’s flame and blowing them at the Cowboy In Black. The Cowboy In Black cracks a bullwhip, snapping down all the Raggedy clown's blah blah fireballs of words as quickly as she throws them. They sizzle beyond Abel’s comprehension, but the heat of their anger scorches him.
The Raggedy Ann doll becomes a Lion, red yarn curls becoming its mane
The Cowboy in Black becomes a Panther.
The Lion snarls at the Panther.
The Panther growls dangerously.
Abel scatters his always perfectly ordered wands of pastels and brushes, clutches his ears. Where is the wild animal tamer? The animals are loose, out of their cages. What will protect him, should these wild beasts decide to turn on him? He grabs the only weapon at his disposal. Black charcoal scribbles out a yellow racecar in frantic sweeping zig-zag lines. A charcoal Raggedy-Ann-Lion appears, paw raised, claws extended. Holding the Lion-Doll at bay a Black Panther rears up, lips curled back, white dangerous fangs exposed. There is no color to this rendering of Abel’s world, save the savage yellow of the Panther’s eyes and the blood red of the Lion's.
Charcoal violent strokes erupt from Abel’s world, seeping into Mary’s, a bucket of water quashes the fire of her words.
“Stop Jarod! He’s my charge I understand what’s best….”
She holds a hand up to quell Jarod, and stoops to Abel.
“Oh, poor Abel. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
She places her hands on Abel’s shoulders, stilling his shuddering, halting his rocking. She can not discern the mumbled words bouncing off the easel that is Abel’s charred world to fall to the floor in ashen piles of residual fear. However, the terrorized pleading nature of Abel's voice is clear as a bell in the night. She speaks to Jarod.
“You need to leave now.
The world has shrunk, collapsing in and compressing on Abel. Still he feels the soothing thin fingered touch that could be his dead mother’s. The same touch cups his chin. Fluttering about him, tickling the lobes of his ears are the there-there and now-now words of comfort. He looks, focusing on the gingham dress and flowered apron of his mother, then her sweet I love you Abel face. He’s been told of dead but dead is an obscurity as much as analysis and advertising.
His mother’s face is her face.
Her face is Mary’s.
Her face is Raggedy Ann's.
Her face is a Lion’s.
Abel cowers, but reaches for his mother, the doll, the lion, wanting so much to overcome his fear. Behind the gingham dress and the flowered apron are all the clowns, cowboys and racecar drivers that call themselves friends in the reality that Abel carries with him. They peer over his mother's shoulders with expectant, concerned and hopeful eyes. They, too, would like Abel to overcome his fear.
Nights drown into pools of exhaustion, images of a terrified and elated Abel swim through Mary’s slumber. She swallows and sinks into the depths of unsure despair. Mornings she wakes and sorts out the sheets twisted by her troubled sleep and not amorous conjunction with Jarod. She spills coffee grounds across the kitchen counter, her sight blinded by Abel’s check held before her, the bright glow of his smile peering from behind. She reaches for the small battery operated vacuum hung on the wall and finds the phone in her hand instead. Habit nearly presses numbers that telephonically represents Jarod.
The usual square of Jarod’s shoulders sag. He admits defeat.
“We can’t move forward on with this campaign of using cars that look like cheetahs.”
He stands at the head of a long table, humbly handing his career to those that hold its future in their care.
“Our use of Abel is exploitative and is causing problems for him. We need to find another campaign.”
He sits, withdrawn into his own gray world, a faceless man, avoiding his surroundings, blocking out the coughs and throat clearings of intense disappointment.
Mary stays in her office, feeling that the chilled autumn cerebral wind blowing over the landscape of her mind indicates this to be a season for catching up on the tremendous paper work that has always taken second priority to the hands-on care of her patient.
She avoids Abel.
Abel cracks porcelain frailty of Mary's heart, tapping it with the hammer of insistence. Daily he pulls out pictures of the previous weeks, the ones that still have color in them and holds them hopefully before her.
“Can I show this picture to Jarod?
“How about that picture?
“Do you think that Jarod will buy any more pictures from me?
“Will Jarod ever come back?
Each time his petitions drive Mary to her office, to stare at the phone.
“You should call him.”
One of the other clinicians is framed in the door to her office.
“No.”
