The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  “It’s not that big a town.”

  “What about another town? I mean, how do we know it was exactly this town? We saw lots of towns just on the train.”

  “Phoebe, she was found here.”

  “Well I never saw that report or whatever it was, did you?” Phoebe said. “Did you see what it said? Because I never did.”

  Wolf took a long breath. “You can’t suddenly call every fact into question.”

  “Believe me,” Phoebe said, making an effort to speak calmly. “If this were the place, I’d know.”

  “But how? You were a little girl, thousands of miles away. Phoebe, come on! Listen to yourself.” He was pleading with her. He wanted to get away, Phoebe thought, that was all.

  “I’d know,” she said, “because it would feel a certain way.”

  Wolf seemed about to speak. Then he crossed his arms. “Okay.”

  Phoebe looked around. The pressure began to recede. This wasn’t the place—this was anyplace, no place. South of Corniglia she spotted another cliff even higher than this one, jutting farther out to sea. “It could be that,” she said, pointing. “I bet it is.”

  Wolf moved between Phoebe and the wall. He braced himself against it, taking both her hands in his own, and looked straight into her eyes. “You could spend the rest of your life running up and down this coast,” he said. “Next you’ll be saying maybe it wasn’t Italy, maybe it was Spain. But this has to end. Somewhere it has to end.”

  “It’ll end,” she said.

  But Wolf’s expression had clarified. There was something he wanted to say, something pushing out from behind his eyes. “Listen,” he said. “This is the town, and this is the place. I promise, I swear to you—Phoebe, do you hear me?—I swear to you, it happened here.”

  He was squeezing her hands, his face so near Phoebe’s own that for a moment it eclipsed both ocean and cliff. She began to protest, then stopped. Wolf’s expression stopped her. Something had dropped away, laying bare a terrible knowledge she’d glimpsed in him before but never seen directly. His lips were white. Phoebe made a sound and stepped away.

  Wolf released her hands. The determination fell from him, leaving a sick, questioning look. Phoebe covered her eyes, breathing into her hot palms.

  “You were here,” she said softly.

  Her words made the certainty fall against her with brutal coherence, unyielding as earth. She felt buried in it. She ran to the church and tried its door, but the door was bolted shut. She looked back at Wolf and found him watching her with that odd remoteness, as if his mind had switched off or simply fled, as if the pressures upon it were too much.

  Phoebe approached him. In Wolf’s eyes she saw the damage clearly now, like broken glass underwater—obvious, once you knew what to look for. Abruptly Wolf twisted to one side, leaned over the wall and vomited down the cliff. Phoebe fled, sinking to the ground by the church, her eyes fixed to the convulsions of Wolf’s back. When he’d finished, he rose slowly, wiping an arm across his mouth. He was looking out to sea. Phoebe’s teeth chattered. Wolf went to the water fountain and took a long drink, splashing water on his face and then his hair, rubbing it in, then more on his face.

  At last he came and sat on the ground beside her. Water dripped from his hair; he smelled of the sea wind. They didn’t speak. Silty dust blew in their faces. Sitting with her back against the church, Phoebe couldn’t see the ocean, only sky.

  “I started thinking last night you might already know,” Wolf said, sounding short of breath. “Or be starting to guess.”

  Phoebe stared at him. The event gaped before them, so gigantic. There seemed no way of approaching it. “Please talk,” she said. “Please.”

  Wolf sat hunched over his bent knees, forehead resting on his wrists. He seemed unable to lift his head. “I saw her,” he said. “I saw her, and I let it happen. Can you believe that?” He looked up at Phoebe, anguish and incredulity mingling in his face as if some part of him were still questioning the truth of these assertions. “I saw her. I watched her.”

  “But—wait,” Phoebe said, disoriented. “She was—I mean, that stuff you told me before, was it true or not?”

  “What I …”

  “You know. The Red Army? The bank robberies?”

  “Yeah,” Wolf said. “All that was true.”

  Phoebe felt relief. She wanted things to be true. “And she came to Munich, like you said?”

  “She did.”

