Jackson never asks about that. He only smiles like Beth as Agnessa leads me to the main tent and shows me the trapezes. They hang in pairs from the tent ceiling and we watch as the humans swing upon them, and leap, and soar. My heart aches for it and when Agnessa nudges me toward the long rope ladders that lead up, I stumble. I could not—
Mother birds don’t push their young from the nest, Agnessa tells me as she walks me over. But her mother was not precisely a bird and so felt no such need to hold back and shoved her out with one strong wing. Agnessa screamed the whole way down but before she could hit the ground unfurled her wings and flew. Flew away and never looked back, until she was captured.
The ropes sag under my weight, but soon I am at the top and no one there looks at me like I am out of place. They step back and give me the platform, one man holding a trapeze should I decide I want one. But I don’t. I look down at Agnessa and don’t think about anything as I let go and fall.
The air catches me, or I catch the air, and I lift myself up with one stroke and then another. But my body is too heavy for my wings, so I let the air guide me down in slow spirals, until I touch my feet to the dusty ground.
Agnessa beams. If beauty was a thing ... No. If the impossible was made possible ... No. There are just no words for that, nor when she has us climb upon her broad back and nestle between her wings. She smells like all the high places, where only wind and cloud go, and that’s where she takes us, up and toward Maman’s marsh house, where she leaves us, traces a wide circle in the sky, and is then gone.
Fat Tuesday. Tonight, the nuns stay inside to prepare for the coming of Lent, and even the moon has tucked herself away this year. I cannot see the stars for the amount of light that vomits up from the bedecked streets. So many lights and candles and it doesn’t matter that most people have no money; what little they had was converted to light, just for tonight.
Amid the floats roams the circus and its people. Not creations. They have not been made the way Gordon and I have been and I think my eyes should run green with envy. Each is a natural thing: Agnessa the siren, Delilah the bearded lady, Prancer the man who is somehow as tall as rooftops; Foster who smells like the hot metal of fresh coins, and Sombra, who is a shadow against her sister Gemma until she turns into the light and Gemma the shadow. The lions prowl on leashes of cobweb and mist, and I can hardly stand the wonder. Gordon and I watch from the rooftops, trailing the procession. Maman Floss says she will meet us at the end, with hot cocoa because the night is cooler than any yet.
But she meets us with more than that. I don’t notice until I’m on the ground, because the glide down is what I look forward to. Tonight of all nights, I can be me, because they will mistake me for a thing from the parade, possibly a wonder from the circus, so I need no cloak even though the air is cold. Gordon and I reach the last building and there is a rush of air and I unfurl my wings, to catch this and ride it down. I scoop this invisible air into the skin that Maman so lovingly stretched over my broken arms, the ordinary skin she made into extraordinary wings, and even when my feet touch down, I keep my wings spread. They ruffle like silk.
Gordon takes the fire escape to the ground and he’s clapping for me, clapping and laughing until he sees Maman and the strange man at her side. This man is gaunt, his cheeks hollowed as though someone sucked him empty with a straw. But his coat is the color of Lucien’s car and this draws me forward when perhaps I should show more caution.
Chauve-souris, Maman whispers and she draws me close, a hand under my chin. Her long fingers curl up along the side of my face to lift my gaze to that of the strange man. He looks at me without so much as a smile. He is intent, studious, and smells like dark leaves that have been dried in hot sun. When he takes hold of my hand to draw my wing back out, I pull back, but he doesn’t let me go, and that’s when I know. His eyes narrow and his hand hurts so badly around mine and he pulls me toward him. No.
My time spent with Agnessa and the flyers has served me well. For a moment that lasts too long, I give in to his pull. My feet whisper across the ground, and when he has me closer he eases his touch because he thinks ah, she has understood and given up as the smaller animal will give in to the larger. No.
This close in I tuck my wings and dive for the ground. He does not expect this, so I am gone as he turns, as Maman cries out.
