The Electric Woman

by Tessa Fontaine

  “That they are in on something special,” I say.

  “It’s a game you’re playing. You both know the other one is smart. Let them think that they are a little bit smarter. That they will be the ones, the only ones, who might see behind the veil.”

  We are walking back toward his trailer, parked beside our semi. His steps are slow and lumbered, the way it seems a real giant would walk, and I wonder if this is a by-product of being so tall or an act assimilated into every facet of his life after so many years of embodiment.

  “Anyway, you’re good at this. And I bet you’re good at a lot of things you try. You’re going to do good things in your life, whatever you do,” he says. “You’re so young still.”

  “I’m not that young.”

  “Oh Christ,” Chris says. “Be whatever age you want.”

  * * *

  By the fourth morning of the Minnesota State Fair, nobody is speaking.

  We are up for the 8:00 a.m. work call, all in a row along the front banner line while we hoist and tie, but there is none of the usual chitchat or shit talking. There are a few sounds, Spif grabbing the rope from one of the new bally girls as he says, simply, “No,” and does the task himself. The sound of Big, Big Ben testing the speakers out on the front stage. The soft thwack of Brian the Juggler’s clubs landing in his hand just outside the bunk doorway as he practices in his boxers, hair pointing in every direction. Francine the burlesque dancer sweeping the dirt and bugs from the floor beneath her bunk that have accumulated since the day before. The quiet gurgle of our mini-coffeepot as it brews Folgers. And finally, the swoosh and shuffle of everyone transforming in costume and makeup. Their voices are too tired to come out. We finished last night’s performance just six hours ago and have fifteen hours of performing ahead of us.

  Though our crew is made up of very different people, we move like one large breathing organism. Somehow we decide on this silence, pledging ourselves to it for the full hour before we open, letting the first words spoken happen onstage in front of an audience.

  The other sound this quiet morning is the hose, always hooked up just down the trailer’s steps. Short E is down there, taking a shower. The bathrooms are far and take too long to get to, he says, so he stands out there in his boxers or swimming trunks with his bottles of shampoo and body wash and lathers up. It looks dreamy, really. The day is getting hot already and the hose water is always cold after you run it for a minute. I fantasize about that cold hose water as the day goes on and I put on the extra costume for Ms. Olga Hess, the Headless Woman (hospital gown) over my own costume, or for Ms. Vickie Condor, Four-Legged Woman (vest, skirt, and knee socks, plus scarf around my head). I think about it as I grow light-headed from the heat, come back to the main backstage area, and press my face against the single box fan we have there to cool us. Greedy, I stand so my face is right against it, blocking the air for a moment from everyone else. It feels like there is no other way to survive. But then Short E, back from his act onstage, will do a handstand in front of it and cool the length of his upside-down body, cool his ass, and I begin to boil at the injustice of it if he stays longer than five seconds—how dare he block that air from us! Can’t he see how many of us back here need it? Require it for survival? But the next time I walk anywhere, I press my face or chest back to it.

  The meat-grinders last a month in total. Two big, huge, giant, long, massive, thrilling, nasty GTFM state fairs with that smaller county fair in the middle just to tide us over. Even if you slept every minute you were off work during the meat-grinders—between 12:15 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., or 2:15 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., you could not get enough rest. The full month of August. And then the extra performers we picked up will hop back on buses and planes and trains and return whence they came. And we will barrel on.

  I wonder how full everyone’s pee jugs are.

  * * *

  “Listen,” Chris Christ says to me as he comes backstage with Short E. “We’re adding a ding that we think is gonna be a real moneymaker. We need you as Short E’s assistant. Okay?” I nod sure, because of course it sounds alluring, though in truth, adding another act to the others I already do is not what I want—those backstage moments to sit or sprint to the closet toilet between acts are precious. I won’t get any cut of this ding, Chris Christ says, but I will get to help Short E. And walk among the crowd. I’m still unsure, until they explain the ding.

