Numb

by Sean Ferrell

  The It left with her. He’d probably fled because I knew he was a fake, and Darla had left with him because what else could she do? Certainly not stay and stitch up holes in my body as I slowly pinned myself to the circus and drained out a trail of blood as it limped toward its sad end.

  two

  “THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be my night off,” I said to myself.

  Mal spun the claw hammer around his fingers like a cowboy pistol trick. “Hey, if you aren’t enjoying this, why watch?” I was unsure whether he aimed this remark at me or the guy vomiting into his book bag. Mal brought the hammer down and the second nail went through the delicate stretch of skin between my pinkie and ring finger. He almost drove the nail flush to the surface of the bar, and I wondered how difficult it would be to get out.

  The man vomiting had bet Mal that I couldn’t take a nail through my hand without screaming. He sat on a bar stool with his back against the bar. Sweat ran off his nose and he might have been crying, though it could have been the strain of puking. I’d grown accustomed to this sort of reaction to my act. Some fell ill, no matter how much they wanted to see me get pierced.

  “I guess you are numb,” he said. He clutched his bag to his lap. Small black spots of my blood peppered it.

  Redbach, the bartender, said, “Do you think so?” His gut stuck out the bottom of his shirt, which read ASK ME HOW I FEEL. He pulled at his sideburns, one of his annoying nervous habits—along with an eye twitch and laughing at inappropriate moments—and laughed. He pointed at the bar and the guy laid down everything he had in his wallet. Eighty-seven dollars. Then he stood and started to leave.

  Mal called after him, “Hey, don’t forget to come see the show. Numb here has a staple gun trick that will make you piss.” The guy didn’t look back. He walked out onto Avenue B and into a windy New York City night.

  “And tell your friends,” Redbach added. I barely knew Redbach. He tried too hard to be my friend. He was the type of person who would suggest jumping off a bridge but be the last to leap off himself. On the other hand, Mal had always backed me, or so I kept telling myself, based on his willingness to stand by me in the Caesar incident, his “quit Tilly’s circus” camaraderie, and his steadfast support as we struggled up the East Coast to New York, all because of a strange slip of paper I’d found in my pocket connecting my suit to an East Side costume shop. I already had a following in the city in the freak show crowd because of him, his efforts to sell my act, to hawk for me at every bar and impromptu sidewalk show. His own act held no crowds—New York apparently had no appetite for fire-eating.

  After the vomiter left, Mal told Redbach he should go out on the street and charge people to come in and see me nailed to the bar. Redbach hit the door and started calling out to a small crowd at the corner.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I said. “Pull these out.” I looked at my right hand. The flat tops of the aluminum nails poked out the back, just above the meat between the thumb and forefinger and next to the pinkie, and purple indentations surrounded the punctures. An ashtray on the bar almost touched my ring finger. It stank. I pushed it away with my free hand.

  Mal tapped the hammer on a bar stool and pretended not to hear me.

  “Pull them out,” I said.

  He wouldn’t look at me. “We can make some extra cash.”

  Outside, Redbach shouted, “Come see the man who can’t feel pain. He’s nailed to the bar, right inside. This is not a trick. Watch as nails are stuck into his hands and feet. Maybe drive one in yourself.”

  If I could have pulled myself away from the bar, I would have walked out. “Who the hell does he think he is, saying that?” Redbach’s dive bar didn’t get any business, no matter the night or desperation of passersby. The only reason he made any money now was because Mal suggested our little one-man freak show would be a draw and Redbach agreed. We, meaning I, had performed three times in nine days. The first performance had been for an audience of four. The second for twenty. A line jostled out the door on the third night. This was supposed to be a night off. The holes in my hand from the last show, close to these new ones, hadn’t closed up entirely and they began to bleed a little.

  “I want to go back to our shitty little hotel room and clean these out,” I said.

  I’d started this night just hanging out in our hotel room, a two-bed room at the St. Mark’s Hotel. There must have been a sale on glossy school-bus yellow because that was the color of the recently painted room. Paint fumes and mildew smells from the bathroom drove me to wander the hallways. I struggled to make the Coke machine stop stealing my quarters. When the heavy blond woman behind the bulletproof glass tapped the handwritten sign that read no alcohol in the hallway, it was time for me to get back to the room. I wasn’t drinking alcohol, but I didn’t argue.

