The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  A priest crossed the altar, long white robes making him seem to float. Pietro finished his prayers and resumed his place on the pew beside Phoebe. Concern made a crease in his face. It was only then that Phoebe realized she’d been crying, her face wet. “You have some pains, Phoebe,” Pietro said.

  “I did,” she said in a dreamy, distant voice. “But it’s over now.”

  “Is good you go to your sister,” Pietro said.

  Phoebe nodded her agreement. She was floating like the priest, suspended in warm liquid.

  “When you can go?” he persisted. “Maybe today. Perhaps we walk together to the station. You have there your bag?”

  Phoebe turned, looking him full in the face. “I lied to you,” she said. “My sister is dead.”

  She caught a faint reflexive action somewhere in Pietro’s eyes, an infinitesimal quickening. “You are alone?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling, for something had opened, the world was flooding inside her.

  “We go outside, Phoebe,” Pietro said, standing, taking her by the hand. “Soon I take the train, I have already my ticket, but we must speak.”

  He led her from the cathedral. Outside, Phoebe encountered a blissful metamorphosis, everything sweet to her eyes. Even the skinny boys battering a soccer ball around the square looked gentle as mice. God’s children, Phoebe thought, we are all the children of God.

  Pietro chose a bench and they sat. Phoebe breathed slowly, deeply, relishing the push of her lungs against her ribs, the satiny passage of air through her windpipe. The distant rant of construction sounded like music. How could this world have so frightened her?

  Pietro tried to speak, then halted in frustration. “I wish I have some better English,” he said despairingly. “I try to help you, Phoebe.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “You helped me.”

  He shook his head. “Is no good you are alone.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Phoebe said. “Everything is fine.”

  Pietro looked at his hands. “Too fast,” he said, and snapped his fingers. The nip of sound startled Phoebe. “Too fast.”

  He seemed afraid. Phoebe turned to him, filled with sorrow. “I wish you could be happy,” she said. “You made everything good.”

  “I did nothing,” Pietro said.

  But it was time for him to go. They hurried, breathless, through the twilight. “I wish I can stay here, Phoebe,” he said. “But they have bought my ticket and someone will meet my train.” Phoebe caught dinner smells drifting from open windows. Each time they crossed a street, Pietro took her arm, looking anxiously in both directions.

  His train was already boarding. Hurriedly Pietro retrieved his suitcase and dashed with Phoebe to the platform. At the entrance he took both her hands in his own and held them tightly, looking into her eyes. “I will pray for you, Phoebe,” he said. Again he struggled for words. “It needs time,” was all he managed to say. “Non be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Phoebe said.

  He smiled, vexed. That wasn’t what he’d meant. Abruptly he began rummaging in his suitcase, old and frayed, the sort of suitcase a traveling salesman might have.

  Pietro copied from one page of a large notebook onto another, using the same green pencil he’d used to write Faith’s name. He tore out the second page. “Here is the telephone. Three-four-one, is Madrid, eh? I don’t know happens with the phone there, but always you can leave some message, please you will call if you have troubles? Pietro Santangelo. Is me, eh? You will remember? Here I write it.” The pencil shook in his hand. The train’s whistle blew.

  “Go—go! I’ll remember,” Phoebe said.

  Pietro turned and walked quickly down the platform to the train. Phoebe had thought he might hug her, she realized, craved the feeling of being that close to someone for a second. Almost immediately the train began pulling away. Phoebe watched its windows, thinking maybe one would open, that Pietro would wave. But he must not have had time.

  She turned and walked slowly back through the station to the street, retracing the steps she’d taken the night before to the high-rise complex where the youth hostel was. Everything seemed transformed, vast and spectacular now.

  Phoebe went to the spot where she’d seen the girls jumping rope and lay face-up on a concrete bench. She stared at the sky. It was pale on the side where the sun had set, darker as her eye moved across it. She thought of those children, the song they’d sung as they jumped, and suddenly, effortlessly, the words came back to her:

  Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,

  All dressed in black, black, black,

  With silver buttons, buttons, buttons,

  All down her back, back, back.

  She jumped so high, high, high.

  She touched the sky, sky, sky.

