The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

  Always give them what they pay for, Jackson has told us. They pay for our time, our attention, for the feel of four hands upon flesh. She has touched us, so now we touch her, fingers withered and not plucking at her cotton dress the way she plucks at the silk which hides our secrets away. And then, this silk comes away, and she sees how we are made, and she slides from that civilized velvet chair and takes our soft flesh into her pink mouth, and the world washes away.

  We both feel that mouth and ride it to its inevitable end. Dead end, cul-de-sac, the place where all curls into a tight ball before it springs loose once more. And then, we’ve our hands in her hair; four hands and her eyes slit shut and she’s riding her own wave, toward another dead end, an end she never sees coming. Beauty, wanting to be kind but unable, slides fingers into the woman’s gaping mouth and pulls against teeth. Beast can only watch as the body comes apart—withered hands are not strong enough for this violence, withered hands cannot satiate this hunger. Fragmenting flesh blooms like flowers and is eaten petal by petal. Beast eats alone, but Beauty knows the pleasure of this moment even if Beauty cannot partake. Later, Beauty will drink cold white milk and steal bananas from the monkeys; Beauty will peel three bananas and lay them upon our thigh, eating each with five precise bites.

  When all is done and the woman’s skin is but a husk we toss into a back room, we clean each other in the shaded tent and step back outside to find Jackson with the lady’s husband. He stands so tall in the afternoon sun, his shoulders broad. His hands look as soft as his wife’s. Is he looking for her? Oh, no. He is looking for Idalmis, and after paper money whispers between palms we lead him into our tent. He smells like the cigarettes he once pressed into his wife’s thighs.

  Jackson knows our ways and never speaks of them—everyone hungers after all—not until he comes to our room and tells us the complication. The man was of the law, he tells us, and was looking for us, to question us about a body in New York. There will be others, when they realize he is gone.

  There is no horror at this revelation—in Santa Fe, we consumed a priest, and there came others seeking to learn what had become of him. Jackson is not alarmed; there is a glint in his eye because he knows if there is trouble, Beast will swallow it away. Jackson’s hands slide over our hair, the lines of our jaws, the bare expanse of our chests. We lean closer to him; he smells like the underbelly of a rotten house and we have no desire to eat him. But the praiseful stroking is pleasant and when he touches our wings with sure fingers, we shudder. He leaves us in our room, warned and ready for those who will come.

  We know that in some places, people store food for times of famine. We have been unable to do this, travelling as the circus does on a train. Our time on this eastern coast will be limited—this carnival park is filled with freaks, and we are a special attraction. We are a limited-time offering; a thing glimpsed and then gone. We have no way to keep those who will come for later. Beast must suffer the gluttony.

  At night, hundreds of clear lights illuminate the park, burning like miniature suns affixed to immobile poles. At night, we wander. Everyone stares, thinking this attention goes unseen under cover of darkness.

  Mister Hoyt shadows us as we make our way; he carries with him a sweet scent that we know all too well, the scent of fresh meat, and we wonder who and what he has cut apart and created today. We look for him, expecting to find our selves reflected yet again in his glassy eyes, but he keeps well to the shadows tonight and we cannot pick his from among them.

  Young boys trail more obviously in our wake, attempting to tread upon our wings which, when we want them to, trail upon the ground. Wing-tips flicker just out of foot's reach, frustrating the boys to no end. They leap closer; the wing tips flick away, saying no and no and in fact never. Eventually, they give up, standing angrily in the middle of the paved street between tents, watching as we vanish into the crowds. A harpy, they decide. An angel, whispers a small girl who passes by on bare feet and vanishes much the way we did.

  This park has become home, though it is transient. All things are, in the end. We wander without fear, watching the other freaks and ferals as we often watch our selves. Fire, steel, blood, each of these things is consumed the way others would eat fruit, steak, berries. Nothing is surprising—not even the entire building that houses infants in small boxes that are said to grow them into properly sized people—though everything is captivating. Beast is calmed by the idea that there are such things in the world; Beauty clasps her hands together and frets until Beast unhinges them and holds one.

