By Stephan Ladanaj

Part I

I’m sure you’ll excuse the phenomenological approach to this narrative.

I’ve been f-d up for a long time, and that’s the only way I can tell this story. Recent events haven’t helped any. It probably doesn’t matter. Nya.

Georg Lukacs argued that literature has to confront reality, but I say literature doesn’t have to do anything. I think that might be because I come from another place and time. I don’t want to let these ruminations get me down. I’ve got enough problems.

I’m an artist, and an artist and his art are beyond any critical imperatives. Imposing a program on an artist is like putting a committed alcoholic through a four-step sobriety plan: It doesn’t work. I should know. You need at least five steps. Nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa!!!

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!!!”

The blood from the bum’s burn-seared neck and sore-blotched head meandered across the somewhat sloping, ramshackle-built, Khrushchev-era floor of Clown’s apartment bedroom, where it curdled in a waste of motor oil, which Clown used to lubricate moving parts, mostly of flesh, or what would soon be left of it. Clown had stuffed the Stalinist war hero, one of the neighborhood’s long-time alcoholics, into a large bag he was carrying during his Sunday stroll and dragged him up to his place for the treatment. There was something in the eyes, otherwise lost and vacant behind a permanent swollen slosh of yellowing alcohol – a hubris, a vestige of communistic certitude – that Clown simply didn’t like.

And whatever Clown doesn’t like, Clown destroys, nya.

If I bring him up here, I kill him. Nya. There is no thinking, no mulling the larger moral exigencies that justify such actions, if they are indeed justified. Who cares, nya? One action simply follows upon the action that preceded it. I dragged him up here, I kill him. What else was I supposed to do; let him go? He was as good as dead anyway, nya. I’m an artist, and I’ll do everything for the realization of my art. Nya, nyaaaaa…

…a broken leg, a running gag, a cut muster, a handed hip, a birded hand, a toed line, an elbowed room, a tapped nail, a fingered bowl, a footed bill, legs up, all ears, farewelled arms, a beaten brow, shocked hair, a poked nose, a dulled wit, a sharpened tongue –

Knock, knock, knock…

…a, a, a bellied up, sunken teeth, a widowed peak, a fatted calf, a running nose, a breaking will, a bowed leg, a flatted foot, an arched high, a knocking knee, a –

Knock, knock, knock… knock, knock, knock…

“Nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaaa!!! Who is it?”

“It’s me, Babushka!”

“Oh, nya, come in. Why don’t you ring the f-g doorbell?”

“Unlock the door, you foolish boy.” Knock, knock, knock. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re doorbell’s broken. Open up!”

“Oh, uh, nya, hold on, hold on, you old bag. Let me just put his head down somewhere. Nya.”

Clown unbent his legs, stiffened from his long contortion over his tormented corpse, straightening them screaming inside his billowing parachute bottoms astride his large penis, the silk baggy pant legs fluttering in the breeze insinuating itself through the cracked-open window, and limped straddle-thighed to the door, large swaths of brown blood already caking on his favorite suit.

“What do you want, you old nag, nya?”

Babushka powered past Clown, pushing him aside in the corridor, and rapidly hobbled reprovingly toward a pile of cadaver-stiff, grease-smudged rags, plucked up two handfuls and hurried to the killing room, the one where most nights Clown made his bed.

“You foolish boy! You’re incorrigible. How am I going to clean this mess up this time?”

“Nya.”

“What, nya? What, nya?! Just look at you! I bet you didn’t even imagine this muck was dripping through the floor, staining my ceiling again? No, of course not. Whenever you’re playing around up here, you only think of yourself. Don’t you?! Typical selfish American. No consideration for your neighbors. All these years here and you still haven’t learned. That’s not how we do things around here. That’s not how we live. Our mentality’s completely different. I guess they’re right when they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“I’m not an old dog, nya! You’re the old –”

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to you!”

And Clown shut his gruesome, wide-stained red mouth, from the upturned spiked corner of which a squirt of saliva dribbled down his whitewashed bulking granite-squared jaw. Babushka assiduously swabbed the floor with the rags, bent down from the waist with her legs remarkably straightened, as if she was cheerfully kneeless, from which position she continued to castigate Clown, who was facing her ass, looking down and listening to it attentively in a somewhat remorseful manner. His nyas became longer-spaced, contemplative, quieter – “nya-nya-nya…nya… nya…”

“And dripping, dripping, dripping,” Babushka continued, “all over my granddaughter tied to a chair, waiting for you! What do you think that did to her? It’s a good thing I gagged her, otherwise all the neighbors would hear. As if I need the extra trouble. I should have sedated her as a precaution, but now it’s too late. How did I know you were going to pull another one precisely today? So while I’m up here cleaning up this mess, she’s down there twisting and screaming, being dripped on by motor oil and blood in a chair. But do you care? No, of course not. You’re too busy with your so-called Universal Justice for Kyiv Project. You’re too busy with your, with your… art! Baaah! She must have aged twenty years because of you already! Foolish, incorrigible boy. It isn’t enough I have my own problems that I have to take care of the ones you create and then can’t solve by yourself to the end. What would you do without me? I’m an old woman. I’m probably going to die soon. I can barely walk. There’s something wrong with my heart. I take ten different medications and my blood pressure still goes through the roof. I have to go to the hospital, but I can’t afford it and don’t have the time. Who’s going to take care of you stupid young people and maintain order around here when I’m gone? Did you ever think of that? Who’s going to wash your clothes and make your bed and prepare your meals, and what thanks do I get? Everyone does whatever they want. Everyone cares only for himself. That’s the kind of world we live in today. Things were different when I was your age. We had some respect for older people. That’s right – respect! We knew they had something to teach us and we valued it. No one had to tell us. And if they lectured us, we shut our mouths and listened! But now, just look at all of you – filthy, selfish, disorganized, disrespectful – talking back; making faces; don’t you think I know? I know… I know… Whatever you know we knew too; even better with the hell we went through, the war, all the people dying all around us; we were up to our necks in blood – it’s too awful; I don’t want to talk about it. And what did you go through, Mr. Clown? Nothing. We did everything for you then and we do everything for you now. You think you know so much, acting like you know something we didn’t, as if you invented sex and we didn’t know what that was, showing off in public like that on the metro escalators. You think we got any less pleasure than you? Ha! We got even more, because we kept it secret! That’s how things were done – the right way! Well, you just wait. That’s right, you just wait and see what happens. Just keep on that way, and then one day I’ll die, and then you’ll know. Oh, then you’ll know, all right. But guess what? It’s going to be too late!”

Babushka moved around Clown’s apartment with authority and filled a plastic tub with warm water, in which she rinsed the rags and mopped the floor damp with them. She had stopped talking and for Clown the sudden silence was excruciating.

“Don’t die, Babushka, don’t die, nya. I don’t want you to die, nya. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die – nya, nya, nya…”

“Oh, stop blubbering. No one’s going to die.”

“Nya-nya-nya-nya…”

“The smell in here’s unbearable!”

Babushka opened the windows wider, and stuffed the body back into Clown’s big bag. Pushing past Clown in the corridor, she dragged the oozing sack behind her and opened the door.

“Come on, help me bury him.”

“Nya.”

The skull cracked audibly as it bounced behind Babushka down the concrete stairs. A standard-issue Khrushchev-era five-story building, there was no elevator.

“Get the shovel in my place, don’t bother the girl, and meet me in the woods.”

Out in the woods just behind the sleeping district on the left bank of the Dnipro River where Clown lived – nevertheless conveniently located near a metro station and a plethora of minibus routes that kept Clown efficiently connected with the right bank and downtown Kyiv – Babushka sifted the last spade-fulls of earth and evergreen needles onto the fresh mound next to those that had settled to become nearly level again with the forest floor.

“Here!” Babushka shoved the shovel into Clown’s blood-dried gloved hand. “Now let’s go back to my place. You can get cleaned up and I can launder those things – press the ruffles back into that collar – you handsome devil you. But first, we’ll have some borsch.”

“It’s too hot for borsch, nya!”

“Nonsense, it’ll cool you down once it’s inside you.”

“If you say so, you stinking old cow – nyaaaaaaa!!!”

Babushka lives right below me. She keeps her granddaughter tied up for me, and I f- her whenever I want without making any promises. Nya. The hell I need some nervous little bitch on my hands. I’ve got enough problems.

And so Clown had Babushka’s borsch. After a liter of whisky, he threw off his suit, which Babushka scurried to pick up off her floor to chemically launder and press back into looming shape, further fine-stitching any rends and tears, as needed. He surged into the other room, where he grew, seething – nya-nya-nya-nya – freak-colossal and unrelentingly monstrous – the way he had come into the world, as Clown, the real thing universally imitated in the circus, cartoons and mass media, as though it was something funny, as though it was something to laugh at, and the reason why his mother, who had wanted a normal child, abandoned him – above Babushka’s granddaughter, who tied to the chair and gagged, was staring somewhere into the space far beyond Clown.

A shouldered weight, an armed length, a doubled breast, a backed plan, a ribbed cage, an adamed rib, a cocked head, a balled boy, the night after the eleventh but before the thirteenth, a measured measure, a midsummer night dreamed, a tamed shrew, a love’s labor lost, a much adoed nothing, an errored comedy, an as you liked it, an all’s-well that ended… nya, nya, nya, nya…

Getting a hard-on the way I liked under my ballooning silk parachute trousers on my way to work at the Kyiv Stop weekly English-language news rag, swigging whisky on the metro, reading Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” for the hundred and seventh time, nya – “What the f- are you looking at!!!” – I got to thinking about the work of art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City I saw as part of a charity fund raiser for natural-born freaks like me when I was still Child Clown, not that there’s any connection. Well, nya, it was this:

It was like a ladder, and there were these larger and smaller spheres on and between the rungs, and the contraption was plugged in, because the spheres moved up and down but nevertheless stayed in place, unable to achieve either a higher or lower state, as if indexed to their given limits, the ones they were born with.

Our congenial guide, an NYU sophomore who used the upward-winding spiral of the Guggenheim to keep me out of her sight as much as possible without ignoring the rest of the group, said the spheres represented individuals and the ladder was society, and the motion of the spheres represented our futile efforts to change our lots in life, which assumed an inevitability I couldn’t abide. I plied her with questions, but she ignored me the more, and so I tackled her in front of the whole group, slamming her head against a display glass, which kept her reeling on the brink of consciousness for a while, and molested her as best I could with the limited sexual knowledge and acumen of a ten-year-old, which, for Clown, was about the same at that time as it was for the normal child of the same age, smearing her lipstick across her face and rasping: “You don’t ignore Child Clown, stuck-up college bitch, nyaaa.” After that she apologized and we went out for a while, giving me my first sexual experiences inside the basement restrooms of other museums and in The Big City’s parks – experiences Gilda will never forget, nya. As they were undoubtedly experiences of a kind she had never had before, had never had since and will never have again. Then I dumped her. Nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa! I was a monster then too, except smaller. I wonder what she’s doing now. In any case, the incident was proof my instinct was right hating the ladder with spheres. That was also when I discovered my method of dealing with problems that bug me on the spot.

