1. Charles Marvin
Circuses
The planes came in the night, late, in summer-when the leaves of ivy growing outside my
narrow windows shuddered in the predawn breezes, and only a few lights burned, here
and there, in the stone towers of the city. I would lie awake on the worn, thin mattress over
the cagework of my bed as the gauzy curtains stirred about the windows, listening for the
approach of the engines in the dark. Even before the time when the invasions had begun, I
had reached that point in my life where sleep was a rare thing-unwonted thoughts curled
about me like vapors through the hours, as if I were drifting forever from a warm,
cherished place. I would read late into the night, deep into books that would draw me into
an aura of protecting voices, spells to drive them back.
The planes came from far off, riding out over the Great Lakes in long moonlit formations;
they snaked toward the city through forested mountain valleys, gliding over windmills and
old shadowed barns rising from clusters of trees. They would arrive so far into the
sleepless dark that it seemed the night itself was under their spell. As they banked
downward to ride among the unilluminated towers of the city, you felt the sound of their
engines trembling in the very stone around you-you felt it right down to the calcium in
your bones.
To get a better view of them I would turn down the flame of the lamp beside my bed,
casting the room about me in garish shadows; standing among my sheets and pillows, the
mattress sinking under my feet, I would steady myself against the cool shale sills beneath
the windows and gaze outward over the dim realm of the city. For a long time I would see
nothing, as if there was only sound-only the mad roar of hundreds of machines about me in
the dark. Under a bright moon, perhaps, I might catch glimpses of silhouettes passing
overhead like witches. But then the pitch of one of the buzzing trails would begin to drop;
and then there would be others, spiraling in downward crescendos, dogs barking at them
from the building's highest rooms. All at once, a round-nosed fighter would materialize in
the air before us-shuddering in the wind, ghostly, obscured in ragged mists-and then veer
away again, swooping down into the night's fogs. One after another the rogue pilots would
descend, chasing one another around the tops of buildings and rocketing away down the
empty avenues. On nights when the moon was full it seemed they would gradually fill up
the sky, swirling in a vortex over the city. They seemed not so much an invasion of
machines then, but of forest spirits-griffins and gargoyles drawn not by some malevolent
call but by the celestial stonework of the buildings, the rain-smell of old caverns risen into
the night. Their noise filled my skull; the curtains about the windows fluttered past my bare
shoulders; I would watch and listen to the chaos in the dark until the deep light of the hour
before dawn, when all of the planes, as if by one signal, veered off in a maelstrom of
trajectories toward the sea.

2. At times several of us who lived in the upper stories of the building would ascend to the
highest rooms to hold vigil for the planes, in the sumptuous quarters of the celebrated
screen actress Miriam Callaher. I was twentythree now and without parents. My mother
and father had been set afire on a balloon ride by a sudden gust of wind; I had been sent by
their executors to the city to serve as a clerk in my uncle's department store. Miriam
Callaher's tale was an entirely different one, tugging at wishful feelings I still harbored.
Fame struck her at an early age, before she could even remember-she was a child star
whose "declining years" had lingered on for half a century. As her health progressively
failed that summer, our nights gathered round her grew more frequent. Drawn to the
temptation of her imminent death, to the secreted treasures that we imagined sparkled
beyond the silver screen, we must have seemed to her like the tiny, wizened bats that lit in
the foliage just outside her casements, hanging by clusters of berries that they would
suckle, dark-eyed, in the night; we would sit and laugh on her plush red carpets, her
ornamented windows thrown open and candles flickering all about us, drinking her
Madeira as she snored uneasily in her bed.
Gradually these bed-vigils led to odd friendships, occasional parties held in dark little
rooms, and opportunities, finally, to explore the city's underworld. Most of all I remember
my theater nights out with Edward Carras and Corona Dizen, two darkly dressed, ghastly
personages who had befriended me one night when I was unhappy: we sat at dramas in
velvet rooms deep under the city, where the light of captive moons shone over the stage
and lovers met in trance-like silences. Years ago the theater had sunk away into the bowels
of the city, disappearing into a world of dimly lit halls and winding staircases, to intimate
curtained rooms that one would arrive at suddenly out of the dark, as if to the chambers of
buried kings. The city, somnolent in its wreckage under the night's circus of planes, was a
place not of actual but subconscious revolutions, acted out in dumb shows and strangely
agitated melodramas. Unclear as its aims were, the new theater attracted its share of fallen
angels. Edward himself was an erratic genius, a young stockbroker who neglected his
clients in order to roam the city's shadow-world. He was tall, dark-haired, a distracted man
of delicate features who drifted down the cool labyrinthine halls in a long gray raincoat
with notched lapels and raglan sleeves. He had the detached air of a diplomat; he often
stood apart with his hands in his pockets, looking quietly about him on subway platforms
or on the threshold of Mrs. Callaher's sumptuous rooms. I remember him whispering to me
one night in a hushed theater, so far under the city that water dripped from the ceiling,
before an open stage completely dark save for a spotlight shown upon a mule looking out to
the audience. All of the actors in the play had killed one another and were being eaten by
huge, hulking birds. "You can't imagine what it's like," he said. "One day a guy's got
limousine drivers and prostitutes and safe-deposit boxes full of jewels, and then he's wiped
out overnight and in a penitentiary the next morning." Acquisitions programmers struck
instantaneously, darting through matrixes of information toward individual accounts-one
probe from swarms of millions breaching the electronic fortress to marry a family fortune.
