Goldenland Past Dark (2 page)

Dr. Schoenberg discovered Webern one spring evening when the trees were full of songbirds returning from long journeys. Webern was riding his unicycle outside in the rain-damp street, and Schoenberg, driving his yellow Cadillac, spotted the boy a moment too late.

“Hands on the handlebars, hands on the handlebars, my boy!” he had exclaimed as Webern slid off the hood of his car.

Webern limped to his ’cycle, which had rolled some yards away, and hefted it upright. He checked its chrome for signs of damage. “Sorry, mister. But there’s nothing to hold onto, see?”

Fortunately, the Cadillac’s fender hadn’t hurt Webern much, nor did it wreck his unicycle. But nevertheless, Schoenberg insisted he wanted to “atone.” He took Webern out to an all-night diner and, over pancakes, explained the enormous undertaking that had distracted him, that was, in fact, consuming his life: the creation of a new travelling show, destined to be unlike anything the world had ever seen.

“It is not all glory and fire, I am afraid,” Dr. Schoenberg intoned, his dark eyes flashing. “I, my boy, am but the humblest of circus servants. I know not of the tightrope, nor the trapeze; I venture into the mouths of neither cannons nor cats. I cannot juggle, I do not throw knives. And I ride bareback only when necessity demands it.”

“So, what do you do, then?” Webern asked.

“Why, good sir—” Schoenberg leaned toward Webern across the sticky table. “—I am the ringmaster.”

If Dr. Schoenberg had grinned or snapped his fingers, if he had talked about fun times or money or even fame, Webern would have seen through the trick. In his fifteen years, he had come to distrust winks and handshakes, guarantees and hearty laughs. But the man’s solemnity, verging on sadness, and the odd, antiquated way he spoke—the pallor of his face under the diner’s fluorescent lights, and the gently shaking fingers with which he held his cigarette—these things drew Webern in, mesmerized him, even. In Dr. Schoenberg’s blue-black hooded eyes, Webern saw something strange and yet familiar. Maybe it was a particular madness they both shared, a longing for escape that filled their veins like slow poison. Maybe it was a peculiar melancholy that shaped itself into visions of weird and freakish acts. But, though he doubted Schoenberg’s promises of gorgeous tightrope walkers and fabulous silk-lined tents, Webern knew he would follow him anywhere. He left that night, taking nothing more than the clothes on his back and his unicycle, stowed in the Cadillac’s trunk.

The unicycle was there now. Webern could almost hear its wheel spinning,
tick tick tick
, in the compartment just behind where he sat. As the Cadillac splashed down the muddy lane, he wished he could pedal along outside for a little bit—it would calm him down. They’d been driving for more than two hours, and right now, with his legs falling asleep under his suitcase and Ginger batting playfully at his hands every time he moved, it was hard not to surrender to a sense of impending doom.

It didn’t help that Brunhilde had taken out her suitcase and was now clucking somberly as she flipped back the lid. Webern resisted the urge to cover his eyes. The inside of Brunhilde’s suitcase was shellacked with mementos of what she called “the forgotten atrocities,” mostly snapshots she’d taken while wandering the wreckage of her burnt-out city during the war: steeples like black spikes—the Ihagee cameraworks, now a shattered mausoleum—a charred arm, lying in the street—and, most damning of all, a vast panorama taken from a distance, the great wooden skyline gazing out from the faded page with glass-less windows like haunted eyes.

“You know, we often had evacuations of this kind in the Fatherland.” She stroked the loose corner of one photograph, which depicted a headless statue—Webern hoped it was a statue—lying in the ruined Frauenkirche cathedral. “Just before the bombing—”

Everyone groaned.

“Oh, give it a rest, Brunhilde,” said Explorer Hank. “Not Dresden, again.”

She hefted the suitcase onto her knees and swivelled it towards the front seat. “I believe Al still has much to learn from my little museum.”

Al swatted the suitcase away with the huge paddle of his hand. “I’m good, lady.”

“It is important that we remember, is it not, Webern?” Brunhilde nudged the suitcase toward him. Webern mimed a noose tightening around his neck, crossed his eyes, and stuck his tongue out one corner of his mouth. She clucked again, but this time allowed herself the faintest wisp of a smile.