These cries are lost in the sounds of the parade. I run blindly from the man she would sell me to. I picture her mouth on Lucien and stop only once, to vomit every carnival treat I have eaten onto the street which still gleams with gold light. And then, running, flipping into the air when I feel an uprush. Putting more distance between me and everything I know until I stumble against a fabric wall, until I sink into straw and it swallows me and I can only think thank you, thank you, before I sob myself to sleep.
Jackson finds me. I wake to find he has pushed the straw back, enough to allow me to breathe without inhaling it. There’s no panic when I sit up, when I pick straw from my skin. He offers me a wide cup and I drink as if I have roamed the deserts of Paris, and it’s sweet lemonade, the best thing I have ever known. Jackson already seems to know my plight.
“Your bitch maman has my Agnessa,” he says, and he brushes his hands together to remove flecks of straw. His fingers are bent as if his muscles seized up on him, as if he knows the pain in my own body from being changed. “You could stay here. Would never sell you.”
He draws a poster from his shirt pocket and his face is a misery as he studies it. “She does this.” It’s not a question. I realize this is partly why they came, why Agnessa took me in. Jackson has known. “She takes children and she ...”
I can hear the pain in his voice when he can’t continue. Remakes us, I tell him. Breaks us as she was broken. And I know now it’s not normal, and it is like an awful waterfall through me, the truth rushing. All those children who left the house ... where had they gone? I could name them all—but I don’t, because ... Because. That Jackson understands this betrayal is plain on his face. He nods, folds the poster back up, slides it back into his shirt pocket.
“Could stay here,” he says again.
Maybe later, I tell myself because it’s like a dream, that idea. But not yet, not while Maman has Agnessa.
Jackson drives me out to the marsh, where the house sits amid the moss-draped cypress, where the crickets’ call is louder than nearly anything. I see Gordon in the yard but no one else. Jackson waits in the truck. Trusting me. Gordon hurries to my side, clutching at me, warning me how angry Maman is and Lucien, too, and they are looking for me, but they have also—
There is an awful sound from the house, a body screaming like it is being torn in two, and I run because I know the sound a thing makes when it breaks. I don’t care about Maman and Lucien. I don’t even care about me right then because there is this feeling inside like I will die if I stay here, if I am sold, if I am not sold. I have glimpsed awful things—and there is more awful to come, for I can smell the blood—but I have also seen the beauty and the light; I have seen that the train tracks leave this place.
Maman has Agnessa strung up in the room I hate, the walls bright with lanterns. Metal loops now descend from the ceiling, rise from the floor, and even emerge from the walls. Maman has tied Agnessa every which way, with rope that burns into her wings, her legs. I scream my fury at all of them, and Maman and Lucien stare—they have never seen me like this. I have never been like this. Maman tries to talk sense into me, but Lucien approaches with another loop of rope.
This is where things go bad. Agnessa struggles in her bonds, shedding feathers in her fear. The lanterns shake with her fury, light wavering as if in wind. Lucien strides forward and his hands smell like oil, like angry bird. The rope rasps against my cheeks as he drops it over my head, loops it around my throat. I picture Maman bent before him, her own throat held tight in his fist as her mouth moves against him. Chavre-souris, she told me long ago, it is our way. But not mine.
I only go slack enough to draw
him in. He smiles—mon petite, he whispers and draws the rope into his fist. I slip forward, looping the rope around his wrists and pulling as I slide between his legs. With a tug, we both go down, and Maman screams. She can hardly stand it, but her nature is two-fold: the breaker, the healer. She staggers, clumsy in her panic, but I am not once loose of that rope.
It’s deliberate when I sweep a wing into a lantern and send it crashing. Oil and flame lick up the wall, across the floor. The ropes which bind Agnessa catch. Maman shrieks and it’s not Agnessa she reaches for, but me. I dance away, throwing shutters open so the air floods in, feeds the flames. I dash more lanterns to the floor. The room is engulfed and the heat is tremendous as Agnessa’s ropes burn apart. She falls and her massive wings calm the fire a second before it surges back up.
