The Invisible Circus

by Jennifer Egan

  Phoebe finished the wine and asked for the bill, which seemed unreasonably high. She paid it anyway and left, not raising her head until she’d reached the street. Along the wide boulevard people were strolling, enjoying the warm night. Phoebe walked with arms crossed. The food sat uneasily in her stomach.

  One step, another step; like a machine, she found herself plodding back toward the hostel, the last place on earth she wanted to be. Her heartbeat spiraled; she began to sweat. She went straight to the twelfth floor and switched on the light in her room. There was no curtain, and yellow streetlights below gave the darkness a sulfurous tinge. It was nine-twenty. The room seemed tiny. It looked so plain—Faith would have done something to brighten it up, bought flowers in town, something. She’d hated dull rooms, had scandalized Grandma O’Connor once by pinning all her brightly colored underpants to the walls of the room she and Phoebe shared in Mirasol. Phoebe dug the little jewelry she’d brought from inside her backpack, hair barrettes, the bottle of Chanel No. 5, and spread them over the night table and window-sill and small desk.

  The bathroom was near the elevator. Phoebe paused in the dim hall and listened for movement, intending to knock at someone’s door and ask for an aspirin. But she heard not the faintest whisper of motion, as if she were the twelfth floor’s only inhabitant.

  Phoebe changed into her sleeping shirt, turned off the light and lay on the bed, arms folded. The ceiling was made of white squares that sparkled faintly. Her heart pounded in her ears. Something was wrong. She’d failed, Phoebe thought, but at what? Imagining herself in Europe, she’d always pictured someone else, physically even, a tall blonde with an answer for everything—as if, in the course of this journey, she would not only shed her former life but cease to exist as herself. Yes, she thought, to leave Phoebe O’Connor behind and be reborn as someone beautiful, mysterious. But the opposite had happened; her own narrow boundaries had hemmed her in, keeping everything real at a distance.

  She seized the two humps of her ribcage. If I just could calm down, she told herself, but her panic swelled with every second. It flashed through her mind that whatever drug she’d smoked in Amsterdam with Nico and Karl had damaged her brain. She stared at the walls frantic to call her mother, but had no idea where to find an international phone at that hour. She sprang from the bed and pawed through her purse in the dark for the envelope with the hit of acid inside it. Lately she’d wondered if she should just take the acid, swallow it down—maybe that would send her reeling through a last, crucial door like Alice passing through the mouse hole. But Phoebe couldn’t bring herself to take it—she was too afraid.

  She crawled under the covers and curled in a ball. Just get through this night, she thought, but her body trembled, teeth chattering, heartbeat pounding against her eardrums. Gradually she found herself thinking of home, fog swirling like dreams around the Golden Gate Bridge and white buildings of downtown. Fog lapping over eucalyptus trees, so soft, half-liquid the way it poured against the bedroom window, obscuring every other house from sight and even the trees, like being out on the open sea surrounded by nothing, until finally there was nothing left but to close your eyes.

  Dear Mom, Phoebe and Barry, Yesterday we went to Epernay where they make all the kinds of champagne and we took a cool tour of the champagne cellars of Dom Perignon and splurged on two bottles for our poor Reims host but guess what? He doesn’t like champagne! So we drank it ourselves! Wolf’s gone again. I miss him but we don’t get along but I miss him anyways. Life is so crazy. Love, Faith

  Phoebe woke the next morning to a square of gray sky. The panic had passed. She lay still a long time before getting dressed and hiding her backpack under the cot. She stuffed her valuables in her purse, locked the room and walked to the train station for the day trip to Epernay.

  On the train Phoebe’s indefatigable hope rose in her again. Perhaps last night’s terror had been a final test, she thought, and now, in Epernay, something marvelous would unveil itself.

  At the Moët & Chandon winery she joined an English-speaking tour, listening with passionate interest to how the bottles were stored at angles and rotated to shift their sediments, as if the solution to her troubles lay hidden among these damp tunnels with bursts of silty gray moss springing from their walls. It was a long tour, and the longer it went on, the more Phoebe dreaded its end, the return to her own unreliable care.