Other than the little gayboy beach book, Thomas Mann sucks. Nya-nya. He should have stuck to miniature forms. The Nobel Prize means nothing, except for the shitload of money, the exceptional lifetime windfall the winner always lies is not the point, whereas it’s very much the point. That’s why Clown aspires to be a great artist and writer – for the f-g money – nyaaaaa…

Naturally, after reading “Death in Venice” so many times, I’ve already memorized it, but I still like to curl up with the little dog-eared, mangled tome in bed at night – if my sheets aren’t soaked in semen and blood – nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaaa…!!!

“Murphy”, “Watt”, nya. Nobody thinks like that. Samuel Beckett had problems. He also won the Nobel Prize. Who was he to decide life has no meaning?

Dismiss freedom. Explain the wind, nya. Explain silence.

Nya.

The Kyiv Stop, where Clown works as a columnist, is nothing like the BBC on TV, nya. The handsome reporters and good-looking news chicks Clown sees when he tunes in to get the latest of what’s going on in his world. Clown would f- some of both. Media-savvy and photogenic, sleek, chic, suave, mod, sophisticated, charming, intelligent, well-educated, critically thinking, intrepid, relentlessly digging, with piercing analysis and insight, well-travelled and worldly, on top of the issues, capable of synthesizing the many strands of a developing story into a comprehensible information package within a matter of minutes, updating and perfecting it, striving for journalistic excellence in the studios and out in the field, where they often risk life and limb to bring you and I top news stories, nyaaa the guts, the tenacity, the sharpness, the derring-do, the polish, the shine, the gleam, the passion, the light, the purification by fire, the acuity of judgment, the clearness of vision, the demythologizing objectiveness, the straightforward demystification, the clearing of the cobwebs, the pulling back of the wools, palls, and shrouds, the lifting of the veils, the un-obscuring of the darkness, making the crooked straight, the rough places smooth, filling every valley and bringing every mountain low, nya, giving sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb, that they see what isn’t there, hear what has made no sound, and babble their tongues in incomprehensible ways, touch to those without feelings and taste to those who suffer unawares from bad fashion, dispelling misconceptions, dispersing clouds, clearing that up for you, giving the lie to lies, fighters for truth, justice, and the American way, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the kingdom, the power, and the glory, nyaaaaaaa…!!! the BBC, nya, the BBC, the BBC, nya, nya, CNN, ABC – nya-nya-nya-nya…

In America, PBS offers the most balanced reporting, in addition to other excellent programming not provided by any other station, particularly in the arts. It needs the support of viewers like you. They wouldn’t take Clown’s donation; one of the reasons Clown left New York City for Kyiv, Ukraine, nya.

At the Kyiv Stop I’m surrounded by chuckleheaded, knot-skulled cowards who work under the pretext they’re blazing a trail of freedom when they’re only in it for the money. The paper’s constantly losing doe and is millions of dollars in debt, but it keeps hiring. Nya. That doesn’t pertain to me, as I joined the Stop back when it was making money and my contribution made those black numbers jump higher, ejaculating – nyaaaaa! That was back in the day when the paper still had some business sense, and a freer and more democratic atmosphere. Now it’s almost completely senseless. Nya. Though the paper is sinking and taking the ship down with it, I keep plenty of whisky in my drawer, compliments of the company leftover from the good old days, which it had the sense of not cancelling for Clown, who drinks all the time and would blow most of his salary on booze if he was forced to buy all of it.

As for all the slackers who’ve made it in the door, the work is easy because there’s almost none. The format is convenient to manipulate from week to week, requiring almost no effort or changes; the current chief editor and his small band of little news-editing f-ckers plash and slush the long, wishy-washy stories muckily across the pages, clogging them with tepid slop, one story typically sprawling over three to four pages – large squashy photos, big soggy headlines and paid-for swamp filler glut the remaining spaces. Only a few journalists actually do any work, writing the two or three stories that are stretched across each issue, though their work can hardly be called original, while the remaining twenty-five or so stand around jerking off and getting their envelope of money every month. Nyaaa!

The newsroom is filled with phonies, hypocrites, liars, and poseurs. If they are forced to work, they take what was done by other services and bill it as their own. A lot of it they simply make up. By the time it goes to print, whatever nugget of genuine news still remains is embarrassingly old. Most of it has been only slightly rewritten, and by the time it goes to print it’s already well past stale, verging on the putrid rotting, although the editing board tries to sell it as fresh analysis and piercing insight.

Weasels; mean-spirited, petty, dissembling, underhanded, slimy, slippery, shifty-eyed, two-faced, two-timing, traitorous, backstabbing, backbiting, double-crossing, double-dealing, cheating, hoodwinking, iniquitous, perfidious, rotten, scheming, devious, treacherous, duplicitous, insidious, sneaky, fraudulent, unscrupulous, vicious in the face of magnanimity, which they savage publicly and chalk up as a victory over corporate tyranny, largely untrustworthy – nya-nya-nya, venal and vile. Nya. Deluded power-tripping extortionists who don’t understand they are the reason the paper is failing. Corrupt to the core.

The women, if you can call them that, are hideous. Dorky, goofy, gawky, doofy, twitty, dweeby, flat-chested, skeletal-emaciated and blubbery-fat, un-toned, awkward-, gangly- and stump-limbed, narrow-shouldered and wide-hipped, flat-footed, pigeon- and splay-toed, bow-, flabby-, string- and limp-legged, hobble-gaited, hamstrung and cellulite-thighed, pig-armed, ham-fisted, twisted-, gnarled-, twig-, stub-, and fat-fingered, buck- and saw-toothed, hunched, spine-curved and fat-assed, flat-assed and ribcage-torsioned, blotch-skinned, pimply-faced, thick-browed and mustache-lipped, big-mouthed and dull-witted, bug- and beady-eyed, big-eared, big-, hook-, and snub-nosed, sunken- and bloated-cheeked, crooked-necked, double-chinned and chinless, knob-, flat-, fat- and pointy-headed, sweaty, stinking, dirty-footed, grungy-nailed, greasy-haired and unwashed, ugly, and probably worst of all, the atrocious fashion. Bland scarves draped over bony, blanched shoulders and spotted, sharp-pointing chicken-wing shoulder blades, filthy veils, long nylon shawls wrapped around hips over jeans – what the f- ?!

The wreckage, the refuse, the debris, the junk of the Ukrainian female genotype, otherwise fabled for its astounding beauty the world over. Eastern Slavic steppe Martians – aliens in their own land. No wonder they’re journalists – in Ukraine.

The dross, the garbage, the shit, the jiggling lard, the dripping funk, a wreaking mucal gloop pit of bull-dyke victuals, a cesspool bullion strike of battleaxe lesbian longings dissipating their vaginal vapors wistfully into the newsroom’s fetid air. Sometimes it gets so bad I have to use my Clown farts to cancel out the odor – nyaaaaa!!!

Rubber-chicken-faced.

And then there’re the so-called males, nya.

Currently, there’s a walleyed troll with a humpback who actually lives under a bridge.

There’s an old man who waddles in with a couple of changes of diaper in a bag, for which his big-bottomed farmer jeans that come up to his pudge-wrinkled pectorals are the perfect outerwear complement. He looks like a botched foreshortening exercise by a drunken Renaissance master venting his spleen at the Vatican. When the old man isn’t scurrying to the toilet for a diaper change, he putters hubris-filled around the newsroom with his thumbs hooked behind the suspenders of his jean combine like a small-town Deep South demagogue running for Congress at the turn the last century blustering Ukrainian parliament commentary that he refuses to type out, expecting someone to take dictation. For his commentary he has one anonymous source he simply refers to as George.

Thanks to warped sympathies and twisted affinities, the old man managed to sniff out a need, no doubt based on long experience, and sufficiently ingratiate himself with Anel Piskatova – one of two bitches in the newsroom with a decent pair of tits who found a soothing father figure in the old man for her insecure confidence, which had been severely wounded in childhood – to be humping her on the shower-room floor of the Stop’s unisex bathroom facilities – with his new erection implant – nyaaaaa!!! I put a stop to it through delicate coercion by crashing the locked shower-room door – where I found the old man lying on his back, nostalgia-smitten, with his eyes closed and his mouth open in a wrinkled, oblong, prune-drying O and Piskatova bouncing up and down the small, wrinkled implement-stuffed flesh-tube of bygone penile aspirations – and taking over –nyaaaaaaa!!!

His pride wounded, the old man hobbled around the newsroom on his foreshortened legs grumbling under his nose until I pinched the two ends of his farmer’s shirt collar together with my thumb and forefinger, cutting off his trachea, and lifted him purple-faced with his little barrel-jutting limbs dangling and kicking, flicking and brushing my all-purpose super-utility belt with his gummy black shoes. Ah, Piskatova – nya!

There’s an almost completely bald recent college grad from the U.S.’s Midwest with a garnish of red hair around the perimeter of his head, one side of which he grew out long and wafting for a plastered-down combover. I’d say he lacks confidence; something that was never a problem for Clown. Nya.

Clown doesn’t look like that, although Clown bets you thought he did.

Au contraire, Clown has a disconcertingly huge head that would snap the average human neck, as Clown is colossal and seething, right down to his cock, looming stepwise in his ballooning parachute pants, and on his Neanderthalic head rages a huge multi-rayed mass of burning-orange hair that’s far more like animal fur than human hair and looks like a dying nebula if viewed against a falling pall of irradiated twilight or a heavily cloud-obscured moon… and I can’t do a thing with it! Nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa!

Then there’s the artificial swami, a scrawny, gradually vanishing upper-caste-claiming Dravidian, a frazzled gray mustache and beard diarrhea-spluttered from his arrogant gray-brown mug. Glassy-eyed, he mooches money for drinks the city-over complaining of racial discrimination at the workplace to gullible lushes, who literally buy his story, giving him money, stuffing his rags with it, hundred-dollar bills sometimes folded dismissively into his shirt pocket, banging their avenging fists into the bar tops and raising drunken, tearful whelps of indignation against the workplace racists, promising the artificial swami that they will kill them, even though the artificial swami does no work. In fact, whenever the artificial swami does make it to work at the end of any random day, stinking of vodka, he explicitly tells the chief editor in a slurring viper spray that he’s not going to do anything. Nyaaaaa!