Agnessa and I flee the room as the ceiling crumbles and the house is madness around us. Casks and jars explode from heat, sending dwarves sprawling on uncertain legs. Gordon helps them up, small hands clasping small hands that should not be small from now on, lined palms being allowed to finally grow outside glass walls.
This house is ever making things and now makes more Curious Who Used to Live with Maman. They emerge from their hiding places and we save all we can. As the fire consumes the house, the bed of Jackson’s truck becomes an ark for the strange, the misplaced. Gordon huddles in my arms under the canopy of Agnessa’s blood and ink wings, and we leave this place where we were broken and healed, returning to tents and train, and the promise of open skies.
Agnessa shows them to me. One by one, she teaches me the language of the winds.
We, As One, Trailing Embers
1911, Coney Island, New York
We two live as one, but also as two when we are able. When night deepens and the park grounds grow quiet, we can let everything else fall away. When night deepens, we each close our eyes and pretend the same thing: we are a single being, we are alone in our body, we make every choice on our own, for our singular self. We pretend there is but one torso rising from this pelvis, only one head and only one heart. There is not another arm or wing to find our selves entangled in, nor another set of our eyes staring at us. In the darkness, there is only one.
With eyes closed, there is a singular heartbeat, a solitary pulse, and when we stretch, there is no we. We becomes a miraculous “I,” and I drift in this place, alone but not lonely. I don’t know what lonely is or could be; it is not a thing we—it is not a thing I—know. There is always another, but for here in the quiet dark. Still, I must be careful; if I stretch the wrong way or try to turn over, I am instantly drawn back into the “we” that I actually am. I never sleep on my side, on my belly.
If I wake first, I keep quiet. I listen to the soft breathing at my side and try to match it. Breath for breath, I can hide and pretend the we is still an I. Still a me. But soon enough this illusion is broken; there is a deeper breath, a waking breath, a breath that says, “I am back and we are us once more.”
Hazel eyes look upon hazel eyes, and that mouth with its morning-dry lips curls in a smile of good morning. Sleep-warm arms and wings tangle together and we cannot help but burrow closer. Morning was once awful, returning from wherever sleep carried us, coming back to the knowledge of this body, this world. We spend these first moments entangled; it will be all right, no matter what, say these slow caresses. We bend mouths to chests, to foreheads, echoing kisses dropped elsewhere.
These soft touches lead to harder ones and we come together every time; we share everything from the navel down, there is no way to not share such intimacies. We still marvel at it, two minds sharing an identical physical sensation at the exact same instant; two minds momentarily obliterated by the most intense thing we have known. Until—
There is a man—Mister Hoyt—who would cut us apart.
Mister Hoyt has created the finest freaks within the walls of Dreamland, but we who travel with Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade are new to him, made by means other than his hands. We have been on display in the carnival park the entire spring, a limited engagement before our circus train moves on again. Mister Hoyt comes once every week, to study us. He wears a suit of wool no matter the weather, one fine-fingered hand clasped above his heart. Of his other hand, there is no sign; this suit sleeve hangs empty. He watches us with glassy eyes that narrow with unfulfilled interest. He studies us because we are not a thing that has been made by any human hand.
We are displayed on an elevated turntable, in broad daylight. Long have visitors to the carnival claimed there is trickery involved, especially when we were displayed within a tent at night, but these assertions were put to quick death when Jackson moved us outside; even Mister Hoyt stopped saying we had been sewn together—he can not stop looking at us, longing for us. No one seems to mind the heat of the sun or the stench of tar and the buzz of saws against lengths of lumber from renovations deeper in the park; they brave most anything to look at us.
The turntable is three feet around, enough to hold us and whatever Jackson means to display us with. Once he assembled a collection of taxidermied two-faced cats at our feet, mounded so high they constantly spilled over the edge; once it was a school of Fiji mermaids dangling on silver wires. They moved as we moved, nauseating in effect. Usually, as now, it is the frame of a cheval glass, within which we stand. Beneath the table, well-muscled dwarfs walk in countless circles to turn us about.
