CW: none.

On September 28th, 2023, Art the Clown from the Terrifier movies accompanies me to poet Jane Hirschfield’s reading at the Anchorage Museum. Sitting next to me in a blue, padded fold-down theater seat, he wears his usual outfit: a half-black, half-white jumpsuit with a jauntily placed miniature top hat. We came to the event together.

Side by side, we discovered the event door was locked despite the signage on the main entrance indicating we should enter that way. A woman in front of us, unfazed by Art’s high-drawn black eyebrows, his stark white-painted face, or the sunflower sunglasses he lifted from the Halloween store, buzzed the security guard and held the door open for us. He entered with a flourish. I smiled sheepishly and shuffled in after him.

As the Poet makes introductory remarks, Art politely folds his sunglasses and deposits them in the trash bag he carries everywhere with him. He sits supernaturally still, with one hand on each knee, staring straight forward. His smile never leaves his face; black-painted lips frame the rot-toothed smile that seems to grow bigger even as the Poet recites to us by heart a poem she has translated from Japanese:

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.¹

Art sits grinning and stock-still. Respectful, almost. Perhaps he is even listening.

• • • •

For three whole hours, a few weeks before the Poet is slated to read in Anchorage, my apartment door rattles in its frame. The sound is unmistakable, even over the remote class video call I’m on, which is turned up full volume. Someone is trying to get in.

The door to my apartment is not impenetrable. It is not even sturdy. In fact, it is slightly warped and sits crooked in the frame, letting in uneven squeezes of buttery yellow light from the hallway when my living room inside is dark. The bracket in the wall has a screw loose and it will pop out at random, sometimes preventing the door from shutting at all. Yet, the intruder seems unconcerned with this, choosing to rattle endlessly instead of break down the door or force the latch. Only when I go over to investigate, after virtual class ends and silence pours into the apartment, does the rattling stop abruptly.

Even before I lean over to look out the peephole, I already know it will be Art. I lean in slowly, slowly, one eye open, until his sharp white face comes into focus. He is smiling—of course. He rattles the knob exaggeratedly, as if to confirm what I am thinking (there he is!), and covers his mouth with his hands, miming a giggle. My breath catches. He rattles the knob again, delighted.

I pull back. Art is on my doorstep, doing a bit about the fragility of the barrier that keeps him out of my home. He will not leave until I see it. Art is persistent.

• • • •

After the recitation, the Poet says that the translated poem has remained with her this long because it is, to her, a lesson in permeability—instructions for living. The Poet seems to speak poetry in addition to writing it. Her very tone of voice, the cadence of her delivery, suggest a kind of deliberation, or a perpetual consideredness. In this voice, she tells us that the poem changed her life.

Art nods along as she begins to explain: The moon symbolizes consummate beauty; the house, as it does in many cultures across the world, represents the physical home, but also the metaphorical space where life takes place. She says the poem reminds her that you can fortify yourself against the terrible winds, but if you do, you’ll no longer feel the moon.

• • • •

Art begins to appear out of the corner of my eye.

At the grocery store, he pretends to examine the pickles while I pick out salad dressing. He stands with his whole body facing mine at the other end of the aisle and stacks tray after tray after tray after tray of microwavable beef stew in the crook of his arm until they fall to the ground with a clatter. I jump and he grins. I grab four packets of instant mashed potatoes and look straight at the shelf in front of me. He juggles cans of soup, inching closer to me. No one else pays him any mind.

While I pick a loaf of bread, he carefully selects a rack of ribs, scrutinizing the deep pink flesh with a comical intensity. He studiously avoids making eye contact, though from the corners of my eyes I watch him compulsively—I cannot look away.

Art sneaks up on me in the produce section holding a plump tomato up in front of each eye; he trembles with silent laughter at my surprise.

• • • •

I watched Terrifier 2 in theaters five or six times, and another few times at home. I went so often that the youths working at the Anchorage discount movie theater (now, sadly, closed) started to recognize me. They gave me a free ticket, then free popcorn. Once, they even turned off a different movie halfway through to show me Terrifier 2 in a heated theater instead of the freezing one it was initially scheduled to play in.

The discount theater was old enough that the seating was mostly flat and gently sloped, not steeply terraced like the others in town. I was almost always the only one in the theater, but I always sat in the very back row.

• • • •

Art sits bolt upright from where he’s been hiding in the backseat of my car. I’m on one of my nighttime drives, the only thing been keeping me sane through the pandemic.

I register his presence in slow motion, though it’s only a heartbeat of real time. First, the silhouette of his top hat in the headlights of the car behind me, then his head, and finally—when my eyes adjust—his smile, black and rotted as always. His fingers curl over the beige fabric seats of my beloved Subaru Outback, his left hand millimeters from my right shoulder. A chill passes between us.

