Zephyr Dorsey

The Ringmaster’s Widow

Alamo and I shoulder our way through the athletes, performers and hangers-on inside the cantina, squeezing between the boxers and shotputters and long-hammer-wielding bell-ringers gathered at the large tent’s entrance, each muscle-bound mutant gazing down at me with a hard or hungry look of artificially super-charged testosterone.

Recognizing me, several of them step aside to ease our passage through their hulking mass. As the young widow of our recently deceased ringmaster, I’m virtually a celebrity around here.

The music playing this time of night is still up-tempo. Later, near sunrise, it will slow, and the old circus hands will wrap their arms around each other, swaying to the meandering rhythm and crooning off-key dirges lamenting the loss of the old days, of the times before the world suffered its terrible, apoplectic fit and seized up and plopped over sideways into the ashcan.

Just before Alamo and I arrive at the bar, a line of track-and-fielders walks past us. The track-and-fielders never quite fit in with the rest of us weirdoes. They’re too well-proportioned, too genuinely athletic, too finely tuned. They’re also the main event of the Circus, and they know it. Although their performances are not the biggest moneymakers of the Circus Olympiad (me and my girlfriends make more on tour then they do), their events are at the heart of the whole enterprise. They are the excuse for bothering to bring this crazy travelling freak show from village to village at all.

“How ya holdin’ up, sweetie?” asks Jameson the lion tamer, his black eyes brimming with compassion.

“Fine,” I lie.

“I lost my first wife several years back,” he says. “Tell ya the truth, I still ain’t recovered.” He touches my arm and offers a sympathetic frown from beneath his bushy moustache before the differently moving currents of the crowd carry us away from each other.

At the bar, I hop on a seat, but Alamo remains standing between the stools. I scrutinize him with a sideways stare as he surveys the crowd, attempting to read his mood. I feel like he’s got something he wants to get off his chest, and I’m pretty sure it has to do with me. With his eyes narrowly set on either side of his long nose, he looks like a particularly gaunt wolf. His hair is long, down to his narrow shoulders, and tonight he’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a limp collar and faded pattern, buttoned only at the solar plexus. His usual get-up. He’s a skinny guy, a year or two younger than me, and he can pull-off the slovenly look fairly well, but his hipless flanks are completely lost inside his raggedy castaway pants.

One of the bartenders comes-up to us. He goes by the handle of Crusher. Back in the day, when everything was still a mess and we were all just crawling out from the rubble of our dashed lives, Crusher toured with the Circus Olympiad in the lumberjack ring, a logroller. He’s of average height with the strong shoulders and forearms of a man who has done a lot of heavy lifting and real work in his life. He wears a ballcap, the visor bent low over his small eyes. His hair and beard are dirty-gray like steel wool. Because the tone of his voice is so low, he’s able to speak under the blare of music and conversation instead of having to climb over it.

“So’s this hooker and this bookie walk into a bar,” he begins. “Wait! Looks like you two know that one.”

I roll my eyes.

“So, what’ll it be for you two punchlines?” asks Crusher, ignoring our lack of appreciation for his joke.

“Two buckets of piss,” I say. I look over at Alamo who is only half-turned to the bar. “And he’s paying.”

“Sure, sure,” says Alamo, his wolf eyes settling on a couple of female gymnasts at a table near the band.

“Warm or flat?” asks Crusher.

“One of each,” I answer.

“You got it, Trixie.” The barkeep raps the bar with his knuckles and walks away.

Alamo and I listen to the music, he facing the crowd, me hovering over a bowl of pretzels. Several minutes pass without us exchanging a word. We’ve always been comfortable with each other that way, able to exist side-by-side in complete silence, which is exactly the kind of friend I need right now. I think sometimes I could go for days without uttering a syllable. I hate small talk. Small talk is just words sewn over an old rag filled with holes.

Our beers arrive in two dirty mugs that I try not to inspect too closely. I grab mine by the handle and lift it and blow the head toward Alamo. It’s a little tradition we have.

