CIRCUS
The Colonel stands center stage, awash in light, his trademark patois made incomprehensible by a huge red bullhorn.
The Colonel stands center stage, awash in light, his trademark patois made incomprehensible by a huge red bullhorn.
Suddenly the air is full of lithe and spangled tumblers in blue and red and white leotards, swinging in wide loops from metal batons attached to wires so thin one can easily imagine them invisible, lending the acrobats the illusion of flight.
The tumblers barely touch the bars, swinging wild and at seeming random, catching for the briefest moment before flying out once again into the void, somersaulting and catching the next baton as if only by chance.
Gordy tries to count the acrobats, but it’s an impossible task, they crisscross and fly too quickly. There may be five of them, there may be seven, there may be ten.
The batons are being swung across the expanse by ten clowns clinging to short chrome fire poles, which have descended from neat holes in the tent roof.
These clowns are arranged at intervals around the trapeze rig, and hang from the poles by their legs, leaving their arms free.
They catch the batons in white-gloved hands and throw them out again in the general direction of the trapeze artists, carelessly, without aim or purpose or urgency, and sometimes—holy hell!—they miss the baton entirely, and it floats indifferently away.
Gordy is chewing the insides of his cheeks, he frets with fear, he thrums with vicarious adrenaline.
Impossible for this to end well, there is no sense here, no pattern, there will be a collision, a clown will fail to throw a crucial baton, will throw too soon or too late to meet an acrobat in her moment of need.
The indifference of the clowns is terrifying and exhilarating; the tumblers depend entirely upon the whims of these buffoons.
Below, Gordy sees nothing to halt a fall but the most impractical arrangement, a mere sop to safety: three small black trampolines arranged in a triangle at a height of ten feet, none of them larger than a child’s inflatable pool…
... meanwhile, a hundred feet up, these fools practice their arbitrary tosses and catches.
Gordy wants to cover his eyes. He winces with each hush of the crowd. The clowns are in danger themselves as they lean out to make their catches. They must have feet like monkeys; Gordy can’t understand how they remain on their poles.
Still…there must be some method. Somehow the acrobats keep aloft; somehow a baton always floats by to meet them, and they flip and turn, catching the baton, or—sometimes, unbearably—missing it, but then catching, one heart-pounding second later, the feet of another tumbler ...
... who is being held arm-in-arm by yet another who hangs inverted from his bar by the knees, and then the three danglers each see a baton all their own and go spinning off in different directions…
The faith of the acrobats infects the crowd, and they begin to laugh, delighted at the madness, or caught in it. Every second that passes without fatality is a new miracle. The production is effortless and impossible, complex and happenstance, flight and gravity, all at once.
Gordy is in the midst of deciding whether he is watching the skillful enactment of endless rehearsal or the improvisational trapeze act of highly proficient lunatics, trying to find some hint that even the misses are all a part of the dance—when there at last comes an accident.
The clowns shriek with the crowd as three acrobats simultaneously miss their bars with no rescue and fall to earth feet pointed down straight as arrows the crowd rising to its feet with horror and anticipation then groaning in furious relief and joyous disappointment as ...
... each of the three of them lands directly in the center of one of those three trampolines, stretching deep dimples into the elastic until the metal rings of the tramps are level with the crowns of their heads and then ...
... shooting back up, rising and rising and eschewing the batons the panicking clowns toss their way as they ascend, nearly touching the tent roof, holding for the briefest instance at the top of their trajectory, consecrated in the absolution of flux, the moment between ...
... rising and falling that is neither and both—and in a heartbeat, an instant, Gordy sees that the center one is a heartbreaking beauty, a woman with dark hair shot with gold, and in the way of boys he is immediately in love—yes, love, she’s the love of his life—but then ...
... they begin their plunge, and now it really is time to eat your goiter, ladies and gents, because even if they fall precisely straight down, whatever springs were in those ridiculous triumvirate tramps are shot for sure.
But…wait! In the commencement of their fall, the three stop, hold, and float, and the crowd has forgotten how even to scream.
Captured, the acrobats jounce up and down on consecrated air as if standing on an atmosphere of jelly.
The audience stares at the hovering figures, amazed, stunned; these are not performers, they are yogis, mystics, wizards, holy people; they have mastered air, they have tamed gravity.
But wait—the other four acrobats are swinging in higher arcs, and higher, they release their batons and hurtle upward to join their comrades.
Seven of them, standing on nothing at all…and then the silence is shattered as the crowd sees, in uproarious unison, the seven spider-silk tightropes stretched across the tent, and they roar their weak-kneed approval.
At this moment, the poles from which the clowns are suspended detach from their fixtures, and the fools swing one-handed, tossing their now-detached silver poles to the men and women on the tightrope.
At the apex of their swing, each clown releases, double-somersaults, lands on one of the platforms, and bows, as below everyone hoots and brays at their fabulous funambulism.
They descend down-ladder as the tumblers begin the tightrope routine—not walking the tightrope, you understand, but using their poles to *vault,* hopscotching from wire to wire ...
... somersaulting hodgepodge past one another in catastrophic hurdle, sometimes jousting with one another, twisting just before collision.
The crowd rises to its feet and commences stamping, which throws off the pattern of the bleachers’ sway—the pattern Gordy has, unconsciously, learned to ride.
Without warning it whips, sharp as a roller coaster, to the left. For Gordy—staring with wonder between splayed fingers, himself rising to his feet—this is enough to disrupt his equilibrium, topple him; he overcompensates, pinwheels his arms, screams, tilts, falls.
No one sees him go; none takes note of a boy disappearing between bleachers and canvas backing.
Gordy hardly notices it himself, so caught up is he in a frisson of sympathetic tension for the plight of the tightrope vaulters, so convinced a deadly fall is imminent for them, that when he finds himself falling, surprise barely registers.
It seems axiomatic; if they are to so boldly defy physical laws, then some other must pay gravity’s price.
*This is it* he thinks, and, even as he thinks it, he hits.
*This is it* he thinks, and, even as he thinks it, he hits.
• • •
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