The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  It was obvious: he’d lied. Phoebe reached this conclusion, then waited in the bath of greenish light to discover her reaction. She felt a wave of fear, then tentative outrage—How could he lie? Why would he lie?—but these emotions were borne away almost instantly by a stronger feeling of promise, a swell of possibility that seemed almost to lift her from the bed. Wolf knew more than he’d told her! What yesterday had seemed a blank, impermeable wall now had sprung wide to reveal—what? Anything. Anything at all, Phoebe thought; what did it matter as long as there was more? This reprieve, this hope, it was all she needed. Like finding out that Faith was still alive.

  Feeling manic, almost high, Phoebe slid back to the floor and sifted quickly through the remainder of the snapshots, more bleached-out scenes from Amsterdam and Belgium and France, but these no longer interested her. She’d found what she was looking for. Then another picture caught her eye, and again she set down the pile and lay on the bed, holding the picture in the bath of light from the desk. Faith and Wolf sitting on the brick steps of the O’Connor house, a tiny Phoebe wedged between them, barefoot in her white nightie. They each had an arm around her, leaning in so protectively they might have been her young parents. Phoebe looked at her own small face, the smile modest but certain, as if a giant happiness were pushing out from behind it. She felt a surge of longing disbelief—where had that moment gone? Gazing into the camera, smiling at whoever was behind it—the memory was as lost to her as if she’d never been there. And now it was gone: the moment, the house, her sister. Only this image remained, mocking their absence. Pictures are sad, Phoebe thought. Pictures are always sad.

  Eventually Phoebe replaced the snapshots in their envelope, keeping aside the one of Faith in the Hofgarten. She returned the carved box to its shelf and went to the living room, where she paced, photograph in hand. Still holding it, she finally turned out the lights and lay rigid in her makeshift bed, eyes tightly closed, pulse hammering at her throat. It was impossible to sleep, yet she must have slept, for the sound of keys in the lock made her start awake and lie motionless, searching for her bearings. At the front door Wolf and Carla were quietly removing their jackets, a cigarette smell from their clothes seeping to where Phoebe lay. Soon their murky shapes crept toward the bedroom, Carla first, then Wolf, who shut the door behind him. Phoebe heard the bathroom sink, the flushing toilet. Then the stripe of light vanished from under the door and she thought she heard the sigh of bedsprings as Wolf and Carla lay down together on that soft mattress. Phoebe was filled with sudden dread of what else she might hear. Her mind reeled with the memory of Wolf and Carla kissing hello, lips meeting so easily, bodies that had met perhaps hundreds of times in a way Phoebe couldn’t fathom. She threw off her blanket, sweating now, fixed her eyes on the door. I’ll die if I hear anything, she thought, I will die. But she didn’t. She heard nothing at all.

  sixteen

  She was back in the Hofgarten by noon the next day. Everywhere Phoebe looked were things her sister might have seen: trees sharp as etchings, pebbles like tiny jewels under her feet, the black dome swollen and tender as a fresh moon.

  Wolf and Carla had gone off early that morning to look at apartments. When Phoebe returned at three-fifteen, Wolf was already back. On the table lay a map he’d drawn, directing her to the bar where he and Carla had eaten lunch. “Long walk,” he said.

  “I went back to the Hofgarten,” Phoebe said, and peered at Wolf’s face. She saw nothing.

  “I brought you a sandwich,” he said.

  He sat with Phoebe while she ate, then went back to his room to work, bare feet snapping on the polished floor. Phoebe removed Faith’s picture from her purse and paced the apartment, anxiety and excitement constricting her chest. Finally she knocked at Wolf’s door. He sat at his desk. “What’s up?” he said.

  She handed him the picture. Wolf took its edge, studying the image of Faith as though he’d never seen it before. He turned the picture over. “Where did this come from?”

  “Your box.”

  Wolf shook his head, smiling as if a joke had been made at his own expense. Yet he didn’t seem surprised. His eyes wandered again to the picture.

  “So she did come back,” Phoebe said.

  “She did,” Wolf said. “She came back.”

  Tiredly he rose from his chair, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of both hands. Then he stepped to the window and looked outside. Someone was cutting trees, an electric saw chewing at the silence.

