The Grand Tour

by E. Catherine Tobler

  He supposes it’s funny. No one looks sideways at him and Sam, not even when they walk down the street with Sam’s hand in Harper’s back pocket. Even Maisie didn’t blink when she found them kissing on the dock under clouds of fireworks at the 4th of July celebrations. Everyone thought it was nice they had each other. But if they knew the truth about—

  “Here you go.”

  Aidan offers Harper an unbroken jar of pickles and Harper takes them with a nod. Once Aidan has rung up the order, bagging everything neatly, Harper realizes he doesn’t have his pack. And his wallet’s in his pack. His pack is in the dusty shadows of the barn loft, full of circus marmalade.

  On account, Aidan says and shoos him out the door, because Maisie can’t leave well enough alone and she’s trying to pick up the shards of glass that Silvia has already swept into the dust pan. The entire place smells of brine and when Harper steps outside, the scent of the circus is a sharp contrast.

  Some years, he and Sam argue about whether it’s a circus or a carnival. “Circus” implied a professional organization, didn’t it, Sam wanted to know, but Harper wasn’t sure. “Carnival” felt more true to what Harper remembered as a kid—what he tried not to remember. The way he’d step into a tent, the way the world would become only that close, warm space, the way the music had leaked into his bones. Didn’t matter what the music was, it carried him away, until it was him and the music and nothing else, until his heart beat in rhythm with the drums, and he shed clothes and inhibitions until he was naked in the dirt, dancing as if his very life depended upon it.

  “Hello.”

  Without realizing it, Harper finds he’s walked to the edge of the circus. The carnival. Before him is the chain link fence and beyond that is a young girl, her face brown and glowing in the soft morning light. She’s wrapped in a cape, hands bunched into the fabric to keep it closed. She’s like a copper dandelion, all thin legs and body and an explosion of dark hair. A nimbus. At her side, there’s a small man—not a child at all, but not even half the girl’s height.

  “Hello,” Harper returns.

  “We don’t open till later, till it’s dark and we look all properly lit up,” she advises. The small man tugs at the hem of her cape, but she shushes him. “You can come back then.”

  Through the fence, she passes Harper a handful of bent tickets. They look water-stained and ancient, but Harper finds himself taking them. The paper is soft between his fingers, like if he rubbed his fingers back and forth, it would just come apart in small rolls. They are tickets for admission, not to just the grounds, but to specific tents for specific events. Drawings decorate some of the tickets: a monkey, a mummy, two winged bodies entwined into one.

  “Oh. I—”

  “Can see it in your bones,” the girl says. “Circus folk.”

  The denial is on Harper’s tongue, but she’s already turned away, vanishing into the tents. Harper stares after her, swearing he saw wings in her wake, trailing lower than her cape, but she’s gone and he isn’t sure, and the circus stands there, beckoning. They weren’t soft bird wings, but something of bone and leathered skin.

  He turns his back on the circus and walks away. By the time he’s home, the tickets are bent into the pocket of his jeans, but not forgotten. He can feel them pressing against his thigh as he unpacks the groceries. He doesn’t mean to open the cupboard where the six jars of lemon marmalade sit, but he does, and he stares the way he’s heard people stare into abysses. The marmalade stares back at him, daring him to—

  “To what,” he says to the empty kitchen. He lifts his chin, and thinks of the first time he was confronted by kids at school, the first time they called him faggot, fag, fucker. He remembers the crack of Phil’s fist against his jaw and can taste the copper of blood against his tongue. But he remembers, too, the way the boy went down under Harper’s own fist.

  The marmalade is in his hand before he can reconsider again. The lid comes off easily beneath his anger-fueled fingers, and the scent of lemon is in his nose, bright and gold, and he can already feel himself going, though he hasn’t dipped his fingers into the sweetness, hasn’t allowed the memories to cross his tongue. The first time, all those years ago, it had been a mistake; they hadn’t known what the marmalade could do, didn’t know it contained everything a person needed. Everything they avoided. Jars full of time and memory, not just marmalade.

