by Tim Kreider
“Enough of this excitement,” one guy announced on my first morning, putting out a cigarette in his plate. “Time for beer.”
“You’ll see plenty of drinking here,” Annie was warned when she joined the circus. “All times of day.” Annie and I liked to drink beers in the vestibule between her car and the next, which had a Dutch door we could open to the air. We’d sit dangling our legs over the side and occasionally poke our heads out into the wind and noise. If you stuck your hand out there when a tree branch was whipping past, the leaves would smack your palm hard enough to sting for minutes. Lights flashed and clanging bells Dopplered by as we passed through intersections. As the train traveled farther south, the metal swing sets, piles of tires, and misty hills of Appalachia gave way to groves of bamboo and honeysuckle, fields plowed in undulating green and yellow lines like contour maps. We saw a woman standing in her lawn in her housedress, a pit filled with cattle bones, a repairman bent over exposing what looked like two feet of ass crack. Once, when we had stopped for a minute, I leapt down off the train and quick grabbed us some honeysuckle to taste while Annie went “Aaiiieeeee” and flapped her hands in delighted alarm.
As we sat drinking beers and watching the passing countryside, we’d spin elaborate worst-case scenarios: I would survive Mexico City but ironically die in a plane crash on the way home; Annie would avoid flying but be ironically killed in a bus wreck; my plane would crash ironically into her bus. We imagined both of us peering out of the train door and getting our heads neatly skwapped off by a passing train or telephone pole and our lifeless torsos, now open fire hydrants of blood, toppling back into the vestibule. Annie has very loose, jiggly kneecaps that were fun to slither around under her skin while we talked.
“You know the trainmaster will throw you off the train if he catches you doing that,” someone passing through the vestibule told us. He meant dangling our legs out of the train. Annie told me he probably wasn’t exaggerating: the circus’s management philosophy was very nineteenth-century. The basic contract was: You don’t like it, get off the train. So we stood instead, leaning over the closed lower door to look outside. When we were on a bend in the track, the wheels screeching against the rails, you could see nothing but train curving away in either direction, people leaning out the windows and doors to wave and give each other the finger. For the first time I could appreciate the train’s true length; it was like being inside the Empire State Building laid on its side. Big red circus letters painted on the sides of the cars advertised who we were. No one can resist waving to the circus train; one group even waved to us from a cemetery. We had no choice but to wave back, conscripted into service as ambassadors of goodwill. Sometimes Annie wore a red clown nose while waving. At one crossing, a man sitting in the cab of his pickup waiting for the train to pass got to see Annie, wearing the nose, flash her breasts at him. I caught a glimpse of his face bursting into laughter before he was whisked into the past.
We were hanging out in the vestibule when one of the concessionaires approached us and mumbled, “Now, I don’t mean nuthin’ funny”—a sure sign of impending funniness—“but I never knew the teacher was married. Some of the things I said . . . I shouldn’a said them.” It seemed he was trying to apologize for having flirted with Annie, apparently so clumsily she’d failed to notice. She told him it was fine, but she didn’t like knowing that people were talking about us. She was still seething over having been teased in print for being standoffish by “Big Bertha,” the circus newsletter’s anonymous gossip columnist. Even more than most workplaces, the circus was a hotbed of gossip—after all, everyone not only worked together but lived together. It was effectively a small town. One of the dancers later asked me whether Annie and I were really married, boyfriend-girlfriend, just friends, or what.
“Just friends,” I answered, after a telltale hesitation.
“Liar,” she said.
I mean it’s true we were having sex. But this was more in the spirit of two people who happen to have a common enthusiasm for an extremely fun activity, the same way two guys who both enjoy drinking or chess might say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere” or “How about a quick game?” Once, when we were hanging out in the vestibule, the train hit an especially rough stretch of track, and one of us idly wondered what it would be like to try to have sex during this severe rhythmic jouncing. We exchanged a look. An instant later we had vamoosed, leaving a cartoon Annie-and-me-shaped puff of dust where we’d been standing.
After we disembarked in San Antonio, Annie made it a mission to buy wedding rings before crossing the border as a prophylactic against harassment. We got a pair of fake gold bands from a street vendor for five bucks apiece. It was funny: even though I never notice whether anyone else is wearing a wedding ring, I immediately felt as if mine were radiating my bogus marital status to everyone in sight. It seemed as if we ought to have some sort of ceremony. As we put them on, I said to Annie: “Now we are man and wife.”
“Man,” she snickered.
On the eve of our departure for Mexico we went to see a movie about an asteroid destroying all life on Earth and wept at the scene of the doomed astronauts saying farewell to their loved ones back home. Annie called her mother that night. The next day, at the bus station, we agonized over whether to take the 1:30 or the 2:30 to Mexico City, since there was no way of knowing in advance which of them was destined to crash, decapitating all on board. I got all calm and fatalistic and told Annie it was out of our hands—we’d just have to choose blindly.