  In the room I hadn’t known what to do with myself, so I ended up just staring at our little black-and-white TV with the speaker-wire antenna that ended with a coat hanger wrapped in aluminum foil and taped to the only window in the place. This TV had followed us ever since we ran away from the circus and headed north from Texas. Over three weeks we had hitchhiked and made rest-stop bets for rides in the back of eighteen-wheelers. Whenever we stopped Mal would hook up the TV and find a channel with reception. “Someday we’ll be on TV,” he’d say. When we finally reached New York City, we did street performances to scrape together the money for a week in the shit hotel we were in. And since then, for almost two weeks, I’d been driving nails into Redbach’s bar with sad regularity and looking through the Yellow Pages for the clothing rental store that might be the source of the business card. I’d visited a dozen during the days and called more in the evenings. None used cards like I’d found. That night I called a few more until I realized the hour, too late for any of them to be open. I couldn’t concentrate on TV, and the paint fumes were dizzying, so I’d wandered over to Redbach’s under the deranged theory that I could go in and just have a drink.

  When I’d arrived, I’d found Mal talking with Redbach and a guy with a huge green knapsack. He laughed, his arms swinging. I heard Mal say, “It’s gonna be amazing. Nobody has ever done anything like this.” Then he saw me and his eyes darkened. Before I sat down Mal told me the guy with the knapsack didn’t believe I could do what I could do. The betting had started, and now I was nailed down again.

  “Listen,” Mal said. “We showed that loudmouth, and you’re here—”

  “I’m always here. All we ever do is sit in this place.”

  “I mean, as long as you’re already nailed down, why not?”

  “You started this. That guy was just having a drink, and you started all this. Now get me off this bar.”

  “He said you looked like a pussy.”

  “You asked him if I looked like I’d ever been nailed to a bar. What was he supposed to say?” My arm tingled, probably due to a nail against an artery or vein. My legs creaked. I could hear voices outside bartering prices with Redbach. People would be coming in any second. In the mirror on the other side of the bar I saw myself, a skinny blond white guy without enough to eat and too little sleep, nailed to the bar. I wore the Batman tee one of the roadies had given me before I’d left the circus. Mal had been given the complementary shirt, red, with Robin’s R in a black circle over the right breast. As far as I knew, he’d never worn it. His dreadlocks, unwashed and uncontrolled, danced with his reflection in the mirror behind Redbach’s bar, the hammer wagging in his hands. If I looked tired, he looked exhausted. Until then, I hadn’t noticed how out of it Mal looked.

  People started coming in, and Mal said, “What the fuck are you gonna do? Call tuxedo places all night? Shut up and enjoy the free booze.”

  He took on the role of carnival barker, a ghastly imitation of Mr. Tilly.

  “Come on in. You want to see the man who feels no pain? You might not have read about him in the papers, you might not have seen his picture in the magazines, but you can be sure you will someday. Don’t ask for his autograph, though. He’s
pretty nailed down at the moment.”

  I hissed at him through my teeth. “I’m not in the mood, damn it.”

  Mal shot me a smile and said, “That’s your problem, isn’t it?” The floorboards groaned as more people stepped into the bar.

  A woman with a crew cut and a lip ring asked, “Does it hurt?”

  I looked up at the TV that hung over the bar. It received the same shit reception as the set in our hotel room. It had the fuzzing in and out of faces so you couldn’t see any details, and I thought that it might as well have been a show about me because it displayed everything I felt. Unfocused, unclear, uncertain. I drifted back to Texas and an overheated trailer as I waited to go onstage, and a spiel Mr. Tilly had written for my act over a year ago leaked out of me.

  “None of this hurts. I can’t feel a thing. No one knows why. Maybe it’s all in my head, or maybe it’s in yours. I don’t know. All I know is, it’s hard to scratch your nose with your hand nailed down.”

  I always thought it silly, but when I started performing in the circus, Mr. Tilly said I needed a way to introduce myself to the audience. I’d been saying it twice a day, three times on Saturdays, ever since.