  “Faith made me swear I wouldn’t talk about it,” he said. “To anyone, especially her family. But I guess you’ve got a right to know, and anyway, at this rate you’ll find out with or without me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phoebe said, shamed by the memory of pawing through Wolf’s sparse possessions.

  “You do what you do.”

  “It was wrong, though,” she said, wanting him to forgive her. “It was.”

  “You did it.”

  There was a pause. “Why did she make you swear?” Phoebe said.

  “She got into a thing in Berlin she wanted off the record.”

  Here was a turn Phoebe hadn’t expected. “What kind of thing?” she asked fearfully.

  Wolf glanced at his desk, noticed he’d left the cap off his needle pen and carefully swiveled it on. “Let’s get out of this room,” he said. Phoebe sensed his wish to quarantine Faith, away from his work and desk and bed. The thought saddened her.

  Phoebe sat on the living room couch. To her surprise, Wolf brought two beers from the kitchen and offered her one—how could he think of drinking? Brusquely she refused it. Wolf started, surprise in his face. He set the beer on the floor. Out of guilt, Phoebe picked it up and drank some.

  Wolf lowered himself to the rug and leaned against the base of the couch so he was in front of Phoebe, to the left of her shins. She couldn’t see his face. He lit a cigarette, using one bare foot to drag the ashtray over.

  “Well?” Phoebe finally said.

  “I’m kind of at a loss,” Wolf said. He sounded nervous.

  “Just tell what happened.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll sound weird, out of context.”

  “About Berlin,” Phoebe said. “What you weren’t supposed to tell me.”

  “Okay,” he said, “okay.” He dragged on the cigarette as if it were a joint. “Well, we left the States, Faith and me. You know that, obviously.” He gave a nervous, smoky laugh. “We left because of this bad feeling.”

  “What feeling?”

  “Just, things going sour. Things having already peaked. There was a mood in the air like something had turned, bad omens or something, I don’t know.” The cigarette shook in his fingers. “I guess Cambodia was the beginning. April. Or maybe not Cambodia … no, but it was, I mean, bad things happened before that, Christ knows, but invading Cambodia after everything we’d done to stop the war … you thought, Jesus, has anybody heard us? Then the National Guard just mows down those kids at Kent State. Kids, you know?—just blew them away. It was a level of evil you couldn’t cope with.”

  Phoebe heard the bitterness in his voice, tinged even now by a flutter of amazement, a stung disbelief.

  In the Movement, too, Wolf said, something had slipped. Hell’s Angels messing people up at Altamont, the Weathermen self-destructing, literally, in a New York City townhouse. All in a couple of months. The Haight was on a slide, full of junkies and runaways, gang bangs. They’d made a wrong turn somewhere back, that was how it felt. Now they were lost.

  “Faith and I had been broken up almost two years, barely spoken,” Wolf said. “Then in June I spotted her across a courtyard at Berkeley during some rally, another windbag speech. I watched her getting more and more bored, and when she started to leave, I came around and intercepted her. We kissed hello. I said, ‘So, what do you think of all this?’ ‘I think it’s bullshit,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean the rally,’ I said. ‘I mean everything, the whole scene.’ She said, ‘That’s what I’m talking about.
’

  “It was this warm day, kind of sweet-smelling. Faith looked so beautiful, that long hair catching all the sunlight. ‘Let’s split,’ she said, ‘just take off.’ I said, ‘Cool with me,’ so we started walking toward my apartment and suddenly I was dying to be with her again, dying for all that craziness she brought. ‘You know, I didn’t mean split the rally,’ Faith said as we were walking. ‘I mean split.’ ‘I know that,’ I said, although I didn’t, I had no idea what she meant, but at that point I didn’t give a damn what it was, I just wanted it.

  “We were gone in a week,” Wolf said. “Faith had a shitload of money, from your dad, I guess. Five thousand bucks. I had some savings, too, plus I sold my truck for seven hundred.”

  “I got that money, too, that five thousand dollars,” Phoebe said in a rush, then wondered why.

  “We were after something,” Wolf said. “We truly were. In a way that’s hard to admit, it sounds foolish now but it didn’t then, that’s the difference. Hundreds and thousands of us, all reaching. It’s a powerful thing, that many people believing in something at once.”