“I haven’t seen Laslow around much,” Crusher says to me, lingering vestigially after delivering our drinks. “How’s the little tyke hanging in there?”

“Fine. Thanks.”

“Good.” Crusher rubs the bar with a rag that looks dirtier than the bartop, itself. “Good,” he repeats. “Is he getting outside some? I mean, some exercise might–”

“He’s with relatives.”

“Really? Which side?”

“What’s it matter?”

Crusher looks at me a long moment then sets his rag behind the bar. “It’s good to have family in times like these,” he says, his eyes moving to Alamo. “So you’re the big spender tonight, eh, Butcher?”

Alamo’s last name is Butcher. But he’s of such a slight build, when people call him that, it’s usually with sarcasm dripping from their talk-holes.

“Reckon so,” he says, turning to the bar.

“Card?” asks Crusher.

“Will a ring due?”

“Is that a proposal?”

Receiving only a deadpan stare from Alamo, Crusher reaches down and pulls out a ring-imprinter. After punching a few of its buttons, he slides it forward and moves toward a handful of chips being waved at him by a buff female bull-rider at the far end of the bar.

Alamo presses his fist into the reader, and his ring is charged for the two drinks. Then he turns around and leans back, his bony elbows atop the bar behind him.

I spin on my stool so that I face away from the bar, too, my knees knocking him in his bony hip as they swing around. He absently cocks his midsection out of my way without looking at me and sips his beer.

“Have you been to see Madame Bovary yet?” he asks finally.

I knew he had something on his mind. He’s been after me to visit that headshrinking charlatan for weeks.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She’s just an old lady with some secondhand body monitors and some kind of crazy spherical graphics display. Probably dug it all out of some junk pile somewhere after the Cataclysm.”

“I don’t get you, Trix. Don’t you want to sleep again?”

“Of course, I do. I just don’t like the idea of some old crone digging around inside my head.”

“She helps people access their repressed memories.”

“Well, if I’ve got some repressed memories, there’s probably a good reason for it. My life ain’t been a walk in the park, ya know.”

Alamo turns to face me. “You can’t go on like this, Trix. Nightmares keeping you up all night. I know it’s affecting your business. I see how you’re having to scrimp lately.”

“What?” I can’t believe he’s bringing my work into this. We usually follow an unspoken rule about never talking about what I do for a living.

“You’re not putting yourself together like you used to. You used to banter with the guys, bat your eyelashes at them. Now, you’re letting the younger girls poach some of your business.”

That one hurt. The truth often does. “Why don’t you worry about your own business and leave me to worry about mine?” I say. “Don’t you have some unpaid bet to go collect-on or something?”

“Trix… you’ve just suffered a traumatic loss. It’s okay to reach for a little support. Madame Bovary can help you.”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“You’ve gotta find way to carry on. You’re wasting away. One death is tragic enough.”

“You’re a jerk,” I say, even though I know he’s trying to help me.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Just give me some time, Alamo. It’s only been a few months.”

He sighs and turns away.

I drink my beer and look over the crowd, thinking what a bunch of misfits we all are. Monsters and freaks. Sacks of genetic mutations, all strange in some way or another. Even the athletes. Especially the athletes. All of them abnormally tall or muscular or flexible or fast. And, of course, whatever weirdness they were born with, they’ve greatly augmented it by revving up their genetic dispositions with heavy doses of the various drugs circulating through the Circus Olympiad life-style, drugs that make them even more freakishly fast or strong, or that increase endurance or reduce pain, or that give them time-release energy or a sudden burst of adrenaline. Many of the women as well as the men have horse muscles on their legs and the necks of bulls setting atop their shoulders. On any given day in the Circus there’s a small army of people with their synapses so fired-up that they could catch a bullet between their teeth.

Alamo sets down his mug and grabs my arm. “Come on. Let’s go see her now.”

“Who? Madame Bovary?”

“No time like the present.”

For some reason I set my mug down on the bar and allow myself to be led toward the exit.

Several brawny giants look questioningly our way. I could have Alamo pulverized with one whimper, one frown, but I allow him to take me out of the cantina before I yank my arm away.