  And she never came back, back, back,

  Till the fourth of July, lie, lie.

  Miss Mary Mack …

  Phoebe gazed at the sky, singing softly to herself. She thought of how young she still was, all the things that hadn’t happened yet. She felt her connection to the stars and the planets, the old men smoking cigars on a bench next to hers, the people in yachts and slums and forests; above all, to Pietro Santangelo, who had saved her. Hope, Phoebe thought. There is always hope. A part of her was with him even now, Pietro Santangelo, riding past the stubbled, glittering fields that were God’s work, watching the sky fade to black.

  twelve

  Paris, Wow!!

  Love, Faith

  Phoebe sat on a front pew inside Notre-Dame, the white envelope in her hand. The acid itself was on a tiny white square of construction paper, smaller than her smallest fingernail. A red Mickey Mouse in suspender shorts was printed on it, one fat finger pressed to his lips as if to stifle a smirk. Phoebe found him menacing, but maybe Mickey Mouse had always looked like that.

  She’d come to Paris after it became clear that nothing she did would revive the spell cast by Pietro Santangelo and the Reims Cathedral. She’d known the feeling was gone the moment she woke the next day in that cinderblock room, had hurried immediately through heavy rain to the Reims Cathedral, only to find it chilly and dark. She’d tried kneeling, standing, praying, slowly descending the nave with her eyes closed, then turning around at the altar and popping them open to gaze with all her strength at the rose window. But the hum was silent. Her wet hair dripped on the stone floor.

  Phoebe had taken the train to Paris and arrived late the previous afternoon. She paid for a small blue room off the Place Saint-Michel, with a sagging bed and a window overlooking the street. She bought a falafel sandwich, wrote her mother another postcard and went right to sleep.

  Another failure. Even Pietro Santangelo had seen this one coming—even he had recognized whatever it was in Phoebe that kept her from making the final, crucial leap. All morning she’d sensed her sister’s mounting impatience, imagined the antsy look Faith got when things went on after her mind had already strayed from them. And it seemed to Phoebe now that her time had nearly run out.

  Gingerly she clasped the tiny square of acid and set it on her tongue. It had no real taste, just a faint sweetness at the back of her throat. She chewed until it turned gummy, then swallowed.

  Two minutes, five minutes. Anxiety clutched at Phoebe’s stomach. The cathedral’s blue stained glass and echoey clamber of tourists reminded her of the vast indoor swimming pool where she’d taken lessons as a child: its warm, chemical smell, the dozens of strange children and slender, bushy legs of their instructor, who wore buried in his chest hair a gold whistle, which he blew to make them jump. Gazing in fright at the glossy, viscous-looking water, dreading that whistle—certain, once she’d plunged into the water’s sticky depths, that she would not resurface.

  After fifteen minutes Phoebe left Notre-Dame for the open air. The acid might not work, she thought. After all, she’d been given it months ago. Did acid even last that long? And the thing was so small.

  Following her map, Phoebe took Rue de la Cité ac
ross the Seine, then walked toward the Louvre along Rue de Rivoli. Life-sized female statues were draped languorously alongside windows and above them, their arms dangling, loose garments falling open.

  Dear Mom, Phoebe and Barry, My French is the worst but luckily we have a friend who translates. Everyone in Paris keeps talking about the demonstrations of two years ago when they tore up cobblestones from the roads and threw them at the cops and they built barricades like the French Revolution. The whole country went on strike for a couple of weeks literally no one worked or studied they just wandered through the streets talking to each other. Nobody locked their doors people slept in strangers’ houses and fell in love and pulled the hands off the clocks outside because time was stopped. (Remember Mom?) Everyone says how it was the most incredible time of their life and how depressing it was when the whole thing finally ended and they were just students again, supposed to take exams and get jobs and all that. Some people say they almost wish it never happened so they wouldn’t know how things could be and they’d still be happy. Love, Faith

  Daffodils in white paper.

  Waiters shaking white cloths over restaurant tables.

  Deep in Phoebe’s stomach, something was slowly uncoiling. When she rubbed her eyes, an electric mist hung in the air. My God, she thought, it’s actually going to work, and felt a thrill of fear.