  It’s brilliant.

  Short E walks out onstage and tells the crowd that he wants to share a special story with them.

  “My mom was a preacher,” he says. “And I grew up going to church and listening to her preach. A couple of years ago, she died of cancer. It was the hardest time in my life, but right before she died, she said she wanted to give me a gift. I want to share with all of you what she said, and what she gave me. It’s this,” he says, pulling a small gold object out of his pocket. “The world’s smallest Bible, for the world’s smallest daredevil.”

  The Bible is about two inches by two inches, a teensy paper book with print so small it requires a magnifying glass. It slides into a gold plastic case bedazzled with red or blue sequins. The whole thing is very ornate and gaudy, and an exact replica could be purchased by the audience for just one dollar.

  Or two dollars.

  Or three dollars.

  Depending on how God-loving the audience seems. How willing to part with their money for a little reminder of the Lord’s words and the story they’ll be able to tell their other good Christian friends about the no-legged man they’d helped by purchasing the Bible from him in his dead mother’s honor.

  “I’m going to bring my assistant out now,” Short E says, and I come through the curtain with a sweet smile on my face and Bibles dangling from my fingers. Did I mention that the Bibles were also keychains? So that the Good Word can come with you wherever you go?

  I walk across the stage and down the steps into the crowd, swinging the little dazzlers from my fingers as I weave through the audience, smiling my best sincere close-lipped smile, which I hope erases the memory of me from just a few moments earlier, when I was asking them for another dollar to see a girl bent like a pretzel.

  “You don’t look like a freak to me,” one Christian in a lime-green collared polo shirt whispers to me after I sell him the world’s smallest Bible. I can tell he is a Christian by the tenderness with which he clasps the gold book I trade him for two dollars. Also by his haircut. “In fact, I think you’re beautiful,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say, and consider marrying him and moving to a condo, but the music cue for the guillotine act starts, so instead I walk up the steps and part the curtain and sit in my backstage chair for four minutes until I become a four-legged woman.

  Another night, a man in wraparound sunglasses and a sleeveless orange T-shirt asks if I like being an entertainer.

  “Yes, it’s pretty great,” I tell him, trying to let the sheen of my blond hair blind him into purchasing five Bibles.

  “Well, baby,” he says, “I’m an entertainer, too. I’ll entertain you all night long.” Each of my fingers has a Bible dangling from it, like a mobile of holiness. I look over at the woman standing beside him. I’d assumed she was his wife. She smiles a wide grin at me. Her cheeks are shiny and hot, hot pink. My Bibles clink. They buy seven.

  * * *

  When the act is over one night, and Short E and I count out the money we’ve made him—he gets a percentage of this ding, like I do for the blade box—the Big Boss sits between us.

  “Who sells more, Short E, you or Tess?”

  “Tess, usually,” he says.

  “That’s what it looked like to me, too,” Chris says. “It’s too bad. Back in the day, the crowd would only buy whatever ding we were selling from the freak. Wanted to support him directly, give him business. Wanted to be up close and shake his hand and look. Nowadays, people are too scared.”

  “Sometimes they come up to me to buy one, take a picture with me,” Short E says. “It makes sense.
I’m the biggest star in the show.”

  “People are mostly chickens, now,” Chris says, ignoring Short E’s last comment. “Want to sit on their fat asses and see freaks on TV and not have to actually be face-to-face with them. Too scared to see them as people. Easier to only consider them from afar. Chickenshit.”

  “Chickenshit,” Short E says, and we tear into another plastic bag of Bibles, ready them for the next act.

  WILDEWOMAN

  Two years and ten months after the stroke

  25 days into The Trip

  August 2013

  I get a photograph of a towel folded into a swan.

  There’s another, folded into a dog.

  The towels are crisp, white, stiff. They are perched on the end of a finely made bed. These, I learn, were waiting for my mom and Davy each day, after their small cabin on the cruise ship was made up, and wasn’t it pretty funny?