“What’s your problem, Al?”

“Come on, Trixie. I want you better.”

“Why? Why are you so obsessed with making me better? Maybe I just can’t get better. Maybe I don’t deserve to get better.”

Alamo’s wolfish eyes turn inward. “You’re the only friend I got, Trix. If you go batty, I’ll be all alone in this mess.”

“Get used to it. We’re born alone, and we go out the same. From womb to tomb — bam! — one short drop.”

He takes hold of my hand and leads me down one of the paths the Circus traffic has already worn in the grass, the ends of his mostly unbuttoned shirt flapping behind him. Part of me knows he’s right, that I’ve been putting off visiting Madame Bovary for too long.

“Here,” says Alamo as we arrive at her purple tent. He twists off his charge-ring and takes my hand, forcing me to accept it. “We’ll charge it to my account.”

He steps toward the tent’s entrance.

“Wait,” I say.

“What?”

“I don’t want you to go in with me.”

“You sure?” he asks, scrunching up his brow.

“Yeah.”

His face relaxes. His skin’s so smooth it’s almost liquid. “Alright,” he says.

We stand quietly a moment, staring out into the darkness surrounding the camp. There used to be a city out there. Now, there’s just nothing. Worse than nothing. An absence.

“I was never well, Alamo. I want you to know that.”

“Maybe I should go in with you.”

“No.”

“Alright. Fine. I’ll see ya in a few minutes then, Trix. I won’t be far.”

I nod my head.

Alamo walks away. My only friend in the world. When he disappears into the night, I feel a flash of panic, like I’ve just been set adrift in the eternal void.

I take a deep breath and draw back the curtain and walk into the candlelit, garishly decorated tent.

Madame Bovary is sitting at her table. She looks up slowly.

“Been expectin’,” she says. She motions to the seat across from her. “Sit, my lovely.”

I lower myself into the chair. “I’m not really sure why I’ve come.”

“Them’s the only kind me gets.”

She lays an imprinter on the table beside her crystal ball. She must have heard Alamo telling me to use his charge-ring just outside her tent.

I place the ring on the imprinter. After the account information has been read, I put the ring into my pocket, and the ancient woman takes the imprinter and stashes it away and stands and shuffles toward me.

“The blouse,” she says, her gestures indicating that I should take it off.

I pull it off reluctantly.

“Ah, such a beautiful young missy you are.”

The warmth of the tent dissipates as soon as she starts placing the icy contacts on my skin. I try not to flinch at their cold touch, but by the time she’s done, I’m shivering — though I’m not sure if the shaking is due to my nerves or because I’m actually that cold.

Madame Bovary, who seemed to have paid no attention to my discomfort while connecting her wires to me, surprises me by offering to bring me a wrap for warmth.

“Yes, please,” I say, nodding my head and crossing my arms in front of my bare breast.

She pours me a cup of a hot beverage that smells like tea.

“Drink up,” she says before shuffling behind a divider.

I sip the tea and think of Sven and of his sudden death and of how there is nothing lonelier than the return to loneliness after being loved.

After a few minutes, Madame Bovary returns. “Here you are, my lovely,” she says, holding a piece of cloth toward me, her eyes burning like blue flames in the dim, smokey tent.

I secure the flimsy garment around my shoulders as she peers at her monitors and adjusts a few dials. I begin feeling a little funny and realize that the tea is drugged. I had been told about the special elixir she serves her customers but had forgotten about it.

She places a sort of tiara on my head.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Your halo, my angel.”

“What’s it for?”

“All part of the magic.”

She seats herself across the tiny table from me. Between us sits a large crystal ball, glowing softly as if filled by a luminescent gas. Instead of a keyboard, she uses some sort of abacus-looking device to control the programs she uses. As she begins moving the beads of the abacas back and forth, a succession of shapes and colors begin swirling within the transparent ball.

“Yes…” she coos to her instruments.

My thoughts begin to drift. I wonder what sort of information the pads and wires attached to my body are conveying to her and her glowing little sphere. Can she measure the toxins and antibodies in my bloodstream? Can she see all my habits and addictions? Can she diagnose my health or read my whole genetic history?