Smoke and mirrors is what they said early on, encouraged by Mister Hoyt, so that others would come see Hoyt’s creations rather than Jackson’s. Now, Jackson plays up the notion of mirrors, because at first glance, one cannot help but think we are a reflection. Today, flawless Beauty’s reflection is that of Beast, while withered Beast gazes upon Beauty with an endless hunger. Only we and Jackson know the truth of it: we are each Beauty and we are each Beast. Only by taking turns can we find the space to breathe and live.
They watch, captivated. Park visitors pay their coin and gather around our turning base, and watch as we rotate through the afternoon. It is summer now and the unbroken sunshine turns our wings to silver and gold. If you know where to look, you can see where we are shaded blue with quiet blood and sometimes the orange of a rousing blush. These hues are secret to most; had by others for another coin.
In the sunshine, only silver and gold, only Beauty and Beast. (Jackson once twined us inside rose vines sharp with thorns; there was a single rose, dark as heart’s blood, held in the cleft of our waist, this for visitors to discover as we turned and turned.) We lift our hands—two without flaw, two withering down to bone—to the heat of the sun, allowing beaded sweat to run down our adjoined torsos. Within that hollow, sweat collects, then rivers down shared belly, shared legs. Some ladies cannot bear the sight—it is reflection only, one man reassures his wife as she turns her face away; she peeks from the safety of his shoulder, but she sees. In her eyes, we see that she understands.
She knows that this is one body, imperfectly and improperly made. She cannot tell if we are male or female, cannot know the flesh that lurks beneath the strip of silk that wraps our waist. She cannot judge by the fall of straight ginger hair, or the four hazel eyes which evenly regard her in return. But she can believe that in the making of us someone made a terrible error. We should have come from the womb separate, yet did not. Our mother, merely flesh and bone they say, was cut open so that we might live. But we think we came from the heavens. We remember a space without space, a world without end. Amen.
Later, this woman comes to our tent, this lady who could not look at us under the clear daylight. In the tent, the air is warm and occluded by the haze of cigars, cigarettes. Men have come, looked, gone, but the lady, she lingers, and without her husband she eyes us with more interest. We bow our heads and say nothing. Here, we cannot yet speak.
Jackson who owns the circus is quick to slither up to her, to stroke a rough hand over the fall of our ginger hair and tell the lady she can have us. Anything here might be had, enjoyed, consumed. We watch her with
a kind of hunger, saliva on a tongue, ready to dissolve that pink mouth should it come near enough. Jackson makes his deal, a whisper of paper money between palms, and we guide the lady deeper into the tent. The things we do are not for others’ eyes.
Here, the air feels cooler, the striped canvas covered in the fragmented shade of a tree outside. Here, we lead the lady into a room, where she sits upon a chair of padded velvet; she’s surprised at this chair, this small piece of civilization amid the freaks. Nervous laughter accompanies this word; she doesn’t apologize. She smooths her sweaty hands over her dress, over thighs and silken stockings. We watch these hands and her face in the same instant; she radiates want and curiosity, no longer the shame and fear she displayed outside.
We come to stand before her, nudging her knees open with ours. This bold approach surprises her; she sits straighter, drawing her spine in, her breasts out. Where her stockings end, we see the marks upon her, the scars of cigarettes pressed into skin. When we study these, there comes a sharp intake of breath from her. She paid for us, but her touch is slow to come, tentative. She touches a wrinkled arm and our eyes close. The world reduces to a pinprick; in the dark, I am singular, solitary. There is only she and me, the stutter of her damp fingers down my bare arm and then across our belly. This shared sensation is agony, pleasure and pain both because it is not wholly mine, yet within this communal knowledge there is a doubling of want, of need.
“Which of you is Idalmis?” she asks. Her breath is a warm flutter above the silk that still wraps our waist.
“We are,” we say together, two separate voices that are of a melody together; contralto and baritone.
The woman doesn’t know what to do with this information; that while we have two torsos, we have but one name between us. She looks from one to the other, and it’s not confusion that crosses her features but determination.
The Grand Tour: A Jackson’s Unreal Circus & Mobile Marmalade Collection Page 5