Mary can't bring Jarod back, nor would she if she could.
“It’s too dangerous for Abel.
She pauses and in her pause says to herself what she won’t say to her colleague.
I’m too weak.
“Abel can’t make choices. He isn’t capable. Who will protect him if he makes a bad choice?”
The clinician speaks at her clipboard.
“He seems to be okay when he made a choice to give Jarod his picture. He certainly liked getting a check. I've never gotten a check that big.”
The clinician disappears from the doorway, words trailing back into Mary’s office.
“Maybe we should protect him from the outside world, but should we shut him out from it?”
Mary isn’t sure. But she does owe Abel an explanation. She goes to the nurses station.
“Where is Abel?”
The staff of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute is sure that he is in his room, creating yet another portal to some world of racing, rodeo or circus.
Abel is not.
Though it is outside the world that Abel cares about, he has come to know that within the world of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute, the back door is left open when the garbage is taken out. Through the same door as the garbage exits, Abel takes his leave, entering the world of choices, armed only with the magazine that Jarod has given him.
The world is filled with clowns, cowboys, stilt-walkers, broncs, racecars, and choices. Whom should he ask first? Someone must know the whereabouts of the Black-Clad-Cowboy-Ringleader. A clown in a suit with a frown and a tie that changes color oozes out of the crowd of clowns and cowboys.
Abel holds up the magazine.
"I did this!"
The clown shrinks, absorbed into an expanding frown. Abel backs away. He speaks to a man on the back of an elephant, a waste disposal elephant.
"Do you know where I can find Jarod."
He holds up the magazine.
"I did this for him."
The man on the elephant laughs a deep laugh that bounces painfully between Abel’s ears. A bucking bronc rears up with a screech and kicks its front legs, nearly coming down on Abel. The cowboy on the horse yells at Abel in the blah-blah language of obscenities.
Abel is not to be found in his usual world, his room. Mary saunters to the day room. Abel has not brought his world there. Mary shuffles to the dining hall. There are no rodeo, no circuses. The pace of her heart infects the movement of her feet. She scurries to the game room, then physical therapy, then the showers. She trots. At the phone, one call is nervous. The next is irate. Another number is dialed. Buttons are missed. Panic plays havoc with her fingers.
The phone on Jarod’s desk demands attention. He hesitates. It is his private line. Few people have that number, Mary is one of the few.
“This is Jarod.”
Panic spits out of the phone. Has either the rodeo or the circus has come to him?
“No, Mary. Abel hasn't come here.”
Mary hangs up, running from the secure world of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute, seeking where the real world overlaps the autre monde of Abel's. Jarod punches numbers on his phone.
“Get me a list of all the places where we have posters and billboards of the cowboy-clown advertisment.”
The list is in his hand in minutes. He slips the list into a magazine, marking the place where the Cowboy-Clown tries to escape. Jarod leaves the agency, entering another universe where worlds collide.
Abel is frightened. Clowns laugh at him. Wild animal tamers snarl at him. Bucking broncs and elephants try to stampede him. He cowers in a bus stop cave, just beneath a cowboy-clown being bucked from a bronc. He rocks and murmurs,
"I did this."
Clowns, baton twirlers, jugglers pass the cave. None of them believe Abel. None of the see through the portal that Abel has crafted for them, until the Black-Clad-Ringleader Cowboy arrives.
Jarod exhales into his cell phone.
"I've found him."
Mary inhales from her cell phone.
“Oh, thank God. Where are you?”
“A bus stop. At the corner of….”
Mary is on her way. Jarod waits.
“I did this.”
Abel points to the poster of a cowboy-clown being thrown from a bronc, that fills the back of the bus stop. The passerby peers with skepticism, nearly laughing until he looks to Jarod. Jarod’s brand name attire is enough to make him intimidating. Jarod nods.
“Yup. He’s the artist that did this.”
He forestalls further skepticism on the part of the passerby.
“I’m in advertising. Would I lie to you about this kind of thing?”
He indicates Abel.
Abel beams proudly. Surrounding him are Stilt-walkers, clowns, jugglers, elephants, tigers, lions with their tamers, aero- and acrobats. Only now it is different. He is one of them. He has joined the circus.
