Mechanique (2 page)

4.

We’re the circus that survives.

Boss claims we were always around; she shows me glue-paper posters with the edges singed and flaking. The circuses are owned by a series of brothers with names I don’t know, and peopled with acts I’ve never heard of. (I recognize
Grimaldi
, the brothers’ false name.) Other than that, there’s nothing much to them but worn-out pictures. I don’t even know where she’s found them.

Some of the circuses have an eagle mascot; some have a lion, or a flaming hoop, or an eight-point star. The emblem of Tresaulti Circus is a griffin in profile, her hinged wings outstretched. A tattoo of that crest covers the top half of each of Boss’s wide, pale arms. You can see them in the ring, though the tattoos look like lace sleeves in the lantern light; you wouldn’t guess if you didn’t already know.

You have to really know what you’re looking for, when it comes to her.

The names of the other circuses are different from ours, so I know they can’t be our circus still going, but the only time I ask her about it (when I’m still young and stupid and too slow to get out of the reach of her arms), she clips me on the ear.

“The name changes, Little George,” she says, “but the circus is always the same.” She flicks the tattoo on her right arm as if to prove her point or wake the animal. Her nail slices her skin, and where the griffin’s metal wings have been grafted, the blood pools like oil.

For a moment I’m frightened, but I don’t know why. Nothing to worry about.

No one has wings like that any more; not since Alec died.

5.

This is what happens when you take a step:

Your first leg moves out from underneath you. By now your chest is already moving, your back foot ready to push.

(You will not notice, but here you are the tallest you will ever be, poised on one foot and ready for motion.)

Your first leg sweeps ahead, and your back foot powers you. Your weight is propelled forward, inertia dragging you back.

In this instant is the body-terror; here you are unbalanced, unable to rest or move back. Your arms are swinging, trying to keep the mechanism in motion. Here you are at the lowest point. Here is the danger of falling.

Your first leg hits the ground, heel first, and the worst is over. The chest is following, finding balance in this new place. Now if you lift the back foot, you keep hold of yourself. Your back leg swings to meet its brother, and you are standing still.

This is what happens when you take a step: you are moving closer to what you want.

This is what happens when an aerialist lets go of the swinging trapeze:

She swings with her legs forward and lifted, feet pressed together and toes pointed, for momentum.

By the time she lets go of the bar, her legs are already touching her chest, and she is in the pike position of a diver; she is already pulling her torso away, arcing backwards as fast as she can. Her arms are close to her chest like the folded wings of a bird, for speed.

Then her arms are straight, arms extended. Her spine is parallel to the ground. Her eyes are fixed ahead, and her path is clear; she is the bird in flight.

But the legs are coming up behind her; gravity has hold of her, and her legs are weights dragging her down to the floor forty feet beneath her.

Here, someone catches her. (Or they don’t.)

She wraps her hands around her partner’s wrists, and her momentum drives the swing. Her legs snap down, under her and forward; now the power of the pendulum has hold of her, and she will swing out, her toes just brushing the fabric of the tent. She will spend a moment weightless, motionless; a state of bliss.

This is what happens when an acrobat lets go of the swinging trapeze: the bird or the ground.

6.

I don’t know if it was cold or not the day Bird auditioned; I remember looking at her and going cold, but that’s not the same thing.

(She had another name back then, but I don’t remember it. It doesn’t do to hold too tightly to the old life.)

She approached the campsite with her head high and her hands visible—no weapons. She was in a dirty coat that must have looked sharp, once.

I was on watch, but I could only stand dumbly and gawp into a face that was so spare it hardly seemed she had one, just an expanse of skin with two gleaming eyes set in it.

“I would like an audition,” she said.

She said it without ego, as if I were the one who would audition her, as if I would know exactly what to do.

And I did; I got Boss.

Boss picked up a drill and came back holding it at her hip like a pistol. She carried something with her whenever someone came asking after work. “Scares the cowards off,” she said, and it was true. Most people just looking for a job balk at seeing a woman with a brass elbow in her hands.

But this time it was Boss who balked. When she caught a look at Bird’s face she stopped in her tracks, and for a moment I thought Boss was actually going to take a step back from her.

(Some moments are endless and terrifying, even if they turn out all right. Most moments with Bird in them are like that. This one was the first of many.)

