Tales from the Deep - The Saddest Clown

January 2067. Shaz is fighting against his alcohol demons, with a failing liver and nowhere to go. Jackson's is his last haven, the only place he can take shelter into. Fortunately for him, Vince is not going to give up on him so easily.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

The first thing he noticed upon waking up was the odd, white tint of the walls – an aseptic, sterile emptiness stretching in every direction, covering the ceiling as well. The second thing he noticed was the pungent smell of nitrile gloves and hand sanitizer. The third was the humming noise in the background, the constant beeping of some weird machine he could not make heads or tails of. Despite his confusion, he didn’t need a fourth or fifth hint to understand what was happening. He knew perfectly well where he was – only the “why” was still a mystery. He had a reasonable guess, though, and was pretty convinced it wasn’t too far from the truth.

He looked around the room from the bed he laid in, gazing left and right to get a better measure of his situation. The machines were pumping, saline solution dripping; several monitors surrounded the bed, all showing vital parameters in various shades of green. He focused on his own body, listened to his muscles, his organs, his bones. He heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t seem that bad. Almost no pain either, just a little malaise and discomfort in his chest. He wasn’t going to meet his maker, at least not yet.

“Ah, you are awake. Good.”

A voice attracted his attention. It was a doctor, seemingly, a green-haired man with a strong German accent. For some bizarre reason, he could only see the left half of the doctor’s face, under the dim, bluish lights.

“Gaetano Trasimeno, twenty-eight years old, great white hybrid pseudohuman. Is that correct?”

The sharkman named Gaetano nodded in silence. The doctor’s voice was dull, monotone – not dissimilar to a distorted, robotic text-to-speech engine. A thick shadow appeared to resonate from his silhouetted figure, hiding the man behind layers of darkness. Gaetano tracked him with his eyes, breathing slowly, feeling wary of his presence. A glowing, golden iris gazed back at him, piercing the subtle penumbra around the doctor, its luster barely held back by the faint neon lighting that filled the room.

“A promising specimen. A shame it expired so soon.”

Specimen? Expired? Gaetano blinked twice in confusion. He wasn’t sure how to interpret those words. He felt quite well, after all. Just a little bit of pain here and there, definitely nothing grave. How could he possibly...

He gasped. There was blood on his bed sheet. Blood and entrails. He felt his voice freezing in his throat, as everything around him turned red; the white of the walls, the bluish neon lights. All a deep, sickening red. And the doctor, the half of him that was previously hidden from sight… a horrific bundle of mechanical valves and tubes, pistons pumping furiously, yellow lights glowing where an eye should have been. Gaetano wanted to scream, but his voice wasn’t coming out, as if he had no lungs. The doctor peered at him, his one biological eye shining dimly in the now-crimson lights.

“I have no need for such an unhealthy subject.”

He snapped his mechanical fingers.

“It’s all yours, boys.”

Suddenly, the door burst open, letting two other sharkmen roll into the room – a hammerhead and a great golden, both equipped with handsaws and drillers. Gaetano felt his throat finally unlock, air beginning to flow again, as he let out a scream of pure terror. The two sharks continued to march forward, demonic grins painted on their contorted faces. Then, they pounced on him. He felt the cold, rusted metal digging into his skin, the saw’s blades carving him into pieces.

“No, stop! NO! NOOOO!!”

He opened his eyes. Blinked twice. Three times. He looked around, breathing heavily. Where was he? This was no hospital. The wooden counter, that buzzing sound of people talking, that familiar scent of cheap, second-rate coffee…

“Slept well, Shaz?”

That voice. The sharkman named Gaetano – or Shaz, or Chazz, or Chad, or Artemio, or about seven other names depending on the day of the week – raised his gaze. Only to meet with a deep, unnerving, blurry mess staring back at him.

“Hell no, Vince. Hell. No.”

He drew a deep breath. Jackson’s. This was Jackson’s. No weird hospital, no morgue with killer fishfaces. Just plain, old Jackson’s. Yet...

“Nightmares?”

“Like ya can’t even imagine, Vince.”

“How about a glass of vodka lemon to recover, then?”

