by Tim Kreider
Annie was jealous that I got to spend my days going on field trips with her friend while she was stuck in the classroom all day.
“Lou is coming between us, Annie,” I told her. “Lou must die.”
Her eyes lit up with an evil hope. “He is the one who will die in Mexico City!” she said.
“It’s the only way we can save ourselves.”
“Sacrifice!” she cried gleefully.
“Sacrifice! Sacrifice!” we both began chanting, bouncing up and down on the bed. “Lou must die! Lou must die!”
It was wrong of us to offer Lou as a sacrifice. Lou was a good guy. It was also probably foolhardy of us to invoke the old local gods in jest. I’d seen the goddess of death, Coatlicue, at the National Museum of Anthropology: wearing a tasteful necklace of human hands and hearts with a skull pendant and a mid-length skirt made of snakes, snakes also spurting from the decapitated stump of her neck (an Aztec artistic convention for blood), two of which were curled face-to-face to resemble a single grinning, fanged, and fork-tongued serpent, she was, to all appearances, not one to be summoned on a false alarm. And the circus was no place to risk jinxing anyone: there had recently been several serious injuries on the show. I’d seen a girl who had to walk around with both arms in casts propped up with sticks, raised over her head in what looked like triumph at all times. A performer in the other unit of the circus had been badly burned during a fire act. (“How’s that guy doing?” I asked Annie. “Not good,” she said.) And last month a woman working without a net had fallen forty feet from a trapeze at the D.C. Armory. This wasn’t supposed to be possible, but somehow the cable attached to her harness had broken. She’d landed on her face. She was still on crutches, and one of her eyes was completely bloodshot. Lou had griped about the low attendance at shows in Mexico City; performers were up there, their lungs laboring in the filthy high-altitude air, risking their lives every night, for what—a couple of hundred spectators?
The circus doesn’t have a doctor, Annie told me, or even EMTs; if someone gets hurt, they just call 911 and wait, like the rest of us. But there is a performance protocol in the event of an accident: there’s one piece of music the orchestra plays when the trapeze artists make the triple somersault, and another to play if they don’t. If there’s a fall, the band whips up a jaunty, up-tempo nothin’-to-see-here number and the entire complement of clowns charges out in full force, deploying maximum antics to distract the audience. “ ‘The show must go on,’ ” Annie said grimly.
After almost a month in Mexico City, my nerves had begun to go. It seemed as if not one second passed without the sound of a car horn playing “La Cucaracha,” “Dixie,” or the theme from The Godfather. Annie told me I made this same observation every day. “Just tune it out, man,” she snapped. The cry of the Chiclet hawkers on the metro, ending with the sustained moan “Pesooooooooooooo,” started to sound inhuman and droning as a car alarm. The air always smelled like exhaust fumes and piss. I’d get winded after going up one flight of stairs. Phase one of the city’s pollution control plan had been in effect for the last five days, a new record, and power plants had reduced their output to 60 percent, so that the hotel’s lights kept flickering. The Palacio, the arena where the circus performed, was usually a dully gleaming bronze button on the horizon, but now it was barely visible through the dirty brown haze. It wasn’t until two weeks into our stay that I’d discovered our room had a view of the mountains. I finally got the inevitable diarrhea after eating pancita, a soup made with tripe. Annie had watched in horror as I ate it, begging me to stop. ABUNDA MATERIAL FECAL EN COMIDA DE CALLEJERA, a recent headline had read. Annie translated comida de callejera as “street food.” I didn’t need help with the rest.
YANQI MATADO—another tabloid headline, accompanied by a photo of a feckless American goofball like myself. Matado turned out to mean not just killed but to connote something more like slaughtered. On the metro, I interrupted Annie in the middle of an extended daydream about being held up at gunpoint and having to explain to her assailant, in broken Spanish, why she had no valuables on her person. She had already worked out in her head rough phrases for “At pyramids yesterday, so no more film, no camera.” I thought it sounded like a more complicated explanation than a mugger would sit still for.
“No, no,” she said. “In the fantasy he was really nice about it. He was trying to understand me.”