Finally Boss said, “What do you want?”

Bird said, “I want to audition.”

Another long silence before Boss said, “Inside.” The griffin on her arm was trembling.

They went inside the tent. I got a “You keep busy, nosey,” from Boss, so I fetched tent spikes and coils of rope and kept looking over at the closed entrance of the tent, waiting for some sound, any sound, that would tell me what was going on.

It was the first time anyone had gotten inside the tent before being in the Circus. Usually people auditioned right in the campsite, so the rest of the troupe could come and watch. You could get a feel for most people by the way the troupe took to them or not.

When they came outside, Boss looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Bird was behind her; she had chalk on her hands, and something about her expression made her hard to look at.

“We have a new aerialist,” she said. “Get the girls.”

I made a run for it, circling the camp in under a minute, shouting at Panadrome and Barbaro and Jonah and Fatima to get the others and bring them to the tent where Boss was waiting.

Bird stood with her arms at her sides, her palms making chalky handprints on her coat, and looked at them all as they approached. Jonah smiled at her, as usual for Jonah, but everyone else seemed to hang back as if smoke was coming off her. Panadrome seemed surprised Boss had auditioned Bird alone; he looked back and forth between them, his face clouded.

Elena, small and stretched tight as a drumhead, pushed her way to the front, frowned, and folded her arms.

“Too tall,” she said. “Who could catch her?”

“She’ll have hollow bones put in, like the rest,” Boss said, in that voice that doesn’t allow argument.

(Boss didn’t look at Bird either, that whole time, and I should have known then what she had seen in the tent that frightened her, but I was young. You ignore a lot of warnings when you’re young.)

Elena didn’t argue, but she looked at Bird with narrowed eyes, and you could feel her setting her heart against this strange woman with the shoddy coat and the smooth, expressionless face.

“She won’t last,” Elena said.

Elena is a bitch, no mistake—she’ll slap you as soon as look at you—and I’m the last person to think cruelty about Bird, but even the broken watch on Ayar’s back tells the time twice a day, and it was Elena’s turn to be right.

7.

Boss always tells the rubes that her late husband made us all.

“Oh lord,” she says when they wonder about our mechanicals. She lifts her hands and trills, “I can barely oil the things, let alone!”

She doesn’t say what she lets alone, and no one asks. She’s wearing her long dress with the sparkling coat over it, looking like an enormous sequin. She looks like looking good is all she can manage.

I think she says it so they get the feeling we could break at any moment. It’s always more exciting to watch something you know could backfire.

“We saw the last performance,” they would be able to say. “We saw the final act of the Circus Tresaulti, before everything went wrong.”

But there’s no mistaking what she can do, not among us real folk, no matter what she tells the crowd.

(I didn’t understand her. I had been with the circus too long; I felt too safe to know why it was better to make some things seem breakable and frail. I didn’t know who might come looking for us, if they thought we were strong enough to take hold.)

The workshop truck is the first truck behind the passenger trailers. Boss keeps it locked, with the key around her neck. Whenever I catch a look inside it seems a useless mess, one table and some tools and some scrap in a pile in the back, but she works magic with whatever she’s got. (With metal, with audiences, with us.)

All the aerialists have skeletons of hollow pipe. It’s tougher than bone, and lighter, and easier to fix when it breaks. For them it’s all under the skin, though—Boss wants all her girls to stay pretty.

“No man pays to look at an ugly woman,” she says.

Ayar is laced with metal bands that weave inside and outside his chest like a second set of ribs, and at the shoulders are the two gears that help him lift the small truck when it’s that time in his act. (It would have looked awful on a paler man, but Ayar’s bronze to start with and even his eyes are sort of golden, so this looks more like him than when he was human. That happens, sometimes.)

The teeth of the wheels are visible in back, so you can see him working. His spine, though, is the draw they put on the poster. It’s melted together from bits of copper and brass that Boss has found; there’s a watch face in the middle. It was still going when she welded it on him.

“It’ll stop on its own,” she said, when he complained about it. “Don’t whine. It looks just like the garbage pile.”

That was his angle—she wanted him to look as if he had risen from a trash heap stronger than the men who had buried him beneath it. It was meant to inspire and to frighten—the junk-man resurrected. (Boss makes freaks, but she knows what she’s doing.)