Shaz frowned, his eyes going wide before he jolted backwards, nearly launching himself out of his seat. Jackson could only stare, dumbfounded. That wasn’t the reaction he was expecting. Not at all. He adjusted his yellow hat, mumbled something unintelligible, then looked at the sharkman again.

“Perhaps a beer, then? Or a jug of rum?”

Shaz couldn’t bring himself to meet Jackson’s inquisitive gaze, instead lowering his eyes to the ground.

“Well, uh, actually I... d-do ya have any... water, Vince?”

“W... water?”

“Yeah, ya know, that stuff that comes out of the tap. A glass of that. Ya have it?”

Jackson fell silent, his arms crossed, a wave of utter disbelief rushing through his brain. Water. Shaz. Shaz drinking water. In what messed-up parallel universe had he somehow landed? Was he unknowingly sent to some weird, bizarro alternate reality while brewing coffee for the last customer? Was it his divine comeuppance for having almost – almost – broken someone’s teeth after he was compared to Notorious Dickson, the man with all cock sizes at once, from the cult hit porno movie Schwanzerblitz (copyright Mr. Daevka productions)? Or, wait, what if this was all just an elaborate practical joke – a classic hidden camera prank? Was Shaz in on it? And for how much money?

“Water.”

Jackson repeated himself once more, to be sure he hadn’t simply heard wrong. He quickly glanced around the establishment, searching for camera drones or concealed microphones. He couldn’t find any. Either the perpetrators were very smart about hiding them, or this wasn’t a joke. Jackson placed his bets on the former.

“S... something wrong, Vince? I can go somewhere else if it’s a problem, fella!”

“Shaz, let’s be honest: the chances of you asking for plain water are slimmer than that of a volcano erupting somewhere in Germany right as we speak. Which is to say... absolutely negligible. Who are you and what have you done with Shaz?!”

Jackson’s mind flashed back to the previous week, to an old movie he was watching with Kia Takara in a rental car at a vintage drive-in. A movie where alien invaders would replace humans with clones emerging from pea pods at night, after murdering the original. Alien movies were considered indelicate ever since first contact with EXODUS, but there were still places where they were shown to the public – places you had to have connections to find. And Jackson had no shortage of those. Sure, he could have chosen a romantic comedy or something, but apparently Kia liked old sci-fi movies. So he soldiered through it, knowing it would make her happier. However, that movie ended up shocking him much more than he thought. Pod people, cloning and replacing humans. He shivered. Could this “Shaz” be part of the vanguard of a real covert alien invasion? His mind raced, his eyes started looking for a suitable blunt object to use, in case things went awry while trying to ascertain the identity of the supposed sharkman in front of him. He spotted an umbrella in the corner, pondered that option for a brief moment, before settling on a nearby crowbar he had used to open the cafe’s shutters earlier that morning. He couldn’t just grab it, though, not without rousing suspicion from the entity clearly impersonating Shaz. He had to be smarter than that. Aliens weren’t dumb.

Then, he noticed it. A small scrap of paper, clutched right between the sharkman’s fat fingers, penned in some unreadable handwriting. He could have easily ignored it and continued with his original plan, but fishing for hints was probably better than relentlessly beating up a self-proclaimed sharkman with a crowbar in front of fifty customers without any actual evidence to go on.

“What’s that paper you’re holding, Shaz?”

“N-nothing.”

“Yes, of course, nothing. If it’s really nothing, you’ll have no issues with me looking at it, right?”

The sharkman nodded unconvincingly, averting his gaze for just an instant. A long sigh escaped his toothy maw.

“Alright, aaaaalright, I’ll spill the beans! No need to be pushy.”

Shaz looked at Jackson with dull, tired eyes, no energy left in them.

“It’s a doctor’s note, from a friend of mine. Shissu Kobase, ya know him?”