Maybe this is how she does it, how she makes prophecies concerning the lives of strangers. She can read our futures because she can read our pasts. She can make her measurements and use them to predict how my skin will spot and wrinkle as the years go by, how my breasts will sag and my back will stoop. She can learn how my bones will grow brittle and my stamina weaken. She can see the diseases inside my body waiting to attack until my body’s defenses begin to degrade with age.

She turns from her instruments and gazes into the crystal ball. The shapes and colors in the glassy sphere are meaningless to me, but I know that her shining blue eyes are reading volumes there. Myriad diagnostics from my body are probably streaming into the seeing eye between us: heart rate, brain-wave pattern, blood pressure, perspirational changes, facial movements. I feel utterly naked before her, like a corpse upon an autopsy table.

Images flash through my mind. Sven. The blood on his shirt. Laslow, his son. My destroyed artwork. Lightning. The raindrops pummeling the disturbed surface of the water.

“He is here with us now,” says the old woman.

“Who? Who is here with us?” I can feel my heartrate accelerating, my muscles tensing.

“Look into the crystal ball,” she orders as she attaches rings to her fingers and thumbs. “Tell me what you see.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Try, lovely. Try.”

I stare down at the glass sphere. “Sven!”

His face has appeared within the mists and swirls. He is lying there, in my arms, staring up at me. There is something off about his expression, something not quite right. A part of my brain realizes that his image has been taken from some photo Madame Bovary has managed to obtain and that her crystal ball’s program is using it to construct a three-dimensional image.

“Sven!” I hear myself gasp. “Oh, Sven!”

He is dying all over again. I cradle him in my arms, the blood running down the side of his head and onto the collar of his red ringmaster uniform.

“Is he hurt?” asks the old woman. “Tell me what you see.”

“His top-hat has fallen off,” I answer. “His hair is soaked with blood.”

The images in the crystal ball change as I speak. Peripherally, I see the woman adjusting the controls of the tall device standing beside the table.

“Trixie. Trixie!” Sven calls to me. But it is not his voice, not exactly. The words have come from Madame Bovary, although they sounded a lot like Sven’s.

“I’m here, darling,” I say, frightened, unsure what to do to help him. “I’m here.”

Circus performers gather around us inside the sphere. The crowd in the bleachers remains utterly silent.

“Take care of my child, Trixie,” Sven struggles to say. “Take care of Laslow.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be–“

He grips my arm hard.

“Promise me!”

“I promise, Sven. I promise.”

His grip relaxes, and his body sags against my own. I stare down into his face. He is gone.

I hold him closer, my forehead pressing against his wet shoulder, my body rocking as the tears stream down my cheeks. When I look again into his face, his eyes have turned to empty sockets. I hear a pleading, raspy voice, and Sven’s dead lips are moving.

“What have you done?”

I jerk back in my seat.

“Leave this memory, my lovely,” orders Madame Bovary. “Go back farther.” Her voice is her own again, creaky and rough, like a casket hinge opening. “Tell me what you see.”

The kaleidoscopic clouds inside the crystal ball roil through a series of shapes and colors. After a moment, recognizable images begin to form.

“It’s Sven! He’s alive.”

“Yes… What is he doing, my lovely?”

“He’s in bed. I’m with him. Lying across his chest.”

The images in the glass ball continue clarifying. Sven and I are lying on a pallet inside our tent. Beside the pallet, the tent’s curtained entrance is half open, and the light outside is gray.

“He’s whispering something to me,” I say.

“What?”

The mouth in the computer-manipulated image opens and closes disjointedly as the crystal ball’s program attempts to animate the source image.

“He’s saying…”

“I love you, Trixie.”

The words have come from Madame Bovary again, yet they have the same unusual accent Sven acquired while growing up in the irradiated lands.

“I didn’t think I could love again after losing Gretchen,” he says. “I’m so glad I found you.”

“I can’t be a proper wife to you,” I say. “Doing what I’m doing.”