The birds croaked and flapped before us. "There's nothing to buy anymore," Edward
whispered. "It's a feeding frenzy."
Corona Dizen was an occasional actress in the dramas we would attend. Their purpose, she
would explain to a doubtful Mrs. Callaher, was political: to counter the dangerous notion of

3. a split between reality and the imagination, roughly analogous to work and play. Political
reality, she would insist, was simply imagination in its most basic form, played out upon
people's lives-men were sucked into machines, women ground to the bone, children
enslaved, all to produce the wealth of a shimmering diamond necklace worn by a dowager
queen. "That is why you must give us all your money when you go to heaven," she would
explain eagerly to Mrs. Callaher, her dark eyes animated, her smooth face rippling with just
a hint of mirth. "All of the artists must keep their money together, and never give it away. If
we have enough capital we can change the world's dreams. Listen to me, Mrs. Callaher, I
know you are not sleeping!"
I followed in the perfumed wake of this ominous couple like a black cat who, for periods of
time, becomes the companion of strangers. I had a half-formed idea then that I would make
my way through life in this fashion, moving lightly from one tableau to the next, existing on
the intoxicating essences of people's lives. Edward Carras and Corona Dizen were dark,
exotic fare: the sort to share with casual acquaintances scenes and confidences that would
be secreted away by others. I think that they were as interested in my curiosity, in fact, as I
was interested in them.
It wasn't until the night of Claus Mueller's hair-raising production of James Fenimore
Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales that I was sufficiently distracted from my companions to
really understand what attracted them to the new theater. Even then I could see that their
political views were mainly decadent; they spent their time drinking Madeira and going to
plays. Nevertheless, I vividly remember sitting with my shoulders hunched, God knows
where under the city, between the rustling and faintly luminous Corona Dizen and a huge
pile of a man in a seersucker suit who was eating something from a bag, gazing to the vague
burnished light of the play before us and thinking: now this is something, isn't it? A
shadowy figure stood in the middle of the stage, wrapped in what seemed like sheets. A
gentle, swirling music played about her-now and then clear tones of it would ripple
outward, the upper bars of a xylophone, perhaps, or chimes tapped one by one. The light
about the stage warmed to a feverish golden haze crossed by moving shadows, such as a
canopy of wind-tossed leaves might make under a harvest moon in a house. The figure at
the center was a woman, dressed in a shawl and a bonnet that stuck out so far in front of
her face that she could not be seen. She looked about her, standing awkwardly before a
rude table lit faintly by an oil lantern. The shadows of her teacups flickered behind the four
glass panes at the top of a corner cupboard; a rocking chair stood apart from her. She
looked about her for some time, her hands at her sides, as if wondering what to do.
Throughout the play it had seemed that she had had no lines to speak. She had initiated
none of the dialogue, speaking only when prompted by one of the other characters. After a
scene of extended debate in which she would stand in the bright sunshine and look about
her, someone would stop and ask her what she thought about the Indians, about the cattle,
about whether or not she believed in God. On each of these occasions she had hesitated, the
characters standing apart and watching her as she struggled to make some reply. More
often than not her answers bore no relation to the play, and after she had finished-it was
hard to hear, exactly, what she was saying through her bonnet-the other characters would
go on with their conversation as if she had never said a word. She was listed in the program

4. as "Mother," played by an actress named Clara Brown, of whom neither Corona nor Edward
could call anything to mind.