Some say the artificial swami has a double who proceeds and precedes him around town, the two always just missing each other. While neither will admit to mutual acquaintance, they leave each other’s name mangled in a tsunami wreckage of withering aspersions wherever they go. That goes for whenever problems at the Stop are said to originate from their computer terminal, which they share, the one coming in when the other is out, though they collect a single salary. Clown thinks you can tell the difference between the two, as the double, on average, tends to come into the office slightly earlier than the artificial swami.

And there’s the moccasin boy, an editor, who likes to stand in the newsroom with his hands in the pockets of his mustard, rust-striped wool jacket, thumbs sticking out over the pocket flaps, his feet in something like classical ballet’s fourth position ready to execute a series of grand plies, wearing his damned moccasins, of course; large, sissy, leather shoelace loops prominently displayed flapping against the tongues; cogitating, brooding in silhouette against the large map of Kyiv on the brick wall in diminished light, profile somewhat obscured by a crook in the Dnipro River, catching the dying sunrays through the window sideways with his yellow irises to intensify their luminosity, giving his head the appearance of colorized Greek statuary under the dark coils of his carefully tousled hair, projecting the mysterious, Romantic, eccentric air of… a writer?

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Like the walleyed troll, there are others with humps, some of which can probably be called mere hunches. Most of the others are dumpy and fat-assed, and all are alcoholics. I drink more because I’m a monster.

And they all think they’re writers, nya. I’d slaughter them wholesale for just harboring the delusion, let alone hurling it up to gratify their bloated egos if the paper didn’t need their live, flab-quivering, lard-stinking carcasses for newsroom space filler, nyaaaaa…

But speaking of writers, nya, nya, nyaaaaa, I, Clown, a writer and an artist, came on board the Kyiv Stop with my “Killer Klown” column, in which I am the story, and document in extreme and graphic detail my gruesome citywide exploits under the banner of my self-proclaimed Universal Justice campaign, with large, harrowing and carnage-filled photographs of Clown in action, real or simulated, taking up two full facing pages in the middle of the paper – nyaaaaa!!! Readers have commented that the faked images seem more true-to-life than the real ones, which has encouraged Clown to act first and take pictures later. Naturally the column carries my by-line: Clown – I never use pseudonyms, nya.

So as not to misspeak, the two pages are not just my photos and column – they’re loaded with ads. That’s because the column is the most popular part of the paper. There’s something like a six-month waiting list for businesses to run their ads on those pages, and the Stop is shameless in charging uncompetitive monopoly rates for the privilege.

Thus, every week, I only write a couple hundred words. My art, extant in Kyiv, speaks for itself; the column merely functions as an after-act gloss, a surreal, expressionist, minimalist documenting of what I’ve done for the record. Clearly, with demand high, I have to keep producing, and interest in my work provides great incentive to continue. But unlike the early days, currently, it’s the only part of the paper generating revenue, and that’s not enough to pull it out of the red, nya.

I ripped into the Kyiv Stop like a samurai tearing through a paper wall, with my gruesome countenance no surprise to anyone, thanks to the Kyiv Stop already having run some terrifying photos of me wrecking a number of new discotheques for exercising their face-control prerogative against me – scintillating moments captured intrepidly by Stop photogs who just happened to be… in the right place at the right time – nyaaaaaaa…!!!

“All of us at the Stop appreciated how it took those clubs almost another year to reopen,” the then chief editor of the Stop, Geoffrey Thorngood, a gregarious, fair-minded grunger from Massachusetts who was also the scion of a willful confluence of WASP clans, told me over the phone prior to the live, in-house interview I still had to suffer through without a drink to get the job, nya.

“Yeah, nya, there isn’t a club in Kyiv that doesn’t let Clown in now,” I said, exceedingly flattered.

“And we at the Kyiv Stop appreciate how some of your escapades, though perhaps at times far in excess of the more moderate measures that could be taken but for some reason never are to correct a situation, have, in our opinion, curbed a number of pernicious tendencies affecting the wonderful people of this brave city.”

“Nyaaaaa!”

“Which reminds me: Beknownst to you or not, we also ran a series of photos of you gutting the insides of standing cabs with your bare hands right outside our offices and then setting them on fire, which, regardless of the reasons for your actions, we at the Stop found totally amazing, particularly given the superhuman velocity of your caper.”

“Those taxi drivers rub me the wrong way, nya, especially after a couple of liters of bad hooch that’s supposed to pass for cognac in the bar next door.”

“When you look at the whole series of photos in sequence on our website and then view the video,” Thorngood said, “that’s when the power of the Internet over the print edition really hits you. We at the Kyiv Stop really appreciate that.”

“I did it for my art, nya.”

“Well, we can really appreciate that and we’d like to give you the opportunity to develop as an artist in this fact-based writing genre. Just look at what I’ve been trying to do with the restaurant reviews in our Lights and Nights section. With things changing so quickly, the times are calling for new, courageous hybrids and mutations, and I’m not talking about the journalism of the kaka-gonzo type, but something much higher. There are the few out there who will be the foundation-layers and trendsetters, ahead of their time, and we at the Kyiv Stop don’t want to see them sacrificed to the ravages of the invidious, only for those same assholes to steal the originators’ ideas after they’re dead and claim them for their own. At the Kyiv Stop, we can really appreciate what a monster like you can do for us while developing his own art.”

“Nya-nya-nya… nyaaaaaaa!!!”

Nya.

Then there was the next chief editor, nya. An alternative press editor from New York City, he was incontrovertibly right about everything and always had to have the last word. Needless to say, Clown put a stop to that, nya.

The insidious lisp, the squint-eyed viciousness, the snake head, the pointed yellow teeth, the poison tongue, the buzzard profile he had the cheek to compare to the noble hawk’s, the pretense to literary greatness, the beatnik sweaters in summer, nya. His pose behind the computer was that of the gifted, privileged mediator between the great literary dead and the final copy of the news page, chiaroscuro shadows sucked into his ghoulish face hollows as if he had especially worked on the macabre warped remove of his features as the physical enshrinement of his delusional claims to the universal literary spirit, nya; as if it was his by natural right, genetic, preordained.

Nya-nya.

The endless opinions; about pineapple chunks on Kyiv pizza, for example. Clown happens to like canned pineapple chunks leaking their syrup into the red tomato-sauce face of Kyiv pizza. Yum-nya…

New York City restaurants, public health officials and the age of fresh fish. Nyaaaaa! There was no end to it. He knew it all. It never stopped.

But worst of all, lifting his head, propelling it into an outdated elitist literati wobble, half-solidified ulcerous spit flecks lodged in the corners of his mouth, which was thrown brazenly agape between the caesuraed iambs of his bloviations, amphibian resin-yellow gastric-juice-covered tongue lolling challengingly out at you, stickily punctuating the shocked silences of the craftily provoked wordless air-hung spaces, he would call himself a… ‘writer’.

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

He found himself so profound and intense, that he thought himself intimidating – sufficiently so to scare even Clown.

Nya-nya-nya-nya…

“Right,” he finally said. “We want to make changes here at the Kyiv Stop. We want something fresh, new, up-to-date, hip, urban-beat, metropolitan-paced, city-rhythmed, by someone with their ear to the ground and wearing out a hole in that old shoe leather, counterintuitive, not just polishing the brass on the Titanic, capturing this town’s sights and sounds, its inner logic, with a sense for its idiosyncratic subtleties and nuanced gradations, its speeds and brakings, its redeeming features and its reprobate delinquencies, its juices and flavors, youth-oriented, and with-it. Your pathetic and highly dubious so-called column doesn’t fit the bill anymore. I’m killing ‘Killer Klown’. It’s dead. And so are you… Clown.”

I snapped his presumptuously tottering head back on his attenuated chicken neck against the wall like a twig with a flick of my finger into his forehead, nearly killing him, and destroyed the newsroom so that it had to shut down for a month before all the equipment could be replaced and as much of the archives and data restored as the company’s infotechs could retrieve from their backup system. The reconstruction wasn’t finished yet and the ceiling was still sifting asbestos (actually beneficial for Clown) onto us cadres when the newsroom reopened for business, desperate to be heard.

And that was that, nya. No one challenges Clown.

Now we’re under new ownership, nya. The old publisher sold the paper for a song after losing a shitload of money to bad business decisions arrogantly taken. And there’s a new CE – of course, nya.

He’s well into the latter part of his middle age and tries to project a laid-back composure enriched by Northwestern sensibilities engendered somewhere around Portland, Oregon, all of which is supposed to belie an obsessive and infectious workaholism that inspires others to clamber for the heights, with the outstanding efforts reflected in the end product. Yeah, right, nya.

I can see that sparse resume now: “substantial news writing and editing acumen, team player, self-starter, achievement-driven, goal-oriented, extensive management experience…”

Nya.

Now it’s been ship bottom familiarizing itself with the floor of the ocean blue.

As for his fashion sense, he mostly sports a yellow-tinted polyester suit jacket he wears as a blazer with wide, baggy, wrinkled, beige American fat-ass chinos, the breadth of which are only surpassed by the diapered old man when he wears a pair of chinos instead of his suspendered overall farmer jeans, nya.

Because of the refractory qualities engineered into the polyester, the CE’s jacket changes color from yellow to green to gray to blue, with purple also an exotic possibility, depending on the intensity of the light its exposed to and the angle of that exposure, meaning that typically different parts of the jacket appear different-hued at the same time, since every part necessarily commands its own angle at every given moment, independent of the light.

There could be some wool mixed into the jacket; in any case, I wouldn’t doubt it. It’s amazing what they can do these days with synthetic-natural fiber blends.

As of this writing, the current CE’s already been fired, nya. And rehired again. There is no dearth of grist for the farce mill.

There’s even a wonderful shot of the exact moment it happened on the Internet, with the Stop’s new owner, Umumbi Mgumbi, a tall, stately, suave, coal-black Nigerian – who was actually a South African citizen with substantial diamond holdings invested in an agglomeration of heavy industry projects in the corpulently criminalized and slit-eyed eastern part of Ukraine – tieless, pastel powder-blue suit jacket thrown confidently open, hands thrust into his pockets – peering down through sunglasses and smiling wryly at his former CE across the newsroom over the heads and in the sight of the entire Stop staff in a perfectly staged moment of maximal humiliation.

The fired CE’s profile is the foreground of the photo – head down, eyes cast pensively on the floor, lower lip jutting out like a retired New England fisherman’s, Robert Frost-like, reading the Minuteman Times on his porch, new old-age wrinkles insinuating their way between the growing folds under his chin, etching, frighteningly unsolicited, some abrasive, saturnine character into the neck and jowl, gray side strokes forcing their way through the generic men’s hair dye, the top of the scalp gone more than thin, shining now, suddenly, unexpectedly, with unsought, undesired, uninvited transformations, formerly matt, accompanied by a cocky smirk, a thrown-back head, all taken for granted, now a source of helpless gloss for any photograph, the horrendous, terrifying moment of loss permanently enpictured, which no photographer would take the time to airbrush, as the reality was now too glaring that any retouching would be tantamount to unethical misreporting, what hair had formerly been sufficient to carelessly flip back with a comb, white t-shirt, picket fence, mowed lawn, pickup truck, cold beer, hands on hips, no inordinately protruding paunch yet, Mr. Middle America-fashion in idealized Reality TV mode, now had to be grown out longer at the front and carefully manipulated and spread out with the fingers over the part that was increasingly gone.