Sven strokes my hair but says nothing.

“Let’s leave the Circus, Sven,” I plead. “Start a new life somewhere. On some mountaintop. Or maybe up north, where the land’s not so dried-up and sick.”

“And Laslow?”

Black stormclouds begin churning and filling the crystal ball.

Madame Bovary’s own voice returns. “Tell me about… Laslow.”

Images of my stepson spin through the tabletop globe, his face morphing between the different snapshots available to the crystal ball’s program.

Curtains pull-back within the globe. I move forward through them and find myself standing inside our family tent. My traveling trunk is open, and my artwork has been strewn-about.

“No!”

“What is it, my lovely? What is wrong?”

“He’s ripped it all apart!”

“Ripped what apart?”

“The work of a lifetime. Ruined. All of it. My drawings, my paintings…”

Laslow sits on the floor near my trunk, my destroyed artwork spread around him.

“What have you done?” I demand, collapsing to my hands and knees and shoving him away as I try to put back together what has been forever undone.

“I hate you!” he yells. “I hate you!”

Lightning flashes inside the cube.

“It’s only rain,” Laslow is saying, looking out through the curtains of the tent, his whole demeanor shifted from the scene before. “The rain is water from heaven. Mama loved the rain. She said it hardly ever rained where she grew up.”

The scene shifts again, and now Laslow is swimming, raindrops splattering around his half-submerged face. More lightning. The sound of thunder shakes Madame Bovary’s tent.

“Time to get out of the water, Laslow!” I call from the bank.

“No!” He begins swimming farther away.

“You know there’s no swimming when there’s lightning.” I step closer to the stony edge the warm spring’s pool. “Get out!” I demand. “Now, Laslow!”

“No. Go away! You’re not my mother!”

I step into the water, quickly, before he can swim away. As I reach for him, he turns his head toward me.

His eyes are hollow sockets —

“What have you done?” he asks in a hoarse voice.

I pull back and shoot a glance up at Madame Bovary. She is hovering over the crystal ball, frantically moving her ringed fingers. The face of Sven returns, his eyes dark recesses, his hands and face pressed against the rounded glass as if he’s trapped inside.

A wind blows through the tent’s thick curtains, and the candles flicker, and the crystal ball brightens.

“What have you done?” The thunderous voice comes from everywhere at once. “What have you done?”

I shut my eyes. When I re-open them, Sven is looming above me at his full height. One side of his head and neck are covered in blood, and his eyes are black voids. His body flickers and ripples in the candlelight, and I can see that he is no more substantial than the candle smoke with which he mingles. Madame Bovary has conjured up the ghost of my dead husband!

I leap from my chair, tipping it over backwards. “Stop this! Turn it off!”

I yank the wires from my body, the wind inside the tent whipping my hair around. Sven reaches for me with his spectral hands as the old fortune-teller struggles to remove the control-rings from her shaking fingers.

“Turn it off!” I yell over the howling gusts.

“No control!” Madame Bovary yells back. “Feeding off your energy!”

Sven’s flickering ghost lunges at me. When he grabs me, it feels like ice-water pours down my spine.

“What have you done?”

I fall backwards through the tent’s curtains, scrambling away crablike before leaping up and turning to run.

I run down the path leading away from the Circus’s sprawling campground, the back of my neck tingling from the presence of Sven’s spirit just behind me. Circus people of all shapes and sizes begin running toward me. I can only hope they reach me in time.

The air begins to smell of sulfur. The ground turns damp. We are near the warm spring. I lose one of my shoes in a mudhole. My legs grow wobbly. I know I can’t run much farther.

“What have you done?” demands Sven in a thunderous voice just at my ear.

I collapse upon a mound of freshly turned earth, my chest heaving.

The ghost falls to his knees beside me, placing his incorporeal hands upon the mound.

“Get that damned projection device off her head!” I hear someone say. I think it’s Alamo.

I feel the halo being yanked from me, and the kneeling ghost of Sven disappears.

The boy’s drowning had been an accident. Surely they will believe me.