Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Nothing wrong with wondering where you come from,” Zasper said. “Anybody would.” Thank heavens the boy didn’t look Molockian. If he had looked Molockian, Zasper’s bit of playacting all that time ago might not have worked, and Danivon Luze could have ended up as one of the skulls on the top of that blasted temple. Zasper shook his head, driving away the thought, and repeated something he had said so often it had become rote: “We saw about twenty provinces on that journey; you don’t really resemble the people in any of them; I can’t be any help to you.” Though wholly false, taken phrase by phrase the statement was quite true.

  Danivon merely stared, his nose twitching. When he did that, it made Zasper feel uncomfortable, as though the boy knew something he shouldn’t. Knew something he wasn’t saying. “Besides,” Zasper said hastily, attempting to divert that gaze, “from what I hear, you’re not that lonesome that often. Not so far as feminine companionship goes, at any rate.”

  “Oh, that,” said Danivon Luze with a self-deprecating grin that admitted everything but specified nothing. “I didn’t mean that, Zas. But never mind. Even if you go back to Enarae, I’ll come visit you. They make real good guns in Enarae, so I’ve got a reason. I’m not going to let you just disappear. I just won’t.”

  It was true, they did make real good guns in Enarae. Zasper’s home province was not remarkable in most regards—not to anyone who had seen Beanfields with its Mother-dears, or Derbeck with its Old Man Daddy, or City Fifteen, full to its walls with dinka-jins. However, Enarae did have an unusual preoccupation with personal weaponry, due to having been founded by weapons engineers descended from sea-girt Phansure, the legendary homeworld. Shrines to the Guntoter stood on every other street corner; citizens were accustomed to the chatter and blast of weapons, the hushed slump of falling bodies, the ritual (sometimes sincere) wailing of the bereaved. Five classes were recognized in Enarae: Executive, Professional, Wage-earner, Trasher. And, of course, Outcaste. The lower one’s caste, the more one’s self-esteem could depend upon prowess with weapons. In acceptance of this fact, Zasper did not disarm himself before returning home.

  Immediately after he arrived, he went to Old Town, the entertainment district, where he strolled Tyme Street from end to end, examining the displays outside every joy shop, relishing the menus recited outside every café savoring every familiar sight and smell. At the bottom of the street, where a rusted iron railing leaned above the sluggish river, he turned the steepish corner and looked down a slanted flight of stone steps into the Swale. Whenever he thought of himself as a youth, orphaned and lonely, he remembered himself doing exactly this: walking down Tyme Street, slowing his steps as the street narrowed above the river, almost stopping as he heard the clucking water at that final corner, wondering each time what marvel would be around the bend. Now, as he came around it once more, he knew no matter what else might have changed, the Swale had remained the same.

  Now as always it seemed strangely empty for such a populous place. On one side the river crawled under ancient piers and around the hulls of silent boats. On the other, vast timbered structures pocked with blind niches leaned toward one another over narrow alleys. Every wall was pitted with doors, massive doors, iron-hinged doors, tightly shut or barely ajar. There were peepholes too, and windows where heavy curtains quivered continually, as at the touch of a restless hand. Behind the doors one could catch glimpses of tortuous corridors leading off into dimly lit interiors, and twisting stairs bending upward to tiny tilted landings that seemed built more for spiders than for people. Dank walls dripped with river sweat and stank of damp rot. Everything in the Swale suggested the disreputable and decadent, the presence of debauched and covert pleasures. The sound of the Swale was a muted growling, the murmur of a swarm in a hollow tree, not immediately visible or threatening, but ominously present, nonetheless.

  A short way down the Swale was a gambling establishment run by Zasper’s oldest friend, Ahl Dibai Bloom. Zasper was no sooner in the door than he heard the greeting:

  “So you’ve come home, eh, Ertigon?”

  “Better late than never, Bloom.”

  “Thought it’d be never, so I did.” Bloom scuttled across the room and zoomed his elevator legs, looking down on Zasper from on high. “Thought I’d see you never again, Ertigon.”

  That had been what Zasper had thought too, once.

  Bloom tugged him to a table more or less secluded from the ruckus going on.

  “So, what brings you back again, Old Man?”

