The spectacle of The Great Fastidio alphabetizing paper clips was an admittedly acquired taste. Once acquired, however, it could quickly become an addiction. It was his fourth year with the carnival; and, being more of a showman than one might expect, it was his fourth production. Indeed, he had contrived, for each lap around the country, a different meticulous demonstration.

The first year he had been put on display as a study in obsessive compulsion, a psychological version of a bearded lady or fire eating dwarf. A “real life" living room setting was constructed for him in the seedy sideshow tradition. He dutifully arranged the room in a manner keeping with his peculiar claim to fame: placing everything at perfect ninety degree angles, combing the nap of the area rug and fanning the magazines with alien precision.

He quickly grew bored sitting in his fake living room and so he began experimenting with the arrangement of the magazines. He had originally laid them out chromatically so that the National Geographic yellow did not clash against the Time red but rather segued through a pair of conveniently orange copies of The Utne Reader. This method, however, posed problems with chronology and the presence of several non-standard sized magazines created additional aesthetic restrictions. As he passed the hours absorbed in his task, trying increasingly esoteric though flawlessly logical patterns of organization, an amazing thing happened.

People watched.

By which I do not mean that a large number of people walked though his tent to glimpse The Great Fastidio, though many did. The remarkable thing was the growing number of people who stayed; who stood there, some for hours, watching with a muted kind of awe. It seemed that his unprecedented focus on a single task would prove far more compelling than a rudimentary tableau of the fastidious life.

The next year, he proofread copies of the Sunday New York Times, cataloging errors and inconsistencies of style in his rigid block handwriting on a large wipe board. While the crowds swelled considerably and the gate for his attraction with them, the Great Fastidio began to feel the restless stirrings of the artist.

In his third year, The Great Fastidio took the act to a newly conceptual level. The problem with the previous shows, he had decided, was the curse of objectivity. Everything about the magazines and the newspaper copy was predefined. While The Great Fastidio was actually inclined to perform his tasks, any member of his audience was capable of doing so as well. So it was in his third year, seeking to create something truly unique, that The Great Fastidio made a bed. It was a process that, for the purposes of his show, took ten hours.

He began with the base sheet. Considering fitted sheets to be a crutch of the lazy, The Great Fastidio worked only with flat sheets which he tucked, folded and stuffed with measurably perfect symmetry. He would use a large carpenter´s level to flatten the sheet, removing every bump, wrinkle and crease. He could smooth about an inch a minute on his first pass, moving only half so quickly on his second. It was his best show ever, to judge from audience reaction, and only halfway through the season the carnival boss had twice raised the admission to see him.

The bed making production was most popular with female patrons. Something about the sight of a man performing a domestic task with such an obsessive intensity of focus and purpose appealed to women and unsettled men.

Only one patron that season, however, thought to call the performance erotic. When the word materialized in her head, even though she did not gasp or move, she blushed with such vibrant heat as to cause Fastidio to look up from his work.

The moment came as an epiphany to her; a late twenties, self-described spinster who had prematurely given up on the fairy tale of romance and the myth of eroticism. What was perhaps the most amazing for her was the fact that she had not recognized it before. She had attended The Great Fastidio´s every performance in her area. She had been one of the first to stand in rapt fascination at his magazine routine, making a delightful game out of understanding his patterns and trying to anticipate his next variation. She had stood there an entire day watching him edit The Times, silently rooting for him to find an error. (He found 27 typos the weekend he had spent in her town)

The week prior to the carnival and The Great Fastidio´s bed act, her palpable anticipation had become a source of amusement for her small circle of similarly jaded friends who accused her of having a schoolgirl crush on the amazing sideshow neurotic. She had waved off their insinuations at the time that they were made, but the new context of The Great Fastidio´s act; the intimate presence of the bed on stage like a gun waiting to go off snapped everything into surprising focus.

While the eroticism of Fastidio´s act was akin to a strike of lightening, her subsequent daydreams were like the grinding of tectonic plates; slowly building a mountainous fantasy that eventually became an obsession. She imagined the optimum effect of his every caress and touch calibrated by his razor fine neurosis. She imagined the precision of his tongue, the inevitable knowledge of female anatomy that only obsessive research could yield . . . .

Not long after the bed performance, she came to the decision that she would seduce the strange creature and the year that followed was an exercise in self-transformation. After a week meditating on the question, she decided that to attract The Great Fastidio, she would need to be, herself, an exercise in precision. Sure, she could try going to him as imperfect as she had always been hoping that he would shape her in his compulsive hands, but she knew that she would have to stand out. Catching his eye was of course pivotal to catching the man himself.

