The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (7 page)

William Corbin: A Meritorious Life

C
ORBIN, WILLIAM (1570–1660). Clown. Place of birth: Manchester, England. After he died, William Corbin’s body was taken, in secret and at great peril to his acolytes, back into the heart of the Klounkova Territories, where, on a modern map, one might now find Moldova, though at one point, the Klounkova Territories ranged from the edge of the Black Sea and westward into the European continent, cutting large swaths through the Ukraine and Romania and parts of Bulgaria. Corbin was interred in the southern flatlands of Moldova, though it had been his wish to be buried deeper in, nearer the center of the Klounkovan encampments. In the end, his friends and followers dared not risk discovery by the nomadic and restless Klouns.

Corbin owed his fascination with Klouns to his father, a village constable, who often took his three sons (of which William was the youngest) to variety acts and lowbrow, death-defying street shows, carnivals performed by traveling circuses hailing from Eastern European regions near or bordering the Black Sea. Inevitably, performing as part of one troupe or another, would be a Kloun, who, big-footed, of pale complexion, and with an over-expressive face, would often steal the show through popular movement skits and drama tumbles and the performance of ineffable sleights of hand. Although Corbin’s father detested the antics and the appearance of Klouns, William was enthralled by the graceful movements achieved by their curious and oblong shapes. Time and again, William would sneak past his father and watch with fascination, as “even their emboldened eyebrows danced along the contours of their paper-white faces.”

One day, a young William broke from his family, found his way to a small congregation of Klouns, separate from the amassing crowd, and offered himself to them as an apprentice:

Only after meeting them face-to-face, standing not two feet away, did I realize the truth of their size, speed & strength. Clearly, they stood a head taller than my own father, if not taller still, and were fit with powerful legs & exaggerated forearms. Silent they were as three stood & before I knew they had yet moved, surrounded me & lifted me above their heads. One supported my legs, the second my neck & shoulders, while the third walked alongside & beneath me, & they turned me over & over again, as if I were a spit hog, cooking over an open flame.

The Klouns stripped the boy of his shoes, replaced them with a pair of their own, large and ridiculous, and then smeared a chalky substance across his face in uneven clumps before setting him back down and roughly pushing him back toward the crowd, whose attention had turned from the puppet show to the performance of the Klouns and Corbin.

“Yet the whole time, not once did they speak, nor never did one even so much as smile.”

At the age of sixteen and disillusioned but not swayed by this encounter, William Corbin began in secret to learn the actions, attitudes, and performances of Klouns. Spending long hours watching carnival sideshows where Klouns most frequently performed, William put to memory many of the more well-known Kloun acrobatics, such as Bênchï’s Ten Facial Forms and Coefçneuçi’s Six Corporal Attitudes, which he then practiced at night in an abandoned shed some miles outside of town. When not practicing the foot steps and body rolls of Klouns, William occupied himself with the design and construction of authentic feet—“overlarge and made of flesh-colored sap, fired and molded to a shape that, when placed flush to my own foot, fits so that one cannot tell that my feet are, in relation to most Klouns, abbreviated, and made of such materials, and with accurate texture and design, so as to act not as simple props, but to act as feet act.” He also spent his time mixing face powders with plant resins to produce makeup to pale the color of his face and redden the surface of skin around his cheeks, the recipes of which have long since been lost or forgotten. He worked for over three years to develop a mixture that would not fade or smear despite “sweat, the heat of a noonday sun, the salt waters of the Atlantic, nor the simple, casual touch of a child’s finger, drawn along my cheek to see if I am real, to see if I am in fact a Kloun.”

At nineteen, confident in his appearance and the craft of his movements, confident, too, in his ability to pass as a Kloun, William Corbin began performing in the town’s main square, never once recognized by his neighbors or friends or even his father. He continued performing for six months before he joined a small traveling show that was headed back to mainland Europe with plans to return to Romania and hopes of performing along the way. He traveled for two years without incident or discovery, further honing his skills as a Kloun and learning the now extinct language of that people. Once in Romania, Corbin left the troupe and traveled into the Klounkova Territories, which had begun to shrink little by little, year after year. To his surprise, he was easily accepted by a highland tribe, with whom he traveled for two years, and where he married and he lived peacefully, and soon he began to feel not that he was disguised as but was in fact a Kloun.

