“You can use the car when you’d like, as long as you ask first,” his father says.
“Oh. Okay. Thank you. I promise to ask,” he says.
HENRY ARRANGES TO GO TO the Hoosier Youth Circus twice a week. Whenever he uses the car, he brings something home for his father that he knows he needs: a roll of tape, a bottle of windshield washer fluid, a loaf of bread. Sometimes his father gives him money if he wants something specific, but usually Henry uses his own. There aren’t many regular jobs around, but Henry mows lawns, bales hay, moves furniture—whatever people will pay him to do. His father continues to give the car up without much questioning. He is more grateful for this small contribution of money and time from Henry than Henry ever expected.
Henry doesn’t have to worry about tuition for the circus class or keeping his grades up for it, because he isn’t officially enrolled. He can’t pay for it, and Christiakov says he would be bored by the regular classes, anyway. When he asks Christiakov what he wants for private lessons, he says this is about art and scholarship, not money.
Part of Henry thinks he could just tell his father what he is doing. As long as he doesn’t ask for money and keeps running errands, Henry suspects he couldn’t care less if his son wants to be in a circus—and why should he care? It doesn’t hurt anyone. He wants to tell him, in fact, but something keeps him from saying anything. Later, after he moves out, Henry will realize that he didn’t tell him because he didn’t want to take the risk. He didn’t want to give his father the opportunity to try to take something Henry needed as badly as he needed this. Because, if he said no, what else could he want but to hurt Henry? Everything else could be chalked up to accident. Even his father’s fury was a kind of accident, a force that had nothing to do with his father’s real feelings or desires. But to say no to this, what else could it mean but that his father did not care about him, did not want him to be happy?
For now, the only person who knows where he goes in his father’s car twice a week is Cassie, who keeps all his secrets, as he keeps hers. He’s been thinking lately that they either know too many of each other’s secrets, or too few. They can’t seem to get away from each other. They have broken up more than once, but when something bad happens to Cassie, instead of going to her new boyfriend for comfort, she comes to Henry. It happens every couple months, Cassie showing up to school in tears. He’ll find her standing by his locker like that, and he will not ask questions. To Henry, the reason for her crying seems much less urgent than the crying itself, and the crying itself he understands implicitly. When something bad happens to Henry, he doesn’t cry, but he goes to her, whether they are together or not, whether they are fighting or not. They end up in bed and back in love, back to holding hands in the halls, back to sloppy kisses hello between classes.
She says she doesn’t mind that he’s studying to be a clown. She likes it, she says, even though she can’t say “studying to be a clown” without giggling. She only wishes he’d take her out once in a while. She’d love to go to the bowling alley in the neighboring town, she says. She wouldn’t say no to a dollar movie, a burger, to watching him get swallowed by ghosts playing Pac-Man at the arcade, if he asked.
She mentions the Pac-Man thing again, one Saturday while they lie side by side on his bed, making out. When she brings up going out, Henry gets annoyed. He spends all his money on gas and food, and he’s explained this to her at least a dozen times.
“Take some from your dad,” she says, sweetly, letting her hair hang down in his face. In the time it takes for her hair to sweep across his cheek, he goes from annoyed to beside himself.
He sits up, and when she moves, too, he forces her back down. “Are you retarded? Or do you hate me?”
“What?”
“You know he’d like fucking kill me, right?”
“I don’t know,” she says, her eyes darting back and forth. “Don’t be mad.”
You do know. He could kill me. He could. You do know, don’t you?
He has the worst thought he’s ever had, then, that he would like to push her off the bed. He thinks he would like to see the look on her face when she fell, thinks it would satisfy him to see her reel back into the dresser. As soon as he thinks it, he is disgusted with himself and lets Cassie go. She’s already sensed the danger, though, and looks at him with the same fear on her face he saw when they were little, when she thought her sister would tattle on her for doing dirty things in the overgrown grass. This fear still softens her, makes her something exquisite to Henry.