Now she was abandoned on the stage, alone in a wilderness cabin. On the table before her
were various household implements-a white butter dish, a creamer, a half-empty water
pitcher; knives, forks, and spoons; a sieve, a whisk, several plates and saucers; a blackened
bread pan, and a cast-iron skillet pearled with bacon grease. She took up a large wooden
rolling pin as the indistinct light swam about her, trembling a little, the music rising in
intense oceanic swells around her. I sat utterly spellbound in the audience, the
mountainous man beside me turning something over and over again in his mouth.
Suddenly a high-pitched scream, icy and horrible, rose from the bundle of rags before us. It
was as if it was all she could think of. In the next instant she was whirling about, smashing
everything on the stage to pieces. Her fury was terrible, indescribable. The crockery flew up
around her, the chair-the chair she attacked like a human being-and then all the lights went
black.
Afterwards, as people gathered to talk in the dim yellow corridors leading out from the
theater, it was clear that something extraordinary had taken place. You could hear it in
people's voices. If I had been asked then to explain just what it was that had happened, I'm
certain I wouldn't have known just what to say. But I had felt something-that sense of
recognition that occurs only inside history, yet kinetically distances one's perspective from
it. Clara Brown, standing without a script in the eye of the play's dream, unable to meet the
demands of either the real or the unreal-a principal player in a drama beyond her control-
was where we felt ourselves to be, the story of the world mutating in the grasp of our
minds like a fairy tale no longer comprehensible. The newspapers would articulate this for
us in the morning: in the meantime we simply felt excited, aglow with a secret knowledge,
as if the heavens themselves had given us signs.
Edward left us after the performance, pushing his way back through the crowded corridors
to the dressing rooms backstage to get his program autographed; meanwhile, Corona and a
bearded, monocled man holding a small velvet box stood and discussed the luminous glow
of the stage lighting, which had reminded the gentleman of certain paintings of Bierstadt
and the Hudson Valley School. I stood beside Corona, watching the man as he spoke to her.
He looked back to the two of us, pleasurably to her and with flickers of nervous irritation to
me. When Edward returned the halls were emptying. He hadn't found any of the actors-a
trap door had been left open behind the curtains of the stage, he said, and from there an
iron ladder had led down to a series of storage rooms, dark passages of old brick and damp
timbers that led only God knew where. Having settled that, Corona and I bade our
threadbare aesthete farewell-he was dressed all in black but his clothes were dusty and
unkempt-and found our way back up to the streets, which were empty at that hour and
hazy with a creeping fog.
Later that night we would gaze from the stone parapets of the city's highest cathedral, out
to the waterfront where crowds of men were being beaten back onto torch-lit wooden
piers under the towering silhouette of a Navy destroyer. They were roused like this from
home and tavern in the dead of night to be shipped to the wars overseas; Edward and I

5. were fortunate to be working, exempted from impressment so long as the wars remained
stalemated. I reminded Edward of this and he nodded slowly. "But I can't seem to wake up
in the morning anymore," he said, his voice clear but faint over the distant shouts of the
captured men. "I set the alarm but I keep dreaming it's this man who's talking to me. I've
been coming in late for two months now, sometimes not at all." He continued to gaze out to
the smoking, fiery glow over the rioting crowds, his face cast in shadows. "I just can't seem
to get frightened enough anymore."
I hadn't seen this coming. I admired my friends and thought little of what might be their
failings, until such time as evil manifested itself in them and prompted a parting. But this
was too sudden. I had little choice, therefore, but to sit and listen as Edward wondered
aloud if he could get a job in my uncle's department store, in our own building and the ones
adjacent to it, just for a while. He thought the proximity would be a kind of convalescence
for him: he could look down from his room in the mornings to the display windows along
the street, where the sun crept down to warm the mannequins over the lone early
pedestrians, and know that his world was small and safe. At night he would breathe in the
dusky smells of stone and rain through the fragrance of the vines about his windows, and
know that he was exactly where he was supposed to be, a worker in the garden. What he
figured, essentially, was that in an impaired state he might be able to manage a life
something like mine.
Corona sat in the moonlight at the top of a dark stone stairway, overlooking the two of us
further down amid the shadows of the cathedral. It was another subtle game they played-
one of them would speak to me as the other listened, as if I were an intimate object used
between them. Corona was wearing a black dress with a wide collaret that evening, high
heels, jade earrings. Her dark hair was cut short, like a boy's. After considering us for some
time she said to me that it would be good if I could do everything I could for Edward. Her
tone was austere yet confidential, as if Edward could not hear her. "He can be trusted," she
went on easily. "He will not make mistakes and is not ashamed to do simple things. But you
must help him."
