Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Read online

  He wasn’t my idea of a friend. He seemed to be waiting for something better all the time.

  (I feared he’d take my place in the tumblers and leave me out in the cold; it was my biggest worry, then.

  You don’t see as far as you should.)

  I should have paid more attention; Alec fell when I was very young, but you’d think something like that would give you a sense of who was out of their mind.

  But I was still young, and Fatima was so lovely in the firelight when she smiled, and the tumblers told me they’d give me a name of my own someday, and what did I know that I was a fool?

  How was I to know he had seen the wings?

  11.

  This is what the wings are like:

  They arch just over the wearer’s head when they are closed; they brush the calves of a tall man. When they are open, they are wider than a man is tall, the primary feathers half again as long as an arm; the tops of the arches nearly meet.

  Of all the mechanical pieces in the Circus Tresaulti, Boss has taken these into her heart. Here there is no iron cage, no grinding supports. The ribs of these wings are made of bone. (The dead don’t need them any more, and what should she do, let them go to waste?)

  She has wrapped them in brass so they shine, and so that no one thinks too long about what makes these wings seem so warm, so real.

  Each feather is jigsawed and hammered and smoothed so thin that when it strikes another feather it rings out a clear note. She has constructed them so that, when the wind passes over them, it rings out a triumphant G major seventh. (She knows the chord by heart. She had a life before the drill and the saw; she was the first of them to leave her name behind.)

  The gears are small-toothed, and the edges burned with a smoky pattern that looks like the shadow of leaves. (She thought, a long time ago, about adding jewels to look like water drops, but Alec laughed and said, “They’re flashy enough already, don’t you think?” and shook himself like a bathing bird until their bedroom filled with the sweet, clear notes.)

  Though they have knobs of gears that attach to the shoulders, though it takes hours to set the joints so the nerves and muscles can move them, everyone sees the wings are not really a machine. They are art; they are skill; they are proof that the world has not abandoned beauty.

  Alec was handsome, and had the air of a man who knew he was destined for great things. As soon as Boss saw him she knew what a find she had come across. When Alec was alone in the tent, she approached him and spoke, which is all it has ever taken for her to draw someone in.

  Not that any of the rest of them would know it; most of them came looking for her. Alec was the first one of them she ever chose. (The only one, until Stenos, lifetimes later.)

  It was for Alec she made the wings.

  It was the only gift she ever gave him; it was the only gift she has ever given to someone without a new name attached, the only gift she’s ever given without killing someone first.

  With the wings on he was more than whole, and felt it. He dropped from the ceiling and basked in the applause, in the wondering gazes, in the sharp intake of breath when people saw what he was.

  He was magnificent. Until.

  When Boss ran out from behind the curtain and saw the mess that had been Alec, the wings were bent from the impact, and it looked as though he had tried to cover his face, as if he were shy; as if he no longer wanted to be seen.

  Boss does not know when that change happened in him. She was not looking at him when she might have seen it; she assumed he would be happy to be perfect.

  In the warehouse, after they had carried the body out, she closed the wings, locking the joints, lacing tight the ribs to hide the copper petals as much as she could.

  They are almost the same as any other bundle of pipes and scrap in her workshop. Half a dozen performers have joined the circus since; none of them has given the wings a second glance.

  But if you are as single-minded as Bird, or as hungry for glory as Stenos, then you see them.

  If you are like them, then when you enter the workshop there is no pile of scrap, no steel table wiped almost clean of blood. There is no terrifying rack of drills and ratchets, no coils of cord to lash your bones back in place. There is no Boss to inflict her will on you, to build you up and wake you with a new name and a body she knows will look good at the center of the stage.

  For you, the world narrows to a single point as you step inside the workshop. (This is what happens when you take a step; you are moving closer to something you want.)

  For you, the workshop is only the roof that has been pitched over your waiting wings.

  12.

  The knife thrower was a soldier in the last great war.

  “Unofficially,” he says, which sounds like he was a resistance fighter, but truly means he was on the wrong side when the dust settled and the other government was in place.

  He has an answer ready, though, when people ask him where he learned to throw. “There were lot of rats in my neighborhood,” he will say, and laugh.

  His assistant’s name is Sarah (he thinks; she changes it a lot). She hardly speaks—she’s a little simple—but she’s thin enough that it’s almost impossible to actually strike her with a knife no matter where on the wheel you aim, so he pays her enough from his takings to keep her around. His knives get awfully close to the skin, sometimes; he doesn’t want to imagine what might happen if his next assistant is tubby.

  The Circus Tresaulti is camped two miles outside town the day he decides to audition, so he loads the wheel and Sarah in the truck, and drives out into the hills until he reaches the camp.

  The camp is a half-circle of two dozen vehicles fanned out behind the tent, vans and trailers and painted wagons lashed down to truck beds. He unloads the wheel carefully—paint is hard to come by if something chips—and Sarah, and pops on the top hat he’s managed to protect from two wars since his soldiering days (the hat collapses, so he can strap it to his back and carry it anywhere). By the time he has the hat on and Sarah is all strapped in, the circus folk have made a little audience around the wheel.