  Because Bloom had more sense than most people, Zasper tried to explain.

  “Lately … lately, do you get the feeling something isn’t right?”

  “You mean in addition to the normal everyday constant things that aren’t right. Like these phlupping taxes, and the number of babies getting knocked off in the street, and …”

  “I mean,” said Zasper with a good deal of dignity, “something else, Bloom. A kind of feeling I’ve had lately.”

  Pressed for details, he could offer only generalities. He said it was only a feeling, as though some hideous danger lurked just out of sight. Danger was an Enforcer’s constant companion, of course, and Zasper said he didn’t mean any ordinary danger, like maybe getting killed, but something worse than that, far worse than that.

  Bloom listened without being impressed, but then it took a lot to impress Bloom. Still, he was a friend and Zasper hadn’t that many friends left alive. Whether Bloom understood or not, Zasper was still most comfortable in Bloom’s place or around the Swale.

  He came there often in the evenings when the river mist rose thickly and the lamps made balloons of light in the soggy air. Sometimes he stood at a corner for an hour or more, listening, watching, soaking up the quality of anticipation he had always felt there, the expectancy that hovered, as though something remarkable were about to occur, some wonder were to creep down the nearest alley, emerging at any moment. If he turned his back, he would miss it. The opportunity of witness would be gone unless he waited, patiently, for whatever it might be.

  One evening while engaged in this solitary occupation, his scanning eyes detected movement where no movement should have been. Turning his head slowly, focusing on the shape of a crouched shadow, he translated the image into a scarcely credible reality—a girl child. A girl child, moreover, full of nervous twitches, half-suppressed fits and starts and trembling shivers that betrayed her presence beside the bulky hinge post of a tightly closed door. The door was carved in high relief with assorted pornographic scenes to advertise the establishment behind it, a brothel of a particularly unhealthy sort.

  A girl this age had no business anywhere near there. Who was she? What child would dare these threatening alleys to hide herself in such a place? An older and more experienced person would be ill advised to do so. A girl child had no business in the Swale at all!

  He moved silently, as Enforcers are taught to do, around and behind, coming up from a direction she would not expect. He did not speak until he had one iron-hard hand fastened firmly on her shoulder.

  “What in hell are you doing here, girl?”

  It wasn’t so much a question as an exclamation, and though his voice was purposefully harsh, his prey did not seem frightened by it as she hung almost limp in his grip. He thought she drooped there like some little animal, too shocked to struggle, maybe playing dead the way they do, waiting for him to drop her so she could scurry off.

  Instead, he drew her into a half-lighted doorway to get a good look at her, a pale-skinned child, thin as a scabbard, topped by a tangled mop of flaming hair. He noticed her gnawed and bleeding fingers when she pushed the hair away from a tear-runneled face, away from stone-green eyes not so much scared as watchful, the skin around them dark as a bruise. He’d seen eyes like that before, also in a child’s face, but it took him a minute to remember where. A dozen years before. In Tolerance. A little boy, peering over a shoulder. Those eyes, Danivon’s eyes, had been watchful in this same way.

  “Child,” he s
aid, shaking her gently, made mild by memory, “what are you doing? It’s damned dangerous here.”

  “I come here all the time,” she said, staring into his face. She saw a stocky man with a gray braid over one shoulder and an Enforcer’s badge on the other. Enforcers were mysterious, almost legendary creatures. She had no answer for the question he had asked. She didn’t know what she was doing in the Swale. She came there, that was all. She sometimes thought she came here to get away from … whatever she wanted to get away from. Other times she thought she came here because of what was here. Though she lacked sufficient vocabulary to define the place, she could feel its essential nature. It suited her because it was like herself.

  “Not a good place to come ever, much less all the time,” he said.

  She was moved to attempt explanation. “It’s … it’s like sort of secret,” she said. “Or like the shrines. Sort of like me too.” Struggling to understand the nature of the Swale, she had come up with amorphous concepts of taboo and sacred things.

  “What’d you mean, like you?”

