Susan Daitch - Siege of Comedians

SIEGE OF COMEDIANS

SIEGE

OF

COMEDIANS

A NOVEL BY

SUSAN DAITCH

2580 Craig Rd.

Ann Arbor, MI 48103

www.dzancbooks.org

SIEGE OF COMEDIANS. Copyright 2021, text by Susan Daitch. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 2580 Craig Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data available upon request

The story of Fair Brow is quoted from Italo Calvinos Italian Folktales, Pantheon Books.

The All-Purpose Mourning Stadium appears courtesy of artist, Patricia Smith.

Text on page 257 is from https://www.weltmuseumwien.at/schausammlung/#kulturkampf.

ISBN: 978-1950539338

First US edition: September 2021

Interior design by Angelica Gillespie

Cover by Matthew Revert

Printed in the United States of America

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CLAY HEADS TALKING

The mobile phone companys logo was a rotating aqua and orange Mercator map that folded into a globe as it turned. Over and over again the lobes of the momentarily flat map turned three dimensional and curved into a ball then unfolded back to the flat map. The animation appeared on a screen in the front window of the store, a branch of the Global Pathways Wireless. Located on Martin Luther King Blvd, sandwiched between a Mickey Ds and a Starbucks, this branch was busy for mid-day, midweek. A woman and her son were considering an upgrade. A group of teenage girls were looking at new phone cases and deciding which ones had decent bling potential. A man holding a Wildlife Conservation Fund backpack by a strap had only wanted to replace a lost charger. The two people who worked in the branch were happy to have so many customers, because most people solved their problems in front of a computer screen or other device, so walking talking humans who strolled into the store had become less and less common. Their jobs depended on good service, so they were eager to provide it, though they kept half an eye on the teenage girls who looked, to the manager, like a gang of shoplifters. Both manager and employee wore aqua and orange striped polo shirts. Once in a while an older customer who had lived on the east coast would tell them these were Howard Johnson colors, but they had no idea who Howard Johnson might have been or why he would be known by the colors that symbolized Global Pathways Wireless.

When the bomb went off, windows shattered outward onto the pavement and a fist of black smoke burst through the screen that had, until a second ago, been filled with the endless loop of the spinning globe. Almost immediately the air smelled of toxic melting metal, plastic, burning USB cords, and paper. Greedy yellow flames reached for the McDonalds and the Starbucks, but they had working sprinkler systems. Global Pathways did not.

By the time the fire department arrived and put out the blaze, only a few of the retrieved bodies could be identified. The five that were burned beyond recognition were sent to a lab in New York to have their faces reconstructed. The lab in New York was really only one or two people who specialized in reconstructing heads and thereby finding identities. This is a very specific skill.

They arrived at my studio via FedEx. The blackened knobs that had once been heads were not a pretty sight, I can tell you. Sometimes I hope Ill find something surprising in the minute chambers and alleyways of human remains: diamonds or emeralds tucked in jaws, lodged behind molars, but all I lifted from the crates and boxes were bones in need of major facial reconstruction. In the case of the Global Pathways victims, there was enough skull to flesh out the faces and heads in clay. When nearly finished, they looked decently lifelike. Five people: a middle-aged man and woman, a young man in his late teens, early twenties, and two very young girls, maybe twelve or thirteen. The younger man had wide-set eyes, a short thick nose, and a broad face. His teeth were mostly intact and in no need of orthodontia. Perhaps hed had braces when young which meant he came from a family who could afford expensive dental work. That was all I knew. Any or none of them could have been the human time bomb. The horror of their last minutes on earththose expressions are unknown. My job is to measure the space between eye sockets, to mold calm and straightforward appearances in clay over bare bone because identification needs to reside in neutrality, not terror. Terror is not useful for ID-ing and only causes trauma to surviving friends and family who have to view the clay reproductions. Its hard enough as it is. To look at and understand the fear and pain in their loved ones last moments on earthwhat would be the point of that? Ive never sculpted a screaming face.

Holloway, the detective who called from Missing Persons, couldnt resist telling me heads would roll if I didnt turn this one around quickly. His sense of humor tended to link obvious phrases or truisms with the gruesome nature of our work, so when on a job with Holloway, it was no surprise he didnt ever react to the horrific ways life could end. He never gagged or had to look away no matter what had been done to body parts. At the same time, he had a penchant for looking at a crime scene as a fulcrum for unseen forces and would speak in a tone of wonderment, as if he were the first to note phenomena: the influence of high tides, rhythms of underground vibrations created by subway cars, mice and rats fear of open spaces or, as he called it, rodents agoraphobia. He was obsessed with Fermis Paradox, and would, in the middle of an investigation, talk about the possibility of humans being absolutely alone in the universe, that there is no planet out there somewhere with another Holloway and another Iridia Kepler sifting through the same evidence and coming to a conclusion way more quickly. It wasnt my job to go to crime scenes, for the most part, but he would talk to me about them. Why was the weapon distinctly left facing east? Why were candles positioned on the windowsill? Sometimes I wanted to say to him, Dont get your eye stems in a tangle, its just random and haphazard, but then hed figure things out in unexpected ways. While he was speaking to me over the phone I imagined him in the morgue instructing the coroners assistant to box up the skull and have it messengered immediately, all in a days work.

My studio is a fourth floor walk-up in Sunset Park, a former warehouse, a warren of other studios and small businesses. I also live there which is illegal, but this is what I can afford, and the management company who works for the absentee landlord doesnt seem to snoop around as long as nobody burns the place down.

The first thing I have to do when the heads arrive is boil them to remove any excess bits and pieces of lingering decay or charred flesh. The pots on my stove arent the stuff of television cooking shows. I warn the rare guy who comes home with me not to look at anything on the stove, but few can resist the temptation. Once a professional climber who led teams up the Rockies and into Death Valley, someone youd think would be pretty tough, peeked under a lid and left screaming, saying, No really, Im fine from the stairs, Ill be in touch. I knew he wouldnt call again, but I was okay with that.