At the border, Annie took longer than everyone else going through the customhouse because she had to obtain a work visa. I was on the bus waiting for her when the driver stood up and asked us all something in Spanish. I realized he was trying to confirm that everyone was back on board, and I stood up and used my first public Spanish: “No!” (I know it’s the same word as in English, but I yelled it with a Spanish accent.) Everyone turned to look at me. “Mi esposa,” I explained, gesturing helplessly toward the customs building. Everyone smiled, understanding. It was the only word I could think of.
The economic escarpment at the border was dramatic: the asphalt and neon of backstreet America turned abruptly to dirt roads, hand-lettered signs, kids piled into the backs of pickup trucks, and livestock just standing in the middle of the street. For a couple of hundred miles we saw nothing but prickly pear and Joshua trees, with an occasional line of jagged peaks on the horizon. We used our time on the bus to attempt to hastily learn Spanish and jot down some wills. Looking for safety instructions, I stuck my hand in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me, into what proved to be a gooey orange burrito stuffed with hair. It seemed an ill omen.
Annie had been somewhat reassured of our odds after phoning her mother, who’d told her that all her old-lady friends had been going to Mexico City for years and none of them had ever been kidnapped or killed. The State Department’s been issuing those same warnings for twenty years, she said.
“Of course, my mom dismissed my lupus symptoms for a year before I was diagnosed,” said Annie. “You know what she said to me when I told her I had it? ‘Well, dear, everybody’s got to have something.’ ”
* * *
“Danger is almost always less than you imagine it to be,” our hotel’s guidebook assured us.
The hotel where most of the circus workers were being put up was on a heavy-flow eight-lane street across from a Wal-Mart. On the afternoon we arrived there was a windstorm that blotted out the view with dense gusts of dust and grit and garbage, airborne because the city had been completely denuded of grass. It was like the weather on Mars. I asked one of the clowns who was originally from Mexico City whether the sky was ever blue here.
“Yes,” he said.
“Really?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
The hotel guidebook also mentioned, as a point of local color, that the nearby Hill of the Star had in pre-Columbian times been the site of the New Fire ceremony, in which, once every
fifty-two years, a sacrificial victim’s heart would be carved out and a fire lit in his chest cavity. It was sort of like Groundhog Day: if the fire continued to burn, runners would light torches from it and take them to temples throughout the empire to let people know that the world would continue to exist. The book did not say what happened if the fire went out.III
Over dinner in the hotel restaurant that night, I reassured Annie that I wouldn’t blame her, in my last moments, if I were to be killed here.
“No,” she said, “I’d blame myself.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want you to feel bad about it for the rest of your life.”
“How long?”
“Well, you should always feel a little bad about it, but don’t let it ruin your life.”
“I’ll never forgive myself,” she said solemnly. I noticed she was talking about it in the future tense now instead of the good old conditional.
“The main thing to remember,” I said, “is that I liked you a lot and you made the last year of my life much better.”
“Aw,” said Annie, sounding genuinely touched for once. “You really sound like you’re going to die.”
This sort of paranoia was rampant throughout the circus. In the hotel lobby I’d noticed one of the musicians reading a book titled The Most Dangerous Places in the World. On the shuttle bus a dancer said, “I thought Baltimore was scary.” Annie overheard the tiger tamer talking to his wife long-distance on a pay phone, complaining about being afraid of the food, eating nothing but steak day after day. By way of a sign-off he said, “I’ll try not to die.”
On our first full day in Mexico City, the entire circus was assembled in the arena for a briefing by a representative of the American embassy. He wearily reiterated the State Department warnings we’d all by now memorized: the spiked drinks, the ATM robberies, the deathtrap taxis. A worst-case scenario, he said, would involve being kidnapped for anywhere from twelve to seventy-two hours, driven around the city, and forced to withdraw money from ATMs at gunpoint. “Crime in Mexico City is virtually a risk-free proposition,” he told us, reciting it like a well-worn phrase. Often, he was sorry to say, the police themselves were the perpetrators. I found I was more disturbed by the thought of my death going unavenged than by the thought of being murdered. In conclusion he said, “I wish you the best of luck.”
Most of the performers kept themselves insulated from the sprawling, impoverished metropolis around them, moving between their hotels and the arena in shuttle buses. Tourists were targeted in particular because they were perceived as wealthy, which, relative to most people in Mexico City, we were: to beggars and street thieves, even the roustabouts must’ve looked like Princess Diana. The first day Annie and I ventured into a city market, we had to run a gauntlet of merchants and vendors stepping into our path, each grinning and saying, “Something more, señor? Something more, señor?” A tiny woman pulled at Annie’s sleeve, begging for money to buy a tortilla with a hand to her stomach, her mouth open and twisted with weeping. A shoeshine boy chased me down the street, shining one of my shoes against my will while I politely tried to flee.