  From Rue de Rivoli she turned onto the massive Avenue de l’Opéra, but before reaching the Opera House itself, Phoebe veered right onto a smaller street, Rue des Augustins, then left, and soon was lost among a web of tiny streets that lifted gradually uphill into some kind of wholesale shopping district. One store contained nothing but racks of turquoise T-shirts with roaring lions on the front. White sailor hats crowded another. The cheap, garish clothing mesmerized Phoebe, as if her eyes had craved precisely these gold-tasseled combs and fake clotted pearls, necklaces of candy-plastic gems. “Blue T-shirts,” Phoebe said aloud, staggered by the power of word and object combined. “White sandals,” the phrase whispering across her lips, “white sandals …” whiter and more delicate than any pair of sandals she had seen.

  Phoebe began to feel someone else’s gaze upon her, taking in her movements, approving. I’ve done the right thing, she thought excitedly and then stopped, distracted by the fluid, translucent skin of her arms, her opalescent fingernails.

  By slow degrees, the landscape was flattening into two dimensions like children’s-book lands or religious paintings. Copper horses leapt from rooftops. Phoebe looked at the azure sky and laughed, knowing her sister was near, sensing Faith’s passion and humor and wondering why she hadn’t swallowed the white paper instantly upon arriving in Europe, saved herself so much sorrow.

  Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Yesterday at a chateaux outside Paris Wolf and I jumped over those velvet ropes that block off where you aren’t supposed to go. And we walked through the rooms nobody ever sees they were so beautiful and quiet with silk furniture and little glass things you could pick up. We pretended like we really lived there and lay down on a canopy bed with carved posts but maybe some kind of silent alarm bell went off because a guard came running in and totally freaked and we got thrown out but still it was worth it (Wolf doesn’t think so). But sometimes I think those velvet ropes are all over the world you just cant see them. In Paris I keep thinking where is the best most intense part of Paris, where is the absolute center of Paris and I cant exactly tell, I’m stuck outside the velvet ropes and I just hate them, it makes me so furious when all I ever see is the same normal stuff everybody sees. I wish I could climb over like in the chateaux but the problem is, in Paris unlike a museum the ropes are invisible, you cant tell which way is in which way is out. So you just keep trying. Love, Faith.

  The world shuffled, arranged and rearranged itself around Phoebe like a bird puffing out its feathers. The speckled pavement poured downhill, gallons of loose sand. She jumped to avoid it touching her shoes, but the air felt so thick, thick as water, slowing her movements.

  At the heart of each sensation lay the kernel of something familiar, a germ of ordinary perception or thought distorted beyond recognition. Sounds became indistinct; traffic, voices, airplanes, everything ran together into one larger sound like a crowd, hundreds and thousands of people assembling nearby. Something is going to happen, Phoebe thought, some tremendous thing is on the verge of taking place and she stopped where she was, stilled by a dragging, irresistible force like the sea’s undertow, stood quivering, waiting for the crowd to rumble into sight and sweep her along, but the crowd never quite appeared, it simmered just beyond sight, on the perpetual verge of materializing the way movie theater lights seem always about to dim when you know they’re going to. Phoebe looked at her watch but found it inscrutable, tiny bars under glass, deeply beautiful, a work of art no less, except where were the hands? Someone’s pulled them off, she thought, time has stopped.

  In a window Phoebe caught her reflection and moved nearer the glass, exchanging with herself a look of such mutual knowledge it embarrassed her. What we’ve been through, she thought. As a child she’d played a game of staring in her bedroom mirror and tempting herself not to recognize the girl who looked back, a delicious fear seeping through her stomach as her own image became another girl’s, a stranger whose presence made her shy. Phoebe stared at the slur of her own dark hair, wide-set crooked eyes gazing back through the murky glass, another girl, another person’s hand reaching gingerly, gingerly out from behind the glass to touch Phoebe’s own, and it was Faith.

  It was Faith.

  From across the window Faith stood looking out at Phoebe, their two hands meeting on the glass. Behind its chill Phoebe felt her sister’s heat. “My God,” she whispered.