  She shrugged. What she meant was, special. What she meant was, holy, but she didn’t even have that word. What had occurred to her was that perhaps the reason she was here alone and not with other people was that she was different. Destined for something extraordinary. The idea had come from nowhere, sneaking into her mind bit by bit, like a little warm breeze, thawing her chilly heart. Being different would explain a lot of things, like why nothing worked out for her like it did for other people. She wasn’t sure she really believed the idea, even though it was comforting. Comforting ideas didn’t always—or even very often—work out, either, so she hadn’t dwelt on it much. Still, she didn’t disbelieve it, not yet. She could be destined for some particular purpose, maybe, and if so, she wouldn’t be harmed by haunting the Swale as ordinary people might be. Coming here—it was almost a test!

  “My name is Zasper Ertigon,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Fringe,” she said. “Fringe Dorwalk.”

  “There are better places than this, Fringe,” he told her.

  “Where?” she asked him, intrigued. She had been looking for better places as long as she could remember.

  Their friendship began with that question. Remembering his own youth, he did not waste time in admonitory lectures. Instead, he showed her some better places, safer at least, like the way to get into Ahl Dibai Bloom’s gambling house from Tyme Street, without going through the Swale. Ahl Dibai Bloom, bobbing up and down on his elevator legs as he did when he was amused, said he could use a young person to sweep the gambling rooms and stack the bottles, winking at Zasper over her head as he hired her for this duty.

  After that, Fringe spent a lot of time at Bloom’s, often when Zasper was there, mostly listening as they talked. Zasper told her a censored version of his life as an Enforcer, and she talked artlessly about herself, as though about a stranger. Little by little, he came to know who and what she was, though there was little enough he could do about that. Enforcers who had left off being Council Enforcers to become provincial Enforcers were just that. They had no great status, except among old colleagues. Still, they had a certain reputation and were not often interfered with. Habitués of the Swale, at least, soon learned that Fringe was Zasper’s bit of harmless amusement and better left alone.

  Freak shows were still current on Earth toward the end of the twentieth century, though less fascinating than in some former times. Television had made freakishness a commonplace; the National Enquirer and its ilk had made aberration a matter of mere momentary titillation, of no more duration than a headline. The world’s fattest woman was only a person with a glandular disorder. Human skeletons were merely anorexic. The seal woman was a thalidomide baby. Bearded ladies and giants were no longer fantasy but matters of endocrine malfunction. A child born with an extra leg, the result of an incomplete twinning, would have had his supernumerary appendage amputated at birth. Elephant men had been reen-acted on Broadway and in the movies. Dwarfs and midgets were merely little people who could take the roles of Munchkins or Time Bandits or small furry spear-carrying Ewoks in Star Wars epics. In cosmopolitan places, in urban areas, where the abnormal was ordinary, wonder at the bizarre had been lost.

  In rural areas, however, eyes still widened and mouths still gaped. There the birth of a two-headed calf was still cause for a visit from the neighbors, hexing was a day-to-day possibility, the evil eye a fact. There credulity reigned and one of them was born every minute, fair target for the one-ring sawdust circuses, the dog-and-pony shows, still playing beneath canvas, their often dilapidated but brightly blazoned trucks moseying from smallish town to smallish town, their performances long on smaller animals and acrobats and totally deficient as to elephants or tigers. There, the snake charmer was still good for a three-dollar admission, and the cooch dancers brought out the boys who had no local topless bar for their after-work delectation. There, though the glitter was tarnished, the glamour faded, and the repair budget was always in arrears, the authentic aura of circus enchantment could still be found.

  Mulhollan’s had all the essentials, albeit on a small scale: taped calliope music tootling over the P.A. system, the whir of a cotton-candy machine, the shout of the straw-hatted ticket seller from his high booth, the barker’s spiel outside the sideshow tent, the hum and mutter of the crowd; the smells of wet canvas, hot grease and caramel corn, horseshit and sawdust and hay; a dangle of trapeze ropes, a strut of plumed horses, an awkwardness of ruff-necked dogs dancing on their hind legs. Mulhollan’s had Clown Alley, oleaginous with greasepaint, spider hung with fright wigs and balloony pantaloons. It had Sizzy’s souvenir stand, its roof striped red and soiled white, its tattered sides emblazoned with peeling silver stars. The shelves inside were crowded with gimcrack junk: whistly whirly-birds on a stick, clown-faced coffee mugs, silver caps with horns and ears, plastic boomerangs and Frisbees, tiny wooden acrobats that swung around a bar when one squeezed the uprights together, ashtrays with pictures of dogs and snake charmers on them and the words MULHOLLAN’S MARVELOUS CIRCUS in curly P. T. Barnum letters.

