Circus of the Grand Design

by Robert Freeman Wexler

  ~

  Lewis's name, in a voice like a song, rose from his unconscious to awaken him. For a moment he thought he saw sunlight flowing into his room, then it vanished; he doubted he had truly seen it. Sitting up in the bed, he caught a fragrant trace of citrus, but the woman was gone. He rose from bed and went to the shower.

  In the hall, the lights were again bright. All the way to the dining car, as usual carrying his satchel with journal and legal pad, he felt as though he was walking upstream through an oatmeal current. The dining car was empty—not even Cinteotl was at his station. He wanted food and coffee, but didn't have the energy to fix anything himself. The coffeepot held enough for a cup. He filled a mug and sat in a booth, facing the door to the gym. A magazine with a cover showing a model sailing ship lay on the tabletop across from him. Ignoring it, he took out his journal notebook and began to write, but...He found himself unwilling to describe his previous night's experience. What could he say? Even in the privacy of his own journal any description would sound preposterous. Instead, he closed his eyes, trying to recall each detail of the woman's materialization and subsequent actions. She hadn't spoken, but her voice would be the sound of a cello.

  The door to the gymnasium opened. A woman entered. He hid his bandaged hand under the table.

  The woman's shoulder-length hair was light brown; the citrus woman's was black, and her body had been soft and curvy. This woman's was bony. She wore jogging shoes and a loose, sweat-soaked shirt. When she saw Lewis she gasped and started to edge back into the gymnasium. Then she stopped her sudden retreat.

  "That's mine," she said in a shrill voice. She pointed at the magazine.

  "Okay, I wasn't going to take it," he said, keeping his voice low and gentle. She took several quick steps forward, reached, and snatched the magazine. "Are you Miss Linda?" he asked. "I've met all the other women so I assume that's who you are, unless of course..."

  "I work much too hard to associate with entertainers," she said, her voice now firm.

  "Then why do you perform as a clown?" As publicist, he felt he had the right to know. She turned to leave the dining car, and he watched the backs of her ropy-muscled legs propel her away.

  Lewis flipped his journal notebook closed and took out the legal pad, deciding to make a list of train cars. He drew four rectangles to represent cars, then wrote Gym in the first rectangle, Dillon's Office in the second, and Storage in the third.

  How much more could there be?

  He jumped up and walked through the gym, Dillon's car, and past the door marked storage. The next car had one glossy red door with the word Lounge, painted diagonally in bright blue. He walked in, expecting something spectacular, but found ugly vinyl furniture facing an antique-looking television. Opposite the television, bookcases covered the wall. In the far right corner was a door, and inside, a closet containing a washing machine and dryer. Seeing such a mundane thing gave him an odd sense of comfort.

  He turned on the television. Sound came first, a fiddle, a man singing, then a wailing. A black and white picture emerged—the wailing sound came from a man's throat. Lewis had never heard anything like it. The singing/wailing man was huge, with a broad-brimmed hat. He sat on a stool holding a guitar that in his hands looked like a toy. Musicians (drummer, fiddler, a thin man playing a stand-up bass) grouped around him on a low stage. Though the television looked old, its picture was clear, with crisp definition. The big man began singing a bouncy song about a man named Fuzz Dixon, and the camera panned around, showing a dirt-floored arena surrounding the stage. A figure came into view: Bodyssia, leading her capybaras. Home movies? Jenkins carried out a burlap sack. The sack wriggled. He lowered it to the ground and upended it. A winged shape popped out—a bird as big as the one Cinteotl had been cooking. It shook itself, squawked, and spread its wings. It seemed to be unable to fly. Bodyssia's animals—couldn't be capybaras, more like awkward bears—circled the bird. The bird hissed at them. A capybarabear darted at the bird. The bird shook a wing at it and the capybarabear stopped. Another crept close from the other side. The bird flapped toward the stage and the three capybarabears converged on it.

  Lewis turned off the set. Must have been an act. The bird was trained to play-fight...like a fighting rooster...very dramatic.

