Harlequin

Most kids have teddies or some variation of that, but I had my plush little harlequin. Each night he would sit faithfully beside my head, and stare down the monsters with his frozen expression. And there were a lot of monsters. No names for any of them—they were too primeval for names. A werewolf in a story can be killed, vampire staked. Dragons and manticores can be slain, given enough time. Even Godzilla eventually retreats to the ocean. But these shadowed things weren’t fairytales. They didn’t inhabit neat little stories with rules that confined them.

My harlequin would stare them down for me while I slept.

I don’t know why, when I put my new little clown beside my pillow, I slept better that night than in a long time. Even as a very young child, I saw the silhouette of eldritch things, extending long appendages across the wall, or morph into being outside my window. Sometimes they were there, in time, with me, but no space was occupied. Only Harlequin could stand to keep his eyes on them.

I’m old and the shadows still lurk sometimes. It could be my mind going, but sometimes I see something move or shift around the frame of the door, or at the place where the floor meets the wall. It’s them, lurking, resentful, cursing my survival to adulthood. It’s great being an adult at times like that. You just shut down your imagination and go about your business. Balance your checkbook, check the mail, go for a walk and see the cars driving by. The reality, as officially outlined and accepted by other adults, is real again.

There’s no point in telling anyone because it’ll be blamed on dementia or Alzheimer’s or some other thing. And there are grounds for it, too. I’ve been losing my bank card consistently in the last five years or so. A few times I’ve left the house with food still in the oven. I haven’t told anyone yet, but I don’t think the forgetfulness has anything to do with it. A doctor would tell me it was a hallucination or an “illusion” of my eyes, but after all these years I still recognize them. I’ll tell my son eventually that I’m forgetting things. But right now I’m still sharp, just a little forgetful, and I want to take care of some business first.

My granddaughter is having trouble sleeping. My son says it’s night terrors and an over-active imagination. Sometimes, when she’s unplacatable, terrified until she’s about to cry, he and his wife let her sleep in bed with them. I can imagine clearly what she’s seeing, those images still sharply outlined in my mind. Pacing along the walls, the corners, the nooks, and crannies, trying to become more real on this side.

I read in a magazine once that the little curls or “flying eaves” at the end of traditional Chinese structures were made to keep spirits away. I wonder if there’s something about our dimensional space that makes it hard for these things to squeeze their way in. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to tell a kid, “It’s just a dream,” or “It’s just a shadow,” because so many of them can’t slip through.

They say some things skip a generation. I don’t know who “they” are, but they could be right. My son was always a sound sleeper.

It’s time for the granddaughter’s seventh birthday, and I take Harlequin down from the bookshelf. He’s still implacable as ever. Still observing. Nothing gets past those eyes because they never close. And Harlequin doesn’t get afraid.

“Sorry to take you out of retirement,” I tell him. “But it looks like you’re on active duty again. I know you’ll do a good job.”

Why do those things go after the young? Maybe because kids believe in them more. They haven’t decided on reality yet and that’s a sliver through which they can slime on in, can start working around the corners of a room, and slowly amass more of themselves. I’ve probably never seen what they look like when they’ve completely crossed over, thank God.

I guess that’s why they make you afraid. It’s not like they’re able to appeal to any other emotion. They’re cosmic trespassers, burglars, would-be abductors. I’m sure if they could appeal to us in another way they would. But the fear works good enough; you believe in them more, you concentrate and focus on them. It’s like an anchor, and they get more solid, or something like it—I don’t think they’re matter in the way we are—and they begin to escape the confines of the rectangular room and spill out onto the floor. They need an anchor because something—something dimensional, or extra-dimensional maybe—prevents them from just coming in, fully formed. If there’s ever a time when new dimensions are more concretely studied, I’m not sure it’ll be enough to uncover the mystery. Math might be able to work some of it out. Of course, as a kid, I was also bad at math, and that never changed, so I guess it’ll remain a mystery for me.

I buy a present for her birthday from one of the retail stores, but after she’s opened it and lavishes all her attention on the plastic thing, I tell her that I have another present for her, from when I was a kid. My son tells me I shouldn’t have, etc., but I give her Harlequin, and a lovely sheet of parchment paper that I purchased at the art store downtown. With a nice fountain pen, I wrote a little “story,” if you can call it that, about Harlequin, and how he’s been around for over a thousand years, sewn up in a hovel somewhere, and it was always his job to stand guard at night, in a window looking out at the black forests or on a shelf or in bed with a sleeping child.

Did Harlequins even exist a thousand years ago? It doesn’t matter. She’s seven.

And hey, it’s not like I remember picking him fresh off a shelf at a toy store. I just remember a relative handing him down to me one day. Can’t recall which one, though. A grandfather, maybe, or an aunt. Grandaunt? For all I know, he was made for this purpose.

On her eighth birthday, she doesn’t look so tired. On her ninth, her parents report that the nightmares are gone completely.

She turns fifteen, and the banality of the world seals itself around her. She probably forgets the nightmares. But she still loves Harlequin, just like I did.

He never seems to wear out. He’ll collect a little dust, and needs wash every now and then, and the color of his clothes have faded slightly over a period of decades. The threads are still holding strong, though, and the cloth is still firm. And the eyes never fall out.

-End-