  It was pretty funny.

  There was another one, two legs out to the side, some kind of tail, maybe, and an oversize head, but nobody could figure out what animal that was supposed to be.

  * * *

  Then there’s another photograph.

  The background is black night sky. There is the faint hint of a recent sunset from a deep red stripe across the horizon.

  Davy posts a photograph of my mom from the ship on the blog he’s keeping. The caption beneath the image reads: “On the deck, singing.”

  If this were a painting by one of the masters and not a quickly captured cell-phone snapshot, we’d discuss the brilliant use of light to illuminate the face, a bright wash across all the skin so it seems to glow. Not the kind of light that has been still, like an ever-glowing constellation, but instead a kind of light in motion and a face that has just moved through darkness into the light.

  The background’s tinge of red is just enough to bring the color out on her cheeks and a rose flush for the lips, enough to remind us with just a glimpse of her pink, pink tongue that she is vibrantly alive.

  There is wind in her hair, that wild silver mane, raised to the heavens and tossed to the side, a Wildewoman out at night on the deck of a ship somewhere in the Atlantic.

  And her eyes. They had been the gray slugs of illness for those first months after her stroke. Unrecognizable. And then they’d come back moments here or there, but they seemed to gray over again when stimulus was too overwhelming.

  But here, in this photograph, they are two gorgeous moss pools—almost green? could it be?—and glittery and focused, sharp, and she is looking at the camera, at her husband, and she is on her way to somewhere.

  I want to feel terror. I do feel terror. I fear that all the bad things I can invent will happen. But then there is this photograph. She is sparked.

  And her mouth is open.

  In motion.

  And there is song coming out.

  There are things to say, and there are so many ways to say them.

  THE SWORD SWALLOWER

  Day 71 of 150

  World of Wonders

  August 2013

  Chris Christ is hunched on a stool with hands as big as truck tires and his two continual streams of black snuff running from the corners of his mouth.

  “Tess!” he shouts. “Time to learn!”

  He knows every act backward and forward and is a former chimp trainer and knife thrower.

  “Stand here,” he says, pointing beside him. His legs are stretched straight and wide from the stool. Maybe this should be a moment of hesitation. I do not hesitate.

  He puts one hand on my clavicle and one hand on my forehead. Presses.

  “Stand up straight,” he says. “Straighter.”

  It’s early evening and there’s a pause in our regular day: a storm. Lightning nearby. It has temporarily shut down the fair.

  He pushes my head back until I am staring straight up into the eye of our tent’s center pole.

  “You’ve got to be lined up perfectly straight,” he says, “or you’ll never get the sword down.”

  * * *

  In India, fakirs, beginning as early as 2000 B.C.E., swallowed swords and walked across hot coals, handled snakes and stepped on broken glass as ascetic tributes to the divine, as assertions of power, connection, and invulnerability. What is a body if you take its power over you away?

  In 1912, there was a Dutch fakir, Mirin Dajo, who asked his assistant to pierce a metal foil all the way through his body. It went from the center of his back through his organs and came out the front. He appeared unharmed, creeping up to the edge of the stage for his audience to inspect the foil and skin that the metal came through.

  This was not an act of trickery. Dozens of doctors examined him, X-raying his body, asking him to perform various tasks to see if they could spot the illusion. He even jogged around the building. He wanted to prove that his feat was possible only through his ability to withstand the pain.

  The doctors decided that he was able to create scar tissue in his body over time by slowly inserting the metal and allowing it to partially heal before inserting it farther. Between performances, he walked around with metal tubes through the holes. A secular stigmata.

  Eventually, as the audience’s need for shock increased, he was impaled by three hollow tubes at once, and had his assistant pump water through the tubes so the clear liquid poured out the front of his body, splashing the crowd.

  Human fountain! people chanted.