I only swerve a little bit when I see him in the rearview mirror, even though my heart leaps, ready to take off out of my chest. I wonder if he knows how afraid I have always been of this exact scenario: A killer in my backseat, just like all those chain emails from the mid-2000s promised. I wonder if he knows how hard I startle when something in my trunk shifts or a streetlight casts a strange shadow in my backseat. I breathe hard—pant, more like. Animal. He must know.

He smiles. Art is unpredictable. I can feel his eyes on me in the rearview.

• • • •

Art listens intently to the Poet, nodding, and digs quietly through his trash bag. The bag itself, like Art, operates on a supernatural logic: Despite containing the whole of Art’s existence, it is impossibly light and never tears. He jostles his whip, whose chain-link tails ending in a needle, a pair of shears, and a scalpel make a soft noise like wind through slats. From the bag, too, he produces a wooden post, stuck through with steak knives, forks, nails. All bloody.

Permeability, he understands.

Permeability, in a horror-related context, references fears around our human bodies’ construction and relationship to the world. We fear, theorists suggest, our vulnerability to penetration, leaking, unbounding, merging, collapse, invasion, inhabitation, unmaking. We fear, in other words, that the spaces between the roof planks might grow too large, and our osmotic balance might be disturbed.

Art and his bloody instruments are expert in creating this type of disturbance. He is intimately familiar with the boundaries of the human body and how to blur and break them; he does so with a gleeful creativity, a kind of comfortable whimsy absent even in others of his genre. Giggling, he sashays around an abandoned warehouse wearing the breasts and hair of a woman he’s killed and flayed, then strikes a pose; with a theatrical flourish, he serves Halloween candy from a de-brained head to unknowing trick-or-treaters that compliment him on the bowl’s realistic look; when his own head is bludgeoned open, he reaches pale fingers into the cave of his skull and scoops out blood and brains to leave a message on the mirror: ART WAS HERE.

With his tools he creates wounds, openings, pores, spaces for flow—and, in the space within and between bodies, he plays.

• • • •

There’s something about Terrifier 2, the second one specifically, that captivates me. I still can’t quite put my finger on what, specifically. At two hours and eighteen minutes, the film is long and a little nonsensical. The first time I saw it, I went to the bathroom and missed the few minutes of background explaining all of Art’s supernatural (or perhaps demonic) powers. I hadn’t yet seen the first Terrifier movie, or even the original short film.

So, for me, in that viewing, Art simply appeared.

I mean—Art appeared. Like a vision. Without rule, law, or any kind of in-universe governing logic. He was human, supernatural, and traveled in dreams. With plastered-on grin and horn in hand, he seemed to dodge the mechanistic concerns of other horror-movie killers, along with any sense of an underlying driving motivation. As far as I know, Art did not come from any restless body discovered, any ancient blackened tome opened, any cursed box unsealed.

Art simply appeared, a body without origin, a pure agent.

• • • •

Art stands beside the telephone pole in the parking lot of my office. Sits cross-legged on the gravel shoulder of the road. Pretends to drink gas straight from the nozzle at the next pump over. Peers over the menu at me from a neighboring table at my favorite lunch spot. Listens from the double-wide chair at my doctor’s office for a nurse to call my name. Watches me drive south from the last exit in town, arm held straight out for a perched magpie. Leans heavily on the passenger-side door of my car when I leave to see the Poet speak. And when I get in the car, he gets in too.

Art follows me. In all of these places, Art waits for me.

• • • •

The Poet explains the freedom of translating as compared to writing: In translating, she knew the poem already existed, whole, so there was no chance of hurting it. She could experiment with different tenses and perspectives, searching for power. Fears allayed, she could dramatically make and remake without the worry of losing some platonic poetic ideal. Art, feeling me shift in my seat, mimes wiping a tear from below his eye and dabs at his cheek with a bloody handkerchief from the trash bag.

Poetry, the poet explains, is a means of inquiry and of exploration: Much like science, poetry is its own methodology. Translation of poetry, thus, a way to iterate on this methodology, a way to experiment or to play. In other words, to translate a poem is to skin and try on.

My eyes begin to well up, but I don’t move because I don’t want Art to see. I have been feeling scared raw lately, especially with the way Art has been startling me. And the Poet’s voice is soothing, quiet even over the mic. The idea of letting cool winter moonlight leak in on the drive home feels like a balm. I need it. I exhale, feel the muscles in my neck relaxing for the first time in what feels like weeks. I am growing used to the feeling of something beside me, something that follows me. I am scared, but it is becoming easier to look.

I will need to write again soon. I often forget to need to write, even though it feels like coming home. The tears ball up in the corner of my eye. Art leans over in the blue, padded fold-down seat next to me and produces a yellow pencil from his bag. He turns, grinning, to hand it to me. Freshly sharpened, it carries the faintest sweet scent of wood. Outside, the harvest moon is full and round. Art can smell the disturbance.

¹. Shikibu, Izumi, and Ono no Komachi. “Although the wind . . .” The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan. Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, Vintage, 1990.