  Harper digs two fingers into the marmalade, using them like a spoon to bring the tart sweetness to his mouth. His fingers sear lips and tongue because the marmalade contains the memory of his first time with Sam; Sam had speared him with two fingers this way, caressing lips and tongue, daring Harper to suck his fingers while the otherworldly voice of Holly Johnson pounded down through them, the world washing away in hues of fuchsia and emerald. The thumping bass drove them to the floor, further into each other. Harper falls to his knees now, the kitchen walls evaporating as he is pulled back in time.

  The basement club is so small, and surely his eyeliner and hair occupy more of the sooty room than they should, but he doesn’t care. Most of the people packed into the space have come to see him, have come to listen to the music that spins from his fingers. In his booth, Harper stands a god, Maybelline and Rimmel having crafted his face into something Venus herself would envy. His dark hair surrounds his ivory face like a cloud of ravens, so he’s perched a small black bird at his crown; he found it in a bin at Goodwill, and maybe it was a white dove intended for a Christmas tree, but he’s colored it black with Sharpies and wears it like a bonnet now, its beak burning silver under the club lights.

  Excess pours from everyone in the room; quilted leather jackets, beaded jeans, the thump of solid boots and stiletto heels against the cracked checkerboard tile floor. The dim air is a haze of AquaNet, cigarette smoke, and Giorgio. That’s when Sam walks in, on the arm of a man Harper will always call Steve McQueen; he’s got that rugged, devil-may-care kind of face, whereas Sam is all libertine highwayman Adam Ant, sharp face drawn sharper with pencil and lipstick. The gold ball buttons on his white vest spark like fire as the club lights wash over him, his belt slanting low across his hips.

  Harper hungers, but Sam is swallowed by the crowd, and the night pounds on, vinyl tracks flowing one into the other under Harper’s swift fingers. He loves finding the perfect juxtaposition of songs, of notes; loves rolling one song into the other without pause. In another time, he thinks he might’ve been a minstrel, might have written and composed, but here, this is as close as he’ll get and he’s fine with that.

  The crowd never stops moving, not even when Harper’s set becomes Wilde’s, the disco-pop awash in heavy metals as the new tide rolls in. Harper squeezes through the crowd and up the stairs, hands ghosting over his shoulders, back, and legs as he climbs his way back into the street. It’s winter, and he steams in the cold air, T-shirt sleeves raked up to his shoulders, digging his hands into his hair when Sam finds him. Harper exhales and it’s all fog between them, until it’s just the slanting streetlight, turning Sam’s buttons vaguely orange.

  “That was you?” Sam asks. “The music.”

  The black bird drops out of Harper’s hair, a dry rustle against the street. “That was me.”

  The music still pounds through Harper’s veins and he knows it’s telling him to close the distance between himself and Sam; he wants to kiss that painted mouth and know what Sam was drinking (vodka, his far-away-mind knows). But Steve McQueen comes up behind Sam a breath later, and they move down the street, toward cars parked in shadow.

  Harper turns to watch them go. Turns, mostly, to watch Sam’s backside in retreat, black leather still hugging him after all that dancing. Sam passes through an angle of streetlight and turns, too, and Harper is blinded for a moment by all those gold buttons. He raises a hand as if to ward them off, but his fingers are sticky with marmalade, and he’s on the floor of a kitchen thirty years distant from that winter street.

  Harper leaves the house before sunrise. If Sam smelled the marmalade th
e night before, he didn’t mention it. Harper didn’t finish the jar, but swallowed half of it, and it terrifies him. The knowledge that he could so easily devour every jar in the cabinet without blinking. It’s not just memories of him and Sam in the jars; it could be memories of anything. He doesn’t know how the circus does it, doesn’t know who makes the marmalade, but he’s known enough to avoid the circus after their first visit. No one should know the things those jars hold; no one should have access to a man’s mind like that.

  Still, he wants to know.

  The tattoo parlor sits on the corner of the town’s oldest block; the building used to house a drugstore and soda shop. Harper found the original sign in the store room when they were setting up, so it hangs over the front desk. Paradise Drugs it reads in patina-spotted chrome, and everyone who comes in still has a good laugh over it. One man had it tattooed across his shoulders, bits of the sign flaking down his back in inky splotches. The parlor is quiet now and Harper’s a good six hours early; he’s only got one appointment on the books: a woman named Delilah.