  Human fountain!

  Human fountain!

  After swallowing a sword that nicked his heart, Mirin Dajo died of an aortic rupture in 1946.

  * * *

  The way pain works:

  When a sharp object presses against our skin, receptors send electrical signals through nerve fibers to the spinal cord and then up to the brain. Some of these fibers run like insulated telephone wires and carry the signals rapidly; others move through weblike neural connections and travel more slowly. The signals move to the brain’s thalamus, which acts as a relay station and directs them to the sensory cortex. The signals are then interpreted by the brain as a sharp pain. The slower impulses, traveling through the weblike neural fibers, become a throbbing ache.

  Our brain has total control over our pain signals. When it believes we are in extreme danger, the brain turns the pain signal down so that we are not hindered by relatively minor pains instead of fleeing greater danger.

  To train the body not to feel pain, to control thinking about the pain, then, does your brain have to believe itself to be in a constant state of life-threatening crisis?

  * * *

  Loose carnie children, dripping rainwater, peek under our tent’s sidewall. It’s pouring. The fair is closed until the storm passes so that nobody gets struck by lightning at the top of the Ferris wheel. Chris has decided it’s time for me to swallow swords. It’s one of the only acts I haven’t yet learned, but we all need to know every act in case anything happens to anyone, the Giant says.

  It feels good to put the blade in my mouth.

  But good isn’t quite the right word for how it feels to have the metal inside—it isn’t complicated enough. It feels dangerous and important, one of the pinnacle sideshow acts. And it hurts. Something jammed in the throat leads to gagging and the rise of bile. There are three sphincters to pass in the throat and esophagus—a body’s emergency brakes. Do you want to know the secret to all the sideshow acts right now? Ready? Untrain your instincts. Unlearn self-preservation.

  There are five big caged lights hanging from the tent’s center poles that emit a soft buzz against the storm-dark. The wet earth smell has, for a moment, overtaken the funnel cake and corn dog grease that hangs in the air all day.

  A wrong wrist twitch and the sword inside might pierce my lungs. Might nick my heart. I feel some relief as I stop imagining the pain of others and, instead, live inside my own potential for catastrophe. As I look for the divine.

  “Think of the blade going down your throat like it’s a big stiff prick,” Red, who swallows swor
ds in the inside show, tells me. He can slide twelve down his throat at once. He holds seven Guinness World Records. It says so on his van.

  “And the gag reflex, think of that as just the pubic hairs tickling your throat,” he says, winking. Tommy has folded a coat hanger into a sword for practice, which he made by straightening a wire hanger all the way out, doubling it, then twisting a handle. Mimicking him, I lick both sides and tilt my head back, let the metal rest on my tongue. I choose a little danger.

  Anything can happen to anyone. Last season, the knife thrower flung his blade at the board and it landed in his longtime partner’s thigh. She was taken to the hospital for stitches, but thirty minutes later, when their act came around again and she was still gone, another cast member had to go stand on the board. She had to know how to go stand on the board as if she didn’t know how blood looks falling down the angles of fishnets. Had to know how to immediately erase memory. That’s the predictable kind of crisis in this business, of course, and the predictable victim. But there is a whole carnival of bodies being whipped through space on big machines and sex and meth and the momentary elation of being the object of attention under those bright stage lights, and the truth is, there are potential crises all around at every minute.

  I heave. My throat’s gag keeps catching and I cough hard, waiting for the vomit to rise. When I pull the sword out the quarter inch it’s gone down, the metal has flecks of white and clear fluid on the tip.

  “Relax your throat,” Chris says.

  “Some people are naturals,” Red says. He watches me attempt a few swallows and cough. “Some people aren’t,” he says, staring me down. Rain is falling up from the ground.

  I’ve tried and coughed the hanger sword out twenty times. It’s hard to tell how far it’s gotten, but I don’t think I’ve even passed by the first gag sphincter.