  He starts with the patter; he doesn’t believe in wasting time.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” he calls out, “prepare to enjoy a feat of death-defying dexterity!”

  “We’ve all enjoyed them,” says the brass-covered hunchback, and the strongman says, “You can tell because we’re not dead yet.”

  There’s a ripple of laughter among the watching crowd that the knife thrower does not like.

  “For the owner of the Circus Tresaulti, I will give my finest performance,” he goes on (no use wasting all his rehearsal). He gives the crowd a quick scan; he sees the tall, slender man who looks like a leader and nods curtly. The man raises an eyebrow, half-smiles, nods back.

  The knife thrower clears his throat and throws five knives, one by one, near Sarah. It’s child’s play for him; it’s just a chance for him to make sure the blades are balanced. The first round can go on for ages if the crowd claps after every knife, but this group is just staring at him, so he gets it out of the way.

  After the first round he collects the blades from the board, spins the wheel, and walks five paces. Then the knives fly from his hands all at once, thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk into the wood. The last knife slices through the end of Sarah’s ponytail and pins the lock of hair to the board.

  Silence greets the big finish, and the knife thrower looks at the tall owner and squints, not understanding.

  After what seems like an hour of quiet, a fat woman emerges from the crowd like a puddle of oil. She walks past the knife thrower without looking at him, straight to the board.

  “You want a job?” she asks.

  Sarah nods.

  The woman waves her hand as she turns to go, and a boy jogs forward and starts to undo the straps.

  The knife thrower warned people off the Circus Tresaulti every night of the run. “A pile of thieves,” he said. “They took my assistant! They’re a den of tricks
ters!”

  It didn’t stop anyone from going. The knife thrower knew because he bought a ticket every night—you have to check out the competition—and the tent was always full.

  People have no loyalty; that’s what it is. That’s the real pity.

  13.

  When Bird came to Tresaulti, there was nothing wrong with her.

  “Well, not to look at,” Boss says when anyone mentions it, just to let everyone know something must have been wrong elsewhere. Her spine, they guess. Her innards. Maybe her bones were rotting out.

  It must be something, because Boss says she doesn’t like to put metal into those who are perfectly good. She’s refused me a dozen times.

  (“You just put on your brasses and shut up,” she says, every time I even open my mouth to ask.

  Once I say, “Bird wasn’t broken, but you did her!”

  “The ones I fix were all broken,” she says, and waves her hand. The griffin on her arm flaps its wings.)

  I think Bird must have been mad, and that’s why Boss did it. You’d have to be mad, to ask.

  I think Stenos must be mad now. You’d have to be mad, to keep her.

  Bird let Boss put hollow bones in, like the rest of them, and she trained alone at night to learn the routine; she did the flips close to the ground, the strength work on the bars to get used to the height, swinging back and forth on the trapeze with her feet pointed out, for hours after the shows were over.

  She lasted a few years with them, letting go and spinning, snapping out her arms for the catch, bringing her knees to her chest to be swung up to the rigging. She was elegant, powerful, powder-handed, and weightless. For her, it was the bird and the bird and the bird.

  Then it was the ground.

  Ying slid down the rigging to go warn Boss what had happened, but the act went ahead without her—Boss’s orders are that the act goes ahead, no matter what.

  (“What,” she said, “war without end, and one more body will worry them?”)

  Only after the act had finished and the tent was empty did Boss take Stenos to go scoop Bird up from the sawdust and bring her out of the lantern light to the workshop to see what could be done.

  (It was a good thing about the bones, after all; Boss was able to put her back together, unbending what was mangled, putting in new pipes where they were needed. Now Bird’s got a thin iron plate over the skin of her left temple, and a glass eye, but it could have been worse. She could have been Alec.)

  Sometime after Boss had fixed Bird, while she was still asleep, Boss must have had enough of worrying about people falling. Or she was angry at Stenos about something; there’s never any knowing, with Boss.

  Boss hauled Bird onto her shoulders, banged her way outside the workshop, marched across the yard where we were loading out, and dropped her right in front of Stenos.

  He had to crouch and shove his arms out flat to catch Bird before she hit the ground. He was so tall and carried her so easily that, knocked out in his arms, she looked like a roll of leftover canvas.

  Stenos looked at Boss like Boss had lost her mind.

  “The problem’s yours now,” Boss said, with the air of someone delivering a punishment. “Your duo act goes live in the next city.”

  Boss disappeared into the maze of the camp, lost among the little pools of lantern light.

  Stenos looked down at the sleeping woman in his arms, his gaze unblinking. After a long time, he curled his fingers inwards, holding her tighter.

  I left him alone. There’s no talking to some people.

  But my skin was crawling the whole time I walked away, and at the edge of the camp by the feed truck I stopped and looked back.

  I wondered if they had ever spoken. I remembered their meeting, when they had recoiled from one another, but since then they hadn’t exchanged so much as an angry look.