The imposition, the invasion, the rudeness, the intrusion, the gumption, the audacity of encroaching nothingness, the resulting bootless indignation – nyaaaaaaaa…!!! And life not even lived. Nya-nya-nya.

Things just aren’t the same anymore. He asks too many questions, like he doesn’t believe me. He edits my work as though it was adolescent fiction, ruining my art and the whole point of writing the column. He’ll add, “And so Clown went” or “And so Clown said”, nyaaaaaaa…!!! It’s all wrong! He’s incompetent. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

As if I don’t have enough problems. Now, a lot more’s going wrong. There almost isn’t a night I don’t tell Babushka my problems and take her granddaughter, whom I rape repeatedly, tied up and screaming through the tape over her mouth, for solace.

If you feel the muffled screams will be distracting, you should stuff a soft rag, preferably a silk lacy handkerchief for the compassionate touch, which also promotes salivation, helping retain moisture and prevent a dry choking (with the proviso that the victim keeps swallowing so as not to choke on the saliva instead), into the oral cavity first before covering it with tape. They seem to like that, kicking their legs out excitedly in many directions.

Nya.

After winning her from the disgruntled old man, day-in and out I was banging Anel Piskatova in the unisex bathroom in open view of anyone who came in, nya, half-naked from the waist down, into the wall, cellulite shivering down the length of her thin legs, compressing her cheek against the tiles, scrunching the nose and mouth, forcing it open, unresistant of the drool pooling at her feet, the nape of her neck clinched between the pads of my two fingers, twisting her around helpless as per my wont, my other hand clenching her big conical tits, nipples sticking up from their high position on the breasts through her cheap, thin, tight v-neck and Clown’s gloved fingers, nya, she grown used to my size quickly following great anxiety and anticipation accompanied by asylum-ward screaming, now panting hard with feral expectation, making low earthy grunts alternated with feline-heat mews, like a colicky baby left abandoned under your window, raising and raising the pitch of the register to a sustained howling, her thick, acrid smell wafting up into Clown’s face and senses, driving him wilder and madder, Clown coming endlessly and roaring just as his hand released the heavy breasts and covered her mouth gently with his middle finger, proffering a compassionate tenderness that raised the height of the final part of the coming, and the after-come, nya, the tip of Clown’s forefinger gently petting the dark hairs of her upper lip, and with his super senses, lovingly feeling and hearing each individual whisker as it flicked by, enraptured.

And now, a sudden unrequiting air?! Nyaaaaaaa…!!!

Now Clown pulls her by her choppy, brittle, astringent hair out of her seat in the newsroom, screaming and flailing, drags her into the bathroom and has his way, clutching her with one hand by the waist and tipping her over, covering her back with the other hand for leverage, plunging her head into the toilet of one of the stalls to hear her gurgle to my beat until I’m done. Nyaaa!

Is it possible that another interest has been sparked? Compared to Clown? After giving her all the freak in me, is there anyone who can even compare?

Nyaaa…

Better than Clown? Better? Who does she think she is; doing this to Clown? To Clown? Nobody does this to Clown!

Nya-nya.

And then there’s Adam Pinch, who never had any intention of ever doing anything to Clown except being his friend, his good-good friend, maybe the best friend Clown ever had, and Clown, and Clown… Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…

Who was Adam Pinch?

Nya.

Adam Pinch wasn’t a dwarf, nor was he a midget. For he was much smaller than either, about the size of the typical cat, or maybe a little bigger; bigger, perhaps than a larger small dog, but not nearly as big as one of medium size. I don’t have exact measurements, nya.

To call Pinch a gnome, elf, hobbit, or even a gremlin would be to mythologize him, which would be unfair to Pinch, since he was simply a very tiny person, a miniature male human being.

I don’t remember exactly when the Stop hired Pinch, who, like Clown, was from New York City, but it was after me, nya.

The bad incident started off regularly enough as a congenial mutual prodding, with Pinch telling Clown that his “Tiny Tattler” column was now more popular than Clown’s “Killer Klown” column, judging by the number of hits on the Internet, nya. To this Clown promptly replied that Pinch was misusing data with no meaningful algorithm and which could be explained in any number of ways. To this Pinch countered, now more aggressively, bending the little microphone he wore closer to his mouth and turning up the little amplifier lashed to his chest so that the whole newsroom could hear him squeak me out in his tiny raspy voice with the decibel range of a hoarse sparrow, that the only way to interpret the data was quantitatively, meaning more hits meant more readers meant more popular. This ticked Clown off, and so I told Pinch to his tiny beak face that his “Tiny Tattler” was a brazen rip-off off my oligarch Q&A interviews, five or seven of which ran before I started my column, nya. “Effective, nya” I said, “but nevertheless a rip-off. Acknowledge your sources and influences, Pinch, or get out of the business!”

Nya, and while Clown was ready to nip the joke that had turned into a professional tiff in the bud, by this time Pinch was jumping up and down on his desk in a rage, turning the knob of his amplifier as far as it would go, screaming incomprehensibly into his microphone in his high cheep-cheep birdie rasp what was probably vociferous denial of my allegation, a mad-doglike froth obscuring his ballpoint mouth, and everyone thought Pinch had just about had it and would blow up, and so Clown lost it too and took away the little ladder Pinch used to climb up on his desk.

And once on his desk, Clown remembers how the tenacious little man would stand bent over his keyboard, a sweat immediately building and dripping off him from the effort, soaking his little suit and staining it through with his body’s grease and salt. And I remember how he used to type, using the gathered fingers of his entire hand like bottle caps, popping them against the keys one at a time the way you, or even I, nya, might peck and poke with our two index fingers, not knowing how to type (Note: Clown has a keyboard several times larger than the usual, custom-made to accommodate his much larger fingers, allowing him to fully employ the QWERTY-asdf;lkj typing method, nya).

And, sadly, nya, this led to Adam Pinch’s tragic newsroom end, although Clown had absolutely no intention of killing him, for while the removal of the ladder quieted Pinch down, even after Pinch apologized to Clown and asked for the ladder back, Clown’s heart (Note: or whatever the f- it is – nyaaaaa!!!) remained hardened, and this went on for hours, and so Pinch decided to chance casting his fragile little body onto the wheeled chair below him, which to Pinch must have seemed a great distance, and from there somehow clamber or perhaps even jump again to the floor. But his pen-cap feet hit the edge of the seat, sending the chair wheeling out from under him, and he crashed onto his back, a crushed and mangled little man. Nyaaa…

Nya-nya.

Moved by this pathetic sight when it was too late, a wailing Clown picked little Pinch up into the palm of his gloved hand – “Speak to me, Pinch, speak to Clown,”; “I-want-to-die,” Pinch said, his broken microphone still able to send the electronic impulse crackling through the heavily damaged amplifier; “You’re going to live, Pinch, you’re going to live! Clown is going to help you – nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!” – and Clown shoved Pinch into a compartment of his all-purpose super-utility belt and used his sonic transport abilities to get Pinch to the nearest veterinary clinic, as the hospital across the street refused to take the case, arguing that Pinch was too small to do anything with. But the vets also refused to operate, saying that while Pinch was about the size of the cats they had the pleasure to work on, Pinch was, after all, human, for which they had not been trained, adding that all his bones and organs were therefore in different locations, and they weren’t going to risk cutting him open only to have the blame for a mistake and his inevitable death placed on them, nya.

And so, splayed twisted in Clown’s hand, tiny Adam Pinch kicked the thimble, his brave last words, sputtered through his doll’s pursed lips close to Clown’s ear, his amplification system already fried: “I had it coming.”

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Clown scoured downtown garbage bins for a receptacle to put Pinch into, finally finding a wooden wine-bottle box, a miniature crate really, in the lower Podil district of Kyiv discarded among the many small churches there – too small to contain Clown, nyaaa… into which he deposited the little corpse.

At the cemetery, Clown lazily dug a hole out of a narrow drainage ravine with the heel of his boot and dropped the box in it.

The sun was pounding, relentless. Clown was polishing off a bottle of whisky.

“Is it possible that someone so small had a soul,” Clown asked whatever force might be listening. “If there is a God, I’d tell him to rest Adam Pinch’s diminutive soul, if he had one, nya.”

Through the glare off the polished stones a tattooed gravedigger with a shovel and multiple piercings disfiguring his face fearlessly approached Clown, introducing himself as Ilarion Promefeyovich Rodin, announcing he wanted to be Clown’s apprentice.

“Oh, my very own Wonder Boy, nyaaaaaaa…!!!”

Bending him over with one hand into “The Thinker” pose, Clown sodomized Rodin.

He wiped his giant penis on Rodin’s black, gothic t-shirt when he was done.

“You don’t want to know me,” he said to Rodin’s hemorrhaging ass. “Nya-nya.”

Am I the Son of the Angel of Darkness? I don’t know. I was never given an identity. I was born this way. Nya. I’m Clown.

Part II

A cornered mouth, a fingered tip, a tearing eye, a capped knee, an altered ego, a dressed wound, a shoed horn, a coated tongue, a one upped, a two faced, a three’s crowd, a topped dog, a bottomed line, a chickened breast, tolled alls, ifs ands or buts noed, a brained skull, an assed brain, a titted mouse, a nosed gay, nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa…!!!

O, yeah, roll around, baby, roll around, struggle, struggle, nya, that’s it, that a girl, come on, some more, some more, nyaaaaa, come on, make some more muffled mouth sounds – mmm-mmm-mmm – yeeeeesss, yeeeeesss, yeeeeesss, that’s right, that’s right, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa, nyaaaaa… Come on, come on!!! Give me the f-g ten-second preview – that’s right – come on you f-g bastards, give it to me, give it to me, give me the f-g preview, nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

Here, in the darkness of my room, the computer monitor soothingly glows bondage videos, David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” croons softly through the speakers, and my ballooning parachute pants are down, the pads of the fore- and middle fingers of my left hand lightly push down against the back of Babushka’s granddaughter’s head, as she suffers to get her mouth partially around the head of my cock, giving me head, nya, otherwise I’m using no force, ropes, or coercion – for Clown life is good, nyaaaaaaa…

In binding and gagging, the gagging is the most important part. For every reason. Aesthetic, psychological, physical. Nya. Because it seals the part they use the most to express their will.

