The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  Phoebe wended her way to the bakery. Cakes big as hats, glazed, draped in shredded coconut or curls of chocolate, studded with fat raisins, cakes whose frostings gleamed like the shining white houses in Kensington. We ordered you a cake maybe you already got it. I hope it’s not stale they promised it would stay fresh … Here it was. Faith and Wolf had been in this very store eight years before, this very room, their sandaled feet had walked upon this same gray marble floor, perhaps touching the spot where Phoebe stood now. She felt a kind of wonderment. At that moment a loudspeaker suddenly crackled to life. “Attention all customers,” said a woman’s English accent. “The store must be evacuated. Kindly move toward the nearest exit doors as quickly as possible.”

  A stillness fell. “All customers are asked to leave the premises at once. The store must be evacuated. Kindly proceed …” People began gathering their parcels and moving briskly from the room. Phoebe looked around in confusion. “Attention all customers …” Was the store closing for the day? But obviously not. Baffled, she followed the crowd into a central area filled with mirrored cosmetics counters, where hundreds of shoppers were already gathered. She heard the terse, complicit whispers of people in danger and experienced a thrill of fear. Something was the matter. Light poured in from the street, but the bottleneck of departing customers forced her to a standstill some distance from the doors. She began to grow nervous. Yet at the same time, she felt strangely exempt from any real danger. “All customers are advised to move toward the nearest exit doors. The building …”

  “What’s going on?” Phoebe asked a man beside her, who carried a round loaf of bread under his arm.

  “Bomb threat, I’d imagine,” he said. “Happens fairly often.”

  “Wow, a bomb?” Phoebe said. Everyone seemed so docile. “I guess ‘threat’ doesn’t mean there’s really a bomb, though.”

  “Rarely,” the man said. “Mind you, they do go off now and then.” From his half-smile Phoebe sensed he was baiting her, and tried to assume an air of indifference. The doors looked very far away.

  “You’re American,” the man observed. He pronounced it “Amer-ee-can.”

  “Yes,” Phoebe said. “I got here this morning.”

  “You haven’t got many terrorists in America, then.”

  “Terrorists?” Phoebe said, startled. “No. Well, I mean, Patty Hearst was a terrorist …”

  He frowned. “Who’s that?”

  “She was this rich heiress, but then she was kidnapped by terrorists and she became a terrorist, too. It was incredible,” Phoebe said, aware as she spoke that it didn’t sound particularly incredible. The man said nothing. “Are there a lot of terrorists in London?” she asked.

  “We’ve got our share. Mind you, the French have it worse; they’ve got bombs exploding every time you turn round over there.”

  A smell of anxiety and humanity filled the vast room. Phoebe wanted to escape. The man had a kindly, defeated air. She pictured his children leaping on him like monkeys before he’d had a chance to put down his loaf of bread.

  “So … what’re they trying to do? The terrorists in London,” she asked.

  “Depends which ones,” said the man. “The IRA hate the Brits, full stop. The Pal-ee-stinians want hostages freed, or they’re taking revenge over some bloody thing. Then you’ve got kids all over Europe that haven’t got a clue, just sod capitalism and that. Cooking up bombs and carrying guns around—that’s the bit they really enjoy.”

  “I’m sure they have better reasons than that,” Phoebe said, feeling oddly defensive on the terrorists’ behalf.

  “Avoid boredom?” he said with a short laugh. “Best reason in the world.”

  Finally they neared the doors. Phoebe felt a sudden, odd reluctance to leave the danger behind. She pictured the terrorists observing this commotion from some hidden place, and longed to slow down for them, flaunt her fearlessness.

  At last they pushed through a door to the street. Phoebe looked around for the man she’d been speaking with, thinking he might have paused to share with her the triumph of escape. But he’d disappeared. The crowd, still flooding from the doors behind her, forced Phoebe to move on. Policemen crowded the sidewalk, black helmets strapped beneath their chins like bonnets. Phoebe slowed, resisting the crowd’s momentum. Customers still leaving Harrods were caught in the press of bystanders pushing toward it. The policemen’s short-tempered warnings did little to quell the crowd’s desire to move nearer the trouble. And Phoebe felt it, too—here was the world of events, a place she knew only from pictures, from newspaper stories. Overnight she had reached it.