Although he kept a journal of his life from the time he left England, his entries are written almost exclusively in Klounkovan, a singular and indecipherable language, and so it is that no one knows how his charade was discovered, only that it was. In 1640, William Corbin was violently expelled from his tribe and was forced to leave the Territories. He was separated from his wife, who, it is believed, was pregnant, and he was often forced to hide even after crossing the border separating Klounkovan lands from the rest of Europe, even as he traveled back to England, shadowed as he was by a small, independent band of Klouns who believed exile too lax a punishment for Corbin’s crime and betrayal.

Once he returned to England, Corbin continued to perform under different names and bearing different guises, and in time developed a system of training others in the movement arts of Klouns. Every week until his death, a small group of men (no more than ten at any given time) would gather at night and in secret in the chill and damp fields on the outskirts of town to learn Corbin’s craft. While these men’s movements paled in comparison to those of the original Klouns, and could not compete even with the inestimable power and abilities of Corbin himself, they continued to practice his craft nonetheless, and passed on his knowledge to others, and their descendants continue to perform even today, having, over time, outnumbered and then replaced the race of Klouns, which disappeared some few years after Corbin’s death and whose storied past has long since been forgotten.

The Sounds of Early Morning

S
he sat up in bed but couldn’t find her husband, then found him lying (“Poor exhausted bunny”) on the floor at the foot of the bed, the surgical mask still wrapped around his head, twisting around to cup not his mouth but his ear. If she squinted at him, he looked scrubbed and fresh and like a boy playing doctor, but she had to squint.

How funny,
she thought.
How absolutely wonderful.

Moving through the house to the kitchen, she noticed the cracks in the wall were bigger today than they had been the day before. They would have to move soon, or else repaint.

In the living room, the dog was barking, and though she couldn’t hear him, the force of his barks made her chest feel rubbery and beat upon, and so she moved quickly through the room, crouching behind the couch so that its cushions, already torn beyond repair, would absorb the brunt of the animal’s timbral and violent voice.

There were still dangers, she decided. And if her husband continued to refuse to send the dog away, something else might have to be done. For their own protection.

Once she had made it through the living room and into the kitchen, forgetting for the moment that her ears were protected, she moved gingerly among the items on the counter and the appliances in the cabinets, lifting pots and pans by two fingers instead of four, cracking the breakfast eggs the old way, wrapped in nonreactive plastic towels, rolling them under a heavy, padded, cast-iron pin so that the shells were crushed fine, would not be as noticeable when eaten. She had become so adept at her routine, so careful, so quiet, that it wasn’t until she dropped a dish that she remembered being protected, remembered her husband’s tiny knife, the sharp pains, and now the blessed, blessed silence.

She smiled.

The first task, she decided, was to take care of the dog. She was reluctant, but she couldn’t rightly avoid the dog forever.

She wrapped herself in her afghan. She tightened her hood. She wore her mittens. The dog had chewed the goggles into a useless mess, so she approached him with her eyes closed, rapidly blinking at intervals to check her progress, his movements. Grabbing him, she covered his snout and threw him outside, and then beat him back with her voice until, with what she imagined was a whimper, he scuttled off. Better, she would explain to her husband, than cutting its vocal cords. No need to be cruel, she would explain. Can’t leave the poor thing defenseless.

Then she made the bed.

She did so stepping carefully over and around her husband.

She hoped her screams hadn’t caused him serious harm. His skull had always been soft, delicate. Normally he wore hats, hats she had knit for him out of a fibrous copper material he’d brought home for her after the last time he had gone scavenging. He should have worn one of his hats before he performed the operation. She should have reminded him, but in her excitement, she’d forgotten all about it. All about him.

She finished the bed and then looked at her husband, still on the floor, still breathing, but only barely, and she worried.

In an hour,
she thought.
If he is not awake in an hour, I will wake him.

She fixed herself a cup of coffee, and moved to the back porch. So much time had passed since either of them had dared step outside that the vines had brambled—perhaps a defense mechanism—across the patio furniture, so that it took her not a few snips with her shears to cut out a space for sitting. She carried the afghan outside with her, just in case. One can never be too careful. A swooping, cawing blackbird. Claps of thunder. Yelling, rambling children. Very real dangers, all of them. But, in truth, she didn’t expect to use the blanket and was, after a moment, quite frustrated at herself for being so cautious, for bringing it along at all. It snagged on the thorns.

After a time, her coffee went cold. The wind picked up and was, no doubt, howling. She could feel the sound of it against her cheek. Rather than cover herself, though, she gave up on the morning and, back inside, sat down to wait for the afternoon.