We’d both become superstitious as soldiers nearing the end of their tour. Annie’s latest blood tests had come back looking suspiciously normal, her antibodies at zero percent. Did lupus go into remission? Was it possible she’d been misdiagnosed? Annie refused to call her doctor. “I don’t want to find out I don’t have it while we’re down here,” she reasoned, “because then I will be killed.” We got into a debate over what seemed like the legitimate statistical question of whether talking incessantly about our robbery/kidnapping/murder increased or decreased its probability of occurring. Whenever one of us spotted an eyelash on the other’s cheek, we’d always dab it off and hold it up on a fingertip to wish on and blow away. Once, after Annie had made her wish, I said, “So at least we’re safe for another day.”
“Well,” she said, “I am.”
At a circus party at Mexico City’s Planet Hollywood, where showgirls were hitting the dance floor, midgets were shooting pool, and roustabouts were getting into shoving matches, Annie and I got drunk on tequila and confessed our deepest fears to each other, which turned out to be identical: that we would be abducted and Annie raped while I was forced to watch. SEX CRIMES INCREASE had been another recent headline.
“I fear that my failure to act heroically will come between us forever,” I said. “You will always blame me and think of me as a coward. It’ll destroy our friendship.”
“I know!” she cried. “I imagine the same thing, you not being able to do anything, and being ashamed and guilty about it, and I feel bad! In the fantasy, as I’m being raped, I feel bad for you.”
“That’s nice,” I said, made sentimental by tequila. “So, look,” I continued, “if you are raped while I’m forced to watch, is it going to put a huge damper on our relationship?”
“It’ll put a big damper on my life.”
“Right, right, of course,” I said. “Well, mine too. I mean, obviously not as much of one—”
“Unless you’re next in line,” she said, with a certain gleam in her eye.
I stared at her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I said. “It—it titillates you!”
She cackled delightedly, wriggling and stamping her feet. Annie loved the word titillate.
On one of our last nights in Mexico City, Annie had one of her panic attacks about mortality. We’d been watching some science show on TV about the scale of the universe, infinity, and eternity, which always gave her the horrors. Like an idiot, I tried to talk her through it and reason with her, until she pulled the blankets over her head and screamed at me to stop. We turned instead to the more soothing Anaconda, which had been on heavy rotation on cable all month. We tried to make things more interesting by placing wagers on the order in which the characters would die. Owen Wilson went first, to no one’s surprise; we saw his agonized face bulging in bas-relief from the snake’s belly during a swim-by. Annie had the pompous scientist down to die next, but then Jon Voight strangled Owen Wilson’s girlfriend with his legs. He tried to kill Jennifer Lopez, too, but was stabbed with a tranquilizer dart by Eric Stoltz, shockingly revived from his wasp-sting-induced coma per Annie’s prediction, putting her back in the lead. During a lull in the carnage, Annie asked me: “So, if our trip to Mexico City were a movie, which of us would die, and when?”
“Depends what genre it is,” I said. I hoped it would not prove to be a film like Anaconda, in which the characters’ deaths were a foregone conclusion and the only fun was in seeing who would be next. If it was a noir, I knew, I was doomed to die alone, the patsy in this conniving dame’s frame-up. “Maybe it’s a screwball comedy!” Annie said hopefully. Annie
did resemble the quirky, scheming heroines of the ’30s more than anyone else I knew. And in a comedy no one would die, except maybe some crotchety aunt who’d leave us millions, and we’d end up bickering happily ever after. At last Jon Voight was swallowed whole, in a POV shot from inside the snake’s pulsing gullet.
What’s obvious in retrospect, although we would have denied it at the time, is how much fun we were having imagining our own gruesome murders, spooking and riling ourselves up like kids on a sleepover. This is essentially the circus’s business: turning all the old primal terrors—being devoured by predators, falling while swinging from one branch to another, being chased by leering men with bottles of seltzer—into little pantomimes of near death and escape to thrill and, yes, titillate us. Professionals literally risk their lives to provide us this sensation. These acts wouldn’t be exciting without the real possibility of failure, injury, or death. It’s a family-friendly form of human sacrifice: instead of the Hill of the Star or Altar of Forgiveness, the Globe of Death. Lou must die!
