The Cure for Fun

I

They were all thin and most of them weak, but they had large heads. Their bodies were young, their skin smooth and soft. They ate little and seemed to feed on an unknown source. Few of them ever made it past fifteen years, which was like old age to them, though they still looked like children. They all lived together beyond the city in a home guarded by the Pentad, a thought-form. It could not be seen or felt, only heard in mind.

There was a duo that thought themselves the cleverest. Their names were Grin and Bear. Grin was a sage and sometimes thespian. Bear was a typologist and a student of the natural world. They dressed well and complimented each other on this. They would scan books for hours, looking for words that sounded pleasing to them, then string sentences together that summarized their concepts. They saw they were pioneers in a new way of life, but the others didn’t understand them.

“I am a believer, and let my psychic faculties guide me in choosing which ideas are the best,” Grin might proclaim.

“I inquire, and ascertain truth through rote method, taking no-thing prima facie,” Bear might proclaim in turn.

Grin was balding and covered this up with a baseball cap whenever he could. His filthy, gray locks hung in a semicircle around his pate. Bear was full-haired and still beautiful by his estimation. His liver-spots were numerous, and he had crustaceous jowls. They thought their research secret and bound to be revolutionary. The Pentad watched them with curiosity, assuming that with patience they would someday disappear.

II

A train ran to the home each Wednesday. It was a golden train that glowed. It ran down the western hill along a switchback rail to increase anticipation. The children came ringing bells to meet it, opening a special gate in the fence. It rode through the yard and crested the sill of the largest window in the living room and traveled freely throughout the home for an hour or two. The children chased the train from room to room, throwing their dirty clothing and toys and wrappers and other assorted trash at it. The train spewed confetti from its funnel and other Goldbergian pipes along its back and honked a charming horn. Sometimes the children fell spasming on the floor and foamed at the mouth and couldn’t be brought back to their senses for the rest of the day. The Pentad would also seize as the train made its way through the home. The lights would flash and pop, recharge, flash, drive needles into the brains of the children, who kept laughing anyway. Grin and Bear would sharpen their straight razors on a strap and scowl and read their novels upside down. The Pentad screeched sometimes, and everyone could hear it like the sound of an animal in the night driving them stark awake, upright, terrified, no mother to huddle around her offspring and growl. The train screeched sometimes too until it seemed that everyone was deaf and all could be heard was the whimpering of the one that watched over them. Grin and Bear would go to the others and tell them to stop and quit their racket and the others would go on all fours and bark at them, draw lines on the floor, territorial no you can’t cross here. Grin and Bear always went back to their attic and plotted again and mulled until the day came that they had a plan.

Bear stood on a banana crate and named the other children for what they were: hylics, a word he once read in a book.

“They hath no perception of the higher worlds, lacking these faculties entirely, living in a kind of hypnosis, which by dint of repetition they deem amusement; breads and circuses, as it were,” he rambled.

Grin concurred and noted silently to himself that he was even closer to the divine than Bear, who in turn noted silently to himself that Grin’s disinclination to ratio limited his progress in the Mysteries.

What these Mysteries were, neither of them knew, but they figured this was why they were called that. They conferred on some late nights about what their reward in the afterlife would be for their commitment to study. Bear imagined long rows of hedges along which stood fruit-colored ready-mades representing transcendental realities, blossoming plastic mechanisms, flowers of dirigibles and mobiles creaking under a calm and starry night, attended by cartoonish anthropomorphic beans embodying Truth and Beauty. Grin fantasized of shelves filled with expensive magazines showing photographs and drawings of young, naked, and sexless boys or girls who would arouse in him contemplative states instead of the confusion and self-abuse their profane counterparts caused. I will sit in my comfortable armchair, and marvel at their anatomies, he thought to himself. This mental chair would seem gigantic, totally engulfing him and his merry dangling legs, and gently creeping into the distance as he focused on it in his mind’s eye.

The greatest obstacle that faced them was pleasure, of others as much as themselves. They knew how easy it was to confuse appearance with reality. Knowing too the transformative power of art, their plan was to stage a drama in which pleasure was murdered, but they were unsure who would portray it, one or the other.