  Mulhollan’s circus was Sizzy’s circus, where long ago she had found refuge from small-town memories, ultra-pious kin-folk, priests, nuns, and people who had to be lived up to. Mulhollan’s circus was Sizzy’s circus, where neither she nor the twins had any history requiring explanation.

  “What are we going to do here?” asked Bertran, looking around himself in a mix of awe and amazement, prey to an unfamiliar bubbling feeling he did not recognize as elation.

  “You’re going to be in the sideshow,” said his aunt. “You’re going to earn a living, the only way you can, until you grow up and they maybe cut you apart, and then you can do what you want.”

  “I don’t think child labor’s legal,” said Nela, without conviction, feeling what Bertran felt and recognizing it no more than he.

  “You’re not going to labor,” said Sizzy. “You’re going to stand on a stage, all dressed up. After everybody’s had a look at you, we’ll put a curtain between the two of you, and the women in the audience can take a peek at Nela and the men can take a peek at Bertran. For five dollars extra.”

  “Look at me naked?” screamed Nela, shivering pleasurably.

  “Naked,” said Sizzy. “Just a peek.”

  “She’s got hair on her chest,” said Bertran.

  “That’s what Nair is for,” his aunt announced loftily. “And hot wax treatment, and maybe even electrolysis.”

  “She doesn’t have much boobs.”

  “So she’ll get implants,” Aunt Sizzy said, undismayed. “Look, kids, be practical. Nobody wants the responsibility. Nobody’s ever known what to do with you, including my poor fool of a sister. At least here, there’s some purpose to your life, right? And some enjoyments too, I’ll bet. Marla was my favorite little sister. She wasn’t long on sense—none of Mom’s babies born after she was forty had good sense—but she had a good heart. I owe it to her to see yo
u get some enjoyments. Fun, you know?”

  They didn’t know, but they learned. After the initial shock, it turned out to be not bad. Good, in fact. The best thing was that the circus was completely matter-of-fact. After all those years of strain and prayer, circus life was sensible and acceptable. No giggles. No pointed fingers. No labored three-party consultations in the confessional. No arguments about what bathroom they were going to use. Just, “Hi, Berty. Hi, Nela,” from a clown. Just, “You kids going to eat or what! Get over here before I throw it out,” from the cook. Just, “Try on your new costumes before noon so I can get them done before the show tonight,” from Mrs. Mangini. The Manginis were mostly trapeze or horse people, but Mrs. Mangini was too fat to ride or fly, so she did a lot of the circus sewing instead.

  The twins had a new double fold-out bed in Aunt Sizzy’s trailer. They had a wire-haired fox terrier named Flip who belonged to them but also did acrobatics in the clown act. With them in the sideshow was a hairy-nosed geek named Ralph, who ate live chickens and was billed as the Alaskan Wolf Boy. They had Sappho and Archimedes Lapin, billed as the smallest man and woman in the world, even though they weren’t nearly the smallest. They had the cooch girls (any female below the age of thirty who wasn’t otherwise occupied) as the opening act, including the girl who doubled as Madame Evanie, the World Famous Snake Charmer. They had the marvelous Timber Head, who could drive nails into his face. They had Countess vampira, with her long, long fangs that not even the dentists in the audience could tell from real because she’d had them done in Los Angeles where dentistry had attained the status of an art form. They had Tiberias, the mind reader, who usually didn’t but sometimes could. And they had Bertran and Nela Zy-Czorsky (which Nela had made up out of the letters of their own name and pronounced Zee-CHORsky), the Eighth Wonder of the World, the only malefemale Siamese twins in the universe.

  Bertran’s costume was midnight-blue, bow tie and tails, with a gleaming white shirt. Nela wore a shimmery pink dress, all sequins and ruffles. They stood side by side on the platform, long enough for people to get restless and start to question the whole thing, then they turned away from each other, just a little, showing the broad pink band of flesh that joined them. Aunt Sizzy would shout, “Is there a doctor or nurse in the audience?”