The fire-eater flicks his Bic before his Camel Filter, then swallows his flame. Trapeze artists work from hanging platforms, performing daring aerial feats with graceful swipes of squeegees and brushes. Though a grown man, giggles bubble out of Abel with five-year old delight.
Truck-elephants lumber in their bored gait, nose to tail. Funny yellow clown vehicles disgorge bulbous nosed buffoons, mouths yawning, spewing the blah-blah mime language mimicking real life. The hot dog vendor with his chrome cart and red umbrella is -- well -- a hot dog vendor with a chrome cart and red umbrella. What would Abel's Walter Mitty-ish circus be without a hot dog vendor? Stilt-walkers step around him, mock grimacing, muttering in theatrical annoyance. He moves among a miasma of clowns, part of the parade. Midgets, sharing his own diminutive stature, silly laugh and waggle tongues at him
His companion, Mary, chases off the clowns. She did not make it to the circus with Abel. Traveling down the street with her charge she never left her job and by the responsibility of her duties will not suffer the naïve cruelty of children confronted with someone different than they.
Abel Quodlibet is an institutionalized schizophrenic.
He tugs, strains, and yanks at Mary’s arm with an urgency to return home, to The Progressive Rehabilitation Institute. There is urgency to to feel brush, charcoal, pastel in his hand; to once again see what he sees now, only against the weave of canvas and paper. He urgently needs to give the Circus back to the world. It's as if he knows the world can't see the circus as he does, but he doesn't know that. It doesn’t matter. He can give it to the world. He has needs to do so. He needs sketch-pads, water color paper and canvas, brushes, pencils, sticks of circus-conjuring magic. The Progressive Rehabilitation Institute can hardly supply his demand. His room, the dayroom and most of the hallway walls are filled with circus bright colors, water and oils, filled with such detail that they could have only been rendered by someone who really has been to the circus.
Tongue seeping from the side of his mouth, charcoal wand in hand, Abel brings to life the Ringleader; a somber man of gray tones. Waving wands of colored ink, tattooed men appear in crisp magic. Flourishing batons of pastels, Chinese floor acrobats dance across the sketchpad ring in Abel’s circus.
He is contented for those moments, enveloped in the fugue of bringing to life the avatar of the greatest show on Earth. It’s so large. It overflows his senses, his room, the halls, the dayroom and dining room. The offices and homes of the staff are happily overwhelmed with the Circus. Some of it, that which has marched beyond Abel’s memory, is pressed into drawers. Along with pages depicting a tall man in a long coat and an umbrella who has no head, but still sports a bowler. Abel knows this man, but can not speak to whom, or what, the man might be. He is not someone of whom Abel is afraid. Mary and the other therapists have speculated. They’ve have sent pictures out to other, more degreed therapists, who delve deeper into the speculation of human behavior and relationships. Upon seeing this headless man, they too have – speculated.
Abel has captured every aspect of the circus and imbued paper leaves and taut canvases. Every aspect of a world that surrounds everyone is there, but to which only Abel is privy to see. Abel is the gatekeeper of a portal peering through the wall of sanity. By virtue of his affliction, he grants us a view of what we yearn yet shun.
Abel Quodlibet is a savant, an artist.
Abel is not a valued contributing member of society.
Being a portal to the autre-monde that surrounds us is not a valued skill. It holds little potential for that which is valued: income, revenue, money. What paltry funds are derived by the occasional sale of Abel's art barely pay for the sketch pads, water color papers and canvases that Abel constructs into windows; passageways through which the world views the invisible circus surrounding it.
"Circus Voltaire," Abel will murmur.
Everyone passes it off as schizoid ramblings. No one, not even Mary sees the savant wisdom. Mary’s mission is to see to it that this perceived lacking is rarely spoken of within Abel's presence and then only in hushed tones. Abel’s urgency defines his value to the world.
"The whole world loves a Circus," murmurs Abel, pastels smeared on his cheek.
One occasion, when the tones rose above the volume of being hushed, left Abel struggling with a demon, a colorful pastel clown with huge down-turned fire-red lips trapped in a colossal aqua tear, surrounded by charcoal demonic fire eaters and whip wielding lion-, tiger-, devil-tamers. Abel lost the struggle and the demon unleashed himself through Abel’s wands of pastels and charcoal, raking and pillaging the pages of two sketchbooks. The only thing that contained the demon was his entrapment in the tear. Mary and the other therapists and the therapists that delved deeper, speculated that this to be the tear of grief, the tear of loss.
