AS THE CIRCUS WENT NORTH, the heat subsided. The sun ceased to be an enemy and recast itself as the cheery white light that illuminated the streets of Toronto in August. The performers took the bus into the city. They passed the sign that said BIENVENUE À LA CAPITALE DE L’ONTARIO.
Henry was looking absently out the window, trying to interpret the sign when someone tapped his shoulder. It was Vroni. She offered Henry a white jelly bean from a bag she’d bought at a gas station.
“The white ones taste like semen, anyway,” she said.
He thanked her and pretended to eat it, using the same sleight of hand he used to pull quarters from behind people’s ears to get it discreetly into his pocket.
Bienvenue.
The Toronto show was supposed to be at an inside venue that no one at Feely and Feinstein had been to before. The circus was told that there would not be anywhere to park their trailers all night, so the performers made camp at a nearby park and caught the bus to get into Toronto proper. Only the larger props and the animals were driven into town separately by Lorne.
The performers were already exhausted and anxious about the unfamiliarity of this setup—they always parked right outside their venue or had plenty of places to park where they pitched the tent. Then, somebody read the map wrong, and they got off the bus too early. The performers groaned when they realized this, rubbed their heads and lower backs.
After a ten-block walk hefting along their own trunks and backpacks, they arrived at the Green Lion. Henry felt like he had wandered into somebody’s garage. It didn’t seem like a performance space, but a private place. He smelled salt and beer and a hint of motor oil. The floor was concrete and on the walls were pictures of shows that had taken place on this stage, ticket stubs from carnivals and concerts in frames, and props—a knight’s breastplate made of macaroni noodles painted silver, a string of fake sausages, a white judge’s wig. It was a funny place—funny in an aggressive, absurd sort of way. In the pictures, a magician in white blew a bubble the size of a beach ball and six girls dressed as different kinds of fruit posed for a still life in a giant bowl. There was a picture of what looked like a cabaret show, a Barbie-shaped girl in fishnet stockings inserting a giant key into a giant lock.
Azi was not pleased.
“The ceilings are too low,” he told the Green Lion’s manager, a man with a pinched face and a pair of round glasses. “There’s no way we can fit our elephant in here.”
The manager shrugged. “Sorry, man. This is what we’re working with.”
“That’s half an hour of show, gone, right there,” said Azi. “We can bring down the high-wire walkers. But there’s no way we can set up for trapeze. Even the horse … the horse is questionable.”
“I’m sorry,” the manager said again. “I think there was some miscommunication. I was told this was a small circus.”
This time it was Remy Delaflote who interjected. “We are a small circus,” he said, reddening. “You were expecting, what, some kind of miniature show? Flea circus?”
The manager looked as if he wanted to laugh, but he squeezed his lips together with his hand and nodded, looking at the floor. “Are you Mr. Baratucci?” he asked.
“No,” said Azi.
“Well, see, I was fairly clear with Mr. Baratucci about what we could accommodate. Could I speak with him?”
“Mr. Baratucci had to take a leave of absence.”
“I’m sorry there’s been a misunderstanding,” the manager said, “but certainly there are plenty of acts that don’t require a horse or an elephant. Besides, there’s another show here tonight. No one will notice if your performance is a little on the short side.”
The blood drained from Remy’s face and the other performers shuffled their feet and looked at the posters on the wall or the frayed luggage sitting beside them. The thing that made them feel the most pathetic was how hard the manager was trying to be polite. He said no one would notice if the program was short, but the fact was that no one would notice if the program happened at all.
Azi put his hand on Remy’s shoulder.
“If Caleb had known—shouldn’t he have told us? We could have gone home. Sent the animals, too.”
Azi shook his head. “Honestly, he probably meant to. His head is not in this right now.”
The Green Lion’s manager clapped his hands together. “I’ll call the other act right now and see if they can set up earlier.” He walked away.
Azi studied the ceiling, the rows of chairs, the width of the stage, as if calculating what this space could contain. Henry knew he was thinking how he might rearrange it, so that they could fit in all the important parts, and the show would feel complete.
But Henry also knew it wasn’t the lack of space that was getting to him, not really. It was Caleb doing un-Caleb-like things that made everyone suspicious, and it was looking like before it was all over it would be Azi who had to answer for them. Henry exchanged a furtive glance with the fire-eater.
“Alright, people,” said Azi, stepping in while Remy seethed. “We have six hours before the show. So go and put your stuff down backstage, get some food, do your prep, take a nap … whatever you need to do. I’ll see you all at five. No later than five.”
Henry left the Green Lion and stepped into the sunlit street. The Delaflotes passed him, talking in vicious-sounding whispers. The only words Henry caught were “Baratucci” and “new gig.”
He shielded his eyes from the sun and walked north up the street. He thought about the evening’s show—without elephants or aerialists, there would be more pressure on himself and the other performers to make the audience feel satisfied. Still, he found himself in a good mood. Maybe it was the breeze. Maybe it was the French.