  ~

  A musky stench greeted him on leaving the lounge car, a wet, animal smell that reminded him of the horseback riding lessons he had taken at summer camp when he was a teenager. Instead of rooms, the car contained two stalls. A thick layer of straw carpeted the first, and the three capybarabears sprawled, apparently asleep. Against the back wall were three large bowls filled with apples, carrots, and potatoes. The second stall contained the dirty-white horse that had raced the mechanical horse.

  Lewis pulled the legal pad from his satchel and drew two new rectangles, which he labeled Lounge and Capybarabears/Horse.

  The next car smelled worse, and he wasn't surprised to see the elephants. The car was at least as large as the gymnasium, with two pens fenced off from a scuffed and dirty tile floor. In one of the pens, grass carpeted the floor and an enormous tree with broad leaves spread drooping branches. Near it were two birds like the ones on the television. Distant trees jutted from a low hill. What a clever diorama. He couldn't tell where the pen ended and the background began...but they were real trees...real grass. Not a background.

  The elephants lay beside a pond, the two smaller ones and the other, much larger, covered with coarse, black hair. With the grass in front of him, Lewis could pretend he was outside. He was getting used to the smell. It would have been nice to walk in there and sit under the trees. Not with elephants there, of course.

  The second pen was smaller, with a floor of packed dirt. It contained a jumble of equipment: straps, buckles, padded blankets, wooden platforms mounted on wooden braces (elephant saddles?). On his growing diagram, Lewis drew a larger box and wrote Elephants.

  Orange, greasy-looking stains streaked the walls of the next car. He found one unmarked door in the middle of the corridor and turned the knob. The light from the hall showed him a cord hanging; pulling it turned on a bare white bulb. The room was empty, and dust covered everything. Some of the swirls in the gritty floor looked like footprints. The dust made him cough; he closed the door and noted: Empty Storeroom in a seventh rectangle.

  Next came a car that was a wide corridor, like the rounded interior of an airplane but without seats. Oval windows, cloudy of course, lined both sides. The bottom of the windows were level with his waist, as though meant to be used while seated. He wrote Passenger Car, No Seats.

  He moved deeper into this new car. His mouth felt hot, and he kept swallowing and clearing his throat, trying to force out the lumpy sensation. Water would be nice. Weren't you always supposed to take a canteen when you went for a hike? In case something happened. He had the impression that the car was becoming narrower. The train couldn't extend much farther. Maybe he would find something to drink ahead. It didn't make sense for the train to have this vacant car. He imagined the train encircling the globe, hovering while the land and sea rotated beneath it. That was why he never felt motion—the train levitated, and the world moved.

  He leaned against the wall for a moment, and wrote: "It goes on and on." A few yards farther on his hair brushed the ceiling.

  Startled, he stepped back and looked around. Nothing. When he continued, his hair again brushed the ceiling; its curved, white surface pressed against him. The windows were now smaller, and lower than his waist, as though the whole car had shrunk proportionally. Back the way he had come—the corridor an infinitely long passage stretched to the inhabited parts of the train, and in front of him, the same. He returned the legal pad to his satchel and left it on the floor. Bending forward, he kept going and was soon on hands and knees. His injured hand began to throb again, and he tried to keep his weight off of it. His knees ached from pressing on the floor. He pulled himself along, over a surface of pitted stone, on and on, an agonizing belly crawl. He w
asn't claustrophobic, but what if he got stuck? Nobody knew where he was. He didn't know where he was. This car didn't even look like the train anymore.

  The ceiling pressed down; he flattened his body and squeezed through into a larger space. His hand struck air. He found himself at the edge of a canyon. At the bottom, a stream flowed, far away, too far to reach. The stream taunted him, water, clear and fresh but of no use to him. With all that inaccessible water, his mouth filled with the dust of crumbly, yellowed newspaper. His heart boomed in the narrow passage. Out out out, his heart said.

  He backed frantically, blindly, continuing until he reached his satchel and lay beside it, panting.

  In both directions, the corridor appeared unchanged, a simple tube with windows, stretching beyond his sight. The endless tunnel disoriented him: to his right, to his left, everything identical; he had to get away, back to familiar cars, people. Staying here was dangerous. The walls—what if they contracted before he could escape? He jumped to his feet, his satchel flapping against his side as he ran. The door was close. It would swish open, granting him escape from this tubular hell. When he neared the door, he slowed, and caught sight of a brick structure outside. The train had stopped.