Her husband looked vulnerable, like a pile of leaves. He still hadn’t woken, but his lips moved slightly when she moved him from the floor to the bed. She tied him there, anchored him to the bedpost. She removed the mask from his face and covered his ears with the pieces of foil left on the nightstand.
Too little too late,
she thought to herself. She set his head against a pillow and pulled the sheets to his chin. She pinched his nose, hoping he might wake. He had been against the operation from the very beginning, and now she was afraid he might have been right. They had torn through twelve notebooks arguing back and forth about it, until, finally, she had worn him down.

She lightly touched the bruises on his cheekbone, bare patches high on his face, which had not been quite protected by the mask. She mussed his hair, careful not to pull any of it out. He had been against the operation, but he hadn’t offered any other viable solutions. They had already replaced three windows, and this in just the past week. The dog could not be placated and had become so harmfully loud, neither of them could approach him without suffering bruises and cuts. Children from other neighborhoods and looters, with all their shouts and threats, their powerful voices shuddering chips of paint and loose pieces of drywall onto their heads—the world had become wholly unpredictable and loud. She and her husband had to do something.

She looked at her husband, at his bruises, his cuts, his now misshapen nose. It had been such a nice nose. She touched his cheek. She pressed the flat part of her palm against it. She pushed his head gently to the side. She could get a mirror, she thought. She could find her compact in her purse and hold it under his nose, like she had seen someone do once in a movie, although in the movie the man was trying to make sure a person was dead, and she would be trying to make sure a person was alive.

She shook him softly by the shoulder. She wanted him to wake up. She wanted him to wake up and to make her believe everything was going to be okay. She pressed her hands into his stomach, leaned into him, not too much, just enough to make him open his mouth, to force air out of him, to elicit even the smallest breathy rasp of his voice. But even if he had made a sound (and maybe he did), she wouldn’t have been able to hear it. And then the reality of this—she couldn’t hear anything at all—slowly became real to her.

My, I’m jumpy, she said.

She said this thinking she should at least be able to hear her own voice inside her own head.

Anxious, she said.

Anxious, she said again.

Anxious, she said. And again. Louder. And louder. Straining her throat. Yelling, screaming.

She closed her eyes and cupped her hands over her ears as if she were in a concert hall and yelled as loud as she possibly could. Tried to imagine what her voice, so loud, might sound like.

Nothing.

She opened her eyes then, and, seeing what was left now of her husband’s face, she let out a small gasp and then covered her mouth, afraid even the softest sound might ruin him beyond repair.

Housework, her mother always said. Tidy up your house, tidy up your soul.

So she moved into the bathroom. Scrubbing the grout, tearing mildewed strips from the shower curtain, polishing the marble countertops—these actions calmed her. But.

She rather missed the dog now. She wouldn’t quite admit it, but she rather missed the noise.

She wouldn’t mind, she decided, even if one of the children or a looter came to stand outside and shout at the walls.

Then, after a moment, she realized that they just might be outside that very moment and that, unless she looked, she would never know.

So she looked. And sure enough, eight boys stood in a semicircle in the front yard. Their shouts, amplified (or so she imagined) by hollowed-out plastic drinking cups, warmed the air around her house. Standing on the porch, she removed her sweater.

They must be very young,
she thought.
Their voices haven’t changed, or else they are hoarse from hours of shouting, weeks of shouting.
The damage their voices caused was negligible.

Still, the grass at their feet browned, and the plants closest to them wilted under the weight of their breath. It was obvious they were trying their best. But in the end, their wasted efforts only depressed her further.

Dressed in her space suit, she walked protected through the neighborhood for the first time in months. She waved at her neighbors’ houses. She smiled at the sunshine. Twice, she stopped her walk to bend down to the earth and unroot the small blades of grass pushing through cracks in the sidewalk.

If looters whistled at her, she took no notice. One or two children ran up to her, throwing their voices at her, and then ran away, unsettled, frightened when nothing happened, when she showed neither sign of fear or anger.

The suit wasn’t meant for space, she knew, but
space suit
had become a loving term between her and her husband.
Put on your space suit and we can sit outside,
he’d say.
Let’s put on our suits so we can make love.

There were no real space suits, just as there was no real space.

But before, even wearing the suit, even wearing two suits, she wouldn’t have dared walk outside for such a prolonged time. No matter how protected her body, no amount of fabric or material could protect her ears. The small predatory birds, in order to survive, had learned the construction of angles and reflection, refraction of sound that could pierce even the most secure ear-covers. Furthermore, the rustle of leaves, the crack of twigs, the rushing sound of a strong wind—any of these could be harmful, or fatal, even.