Being a schizophrenic had not shorn the desire to be valued from Abel.
Mary Hansen comes to Abel's circus regularly, spending a portion of each day gazing through Abel's windows, sharing his interest in the circus, though hers is professional. Abel smiles when she enters his room. Just at the edge of his world, she waits, sometimes waving, sometimes calling. He smiles. With the flourish of his markers, pens and brushes, he lures her beyond that line in the intellectual sand, from the cool grains of professional interest into the burning crystals of awe. She is Abel's friend, though that friendship is embodied beneath the shell of “case worker.” What she experiences through the windows to Abel’s autre-monde subdues enjoyment, molesting Abel’s world with analysis. She sees his circus as a measurement of his mental well being. Abel cares not. “Analysis” is meaningless to his world as a transistor radio is to the world of dinosaurs.
On this day, Mary bubbles. She is not alone.
“This is Jarod, Jarod Cain – my boyfriend.”
What goes unsaid bubbles out of her, Jarod, has taken time from his impossible schedule to take interest in her work, to take interest in her. She peers over her shoulder, to Jarod, drinking in his tall stature with appreciation. Jarod rocks on his heels, hands in his pockets, drinking in one of Abel’s pastels with an interest that might be polished into appreciation. Mary takes his arm.
“I promised to take him to the circus. So I brought him to you, Abel. I told him you could bring him the circus.”
Jarod’s head bobs on a skeptical spring.
“Mary makes it sound as if we’re really going to the circus.”
Jarod spends too much time toying with people’s fantasies in a calculated, quantified way, to see that Abel's art is a portal to an alternative world. Mary squeezes a smile and a girlish giggle at Jarod and softly whistles the Circus March in muted calliope puffs. She smiles at Abel, a man who can't drive, but can take people to a circus in another...what?...place?
Calliope music brings a smile to Abel. Someone has come to share the circus with him. He gazes at a woman, half-formed out of the air of his separate conscious, caught in a back flip on a horse. Mary has come, standing behind him, gazing with him at the woman. He senses Mary, though he dares not turn to look, lest the horse-acrobat dissolve from his world.
Mary circles Abel, peering over the edge of his easel, studying the circus reflected in child's eyes set in the cherubic round face of a boy-man. Some days his eyes are green and threaded with a brown terror that distorts the face into a mask of insipid angst. Today, they are brown, laced with green wonderment for the spectacle of a horse and woman. Abel’s hand raises, pastel in hand. A calliope takes shape in the fibers of the paper, behind the woman, still frozen in tumble.
“Abel. Look at me.”
Abel’s eyes raise, then once again are drawn under his cerebral Big Top. His hand gestures. A benevolent, familiar, blithe Raggedy Ann clown forms as it often does when Mary comes to him. He sees what he sees.
"Abel, can you look at me." The Raggedy clown speaks again.
Abel struggles to form words. But, it’s too difficult to manage two worlds at the same time. The woman performing a back flip on the back of a horse needs his attention. She can’t be left incomplete, suspended. His hands momentarily freeze, sensing the stranger that has slipped into his world, brought by the Raggedy Ann Clown, an intruder from that other obscure world that surrounds his; that world that flutters subliminally in and out of focus. The stranger steps around, standing beside Raggedy Ann/Mary. Pastels, extensions of Abel's fingers, are exchanged for charcoal. In that space just behind Raggedy Ann clown, a ringleader forms from grays and blacks and -- no face. Though there is a top hat.
Oh the speculation that will sure to follow.
The Raggedy Ann clown speaks.
"Jarod is in advertising."
Advertising? Juggling? Abel doesn't know? His hand sweeps the page, leaving a red, blue and green ball floating in the air above a juggler in a Harlequin costume. His mouth works, chewing out murmured words.
"Come one. Come All. Step right up."
The ringleader is given a mustache, a handlebar mustache with possible sinister points sprouting like wings in the airy space between collar and top hat. Memory gives Abel an impression, but no interest or real thought about the entity of advertising. It sits in the upper bleachers of his circus along side analysis.