  The woman with the lip ring snorted and inspected my hand. “Fantastic,” she whispered. “I want to buy you a drink.”

  Mal stepped behind the bar and poured me a whiskey. I took the drink and said, “Fifteen minutes is all you get,” then I poured the shot down my throat.

  People took turns walking up to examine the nails in my hand. Some of them pulled out cell phones and began to call people to get them to come see me, or snapped photos or videos.

  “I don’t know the name of the fucking place,” said one man into his phone. Across the back of his head a tattoo read kamikaze. “Just get the fuck over here. You’ll freak.”

  People bought me drinks, and after ten minutes I was sweating alcohol. Too distracted by the redhead with the low-cut shirt and scratch marks between her breasts who pressed into me as she leaned over my hand, petting it softly around the nailheads, I didn’t know how long Mal argued with the skinny guy near the end of the bar. The redhead cooed over my hand. This was another typical reaction to me. I’d seen people light up like they’d never been so moved when they saw me take a nail in the hand, or a staple in my back or thigh; people smiled in a way that said they hadn’t smiled in years. Women like this one found it reassuring, I guess, like I somehow understood them or had been through what they had.

  I realized that Mal and the guy were arguing about me. Mal’s eyes, flickering between lazy and disturbed, begged for it to get out of hand. He had a hint of a bored smile. He often mistook boredom for “passion for drama.”

  “What you are saying, pal, is such bullshit,” Mal said.

  “This is a scam and you know it. This guy’s just got piercings in his hands, and you’ve got everyone thinking this is some shit. I want my fucking ten back now.”

  “No, you don’t. You want to give me another fifty and put a nail in my friend yourself, don’t you.” Mal handed the guy a nail and then turned to me and said, “Put your left hand up there, all right?”

  “No.” I said, “I want to leave.”

  Mal leaned across the bar, grabbed my left ear, and pulled it to his lips. “Listen,” he said. “I could give you a hundred and one reasons why you should do this. Because you can. Because they want you to. Because they have paid for it. But I’m not going to waste my time. Put your fucking hand on the bar or I won’t pull these nails out and you’ll have to rip them out of your goddamned hand yourself, you shit.”

  Where had this guy come from? I wondered. He couldn’t be the same person I’d come up the coast with. Definitely not the same guy who’d protected me in Texas, who’d demanded a reason for me to go into a lion’s cage. His eyes were dark and he fidgeted with the hammer like it was hot. He smelled like whatever kept backwashing out of our tub.

  I tried to step back but could only reach as far as my nailed-down arm would allow. Mal returned my glare. He looked down for a moment, then said, “Listen, man. We’ve been too fucking poor for too long. Let’s just take their money, all right?”

  My pulse drummed in my ears. I felt like a child who, despite being right, was ignored. My friend, my supposed protector, was using me for his own gain, trying to convince me it was for me and ignoring my complaints. For a moment I imagined that I had the nerve and the strength to pull hard enough to rip the nails out of the wood or to pull my hands free, tear the nailheads through my skin. I knew it wouldn’t hurt, but there was still a part of me that understood some level of self-preservation. As the idea came to me I became weak and gave in. As always, Mal ran the show.

  The crowd watched. A breathy, salty smell rolled off them. With one hand Mal held out the hammer to the skinny guy, and with the other he took a wad of crumpled bills. As Mal placed a nail against the skin of my left hand between the forefinger and middle finger, the guy raised the hammer above his head. If he had had anything to drink, I couldn’t tell. He brought the hammer down in one perfect blow and drove the nail through my hand and into the bar.

  The redhead held my glass for me and I took a sip of my drink, then she sipped it, like we were taking communion. Nailed down tight, my fingertips and palms began to focus on the rough grain of the bar. I couldn’t move my hands, so I soaked up what little of the wood bar I touched, like a sponge, and, as I did so, I could read my fortune in it, like a palm reading in reverse. I saw my future: I was out of this bar tonight, and I would never be back.