In a city park he watched a street clown in suspenders and baggy shorts performing with a man’s tie. The man had a little boy around four with him, probably his son, who was giggling. The clown had his wrists twisted in the tie, then he tried to wear it as a belt, then as a jock strap. The man was only half-watching the clown. Mostly, he watched the boy, who was in such a fit of laughter that there were tears forming in the corners of his eyes. Some people on the street slowed down or stopped, but their eyes were also on the little boy. The boy was trying to calm himself down—his laughter was the frantic sort, as if he were being tickled. But every time he got a grip on himself, the clown would do something new, and the boy would start up again with an involuntary shriek. The clown started pestering the father to help him with the tie, who, still watching the boy, instructed the clown to first wrap the tie around his neck, then make a knot. When the clown tied the knot too tight and turned purple, the boy’s knees failed him and he sank into a sitting position on the sidewalk. People continued to gather. The clown became a mirror of the business man, mimicking his every move, the flicks of his wrists and even the blinking of his eyes.
There were no acrobatics and no props except the tie, but the act was flawless. Henry could almost hear Christiakov: “Everyone is involved emotionally,” he would say, “the little boy, the father, the onlookers, the clown himself. Everyone has something at stake. Tension is building and being released every second.”
The boy couldn’t stop laughing, but the joy of laughing released that tension. And the father was invested because the clown made him the hero in this skit, a role the clown would not let the man slip from. And the people watching, all these fanny-pack tourists and French-Canadian granola hippies, they knew that they were witnessing something of true value.
“Henry. Are you getting this, Henry?” said the Christiakov in his head. “Are you taking notes, Phenom? Burn this into your brain.”
The audience would remember the show for a long time, and the father would remember it longer. The boy, though, would remember this for the rest of his life.
The tie had become the world.
Henry felt a presence beside him and turned to see Kylie, arms crossed in front of her, watching the show.
“Hi,” he said.
>
“This is incredible,” she said, not looking at him.
“Yeah. I know. He’s a genius.”
Kylie sniffled in the cool air as the wind from the lake picked up. Henry figured she was done talking to him, but after a moment she spoke again.
“So, do you think it’s over?”
“Do I think what’s over?”
“Feely and Feinstein. Don’t lie and say you don’t know either. Just tell me. Is it over or not?”
Henry watched as the crowd disbanded, leaving quarters and dollars in a sand bucket that said TIPS.
She had demanded that he not lie, and he felt bound by this, so he told her the truth. “I think so,” he said. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”
Henry had no money with which to tip the clown so he robbed a wishing well a block north. Kylie waited for him, and after Henry left the clown a handful of wet pennies, they walked the city, looking for other street shows. People were out enjoying their Saturday, weaving in and out of the pubs and shops and smelling like peppermint schnapps and perfume. Most of them were Kylie’s age or slightly older, the boys all with grins that showed white, sticky-looking teeth, and the girls all with gold earrings and permed hair as they clung to the waists of their boyfriends. In and out, in and out and around—Henry watched their feet, the way they couldn’t move in straight lines. They leaned toward the people they were with as if they had no choice, as if the bodies next to them pulled them with a force as strong as the gravity that held the bottoms of their shoes to the pavement. Henry walked and sometimes he imitated their lean and their step, though he had no one to lean into.
Kylie did not hang around his waist. In fact, people who saw them would have probably thought they didn’t know each other at all, that they were two strangers that just happened to be walking up the same street at approximately the same pace, with the same long, pointed gazes at anything that was not one another—the ice cream vendors, the hungry birds, the thin fissures in the sidewalk. When Henry did a funny walk, Kylie ignored him just as she would have ignored an overly excited child.
Still, she let him buy her a hot pretzel with the rest of the money he’d scraped from the bottom of the wishing well. They found a bench and sat together while she ate. She kept her eyes on Henry, as if she thought that any moment, he might snatch the pretzel away.
He smiled at her, and it was his charm-you smile, the best one he had. Things are going okay, he thought.
Then, with a full mouth, she asked, “Did you fuck Caleb’s wife?”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes and chewed faster. “Caleb’s wife. They said you and her had a thing.”
“Who said that?”
“Jenifer and Vroni. Lorne. Remy Delaflote.”
“Really?”
“Lola. Sue.”
“Sue?”
“Yep. And Azi thinks so, too.”
He wanted to say “Never! I would never even think to do such a thing!” But he had thought to do exactly such a thing.
It was clear that Kylie had been waiting to ask this question a long time.
“No,” said Henry. “We didn’t. I didn’t.”
Henry read suspicion in the muscles of Kylie’s face, but then the expression began to soften, revealing a sort of a hope. A bit of salt stuck to her lower lip. If he kissed it away, she might give in, at least for a moment, and like him again. But he thought better of this.
“She loves Caleb,” he said.
Kylie licked the salt from her own lip. “She rejected you.”
He felt his face burn. “Yes.”
Kylie was quiet for a moment, as if unraveling the implications of this. If Henry had been rejected, then he’d made an advance. If Kylie asked him what that advance had been, he would have to tell her. If he was going to keep on with this terrible, kamikaze honesty, then, after he told her, he would have to go back to that wishing well and drown himself.
