Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Read online

  This is what happens when an acrobat lets go of the swinging trapeze: the bird or the ground.

  6.

  I don’t know if it was cold or not the day Bird auditioned; I remember looking at her and going cold, but that’s not the same thing.

  (She had another name back then, but I don’t remember it. It doesn’t do to hold too tightly to the old life.)

  She approached the campsite with her head high and her hands visible—no weapons. She was in a dirty coat that must have looked sharp, once.

  I was on watch, but I could only stand dumbly and gawp into a face that was so spare it hardly seemed she had one, just an expanse of skin with two gleaming eyes set in it.

  “I would like an audition,” she said.

  She said it without ego, as if I were the one who would audition her, as if I would know exactly what to do.

  And I did; I got Boss.

  Boss picked up a drill and came back holding it at her hip like a pistol. She carried something with her whenever someone came asking after work. “Scares the cowards off,” she said, and it was true. Most people just looking for a job balk at seeing a woman with a brass elbow in her hands.

  But this time it was Boss who balked. When she caught a look at Bird’s face she stopped in her tracks, and for a moment I thought Boss was actually going to take a step back from her.

  (Some moments are endless and terrifying, even if they turn out all right. Most moments with Bird in them are like that. This one was the first of many.)

  Finally Boss said, “What do you want?”

  Bird said, “I want to audition.”

  Another long silence before Boss said, “Inside.” The griffin on her arm was trembling.

  They went inside the tent. I got a “You keep busy, nosey,” from Boss, so I fetched tent spikes and coils of rope and kept looking over at the closed entrance of the tent, waiting for some sound, any sound, that would tell me what was going on.

  It was the first time anyone had gotten inside the tent before being in the Circus. Usually people auditioned right in the campsite, so the rest of the troupe could come and watch. You could get a feel for most people by the way the troupe took to them or not.

  When they came outside, Boss looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Bird was behind her; she had chalk on her hands, and something about her expression made her hard to look at.

  “We have a new aerialist,” she said. “Get the girls.”

  I made a run for it, circling the camp in under a minute, shouting at Panadrome and Barbaro and Jonah and Fatima to get the others and bring them to the tent where Boss was waiting.

  Bird stood with her arms at her sides, her palms making chalky handprints on her coat, and looked at them all as they approached. Jonah smiled at her, as usual for Jonah, but everyone else seemed to hang back as if smoke was coming off her. Panadrome seemed surprised Boss had auditioned Bird alone; he looked back and forth between them, his face clouded.

  Elena, small and stretched tight as a drumhead, pushed her way to the front, frowned, and folded her arms.

  “Too tall,” she said. “Who could catch her?”

  “She’ll have hollow bones put in, like the rest,” Boss said, in that voice that doesn’t allow argument.

  (Boss didn’t look at Bird either, that whole time, and I should have known then what she had seen in the tent that frightened her, but I was young. You ignore a lot of warnings when you’re young.)

  Elena didn’t argue, but she looked at Bird with narrowed eyes, and you could feel her setting her heart against this strange woman with the shoddy coat and the smooth, expressionless face.

  “She won’t last,” Elena said.

  Elena is a bitch, no mistake—she’ll slap you as soon as look at you—and I’m the last person to think cruelty about Bird, but even the broken watch on Ayar’s back tells the time twice a day, and it was Elena’s turn to be right.

  7.

  Boss always tells the rubes that her late husband made us all.

  “Oh lord,” she says when they wonder about our mechanicals. She lifts her hands and trills, “I can barely oil the things, let alone!”

  She doesn’t say what she lets alone, and no one asks. She’s wearing her long dress with the sparkling coat over it, looking like an enormous sequin. She looks like looking good is all she can manage.

  I think she says it so they get the feeling we could break at any moment. It’s always more exciting to watch something you know could backfire.

  “We saw the last performance,” they would be able to say. “We saw the final act of the Circus Tresaulti, before everything went wrong.”

  But there’s no mistaking what she can do, not among us real folk, no matter what she tells the crowd.

  (I didn’t understand her. I had been with the circus too long; I felt too safe to know why it was better to make some things seem breakable and frail. I didn’t know who might come looking for us, if they thought we were strong enough to take hold.)

  The workshop truck is the first truck behind the passenger trailers. Boss keeps it locked, with the key around her neck. Whenever I catch a look inside it seems a useless mess, one table and some tools and some scrap in a pile in the back, but she works magic with whatever she’s got. (With metal, with audiences, with us.)

  All the aerialists have skeletons of hollow pipe. It’s tougher than bone, and lighter, and easier to fix when it breaks. For them it’s all under the skin, though—Boss wants all her girls to stay pretty.

  “No man pays to look at an ugly woman,” she says.

  Ayar is laced with metal bands that weave inside and outside his chest like a second set of ribs, and at the shoulders are the two gears that help him lift the small truck when it’s that time in his act. (It would have looked awful on a paler man, but Ayar’s bronze to start with and even his eyes are sort of golden, so this looks more like him than when he was human. That happens, sometimes.)