The Ringleader looks at Mary, straightens. He is not accustomed to being dismissed so readily. In his world he is an important person. In the autre-monde of Abel's circus he is only a ringleader, someone who simply facilitates the presence of those who are of real interest, the clowns, the acrobats, the stilt-walkers. Jarod wanders the room looking through Abel's windows. Bubbling under the surface of his gaze is something not readily experienced by people of advertising. It's faint, nearly imperceptible, but it's there. It's awe.
This is Jarod’s first visit to the circus since childhood. His memory of it sanitized by years of adult skepticism, the doubt of the inherent magic in life.
“You’re right, Mary, we’ve come to the Circus.”
Jarod leans toward a water-color of a rabbit, just extracted from a hat, ears in the grip of a magician. Jarod leans, then blinks. pulls back as if the magician had just snapped his fingers in his face.
“This imagery really reaches out to you. I have the best artists at my disposal at the agency and they can’t do this.”
Mary smiles, hot cocoa warmed inside by her high-corporate boyfriend’s sudden appreciation of what is really important in life. Life beckons in a series of soft chimes. Mary listens. She’s being “binged.”
“Jarod, I need to run to the nurses station to take care of something. Keep Abel company for a few minutes. Just be quiet and he won’t get frightened. We let him stay in his world, because reality is often terrifying to schizophrenics.”
Jarod slowly drifts up behind Abel, intimidated by -- what? Abel’s – schizophrenia? – genius?
Acrobats flip
Horses whirl.
Jarod blinks and reels.
Chin nearly resting on Abel’s shoulder, closer than he ever would be comfortable, he seeks to see what Abel sees from where Abel see it.
"Do you ever draw anything besides the circus?"
A flaming hoop held by a dwarf dressed in a pink poodle costume with a powder blue ribbon on his head seeps out of the paper fibers. A pink poodle with a powder blue ribbon tied to its head, jumps through the hoop
"Do you ever draw airplanes?"
Abel swishes the paper with colored wands and pastel flair. An airplane forms, spreading though the paper fibers. Jarod smiles, squeezing Abel's shoulder. The airplane becomes a funny little toy straddled and driven by an orange-haired clown with a smile that spreads like wings beyond the edges of the clowns face.
"Have you ever been to the circus?"
Abel lines up his pastels in the tray of the easel in order from dark to light, reds to blues. He opens a trap door to his autre monde and pokes out his head. Words escape like bats from a cave to flutter at and about Jarod. Somewhere in that barrage is the word "yes".
Abel has been to the circus.
The same circus shared by others.
With fluttering hands and words, he brings that excursion to the Ringleader. Jarod is pressed back by the virulence of Abel’s ebullient expression. The experience escapes from Abel like air leaking from an oversized balloon.
Mary returns, halted at the door by a room filled with Abel's words. Jarod wedges a few of his own between those expanding and flattening against the walls.
"I'd like to take Abel to the rodeo."
The rodeo is brought to town on a Saturday by men who scuff the pavement with the heels of pointy-toed, snake-skin boots.
The rodeo is brought to the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute on Sunday by a "yee-haw" murmuring Abel Quodlibet.
He releases what he absorbed while bound to an arena seat by the thongs of fascination. Eyes wide and jaw slack, he weaves another world around himself, cocooning himself with paper, and canvass in an aura of broncs, chaps, saddles, steer and men in wide brim hats who spit in the dirt. Abel ptooeys, takes up his water dipped brush, whip-cracks it and dubs up dirt-brown.
“Yee-haw!”
He lays dirt around and beneath a bull, above which curls a cowboy heels above head, mid-air. That rider will need a place to fall.
“Rrrrrrr-weeeeeee.”
Abel whinnies.
By Wednesday the rodeo gallops out of Abel's room on its way down the corridor toward the day room. The circus is leaving -- more or less. A cowboy dives off of a horse, grasping longhorns, wrastling a steer to the ground. His nose is a bulbous red ball. His smile is smeared well past his lips and up the side of his pasty white face. His eyebrows are painted into points above each eye. The circus has not entirely left. Diving off the horse is the epitome of the cowboy-clown.
"Hmmmm."
Jarod's hmm is drawn out with the introspection of a scientist reviewing test data.
"We'll have to work on this."