Of course nobody really wants to see anyone killed at the circus—Jesus, it would traumatize the freaking kids for life—but if you really had no interest in seeing anyone hurt, you could always go to a movie or the zoo. What you want is to see someone nearly get killed. The circus’s real promise, the one it whispers as it tucks you in sick on cotton candy, is: Not this time. The tamer sticks his head in the lion’s maw and withdraws it, grinning; the acrobats bound unhurt off the net, arms raised in triumph; an old lady lifts a surprisingly taut, supple leg to the barre, defying age, a fantasy of athletic grace. Even Jon Voight’s not really dead! Holy shit—the titular snake unexpectedly vomited him back onto the deck of the boat, coated with sputum but alive and gasping for air. It was still anybody’s game.
* * *
I flew home unkilled from Mexico City with two carry-on items: a black velvet painting of the Devil on the toilet and a single pork rind the size of an open umbrella, both of which Annie had cajoled me into buying. After she’d safely returned to the U.S. she sent me another souvenir: a paper-mache figure she’d made inspired by the alebrijes we’d seen in Mexico: a little girl with black-and-white-striped Pippi Longstocking limbs, a polka-dot jumper, curly pink-ribboned pigtails, and a skull for a face. It was not only a Hello-Kitty memento mori but a sort of self-portrait.
But in another surprise twist, a ta-da! reprieve, the snake spat Annie out again, too. About a month after our trip to Mexico, she was unexpectedly given a clean bill of health. Yeah, that’s right, guess what: no more lupus. It wasn’t in remission; it was just gone. Her doctor shrugged and said that in about 5 percent of cases, the disease “just burns itself out.” It’s also possible she was misdiagnosed; her odd constellation of symptoms could have been caused by “fifth disease,” so called because it’s the fifth, and least well known, of the infectious childhood rashes. (Schoolteachers are exposed to a lot of germs.) Annie gets a little touchy when you bring up the lupus scare now, and jealously defends her right to continue fretting about her health. One day, she reminds us, it won’t be a false alarm. She didn’t return anyone’s fifty dollars.
I lost my wedding ring in a pyramid of grapefruit at a grocery store a few months after I flew home—another item on Annie’s short list of things for which she will never forgive me. Annie married the juggler, the one she’d run away from to join the circus. They now live in the same cabin where I once photographed her illicitly sitting thumbs-up in vindictive triumph. Not least among his virtues, she explained, was: “He puts up with me.” Watching her walk down the aisle to the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise, her ex-fiancé Zach, standing next to me, wept. In an entirely uncharacteristic burst of emotion he admitted, “I always thought I’d end up with Annie.” I had never thought any such thing, and yet, looking at the wedding photos, I have to admit I look kind of teary-eyed, too.
Twenty years after the Great Mexico City Circus Train Caper, the Greatest Show on Earth announced that it would be closing after 146 years. Feld Entertainment, which owns the circus, claimed that attendance had dropped after animal rights activists forced them to eliminate elephants from the show. Annie, now a fervid animal rights activist herself, was unmoved: “They were behind the times anyway.” It’s true the circus was an atavism, a relic of the nineteenth century surviving improbably into the twenty-first, like faith healers still working their tent-revival miracles on satellite. The trapeze and the high wire must seem lame and anachronistic to kids jaded to slow-motion zero-g CGI martial arts. Early movies captured real acts—Douglas Fairbanks scrambling up a drawbridge, the house falling down around Buster, Fred and Ginger doing a once-in-eternity dance in a single take. Most action scenes in American movies are now effectively very expensive cartoons, but the circus was still low-rent and real—muscle and sweat, sawdust and dung, and the chance of blood in the air.
I remember, on my last day in Mexico City, watching the show one last time. When the circus began, they’d bring on everything at once in a motley spangled parade like a Roman triumph, a total sensory onslaught designed to blow the minds of five-year-olds: clowns, acrobats, dancing girls, giant puppets, a whole basketball team on unicycles, camels and zebras, elephants walking single file with tails twined in trunks, the animal tamer in a chariot flanked by tigers. It was the first time I’d given in and watched the circus with uncritical kidlike interest; it gave me chills when the tamer cracked his whip and a team of dappled whites reared up in unison, plumed and rampant. Even the tightrope act seemed more suspenseful than usual. Unlike Annie, I do have a fear of heights, and my stomach clenched with sympathetic terror as I watched the act’s climax, a seven-person human pyramid crossing the high wire. I realized I hadn’t been breathing only after they’d made it safely to the other side. You could hear the gust of cathartic exhales all around the arena. Then the fanfare and applause. It looked pretty scary there for a while, but see?—everyone’s fine. Everybody knows, at least in theory, how to make it to the other side: you just keep placing one foot in front of the other, don’t look down, and keep smiling, no matter what. The show, as they say, must go on.