Now, nya, there are levels of effectiveness, depending on what you want. I go for the tape because, in my opinion, it not only looks the best, but it is also the best insulator, especially when used together with a stuffing rag, against unwanted noise.

A scarf, tie, hand towel, elastic sweat band, rag around the mouth, strips of sheet or cloth, especially if you cleave gag, her underwear, pantyhose, brassiere, or even gauze wound around and around the head, though easier on the hair than tape if you prescribe to the wrapping method, together with a mouth-stuffing rag, just aren’t as effective. Each one of them can lift up or push down, loosen, unravel, and come undone. With tape, that’s almost never the case. Black’s the most erotic. Nyaaaaa! As an artist, Clown has aesthetic sense and good taste. Clown despises devices.

Nya-nya.

“Mmmmm… mmmmm… mmmmm…”

“Shhh… shhh… shhh… that’s right, baby, nya, that’s right, that’s right… you just be good to Clown, you just be good now – nyaaaaa…”

Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned”, nya. Fitzgerald’s The Bound and Gagged, nyaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaa…

Out of whisky, nya.

“Where’s that putrescent old hag of yours when I need her, you little f-d-up bitch!”

“Mmmmm… mmmmm… mmmmm…”

“Shut the f- up!”

“Charlotte’s Web”, nya. Charlotte’s Website. Surreal spider. Posting those messages, nya. Ahead of her time. Commonplace now. Nya. Why didn’t they kill that f-g pig? “Stuart Little” was better. Nya, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya…

“Mmmmm… mmmmm… mmmmm…”

“I said shut up!”

“Winnie-the-Pooh”. Pooh the Winnie, Pooh the Winnie, nya, Pooh the Winnie, nya-nya, Pooh the Winnie, Pooh the Winnie, Pooh the Winnie, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

If you look at my eyes, if you dare look at my eyes, if you can bring yourself to look into them, you will be transfixed by fascination and horror, chilled and terrified to the spot in a nauseating immobility, a petrifaction, rather than running away; run, run, nya, run away… run away… that’s right, as hard as you can, as well you should, though I would catch you, unable to tear yourself away, unless I let you go – and that’s unlikely, nya-nya-nya – much the way I am every day, when I look at myself, when I look into myself, and can’t tear myself away – for hours – and even after I make it out, I’m still in, the sight of my gaze into my own eyes persistent, unfading, always before me – nyaaaaa, nyaaa, nya – peering, peering into my head, piercing deeper, deeper, into my world, into… my infinity…

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…

There are no whites, no irises, no pupils. My eyes are like billiard balls, with the same glassy-enamel consistency, size, and hardness, mono-colored, a deep translucent blood-amber, from lid to lid, corner to corner and all the way around, fathomless, endless… And if you look hard enough before I kill you, you will see them staring back into the deepest reaches of my mind… nyaaa…

Reading “Finnegans Wake” and listening to Lady Gaga taking up all the seats at the back of a bus on my way home from work (people move for Clown, nya-nya-nya), a multi-pierced, tattooed, gothic chick danced above him, listening to her own black death music, of which Clown isn’t too fond, chewing gum, jerking her upturned head in alternating oscillations, eyes closed, nya, like she wasn’t even noticing Clown – and Clown likes that, nyaaaaa – and when she opened her eyes, Clown jabbed a threatening finger into the air at her, belying a smirk of sharp rust-red teeth jutting through his lips. She just laughed defiantly, closed her eyes again and continued dancing. Clown’s hand closed around her waist. Lilia. The chick had spunk. She was beautiful. Clown was entranced.

Nya.

Now Clown worried about what Lilia would think of the putrid stench of decaying flesh permeating his apartment from time to time and charged Babushka with greater austerity in cleaning the f-g mess up as it occurred.

Babushka, needless to say, was upset.

“Oh, so now you’ve got a girl in your life and suddenly that’s all I mean to you?”

“Nyaaaaaaaa!!! I’m the artist! You do the dirty work! Nya. And that goes for burying the dead, too. I’m not going out there anymore. When I’m done, you drag the body out, you bury it, and then you come back here and clean the place up, you stinking old bucket of slop!”

“Oh, so now we’re suddenly a great artist. So now we don’t want to soil our gloves anymore than we have to. And all I’ve done for you!”

“Nyaaaaa…”

“What, nya? What, nya?! And what about the girl; the other girl, my granddaughter, Mr. Clown? Oh, I’m sorry; or should I say, Mr. Artist Clown?”

“Nyaaaaa…”

“Nya, nya – nya yourself, you selfish, overgrown monster. What’s to become of her now; after you ruined her, after you made her no good for anyone else? Did you think of that?”

“Nyaaaaa…”

“No, of course not – selfish, egotistical – you only think of yourself, your art, your fame. Well, where is it?!”

“It’s coming, nya; more and more people know about me and, and -”

“And, and – and nothing! That’s what and. Meanwhile, I’ve got a mental case on my hands because of you – raping, raping, raping, making her suck until her mouth’s completely ripped open. Now you’ve got a girl and who is that little granddaughter of mine good for? She can’t be seen in public; when company comes over, I keep her locked in the other room!”

“Nyaaaaaaa!!!”

“That’s right, that’s right! Who does everything for you? Who takes care of you? Where would you be without me? I even give you my granddaughter, my own flesh and blood, because… because… because you’re so damned handsome; you, you remind me of my… of my husband! Oh-ho-ho-hooooo…!!! And of… my… son!!! That wife of his was just no good for him, just no good. Oh-ho-ho-hooooo…!!! And I don’t want to see you make the same mistake! Oh-ho-ho-hooooo…!!! Oh-ho-ho-hooooo…!!! Oh-ho-ho-hooooo…!!!”

“Ah, nyaaaaa, put a lid on it, you leaking old bag of trash! First you kill them and then you mourn them. Nyaaa. I don’t want to hear it.”

Clown’s got enough problems.

Clown delivers worse than death. He can create life inside death; a living consciousness trapped inside a corpse. Maybe I’ll tell you about it some time. Nya.

“Hey, hey, Clown.”

The Cloven-Hoofed Liar, nya.

“What is it, nya?”

The Cloven-Hoofed Liar was sucking up to Clown over whisky and beer in the large-windowed bar next door to the Stop, obsequious, grovelling, ingratiating himself before Clown, moved by fear, with the awkward effect that he was trying to demonstrate a parity with Clown, of awesome consequence, nyaaaaaaa, bragging how much control he had over the employees, getting people fired, and the news content of the paper, operating behind the scenes where he preferred to be, invulnerable, the CE actually being The Liar’s secret puppet, his dupe, his stooge.

“You see Ray Litcoven over there?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“I just got him fired – heh-heh.”

“Why did you do that?; you little turtle-backed, bat-faced prick.”

Clown despised The Cloven-Hoofed Liar, who was said to be the offspring of a 19th century Transcarpathian coffin maker and a large-flasked homunculus, nya.

And whatever Clown doesn’t like, Clown destroys, nyaaa!

“Heh, heh, because he’s a sucker, a dolt, a loser, and a fool. I didn’t like him. He was in the way. He’s always drunk, strangely aloof with a surreptitious air of quiet, superior contempt about him, there’s an annoying honesty, generosity and goodness to his soul that normal conniving people like us find almost cloying and that I simply found intolerable, and at my initiative it always left him open to abuse, mockery, and derision. And now he’s fired. Because he was a nobody with pretensions, possessed of an inexplicable resilient stubbornness that proved nothing in the end. Heh-heh.”

And I, Clown, looked over at Litcoven, and there it was, that importunate superciliousness, drawn down in some sadness as he stared into his vodka, cognac and beer, but nevertheless unvanquished and defiant. He showed his contempt even for Clown, calmly fearless, and Clown, in reluctant admiration of this Litcoven, and swallowing his own envy and pride, had to say that Litcoven had been on his way to becoming a damn good writer – minding his own business, not bothering anyone, just trying to get on with it, making some money as a second-rate reporter working for a rag like the Stop to support his drinking, not unlike thousands of other literary alcoholics trying to make their way in the cutthroat world of hackery and then somehow, with some persistence and perhaps some luck, if the drink didn’t get them first, higher, into the empyrean reaches of real writing, after which they might quit the booze – nya, nya, nya… Using the Stop as his headquarters, Litcoven seemed to be making it – until his throat was indeed cut, by The Cloven-Hoofed Liar.

“Yeah, heh-heh,” The inebriated Liar continued, oozing molten self-indulgent dross over the story of his own cunning, “and as soon as he told his girlfriend, who’s pretty damn good-looking – too good-looking for Litcoven, in any case, though I’d f- her, heh-heh-heh – she left him.”

“Nya, he was making a career, and despite his drinking, getting along, on his way to becoming a writer, which, if he succeeded, would allow him to get married, have some kids, and continue on somewhere as a writer, leaving the Stop and this shithole as just a dim memory, far behind, independent and answerable to no one except perhaps his literary agent and his readers. He was using the Stop toward his purposes and the Stop, willingly or not, was helping him, but you didn’t like that and decided to end it, nya. Throw a wrench in Litcoven’s works. Put a flat in his tire. Switch the rails to throw him off the track. Effectively put a stop to his life, causing a living death to follow, nya.”

“He left himself open. Heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh. He made himself vulnerable. I did the natural thing and went for the weak spot, which with Litcoven was just about everything, heh-heh, heh-heh-heh. It’s biology, evolution – the survival of the fittest. This is what males are supposed to do. They fight each other for supremacy and their offspring. Why should I let him make it if that could mean him having children, leaving less room in the world for mine? And who wants children in the world who are like him anyway? If I won the day, that just proves the point. It means biology and the laws of evolution were against it.”

“In other words, you got him fired for no particular or apparent reason, except you didn’t like him and something about him bugged you, because you felt you could do it and because it gave you a feeling of superiority and power. It helped validate and solidify your compulsion for control over your environment, where you feel you not only need to, but have a right to feel supreme, because you’ve earned that right – after all you’ve put yourself through to get where you are today.”

“Hey, that’s pretty incisive. Heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh…”

“But most of all, the behavior reflects a vicious complex of inferiority that dictates you have to be sovereign in your own chosen petty little realm, and feel a pernicious need, even rage, to destroy anyone who appears to threaten you in the delusional self-ordained reign of your imagined fiefdom, precisely the way you felt threatened by the potential Litcoven’s talent promised to deliver, launching himself way past you and spiritual kindred of the same ilk in similar pulp and trash print-media recycling stations around the world, nyaaaaa…”

“I deny it! That’s a lie! Heh, heh, heh-heh-heh…”

“And so, I’m going to cripple you, nya. Severely. You little penguin-waddling, mole-digging rat. How does a wheelchair remote-controlled from a distance by your wife sound. Immobile, mangled, twisted and crushed in a wheelchair that makes that mechanical whining sound that goes higher the faster your wife makes the chair go, the only reassuring sign that your now totally useless life is making any progress into the next day, completely incapacitated, head wobbling off to the side from its own weight, drool dripping incessantly from your mouth, itches you can never scratch again, urinating and defecating into plastic bags that your wife has to change every couple of hours, perhaps some tubes stuck into you here and there for good measure, and for the hell of it, nya…”

“You can’t hurt me. Heh-heh-heh. Heh-heh. I was once thrown out a seventh-story window and landed on my back, like a cat lands on its feet, unharmed. Heh-heh, heh-heh, heh-heh…”

And of all his ‘heh-hehs’, that was The Cloven-Hoofed Liar’s last.