  You see this lagoon well believe it or not we went swimming in it the water was totally clean just a little green from algae. The ducks weren’t scared they came quacking right up to us. But the English cops totally freaked and about eight of them stood in a row hollering for us to get out with their oval hats down over their eyes and we said No No you should come in the water’s so nice it would do you good but they blew their whistles and kept yelling so finally we came out with the ducks paddling after us. What a crazy day I was so happy!! Love, Faith

  The trees of St. James’s Park hung like velvet drapes, heavy, dense, sunlight spilling between their leaves and soaking the bright grass. Phoebe walked to the water’s edge and looked at the ducks, their crisp, bright markings like costumes.

  She circled the lagoon. It was large and sprawling, curved bridges spanning its narrowest parts. In the middle a spray of water shot straight into the air. A nervous excitement coursed through Phoebe. Following Faith’s directions filled her with a keen anticipation, though for what she had no idea. Objects seemed to leap at her, charged with significance.

  Phoebe bought a ham sandwich, chocolate cake and a green apple. She carried her tray to a small stone table outdoors and devoured the food, ravenous. After finishing her meal, she opened her notebook and wrote: “July 2, 1978. In England everything is more real. The money is colorful, the coins are heavy like real gold, the parks are greener, the people have beautiful accents. There are terrorists all over, and bomb threats. Nothing is the way I’m used to. This is the real world and I’m totally alive, for the first time ever.”

  Eating left Phoebe exhausted. She found an empty cloth chair on the grass and sat down, taking Faith’s postcards from her purse and fanning them in her hands like a deck of cards. There were eighteen in all. Phoebe looked at the postcard of St. James’s Park, then at the park itself. A part of her had not believed she would ever actually sit here, as if the real places would vanish, like mirages, just as she reached them. Now, for the first time in years, the ground felt so solid under Phoebe. She let her eyes fall shut, sunlight warm against her lids, sounds of birds and children and distant traffic lulling her to sleep.

  Phoebe woke at six-thirty with a parched throat. Earlier, a boy had shaken her awake to collect money for the chair, but his accent had been hard to comprehend and there were moments of confusion before she’d managed to produce the desired coin. Now Faith’s postcards littered the grass. Phoebe scrambled to gather them up, afraid one might have blown away—but no, all eighteen were there. She tucked them back in their envelope. A ghostly population of empty cloth chairs scattered the grass. The sky had clouded over. Shivering, Phoebe stood.

  Quickly she left the park, dogged by a sense of having lapsed, missed something important. She soon found herself under the overhead tracks at Charing Cross station, murky air illuminated by the greenish light from tiny fish-and-chips shops. Railway workers in blue uniforms and boots tossed half-smoked cigarettes into the gutters. Their speech, like that of the boy who had wakened her, was impossible to decipher. From the station doors came a dank, breathlike smell and a gush of human traffic. Phoebe stood in the shadows and watched. No one looked at her. She stared into the flood of oncoming faces and waited for one to sharpen into focus, to be singled out as in a movie crowd scene. People poured through the doors, hurrying to get home. Finally she turned away.

  The
youth hostel would be open now. Phoebe took the tube to the Gloucester Road station, where an Indian man at a fruit stand displayed a pyramid of figs dusted white with powdered sugar. There were rows of red apples, each wrapped in a tissue.

  Trees tossed and bent in the wind. It felt like rain. Phoebe looked at the swollen sky and thought of her grandparents’ house in St. Louis, that promise of a violent storm, sticks and leaves dashing across the grass as if for cover. “It’s going to be a bad one,” people would say, but always with a certain excitement at the thought of watching the storm lash itself against their windows.