  I know, Phoebe almost said. How would I? she thought.

  “I’d see my dad go off to Chubb Insurance every day,” Wolf continued. “Year after year in his suit and tie … was he happy? I don’t know. It was like happiness didn’t come into it.”

  “Or my dad,” Phoebe said.

  “Exactly! Guy wants to be an artist—is an artist—works at IBM to support his family and the job drains him dry, he can hardly paint. Finally gets sick … it’s tragic.”

  Phoebe stopped short of agreeing. If he was a bad painter, was it still tragic?

  “He was constantly on Faith’s mind, your dad. I knew it when we first were together, right after he died, but by the time we went to Europe, it seemed a lot more intense. I remember on the plane ride over she kept staring out the window. I said, ‘What’s on your mind,’ and she said, ‘Gene.’ She’d started calling him that.”

  “‘I think he’s out there,’” Faith said. “‘I think he sees us.’”

  Wolf lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply from it, then held it in his hand and looked at it thoughtfully.

  “In Europe she talked a lot about Gene,” he said, breathing smoke with each word, “saying to people out of the blue, ‘You know, my father died,’ which didn’t generate much interest. Then in London a bunch of us were sitting in Green Park and this girl had a copy of Howl, and Faith said how her dad knew Ginsberg and Michael McClure, Ferlinghetti, and man, you should’ve seen the faces—complete fascination. Really, your dad knew them? Knew as in knew? But how? Like, who was your dad?”

  Wolf had listened as their questions shaped Faith’s answers, in that conversation and later ones, until the understanding became that Gene had been one of the original Beats, doing whiskey shots with Neal Cassady, showing his paintings in the galleries where Ginsberg and Kerouac read. It was a strange thing to watch, this myth about Gene taking shape, what he could have been, should have been. Wolf knew perfectly well it was bullshit. But he went along. Why not? he figured. It was only a goof, and it made Faith so happy. And when he overheard people repeating the story—that chick from San Francisco, you hear about her dad?—it took on a strange kind of truth.

  “We’d show off for him,” Wolf said. “I found myself doing it, too. At wild times I’d look at Faith and say, ‘Gene approves,’ or, ‘I think we got his attention.’ Whether or not he was her original dad, this guy had come into existence, this Beat painter, and he was like our partner in crime.”

  Phoebe sat up, trying to imagine their father watching her, too, poised to scoop her up as when she’d fallen down as a child, lifting her into the air so swiftly she’d forgotten to cry. But she couldn’t feel him. If she fell, she fell.

  “All through the travel we kept feeling this restlessness,” Wolf said. “London, Amsterdam and Belgium, then Paris. I mean, Paris, Christ! But everyone there was still fixated on ’68, the general strike. You couldn’t make anything build, it was all aftermath.

  “It affected us different ways, the restlessness,” he remembered. “I’d kind of hang back, looking for a next move, and Faith would start spending money hand over fist trying to make something happen, you know, find the one thing that would bring everything else to a halt.

  “Once, she bought fifteen feather pillows. ‘White feathers,’ she kept insisting at the shop, ‘blanches, blanches.’ I’m rolling my eyes—the saleswoman thought she was nuts. A bunch of us carried them up the Eiffel Tower, and at the top we cut them open. It was dusk, this electric blue in the air, the feathers gushed out of the sacks, then floated almost level with us, glowing like bees or something, fireflies. Jesus, what a moment. Someone must have reported back down to the guys below because the elevator door popped open and this guard in uniform came charging out. Faith just pointed over the railing at the feathers, saying ‘Look!’ like we’d only just noticed them ourselves, and the guard looks out, kind of taken aback, these feathers hanging there like big snow-flakes on this summer night, and he stands there blinking like he’s forgotten what he came for. After a minute he smiles, this tight little smile under his mustache, shy, like it’s not used to coming out when he’s on duty. ‘Peace,’ we kept telling him. ‘Peace, brother,’ flashing the V, waving as he got back on the elevator. Faith and I just looked at each other, we didn’t even have to speak. We knew Gene was loving this.”

  “Feathers,” Phoebe said. “That sounds incredible.”

  “It was,” Wolf said. “It absolutely was. I’ll never forget it.”