But things didn’t stop there, for Clown appeared before The wheelchaired Liar and his wife in their apartment in that inexplicable teleportation Clown was master of, having learned the trick from W. Somerset Maugham’s “Magician”, and muzzled the wife’s entire head with a portion of his palm, on the couch, where he proceeded to gently rape her.

“He’s a complete invalid, and yet Clown found out he’s still pulling down a salary. Clown’s going to put a stop to it, and this is how, nyaaaaa…!!!”

The older of The Liar’s two children, the boy, as the little girl was but a cradled infant sleeping away its innocent dreams in the kitchen, entered the room, and the perspective of the crime shifted from the helpless eyes in the wheelchair to the boy.

The implausibly huge figure, the flabbergastingly looming back, the endless expanse of silk clownery covering it, fluttering, sounding like bed sheets shredding in the wind with every downward plunge onto the boy’s mother, who was somehow being murdered, though the boy couldn’t see her under Clown’s nightmare immensity, except for the end of one leg, which was bouncing helplessly against a cushion.

The maniacal voice, repeating: “Still pulling down a salary, nya, pulling down a salary, for what, for what, nya, universal justice, universal justice, nya, nya, nya, nyaaaa…, pulling down a salary, for what, nya, universal justice – nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!”

Now blood gathered in a thin trickle that thickened and broadened after every thrust and began dribbling off the side of one of the couch’s fake-leather cushions.

“Oh, a virgin, nya. How do you explain the children? Though it’s not without precedent – nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa…!!!”

When Clown decided that should do it and it was over, he left, but not before he heard the boy, who was petrified to the spot surrounded by a puddle of his own excrements, in front of his wheelchaired father, repeating mechanically: “Still pulling down a salary, nya, ursal just is, nya, nya, nya, nya, pulling down a salary, still ursal just is, nya, pulling down a salary, nya, nya, nya, nya…”

“That’s right, kid, you’ve got the hang of it. Just keep saying that and maybe I won’t return – nyaaaaaaa…!!!”

What a great way to punish the parents – torment their kids – nyaaaaa!

But after that Clown found out that The Cloven-Hoofed Liar was still pulling down a salary.

He also found out, after teleporting his head as a huge ghostly simulacrum into the tranquil Cloven-Hoofed Liar household, that Mrs. Liar had been telling her little boy that what he had seen had been all just a bad dream.

Bad dream, nya. I’ll show them bad dream.

So Clown showed up again, taped up the mother, and lashed the little boy to himself by a line from his all-purpose super-utility belt, and making him watch…

…“Oh, got some soap in those beautiful blue eyes, nya, shut up, you little brat, or I’ll wash your mouth out with soap, nya, in fact, I will wash your mouth out with soap, there, there, nya, there, nya, nya, nya, nyaaa”…

…drowned his infant sister in the bath.

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

But that wasn’t all, nya.

Because every time the kid would nod off asleep, despite his best efforts to stay awake, Clown immediately appeared as his only dream – “Which are called nightmares – nyaaaaaaa…!!!” – laughing and whooping, of course – nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaaaa…!!! To stop it, the boy threw himself off the balcony. But even on that side, Clown made sure the image of Clown would always be with him, the nya-nya laughter turning into a scream.

Nya, no more kids – nya-nya-nya-nya…

But The Cloven-Hoofed Liar was still pulling down a salary.

Ah, nya, let him get on with it. What can he do with that money anyway? Buy more shit bags? Nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!! As for the wife – that’s her problem! Nya. Or maybe Clown’ll make another visit and f- her till she’s dead! – nya-nya, nya-nya, nya-nya…

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

After wrapping up The Cloven-Hoofed Liar case, Clown found Ray Litcoven in the bar and told him he had convinced the Stop to give Litcoven back his job. But Litcoven told Clown to go f- himself – nya!

He told Clown that the Stop was all behind him now and thanks to his being fired a new chapter had started in his life and he was writing stories, which he had every intention of getting published, about all the assholes in the place, including Clown, except he would change things ever so slightly where it would still be Clown, yet it would be some other Clown, making it impossible for Clown to sue Litcoven for libel under any jurisdiction in the world, regardless whether the burden of proof was on the plaintiff to show the defendant had defamed him, or on the defendant to show that he hadn’t, the stories being fiction and the similarities being mere coincidences.

Nya.

Oh, no, Clown doesn’t like the sound of that at all, nya. What’s going to happen to Clown now, to all of his plans and actions, his art – oh, no, oh, no, not his art, not Clown’s art!!! – to his Universal Justice Project, to death in Kyiv itself???

Clown feels weak. Clown feels like he has been controlled all along, like he is fading, fading, like the Wicked Witch of the West, melting, melting, oh, my world, my world, what’s he doing to me? I’ve been the product of someone else’s imagination all along! Taking over, always having had control, actually doing what Clown thought he had been doing himself – starting his own writing career with this very story! About Clown!!! But it turns out that Clown is actually the story! Even these words, which are a mockery of Clown spoken by himself, are the work of some all-powerful invisible master, and Clown, this fiction that am I, am at his complete mercy. Oh, no, oh, no – nya – goodbye, goodbye, Clown is going, fading, disappearing fast… gone… nya…

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Yeah, right, nya. Give Clown a break. Clown just made up that whole Ray Litcoven bit so that you’d swallow the improbable inconsistency that Clown crippled The Cloven-Hoofed Liar, raped his wife and murdered his children out of an indignant moral compunction to punish The Liar for what he had done to some Ray Litcoven. Nyaaaaa!!!

No one writes Clown.

As for The Cloven-Hoofed Liar, whatever Clown hates, Clown destroys. It may not even be hate. As long as the feeling sweeps over Clown, the most important thing is that Clown act. The system is completely self-contained and sufficient unto itself. Clown acts. No reasons for his actions are relevant. Therefore, they don’t exist. The act is the most important thing, ergo, the vile faux reportage on Litcoven, ergo, the purely spontaneous generation of Clown’s art. Nya, nya, nya.

That goes for The Liar’s salary, about which Clown knew nothing, and whether he continued to earn one or not following his little mishap made no difference to Clown. As far as Clown knows, the salary was merely a product of Clown’s verdant imagination. Although with The Cloven-Hoofed Liar, nya, anything’s possible.

Clown finds it abhorrent to go on and on, as if he was trying to explain himself, or make excuses. Clown was only saying, nyaaa…

Clown’s got other fish to fry.

Part III

Hey, why is Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” more than twice as good as Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”? Because it’s more than twice as long! Nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

Hey, don’t worry if you couldn’t finish Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”… He couldn’t finish it either! Nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

Nya.

Clown’s been a little too busy with his own projects and has to catch up on his reading. What is it with these pieces in The New York Times Book Review? The NYTBR have remained loyal and Clown receives it here regularly in Kyiv, but Clown remains un-amused, unimpressed, and nonplussed by the middling quality of its intellection, as if its made to cater to and encompass with its selections and best-seller lists the broader, mainstream pop consumer crowd, nyaaaaa…

Herbert Marcuse would have had something to say about it. Walter Benjamin? Nyaaaaa… Clown doesn’t think so… Adorno and Horkheimer, nya, nya, Horkheimer and Adorno, nya, Adorno, nya, Horkheimer, nya, A& H, H&A, nya, nya, nya, nya, nya…

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books, to which Clown wanted to switch years ago, wouldn’t accept Clown as a subscriber – one of the reasons Clown moved to Kyiv, Ukraine, nya.

Ever since his mother, whom Clown doesn’t remember, left him, Clown hasn’t been able to deal well with rejection. Nya. Perhaps the mayhem, death, and destruction Clown wreaks are balm-like therapy for his pain. Nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa!!!

And then there’s the illustrious genius academic literary critic and theorist who has made the discovery that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the world – a mere 400 years later – nyaaaaaaaaa! I guess the genius is in stating the obvious. Nya-nya-nya.

The alleged greatness of the claimed prodigious memory – as if it proves anything, nya – yeah, that parasitic work of secondary commentary on original art can be endless.

So there are these two poets, see, and one poet says to the other, “I keep writing and writing this poem, but I can’t finish it, like there’s something blocking me.” And the other poet says, “Like you’re so filled with anxiety over the influence of all the poets who came before you that you feel paralyzed in mid-meter,” and the one poet says, “Yeah, how did you know,” and the other one says, “Because I have the same problem!” Nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaa, nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

The head of the bludgeoned bum kept opening and closing its blinded eyes, as if to beg for death with them, the mouth, crushed into itself, kept smacking the cuddy glop of its teeth, gums, and blood, ceaselessly emitting a low, baying whine that was accompanied by an erratically syncopating, slurping whistle. Clown struck the former decorated communist war hero’s face with a hammer, this time bashing the nose and crushing the cheeks.

“That oughtta learn ya – nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa!!!”

Clown had hung the strips of flesh, sliced out with a sickle, out the windows to dry, but crows, who were well-disposed to Clown, were pinning them against the ledges with their claws and cheerfully tearing at them with their beaks. Nya, krya, krya, krya, kryaaaaa…!!!

Nya-nya-nya.

I keep blowing up the Lenin monument in the center of town and the city keeps replacing it. Blowing up the statue doesn’t cost me anything, nya, but doesn’t the city have anything better to do with its money? Do they think they’re going to win? Nya.

“Mmmlllaaa-aaa-aaa-aammm…!!!”

“Shuuuuut uuuuup!!!”

Knock, knock, knock.

“Who the f- is it?!”

Knock, knock, knock. “It’s me, Babushka! Open the door.” Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock.

“Why don’t you ring the f-g doorbell, you wrinkled old bag of putrid sewage pipe sludge?”

“Unlock the door, you silly boy.” Knock, knock, knock. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re doorbell’s broken. Now open up!”

“All right, all right, keep your brown-crusted pantaloons on. Let me just do something with this head. Nya.”

Clown’s got enough problems.

A hot wind from the Dnipro agitated the leaves of Kyiv’s poplars and chestnut trees into a sustained green malaise. Nya.

Walking down the baking street, Clown pulled a fresh bottle of whisky out of his traveller’s bag, immediately guzzling half with great satiation.