Jarod reaches to dab a finger on the cowboy clown. Abel pushes Jarod’s hand away. Though Jarod has became one of the regular straw-bosses and ringleaders in Abel’s rodeo-circus, he is not yet allowed to touch Abel’s world, only to gaze upon it. Still, Mary gushes at Jarod’s appreciation. Jarod beams at Mary’s gush. His romantic liaison with Mary has been recently enhanced as her gratitude is expressed via a physical outpouring.
Jarod squints, assessing the cowboy-clown as a concept.
It’s insane.
He glances sidelong, using the periphery of his sanity
Maybe it's genius.
He sets his hand on Abel's shoulder.
"Can I take this picture with me?"
"Giddyap."
Abel psychically gallops past Jarod's reality, cerebral lariat looping above his head, lassoing a rotwieler-steer from the previous day's excursion when he and his rodeo had accompanied Mary to the park to watch the kids and the dogs. He nods a satisfied nod that the rodeo is complete, ready to go on the road. Jarod can take the Cowboy-Clown.
Lacing fingers around Jarod’s arm, Mary stands at the fringes of both men's worlds, two mutually exclusive domains overlapping just beyond her comprehension. Consideration for the possibilities enfolded in the portfolio case in which Jarod slips Abel’s cowboy-clown is quashed by trust.
"I'd like to take Abel to the auto races."
Jarod zips his intentions into his portfolio case, along with the Cowboy-Clown. Mary's gratitude flies out from its place beside her heart, white-dove-angel wings beating around Jarod with the rhythm of her heart, driving Jarod from the room.
On Sunday, the races zoomed around the track and on Monday they zoomed corridors of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute. Red, yellow and red-yellow streaks of automobiles roar out of the paper and canvas fiber crew pits, onto the track of Abel's newest disparate reality. The rodeo is gone, but the circus lingers. Sleek cheetah-esque and tiger-like racecars streak for the finish line.
Two weeks later, the rodeo returns to Mary, jumping out at her, as it does to thirty thousand others from the glossy page of a magazine. Diving at her, grasping for the longhorns of a steer Abel’s Cowboy-Clown lands on her dragging her to the dirt. Her jaw, slack with surprise, moves with the text inscribed next to the cowboy.
Not just any clown can take today’s bucking
world of business by the horns.
The words beat on Mary with disdained familiarity. She's seen those same words etched into the fibers of cheap copy paper lying on Jarod's dining room table. She crumples the magazine. Her coffee cup is dropped, pouring over the table. The phone is in hand.
“How could you!
“He’s a ….
“You just used him…
“I trusted….
“I thought…
“Advertising is all you ever….
Words huffed into the receiver are etched into the micro-chips of Jarod-by-proxy, his answering machine.
The phone dangles from the kitchen table, lynched by her anger. Her door is ajar, left open in deference to rescue the frail psyche of her schizophrenic charge.
In the dayroom, Jarod molly-coddles his newest artistic resource.
Mary axe-head wedges herself between Jarod and her charge, protecting Abel like a lioness, protecting cub. She draws in her breath, making ready to roar
"Look! I earned it."
Abel cuts off her thunder.
Floating before Mary is a flag of Abel's pride, a check with a number printed on it that is sizeable in its representational concept, not in the amount of paper required to print it. Behind the check is a glow.
Abel Quodlibet gleams with the gold sheen of value to society. His illumination is not restricted to his world. He is shining and present in the same world as Mary and Jarod.
"I did this!"
Abel holds up another copy of the same magazine that lies crumpled on Mary’s kitchen table soaking up coffee. Her anger goes nova, too bright for her to see any other illumination.
“Get out!”
Words explode, breaking the bounds of mental health professionalism.
“You’re using him! All this time, I thought you cared about Abel, but you just wanted him for your own profitable gain!’
“Look at him, Mary.”
Jarod moves closer, stopping when Mary’s body language flares at him, threatening to consume him in her anger.
“Have you ever seen him this happy? Has ever had such a sense of self worth?”
Jarod opens his hand as if to scoop up Abel.
“He’s not being used any more than the rest of us who take pride in the value of what we accomplish.”
Jarod circles Mary.
Mary circles Jarod.