  Phoebe waited for him to continue. “And then she left?” she asked timidly.

  Wolf lifted his head. “Something happened in Berlin that I didn’t tell you,” he said, the words coming slowly. “Something bad.”

  Phoebe absorbed it. “Someone got hurt,” she said instinctively. Then a dreadful intimation overcame her. “Someone died?”

  Wolf just watched her.

  “Who?” Phoebe said. “Someone from the bank robberies?”

  “No, after,” Wolf said. “After the Red Army dumped her. There were these other groups, and she joined in with one of them. June Second Movement, it was called.”

  “And they …”

  “They set a bomb,” he said. “At the Chamber Court. Faith I guess carried it inside, in a picnic basket. She put it in a trash can in the basement; it went off at night. They thought no one would be around, but a guy was, a janitor.”

  “And he died?”

  “Yeah,” Wolf said. “Head injuries.”

  Phoebe shook her head. She felt horror, not so much at the death itself, which seemed purely abstract, but at the smallest inkling of what horror her sister would feel, having been responsible. “Faith must’ve freaked …” she said.

  “You can’t imagine,” Wolf said. “The papers told everything about the guy’s life, how he was thirty-two, four kids, working the night shift and going part-time to the university. They went nuts with the story: working class guy gets cut down, you know, by these kids—anarchists, supposedly on his side.”

  “But Faith?” Phoebe said. “Setting a—there’s no way. Wolf, there’s no way.”

  “I think at that point she honestly couldn’t see the danger,” Wolf said. “All she knew was that these Red Army people had dumped her, and maybe if she’d been bolder, you know, proved herself more … it put her in a frame of mind to do anything. She’d already taken this drastic step, joining them, she’d staked everything on that being right. I think in her mind there was no going back.”

  Phoebe felt a trickle of relief. She’d found her bearings, could connect even these drastic motives with the person she knew as her sister. Wolf, too, seemed steadier now.

  “You’d think she would’ve left Berlin the minute he died, but she didn’t,” he said, speaking rapidly now. “She must’ve stayed another week, went to the guy’s funeral, found out everything she could about him, children’s names, what kind of car he drove. She actually took a train to the suburb where he’d lived and found his house, stood across the street all afternoon watching people bring food to the widow, saw his older kids come back from school. It’s incredible she didn’t get busted, or questioned at least, except maybe the cops just figured anyone so overtly curious, plus a foreigner, couldn’t be more than a tourist.”

  Faith had arrived in Munich in a state wavering between incomprehension and panic. “I killed a man,” she would say, and freeze, staring at her hands or the wall while the fact ricocheted through her another time. She had bouts of uncontrollable shaking, so she couldn’t walk or even sit up; she’d have to curl in a ball and shut her eyes until the shaking stopped. “I killed a man,” she would say through chattering teeth. “God, please help me.”

  Wolf held her, trying to get Faith to look at his eyes. “Hey, hey, let’s not talk about killing,” he’d say. “No one killed anyone. There was just an accident, okay?”

  But she seemed not to hear, her eyes closed. “I’m sick,” she would say. “I’m so sick.”

  She was thin as a knife, her skin blue-white. All day long she would s
it alone, thinking of what she’d done, as if some answer would come to her by thinking hard enough. But the answer was always the same: “I killed him. Like a gun to his head.”

  “Stop it,” Wolf pleaded. “Look, if you hadn’t been there, it would’Ve happened just the same, Faith, I promise you. The guy would still be dead.”

  “But I was there. I had it in my hands. I could’Ve dug a hole and buried it or else thrown it in the river and then he’d still be alive.”

  “If you’d known there was a guy to be saved,” Wolf said gently, “you would’ve saved him.”

  “But I thought I was,” Faith said, weeping now. “That’s what I thought I was doing—saving that guy. That was the whole point of everything.”