Five centuries ago this was one of the most beautiful cities on earth: an island of pyramidal temples and palaces, botanical gardens, aquariums, and canals, at the center of a vast shallow lake that mirrored the sky, linked to the mainland by long causeways and aqueducts. All razed by the armies of Cortés. Annie and I toured the cathedral built atop the ruins of the Aztec temple, where we stood before the Altar of Forgiveness—something of a euphemism, it emerged—where heretics were brought to repent before being absolved and then set on fire. We also checked out the Palace of the Inquisition, which now houses a medical museum, where a cadaver lay under a glass case like a flayed Sleeping Beauty, arteries dyed with bright pink gunk, stomach deflated, a flap of skin discreetly folded over the genitals, a few black curls of hair glistening underneath.
“Looks like chicken,” Annie confirmed. She was right: the exposed fat—the adipose tissue—looked like a half-eaten drumstick left in the fridge to get cold and glutinous overnight. There was also a disembodied head displayed in a glass cube, half of which had been dissected, with little portholes cut into the skull through which you could view the brain. The other half of the face, left intact, looked like a guy you might see across from you on the bus. He did not look happy. Back at the hotel room I admitted that the cadavers had freaked me out.
“I detached myself from it,” said Annie. “I only freaked out a little when I imagined having to eat it.” I just looked at her. “Like in Alive,” she clarified. Annie loved survival stories in which people have to resort to cannibalism.
After our first day out in Mexico City our lips tasted grimy, and we both had acrid postnasal drip. We showered and brushed our teeth and ordered a bucket of Coronas on ice from room service. (This would become our nightly ritual: almost twenty years later I still remember the phrase un balde con hielo.) That night, while we were drinking beers watching cable, Annie told me: “This morning I saw what you would look like when you’re old. Kind of gray and jowly.”
“Give me a break,” I started. “I hadn’t shaved yet, I wasn’t—”
“No, no, it was good,” she said. “It made me believe for the first time that maybe you would live.”
The sights of Mexico City have gotten jumbled together in my memory with scenes backstage at the circus, like the contents of a suitcase disheveled in transit: police standing around in Kevlar vests idly holding automatic weapons, acrobats muscled like superheroes painted solid gold, teenage boys reading porn comics next to old ladies on the bus, a wardrobe pit crew quickly repairing a rip in a dancer’s costume, bullet holes in the concrete over Trotsky’s bed, ancient basalt blood basins, someone hosing out the hippo’s open mouth, a dozen little chickens on a spit, midgets pushing a baby carriage, a begging child shaking a single maraca in a monotonous, unmusical rhythm, her face blank with rage. Somewhere in the arena an elephant trumpeted, and for an instant everyone froze.
As we watched the circus rehearse from high up in the arena’s stands, Annie provided indispensable dishy backstage commentary: “Remember I told you how the one unicycle basketball team captain stabbed the other last year?” she’d say. “That’s the one who got stabbed. There’s the forty-year-old woman my eighteen-year-old student is marrying—second from the left. They all think it’s just to get into the family act. Oh, and that’s the guy who had the little, uh, domestic violence problem I told you about.” During the star clown’s act, he would force volunteers from the audience to wear tutus and perform a ballet routine. One elegant matron delighted the crowd by raising an outstretched leg to the barre with effortless aplomb. The clown gave her a Well, well, well look, hands on his hips. Annie told me she was a ringer—actually the clown’s own mother, and a dancer with the circus from way back. Annie even knew the dirt on all the animals. She was caustic on the subject of animals who’d died; during the “First Day at School” skit, when the trainer called attendance and the baby elephants dutifully raised their trunks, Annie hissed, “Where’s Kenny? Is Kenny out sick today?” As I watched a troupe of baboons in brightly colored diapers doing flips on the hippo’s back, she leaned over and whispered, “Those monkeys have hideous, hideous asses.”
After Annie started teaching, I spent a lot of my days with her best friend in the circus, Lou. Lou had actually attended the circus’s famous Clown College, which he described as the greatest experience of his life: ten weeks of classes in pie throwing, water spitting, how to run in long floppy shoes. His instructor sounded like some sort of clown rōshi; he was heavily into what Lou calls “the heart of clowning,” not just routines and technique. “If you’re gonna be a clown,” he’d tell his students, “you’ve gotta have a heart as big as Alaska! Clowning is snow on Christmas morning! It’s an all-day sucker!” He and I visited the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe together, where we rode a little conveyor belt past the miraculous image of the Virg
in. Lou, a believer, admitted he had hoped it would look less like a painting.
Lou’s secret ambition was to resurrect the Globe of Death, a spherical cage in which two motorcyclists would ride around and around, their orbits gradually spiraling sideways and then upside down, the two of them zooming around the sphere’s meridians in perfect synchronization, all somehow without crashing into each other. I remembered it well from my own childhood trips to the circus. The old Globe was still in storage somewhere, like Excalibur in its stone, waiting for someone worthy to summon forth the balls to get in there again. I couldn’t understand how you’d even practice this act without getting killed. Lou seemed confident that you’d just have to aim the bike straight ahead, get it up to speed, and let centrifugal force take care of the rest. He figured each rider would get the timing down independently, and then you’d go in there together and sort of work things out between the two of you. Annie told me Lou had never ridden a motorcycle.