III

Over the western hill was a small station where the golden train rested for most of the week. It was kept by a man named Pacqhuart who lived in a clapboard shack. The train dimmed to a pale yellow as it came to a halt. Pacqhuart would reload it with confetti, clean any trash that still clung to it, refuel it, tinker with its mechanisms, and repaint it if necessary. He kept stacks of technical manuals provided by his employers around and beneath his bed. He rarely consulted them, except on a whim to validate his instinct. He was a veiny and overweight man with a long, white beard. He resembled Santa Claus. He tended a flowerbed by the shack in his free time. He also loved to draw pictures of cities at his work desk. He covered reams of paper with amateurish pencil drawings of beehives jockeying in a desert landscape. This is Echo, and this Rheum, and this Alanda, he thought to himself, naming each of them. He was a world-builder. He speculated about the culture in these cities. Here they worship hands and speak a language known as Frasherin, but a minority speaks a dialect of Frasherin known as Frasher-Fawn, he thought to himself. And here they regard the afterlife as fiction, and here they regard it as an extension of this life where one’s social standing is persistent. He felt the depths of his imagination had gone unrecognized in his lifetime.

Pacqhuart wrote brief paragraphs of fictional travelogue info on postcards and stuffed them into the train along with the confetti. He hoped to influence the children at the home. He derived a feeling of permanence from this, not being a father. The children, if they could read the cards, found them boring and difficult to understand. They might chew on them, savoring the taste of the paper, or cover them in a noise of colored pencil. They might scrawl incoherent responses on them like “you are not here!” or “shut up train!”. Those who did grasp something of their content would wonder why objects were shaped the way they were in Pacqhuart’s fictional world, or why people decided to speak with their mouths at all. A girl named Louise stood in a rigid stance for hours on end while holding a postcard in her right hand at eye-level and squinting at it until she began leaping into the air and shouting such that the others were forced to subdue her.

One day Pacqhuart found a postcard stuffed back into the funnel of the train. There was a personal insult written on it, a single word. It upset him so much that he retrieved a cell phone from under his bed and turned it on for the first time in months. He dialed the county’s mental health hotline. A woman answered who referred to herself as “Nikita the Peach”. She always used this name in professional situations, signing it on paper with “~~” afterwards. Pacqhuart explained his general predicament, the circumstances that led to his current position in life, addressing Nikita as “my dear”, then told her what the postcard read.

“Oh, I’m so, so, so sorry,” she said, “that is like, so weird. Why would they say that? I’m very, very sorry for you going through all of that and suffering like that. Do you think you’re going to be alright lol? We have so many people at the center who work with trauma. There is actually a workshop on Working Through Trauma this weekend. Does that sound like something that would help you? Yeah, but that is like so, weird and annoying lol. It’s probably just them, don’t you think? Have you ever considered that it might just be them? Do you have a support network?”

She continued by recommending prayer, describing it as “very much a performative thing” that nonetheless delivered results. Pacqhuart lost the call as the sky turned dark, but his eyes had glazed over and he didn’t notice for a while.

IV

Grin and Bear had cleared the furniture from the center of the living room. At the back of their stage was a giant constructed from barrels, lamps, chairs, and pool noodles. Packing popcorn spilled from its half-finished gut. It reclined against the window that the train usually came through. Grin and Bear had been monologuing to each other in front of the giant for three whole acts. It stared down at their performance through hollow wooden eyes. The children were gathered along the other side of the room. They sat, nervously strolled, or napped on top of one another. Some of them were almost hypnotized by the argument, drooling onto the floor, but few understood what was going on.

The play concerned the inner struggle of a prince. He was represented by the inanimate giant, and Grin and Bear were his court’s various personages. The prince found himself in a time of social upheaval, torn between respecting tradition and the gods of old or demolishing the temples in his capital city to make way for the glorification of his newly inherited empire. His court was populated with many verbose conmen, philosophers, ideologues, failed military strategists, and astrologers, all of them portrayed by Grin and Bear. Their costumes were rudimentary, and the audience had difficulty distinguishing characters because they all talked the same.

The plot centered on a secret conflict between two spirits disguised amongst the inhabitants of this court. One was named The Spirit of Desire, and the other The Spirit of Truth. The prince suspected that supernatural forces were at work this evening but had no way of knowing how. The Spirit of Desire hoped to influence the prince to gratify his lust for position, and The Spirit of Truth hoped to influence his sense of honor. Their identities would be revealed after a culmination of dialogue in the final act.