  Beauty wants so much to be good, as good as the little girl who sits within a locked cage. Her mouth gleams with a thousand needle teeth, hands more like talons, but how this girl sits! Legs tucked beneath her, crossed at the ankles. Spine straight. There is no sign of the scale which runs a river down her belly and between her legs; a dress of white lace wraps her up perfectly. She folds her hands into her lap and keeps her teeth behind her lips even when she smiles. Beauty wants to be this magical thing, this animal reined in, trained, without flaw.

  Beast wants so much to be awful, to unlock the cage and let the little girl tear her dress to shreds. The gleaming teeth should be shown to the world—people should count them and tremble; the talons should be unsheathed and used to tear the world asunder. The scale which brands her skin should be allowed to breathe under open sky; how it must look running with the river’s waters, with the sun’s light. That dress should be trampled in mud, until it is brown, earthen, gone.

  Beast holds Beauty’s hand, and in that heated whisper (please, oh please) Beauty hears a thing she cannot deny. Beauty will break open all the things, if only it will silence Beast.

  There is no silence. Even in the dark with my eyes closed, I can hear the breath. I breathe in and out and match that rhythm, yet realize what I am doing. There comes a point when I can no longer separate me from the we, and there comes the night when Beauty cannot separate the need to be good from Beast’s need to devour. One seems inherently like the other.

  We stand upon our turntable, under the warm sunlight. Today we wear white, not because we feel pure but because we wish we were. There is too much blood between us and Beauty says we must stop. But Beast demands.

  Mister Hoyt watches us; we see snatches of our selves within his ceaseless glassy gaze as we turn and turn. His expression is furrowed today; there is a line which runs alongside his nose between his eyes, like a dry river waiting to be filled. We cannot tell if this is a frown, a scar, a line drawn with an ink pencil. We see a similar line beneath his jaw. He becomes a puzzle, fitted together in ways we do not yet understand.

  Today we turn amid a thousand paper stars. Beth, who helps keep the circus fed with her sweet marmalades and warm breads, folded them with her clever hands as the train made its journey to this eastern shore. She said this star is what was, this star is what will be, and this star is the future none can know. We cannot have that future, because it's in the future; we want it now because we are a greedy heart, but it cannot be had. This is why we call it the future; this is why it is always now and never then.

  We close our eyes and listen to the rattle of the paper stars as we move through them. Today, we have a mirror made to look like a nebula, painted with whorls of acrylic and oils; these colors begin to run down the white silk we wear, painting patterns of their own accord. We close our eyes and lift our arms and never find our selves entangled within the strings that suspend the stars; we are fluid and like them, distant, removed, something that can be observed but never possessed.

  They all want to possess. One man steps past Mister Hoyt and reaches for us, touches the hem of our silk drape. Before he can get closer, before those sausage-fingers can wrap our ankle, he is pushed back into the crowd by our tender. We watch this man; he edges closer again and we bow our heads to get a better look. His eyes are black as pitch; his teeth stained from cigars. His fingers are coarse and stick to the white silk, his head bald and sprinkled with sweat within which we see
the globe of the sun, the arc of the sky. There are no clouds.

  He wears a gun under his jacket, strapped to him with brown leather. Our fingers long to slide under that leather holster, ease it off and know the tacky feel of his shirt. We suspect within his pocket we would find a badge, and when at last he comes to our tent to solicit our private favors indeed we do find a badge and indeed his shirt is tacky with sweat, with warmth.

  “Need to ask you about a man and his wife,” he says, and we don't know who put him on our trail, because who was there to tell? Someone—Mister Hoyt, ever lurking?—saw the man and his wife, watched them enter our tent and never exit. We make a low sound, something closer to a purr than a hum, and our fingers slide down his shirt buttons, steadily opening each. We cannot say where anyone goes once they leave this place. Beauty wavers. Beast breaks the last button. It flies toward the tent wall, and ricochets off to then furrow into the dirt floor like a bullet.