Jackson frowned at that name. Kobase was a weird man, notorious even. To many people, he was a criminal who lost his medical license for numerous questionable acts performed on his patients. To others, he was a kindhearted doctor that did what others weren’t ready to, for almost no money at all. Overall, a very controversial figure, always on the move and never staying in the same place for too long. Jackson had never had the pleasure (or displeasure, perhaps) of meeting him, but rumor had it that he was involved in the harvesting of some of Cyphr’s organs back in Germany. How much truth there was behind that, Jackson couldn’t tell. But one thing was certain – Kobase was, at least, a sort of medical practitioner, with some hint of a code of conduct. That such a figure was a good acquaintance of the shark-shaped disaster sitting in front of him came as no surprise.

“The name rings a bell. What about him?”

“This is his diagnosis. My liver’s gone, Vince. Well, almost. I’ve got second-stage cirrhosis, and it ain’t gonna stop.”

Jackson blinked twice in quick succession. He ripped the folded paper from Shaz’s hands, trying to make sense of what was written on it. It was a short document, with two ultrasound pictures attached. He knew nothing about human anatomy, and Kobase’s handwriting was about what you would expect from a rogue Japanese medic trying to write in English while on the run from armed policemen… but that didn’t make the words he wrote any less scary. Cirrhosis. Quite a dreadful term. Cirrhosis meant that Shaz’s liver was scarred beyond recovery and that it had already lost part of its functions. Yes, it was that bad. Jackson let the paper fall on the counter, looked back at Shaz with his eyes wide open.

“...How long have you known about this? Shaz, this is...”

“One week. I’ve known for one week. It was after I puked my soul out and almost had a heart attack on my way back home from Le Coq. That scared me, Vince. Never felt so bad after getting drunk. So I went to my pal, the doctor. Kobase’s a nice fella – aside from his, uh, weird ideas about eugenics and a couple crimes against humanity, mind me. He owed me one, aaand I asked him for a full-body checkup.”

Jackson stared at him in silence.

“He told it to me fair and square: You drink, you die. Your choice. Then, he ran away ’fore the bobbies could grab him. I ain’t gonna try and fool you Vince, I was heeeeella scared. I’m, uh, still hella scared.”

Shaz lifted his gaze to meet that of his blurry-faced friend. Jackson noticed the sharkman’s deep breaths, his hands trembling.

“...Weren’t you and Renzo drinking grappa with beer until you threw up just yesterday? Didn’t you gulp down seven, I repeat, seven cocktails in a row while dancing with him on the tables? Shaz...”

A sudden twist of his torso, a punch directed at the shark’s snout, striking him right in the ampullae. Shaz fell down from his stool, landed on the floor tiles, bounced on his nape with a loud thud. Jackson glared at him from above, anger emanating from every pore of his skin.

“...You are a goddamn idiot!”

A crowd of customers yelled, someone screamed, though most went right back to drinking their coffee without paying much attention. Shaz was like a piece of furniture at Jackson’s; He was always there, and when he wasn’t, nobody seemed to notice it. Except, this time, Vince seemed mad. Really mad.

“Bloody moonfish! That hurt, Vince!”

“Your liver is a minefield with more holes than Swiss cheese, and you choose to drink to the point of collapsing?! Shaz, what the hell?! Do you have plankton for brains?!”

Shaz stood up and brushed his jacket before returning to his seat.

“Renzo got dumped by Elena, ya know that, right? He was on the verge of depression yesterday! You saw that, didn’t ya, Vince? What was I supposed to do? He needed some sorta distraction, somethin’ to get him away from it for a while. He was out of his mind, that poor fella.”

“To hell with him!”

Jackson drew a long breath, his knuckles still aching from the impact. He looked at the big sharkman with a dumbfounded expression, a train of thoughts wildly running through his head. He sat down, locking eyes with Shaz.

“Shaz, why? If you knew your body was breaking down... why?”

“Because that’s who I am, Vince. A clown, a jester that exists to make everyone else think they’re better or luckier than him. A disaster with no goals or aspirations, who downs gallons of beer as a joke and makes people laugh at him. Have ya ever been to hell, Vince? Well, let me tell ya, hell isn’t some dumb, scary wasteland with devils and brimstone. Hell is a cage we build ourselves, a place where once ya’ve entered, ya ain’t gettin’ out. This is my hell, Vince. I created it back when I escaped from Go. I was drinkin’ to forget how shitty my life had become. Now I can’t even do that, right? Nah, not right. I can still drink and be someone’s jester. ’Cause my life means nothing anyway.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“Vince, tell me... if I died right now, how many people would come to my funeral?”