She goes back to kissing him, deeper now, and Henry doesn’t stop her, even though he is still angry. She is kissing him not out of affection but as a means of distraction, of self-defense. But he needs the distraction. He thinks, She’s fine. She knows how to deal with someone like me, though what the hell that means, Henry doesn’t want to consider any further.
CHRISTIAKOV CALLS HENRY A “KINESTHETIC genius,” which means that he’s a genius of movement. He teaches Henry some basic anatomy because he believes that if Henry knows what is inside his body, he’ll be able to control it that much better—if he is aware of the tiny muscle groups in his face and his ears, for example, and if he knows where the muscles in his back are attached to his bones, he’ll be able to call out to those muscles with his mind and move them as he pleases.
His teacher’s hunch turns out to be correct. After Christiakov teaches him the muscle groups and tendons, Henry spends a session in front of the mirror practicing this skill, which mostly involves making faces at himself, flexing his biceps, and making his pecs talk to each other. Christiakov decides he has a sense of humor after all.
He teaches Henry to juggle irregularly shaped things, to fall, to walk like a drunk, to walk like a woman, to walk like a tough guy—how to look startled, smitten, hurt, embarrassed, how to cry, take a stage-punch, take a pie, and how to be absolutely, positively stone-still. When Henry messes up, Christiakov doesn’t get angry, he doesn’t yell. He says, “Again.” Christiakov shows him videos of Charlie Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, Buster Keaton, Carol Burnett, Emmett Kelly, and Jackie Chan. Jackie Chan is one of the great clowns, according to Christiakov.
“I thought he was just a martial artist. And a badass,” Henry says as Jackie battles an onslaught of goons on the television.
“Are you kidding? He’s a clown to the bone, my friend,” says Christiakov. “They call him a kinesthetic genius, too. You’re cut from the same cloth.”
Christiakov rewinds the tape, and Henry watches his routine in reverse: Jackie Chan pulls a blow, ducks, flips away from his tall, square-faced opponent, contorts his face to rage, then confusion, then laughter.
Christiakov, standing only a few feet from the screen, says, “Okay, now watch his face here.”
But Henry is behind Christiakov, not really listening, mimicking the martial artist’s moves in reverse, as if his body is on rewind. Christiakov turns when he hears Henry land the flip, in time to see him shuffle through Jackie’s three facial expressions.
PHYSICAL MIMICRY IS EASY ENOUGH for Henry. Being funny is more of a challenge for him than being coordinated, but Christiakov still believes he will be a good clown.
“It’s not about being a cheery little idiot, Henry. People get enough of that,” Christiakov says one day. The two of them are outside the rehearsal space. Spring has made the days longer, and they try to enjoy the last few minutes of sun before it goes down for the day. Christiakov is drinking a glass of tea that smells like flowers and looks like piss on ice. “Being funny comes from understanding that the same pain you have, everybody has. If an audience can watch their pain in your body, they feel relieved of it for a while.”
“That seems kind of shitty of them,” says Henry.
“Not at all. It’s very gracious. People are reluctant to give up their pain. They’ve earned it, after all. Which is why you must be careful with it—you don’t want to disrespect their pain by being a mediocre clown. You’ve got to have some grace about it. You’ve got
to tell a good story of that pain, or it’s just going to cut.”
Henry nods.
“Do you understand that, or are you just nodding because you want me to think you understand that?”
“No, I understand. I do.”
“Good,” he says and sips his tea. “Because I’m telling you, if you ever want to get a steady job, you’re going to have to know more than just the rola bola and the unicycle. Circuses that are just a series of neat stunts—they’re dead.”
Henry looks around to see if any of the students are puttering around the studio. He hopes they don’t overhear Christiakov, because what if they’re like Henry and hope to do this for a living? What if they haven’t heard yet that their rola bola skills are for a dead art?
“You’ll be fine out there, I know you will. But if you want to find a place for yourself, I’m just saying, you’re going to have to use your noodle.”