Both circle Abel
Abel has a front row seat at the circus-rodeo. The Raggedy Ann fire-eater wields a torch, sucking in it’s flame and blowing them at the Cowboy In Black. The Cowboy In Black cracks a bullwhip, snapping down all the Raggedy clown's blah blah fireballs of words as quickly as she throws them. They sizzle beyond Abel’s comprehension, but the heat of their anger scorches him.
The Raggedy Ann doll becomes a Lion, red yarn curls becoming its mane
The Cowboy in Black becomes a Panther.
The Lion snarls at the Panther.
The Panther growls dangerously.
Abel scatters his always perfectly ordered wands of pastels and brushes, clutches his ears. Where is the wild animal tamer? The animals are loose, out of their cages. What will protect him, should these wild beasts decide to turn on him? He grabs the only weapon at his disposal. Black charcoal scribbles out a yellow racecar in frantic sweeping zig-zag lines. A charcoal Raggedy-Ann-Lion appears, paw raised, claws extended. Holding the Lion-Doll at bay a Black Panther rears up, lips curled back, white dangerous fangs exposed. There is no color to this rendering of Abel’s world, save the savage yellow of the Panther’s eyes and the blood red of the Lion's.
Charcoal violent strokes erupt from Abel’s world, seeping into Mary’s, a bucket of water quashes the fire of her words.
“Stop Jarod! He’s my charge I understand what’s best….”
She holds a hand up to quell Jarod, and stoops to Abel.
“Oh, poor Abel. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”
She places her hands on Abel’s shoulders, stilling his shuddering, halting his rocking. She can not discern the mumbled words bouncing off the easel that is Abel’s charred world to fall to the floor in ashen piles of residual fear. However, the terrorized pleading nature of Abel's voice is clear as a bell in the night. She speaks to Jarod.
“You need to leave now.
The world has shrunk, collapsing in and compressing on Abel. Still he feels the soothing thin fingered touch that could be his dead mother’s. The same touch cups his chin. Fluttering about him, tickling the lobes of his ears are the there-there and now-now words of comfort. He looks, focusing on the gingham dress and flowered apron of his mother, then her sweet I love you Abel face. He’s been told of dead but dead is an obscurity as much as analysis and advertising.
His mother’s face is her face.
Her face is Mary’s.
Her face is Raggedy Ann's.
Her face is a Lion’s.
Abel cowers, but reaches for his mother, the doll, the lion, wanting so much to overcome his fear. Behind the gingham dress and the flowered apron are all the clowns, cowboys and racecar drivers that call themselves friends in the reality that Abel carries with him. They peer over his mother's shoulders with expectant, concerned and hopeful eyes. They, too, would like Abel to overcome his fear.
Nights drown into pools of exhaustion, images of a terrified and elated Abel swim through Mary’s slumber. She swallows and sinks into the depths of unsure despair. Mornings she wakes and sorts out the sheets twisted by her troubled sleep and not amorous conjunction with Jarod. She spills coffee grounds across the kitchen counter, her sight blinded by Abel’s check held before her, the bright glow of his smile peering from behind. She reaches for the small battery operated vacuum hung on the wall and finds the phone in her hand instead. Habit nearly presses numbers that telephonically represents Jarod.
The usual square of Jarod’s shoulders sag. He admits defeat.
“We can’t move forward on with this campaign of using cars that look like cheetahs.”
He stands at the head of a long table, humbly handing his career to those that hold its future in their care.
“Our use of Abel is exploitative and is causing problems for him. We need to find another campaign.”
He sits, withdrawn into his own gray world, a faceless man, avoiding his surroundings, blocking out the coughs and throat clearings of intense disappointment.
Mary stays in her office, feeling that the chilled autumn cerebral wind blowing over the landscape of her mind indicates this to be a season for catching up on the tremendous paper work that has always taken second priority to the hands-on care of her patient.
She avoids Abel.
Abel cracks porcelain frailty of Mary's heart, tapping it with the hammer of insistence. Daily he pulls out pictures of the previous weeks, the ones that still have color in them and holds them hopefully before her.
“Can I show this picture to Jarod?
“How about that picture?
“Do you think that Jarod will buy any more pictures from me?
“Will Jarod ever come back?
Each time his petitions drive Mary to her office, to stare at the phone.
“You should call him.”
One of the other clinicians is framed in the door to her office.