V

Thunder rolled outside. Rain sprinkled on Pacqhuart’s head. He trudged down the western hill to the home. He had resolved to confront the children and discover which one of them wrote the insulting message. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say. He wondered if the child would even be able to communicate with him. He did not intend harm. He cycled through the names of his imaginary cities in his head in order to relax, his eyes screwed downward, mumbling out the right side of his mouth. By the time he reached the door of the home, the rain was falling heavily. He knocked four times to no response, then let himself in.

It was warm and stuffy inside. The hallways were suffused with a queasy fluorescent glow. Pacqhuart scraped the mud off his boots. He called out again, still no response. He began to wander through the rooms.

He found dust and dead insects everywhere. Furniture was overturned and gutted. Toys and memorabilia were left inside. The children seemed to sleep in painful positions: at extreme angles propped up against walls, with limbs sticking out in erratic patterns, or crunched like rodents into holes ripped in couches and armchairs. Books in many different languages could be seen on the shelves that weren’t toppled and disassembled. Torn pages were layered on the hardwood in some corners as if for a dog. Pacqhuart kept calling out to no avail but started to hear children speaking in the distance. These voices made him uneasy. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He felt that something was following him.

VI

“To whom shall we attribute the joylessness which entered the orgy?” Grin intoned. He portrayed The Spirit of Desire disguised as a priest lamenting the decline of his faith. “To the speaker? To the crowd at large? Shall we blame the spirit of the times? Shall we blame the death of learning? Shall we blame philistinism, ressentiment, or any number of intellectual bugaboos and boogeymen? Shall we attribute it to poor diet, malnutrition, and lack of exercise? Will they believe us if we speak out, or will we be silenced? Will we become ugly and ridiculous, as is so commonly observed? Should we contain ourselves, reserve our energies as if hydraulic, being well-ordered and well-maintained?”

“And are you one of the Righteous People?” Bear replied in the part of a dandy. “One of the Wise People? And do you know the path to the Good Life? Many of these I have known. Many of them have in their beneficence offered guidance to me.” He laughed and lobbed a decanter in Grin’s direction, which smashed against the wall. They fell into mock-combat, unsheathing wooden swords and clashing in cumbersome motion, evading each other with awkward, mechanical side-steps, fighting as if they were underwater.

Pacqhuart stepped out by the staircase at the back of the audience. He stopped and peered at the scene, unnoticed by any of the children. He did not comprehend what was happening. He moved toward them carefully. They turned around and stared. He looked down at their sickly bodies, some asleep, two or three splayed across one another, daydreaming and chewing on hard objects, others squatting rigidly. Their hair was mangled, cut unevenly, half-pulled out. Pacqhuart felt he might grab one at random as a suspect and throttle them. He saw the two he thought were role-playing as knights wrestling on the floor now, biting each other on the neck and ear. He lurched forward to intervene.

Pacqhuart reached down to pull the boys apart and a burning sensation shot across his skin. He cursed the children and gnashed his teeth. A bright orange light flared into his vision. He saw fire spilling from the eyes of the makeshift giant near the window. It transfixed him and a voice resonated from the back of his head.

Do you know how they are treated? The Pentad vibrated pain deep into Pacqhuart’s skull. Do you know what is done to them? In the cities they are bred by number from factories, cubicles of natal sacs and placenta, in the towns and suburbs they are raped and pimped out by their own families, in the far islands they are crucified in tribes to appease senile deities, in the tundra they are fed to bears and other beasts to change the weather, in the mountains they are launched into the sky to study the nature of gravity, everywhere they are employed freely as probes and foils to the powers of nature, everywhere they are employed freely to satisfy the whims of souls in bodies that are bound to this world, pigs and other shit-eaters, maggots who feed on corpses, who lie and teach them all are exceptional, all will be rewarded the same for their duties, that there is no mystery in life but to follow orders, and if they are sacrificed it was for good reason.

The children stood around the large man as he lay on the ground writhing and screaming, tears flowing down his face. They pat him gently and combed his hair, admired his beard, poked at his enormous belly. They could not seem to comfort him.