On a broiler like today, you can’t have enough of the old Johnnie Walker to tide you over – nyaaaaa…

I’ve got a long-term project going at the Academy of Arts and Culture just down the street from the paper, nya. I’ve been staking out the Academy’s compact Byzantine territory for rape victims, disguised as a student, which is to say, as myself, carrying this bag and a couple of graphic comic porn novels under my arm. The students have accepted me as a special freak actor from the regions who is so dedicated to his craft that he’s determined to live the role of a clown – as though a clown could be someone real.

Am I the only one who perceives the irony here? Nyaaa!

Whenever Clown disguises himself as himself, no one ever recognizes him as Clown, who works for the Kyiv Stop, even though my photos are in the middle of every issue, nya.

A city gets the superhero it deserves. Nya. New York City has Batman, Superman, and Spiderman. Kyiv has Clown.

A typical conversation between Clown and clumps of students who gather round him in the little asphalt and brick-paved courtyard between the Academy’s buildings or seething outside its cafeteria goes something like this:

“Hey, that’s a great rasp to go with your evil clown persona. Do you always stay in character?”

“Yeah, yeah, always.”

“But we never see you in any of our classes.”

“I’m in a special program.”

“Oh, yeah? Which one?”

“It’s a secret, nya.”

“Hey, maybe you’re not a student here at all. Maybe you’re… hey, aren’t you… say, aren’t you that -”

“Don’t press your luck, kid.”

“Okay.”

To enhance the appearance of his legitimacy, Clown began lurching into rehearsals of a play about domestic violence, alcoholism and infanticide – my kind of play, nya – written by a senior student, choosing moments at whim to come out on stage behind the main actors and go, “Nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa!!!”

It wasn’t in the script, but students and professors credited the student with brilliance, an accolade the student readily and shrewdly accepted as well deserved.

Nya.

And so Clown would loom around the Academy of Arts and Culture into the night, drinking whisky, breaking the benches with his weight, with a twitch of his shank, nya, and stalking the chicks trickling out of the Academy’s nooks after they’d done practicing, obsessing over their technique, perfecting their form – their form, nya, their form – nya-nya-nya-nya – acting chicks, singing chicks, art studio chicks, violin and piano chicks, but especially the ballet chicks – nya – how Clown wanted those elastic legs split to either side of his giant cock.

They’re always stretching, so I’ll stretch them some more – on the inside, nyaaaaa!!!

Is it possible that when Clown says he never acts on emotion and premeditated foresight, but only on impulse, he’s lying? So what?!

Nya-nya.

Yes, yes, dripping out of the Academy’s crevices, late into the ill-starred night, into the stale pitch of the city’s pollution-trapped swelter, into the woozy, nauseous murk, exhausted, sweat-silted though just showered, eyes sticking with crud, on their way home, to sleep (but not to dream! – nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa…), lugging books, instruments, bags with costumes, warm-up duds, notes, scripts, and art supplies, young, beautiful chicks, now barely wobbling on their high, open-toe heels clip-clapping quickly, anxiously against the pavement, in their tight little dresses, with their tits exposed to the lamplight glaring from the boarded-up maze of connected construction sites, whose serpentine walkways grope their way, finger-like, across the Academy’s property and in between the un-built future residences before releasing their nervous walkers into blind backstreets, lined and narrowed by one-car garages either side, mongrel sentinels lurking and slinking about, in the midst of their days, tongue-hung, leaking summer-heated slobber from their jowls, peering with bad intent from overgrown trees, their cool silence belying a night-animated fever to attack, away from the main thoroughfares, traffic and people.

And then – ‘step, step, step’, barely audible, and then again, ‘step, step, step… step, step, step… nya-nya-nya-nya… step, step, step…’ The strays whine, pin their ears back and bow, heel and then grovel, lay on their backs with their tongues out and their legs up, panting, whimpering, begging to be left unharmed, begging for mercy. Here, Clown is tsar.

The guitar case was mashed into a prickly copse, the demolished guitar itself hung by its three unbroken strings from a tree branch, the neck turning slowly in alternating half-twists, severed from its molested body.

A shifting blur tore a hole in the stagnant ink. The girl stared at Clown’s three rows of glowing rust-red teeth, his horrifyingly massive incinerator maw a jagged furnace, a Donetsk steelworks, a Hell cavern, searing her erotic eastern Ukrainian hair and face with fire. The pressure from the finger he used to cover her mouth broke her jaw, while he shook her like a clammy stone idol in his jubilant ardour with the crushing frenzy of his other hand, penile thrusts mauling her uterus, driving her head into the tree.

It was only minutes ago she had been rehearsing Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”; she was good enough to be giving concerts in Kyiv’s smaller halls; she was going to marry after graduation, have a few children, pursue her classical guitar career like a modern woman – European tours had already been assured, international notoriety would almost surely have followed.

And now she was being rammed to death in Hell by Satan himself.

Why was this happening to her? What had she done?

Clown says: “Who cares?! Nya, nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaaaaaa…!!!”

“This’ll teach you to be a f-g Ukrainian bitch, nya, you f-g c-t! This’ll teach your nationalistic bitch ass to talk Ukrainian to me when I address you in Russian – a normal, human tongue – nyaaaaaaa!”

Nya! Nya! Nya! Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

That ‘Ukrainian nationalist’ incrimination cows them into silence every time! Nya-nya.

It wasn’t a ballerina, but I’ll get one next time. Maybe tomorrow, nya. Clown knows exactly what to do with those tights!

You don’t judge Clown by his words, but by his acts – he says he doesn’t act out of motives, but if you look at the results, you would conclude that there was sinister intent.

But Clown says: “It doesn’t matter – nyaaaaaaa…!!!”

Life’s good, here in Kyiv. It’s one of the reasons Clown moved out of New York City. You think living in Hell’s Kitchen was easy?!

And then there’s the case of Anel Piskatova.

Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!!

Now that Clown’s got Lilia, he doesn’t need some ugly newsroom bitch lording her rejection of Clown over him and his beautiful dark gothic girlfriend, nya.

And Clown doesn’t deal well with rejection, for Piskatova used Clown, and then threw him away when she was done, like a greasy dishrag – nyaaaaa! She broke Clown’s heart (Note: or whatever the f- Clown has – nyaaaaa!!!)

And exchanged Clown for what? Nya. A little man in an orange t-shirt, and a tall deformity with a Frankenstein head.

Clown fed the first one into a wood chipper in the cemetery with the help of Rodin.

The farce that is Kyiv, and the politics of the country of which this sad city is the capital, extends to the Kyiv Stop as well. The paper’s new owner-publisher keeps changing CEOs, as if that’s going to resuscitate the Stop – the dead weight funeral march he bought for a song. The latest CEO rendition is a superannuated, prune-faced, flatulent wind-blowing hillbilly [Clown note: with regional, good-ol’-boy former slave-owning family ties to the old man (see above, nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa; together with the walleyed troll, all three claim connections to Washington, D.C.; yeah, right, nya), though no unequivocal allegiances to same where money is concerned], the head of a defunct PR firm, where all the old men who ‘worked’ there (including the old man, of course, as well as the walleyed troll), elbowing each other in the ribs for the toilet paper, tried building a reputation on the motto that ‘we will never give up on a client – even if we’re dead’ – nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa…

In a shocking twist, which characterizes fate at least half the time, the Stop’s publisher even approached Clown about becoming CE, to which Clown said, “F- off, nya,” as it would cramp Clown’s style. Nya-nya-nya.

But despite fate’s episodically jocund upchuckings, thanks to Piskatova, something like cloud-covered sorrow descended over Clown. Nya. A melancholy nostalgia… a crappy kind of sadness… Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…

So Clown called the modelling agency where Piskatova was trying to get a job to tear free of the Stop and told them she was too stupid to be a model. They agreed not to hire her under the threat of Clown’s vengeance – nya!

But that still didn’t stop Piskatova, who kept pouring on the pain, finally snapping Clown’s patience when the Frankenstein head walked triumphantly past Clown in the hall carrying Piskatova in his arms, going “Waaaaahhh-waaahh-waaahh-waaaaaaaaahhh…!!!” while Kosana Kalamuta, Piskatova’s chicken-brained friend, jumped up and down like a Potemkin Village cheerleader next to the ecstatic couple.

So Clown taped the pair together facing each other, took them out on a boat from the island of Hydropark in the middle of the Dnipro, also with the help of the faithful Rodin, and dropped them accidentally into the river (for the record: Kosana Kalamuta was not involved in any way, nya).

Notwithstanding Frankenstein head’s constant ‘waaahh-waaahh-waaahh…’, it was a silent parting – a battle of the silences, you might say – mine and Piskatova’s.

Guess who won?

Nya.

Clown only regrets he didn’t check what was in Frankenstein head’s knapsack, which sank with him in the Dnipro River, loyally strapped to his back.

Clown’s got enough problems.

Now Clown was all Lilia’s.

Nya-nya.

Nya.

Lilia masturbates my giant cock through tremors of Julia Kristeva – for my gothic love understands me, my weakness, my need, my shameful obsession, my wretched sickness – as I swill bottles of whisky and read excerpts from “The Powers of Horror”, which I have enlarged into neon signposts that flash across my computer desktop, as my forehead palpitates and the shaking of my loins causes my ballooning parachute attire to flutter and whip, generating a Pterosaurian wind shearing and beating through the room, disturbing the entire Khrushchev-era apartment building to its foundations:

“…refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.”

– “The Powers of Horror”

Oh, Julia, Julia!

My love doesn’t see it as a compromise to our relationship, but, sympathetically, as a necessary purgation of my vulnerability. She says Kristeva is merely the object I’ve chosen onto which I project my fears and insecurities and through which I exorcise the demons that hamper my will to Clown perfectibility. She is willing to be there and hold me through my pain.

But it’s not that – no, it’s not that at all; and Clown is secretly anxious, for…

Oh, Julia, Clown folds and collapses, unable to contain repeated ejaculation staring at your poster on his wall. Oh, my little hopping bunny rabbit; sometimes Clown goes into his cosmetic supplies to retrieve a cotton swab and stick it with a piece of Scotch Tape as a fluffy tail on the back of your short black skirt, so that it gives the illusion of protruding, ever so slightly, from under your shiny black leather jacket – titillating, playing, teasing – oh, Kristeva, Kristeva! You coy little hare, you foxy feminist literary critic, you sly little minx. Aesthetic and hot, oh, omnipresence, you appear innocent, you invite me to take the bait of your control, and once I do, you reel me in. Here is all of my isolated desire. The intertextual interpenetrating dichotomy, two halves fused yet separate, the dialectical model of essence versus appearance, ideology, or false consciousness…

Nya, nya, nya, nyaaaaa!!!

When Lilia told Clown not to open any more cans of motor oil, he complied.