  So happy to be able to see the outside, he darted from window to window, absorbing everything he could: a squat, red brick building beside an empty parking lot. The sun cast a pinkish light along the tops of the clouds. On the opposite side of the corridor, a high embankment. Weeds, a few small, yellow flowers. An old tire. Even the tire made him smile.

  He needed to get out there, feel the soft air on his cheeks. Leaving the diminishing tunnel car, he passed through the car containing the empty storeroom and on, into the elephant car, where he stopped, confronted by unexpected absence. The grassy pen was empty.

  Gone? But where would elephants go?

  The elephant saddles had been removed from the other pen. Elephants obviously taken for a ride.

  Picturing them crashing through the train corridors, he laughed, an uncontrollable howl and cackle that erupted from his stomach and rose toward the misty ceiling, growing stronger and louder. Staccato scene changes: walls expand to allow passage, the wind pulling and tearing, eating, always eating, fortunes found despite this foundationless panorama, the essence of which surrounded him, inviolate and handsome. One plateau for the firstborn, a ridge for their elders. The landscape swayed beneath a pink sun. Evanescent doubts like crows flew from heights beyond reach of doom or decay. He was but a speck, even less, without support, without a tether to keep him from drifting into bewildering lacunae where the air-breathers suffer. The floor hard here, tile pavement gave him nothing, aloof in its squares of tensile.

  His head met something, a tubular cushion placed to aid him, here, in his moment of need. With eyes closed, the room became a universe, and he, its lone resident. Whimpering, he grasped the tube of his cushion, snaking pillow of hollow tube, and after a time, the opened his eyes, and the tubes became a hose, the hose fastened to a faucet; he unscrewed the hose from the faucet and turned the handle. Water fell over his face.

  Much refreshed, he turned off the water and sat up. This car must have an exit—elephants wouldn't be able run out through the caboose, would they? He laughed again, but softer this time.

  The outer wall, across from the pens, showed the outline of a large door. Protruding from the floor near it was a lever. He pulled it; the wall-door swung down to form a ramp. Feeling freed from prison, Lewis stood at the top of the ramp, looking out at an empty parking lot. He was about to walk down when he saw coming toward him: the three elephants and a man in a red fez carrying a staff.

  The man tapped the large elephant on the head with his staff, saying, "In Paladin, Clytemnestra, in Percival."

  The two smaller elephants wore the saddle-platforms, the larger one nothing. "Good job today gals. Special treats, special treats for my sweet girlie-girls," the man said.

  The elephants mounted the ramp. Lewis flattened himself against the wall. The elephants passed him; a phalanx of giant, shuddering beast filled his vision. The floor shook under their tread. Unable to move, unable to breathe, frozen—if he didn't move, if he remained still, so still, becoming part of the wall, mere surface, away from those terrible feet...

  The floor calmed. He opened his eyes to find the fez-wearing man staring at him.

  "Well well well," the man said. "Finally got me a new assistant, old one being gone always when work needs doing." He looked at Lewis, his expression stiff and unwelcoming. "Close the ramp door, boy."

  Lewis forced himself to answer, his voice hoarse from thirst, from the intense relief that follows terror. "Not assistant. New publicist."

  But the man had already followed the elephants into the smaller pen. Lewis ignored the order and walked away.

  Chapter 10: Celebration

  The press release was gone from Dillon's desk, so the manager must have been there at some point. Lewis pulled aside the red velvet curtains. Now dark outside, the lights of cars moved along a highway fifty or so yards away. The train lurched. Lewis's stomach twisted, and he grabbed a thick handful of curtain to steady himself. When he looked again the window was cloudy.

  He stared at the glass for a while, then turned and left Dillon's room, hurrying through an empty gymnasium and into a dining car swarming with the entire circus crew.