  The teeth of the wheels are visible in back, so you can see him working. His spine, though, is the draw they put on the poster. It’s melted together from bits of copper and brass that Boss has found; there’s a watch face in the middle. It was still going when she welded it on him.

  “It’ll stop on its own,” she said, when he complained about it. “Don’t whine. It looks just like the garbage pile.”

  That was his angle—she wanted him to look as if he had risen from a trash heap stronger than the men who had buried him beneath it. It was meant to inspire and to frighten—the junk-man resurrected. (Boss makes freaks, but she knows what she’s doing.)

  But the watch didn’t stop. Jonah finally had to send a chisel through the case to turn off the ticking.

  She’s done something to almost everyone, except the jugglers and the dancing girls. For them it’s a pretty brass glove that hinges on and off, or a filigree plate strapped onto the skull—something to titillate, not something that stays.

  (I think the filigree plates are a mean joke, because of Bird, but nobody asks me anything.)

  And there’s Panadrome, whom nobody but Boss looks in the eye. Poor soul. He makes such pretty music that you’d think he’d be better liked. Though even here there’s the hierarchy—there always has to be one, it’s how you know who you’re better than—and Panadrome is last, because there’s hardly any man left of him. He’s just a one-man band with a soul attached.

  The brass-man angle gets us the crowds, though, I can’t deny it. Whenever I walk through what passes for a city these days and slap a poster on some bombed-out wall or other, people sneak out from behind their bolted doors just to get a look edgewise.

  They’re nice posters, in the style of the old ones she’s shown me, huge and glossy and bright—a holdover from the days before the war. Boss got them printed up in New Respite, where the printer could still use colors, so the posters have little flourishes of green and gold.

  It takes ten seconds for me to get the paste over it to where it will stick, but that’s always plenty of
time.

  “Mechanical men,” someone whispers, every time the poster goes up. They’re not impossible to find—here and there you see someone who’s been patched up with wires and cogs—but that’s a homemade business. Looking at me makes them all think there must be some artistry in that circus.

  They glance at my legs, ask how much the show is, make plans to leave their weapons at home.

  My brasses aren’t real, just leg casings with seams up the sides and a gear at the knee that draws blood, but brass brings the crowds, every time.

  The poster has a fancy frame drawn around the announcement, studded with little illustrations of our acts. It’s genius advertising, except when people ask me about Alec, and I have to tell them he’s gone.

  (I asked Boss if she didn’t want to cut him off the poster. “They’ll forget about him by the time they see the circus,” she said. Maybe he’s the real emblem of Tresaulti now, and I’m just the last to know.)

  Ayar is in the top left corner, drawn with his back turned, looking over his shoulder at his spine. The watch is there, frozen at a quarter to six. Under his picture: FEATS OF STRENGTH.

  Top right is a cameo of the aerialists wrapped around each arm of the trapeze, one hooked onto each bar. (Big Tom and Big George aren’t there; they stay a surprise.) THE FLYING SPRITES, it reads, which is fine as names go, so long as you don’t know them.

  Top center is Alec, wings out, grinning like he knew what the score was; he was invincible. THE WINGED MAN.

  The tumblers are left side (THE GRIMALDI BROTHERS), eight of them piled on top of each other, scrambling to get into the drawing and not be chopped out by the frame.

  Panadrome is on the right side. His brass barrel chest is ringed with piano keys and valves; he holds the accordion bellows straight out with one arm, tucks a ratty top hat under his elbow with the other. He’s got a dignified expression. I always wonder if he was a businessman before, or if that’s just how you have to look when you’re more metal than man.

  The jugglers don’t have a place on the poster. Boss has never bothered to name their act; they come in and out so much there’s no point in marking them down.

  Jonah is bottom center, his pose matching Ayar’s; his brass hunch is hinged open, so the printmaker could sketch the cogs and gears and pistons that keep his lungs going. THE MECHANICAL MAN, it says.

  Bottom left is a trio of the dancing girls, the ones wearing the brass skull plates and the metal gloves and hardly a thing else. EXOTIC DANCING GIRLS, the poster says, though it’s only exotic because they’ve had to make it all up as they went along, so it’s foreign stuff even to them. They laugh about it during load-out—each of those girls hauling her own weight in timber. (None of those girls lasted long, and the printmaker seemed to know it; their faces are vague sketches, nothing to hold on to.)

  Stenos and Bird are on the bottom right like an afterthought. You can hardly see their faces, because the scale has to accommodate their pose: he’s holding her aloft with one arm, her hands wrapped tight around his hand, her legs with their pointed feet stretched impossibly apart—one along her spine, one pointing out like a weather vane.

  Underneath them it says, FEATS OF BALANCE, and oh, it’s a lie, it’s a lie.

  8.

  The Circus Tresaulti travels a wide circuit. These days there aren’t the sort of borders there used to be, so anyone with the courage and the means can cross from ocean to ocean.

  It’s decades before they return to a city, where a new generation will come and watch the circus and roll their eyes at anyone who says that it’s the same, it’s just the same.

  (Most people don’t live long enough to see the circus twice. These are ragged days.)

  9.

  The war brought the world to a halt.