  She downed her sample glass of Dom Pérignon and then stood self-consciously, holding the empty glass while her English-speaking colleagues discreetly sipped their own.

  “Please,” said the man beside her, offering Phoebe his champagne. He spoke with an accent. “I have not tasted.”

  Phoebe thanked him, moved by the kindness. She drank the champagne. He was a young man. His eyes resembled Barry’s, the same dark iris nearly indistinguishable from the pupil.

  When the tour dispersed, Phoebe walked slowly back toward the station. Epernay was filled with the tart scent of grapes; it seemed to rise from the pavement, the storefronts, even the groggy weeds along the road. The champagne had left Phoebe woozy. It was only two-fifteen, and the empty day hung before her. Across the street she noticed the young man who had given her his champagne, walking in the same direction. Their eyes met. “You are taking the train for Reims?” he called through the dusty silence.

  “Yes,” Phoebe said. “Are you?”

  He crossed the street. He was Pietro, a student at the University of Turin. He had come to Reims today from Paris, and tonight would take the overnight train to Madrid.

  Phoebe blithely explained that she was making her way toward Italy to meet her older sister. The lie came so effortlessly, bringing with it such a bolt of delight that she wondered why she ever told the truth.

  “She lives in Italia? Your sister?”

  “In Rome. Eight years now,” Phoebe said. “She writes books.”

  “Ah, writer,” Pietro said, nodding. He seemed impressed. “Maybe I have read something.”

  “Well, no. Because the first one is just coming out. Actually, three of her books are coming out at one time.”

  “Three!” He looked amazed.

  “She writes fast,” Phoebe assured him, flushed.

  Pietro stopped walking and pulled from his shoulder bag a small notebook and a green pencil. “Please, tell me her name?” he said.

  “Faith. Faith O’Connor.”

  “Faith O’Connor,” he said, copying slowly. “I will find her books.”

  The train was not due for twenty minutes, so Phoebe and Pietro ordered croque-monsieurs at a bar and ate them outside on the warm concrete steps. They must have looked like traveling companions, Phoebe thought, possibly even a couple. She noticed her voice leaning into laughter, how she tossed her head, each tiny gesture like the sweet ache of a muscle craving exercise.

  “Why did you come to Reims?” she asked teasingly. “For the champagne?”

  Pietro smiled, apparently not understanding. “I gave to you, eh? The champagne,” he said. “No, I come for the cathedral.”

  “Cathedral?”

  Pietro looked shocked. “The Cathedral of Reims? Is extraordinary, most beautiful in Europe.”

  “I just got here,” Phoebe said, abashed.

  Somewhere in the town a bell began to ring. Pietro’s eyes were filled with a gentleness she found difficult to look at. “So, you are here—because why?” he asked.

  “My sister told me to come,” she said. “She loved Reims.”

  Pietro smiled. “Your sister,” he said. “I think she has seen the cathedral.”

  On the train they sat side by side, passing soft fields that leaned and shook as if water were pouring across them. Where the grain had been cut a sharp stubble remained, glinting like broken glass in the sunlight. Pietro’s clothes were clean but smudged, as if he owned few outfits and wore them often. Despite his physical slightness, there was a strength about him.

  “You seem older than college,” Phoebe said.

  Pietro cocked h
is head. She repeated the question more carefully.

  “Ah. Yes,” he said. “For some years I did not study. Now I have returned, but yes, I am older now.”

  Phoebe asked why he’d stopped. Pietro hesitated, and she worried she’d been nosy.

  “I had some creases,” he finally said.

  Phoebe frowned. “Creases?”

  “Crisi? Crisis? You know this?”

  “Oh, crisis,” Phoebe said. “Sure.”

  “Crisis,” Pietro said slowly. He tapped his head with one finger. “Crisis.”

  “A crisis in your head? In your brain?” Phoebe could not keep the eagerness from her voice.

  “Sì,” Pietro said, then seemed to reflect. “No, I am wrong. Not head. In my so-well. You understand?”

  “Your soul,” Phoebe said. She could not believe what she was hearing. “But you seem okay now,” she said carefully. “I mean, you seem stable.”

  “Now I am well,” Pietro said.