  He sits in the darkness a long time, unable to shake the memory of the club. The memory of Sam. When Kelly lets him know Delilah is ready, Harper can’t quite believe it’s already noon, because in his mind he was back at the club. Did Kelly talk to him when she arrived? Harper doesn’t remember, but comes out to greet Delilah. Only, he freezes at the sight of her because she’s from the circus.

  The shop gets all kinds; even in a tiny place like Paradise, the unusual tend to collect, so Harper doesn’t typically bat an eye at the people who come in. But Delilah is like an old memory. She is something ancient, something Harper recognizes and responds to. Her body is generous in every place, be it curved or hollowed, her sharp face punctuated by a glorious beard that lays braided in a thousand plaits between her breasts. Some might say the beard was only brown, but Harper recognizes all the colors inside: the copper, the mahogany, the glimmers of gold and even silver. Harper wants nothing more than to press his cheek against her warm, bare belly in a field of lavender and listen to every sound she makes.

  “Suppose I surprised you,” Delilah says as she sinks into Harper’s chair at his station.

  “Surprised me,” Harper repeats. He feels incapable of speech and turns to pull his gloves on. The ink sits sealed on its tray, the machine all ready to go, but he feels disconnected from the moment entirely.

  She doesn’t want anything complicated; a trail of black stars down her inner left arm, she said on the phone, so Harper set his station accordingly. But once she sits in the chair, everything radiates complication. She looks like a queen, his chair a throne. She is a beacon to him, the way the girl was at the fence. A portal into a world he turned his back on.

  “Gabrielle said she saw you—a man with music in him. At the fence. Gave you tickets.”

  Delilah wants free-hand stars from wrist to elbow, so Harper didn’t make a stencil. He strokes her arm clean with rubbing alcohol, veins running under her skin like ribbons. He doesn’t want to think about the girl at the fence or how that girl talked to this woman, how that girl called him a man with music in him. Harper picks up his tattoo iron and its weight in his hand is a comfort.

  “Can smell the marmalade on you,” Delilah says when the needles touch her skin for the first time.

  Harper doesn’t flinch, least not in his hands. He doesn”t look up at her either, focused on inking a star into her flesh. He fills some of them, until they are wholly black, blotting out her brown skin; others he leaves open, especially the star he places in the hollow of her elbow, where the ribbons of her veins coalesce.

  “Have you tasted it?” Harper asks, blotting blood from his work. Do the circus people eat the marmalade? Do they feast every night? He sets to making another star.

  “Can taste it on you now.”

  Harper flinches so violently, the tattoo iron skitters from his hand, but Delilah catches it before it can hit the floor. She thumbs it into silence, its soft buzzing no more, and they sit there under the bright lights, listening to each other breathe. Harper doesn’t want to meet her eyes, and also wants it more than he’s wanted anything. He drags his glance up her beard, past her mouth, to her eyes. They are yellow in the shadows, yellow like the marmalade.

  “I’m not sure,” Delilah says, “if you understand it and are afraid, or if you don’t understand it and that's what drives the fear.”

  He takes in a deep breath, nostrils flaring.

  “So it’s the former,” Delilah says. She holds the iron in her hand the way she might an egg, fingers curled around it. The needles drool ink down her fingers as the machine exhales. “You know that music never leaves your bones. The need to dance and frolic the way we all used to. They believe it was only women, but what’s a woman after all.”

  Delilah sets the machine aside and reaches for Harper’s hand, drawing it abruptly between her legs, where she’s as stiff as Harper is every morning he wakes.

  “Same as a man. Skin and bone and needs that can’t be explained. Your man knows, too—doesn’t he? Brings you those jars—I seen him come to the tents. Bringing the marmalade to you like he’s begging you to let go, because didn’t you once, under the olive trees at the edge of the world, with the leopards and the snakes. Naked in the dirt once you pulled your fawn skin off. Washed yourself clean in wine.” There is only a breath of silence. “Is it the denial that pleases you?”

