A Crazy Tale

I was sitting in the bar, a little miserable and bored, idly flicking peanuts at the bartender, when the door burst open and a man, breathing heavily, soaked and tousled from the storm outside took the seat beside me, ordered a rather inappropriate amount of whiskey and began to weep, snort, and otherwise express disbelief in some event that had – assumedly – just occurred. Thinking his mother must have died, and, wishing to do him some kindness, I asked “Rough night?” with what I believed to be a heartening smile and encouraging lift of the eyebrows.

He turned slowly, fixing me with a wild eye, and I realized that he was a foreigner. “You have no idea.” he whispered hoarsely, in an accent I could not place. “Absolutely no idea. The things that go on in this country! The things, the strangeness!” His  face was full of a terrible fear. I urged him onwards with a dip of my head. He obliged me.

“I was walking from a bar much like this one, full of beer and simple thoughts, when this rain started. It began to soak me through, and I – being sensible – ran to a building with a cover for shelter. I stood there for a while, leaning against the ordinary door, in what I suppose was an ordinary way, watching the downpour when – to my surprise – the door I was leaning on was opened! For the briefest of moments my center of gravity was lost to me, and, as I tottered between regaining balance and falling, I caught a glimpse of the culprit who’d opened the door. He did not see my plight, for he was looking back into the building with the strangest look of guilt on his face, as if he’d slaughtered a man inside. I grasped this all within a second, for when it had passed I succumbed to my awkward positioning and fell past him, head over heels, inside. The man ran out.

The first thing I noticed, face pressed to the carpet, was the smell of the place. It smelled far too strong, as if the air itself was edible, sweet like the haze of an opium den. I had fallen into some eastern-themed brothel, which explained the man’s guilt. But the sound of the place hardly fit with this theory. It was the most frightening sound in the world; that of hundreds of people in front of me. They were saying something, all of them, rather violently, a massive declaration, or an evil incantation of sorts, unintelligible in the mass of people. I looked up and, to my horror, saw that they were looking at me. This above all unnerved me. They had seen me fall into the building, but did not stop to greet me, merely continued with their…their what? Rehearsal? I was so clearly out of place, I should have been booted out immediately, instantly, but I was merely regarded with some interest and a few grins, as if the people were an entirely different breed of animal, completely impervious to interruption. Their words were too important for me, whatever they were. I tried with all my might to place them, but they seemed to be no-one and everyone all at once. As soon as I had managed to find a lump of young, white men, I would shift my gaze and find an African lady with a head-dress that looked older than the modern world, then a huddled mass of families, then some beautiful women with scandalous red lips and glowering stares. There was utterly no reason for them to be together.

I grew immediately nervous, what with being simultaneously regarded and ignored, so I decided to stand up as well, to be one with them, and to leave. But the moment I stood up – and please believe that I am not making this up – they bowed to me. Each man, woman and child clearly and distinctively folded themselves at the hips, sinking their heads low – some lower than others, perhaps in a sort of hierarchy of respect – and bowed to me. This all took place as if it were merely instinctual – they continued their fevered speaking while doing it, not breaking a phrase. I was altogether unnerved. Was I some sort of lord in their midst? Did they take me as some member of the upper class, a war-hero perhaps? Did I have the mistakable face of a famous astronaut, showing up unexpectedly at an astronomy convention? But how could this be, for as soon as they had bowed it was over, the declarative speech continued, and no more attention was paid to me than to the powerful smell. I ran out, slamming the door on those devilish creatures.

Outside again, I wrestled with what I had seen. I am an ordinary man, to be sure, but I do not believe there is a single man alive who would not have investigated further, so strange a sight was presented in such an extraordinary fashion. And so I decided to find a back entrance, to observe and learn. Moving around the perimeter of the building – in a hurry to avoid the rain – I found a door. It was old and wooden, clearly some sort of storage entrance, for it was large enough that a truck might have backed up towards it and delivered…well, goodness knows what might be delivered to the oddest place in the world. I put my hand on the handle and pushed, opening not the large wooden doors, but a smaller door cut within them. “Doors within doors!” I muttered, “Whatever next?”

