Memorandum/CIRCULATION RESTRICTED PER DEPARTMENT REGULATIONS

TO: Chief of Police
Re: John Doe #16/Suicide & Related Homicides Involving Antiquarian Clown Shoes, Costume, Mask
From: Det. August Kingsley

"After months of litigation, I've finally gotten it, the reason for my resignation; I figure that after ten years on the police beat it's time to capture some new as yet unfelt sensation, maybe this damn novel can help me find it." That was his suicide note, that & these few pages of a historical fiction and research file labeled 'The Clown Shoe Murders'. Swanson, G., deceased, signed in his own hand, red ink, of course, LOL, quoting some writer name of Doctorow, about historical fiction: 'Is there any other kind?'
A. Kingsley

Attachments: Said Suicide Note with Unfinished Manuscript of Police Reporter/John Doe Cold Case File #/69-007313

FOUND MANUSCRIPT/CRIME SCENE/FAINT TRACES, HUMAN BLOOD; DNA INCONCLUSIVE

"I reenact his lithe pianist fingers aggressing the keys, muscle-memoried onto the backside of smudged sheepskin, ripped from a broken framed award citation for 'Dad' from the local Kiwanis Club for Father of the Year the old school typewriter ribbon's weary impressions with the red option atop the almost worn-out dusky black as fraying horizon for a kind of surrogate setting of a son's Sun's last blaze and, in ALL CAPS,  the name of a fittingly two-faced father whose 'love' had deformed him.

'Rap-a-tap-a', enough to unnerve the proudest quality control veterans back at the typewriter factory, made in Taiwan with the doubly famous name 'Remington'.

The noise must've registered in his sensitive ears like the report of the shotgun he'd used with that same name. Tintinnabulation--his addled brain's outcome from hitting his head against his foster home's walls--the doctors named it, after Edgar Poe's creepy coinage imparting the sound poets call onomatopoeia, the typewriter's sentence-ending chime-a miniature reprise of the weird poet's 'Bells' silently peel, as if that somehow made his sanguinary bludgeoning less felonious, though his 16th birthday party guests 'sentence' was that they lay as freakily dead as Mr. Poe.

I wonder if he'd planned on pounding out the last part of an especially bloody paragraph involving the dismemberment of them, catalytic agents of that hungered for 'something new' so perversely bequeathed by a father's own suicidal quest.

Steve Jobs had urged him to 'stay hungry, stay foolish'; the typewriting so confessional it might serve as evidence in his murder trial...especially if he'd stayed foolishly alive.

I'd come to divine yet another kind of sign--a sine, a desperate sound wave pattern made by those keys. Just a string of 'W's' & 'Y's', oscillating waves of heaving angst monitoring his mad science--of an obverse life-denying Dr. Frankenstein's crying: "It's deprived, it's deprived!"

And there were other signs, the subtler sort for the eyes and the feet.

His hiked Joker-like now frozen eyebrows in the pathology freezer like frosted peaks of the sinusoid doubled 'u's oscillating from those keys chorus of metallic snaps, denoting other shocks that had become reflexes, unwitting signs of trauma since an early age. Once, according to his aunt, while being unjustly punished for only seeming to have been sloppy in dispatching his chores, a stinging slap across his as freshly acned face exactly coincided with a San Andreas 3.1 moderate earthquake, the hardly beatified blow toe-to-head Richter-ing in Joey's subterranean places later delved and charted by headshrinkers. Joey had always told himself, and that lone Aunt that he'd felt something shrinking inside him, especially since that day's dual searing faults, their lines crossing, crushing deep down, down, to its/his molten core.

Joey's gut, used to uninvited blows from those rifle-butts-for-eyes must've exchanged peptidyl signals, neuron to neuron with his brain's file marked 'air & mineral rights' belonging to some abstract higher space's ground he'd wished he'd stood that time.

On interview his sympathetic Aunt, guilt-ridden, furious with her sister, unearthed the triggering primordial geology of the lad's tectonic slide---that same Janus-faced paterfamilias had arranged a surprise for the lad's 6th birthday, a threshold both would cross, regardless of the Roman god's warnings about such liminal spaces.

A third-rate clown had been a no-show and his employer growing impatient for that rarity in adult experience: a new unfelt feeling.

Half out of envy for that child-like sensation, Daddy emerged from the attic wearing antique operatic costumery from an old condemned house's auction, the elaborate wooden box carved with the words " Canio Aria 'Vesti la giubba'(Put on the costume)." Daddy hated opera, but loved the hidden sadness of clowns since his own childhood, according to Aunt Cornelia who found the purchase suitable, given his 'pain in the arse' complaints about child-rearing-his inside joke that kids were as unappealing as that part of anatomy. Yes, opera's canon decreed that Canio must play a clown in spite of his pained attitude, and must make the audience laugh, remembering this double faced attraction of his youth to convince himself of his role. He told himself to put on his clown costume, not knowing that his tenor aria expresses pain. As he slipped on the costume a reflexive smirk percolated; it was almost too tight, smothering and he realized what the ultimate unfelt feeling must feel like: 'one size fits all'.

The mask Joey'd inherited felt supple, as if never worn, faintly redolent of his father's cologne, who'd related in the note to his son that it was the same feeling he'd hoped to satisfy in his young son, and his guests: that new, unfelt experience.
He'd then placed his twin-barreled Remington between still-smirking lips, and French-kissed that entirely new never felt experience's cold dark metallic surprise."

END OF POLICE DOCKET REPORTER, Swanson, G./ UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT AS FOUND AMONGST BELONGINGS AT RESIDENTIAL CRIME SCENE/CORONER FILE/ADJUDGED SUICIDE BY SUFFOCATION

Addendum to Memorandum

I hereby resign from detective work; after twenty years of pursuing such gory homicides and related incidents I suppose I'm simply burnt out, as they say, shot, not to put too fine a point-of a gun-on it. Ha, ha. I know one thing---I want to find peace, and what other experiences hold, new and, yep, never felt.

Last known custodian of related evidence consisting of: 1 pair, oversized red shoes, 1 silk costume and 1, valued by appraiser at upwards of $200 k mask now missing from evidence hold last visited by Det. A. Kingsley.