  “We did not—"

  Beast covers Beauty’s mouth with a thin hand. Beauty’s eyes meet Beast’s, and then we look at the man before us. He doesn’t look wary but drugged, like every other who comes to our tent; he is impossibly intrigued at the sight of us, wants to know what lies beneath our paint-stained silk. Wants to know how our breast curves and whether we are concave or convex in all the proper places. His mouth says either is fine, divine, sublime. Whenever anyone looks into our eyes, they fall through the brown and the gold and land in the black.

  “We did not.”

  These are the only words, lies though they are. Beauty carries a plea with every glance, but Beast cannot obey. Beast must suffer the gluttony

  There are but two hands participating in this destruction, weakened yet resolute; Beauty caves inward while Beast gorges. We need to stop; we cannot stop. We need to find another way; for us this is the only way. We need to stop. We cannot stop. Perhaps you need to stop, but you are not you; you are we, and we are starving.

  We fold his shirt and set the holster atop it when we are done. The shirt is dried of sweat now, crisp, and the gun smells like oil. His skin pools on the ground like empty trousers. We lick the blood from each other, slow like we are waking up and the carnival stands around us in silence. In truth, there is a tremor of sound just beyond the canvas walls. So too there is a small shadow. An eye peering through a tattered hole. Our breaths catch.

  The old canvas tears easily beneath our hands, no talons required. Like the girl in her lace, we are unleashed from the tent’s confines, streaking after the small form who flees, who saw too much. Its small feet stutter across the ground behind the tents, but then we have scooped it—her—into our four-arm embrace and she shrieks. This terrible sound vanishes beneath our mouths—Beauty has no hunger but knows that this secret cannot escape. We swallow ragged mouthfuls till we choke, till blood streams our chins, splatters our chests. Everywhere, we are flushed red with terror and anger and so too lust. It is a momentary glimpse of a hunt, a life we perhaps lived before we were bound into this shared flesh.

  We destroy, consume, and cough it all back into the grass. When done, there is nothing left that resembles the young child who peered through tattered canvas. Perhaps five strips of skin splay as a hand might have, but no—no, we will not see that. There are only our shaking hands, fluttering wings, and a screech flying from our mouths. What have we done? Not what we must. Beauty pulls, claws, pummels, but cannot escape Beast.

  In the warm dark, at last we rest. We do not touch; we lay as still as we are able, arms crossed over chests, wings carefully folded beneath. There is one breath, because one other is held. Lungs flutter still; body waits, poised. And then a hand across a belly. Breath comes once more. Hitched this time, unmatched. Fingers slide down shared belly, between shared legs, and curl. Soft, as if saying come on come on. Beauty wants to go, wants to come undone, and Beast refuses, but in the end, cannot. In the dark, there is a gasp. Ours, as it ever was.

  We twist amid a forest made of shining metal willows today, hand-cut by Foster, who always smells of metal, of money, and train tracks. Mister Hoyt has returned to watch us. He talks to us today as the crowd is thinner, less interested. His interest never wavers.

  It is a simple severing, he says, and he gestures as men of the world do (with prejudice, with agency, with insistence), to the juncture between us, where waist dips into waist. Mister Hoyt wants to break us as he might a cracker, easily in two as if we were never one. We have but two legs, we remind him, and he dismisses this with a wave. One of you shall have the legs, and one of you shall have a construct. This is disagreeable, we tell him, and he gestures to the valley between our legs, eyes narrowing as the silk which wraps us folds and bulges by turn. This is disagreeable, he tells us. This is us, we tell him, and we vanish behind trailing metal leaves to emerge a moment later, wings unfurled. He steps back, cowed. The small crowd murmurs in wonder. Can we fly, they always want to know.