  Faith was smiling broadly, mirthfully, and Phoebe, too, felt a plume of laughter rising in her chest, for here was Faith, after all this time, at last—I knew it, she cried, but silently, not moving her lips. I knew it, I always knew you’d come back.

  I’ve been here all this time, Faith seemed to say. Couldn’t you feel it?

  Sometimes, Phoebe said. But other times you disappeared.

  I’ve been in one place, Faith said. You’ve come all this way.

  Phoebe studied her sister, aware of some change in how she felt, being near her, but unsure what it was. Then she realized.

  We’re the same age, she said, incredulous.

  Faith laughed, that big hungry laugh Phoebe had missed and longed for and tried in vain to imitate. We’re two halves of an apple, Faith said. You did it, Pheeb. It’s almost over.

  Phoebe gazed at her sister’s narrow eyes and long mouth, a face in constant motion, or else it was just her own eyes moving over it, trying to gather it all in at once. A face so unlike her own.

  Two halves of an apple.

  How do I get across? Phoebe said.

  Faith smiled. You push.

  That’s it? Just push? And as she spoke, Phoebe pressed her hand harder against the glass in hopes of parting it, stepping through into Faith’s warm arms, but the window held fast.

  When I say push, I mean really push, Faith said. So Phoebe pushed with both hands, palms tingling against the glass.

  Come on, baby, Faith said gently, you’ve got to give it more than that.

  I’m trying!

  Faith shook her head. Crossing hurts, Phoebe, she said. It hurts. Otherwise it would be too easy. You’ve got to be willing to suffer a little.

  I’m dying to, Phoebe said.

  She set one shoulder to the window and pushed with all her might, feeling the pressure in her spine. Her sister braced herself from the other side to weaken the glass, and Phoebe pushed and pushed, but still nothing happened. Dammit, she said.

  That’s not pain, Faith said, not like I mean it, and Phoebe realized with despair that even now she was holding back, even now with only a single pane of glass between herself and her sister, she couldn’t get the job done. But I can, Phoebe thought, I will! And she stood back from the glass and threw herself again
st it with a massive blow, but no, still no, her shoulder and arm felt bruised, but still she was outside.

  Harder, Faith urged, much harder Phoebe come on, we’ll go together at the count of three, and Phoebe moved back almost to the curb; Faith did the same from her side. This is it, Phoebe thought, she would break through this time or perish in the attempt. At a run she threw herself head-first into the glass and Faith did the same; Phoebe’s spine felt severed as she slid to the pavement, her vision stunned to white, yet unbelievably there was the glass, still unbroken, that same thick glass of airport windows—My God, Phoebe thought, how can I get across without killing myself? Head throbbing, blood in her mouth from her bitten tongue and meanwhile someone was shouting—was it Faith?—no, not Faith, another person screaming at the top of her lungs from Faith’s side of the window; sensing trouble, Phoebe staggered to her feet and dove at the glass in a last, wild effort to escape the woman running outside in shrieking hysterics, her hair nubbled in tight red curls. The woman grasped Phoebe’s arm in a parrot claw, hollering, motioning at the window in an apoplectic frenzy of distress. Faith had vanished, the woman had scared her away and a small crowd was forming around Phoebe, but she didn’t care, couldn’t care less. She stumbled free of the screaming woman and wandered away.

  Her head and neck throbbed; her gums, even her teeth seemed to ring from the impact. Nothing she saw made any sense: a blond, bare-chested woman slouched in the passenger seat of a blue convertible—How? Phoebe thought. Why?—her white breasts hanging down to her stomach—I’m imagining this. She blinked to clear her vision, but it wouldn’t stop: everywhere Phoebe looked were bleached blondes in various states of undress, enough to fill several chorus lines. She wandered through the glare of their perfume—prostitutes? In broad daylight, on a busy street? And Phoebe realized then that she must have broken through the glass after all, and this was the other side—this was it!—and hadn’t she always sensed the prostitutes would be here, too? Red corsets and garish makeup, flaunting the gash of their cleavages—Yes! Phoebe thought, she’d reached the other side and Faith must be here, too, waiting, hidden among these prostitutes—was one of them Faith? But no, her hair was dark.