  Phoebe longed to ask more, but her own fragility felt so obvious, burdening every word. Yet she no longer feared prying. There was something indefinably public about Pietro, as if the events of his life were there for the taking. “How did you do that?” she asked. “I mean, get well.”

  Pietro placed a fist against his heart. “Jesu Christ,” he said. “I found Him and I am saved.”

  Phoebe stared at him. “Are you a priest?”

  “Missionary,” he said. “I am just beginning, in Madrid.”

  Phoebe wanted to tell Pietro that she was a Catholic, but was ashamed of not having been to church in so long. “How—how did you find Him?” she asked.

  “He came,” Pietro said. “He came to me.”

  “You mean you saw Him?” Phoebe’s voice was hushed.

  “Non ‘saw,’” Pietro said, putting one hand on each eye. “Saw.” And placing both hands flat on his chest, he flipped them open like two doors making room for something to enter him.

  “Were you afraid?”

  He smiled. “When I don’t see Him, then I am afraid.” After a moment he added, “Still I am afraid, sì, but no I am alone. I am not alone,” he corrected himself.

  Phoebe looked out the window. Beneath a layer of thin, frayed clouds the sky was pure blue. “My sister used to be religious,” she said.

  “Your sister. A Roma.”

  Phoebe felt as if by lying about Faith she’d soiled Pietro without his knowing it. “Yes,” she said, anxious now to be truthful. “Our father was very sick and my sister began to study for her Confirmation.” She was aware of speaking slowly, formally for Pietro’s benefit, and this gave her descriptions the distilled, monumental quality of events she’d read about. “We went to Mass every day,” she said.

  “You also—you accompanied her?”

  “Yes.”

  Jesus on the cross, his ribs like a pair of folded wings. Phoebe’s mind had wandered far from the priest—a spelling test, a two-square game she’d dominated at recess—no event was too profane to bear contemplation in the house of God. Only at the Last Supper did she finally wend her way back to the sermon in time for the breaking of the Host—the body of Christ in that small, flat disk! Phoebe imagined it tasting buttery, sweet, and for years had watched jealously as adults and older children rose from their pews at the end of each Mass to partake of this wondrous food. As they left the altar, she would scrutinize their faces for signs of transformation. But their expressions gave nothing away.

  When finally she’d made her own First Communion—years late, taller than the other girls and wearing the wrong kind of dress—she was disconcerted to find that the Host had no taste at all. It stuck to the roof of her mouth like a cardboard chip from a board game, then melted away. As for the promising wave of intensity she’d felt while coming away from the altar, it proved no more than the dizzying power of her longing for something to happen. By the time she left the church, it had already passed.

  “Your father,” Pietro said. “He is well today?”

  Phoebe hesitated, beguiled by further stories she might invent. But lying to someone so religious seemed deeply wrong. It was almost like lying to God.

  “He died,” she said. Grade school, high school—“Your dad, what does he do?” As if dying were his sole achievement.

  “I am sorry.”

  Phoebe shrugged. These exchanges always made her uncomfortable; in the end she felt obliged to make light of her father’s death, just to get things back on a cheerier note. “It was ages ago,” she said.

  They sat in silence. Countryside yielded to city, modern apartment buildings, bright laundry flapping on cramped terraces. Soon the ride would end, they would go their separate ways.

  The train jerked and swayed pulling into the station at Reims. Phoebe felt lightheaded getting off; from the platform Pietro took her hand and gently guided her down. She heard church bells, big, silvery peals like heavy objects plunging into water.

  “I have some hours before my train,” Pietro said when they reached the street. “If you are not occupied, I can show to you the cathedral.”

  “Oh yes!” Phoebe cried, grateful for this reprieve.

  He led her to an older, residential part of the city, stone buildings four or five stories high, shallow grille balconies. Dozens of squeaking birds hopped among the fussy trees.

  At the far end of a square the cathedral loomed suddenly before them. Phoebe had never seen anything like it, a massive honeycomb of nooks and crannies and statues, points of gray stone rising like stalagmites toward the sky. She and Pietro crossed the square, sluggish pigeons flapping halfheartedly out of their way. The cathedral’s massive rounded doors were bordered by carved figurines laid one above the other, up, up and around the top, where the hapless saints looked like passengers stuck on a Ferris wheel.