  Wolf begged her to come home with him, back to San Francisco. She needed help, needed long-term counseling and therapy—hell, he didn’t know what she needed. But whatever it was, she wasn’t getting it sitting alone in his apartment while he worked at the shoe factory. He agonized over calling her mother and just laying everything on the table, but Faith made him swear he wouldn’t tell a soul as long as he lived. “No one,” she said. “You tell and I’m out the door.” She meant it. Wolf’s biggest fear was that she’d bolt—as long as Faith was with him she was safe, he thought, he could take care of her. But if she ran away, then who knew? So he didn’t call. And as for professional help, Faith greeted the notion with contempt. “Help with what?” she said. Murder was a mortal sin. No one could help her but God Himself.

  “Then maybe God will help!” Wolf cried, his own earthly arguments having failed him. “Maybe He’ll forgive you.”

  “He’ll punish me first,” Faith said. “And I hope He does it soon.”

  She waited. Day after day she sat, waiting for her punishment to begin. She could not understand what was taking so long, then decided this waiting must be part of the punishment itself. But it pained her not to act; her impulse had always been to act, but now her actions had betrayed her. She was afraid to move.

  “She could hardly leave the apartment,” Wolf said. “The minute she was outside, she’d start thinking she’d left the oven turned on or a window open and something awful was going to happen. She felt cursed, a danger to everyone around her. We’d get on the bus and suddenly she couldn’t find her change purse—she’d turn to me practically in tears, ransacking her pockets while everyone waited, and of course it would be right there, somewhere obvious …” He shook his head. “She was constantly bringing up stuff from the past, how she’d pushed some kid in a river and he cut his eye, or hitting your mom on her tricycle—her trike, for God’s sake—how she’d ripped your mom’s stocking and cut the back of her leg. In Faith’s mind her whole life had boiled down to that. Hurting innocent people.”

  At night she would jerk awake and lie rigid with fear. “I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something,” she’d say, peering at the ceiling. Wolf would lean over her, putting his hand on her chest, trying to still the violent kicking of her heart. “I have to do something,” she’d say.

  But no, he told her, that was exactly wrong. There was nothing she had to do except find a way of living with what she’d done. “Look, awful stuff happens,” he said. “People live with it, Faith, that’s how life works.”

  “He has four children,” Faith said. “One’s only three years old.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about!” Wolf cried, seizing on it. “You lived with that—you lost your father, and look, you survived it.”

  He knew instantly that it was the wrong thing. “Right,” Faith said bitterly. “And look at me now.”

  There were long silences as Wolf spoke, but Phoebe just waited. She felt no more urgency, because now she knew—the missing piece was in her hands. She was almost afraid to have the story end, of what she would do when Wolf stopped talking for good.

  With time Faith had calmed down, as Wolf had known she would. Even panic and despair could be gotten used to, and gradually she began meeting people, hanging out a little. At times you might not have known her from her old self, but Wolf saw a difference: she’d grown careless. That hope, the near-evangelical purpose that had fired even her wildest schemes, was gone. She went parachuting with some U.S. soldiers kicking around Munich on a day leave, something she’d never done in her life, but it left her cold. “Her taste for danger resurfaced, little by little,” Wolf remembered. “But not as a road to anything else, she just wanted the feeling. The distraction of it. That scared the shit out of me.”

  While he was at work one day Faith met up with a group of kids drifting south in a van. When Wolf got home that night, she mentioned the possibility of joining them. Wolf said, sure, he’d come along, too, but Faith seemed leery of this. “You wouldn’t like them,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “So, why go?”

  Faith looked at her hands. “Maybe you should go home,” she said fearfully. “To San Francisco.”

  “What the fuck does that have to do with it?”

  “We should go our separate ways.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m bringing you down. I can see it,” she said. “I’m bringing you down, you need to get away from me.”

  Wolf wrapped her in his arms. Faith was sobbing. “Baby,” he said. “Baby, this has to stop. You have to let it stop.”

  Faith spoke into his shirt. “What?” Wolf said, pulling back so he could hear. She was trembling, her eyes closed. “Baby, what did you say?”

  “I killed a man,” Faith whispered.