The sun goes down, and they go inside. Henry has an especially important task to work on: he needs to create a face for himself. All clown faces are unique, and Henry has almost got his pinned down. He paints a jester’s mask on his face, all white with high black eyebrows, little smile lines at the corners of his eyes—all the kind people he has known have these, and he wants them, too. He makes black lines extending up past his natural eyebrows and down to the apples of his cheeks. He looks like a joker from a deck of cards. It is simple and open, and Henry believes the face he’s created is his own proof that he will find a place for himself.
BECAUSE HE HAS LEARNED HOW to stretch, Henry stops getting sick at the thought of his mother or Andre. But he still thinks of them. Sometimes, Henry will say her full name, Rylan Bell, out loud, just to hear it. He does this a lot in the car, on the way to the Hoosier Youth Circus. No one can hear him there, except, maybe, hopefully, her.
Christiakov doesn’t ask questions about why he has never met Henry’s parents or why he has bruises on his arms that never go away. Henry assumes that he doesn’t really care about his parents, since they are not paying him, and he figures Christiakov believes the bruises are from tumbling. He’s not perfect, after all, and some stunts result in inevitable bruises, no matter how well executed.
By the time Henry is only a few months from turning seventeen, his balance is uncanny. He can stand on one foot on the seat of a moving bicycle. He can walk on a line thinner than his finger as easily as a spider can stand on its own web.
Still, one evening, his father shoves him, and even though Henry can catch himself before staggering back into his bedroom door, he doesn’t. The doorknob leaves a mark like a purple butterfly under his bottommost rib.
He doesn’t have to put up with this anymore. But he still does.
HENRY BECOMES OBSESSED WITH THE idea of “air-clowning.” Climbing and hanging from things is the only real challenge for Henry. “It’s psychological,” says Christiakov—the fear of the fall makes Henry nervous and clumsier than he ever is on the ground. But there’s no reason that he should be less coordinated five feet from the ground or forty, so he practices with a hoop that dangles down from scaffolding. Over the course of a few weeks, Henry works on this exclusively. Christiakov gives him a routine and raises the hoop in increments so that Henry gets further from the ground each time he runs through the moves. On the hoop, Henry slips. He moves like a fat man. He can’t concentrate on his face, so he isn’t funny at all. He gets so frustrated, he’d like to hang himself from the scaffolding. Christiakov says nothing but: “Again.”
But just when he is beginning to suspect that he is Christiakov’s favorite, his teacher tells him that he is leaving, for a city near the ocean. Henry finds Christiakov already has a default favorite, a son. Christiakov says this son wants Christiakov to live closer to him.
He tells him this as he drinks his piss-colored tea outside of the rehearsal space. Christiakov leans against the rail and Henry sits cross-legged on the cement. Beyond the parking lot of the youth circus, some of the oak trees still have bright-red leaves clinging to the tips of their branches.
Christiakov says his son is planning his grandchildren, and Henry pictures him, the son, with his pearly-toothed wife in a white house with blue shutters and flowers clustered around the foundation.
“Where’d you get a son?”
“That’s a very personal question, Henry. One answer is, magic. Another involves a long, boring relationship with a woman, of which I can tell you all the tragic details. Which version would you like?”
“Magic, thank you.”
“Very good.”
“But you have a job here. Doesn’t your son understand that?”
“Yes, he understands that. He isn’t making me move. I want to move. I want to make up for some lost time—I was not a good father to him, and now I’m grateful that he wants me around. Moving near him is the least I can do.”
“I’m sure you were a good father,” Henry says.
Christiakov shakes his head. “I promise you I wasn’t.” He pauses, seeming to consider the ice in his tea, then adds, “Although, I’ve never put any bruises on him. I have managed at least that much.”
Henry feels himself blush. “No, I didn’t think that you meant that.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he says and sits down next to Henry. Christiakov’s voice gets quiet then, and he says, “You need to get out of here, too. That’s very plain.”