  “Madness isn’t—” Harper struggles to find the right word. He realizes Delilah has let go of his hand and his hand still rests between her legs. He withdraws, his hand fingerprinted in the same ink she wears.

  “Is it madness to be who you are?”

  “I wanted—” Harper realizes how hollow this want sounds, leaning as he is on Delilah’s plump thighs. “A normal life.”

  “Who decides normal? Moon’s full tonight.”

  Harper turns the question over in his head, even after Delilah leaves the shop. He bandaged her arm, and told her about aftercare, but he thinks the tattoos will heal overnight, after she’s danced in the moonlight. The memory of dancing under a full moon is so sharp it brings tears to Harper’s eyes. He can taste the night air on his lips and remember what it was to lose himself to the music, to the heavenly fires. Can remember what it was to rim his eyes in black liner, to wash his lips in crimson and pink.

  He wonders at the message that comes from Sam a while later; Sam’s working late, won’t be home for dinner and Harper shouldn’t wait up. A whole night before him and it’s like a thorn in his heart. When he leaves the shop, he stands on the stoop, unsure of where to go. He looks back into the shop where Kelly and Manfred are cleaning up, where Silas is finishing some fill work, and Harper almost goes back inside.

  A whole night before him and the scent of the circus snakes through Paradise, popped corn and burnt sugar. He’s walking that way before he decides otherwise, telling himself a look never hurt anyone. Why he stood at that fence and was fine, just fine, not remotely tempted.

  Harper knows he used to be a better liar, because every step closer to the circus makes him feel like he’s hip-deep in a sea of temptation. It’s not the little winged girl who stands at the entry, but a gentleman Harper has never seen yet feels he knows. The man, seemingly bent and gnarled with age and pain, still bears himself as the owner of the revels, the man in charge, the one who knows when he’s well and truly caught a wriggling fish.

  “Ah, music,” he says, and waves Harper’s money and tickets away. “You are kin. Enter and be free.”

  A denial sits on Harper’s lips, but he steps past the man and spits all denials into the dirt. Harper enters the circus, eyes and skin awash in the globe lights that stretch from tent to tent, the striped fabrics making walkways through the endless sights. Its cotton candy here, and butter and oil, but if he breathes deeply enough, he smells the darker things too: the perfumes, the shaken silks, the lust that clogs each and every show. Somewhere deeper in the tents, there is a drum, and the vibration
pounds through the ground, up into Harper’s legs.

  It isn’t fear that floods him now, but desire. It used to be, he couldn’t listen to the radio without losing some part of himself to the music and the dance. Couldn’t turn on the television for fear it would carry him away, and to this day he and Sam don’t own one. The jingle of a commercial, the theme of a popular show, it all felt too perilously close to the edge of a crevasse Harper didn’t want to fall over. He learned to control it—there was music every place in the world, and if he meant to have a normal life—

  Who decides normal?

  —he couldn’t ignore the world.

  But here, the drums are more primal, as they are meant to be. It is a rhythm rooted in the past, in the memories he has tried so long to deny.

  When Harper finds them—his people, those he recognizes without blinking—they encircle a roaring fire. The women dance, not caring who sees, their bodies in ceaseless motion with the flames. Some hold great staves of flowering fennel, and others wands covered with ivy and topped with cones, but all are decked in ribbons, be they worn in their hair or around their ankles. Some have wrapped their waists; some have tied their arms. Some of the women go naked around the flames, and others wear animal skins; some wear long Grecian tunics, in the colors of blood and sky.

  The sight of them is no less than a punch in Harper’s gut. He reaches a hand out, to steady himself on the nearest thing. He thinks it will be a tent pole, but his fingers enclose a firm, fleshy arm, and he looks up, startled at the face that looks back. Neither male nor female, human nor animal, it is a face he knows, a body he ran beside long, long ago, when the world was still soft and forming. His breath is stolen when he looks into the amber eyes, when the clawed hand takes his own and pulls him toward the fire.