He entered off the alley into what once might have been just a storeroom: a sliver of space forgotten among developing real estate. It was barely 60 square feet, including the water closet with a slop sink and toilet in the rear—a section that also served as the kitchen with a hot plate on top of a fridge. The fridge may have been from a hotel room, about the height and width of a floor safe. What was in this forgotten room was stacked up to the ceiling. Some of those stacks divided a cot from a table made of other things stacked up. It was dirty, grimy, and disheveled. But a home.
In what once might have been a doorway between the area with the fridge and the rest of the storage area there was protruding a piano bench providing a seat before the sink and bare mirror. The mirror, no more than two by one, had some chipping, a large crack through one-third of the left side, some paint splashes and rust stains from beneath the glass, all of which limited its utility. He shuffled past all the stacked hoarded belongings to make it over to the bare bench. He climbed over the bench to sit down before the mirror as though he were an actor before a back-stage vanity, minus the lights and surrounding hustle.
The face reflected in the mirror smiled back until he smeared the red paint away with several rough passes of a dingy rag. The starry eyes staring back at him rubbed with the same gray rag were exposed as wan. After several more aggressive rubs of his face into the now color-streaked rag from chin to forehead, and ear to ear, his complexion began to show through the removed pasty white as pallid, almost cadaverous. He did as fair a job as he could rubbing away into the dirty rag his former face, then tossed away that rag into the sink over the red foam nose and bouncy wig he wore when he came in.
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Rising from the piano bench, he removed much of what he was wearing and then began redressing into a fresh outfit laid out on his cot. Last, he pulled a black tuxedo jacket off that cot and on over his white shirt. The jacket also showed a lot of wear and tear. One of the side pockets was torn open, and the collar, cuffs, and tails were tattered. As poor as it all was, there was still a look about him in it. Dignified. He pulled at his jacket lapels to adjust the hang. He stooped to look at his appearance in the mirror beside his toilet. He brushed at dust and lint on his black pants and jacket with a handkerchief, then snapped that handkerchief into his lapel pocket. The soiled square was not much more than another rag from overuse, but against the faded black jacket it appeared a bit whiter.
Dressed in bow tie and tails, he reached for a top hat. Even his scuffed black leather shoes, the right one with a hole, now shined from a bit of spit and shine. He again turned to observe his appearance in the mirror. His eyes looked back at himself with sorrow but no dread. He sighed, took one last glance at his appearance, and turned toward the door, the door he entered the apartment by. He reached for the doorknob with some listlessness and turned it to open the door. With the light cracking into the apartment came the immediate sounds of footsteps passing just a yard from his doorway. He quickly pushed the door close again.
One last deep sigh, and he swung the door open wide and stepped out into the alley, took a couple steps onto the sidewalk, and paused in view of the street. He left the door to his home open.
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It did not seem to matter whether he walked left or right. He just kept walking along the sidewalk toward an avenue. As he stepped, people stopped and stared at him. There was a conformity to how they looked and how they looked at him. In the eyes of those people was fear.
Each person staring was dressed as he had been. Soon the numbers of people stopping and staring forced him to break from a linear course to weave around them like through a long hall of randomly scattered statues.
Everyone he passed wore grease paint. The majority wore smiles in red grease paint traced around the mouth way past the lip line; surprised looks painted with large circles or triangles around their eye sockets filled in with blue, orange, or green and outlined in black or purple; their eyebrows washed out under the greasepaint and redrawn further up their foreheads. A nose covered in red greasepaint or hidden beneath a red or yellow ball of sponge.
Everyone he passed wore a wig of curly, frizzy hair shaped in a helmet-sized cotton ball. But unlike a white cotton ball, each wig was colored red, orange, yellow, green, blue or purple, or various combinations. Some wigs were divided by one hemisphere in a different color than the other, or various stripes, spots, and zig-zagging lines of contrasting colors.
Everyone he passed wore oversized shoes, baggy pants falling below the waist, fluffy shirts, and often polka-dotted boxers showing from unbelted pants falling below the buttocks, or pulled out from an unzipped crotch.
Within a few more blocks he was approached by a group jumping down from where they had been camped sitting on the hood of a derelict automobile. Their appearance was less forced than the average clown he had passed in the streets; and they lacked the fear in their eyes.
“Check this fool,” was spoken by one in the group which quickly surrounded him, and then beat him to death.
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"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.'"
- St. Anthony the Great (4th Century)
"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.'"
- St. Anthony the Great (4th Century)
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