They’re still cleaning up Times Square. It’s on the news, the screens flashing advertisements for Broadway, clothes, food –chocolates dancing for no one. Not many go there now, just a few curious teenagers, journalists, morbid thrill seekers. Like a dead spot in a city still trying to continue after such a profound loss.
Someone must be there though, I reason, it’s always on the news. Workers with push brooms and hoses, faces set in matching frowns. Always with earplugs, just in case, as if that would help. Sometimes the cameras will catch one retching, vomiting. Then back to work. Footage shows they are making some progress.
But that’s not a good place to start. Let me back up a year or so.
It started in a medium sized grocery store in a medium sized city in the middle of the United States. Shoppers in the produce section stopped, cocked their heads and listened as a tinny, high voice chanted. They couldn’t tell where it came from but several of them obviously heard it:
I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, Guess what happens when I tell jokes?
Then a noise, a puff of air in your ear. That’s how they described it. One of the shoppers fell, convulsed just once, blood streaming form every hole in her body. Blood trying to escape like kids on the last day of school, through every exit. It didn’t take long for the screaming to start. Surveillance video caught it all.
Hours, days of investigation, but no resolution, and no blame. Then it happened again, this time in a car dealership in Norway. Few people were there, but the song was the same, and the outcome. One man, trying to sell an SUV, here then gone. Laying in a spreading puddle. No sale that day I guess.
Terrible things that are unimaginable one week, become expected and common when they have happened several times. There was no source of the voice that could ever be found, just the same song:
I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, Guess what happens when I tell jokes?
Two months in, and seventeen people were dead. Most one at a time. All in public places. People started to stay away from stores, crowds, anyplace where you gathered. But oh, the churches were still full, more crammed now than ever. Everyone sure that this was sin, punishment, damnation. Until it happened in the Freewill Baptist Church in Carrey, Alabama. An all-white, conservative, loud crowd of said thumpers lost three that day. So, the voice wasn’t partial to Christians, and all bets were off.
Nearly every country, color, religion, race – an equal opportunity murderer. Talk shows droned – it was sin, it was Democrats, it was aliens, it was the government, it was vampires… Isn’t it funny how dawning horror turns to familiarity, turns to boredom… and the killing continued.
Children chanted the rhyme in play yards. Teenagers taunted each other, “the killer clown will get you!” Adults shopped fast, isolated by headphones or earplugs, then hurried home. Theories abounded. If you hear it, run. If you hear it, stand perfectly still. If you hear it, pray.
Just as we were growing used it, a new wave started. People dead in their homes. A couple were found to be copycat killers, hoping to use the fear to mask crimes, but another fifty-three people died in the same gruesome way. Some alone, some with witnesses. Not safe in public, now not safe in private. Who knew what the isolated cases, the bodies found alone and bloodied days after the fact, heard when it came for them? No one could say.
People did what they always do. Blamed others, assaulted, killed, raped, stole – all in the name of blame for what was going on.
No surprise anymore, the depths to which we fall.
Then we took a breath, and another. Two weeks with no killing. A month with no killing, two months, three. Was it over? It seemed to be over when we hit the four month mark and nothing new had happened. Normalcy crept back in, timid at first then ever bolder. This was cause for a celebration! We beat it. We won.
We did nothing. We didn’t win.
New Year’s Eve. How could we not turn the celebration up, given the year we’d had? We deserved it, didn’t we? Well, some of us did, anyway.
I was working at a small town convenience store. The TV was busted, and I saw about five customers all night – pre-drunk, drunk, and post-drunk in need of snacks. Thinking back now, I was lucky. So many were not.
It was on TV all over the world, every damn station – so many people at Times Square – so many people watching. The latest celebrity just-famous had finished her new hit song, and it was almost time for the ball to drop. Then it happened. Everyone’s hearts sank into silence as the verse repeated:
*I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, Guess what happens when I tell jokes?
I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, Guess what happens when I tell my last joke?*
In the playback it almost screams that last line, you hear people gasp in unison, and then that quiet almost intimate breath of air. En masse, the people fall. Blood everywhere, drenching everything. No one is spared – not the has-been actress hostess, not the suave host, not the people there or the people watching. They all fall, they all bleed. Color on color. Even with no audience to count, the ball automatically slides down and proclaims the year. Happy new year to the newly dead.
The world is very different now. It’s much quieter. We are trying to figure out how to continue. Not a starting over, but a tentative step forward. Some of us are still here while many are not. But we continue. We move forward, slowly, but we never forget. It could come back.
I realize I am singing to myself as I watch the footage again…
I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, I am the fool and I tell jokes, Guess what happens when I tell jokes?
I guess I am the fool. I guess we all are.