Opening day of the carnival, she was there for the unlocking of the gate to the public. Dressed in a tailored suit, which she had ironed and creased with military precision, a starched white blouse whose buttons were oriented with perfect uniformity, literally not a single hair out of place, eyebrows shaped to a precise arc that expressed an aesthetic understanding of the universality of Euclidian geometry. She strode across the grounds, arms and legs moving like a collection of synchronized metronomes ignoring into nonexistence the standard trapping of the carnival that bombarded her senses.

The anticipation poured off of her like pheromones and though no one dare approach her, every head on the fairgrounds tracked her progress. She exuded carnality in a way that every mammal on the grounds could sense and it was no small surprise to the staff to see her walk up to The Great Fastidio´s tent, pay ten dollars for an unlimited ticket and walk in.

They knew she would not be seen again before closing.

The Great Fastidio was already on stage. He sat upon a stool, behind a desk piled high with thousands of paperclips. Beside him, a massive set of card catalogue drawers dominated the stage. One by one, he would pick up the paperclips. He would examine each one, applying unspoken evaluation before turning to the lettered drawers and filing the paperclip by placing it on one of the thousands of index cards contained in the file.

For the first few minutes that she stood there, she wondered if she had made a mistake. The utter tedium of his task, the specter of the office lurking around the performance left her suddenly dry. She could feel fidgeting creeping into her extremities and irrational tears started rallying behind her eyes. These symptoms abated, however, once she caught his eyes. There, as he examined a particularly nondescript paperclip, she saw the intensity that had attracted her in the first place. Seeing it again, feeling the benignly deranged machinations behind that look sparked in her once more the desire to be subject to his gaze.

Emboldened by desire, she placed herself directly across from him; planting herself for the duration of the day. He would have no choice but to see her. She looked at him with a practiced stare that she had cultivated specifically to unsettle him and to plant in his subconscious the knowledge that she had trimmed her pubic hair to the precise length necessary to have each individual hair laying in the same direction.

To her credit, she did have an unsettling effect. It could be seen in the flustered way that he scrambled for a new paper clip as soon as he returned from the drawers, afraid to give himself even the slightest moment without a point of focus. Other clues were subtler. A paperclip filed under “E", for example, denoted a change in his perceptions where interpretation became more important than quantitative information. The self-described spinster had, with nothing more than her hormonally electric presence, turned a scientific evaluation of seemingly uniform objects into a kind of secret Rorschach test.

“E" is for “enticing," you see.

As it became evident to her that his occasional fumbling fingers, and the ever-present beads of sweat on his brow were a result of her scrutiny, she allowed herself another slight smile. It was a smile to let him know that she knew and that all was going according to her plan. This one, again, had been rehearsed countless times to ensure that its confident smirk-like qualities did not cause undue asymmetry in her face. She was, after all, fastidious. Just like him.

He continued sorting, projecting all manner of erotic connotations onto the paperclips, unable to stop himself from making designations that he knew to be patently absurd.

“P" is for “phallic."

“S" is for “sensual."

Her presence was disturbing him. He remembered her, too. She who had silently broken his concentration the previous year, who had haunted his dreams for weeks afterwards, was not just causing him to look up briefly from his work, she was distorting the entire exercise.

“C" is for “cunt."

And so it continued for seven hours, as hundreds of carnival patrons shuffled through the attraction; some merely glimpsing the meticulous spectacle and leaving with derisive snorts, others staying and trying to grasp the inscrutably strange display. A handful even noticed the duel between him and her, though none could actually recognize it as such. Some thought she was even a part of the act.

Which, in a way, she now was.

At the end of the night, when the carnival boss came through to flush out the last of the patrons and give The Great Fastidio the go ahead to close up, Fastidio still did not speak. He simply made direct eye contact, a concession of such magnitude that she knew what it meant, and she dutifully followed him out the back of the tent.

On the way to his trailer, she could observe his natural behavior for the first time. Where she needed to resort to clockwork hyperbole to walk with the kind of precision she suspected he desired, it was clear that he no longer had to calculate to be exact. His gait seemed perfectly natural, a strolling pace with his hands in his pockets. It took an eye that had been studying precision for a year to see that both arms were bent to a forty-degree angle at the elbow and every leisurely step covered exactly 30 inches of ground, regardless of the terrain.