  There were the bombs and the radiation that cleared out whole cities, but that passed. What was worse were the little wars that drove everyone back behind the makeshift walls of sudden city-states, too locked in stalemates to step outside, to step forward.

  But the government man has, at last, managed to create a city that functions (a long time coming, he thinks whenever he looks out on the market in the town square, the only legitimate market he can remember). He knows the roads are open and the world is wide; now he can start to stretch out his fingers over the landscape, along the roads, just to test his reach.

  It’s slow and careful going. Too fast and you falter, he knows; he saw it in his predecessor, just before he came to power.

  He knows, however, that he can succeed at last. He has lived long enough to take the measure of this world; this world hungers for any man of vision who can drag it up out of the mud.

  The government man is on his way back from a city in the east, in the back of his black car newly painted with his crest, when he sees it.

  The government man has the car pull over. He gets out and picks his way over the last of the debris into the city; he studies one of the posters plastered to a crumbling concrete wall that might have been part of a building, once.

  It’s tinted in rich greens and black and cream (he could see it from the road, he knew at once what it was), and he looks at it for a long time, peering at the faces inside the cameos. He frowns and taps the bottom corner of the poster absently; then he’s back in the car, and the driver is pulling back onto the dirt road.

  (The government man has plans to fix what’s left of the pavement, when he has enough reach to hold out his hands and touch the ocean on either side.)

  The paste on the poster still smells, so he knows they can’t be far away. There are two cities between them, maybe. Maybe three.

  The government man’s heart races, and he rests an open hand on the empty seat beside him, like he needs the balance.

  The duo acrobats are new, he thinks. He doesn’t remember them from the first time; he looks forward to a pleasant surprise, when he sees the circus again.

  10.

  Stenos was a thief when Boss found him.

  You’d think he was too tall to be a thief—he stood a head taller than Boss, and she’s almost six foot—but he was skinny for a guy with broad shoulders. Usually by the time they get that tall they look like Ayar, with muscles like bricks, but not Stenos. He looked just like anybody, right up until he jumped five feet in the air to catch some edge on a wall that looked perfectly smooth.

  Boss had caught him trying to sneak wallets from the rubes during the aerialists, just as people were standing up to applaud, so they wouldn’t notice until they sat down that something was gone.

  She disappeared into the workshop with him, and we all stood around like a pile of idiots. I stood around mostly because I was afraid Stenos would never come out again and I’d have to carry the body out.

  Boss doesn’t allow stealing, not from anyone.

  We barter for tickets—we take blankets and oil and sides of meat we can’t identify, shoes and coins and peaches so hard you crack them on the trailers—but we never take more than a show is worth, and we never lift anything from the rubes once they’re in their seats.

  Whenever anyone asks why, Boss says, “It’s good business. I want to come back here someday.”

  She took Stenos into the workshop, and when they came out they pretended she had blackmailed him.

  “It was the circus or prison for me,” he said, and Boss walked him around the camp introducing him, saying, “Look what I’ve caught us.”

  But one look at him and everybody knew he joined up because it was better than sneaking around under bleachers and hoping that desperate people had anything worth taking. He looked well and truly worn out the day he fell in with us. He would have died in another year of working alone.

  That first night he shook my hand as he passed.

  “Stenos,” he said after a beat, like he wasn’t used to giving the name.

  (I don’t know what his name was before he came to us. Maybe it really is Stenos; mine’s really George. Maybe each of us has been wearing their real name all this ti
me, with nobody else knowing. Wouldn’t that just be the way?)

  “George,” I said. “I’m a barker.”

  “Acrobat,” he said. “Someday. I suppose.”

  I laughed. “Me too, someday, I suppose.”

  He looked me up and down, and then he let go of my hand as he said, “You’ll do well if you try.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t feel like asking. I made myself scarce so as not to give him any more passes at me. I gave him a week until he was screwing Elena. Mean finds mean.

  On his way to the trucks he passed Bird, who was dressed for her night’s training on the trapeze. Stenos and Bird both slowed down as they passed, looked one another over, and shrank back like a pair of fighting snakes; they passed on without any other sign of recognition.

  (I should have known what it looks like when people are fighting over something precious; that, for sure, I should have known.)

  The year Stenos joined up, I got permission from Boss to try out for the trapeze after the girls had finished practice.

  “Sure,” Elena said when I told her. She was sitting on the trapeze like a girl on a swing, feet curved like a pair of sickles. Maybe they were frozen that way after so many years. Maybe it hurt her to walk flat-footed on the ground.

  She passed back and forth overhead a few times, lazily; she was on the trapeze just for fun.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She shrugged and pointed. “You take that one, I’ll take this. Jump, and I’ll catch you.”

  She was grinning, and I shivered.

  After a long time I said, “Maybe I’ll just stick to tumbling,” and she swung back and forth above me, laughed like a handful of nails.

  Some people think Bird fell. I never have.

  Stenos didn’t talk much. He carried lumber and strung up canvas and kept to himself. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he never sat with us in the tumblers’ trailer—he was as bad as Bird for keeping away from the rest of us. (Even Elena sat at the night fire, for God’s sake, and if she was on fire none of us would piss on her to put out the flames.)