  “We see the West Façade,” Pietro said. “There, you can find”—he pointed above the left doorway—“Smiling Angel. She is famous, maybe you have seen from pictures.”

  With her sly, beatific smile, the Smiling Angel might have been the Mona Lisa’s sister. Two pigeons roosted on her head.

  They entered the cathedral through a small rectangular door carved in the right portal. A vast space loomed around them, filled with a cavelike smell of wet stone. Phoebe followed Pietro down the nave, feeling cool rock through the soles of her shoes. Pairs of fluted columns rose to the ceiling and curved back down like the ribs of a giant beast. Phoebe sensed them flexing in and out with its breath. The dusky air was streaked with seams of color from the stained-glass windows, purple, crimson, gold, colored puddles on the stone floor. The vast silence was like a sigh, the hum you heard inside seashells.

  They traversed the aisles, Pietro pointing out paintings and statues in a manner at once reverent and familiar, as if these saints were his family members. “Here is Saint Sebastian,” he whispered. “He was soldier for the army of Diocletian, shot with arrows because he was a Christian. When he recovered, so they beat him to death.” His accent, combined with the simple phrases he used, made Pietro’s speech sound biblical to Phoebe, the barest, truest way a thing could be said.

  They paused at a series of tapestries, scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. “Visitation,” Pietro said of one Phoebe didn’t recognize: two women conversing in a doorway. “After Mary learns she will birth the Son of God, she makes a visit to her cousin Elizabeth.”

  Phoebe found it sweet, Mary rushing to tell her cousin the big news. She gazed at the rich, salmon-colored fabric and tried to listen, but the cathedral’s hum seemed louder now, flowing up from beneath the floor as if a giant machine were whirring under the stone.

  “In the cathedral,” Pietro was saying, “is a three-dimension Bible. All windows, all statues, they tell one part in the story …” But Phoebe couldn’t listen, the hum was too distracting, a churn of bright, familiar sound like a schoolyard during recess. A wave of pleasure rolled through her, a warmth low in her stomach, a delicious calm in her limbs.

  “I apolog
ize,” Pietro said. “I speak too much.”

  “No,” Phoebe said, shutting her eyes.

  “We can be silent.”

  She smiled. It felt like her first real smile in days, weeks. She opened her eyes and looked at Pietro.

  “You feel something,” he said wonderingly.

  They stood in silence. The smile just stayed on Phoebe’s face, the corners of her mouth rising inadvertently. In Pietro’s eyes she saw a fierce, burning strength. “I feel it,” she whispered. “All around me.”

  “He is here, sì. With us,” Pietro said.

  Gently, his arm barely touching her back, Pietro guided Phoebe to a pew. They sat side by side on the ancient, creaking wood. Phoebe smelled its polish. An organ played experimentally; hymns she dimly recognized would collapse mid-passage, change key and resume, each random echoey note floating to the ceiling and lingering there before melting into the larger sound. Phoebe felt the silky pulse of blood through her veins. Pietro knelt to pray, forehead pressed to his folded hands. The position looked so extreme, as if someone had thrust down his head, forced him into supplication. He didn’t fight it. He simply bowed, as Faith had bowed day after day in church while their father was sick.

  Phoebe found she was breathing in time with the gentle flex of cathedral ribs. Gradually the border between her own body and the cathedral’s body began to dissolve, and Phoebe herself was dissolving, melting into its oceanic sigh, and what bliss—to be absorbed, to give herself up! The fulfillment of her journey. The fulfillment of all her life, Phoebe thought, as snippets of childhood prayers began drifting to mind. She whispered them aloud—“Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Father, who art in Heaven. Body of Christ. Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us”—each prayer like a glimmer from a splendid, holy pageant that had vanished when her sister died: the games of her childhood, the gaudy echo of electric guitars, Faith arranging her rosary in the shape of a heart on the same glass table where barely a year later she would tease through her fingers a soft green heap of marijuana, pressing it to dust, brushing it over the glass before rolling it into slender white joints. Faith deep in prayer while Phoebe dreamed beside her; returning home afterward to the sweet, intoxicating smell of their father’s illness.