  Phoebe walked in the direction of the youth hostel. She passed a small stone church, dandelions tossing in its graveyard. The long, crooked street blurred. She stopped to rub her eyes and suddenly felt that her sister was very near, not a memory or an echo but Faith herself—laughing, reaching—what else but her sister’s presence could explain the excitement Phoebe had felt since arriving in London, the swell of promise? It was Faith who brought these feelings, who always had. And Phoebe knew, then, that her journey would only be complete when her sister had finally revealed herself. Faith would simply appear, burst from nowhere as when she lost patience during games of hide-and-seek, exploding the stillness by leaping from behind a curtain or beneath a couch, announcing, “Time’s up, you couldn’t find me.”

  A coldness broke in Phoebe’s lungs, like inhaling helium from a balloon. She froze mid-step. From across the street a tall, eccentric house leapt at her in flashes of orange brick. She searched the grainy air, half expecting to see the familiar form of a skinny leaping girl with dark hair. An old woman hobbled by, clutching a frilly black umbrella, and as the woman passed, so did the feeling, unmistakably as a wind shifting course. Phoebe resumed walking, a weakness in her legs, an odd, buttery flavor at the back of her throat. It was raining. Yellow squares of light had appeared inside houses. From a high window came the sound of a piano, notes floating down solid as leaves, then vanishing. The rain felt so good, the wet dress clinging to Phoebe’s legs. Her old life was gone. Gone forever, the years alone in San Francisco, years of waiting, looking for a sign, they had floated away like the thinnest dry husk, leaving Phoebe newly born in a strange land.

  ten

  Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Amsterdam is the be all end all. London was nothing compared to this. Wolf and I are crashing in an empty building where all these squatters have been living for months. The cops dont do one thing it’s the opposite, they’re our guardian angels. We’re like a family, everything is spiritual and when someone leaves maybe you won’t ever see them again but so what, even in that little time you can still love them. At night the stars are so pretty. Love, Faith

  Phoebe stayed in London a week. But the longer she remained, the more the thrill of her surroundings seemed to fade. She began to fear that her own presence was erasing her sister’s, blurring it to vagueness. Simply to go where Faith had been was not enough, to stand there, flanked by other tourists, groups of singing children—not enough. Phoebe worried that her own hesitating nature had kept her from making some crucial leap, entering fully the danger and intensity of that first day, with the bomb threat. She left London determined to push herself harder.

  She arrived in Amsterdam in the morning with two Australian sisters, Diana and Helen, whom she’d met on the overnight boat. They left their bags in the train station lockers—check-in time at the youth hostel was not until afternoon—and walked to the Dam, Amsterdam’s central square. Phoebe noticed a number of young people asleep on the shallow concentric steps surrounding the War Monument, a giant white cone that brought to mind a pillar of salt. She watched with interest as they shook themselves awake, coughing, rolling cigarettes, finally tottering to their feet and stretching skinny arms toward the sky so their tie-dyed shirts lifted up and their shrunken bellies met the sun. She felt a burst of excitement. These were hippies.

  All morning Phoebe thought of the sleeping hippies while she trekked with Diana and Helen through the Rijksmuseum, looking at paintings of moist-eyed burghers in stiff lace collars. At two-thirty, when the sisters returned to the station for their backpacks, Phoebe seized her chance to escape them. The official youth hostel was rumored to fill up fast, and they wanted to be there when it opened.

  “We’ll save you a place if we can,” said Helen, the younger sister, who was always offering kindness. “We’ll leave your name at the desk.”

  “Great,” Phoebe said, nodding and smiling and wishing they would go.

  Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Wolf is gone but I dont miss him. I was made to live in Amsterdam. The craziness here is beyond anything. Maybe I’ll become a Dutch citizen. Just kidding Hee Hee. Love, Faith

  The number of hippies in the Dam had grown since the morning. Phoebe paused at a florist’s stall, watching as they lounged against the War Monument and milled in groups, some entering and leaving the Dam in the brisk manner of drug dealers. One man with dreadlocks thick as wrists played a hoarse-sounding guitar; a blond girl leaned against him, her tangled hair glittering like cut wheat. Phoebe felt the same jealous awe she’d felt for the Haight Street kids who asked her for lemons. She wanted to be on their side.