These fantasies of untimely violent death—not just the circus but slasher films, zombie apocalypse, and suicided idols—appeal mostly to children and adolescents. One’s own perfectly timely, natural death of unglamorous cancer or unattractive old age is a lot less fun to contemplate. So far, despite our decades of histrionic dread, Annie and I have both escaped serious illness, injury, or, arguably, any real problems at all. Except, of course, for time. Annie’s seriously contemplating cosmetic surgery to address the issue of her incipient “wattle”; I’ve begun to fear that her vision of my jowls may prove prophetic. Annie’s mother died of a stroke a few years ago; mine has Parkinson’s. At a little past the actuarial halfway point, we’re both starting to suspect that life may not have much left in the way of pleasant surprises in store for us. Annie’s lately been having panic attacks, and been prescribed Klonopin, Zoloft, and a beta-blocker, and has started cognitive-behavioral therapy for “death anxiety.” The last time we talked she was having trouble swallowing; she was pretty sure it was cancer. Everybody’s got to have something.
Sometime last winter, in a dark existential hour, I remembered Annie’s old emergency antidote to her own late-night dread and decided, Fine—I’ll try it. The clip that did it for me was the famous last number from Follow the Fleet—“Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Fred Astaire, busted at the gaming tables on some shipboard casino, deserted by the girls who fawned over him when he was a winner, wanders disconsolately out onto some fantastic gleaming art deco set where he takes out a little silver gun and holds it dramatically to his temple—but then he sees Ginger Rogers, also despondent, slinking out to the rail to throw herself over the side. He stops her and shows her his gun, pantomiming that he was just about to do something foolish himself. She makes a grab for it, but he frowns at her and tosses it over the side. And then he coaxes her to dance. It looks as if he’
s saving her, but really she’s the one who’s saved him.
Annie and I still ride the train together. Because of her flying phobia, Annie’s racked up so many rail miles on Amtrak that she gets a free sleeper car cross-country once a year and often lets me hop the train with her. We like to take the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago, hanging out in the observation lounge, watching Glacier National Park and the Great Plains go by with a supply of New York Times crosswords and Percocet at hand. What we love most about the train is sort of the same thing we like about painkillers: the cozy in-betweenness of it, being suspended between destinations, temporarily exempt from the relentless press of time. The demographics on a transcontinental train skew so old that, even in our late forties, we get to be the glamorous young couple on board, like newlyweds on honeymoon. Human beings never were more lovely, more perfect in motion.
* * *
I. See the essay “Reprieve” in my book We Learn Nothing, if you’re really interested.
II. The painter, not the philosopher.
III. Further research has determined that what would happen was that skeleton women with eyes and teeth all over their bodies would descend from the stars and kill everyone in the world with knives and devour their flesh.
Kind of Love
Few are lured to the cartooning profession by the promise of its groupie action; it’d be like going into poetry for the money. Most fans of my own strip seemed to be punks or Satanists or bearded conspiracy theorists who brewed their own beer. So when a twenty-four-year-old model contacted me with a friendly, unabashed sexual proposition, it seemed likely to turn out to be either a hoax perpetrated by a basement full of snickering teens or an FBI sting operation based on a spookily astute psych profile. Her online photos made her look like a police sketch of my own anima: a tall, leggy, raucous, loudmouthed girl wearing an eye patch and a pirate hat, hoisting a bottle of whiskey high, her limbs sloppily asplay to expose armpit and pubic hair dyed scarlet. The photos appeared to have been taken at some sort of San Franciscan freak parade; a mock-up of a pirate ship was visible. Other photos showed her nude body painted silver and blue, with vines twining up her torso. In close-ups, you could see a silver spiderweb of fine chains connecting three facial piercings, at nostril, eyebrow, and earlobe.