  They sat in silence. Feathers, Phoebe thought, searching in vain for some moment of her own that could rival the beauty and mystery of Faith’s act. She felt a disappointment so familiar it was almost a comfort.

  Still, Wolf said, plenty of things had gone wrong in Paris. Faith leapt into the Seine on a dare and was sucked downstream, so a tourist barge had to rescue her. Another time she got hold of a bottle of absinthe and spent the night in a hospital with a stomach pump down her throat. “We exhausted each other,” Wolf said, “Faith always lunging at things, me always trying to resist.”

  The final blow had come when someone fell off a roof and shattered his leg at a party Faith helped pay for, a bunch of bands playing outside, people dancing, the guy just slipped. Faith blamed herself—thought she should have seen it coming, should have insisted they put up a railing. In her mind everything flipped, their luck was gone, they had to get out of there fast. She visited the broken-legged guy in the hospital, gave him five hundred dollars in francs. He had no idea who she was.

  “The whole time, we’d been hearing stuff about Germany,” Wolf said. “How there were all these anarchist groups in Berlin doing crazy stuff. Whenever we met a German, they’d talk about this student leader of theirs, Rudi Dutschke, who got shot in the head by a neofascist in ’68, paralyzed for life. It broke their hearts. People literally wept, talking about this guy; they were always toasting Rudi. For the student radicals it was like Kennedy getting shot—this anguish, this incredible rage. I guess by 1970 it was really starting to boil.

  “Anyway, in Paris we met a German woman, Inge, who wrote for a lefty German paper called Konkret. She was in Paris with her French husband, and couldn’t wait to get back to Berlin—Paris was dead, she said, but Berlin was just starting to peak. They were driving back there right after the roof incident, so Faith and I thought, What the hell? We got in the car with them.”

  Wolf paused, as if gathering his thoughts. Phoebe waited in silence, craving some grand gesture from her sister, a triumph. She longed for this and dreaded it, too, the way you dread the loss of something.

  “On the ride to Berlin,” Wolf continued, “Inge told us about this friend of hers named Ulrike Meinhof, a pretty well-known journalist who’d suddenly chucked everything a couple of months before and gone underground with a terrorist group. She’d been the ultimate chic lefty—in her thirties, married for years to the editor of Konkret (same
paper Inge worked for), had a big house in Frankfurt, twin daughters. Inge had been reading her stuff since university, so when Ulrike left her husband and moved to Berlin, she tried to befriend her. But Ulrike kept to herself, seemed kind of depressed. Her articles were getting more and more radical—she was sympathetic to these student anarchist groups that were starting to use violence.”

  “What kind of violence?” Phoebe asked. She was thinking of Patty Hearst.

  “Guerrilla-type stuff,” Wolf said. “Disrupting things, throwing a hitch in the works. They’d all gotten hold of this handbook for urban guerrillas, I think it came out of Brazil. They threw Molotov cocktails, rocks, slashed some tires. Little things. I guess the notion was if you made enough cracks, the whole fascist thing would come crashing down under its own weight.”

  “Students?” Phoebe said. “Like my age?”

  “About, yeah,” Wolf said. “Anyhow, Ulrike Meinhof decides to do a TV play and asks Inge to be on the filming staff. A story about girls who run away from a welfare home. So they start working on that, and meanwhile one of these anarchist kids, Andreas Baader, gets thrown in jail for having set a department store on fire two years earlier. He wants to write a book. Ulrike Meinhof hears about this and volunteers to help him. The kid’s lawyer, this well-known lefty lawyer, Horst Mahler, strikes a deal with the government so Ulrike Meinhof can meet with Baader a few times at the Dahlem library to help him do research. The first visit comes right after the TV show is finished. It’s midday, guards close off a wing of the library and bring in Baader, and all hell breaks loose—masked gunmen come bursting in, Ulrike whips a gun out of her purse, shots are fired, and she and the gunmen go tearing off with this kid Baader in tow. The whole country is in total shock, not only because of this well-known journalist turning criminal, but because Baader’s lawyer, Horst Mahler, he’s disappeared, too. The TV play gets canned, naturally; they’re not going to air a show by an outlaw. A couple of weeks later, early June, right about the time when I ran into Faith at Berkeley, this group issues a statement calling themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion.”