  Phoebe reached in her purse for Faith’s picture. It did not seem impossible that one of these people would remember her sister. But her own appearance felt too neat. The peasant skirt and huaraches were ludicrous, insufficient, and shyness tightened like a hand at Phoebe’s throat. The space between herself and these gypsies loomed, unnavigable.

  The flower vendor eyed Phoebe inquiringly over his buckets of red tulips. She left the stall and crossed the Dam toward the group, Faith’s picture in hand. But at the last moment she lost heart, swerving away from the gypsies and out of the Dam altogether, down a narrow street leading toward the canal. Her heart was pounding; there seemed no room for air in her chest. She went to the canal and stopped on a bridge to regroup. Okay, she thought. Okay. In a minute I’ll go back.

  A few feet away stood a guy Phoebe recognized as one of the sleeping bodies she’d watched come to life that morning in the Dam. She eyed him furtively. His profile was mostly obscured by hair, a wavy pale blond that might have been angelic but for its thinness. Two dirty strings were tied at his wrist. He was leaning over the bridge, staring at the water.

  “Excuse me,” Phoebe said.

  The man started so violently that Phoebe jumped, too. He began to laugh, a harsh, croupy laughter that sounded like coughing. His face seemed unnaturally small, shrunken almost, a child’s face on a man’s body. Yet he didn’t look young.

  “Goh, wat hib ga me bang gemaakt!” he said.

  Phoebe was taken aback. She hadn’t fully registered the fact that these people might speak another language. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” she said.

  “American?” He regarded her with interest. When Phoebe nodded, he said warmly, “American is best.”

  “Thanks,” Phoebe said, quizzical.

  “Then comes Australia, New Zealanders, then South African. Oh, and Israeli also is great.”

  “You know them all?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Everyone comes to Amsterdam.”

  He turned back to the water, gazing at the canal as if some worry lay hidden there. “So … you live here?” Phoebe asked.

  “Yes. I am living here.”

  A pause fell. The man looked up and down the canal. Phoebe thrust Faith’s picture before him. In it, her sister was laughing, her mouth open, a string of white shells hanging crookedly around her neck. The shells were from Fiji; their grandparents had sent them each a set.

  “Did you ever know this girl?” Phoebe asked.

  The fellow took the picture and studied it. His fingernails seemed unusually long for a man. He looked at Faith, then at Phoebe. “Is you?”

  “No, my sister. She came to Amsterdam eight years ago.”

  “Eight years,” he said, laughing his gritty wet laugh. “Come on, eight years ago I am this.” He flattened a h
and at his thigh, indicating the height of a child.

  “Oh,” Phoebe said. “I thought you were older.”

  “Everybody thinks,” he said rather proudly. “Actually, I am eighteen.”

  “Me too,” said Phoebe.

  There was an awkward pause. The guy turned back to the water. Phoebe restored the picture carefully to her purse.

  Suddenly he turned to her. “You have some minutes?” he asked, twisting his forearm as if to consult a watch. But there were only the two dirty strings.

  Phoebe hesitated. “What for?”

  “We can make a visit to Karl. He is staying in Amsterdam more than ten years. He knows everybody coming here.”

  “Sure,” Phoebe said. “Yes, I’d like to meet him.”

  “Some little walk,” he said. “Is okay?”

  She felt a shadow of anxiety. “All right.”

  “So. Please come.” He flicked his gaze along the canal a last time, then began walking swiftly away from the center of town. Fighting her reluctance, Phoebe fell into step.

  “Nico,” he said when she asked his name.

  Phoebe’s anxiety eased as they walked. Along glistening greenish canals the narrow houses sat unevenly, as if floating. Boxes of bright flowers hung in their windows. The day was warm, bits of white fluff poised delicately on the water.

  Nico walked in silence. Twice he and Phoebe passed groups of other young people clearly from his world, and both times the strangers behaved identically: they muttered something to Nico, eyes brushing Phoebe as they passed. She had an uneasy sense that her situation was recognizable to them in some way. “Who were they?” she asked after the second encounter.