Henry does not look at him. He looks at the cement in front of him, wishing to sink into it.
“And here I am getting personal, too, aren’t I? We don’t need to talk about it, as long as we are both agreed that when I go, you do, too. I’m not in the habit of telling my students to run away, but … I would hate to go and have something happen to you. I think you’ve always known you could come to me in a pinch. You have, haven’t you? But since I will not be here anymore, you need to get out of the pinch.”
Henry would be angry with Christiakov for assuming he knew so much, but he is too relieved. No adult, other than his mother, has ever insinuated that anything out of the ordinary or anything dangerous might be happening to his family. He feels vindicated. Even if he does not run away, he knows now that he has the right to.
He considers asking Christiakov to take him with him but quickly concludes that asking such a thing would be asking Christiakov to risk his whole life. A gay Russian immigrant kidnapping a teenaged boy? The town of Edgefield, as little as they cared for Henry, would find Christiakov and string him up.
Christiakov pulls an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. He’s been preparing for this. “Here is a list of numbers. Every circus in the Midwest. My number is in here, too. You may use me as a reference. If you must busk for money, there’s a list of places where you can do this safely, but I would caution you against doing it for any length of time. You don’t want to announce yourself to the law too obviously. They’ll ignore you if they can, but if they see you every day, they might feel obliged to take you in.”
Henry folds the envelope and sticks it in his pocket. “Thank you,” he says.
“There’s a circus in St. Louis that I think might be a good starting place for you. You’ll want to talk to a man named Caleb Baratucci. He is not as friendly or as charming as myself, but he is a good man, and he will look out for your interests.”
Henry would rather look out for his own interests, but he says, “I’ll find him.”
“Good. In a week or two, you’ll get a package from me in the mail. That’ll be your cue to get out of Dodge.”
Henry is finally able to look at Christiakov and sees that he is sad to be doing this.
“This is the only way that makes sense,” says Christiakov. “I always make sense. I have not ever steered you wrong.” He sounds as confident about this as he does about everything else he tells Henry to do, but Henry has already said he will go, and Christiakov is still making his case. Maybe he senses Henry’s hesitation, or maybe he is just trying to convince himself that this is the right thing to do.
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Henry tells his teacher again, yes, he will go.
He doesn’t learn anything new at his last session at the Hoosier Youth Circus. Just practices the old stuff. This time, Christiakov doesn’t say anything, or laugh, or smile while he performs. He says that he has to be his own audience, cheer for himself while he does his acts. He can’t count on energy from the people watching his act.
“What I said about audiences wanting your blood—you remember, don’t you? I wasn’t kidding. They will. The only way to keep them from slaughtering you is to stay confident and stay in character. If you want energy, you have to make it yourself.”
Henry does as he says. Christiakov waits until he is done reviewing everything he knows to uncross his arms and clap for him.
“A phenom,” he says.
Henry bows.
ON HENRY’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, CASSIE comes over with a chocolate sheet cake, which she delivers to his bedroom.
Henry looks at her, looks at the sheet cake, looks at her. He takes the cake from her hands and puts it on his dresser. Her eyes are bright and green like a cat’s, and her thin lips are curled into a smile. He turns her around, kisses the back of her neck and rubs her shoulders. He feels the lumps of poison in her muscles. Henry reaches down and catches the fabric of her skirt between his fingers, pulling it up until it bunches around her waist.
She turns her head and breathes right into his mouth, her too-sweet breath. He wants to tell her that he loves her and thank her for always being so nice to him. But their house is small and the TV is off, for once. His father and brother are in the kitchen making a birthday dinner for him. He can hear their conversation downstairs and he only assumes they can hear his.
When Henry and Cassie kiss, something goes wrong. He slips. Sometimes this happens, even to kinesthetic geniuses. His teeth collide with hers and slide upwards, slicing her lip.
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