I opened it and went inside, with considerably more caution and poise than my last entrance.  My first realization, entering from the back, was that someone else had been watching the crowd of people, from a seat quite near the front door I had fallen through. I couldn’t see his face clearly, because of the distance, but I realized that the people were giving their performance for him. He seemed to be egging them on; perhaps he had paid for this recital. Then a frightening thought struck me: Surely he was angry with me! After all, the people had bowed to me when I fell in. Was he some power hungry dictator who had his followers arrayed in front of him, pledging their undying allegiance? As if reading my very fears, the entire crowd began to sit down. I dove down on all fours, behind the last row of people, so as to avoid being noticed by the dictator. Luckily, no one in the crowd was aware of my second, ungainly tumble, except for a small infant, who, being held to his mother’s breast with his chin over her shoulder, looked at me with blue, innocent eyes. From my position on the ground I could see the dictator’s lower half and was shocked – yet again. Firstly from the fact that he wore women’s clothing, a dress which was some garish, mermaid-green color, and secondly from the fact that he seemed to be completely ignoring the people he had chosen to watch. Indeed, it seemed that he was instead making himself a small snack. He approached a table and began shuffling plates and cups and bowls, muttering to himself all the while, mixing drinks and laying out food. I looked at the faces I could see; surely they were insulted to their cores over such an affront! But they merely regarded the man with placid interest, waiting, apparently, for him to beckon they continue. He must have had them all under his thumb.

He seemed crazy, and not simply as a result of his dress. He spoke some foreign language – if it was a language at all – and at odd and random intervals would pick up dishes as if to hurl them at the people, only to go back to muttering again. I sorely wished he would sit back down and let the people get on with their show.  I confess I was itching with curiosity to find what could possibly have organized so motley and arrayed a group.

Then a thing happened which I don’t think I will ever forget, if I live to be one hundred. The entire crowd knelt to the man. My stomach lurched, not out of any real disgust at the people, for I had seen stranger things within the unexplainable building, but as a result of the actual, almost physical shift in orientation their gesture gave to the room. Suddenly I realized that my very thought had been backwards; that the people had come to see the man, not the other way around, that the back entrance was the front and the front the back, the room spinning in a metaphysical shift. Of course! He was on an elevated stage! But why? Why would hundreds of individuals come to see a man mutter and eat? I was cast into a desperate doubt, for while previously I had seen one man watch a group of people doing something, I was now confronted with hundreds of madmen watching the ordinary activity of one. Had I stepped into an asylum? I gazed at the face of a young girl, intent on pulling from it the reason she had come. She was very beautiful, but regarded the man with almost no interest at all, staring at him blankly. If not the man and not the crowd, what was it? Why was it?

Suddenly her face changed, in such a way I’ve never seen. Her blankness melted and molded into a look of tenderness so sweet that it verged on sorrow, a longing that seemed to rise from no mere shift in semblance, but from some wellspring of desire and need deep and hidden within her breast. Her very soul sprang into her eyes as they gazed ahead, wet with dewy tears as they fixed themselves upon…what? I stood up to find out, so incredibly intrigued that I no longer cared whether I was found an intruder. I could care less if the man was an evil dictator or the people criminally insane, so supernatural the girl’s gaze. I slowly looked towards the stage, my own eyes panning, my neck turning, following the invisible line the girl was boring through the air. At its end I found the most terrible sight my imagination could have possibly conceived, a sight fearful not for its size or strength, but its perfect insanity. The man was holding up to her gaze absolutely nothing of worth. Nothing, but a piece of bread.  I let out a shriek and flew from the place, and have not stopped running until I arrived here.”

The man finished his drink and left the bar, leaving me numb and shaking, full of wild thoughts and strange emotions. I grasped the rosary in my pocket and stared at it, stirred to my core. “You look like you ain’t never seen one of those before.” The bartender laughed, wiping a glass.