Indeed, he did not need to think to achieve such uniformity of motion. He thought nothing of his walk or his arms. The Great Fastidio was still deciding what to do with her. She was a distraction, a wrench in the works. He knew that he wanted her. He wanted to spread her legs and split her down the middle. He wanted to make her scream. Whether in pleasure, pain or both was the dilemma. He refused to allow her the honor of breaking his demeanor. He remembered the smile that had come when he first dropped that paperclip. It had been a senseless commiseration to the forces of lust and gravity, and she had clearly enjoyed it. Yet here she was as well creased and immaculately put together as he. She was clearly trying to be fastidious, but why?

The enigma ate at him.

She tried to fathom what was going on in his mind. She wanted to talk, but what was there to say that would not be superfluous or unnecessary? How would this encounter begin? Would he order her to the bed or was she simply supposed to go? Should she disrobe and reveal the onionskin layers of meticulous self-creation? Would he understand her tribute? Or would he just stand there? Would he fuck her or merely show her his chronologically alphabetized collection of ATM receipts?

The anticipation ground against her.

Finally, they arrived at the trailer, two heads swirling with potent blends of thought and feeling. He put keys to the four locks on the door in an unconventional but clearly ritualistic sequence and they were inside, the interior a mute testament to the authenticity of his act. The trailer, a bland amalgam of ninety-degree angles, alphabetized possessions, ironed fabrics, combed carpeting and spotless surfaces screamed of the pedestrian nature of his disorder. She was suddenly sickened, wanting nothing more than to make him break with the neurosis that truly defined him.

He watched her face fall in a way that would have been imperceptible to almost anyone else. He knew that he had won. Whatever fantasies this girl had held of shaking him, of making him forsake the fundamental order of the universe that he alone seemed to grasp, had faded. She was his, and he would not be moved again. He decided then that he would take her, on his terms. He had not had much use for the shackles since Deidre had left him, but he knew he had kept them for a reason. He would bind her, a symmetrical “X" in the center of his bed. The notion of using her in such a way, of reducing this interfering bitch to another cog in the well-oiled machine that he had made of life, excited him as he had not been in a long time.

The evidence of his lust did nothing to arouse her. It was but one crack in a veneer that she wanted to utterly desecrate. So she began to strip. Mocking his shtick, she worked slowly taking twenty minutes to unbutton her shirt. Stone-faced, he did not seem to mind.

Then she nonchalantly tossed the shirt on the floor, and his erection actually lost momentum for a moment until thoughts of vengeance flooded blood back where he needed it. She then proceeded to slide out of her skirt, kicking it aside with cruel indifference. She wore no panties, only a bra and thigh high stockings. He was momentarily impressed by the uniformity of her trimmed pubic hair. Then she tugged lightly on one stocking, perversely bringing it a quarter of an inch higher than the other and The Great Fastidio struggled to understand her game.

They stood in silence for a moment, each anticipating the other´s next move. Finally, he spoke. “Lay in the center of the bed." His voice had the clipped and even tone of a lifelong elocution student. She smiled at having imagined it so accurately. Then she smiled at what was to come. She flopped lazily onto the bed, her body askew. “That is not what I told you to do."

She smiled and got up, carefully pulling some of the cover awry as she did. As he stared at the bed, she approached him standing so close that he could feel heat coming off her body and the breath from her nose caressing his chin. Without breaking eye contact, she reached out, plucked a book from a nearby shelf, flipped it over and put it back, three spaces from its correct place on the shelf.

In a blind rage the likes of which he had never experienced, he struck her rapidly across the face with two quick and consecutive slaps so both cheeks burned crimson and both eyes welled with stinging tears. Her look inquired and he answered.

“Symmetry."

She would later tell police it was the last thing she remembered hearing. They had found her sitting on the steps to his trailer, fully dressed and smoking a cigarette. She knew that she would be a fugitive. Too many people had gotten a good look at her and too many of her friends knew she was going to be there all day. Flight was futile.

Inside, The Great Fastidio´s body lay in his bed; arms folded across his chest, keeping closed the wound from his groin to his throat. On top of the bookshelf where she had blasphemed against his only belief, sat his organs. From left to right were the most recognizable internal parts of the human body: heart, liver, kidneys, and lungs. They had been lined up carefully, flawlessly spaced three inches from one another. She had even cleaned up most of the blood, making the trailer the most pristine murder scene in recent memory.

As the cops surveyed the painstakingly gruesome scene, one could not help but comment, “She must have been a crazed fan. It seems he died as he lived."

She smiled knowing that the kidneys should have been between the heart and the liver. It was her final assault on his beguiling perfection. She had won.









Eric Stoveken is an Allentown-based writer and actor. "Fastidious" is his first professionally published work.
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