But the watch didn’t stop. Jonah finally had to send a chisel through the case to turn off the ticking.

She’s done something to almost everyone, except the jugglers and the dancing girls. For them it’s a pretty brass glove that hinges on and off, or a filigree plate strapped onto the skull—something to titillate, not something that stays.

(I think the filigree plates are a mean joke, because of Bird, but nobody asks me anything.)

And there’s Panadrome, whom nobody but Boss looks in the eye. Poor soul. He makes such pretty music that you’d think he’d be better liked. Though even here there’s the hierarchy—there always has to be one, it’s how you know who you’re better than—and Panadrome is last, because there’s hardly any man left of him. He’s just a one-man band with a soul attached.

The brass-man angle gets us the crowds, though, I can’t deny it. Whenever I walk through what passes for a city these days and slap a poster on some bombed-out wall or other, people sneak out from behind their bolted doors just to get a look edgewise.

They’re nice posters, in the style of the old ones she’s shown me, huge and glossy and bright—a holdover from the days before the war. Boss got them printed up in New Respite, where the printer could still use colors, so the posters have little flourishes of green and gold.

It takes ten seconds for me to get the paste over it to where it will stick, but that’s always plenty of time.

“Mechanical men,” someone whispers, every time the poster goes up. They’re not impossible to find—here and there you see someone who’s been patched up with wires and cogs—but that’s a homemade business. Looking at me makes them all think there must be some artistry in that circus.

They glance at my legs, ask how much the show is, make plans to leave their weapons at home.

My brasses aren’t real, just leg casings with seams up the sides and a gear at the knee that draws blood, but brass brings the crowds, every time.

The poster has a fancy frame drawn around the announcement, studded with little illustrations of our acts. It’s genius advertising, except when people ask me about Alec, and I have to tell them he’s gone.

(I asked Boss if she didn’t want to cut him off the poster. “They’ll forget about him by the time they see the circus,” she said. Maybe he’s the real emblem of Tresaulti now, and I’m just the last to know.)

Ayar is in the top left corner, drawn with his back turned, looking over his shoulder at his spine. The watch is there, frozen at a quarter to six. Under his picture: F
EATS OF
S
TRENGTH.

Top right is a cameo of the aerialists wrapped around each arm of the trapeze, one hooked onto each bar. (Big Tom and Big George aren’t there; they stay a surprise.) T
HE
F
LYING
S
PRITES
, it reads, which is fine as names go, so long as you don’t know them.

Top center is Alec, wings out, grinning like he knew what the score was; he was invincible. T
HE
W
INGED
M
AN.

The tumblers are left side (T
HE
G
RIMALDI
B
ROTHERS
), eight of them piled on top of each other, scrambling to get into the drawing and not be chopped out by the frame.

Panadrome is on the right side. His brass barrel chest is ringed with piano keys and valves; he holds the accordion bellows straight out with one arm, tucks a ratty top hat under his elbow with the other. He’s got a dignified expression. I always wonder if he was a businessman before, or if that’s just how you have to look when you’re more metal than man.

The jugglers don’t have a place on the poster. Boss has never bothered to name their act; they come in and out so much there’s no point in marking them down.

Jonah is bottom center, his pose matching Ayar’s; his brass hunch is hinged open, so the printmaker could sketch the cogs and gears and pistons that keep his lungs going. T
HE
M
ECHANICAL
M
AN
, it says.

Bottom left is a trio of the dancing girls, the ones wearing the brass skull plates and the metal gloves and hardly a thing else. E
XOTIC
D
ANCING
G
IRLS
, the poster says, though it’s only exotic because they’ve had to make it all up as they went along, so it’s foreign stuff even to them. They laugh about it during load-out—each of those girls hauling her own weight in timber. (None of those girls lasted long, and the printmaker seemed to know it; their faces are vague sketches, nothing to hold on to.)

Stenos and Bird are on the bottom right like an afterthought. You can hardly see their faces, because the scale has to accommodate their pose: he’s holding her aloft with one arm, her hands wrapped tight around his hand, her legs with their pointed feet stretched impossibly apart—one along her spine, one pointing out like a weather vane.

Underneath them it says, F
EATS OF
B
ALANCE
, and oh, it’s a lie, it’s a lie.