“Do you really think she’s pretty? I think she’s strange-looking,” said Kylie. He couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed like she was trying to make him feel better.
“I do. I think she looks like … I don’t know, blond Wonder Woman? Or a really tall Suzanne Somers.”
“Her hands are like a gorilla’s,” said Kylie.
Henry shrugged. “I don’t care about that.”
“You don’t?”
“Do we have to talk about this? I feel like a dick,” said Henry, realizing that at some point during their conversation, he had folded his legs up beneath him, and they had fallen asleep.
“You are a dick.”
“Okay. That’s fair.”
“I just want to know … why Adrienne and not me?”
Another honest question that deserved an honest answer. So Henry tried to get a grip on it, the slippery truth. “I never thought ‘Adrienne and not Kylie.’ I never thought about the size of anybody’s hands—”
Kylie waved her palms and said, “Wait. We should stop talking before you say something stupid. It messes up our on stage chemistry when I hate you.”
But Henry persisted, braced himself for her frustration. “I’m trying to answer your question, okay? I never thought about anyone’s size. It’s not like I don’t like you. I like you! I thought you were cute and smart, right away, and your body is like … it’s amazing, right? If you trained better, you would be really something—you have all this potential,” he said.
She covered her face with her hands. “It’s like you can’t help being a jerk.”
“I can’t, and I knew you were someone who I would be a jerk to, but by the time I figured that out, I’d already been a jerk to you, and I couldn’t find a way to undo it.”
“So you were a jerk to Adrienne instead?”
“No, I was an idiot to Adrienne. Those are your two options with me. Jerk,” he said, holding out one hand, “or idiot,” he said, holding out the other.
Kylie raised her eyebrows. “Well. At least you know it,” she said. She paused for a moment, assessing his face. “Huh. I don’t really feel better,” she said.
Henry couldn’t think of anything else to say, and apparently neither could Kylie. They sat in silence on the bench until Henry felt so awkward, he had to do something stupid, so he started singing. His specialty was early-eighties bubblegum pop so he went with “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
Kylie looked at him in mortified shock. “Henry! Shut up!”
He continued a few more bars, just to watch her face grow pink, just to see her looking around to see if anyone else was listening. They were, of course. Then, just before the chorus, he said, “Why should I stop?”
“Because that song reminds me of junior high, which was terrible. And it’s musically uninteresting,” she said.
Henry grinned. “You only like music that sounds like it’s sung by a tone-deaf monkey and recorded in a high school gym.”
She stood and brushed the salt off her pants and tossed the wrapper in a waste basket. Henry stood too and wobbled as he took a step. One of his legs was completely numb. He had to grab on to the bench for support.
“If you do ministry-of-funny walks all the way back, you’re going to be late, and Azi is going to murder you,” said Kylie.
“I’m not being funny, my leg is just asleep,” he said, rubbing his calf.
He took a tentative step, and the pins and needles exploded all through his leg, making him giggle involuntarily. Kylie frowned and threaded her arm through his—not around his waist, but it was a start.
“Come on, Tiny Tim, we gotta hurry,” she said.
He remembered that in Detroit, she had looked much stronger, and now, touching her, he could feel it, too. He thought, with her new strength, it would not be too burdensome if, for just a few steps, he really leaned on her.
AFTER THEIR PERFORMANCE AT THE Green Lion, the circus was angry. The Delaflotes and Lorne sulked about not being able to perform, but everyone seemed to feel betrayed by Caleb, and maybe that was why the general opini
on of Henry had improved. Caleb had betrayed the circus, which vindicated Henry for betraying Caleb. When Henry returned to his trailer that night, Jenifer and Vroni didn’t hiss a single insult at him as they crossed paths.
On his bed he found a white envelope, addressed to him in Caleb’s handwriting, and his heart dropped. This is it, he thought. This is my pink slip.
Tearing open the letter on its side, Henry found a familiar scrap of lined notebook paper within. It was his brother’s letter. He swiped his finger inside the envelope, looking for an additional note from Caleb, but beside the letter itself, there was no message.
Ultimate Kung Fu
The clowns walk in with makeup like characters from a Chinese opera, with black ponytails that sprout from the backs of their heads like dark cacti. It’s all cummerbunds and wrists wrapped with tape and bare chests in the costumes. It’s all Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and Steven Seagal in the movements. And for God’s sake, this act has to have people who can do the movements. Otherwise, it’s pointless to even stage.
One clown raises his hand, open-palmed: universal kung fu sign for Come at me. He is clearly the bigger and stronger of the two.
The other clown does the same. No, you come at me. This one is wiry and small, and has the more intense ponytail.
You.
No, you.
These two kung fu masters are brothers. Let’s say they are enemies, but not by choice. They’ve been fighting on different sides in a war, and they haven’t seen each other since they were children.
In the time they’ve been apart, one brother has become a master of Possum Style kung fu, while the other brother has become a master of Cobra Style. They are both masters in their way. The thing is, they don’t want to fight in the style they are masters in. They want to fight in the style they fought in together, when they were kids: Mad Monkey Style, the Ultimate Kung Fu.
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