  The crowd around us watched quietly. The room must have had sixty people inside. The sweat and stale beer odors hung on to us all, and traffic noise blared in from the street. Outside, Redbach shouted for passersby to pay to see the freak inside. Mal pulled another nail, clenched it between his lips, and took out a third. The second was driven between my forefinger and thumb. Quickly, and with one sure shot of the hammer, he put the last through between the pinkie and ring finger. Little pools of blood seeped out along the bar and mixed with the beads of condensation falling from my glass.

  I didn’t respond. I never did. Mal, with a look, or Darla or The It or Tilly, any of them, with a simple glance, could make me sit and stay, like a trained dog. All the while, they drove metal through me and made people pay to watch.

  “Like a butterfly in a collection,” Mal said as he poured two drinks for us. Someone made a comment about me being a freak. “No. I saw him on TV,” someone else said. Mal smiled broadly at me.

  “Someone saw you on TV?” he said. “Must be the tape that oilman made.”

  Again, I focused on the old mirror behind the bar, some antique from some other place, a better place, with the slightest ripples running across its surface, ornate wood carvings of flowers and birds twisted, almost gruesomely, into one another across the top. And except for the nailheads poking up over my hand, each a little crooked and at its own angle, my reflection looked like that of a man simply resting his hands on the bar. Just a guy with a drink and a friend with a hammer. I watched everything in reverse in the warped mirror and wished for a moment that I could switch places with the calm stranger, the rested man with the quiet face and easy manner.

  A woman with a long mullet dyed like a skunk’s tail fanned her boyfriend with her handbag. He looked ready to keel over. The redhead jockeyed for position at my side as another dozen people walked in, trying to see past the crowd. More people threw money on the bar to buy me a drink. Everything had just the hint of a warp to it. The mirror distorted those further away more than those closer, and Mal, right next to it, reflected without flaw. He stood tall, king of the warped world. But then I noticed one small distortion in his reflection, at his center, near his heart, where a curl in the glass created a pinch in his body, made a small piece of him disappear as if it never existed.

  Mal held the hammer over his head and said, “One hundred dollars and you can drive a nail into my friend.” Eyes lit up in the reflection; people raised their money
and lined up to pay for their chance. Onlookers clapped. I looked at the redhead next to me, and she leaned in close and smiled. I could smell the sweat and rum coming off her.

  I said, “They don’t care if I can feel it or not. They just want to see someone hammer nails into someone else.” She laughed as if I were joking and wrapped her hands around my waist.

  From the back a guy in a Yankees cap yelled out to ask if we took credit cards.

  By the time they were done with me Mal had over a thousand dollars and I was nailed, both hands and feet, in place. Still outside, Redbach was charging twenty dollars a head. Drinks poured themselves. Mal lifted a glass to my lips and tipped it into me.

  “We better go soon,” I said. “I’m bleeding here. I gotta lie down.”

  “You barely bleed at all.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been drinking too. The only thing keeping me from falling down is that I’m nailed to the bar.” I shook my head. “I’m tired. Pull these nails out of my feet. I want to sit down.” My lips felt too large.

  I had no idea what time it was, other than late. Mal started prying nails out of the floor with the claw of the hammer. He was finally listening. The alcohol must have sedated him because he hummed and he grinned at me as he worked at the nail next to my right small toe. “You’ve gone soft. When we were in the circus, you could take your liquor.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What are you so quiet for?” he asked.

  Once, back in Texas, a few weeks before running away from the circus, before the challenge to go into the cage with Caesar had even been made, I had been near the end of my set when a woman in the audience turned to the man next to her and said, “I can’t believe he’s so quiet up there as he’s doing all that to himself.”

  The man had nodded and replied, “Yeah, well, you know it’s the quiet ones you got to look out for. They eventually snap and then—boom!”

  A few people had chuckled at the man’s remark. I’d been snagged by it, stuck in midmotion as I prepared to ask for a volunteer from the audience to use the staple gun on my back. But when I heard that comment, whether meant as a joke or not, I simply stopped and turned and walked off the stage. At that moment I knew I should leave the circus. I didn’t know that Mal would go with me, or where I’d go, or that a few weeks later I’d be in Caesar’s cage, but I had a vision of myself, belongings tied up in a blanket and thrown over a chain-link fence as I ran across dry fields toward slow-moving freight trains. I knew I’d run away from the circus.