Brunhilde was a little crazy, no doubt about that, but fortunately Webern was still more or less on her good side. When he joined the circus, she showed excitement (or hints of it, anyway—Brunhilde never got too excited about anything but Dresden) on hearing his name with the W pronounced as a V, and unlike the rest of the performers, she never shortened it to “Bernie.” She even asked him if the name had been in his family long, to which he replied vaguely that he was sure he had German in him somewhere. He didn’t dare tell her the truth: that his father had first heard the name while serving overseas during the war.

“Henry, I take it that you, too, cannot bear to face the truth.”

“You know, I never enlisted,” said Hank. “Flat feet. It’s not my fault they burned down your house. So how come you want to torture me?”

Brunhilde stroked her beard. “Why should it be torture to understand?”

“Oh, come on. You wouldn’t show us dead babies and exploded hospitals if this was a history lesson.”

“You Americans act so tough, but underneath you are just like the ones you call the rubes. You want cotton candy, cotton candy that melts away to nothing and leaves only sweetness. You let the little man on the little stage show you tricks, and then you give him your wallet. Is that what you call a history lesson?”

Hank sighed. Ginger stood up in his lap and cleaned his chin with her rough pink tongue.

“You are the one who needs to learn a lesson from history, ” Fydor retorted. “You and all of your people. Many stories could be told of the war. Many, many sad and monstrous stories. But you will listen to none. And yet the tale of your suffering you have told us a thousand times.”

“A thousand and one,” Vlad agreed dolefully.

Webern leaned back in his seat. A few drops of rain still pattered, here and there, on the Cadillac’s windows, but it was slackening. The storm was almost over, and soon they’d be out of this car, somewhere warm and dry where Dr. Show would meet them—unless, of course, that Boulder guy hacked him to pieces first. Webern tried to keep from getting carsick. At least Nepenthe was safe. But thinking about her just made him feel anxious in a different way.

Along the shoulder of the highway, little red signs flashed like warnings:
She put a bullet / Thru his hat / But he’s had closer / Shaves than that / Burma Shave
. Webern closed his eyes and leaned back. Maybe he could still sleep a little bit tonight.

“Whoa, there.” Hank prodded the back of Vlad’s neck with his riding crop. He pointed out the back window. “I think they’re trying to tell us something.”

Webern turned to look. Sure enough, the headlights of the jalopy were flashing behind them.

“We stop, you say?” Vlad asked. Up in the darkness ahead, pink neon letters flickered
EATS
. Without waiting for a response, Vlad jerked the wheel in the direction of the exit, and in moments the Cadillac was splashing into the parking lot of a desolate all-night greasy spoon.

Webern was relieved to climb out of the cramped back seat, away from Ginger’s claws and Brunhilde’s prodding hip bones. He was even more relieved to move the heavy suitcase off his legs. But as he leaned against the car door to stretch, he remembered he didn’t have a shirt on. He started to duck, but it was too late: the beams of the truck’s headlights had already caught him. He slipped one hand protectively over his hump. Back in middle school, some of the other kids had made a game of patting it—“for luck”—whenever he let his guard down, even for a second.

The truck crunched to a stop on the gravel, and Nepenthe hopped out the driver’s side, swinging the keys around her gloved finger. She wasn’t supposed to drive since she didn’t have a license, but apparently tonight was an exception. In her black hat and veil, she looked like a rich widow.

“Dr. Show said he’d meet us here,” she announced.

Some of the other performers exchanged doubtful glances, and Nepenthe snorted, as if she’d just delivered the punch line to a joke way over their heads. She jumped down from the running board, lifted her veil, and spat a peach pit into a puddle. Eng the contortionist climbed out the passenger side window, but Enrique stayed behind in the cab of the truck. No one said anything to him.

Webern was rattling the locked door of the Cadillac when Nepenthe came over to join him. She hopped up on the hood, crossed her legs, and pulled out her cigarette case, a little silver box that she sometimes claimed to have stolen from her psychoanalyst. According to Nepenthe, her life before the circus had been posh.

