In those days it was easy enough to get by. Looking back on it now I don’t miss the instability but I do miss the abiding sense of potential. This wasn’t my youth, but it wasn’t long after. The town was mostly walkable and the bars were open late and I liked most everyone I met. I had little to fear. We all lived on the banks of the Delaware. I kept my car garaged except for grocery runs or trips to visit family or the occasional ill-starred date. And so that was the joy of it — walking down the sidewalk after midnight with a buzz or walking down the sidewalk in the late morning with coffee fueling me on my way. Small joys and comfort and exactitude.
The best part of those days were the conversations with strangers, usually. Sometimes I’d find myself with a prostelatyzer or a figure engaged in electioneering, but mostly it was a way of making new friends or finding certain tensile connections. Four taps and a roundabout and say goodnight. Sometimes I’d make these connections in a bar and sometimes outside on the patio. Once a man in a bookstore complemented the shade of blue on my shirt and offered me a job. I politely declined. Still: salad days? Salad days.
I was taking the bridge across the river when I heard my name from behind me. I didn’t recognize the woman walking there, hurrying to catch up. She was shorter than me by about six inches, thin, with a haircut that resembled a gumdrop, but cute. She said my name again and greeted me with a big smile and I said hello in return and could not for the life of me remember her name. Still, we made small talk as we crossed back over to the Pennsylvania side of the river. She asked if I wanted to get a drink and I said why not, and so we found the nearest bar and walked inside.
It wasn’t crowded at all. The other tenants of the tables and barstools were like us — ill-matched pairs and the odd singleton nursing something smoky. She offered to get the first round and I acquiesced; the bartender greeted her with a hearty “Amina!” and that was how I learned her name was Amina.
We sat opposite one another, and I continued to wonder when I’d met this woman. Had I been drunk some night to the point of blacking out, or was my memory for both faces and names that bad? Usually I’d have at least one or the other. Amina wasn’t unfamiliar to me, but neither did I feel any recognition when I saw her. Still, she had bought me a drink during a lonesome time, and I wasn’t about to neglect that sort of kindness.
I spent the first fifteen minutes of the conversation dreading a moment where she’d turn her head slightly and say, “You have no idea who I am, do you?” But if she thought that, she didn’t say it. She asked me about my work in generic terms, and I asked her about hers while avoiding specifics. Not long afterwards I went back to the bar to get our second round of drinks. I came back to the table, set her Jack and ginger before her, and took a sip of beer. “This is going to sound strange,” she said, and then paused.
I shrugged and said, “I can do strange.” I had no idea where she was heading with this, but I had little fear in my heart. Why would I?
“Do you remember the clowns in the woods?” she asked. And obviously I did. It had been a local news story throughout the state about two years earlier. Picnicking families near Allentown had seen clowns lurking in the woods one afternoon. A driver outside Carlisle saw a figure in a clown suit standing by an isolated stretch of road, miles from any buildings or bus stops. A professor in Gettysburg had been startled by a coterie of clowns running through the town at high speeds, hyper-focused on some mysterious task. For a month, the clown sightings continued; then they stopped, with no explanation ever given.
It was strange: most of us expected an explanation of some sort. A prank would have made sense, but no pranksters came forth. Learning it was viral marketing for something would have fit as well, but no one owned up to it. There was just an array of possible feral clowns, and then there were not. So yes, I told Amina: I remembered the clowns in the woods.
“Well,” she said. “Do you ever feel like the world’s a mess?”
I hated that my reflex was to smile, but still — I smiled. “I feel like that all the time,” I said.
“Do you think it makes no sense?” she said.
“I think it makes no sense,” I said.
“Here’s my theory,” she said. “This world is out of logic. Something’s broken, some universal mechanism or something.”
This was where I braced myself. I’d had friends turn evangelical before, and so I thought I knew where this was going — a conversation about religion and faith and surrender. I was certain about to get a speech or a pamphlet or both. And things made a little more sense: that random encounter with Amina on the bridge was a targeted kind of thing. The bait and switch with beer and Jesus talk. Those were the kinds of conversations I’d moved here to avoid. I certainly agreed with her about the illogic around us, but I didn’t feel ready to commit myself to a church or creed.
“And that’s what the clowns were for,” she continued.
“What?” I said.
“The clowns were the heralds,” she said. “They made no sense, and they were there to get us ready for a greater world that doesn’t make any sense.” She took a drink of her drink and inhaled. “They’re the heralds of chaos, is what I’m saying.”
So that was the question: did it all ring true? At first it didn’t. At first I sat there and humored Amina for a couple of minutes and then our conversation found another topic and I felt like I could breathe again. She had to go not long after that, and I stuck around for another drink. I still had no idea where I had met her, or from where she might have known me. I consulted the usual social networks and found nothing. I wondered if I might see her around town again, in the bridge or on the bar, but I never did.
Months passed and the world grew stranger and more happenstance. Sometimes it felt like nothing so much as rolling dice or divination was causing the sequence of events I witnessed on both a local and global level. I saw churn and random acts of violence and the unworthy glorified. I wondered when it would all end and I saw no end in sight.
And I started to wonder: was Amina on to something? Were the clowns lurking in dark places the heralds of something, the universe’s warning light, the first siren letting you know it was time to move to higher ground? I waited for things to get better but they only got worse, and I wondered what the next heralds might be. I waited around the dark places and in the woods and on poorly lit streets and soon enough I caught sight of others in the distance doing the same. In those days I finally put it together: the next heralds were all of us.
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Tobias Carroll is the author of three books. His fourth, the novel Ex-Members, will be released in June by Astrophil Press.
twitter: @TobiasCarroll
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