A veil of ice fell between them. Jackson had no words, he could only look at the sharkman, almost without blinking. Shaz sighed, shook his head.

“Ya see? The answer is nobody, Vince. I’m just a distraction, a speck of dust on the story of anyone else’s life. So, I gotta be the clown, to keep myself going. If I can turn someone’s mood around with a stupid joke, or by gettin’ drunk, that’s good enough for me. More than that, I can’t do.”

“...You’re right about one thing. I wouldn’t come either.”

Shaz stared back at him, at those empty, blurry eyes, for three long, interminable seconds.

“See? What’d uncle Shaz tell ya?”

Another punch to the ampullae, Shaz fell to the ground for a second time. Jackson jumped over the counter, picked up the sharkman, started shaking him like a ragdoll.

“Because there would be no funeral at all! I wouldn’t let you waste your life in the first place, you thickheaded planktonbrain!”

“V-Vince, whaddaheck! Vince, stop! Viiiiince!”

Jackson stopped his shaking, and instead hugged the sharkman, almost on the verge of tears.

“Why do you have to be so dense?! Do you think that Renzo or I would want to see you kick the bucket? He’s been dumped by Elena? So what? You think he’d be happier if you died trying to cheer him up? Come on, man, what would Jackson’s be without you?”

A quieter, cleaner place without a vice squad inspection every other day, Jackson silently thought, but he quickly dismissed that from his mind to focus on the matter at hand. Shaz was flabbergasted. That interaction, that moment, didn’t go anything like he expected.

Someone... caring for him? Genuinely? That wasn’t possible, not after he left the Fishface Syndicate. And yet...

“V... Viiiiiiince!”

He burst into tears himself, returning the faceless man’s embrace.

“So, you DO have a heart under that horrible, ugly hat! Blooody moonfish, I can’t–”

Jackson suddenly let him go, pushed him back, having to resist the urge to headbutt him.

“Now, don’t make me want to murder you, okay? Leave my hat out of this.”

He slowly walked back behind the counter, pulled a bottle off the highest shelf, then poured its contents into an empty glass.

“Here. It’s premium Yellow Hat Lemonade, home-made at Jackson’s. Sweeter than water, without being a danger for your liver. Have a sip.”

Shaz took the glass hesitantly, smelled the bright liquid inside. He brought it to his lips, chugged it down in one go. Almost immediately, he began to shake his head, his tongue spitting through his teeth. He coughed once, twice, blinked five times in a row.

“Holy plankton, it’s horrible. Please, don’t tell me all non-alcoholic beverages taste this bad!”

Jackson once again resisted the urge to headbutt him. He slowly counted up to ten in his head, breathing every other second. Maybe it would have been better if Shaz had really been replaced with an alien – that way, he wouldn’t have had any remorse in smashing his head with that crowbar.

“But yeah, Vince, I promise I won’t try to kill myself or anythin’. I’m such a goddamn moron. This hell of mine… maybe I can leave it, right? Could there still be a place for me in this world?”

“There’s a place for me. Which means, there should be one for you too.”

“And where is it?”

Jackson tipped his hat, grabbing another bottle from the top shelf.

“That might be asking too much. I’m just a bartender, you know, not a life guru. But one thing at a time. First, let’s try to find at least one non-alcoholic beverage you like.”

Shaz snorted, a dumb smile painted on his snout, as he tapped his finger on the counter.

“I dunno, I’m preeeeetty picky when it comes to taste. Could take all night.”

“It doesn’t matter, Shaz. I have time.”

Shaz grinned. In all his self-loathing, he had forgotten about it. About the fact that maybe, he wasn’t so alone after all. And maybe, just maybe, there really was a reason for him to keep on living. He chugged down a glass of Red Bowler Lemonade. Sooner or later, he would find a drink he was okay with.

Finding a new direction for his life couldn’t have been that much harder.