Babushka was upset, and distraught, would merely shake her head disapprovingly and hobble back into her apartment.

Now Lilia’s black-draped silhouette flaunted a six-month’s swell. It was mid-winter and Baby Clown would be born some time in the spring, assuming normal human gestation.

“You should never have f-d my ass that day, Clown,” Rodin said defiantly when Clown caught him with Lilia in Clown’s bed, as death music blared from Clown’s computer.

“And the child’s not yours, either” Lilia added – hurtfully.

“I suppose it’s Rodin’s,” Clown surmised – scientifically.

“Yeah,” Lilia answered, tumbling the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit from one side of her mouth to the other, her black-purple lipstick smudged across her mouth and cheeks from Rodin’s lustful slobberings.

“Well, that changes everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only this!”

Clown locked the door and began shredding Rodin’s flesh with his fingernails, slicing off a piece of his little dick, the cock head skewered on the end of Clown’s pinky nail – “Whoops, not much of a loss there!”

Lilia stabbed Clown repeatedly in the back with a large scissors, releasing spouts of his yellow blood across the purple sails of his shirt – “Ah, that feels good! Is that you, love? Well, it’s just like you, isn’t it?!”

Clown drove rail spikes through Lilia’s hands into the floor.

“Relax! Take a load off! Enjoy the party! I hate your taste in music, but it’s good for covering up the screams! Here, don’t be shy – have a drink!” And Clown forced whisky down Lilia’s gullet through a spout. “There, that should help you unwind. Woop, woop, hey, don’t be such a lush! Leave some for the host – you know Clown’s partial. That’s how it is! When you get something for free, you take as much of it as you can without thinking. It’s when you have to pay for it that you suddenly develop an appreciation for what you’ve taken for granted until then. Well, that’s human nature, I guess – something that’s alien to Clown. But here I am, trying to fit in, throwing this little soiree for my friends. Oh, these parties are so much work! The fewer the guests, the more there is to do. Now I’m off to lover boy again to see if he’s having a good time!”

Clown slapped strips of Rodin’s flesh onto hooks in his walls – “I just read about something like this, but I can’t place where” – and winding his ankles with steel wire – “I really hate men’s bare feet; I find them absolutely revolting” – Clown slashed his throat and crashed what was left of Rodin through the window, where the flayed carcass twirled suspended from Clown’s ledge in the cold winter night banging against Babushka’s bedroom window one floor below and streaking it with blood.

Now Clown stood over Lilia. He sliced her womb open like a door and was about to tear the fetus out and devour it before its dying mother, but was immediately struck by the thick, fire-orange brush sticking up on its head in the uterine goo. Curled on its side, the large penis was already amazingly developed between its pasty-white legs. And it had a little, tiny rubbery plastic-like red nose, that glowed, just like Clown’s, except, of course, fetus-sized. And Clown tweaked it, once, twice, and it gave a little fetus squeak – beep-beep, beep-beep – just like Clown’s did, except, of course, the sound was much, much smaller.

Suddenly, as in reaction to the tweaking, its grotesque little head turned and it opened its eyes – two little translucent blood-amber marbles, like depthless chambers – and when they saw Clown, the pointed red corners of its mouth turned up and up, almost to its ear holes, in what Clown recognized as his own smile.

But the smile left the hideous little face, which grew troubled. It coughed and its breathing grew labored and wheezing. And then it began to close its eyes, dying.

“That’s right, Clown, you ugly motherf-r,” Lilia gasped, still alive, “it’s yours. When I found out, I didn’t want the sin of bringing another one like you into this world. I was going to abort it, tomorrow, or the end of this week – but you’ve done it for me – ha, ha! – and leave here, run, far, far away, and start over again with Rodin, a normal man with a normal penis. And a real artist! The poor man; he was so good; we had known each other for a long time; way before you! He told me about your cock, I was intrigued, and ended up f-d by something that’s not even human! My God, my God, what have I done, what have I done?! And that good, good man, whom you just killed, he forgave me. Ooooohhh!!! I was already hearing its ‘nya-nya-nyaaas’ inside me – what a f-g nightmare; giving birth to a monster. Thank God it’s over – either way – thank God!

“And you’re not going to have this chance again. I know it. I wish it upon you, you f-g evil abomination. You, you… Clown! I pray to God you’re the only one of your kind on His beautiful green and blue Earth, slipped into it somehow through oversight, error, one of the angel’s innocent, fatal, mistakes; how you got here, who planted you, and what misguided soul gave you birth, only He knows; there must be a reason, but it’s not for us to understand His will or question it, only to have faith; and when you’re gone, there will be nothing left, and the memory of you will die like a disintegrating nightmare.

“And I don’t mind dying. To die is better than to be harrowed by you and that thing I almost made in your image until you or it took my life, which is how it’s ended anyway, except sooner –good. And now it’s dead too, and by your hand – better. My prayers have been answered. I know my work’s fulfilled and I’m not sorry I’m gone. If that was my purpose in this world, so be it. If this is how I pay for my mistake, God’s will be done. I can only ask for His forgiveness. Goodbye, Clown. Thanks for Hell. If that’s where I’m headed, it’ll still be better than life with you. Nyaaaaa!!!”

Clown popped the cord attaching his dead son to his dead mother and gathered the fetus to his bosom, an immense billowing sleeve obscuring the unborn Baby Clown’s form in the crook of Clown’s arm.

He didn’t know why he was heading downstairs, to Babushka.

Maybe I can ask for one of those big pickling jars. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, garlic…

“So, if it isn’t Mr. Clown… Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Arrr-tist Clown. Create any masterpieces lately, Mr. Artiste, or is it the same old shit? Heads, blood, dismembered flesh, et cetera and so on. Well, well, well, maybe you’ll think of something new some day. Oh, is that a prototype you’re hiding in your sleeve? Let’s see it! Or is it just another head? Well, why don’t you say anything? Come in, come in; don’t just stand there like some clown. You’re letting in the cold. This isn’t the Ritz Biltmore in Florida Miami! You can put that thing down, whatever it is, on the table, and have some borsch with us. There isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. We’ve got some guests!”

There was the excessively shaking Lavrenty Artemovich, who lived in the middle two-room apartment on the first floor. Every time he saw Clown, he would start speaking to him about all the times they went through together as tank partners at the front. Babushka to him was some village chick he had had during the war. No sooner he saw Clown squeeze through the door than he started on the Halcyon Days – “Remember when we ran right over those German Nazi bastards!” – while trying to feed with a big spoon Babushka’s granddaughter, who was restrained in a chair, borsch, which he kept dribbling into her lap, causing her to howl in that lunatic register that had been so familiar to Clown and now seemed so far in the past.

And there was the still bright and sprightly Arkady Semyonovich, Babushka’s cross-landing neighbor for more than 40 years, a former circus performer, a clown, who, whenever he saw Clown, could never get enough of coming up to him and touching him, awed at the thing, as if he couldn’t believe it was real.

“I heard breaking glass,” Babushka continued. “I suppose we’re going to have to replace some windows – that is, if you want Babushka to help you anymore… That is, if I wouldn’t be in the way… It’s over, isn’t it?”

Instead of sitting down at the table, Clown headed straight for the liquor cabinet.

“Oh, there’s plenty of whisky, Mr. Clown. You may have forgotten about Babushka, but Babushka didn’t forget about you! You handsome devil.”

Unnoticed by Clown, Arkady Semyonovich was already beside him, his arms lifted up like a child who wanted to be picked up by its father, touching and pawing Clown – “You’ve grown, haven’t you?”

“Keep your hands off me.”

Babushka: “Leave Arkady Semyonovich alone! He hasn’t done anything to you. Mind your manners, Mr. Clown. He’s my guest. You should consider yourself lucky to be here – I barely invited you. So it’s over, isn’t it? Babushka tried telling you; but did you listen? Noooo-ooo-o, of course not. You just went ahead and did whatever you wanted.”

“Don’t touch me. Keep your hands off of me; keep them off!”

“Don’t you dare speak to Arkady Semyonovich like that! Apologize! He hasn’t done anything to you. Leave him alone! You had to find out for yourself; didn’t you? You stupid, silly boy. After everything I’ve done for you, and you still wouldn’t trust Babushka, who would never steer you wrong. Babushka has always had only your best interests in mind. I took one look at that girl, one look, and I knew she was no good for you – only a lot of trouble, and heartache, and broken dreams – a real vampire! – bluaaa-a-a-aaa, bluaaa-a-a-aaa, bluaaa-a-a-aaa…!!!”

Clown was now seated by the table. Babushka’s granddaughter, across from him, her arms tied down to the armrests, was looking at the crook of Clown’s arm, and she was shaking and crying, making the chair creak, almost explosively, wailing, as if she knew… as if she knew… And then Arkady Semyonovich was beside him again.

“You’ve grown, haven’t you? You’ve gotten bigger. Yes, yes, you’ve certainly gotten bigger…”

“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”

“Leave him alone! And what about my granddaughter? All the trouble I’ve gone through to prepare her for you, so that she wouldn’t be like my daughter-in-law, may God eternally harass and afflict her soul – haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaa, haaaaaaaaaaaaa…!!! – look at her; just look at her! What problem do you have with her?! Raping and raping and raping, making her suck and suck, until Babushka ran out of gauze to daub the wounds of her ripped mouth! But no, she turned out not good enough for you! Well, Mr. Clown – who is she good enough for now?! Hah! Who is she good for now, after you, after you ruined her, destroyed her, if she’s not good enough for you?! No, you had to take that black-shadow bitch to almost be your wife, and now you’re down here, aren’t you, after it’s over, after it’s over the way Babushka said it would be, the way Babushka told you it would be, to look at my granddaughter anew, to reappraise her. Before, you did what you wanted and you took it for granted, but now, now that she’s been out of your life for a while, you’ve suddenly understood what you’ve been missing. You’ve suddenly seen her worth! Well, well, isn’t that what it’s always like? Human nature. Yet, Mr. Clown, you big idiot, I never expected it from you. But I know what this is all about. You’ve learned your lesson and you’ve returned. Babushka forgives you. If you want back in, who am I to stop you? Welcome home! I know now that my granddaughter will be your wife! Ha, ha, ha, haaaaa…!!!”

“… And remember how we drove those German bastards back, back, almost into the Atlantic Ocean, and remember…”

“Yes, for sure you’ve grown, for sure, for sure…”

“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me…”

“Leave him alone! My granddaughter – ha, ha, haaaaa… my granddaughter, my granddaughter, ha, ha, ha, haaaaa… my granddaughter, ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaaaaa…”

Clown doesn’t think so. The hell Clown needs some nervous little bitch on his hands.

My ears are two holes with flaps of tissue that fold over them whenever Clown doesn’t want to hear anything.

Clown’s got enough problems.

Nya.

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