  We tried in our distant youth to rocket our selves into the sky. We fell more than once. We tried from the ground, from a cliff, from the very tree tops. We bruised elbows, knees, wings. If I severed you, he tells us as we circle more trees, you could fly. But we would never be whole, we say, and our hands slide down our chests, across metal tree trunks and shining leaves, to make each shimmer. False tree, faux angel, he watches us and wants to break us. When he offers Jackson double for our time, Jackson does not deny him. We are beautiful and beastly and why shouldn’t he receive double every time?

  “Jabberwock,” Mister Hoyt calls us when he circles us within our tent, as if he can still figure out how we are made, how we have been joined into one imperfect flesh. The lines upon his face seem eased today, but are there in memory. “Hell needs its angels, too.”

  His hands are fine and strong and they slide over our arms, over the braided confines of our hair. His fingers dig into Beauty, to send ginger hair spilling. He doesn’t spill Beast, and later, when Hoyt is bent and broken upon the ground, Beast’s single braid that flips down a bare shoulder gives him a handhold; Hoyt clings, pulls, until his hand spasms and opens, until it goes limp as the rest of him.

  “’Twas brillig,” we tell him.

  We gyre and gimble, streaking the canvas walls with blood in our haste.

  Park officials notice when Mister Hoyt goes missing—Hoyt was one of their finest fleshcrafters, they say; he would not simply leave without word when he had done such quality work within the carnival park’s walls. The three-legged burlesque dancer; the bearded hippopotamus, the man whose every finger and toe tells the time in a different country, the miniature lady (aged twenty-seven) who can sleep in a teacup!

  They question Jackson, ask of his company of freaks. Jackson is all cool denial despite the warmth of the day. The air carries with it the scent of tar; Mister Hoyt’s new exhibit is close to finished, a place where people can ride boats through Hell itself and laugh at having escaped afterward. Hoyt wanted us to be a demon, the officials say; he came for us, they say, and now he cannot be found.

  Once they have gone, Jackson comes again. It was never a problem, Beast’s appetite, until we found our selves in this stagnant place, this world within a world, he says. Before, the train would come and go and our performances were fleeting, but now that we are the main attraction people flock to, our beautifully strange ways are more closely observed. Jackson will never, he says, lose us, let us go, abandon us, leave us behind, kick us out, but here—

  he leans in, pulls our mouths close, and kisses us hard, his tongue forked between our lips

  —here, he says, we must be more careful. We cannot do what we naturally must. In his eyes, we see all things: we see the train stretching ever out, across this land and others we do not understand; we see Jackson alone and surrounded, we see him bent and broken and young and tall; we see him leaving us (oh he said he would never) and we see our selves flying. You can fly if you show patience, he tells us.

  Patience is not our gift.

  We go to Mister Hoyt’s Hell
Gate because we cannot resist knowing. We walk through the illuminated buildings and into the dense red glow that beckons from the park’s center. These bulbs have been coated in red paint and it throws everything, including us, into a strange glow. This building is larger than we guessed it would be, but then the underworld is large, vast. It must be, to hold all the dead. Its entrance is a yawning arch like a mouth, with a river instead of a tongue within; there are small boats to tightly hold two through Hell’s journey. The air smells heavily of pitch here and the lights sizzle with warmth in the night’s cool air.

  Within the mouth of the gate into the underworld, we see the child. The child who watched us through the tent’s canvas. Something lurches inside us, for this is impossible—the dead do not come back, no matter what stories say. Yet here stands this child, reassembled with clumsy hands; her leftover skin shows the trespass of not needle and thread but the imprint of broad, strong fingers. Behind her looms Hoyt, the lady and the lawman, and countless others. These dead have been remade.

  Mister Hoyt does not wear his woolen suit tonight but stands before us naked, his skin a riot of lines that mark the passage of hands, blades, magic. Within this body, we see our selves: a being that is not necessarily male or female, a being that has been severed in two—the way he would have done us. A simple severing; we can hear the words echoed as his fine fingers stroke over the line that mars his hip, the line that once dipped into a separate waist. Behind him, we see that there had always been two. Here stands the other Mister Hoyt, the part he cut away, rising from hips and legs that have been constructed of abandoned skins, bones, lashed metal.