  I thought Boss had gone mad in putting them together. It wasn’t right, the two of them. I could feel it in the air just looking at them, like winter had suddenly come, like we had fallen into some shadow and nothing would be the same again.

  Even Ayar’s back tells the right time twice a day, and it was my turn to be right.

  14.

  The women start calling her Bird while she’s still on the ground, before they even know how badly she landed.

  (Before this she had another name, but she wore it like a bad suit, and as soon as the words are uttered, the old name dies.)

  “Poor bird,” one of them says (Elena), and one of them laughs (Penna), and one of them is biting back a scream (Mina), and one of them is running for Boss.

  The one who runs is Ying; she moves so fast that she scrapes the skin off her palms sliding down the tent pole. She performs in bandages for two weeks after.

  Bird has never thanked her. No point; it would only make Ying somebody’s enemy.

  “She fell,” Ying calls, which is a lie.

  Bird wants to give over—it’s easier, surely, just to die—but she can’t. Her eyes are nothing but blood, and she feels sick, presses her face to the dirt, but her lungs are pushing in and out, sucking up blood and dust and whatever air is left.

  Around her, muted, people are applauding. The tent goes dark.

  When everything is quiet again, someone picks her up; she feels strong hands shaking under her. She thinks, Soon it will all be over.

  (But she knows better; Boss told her what would happen when she gave her the bones, and so Bird knows this is not the end. She must wait, and bear it. Someone is holding her.)

  In the workshop, Boss’s hands pass over her body. She feels the motion (it’s pain, it’s all pain, the air is beating against her), but doesn’t move. One eye is gone; she doesn’t want to open the other. Best not to move. Best just to die.

  (She can’t die; she fights; she pulls breath through the holes in her copper ribs.)

  “I should have known better,” says Boss, like an apology. “Elena can tell about this kind of thing.”

  Her throat is too full of blood to answer. The pain is like a brand.

  Boss says, “Stop fighting it,” and there is the ring of a hammer on copper, then nothing.

  Bird doesn’t wake up until the next night, and knows from Panadrome’s waltzes that the show is happening without her. She sits on top of one of the lighting crates, her legs folded under her, and listens to the rubes shouting and stamping until the ground shakes.

  After the show, Little George tells her that Elena performed with a black eye.

  “It was Boss’s present to Elena for letting you fall,” he says, making fists at his sides and rocking on his heels. His metal casts creak. “She slapped Elena right in the face.”

  The other one says, “Some people have all the fun.”

  His name is Stenos; Stenos whom she has never believed about anything. But he was holding her when she woke up, carrying her through the camp like a dangerous animal that had been found asleep.

  Now he is sitting beside her, on her left side; she cannot see him. The heat of his leg bleeds through her skin, warms the metal in her left hand where she grips the edge of the crate.

  (The wings. He is after the wings.)

  They have managed, so far, never to speak to one another. But now she does not try to break away from him. She lets the heat of his skin fan out through her hand, soak into her wrist. She leaves her hand where it is.

  You must live in the place that has been carved for you; this much, now, she understands.

  You must live in the wagons with the aerialist girls and their slippery hands. You must sleep in an upper bunk with your face close enough to the roof that the rain leaks onto your neck, with Elena lying across the narrow aisle, sleeping the sleep of the just.

  You must live in the crook of the man’s arm when you walk through the towns, giving the illusion that you are a pair; when you are not ready to jump and he is gathering the strength to throw you; when you are tired from practice and cannot walk.

  You must live on the ground.

&nbs
p; Now, she is Bird. If she remembers some other name, she wouldn’t think to answer to it.

  She must live with the name that has been carved for her, because of the fall; because of the height of her twists and leaps; because of the wide, bright eye that never closes.

  15.

  Everyone paints up. Boss believes in a real show.

  The aerialists are pink and brown and gold, and Boss makes them paint up all alike—round white faces like a set of dolls, thick black lines along the eyelids, gold shadow from the brow to the cheek and all the way out to their pulled-back hair. Their mouths are plastered white, so if their lips tremble no one can tell.

  Tumblers get red for their mouths, to match their jackets, and black pencil for their eyes. It gets frightening as the act goes on and the sweat leaves streaks of grey and red over their faces, but Boss doesn’t mind if they look scary, I guess.

  Ayar and Jonah don’t get anything except a little kohl. (“No one’s looking at your faces,” says Boss, pushing her work goggles back into the frizz of her hairline and looking at one or the other. “What would you two do with a clown’s face? Hopeless, both of you. Now come in here, Ayar, your right shoulder is bent.”)

  Bird makes up, too. Somehow she found silver shadow the same color as the iron plate, and she makes wide gunmetal smears over her eyelids and her good temple, staring defiantly into the trailer mirror, like she’s doing something she’s not supposed to.

  Stenos doesn’t wear anything but the kohl, not on his own. Sometimes Bird will turn from her seat at the big mirror and find where he’s standing (he’s within arm’s reach of her before a show, always), and she’ll look him right in the eye and draw one finger over his brow, or across his mouth, and leave a trail of grey on his skin.