  Feeling as though he had been in isolation for days, the scene overwhelmed him. Everywhere, people laughing, shouting, jumping on tables. The noise was appalling; it battered at him, a sinuous force that froze him in place. He started to ease himself into the tumult. The activity here, it had nothing to do with him. The outsider, he would be invisible, could likely walk straight through the crowd without being noticed. He scanned the room, seeing the acrobats at a table, that giant Bodyssia woman at the food counter. And on registering the food counter, a world of scents paraded before him. When had he last eaten? He could get some food and take it back to his room.

  A clown—Miss Linda?—sat at a booth surrounded by acrobats. She covered her head and ducked when two of the acrobats rose and leaned toward each other over the table. Lewis expected them to hit each other; instead they embraced. The scene was so outlandish—Miss Linda in long-sleeved coveralls, red wig, face painted white, and the acrobats in their gold face paint.

  Between Lewis and the food counter, Brisbane juggled oranges while Gold, Dawn, and Desmonica watched. Lewis would have to pass them quickly. He hid his bandaged hand in his pocket.

  Gold saw him.

  "Holy Max!" Gold punched Lewis's shoulder. He had a red welt on his cheek. An accident during his act? "That was some run we had, buddy. Your PR is crackling!"

  "Be right back," Lewis said. "I've got to eat something." That wasn't so bad, he thought, starting toward the counter. Now nothing between him and the food except that giant.

  "I'm starved. I'll go with you," Dawn said. She tugged on his left arm, pulling the bandaged hand from his pocket. She smelled worse than she had at their first meeting. With her silver eye shadow she looked like a mannequin. It would be nice to see how she looked clean. He thought about how he had liked her when they met. Although that was before the appearance of the citrus woman. Would she join the party? He looked around the room again, wondering if he could have missed spotting her.

  "Hi Sunrise," Bodyssia said to Dawn.

  Lewis stayed behind Dawn, thinking it would be best to be out of Bodyssia's reach, but he had forgotten how long her arms were. She gripped his shoulder and pulled him closer.

  "Hey handsome, did you like the show?"

  "We've got Lewis to thank for the fabulous crowds," Dawn said.

  "Well cheers to you." Bodyssia leaned over to bring her face level with his. He thought she was about to kiss him. Instead, she squeezed and lifted him. At least she smells better than Dawn, he thought as his nose pressed into her neck muscles.

  She put him down and returned to her food. His sides hurt where she had held him. He would take the
first thing Cinteotl offered and run back to his room with it before anything else happened. Cinteotl stood behind the counter, wiping his hands repeatedly on the sides of his apron, as if he couldn't quite get them clean enough to keep preparing food.

  "The fine art of circusing is a hungry and thirsty business."

  Cinteotl spoke with an odd formality that Lewis supposed he saved for special meals.

  "I have cooked for all of you several hearty dishes from which you may make your choices." He pointed at the blackboard and began reading off several dishes: "marbled groundhog casserole, cephalopod with quinoa..."

  "I don't know when my last meal was," Lewis said. He placed both hands on the counter to steady himself.

  "And for you, grilled locobird with butterfly sauce," Cinteotl said, pointing to Lewis.

  Lewis didn't have the strength to disagree

  "I slipped, Cinteotl, but I caught myself," Dawn said.

  "Melon for desert?" Cinteotl asked, and passed another plate to Bodyssia.

  "I've got to go sit down," Lewis said. "Call me when the food's done, and I'll come get it."

  Alone, finally alone, he sat at a booth, his back to the counter, willing everyone to stay away. He pulled out his legal pad and tore off the pages containing the rough diagram of the train. He would recopy it later, in his room. On paper it looked so simple. A few cars, animals. How many other people, he wondered, had gone to the empty passenger car? Was he the only curious person on the train?

  One of the acrobats walked past, then stopped and spun around to face Lewis. "May you excuse me," the man said. He had a long scar across his forehead. His breath smelled like alcohol.

  Lewis drew the paper closer and folded it, not wanting anyone to see what he had been doing.

  "So sorry to bother you, to whom I have not yet been properly introduced, but I must have a fragment of paper. May you give?"

  Lewis tore off a sheet and held it out for the acrobat, who bowed and thanked him. Then, with the acrobat gone, he unfolded the pages, but had difficulty focusing on the words. Annoyed, he turned around to see if his plate was ready. Bodyssia blocked his view of Cinteotl.