“Got a light?” She took out a green, hand-rolled clove.

“Sorry.” Webern gave the door handle one last tug, then gave up and folded his arms to his chest.

“That’s quite an outfit you have on there,” she said. She looked from his bare hump down to the green frog flippers. Her face was all but invisible behind the veil’s thick black mesh. “You look like an evolutionary leap.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Hank’s fault. Did you see where Vlad and Fydor went? I need to get back in here for my shirt.” Webern squinted across the parking lot, empty except for their two vehicles and a dented station wagon. The rain had dwindled to a stinging mist. The other circus players were filing into the diner, murmuring anxiously among themselves.

“No problemo.” Nepenthe reached up under her hat, into the masses of dark curly hair she wore in a messy chignon. She extracted a bobby pin, hopped down from the car hood, and in seconds, jimmied the lock.

“Thanks,” muttered Webern. He crawled into the car and dug through his suitcase till he found a T-shirt and shoes. Inside, he was cursing. She always had him at a disadvantage.

Webern had met Nepenthe, whom they called the Lizard Girl, the day after he joined the circus. She was his age, but she seemed different than the girls he’d known in high school, and not just in the obvious ways. Nepenthe called herself a poet, and she wore her loneliness proudly, the way other girls wore their dates’ letter jackets. She carried a drawstring bag full of salted peach pits, which she sucked, then spat out in the street, and she constantly smelled of the spicy clove cigarettes that she rolled in green papers. She often called Webern “a chauvinist” and Dr. Schoenberg “a real megalomaniac,” as if these were objective diagnoses, or even nicknames, but when she really got angry, she just opened a book and sat behind it fuming.

Webern thought about her skin, a dry shell, scaled over like his father’s elbows. From a distance, it looked grey and rough as unpolished stone, riddled with cracks and imperfections; it was even flaking off in some places. The first time he’d seen her, he’d imagined cold blood moving like anti-freeze through her blue-green veins. He’d stared at her and she’d returned his look, raking her emerald eyes up and down him, from his smudgy eyeglasses to his tiny hands to the toes of his weathered All-Stars. Later, though, when he’d touched her wrist by accident, he’d been surprised by how warm it felt. It was at that moment, he knew now, that everything changed for him.

Sometimes he wondered if he’d ever get to touch her again. Even in hot weather, Nepenthe wore scarves and veils and gloves to hide her deformity, though she always stared out fiercely, as if daring people to look a little closer. The only time she showed her scales in public was during her nightly performances, when she lay on a plaster-of-Paris rock under a green light bulb like an iguana sunning itself. But Webern knew for a fact that she spent the hottest afternoons in her tent, up to her chest in a kiddy pool full of ice. She was warm blooded, boiling beneath her scales. Her skin couldn’t breathe like a normal girl’s. That was what Brunhilde had told him.

When he came back out again, fully clothed this time, Nepenthe was leaning against the Cadillac’s back bumper with her veil flipped back. Loose tendrils of hair trailed across the scales of her face. She’d found a light without him: she was already deep in a cloud of clove smoke.

“Did you manage to pack up your tent?” she asked.

“Nope. And I’m guessing there’s no chance of going back for it.”

“Probably not. What a drag. I bet you’ll wind up bunking with one of us till Dr. Show buys you a new one.” She offered her clove to Webern. “Want the rest of this? It’ll make your lips taste like honey.”

“Sure.” Webern took it and puffed a little. It felt like a sandstorm in his throat and he tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress a cough. “So, sounds like you know all about what happened tonight. Wanna fill me in?”

“I just know what Enrique told me.” Nepenthe took her clove back from Webern. She blew out a smoke ring and contemplated it. “He was pretty shaken up, poor guy. Apparently, a few hours ago, Dr. Show came charging into his tent with a brand new sword and some delusional story about how he’s been challenged to ‘a duel.’ We have to run, we’re all going to be dismembered, etcetera, etcetera. Enrique wasn’t too worried, because this is par for the course with Dr. Show, but then, while Show’s giving him the directions to this random place, there’s a ripping sound. Enrique turns around and sees another sword blade coming through the wall of his tent.”