“No.”
Mary can't bring Jarod back, nor would she if she could.
“It’s too dangerous for Abel.
She pauses and in her pause says to herself what she won’t say to her colleague.
I’m too weak.
“Abel can’t make choices. He isn’t capable. Who will protect him if he makes a bad choice?”
The clinician speaks at her clipboard.
“He seems to be okay when he made a choice to give Jarod his picture. He certainly liked getting a check. I've never gotten a check that big.”
The clinician disappears from the doorway, words trailing back into Mary’s office.
“Maybe we should protect him from the outside world, but should we shut him out from it?”
Mary isn’t sure. But she does owe Abel an explanation. She goes to the nurses station.
“Where is Abel?”
The staff of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute is sure that he is in his room, creating yet another portal to some world of racing, rodeo or circus.
Abel is not.
Though it is outside the world that Abel cares about, he has come to know that within the world of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute, the back door is left open when the garbage is taken out. Through the same door as the garbage exits, Abel takes his leave, entering the world of choices, armed only with the magazine that Jarod has given him.
The world is filled with clowns, cowboys, stilt-walkers, broncs, racecars, and choices. Whom should he ask first? Someone must know the whereabouts of the Black-Clad-Cowboy-Ringleader. A clown in a suit with a frown and a tie that changes color oozes out of the crowd of clowns and cowboys.
Abel holds up the magazine.
"I did this!"
The clown shrinks, absorbed into an expanding frown. Abel backs away. He speaks to a man on the back of an elephant, a waste disposal elephant.
"Do you know where I can find Jarod."
He holds up the magazine.
"I did this for him."
The man on the elephant laughs a deep laugh that bounces painfully between Abel’s ears. A bucking bronc rears up with a screech and kicks its front legs, nearly coming down on Abel. The cowboy on the horse yells at Abel in the blah-blah language of obscenities.
Abel is not to be found in his usual world, his room. Mary saunters to the day room. Abel has not brought his world there. Mary shuffles to the dining hall. There are no rodeo, no circuses. The pace of her heart infects the movement of her feet. She scurries to the game room, then physical therapy, then the showers. She trots. At the phone, one call is nervous. The next is irate. Another number is dialed. Buttons are missed. Panic plays havoc with her fingers.
The phone on Jarod’s desk demands attention. He hesitates. It is his private line. Few people have that number, Mary is one of the few.
“This is Jarod.”
Panic spits out of the phone. Has either the rodeo or the circus has come to him?
“No, Mary. Abel hasn't come here.”
Mary hangs up, running from the secure world of the Progressive Rehabilitation Institute, seeking where the real world overlaps the autre monde of Abel's. Jarod punches numbers on his phone.
“Get me a list of all the places where we have posters and billboards of the cowboy-clown advertisment.”
The list is in his hand in minutes. He slips the list into a magazine, marking the place where the Cowboy-Clown tries to escape. Jarod leaves the agency, entering another universe where worlds collide.
Abel is frightened. Clowns laugh at him. Wild animal tamers snarl at him. Bucking broncs and elephants try to stampede him. He cowers in a bus stop cave, just beneath a cowboy-clown being bucked from a bronc. He rocks and murmurs,
"I did this."
Clowns, baton twirlers, jugglers pass the cave. None of them believe Abel. None of the see through the portal that Abel has crafted for them, until the Black-Clad-Ringleader Cowboy arrives.
Jarod exhales into his cell phone.
"I've found him."
Mary inhales from her cell phone.
“Oh, thank God. Where are you?”
“A bus stop. At the corner of….”
Mary is on her way. Jarod waits.
“I did this.”
Abel points to the poster of a cowboy-clown being thrown from a bronc, that fills the back of the bus stop. The passerby peers with skepticism, nearly laughing until he looks to Jarod. Jarod’s brand name attire is enough to make him intimidating. Jarod nods.
“Yup. He’s the artist that did this.”
He forestalls further skepticism on the part of the passerby.
“I’m in advertising. Would I lie to you about this kind of thing?”
He indicates Abel.
Abel beams proudly. Surrounding him are Stilt-walkers, clowns, jugglers, elephants, tigers, lions with their tamers, aero- and acrobats. Only now it is different. He is one of them. He has joined the circus.