  Wolf ditched his factory job and got in the van with the rest of these kids. “They were dull,” he recalled, “but there was an edge of desperation that kept things pretty lively. I’ve wondered sometimes if I’m the only one in that group that’s still alive.”

  Their ostensible goal was a Jethro Tuli concert in Rome, but really it was killing time at sixty miles an hour, everyone tumbling around in the carpeted back of the van, hitchhikers hopping in and out, a jam jar full of liquid LSD sloshing around in someone’s lap. They’d lost the eyedropper, were just dipping in their fingers and licking off the drug. There was only one other girl besides Faith, an Italian sixteen-year-old who was shooting speed and running out of money. By the time they got to Rome, she’d been reduced to begging people for the cottons they used to shoot up. Once, in her excitement at receiving one, she’d dropped the cotton on someone’s white shag rug and spent twenty minutes crawling around in search of it, running shaking fingers through the dirty white shag, such a miserable sight that finally Wolf gave her the money for a bag. For the next two days she kept staring at him with these beautiful ruined eyes, saying, “Please, baby, I won’t ask again. But please.”

  “Faith kept trying to get me out of there,” Wolf explained. “It shamed her, I think, being with these people, the level she’d sunk to. But I was pretty sure if I left, she’d forget what level that was, just lose herself in it.”

  After Rome, Wolf took over the driving, which eased his worst fears of pitching off the road, not to mention reducing the number of hitchhikers they stopped for. He tried to keep Faith in the front seat, next to him. Otherwise he could barely drive, he’d be so fixated on the rearview mirror, what she was doing back there. Often she would sleep, her head in his lap, fitful terrified sleeps, but at least she was there, at least he could put one hand on her head or rub her shoulders, whisper into her ear that her luck had turned, everything was getting better now—couldn’t she feel it?—hoping Faith would hear it on some unconscious level and believe him.

  But when they hit the Italian coast, a remarkable change occurred. Faith glimpsed the sea and sat upright, staring at the water with a mesmerized attention she’d not shown for anything in weeks, save the ghastliness of her own crime. “It was amazing,” he told Phoebe. “There was just this total alertness, like she’d remembered something that threw a whole new light on her situation. I waited for it to fade but it didn’t, she sat the
re riveted, and as we drove along the coast, all that anguish, the lassitude, everything—it just drained right off her.

  “We got stuck going inland a long time because of the mountains. I practically freaked out, thinking, Forget it, she’s going to slide back into her funk, but Faith stayed cool. After all these damn tunnels we ended up at this town, Manarola, just one south of Corniglia. I said, ‘That’s it, folks, we’re stopping here,’ and we spent the night on the beach, this gorgeous beach covered with white rocks, big pieces of shell—it looked like the moon. Faith and I sat on a huge rock, and the tide came in around us. She was calm, calm like I’d never seen her—even at her best she’d never been calm. It was like she’d reached a new level, or that’s what I wanted to think. I’d been waiting so long for signs of hope.”

  And sitting there, sea drifting in around them, Wolf had understood for the first time what kind of life he wanted to live with Faith. Maybe they wouldn’t rise up into the sky the way he’d thought, maybe the real thing was doing what his parents had done, pay the rent, read the paper, hell, maybe that was the dare. To live—day in, day out. Just live. It felt like a revelation.

  They cleared away the shells and rocks from a patch of beach and unrolled Wolf’s blue down sleeping bag on sand that sparkled like sand inside an hourglass. Whenever Wolf woke up, he’d find Faith calmly watching the stars. What a relief it must be, he thought, for her not to feel that panic anymore.

  Next morning he and Faith climbed to Corniglia, packs on their backs. The others straggled far behind, but Wolf and Faith felt wonderfully light, like bubbles rising through water.

  They wandered through the town. Faith bought a lavish spread for lunch, figs and mortadella and big cans of tuna. She’d turned in the last of her traveler’s checks in Rome, but she didn’t care. “Why not?” she said, grinning like the old days, the feather pillow days. They set the bags of food in the shade of the little church, then sat on this wall to wait.

  Wolf took her hand. “You’re better,” he said. “Aren’t you?”