Edward stood with his back turned to us, looking out over the machicolated walls of the
cathedral to the dark streets below. "She doesn't even know when she hurts people," he
said, his voice cutting bitterly into the night. He turned to us from the city, his gaze rising
past me to the woman above us. "She'll hurt you, too," he said.
The distant calls of the men had grown more pitched, blowing in on intermittent gusts from
the harbor. The navigational and air warning towers of the destroyer, looming and alien,
seemed to gaze down with a vague sympathy to the men who were being driven aboard.
Teams of other men were being hoisted on platforms into the night, struggling to hold on,
some of them falling to the crowds below. I couldn't watch it anymore.
"I think I can take care of myself, Edward," I said, speaking familiarly to him but becoming
all the more aware of Corona's presence between us. "Life's too short not to, don't you
think?"

6. Corona waited on the effect of these words. She seemed to be holding her breath as she
watched over us, forging the bond between us with a sort of prayer. I realized now that I
was trading our friendship for something more personal and disquieting. As Edward sat
down dejectedly on the smooth steps in front of me, I wanted to reach out to rub his
shoulders, to assure him we wouldn't let him be taken from us. But I sensed also that I had
gotten too close to something voracious and unpredictable, as if I had strayed to the brink
of a dark, wet cave strewn with bones. I wanted somehow to draw back from my blunder
into the cool night air again, but found I couldn't shift the spell of warmth around me.
In the days and nights that followed I would take special care that I would be left alone. I
bought my sandwiches from machines in the basement and haunted the empty stairwells of
our building, avoiding chance encounters on the elevators. Instead of going out in the
evenings, I looked through boxes of old family photographs, arranging the blackandwhite
prints on my bed to make up stories about my childhood. Naturally I deliberated on what I
could do for Edward. I was to become the bridge across what seemed to him an unleapable
chasm to my uncle; he would walk trembling over me as I looked down to the traffic,
praying he wouldn't screw up and send both of us falling.
It was all too much. Edward's malaise seemed reckless, uncontrolled, and finally all too
casual. As was typical when faced with dilemmas, I took to my bed and read books. It was
the only freedom I had from the messes I got myself into, from those who laid
responsibilities upon me with no more thought of it than children would have. My tastes in
literature, perhaps, were all too indulgent of my moral weaknesses. I would have preferred
to dream. At any rate, they kept me out of more trouble than I was already in. There, at
least, I shadowed the lives of others vicariously, without the risk of someone's eye suddenly
flickering to catch my soul.
I immersed myself in tales of torch-lit barges which moved down rivers under the earth,
unknown to the world above. Those who had found their way through forests down to the
rain-swept, rocky openings of the earth, or who had wandered down subway tracks to
where the city ended in tunnels of steam, after groping their way through darkness finally
to a vast shore, would there find rescue: a luminous ship would approach, animating the
overarching walls of the earth with an undulating fire. Around the stout legs of the boat's
twenty-six oarsmen, from bow to stern, a perpetual orgy writhed, ruled by a king in flowing
robes who would walk, barefoot, over the backs of his dominion. As the barge drifted in and
the king reached out amid the smoking torches, smiling, to help you aboard, you couldn't
remember anymore what it was that had brought you to him. As you climbed in, your
clothes were stripped from you like the dressing of a wound, and then you were subsumed
forever.
From time to time another barge, utterly dark, would float by the naked kingdom in the
passages. The revelers would give this ship wide berth, hearing from it only the sound of
dogs barking. Under the world that makes a terrible din-some said that the dogs had been
driven mad by the echoing of their own rough voices. Sometimes, as the fiery kingdom
drifted slowly out into the wide expanse of an underground lake, out from amidst
waterfalls rushing down serpentine chasms, the barking would be heard far in the distance.

7. At other times, through a narrow aperture the wooden barge would pass far too closely,
listing to one side, the water rising up its rotting deck. The bearded king would stand
among his subjects and watch the silhouettes of the dogs flicker in the low amber glow of
his kingdom. Now and then one of the forms would leap with a growl into the water and try
to make it up onto the revelers' barge, only to be beaten back: the animal would bite at
their flesh as it went down, its teeth flashing in the dark.
I read on, digesting my dilemma through the evenings by way of metaphor, until one night I
awoke to discover that I had been sleeping for a very long time. The lamp at my bedside
had burned down to a low flicker, and the curtains stirred airily about me: outside the wind
had picked up and the air had taken on a certain chill. Thunder over the distant mountains
rumbled softly down the avenues, and for a moment I thought I could hear a sputtering
high overhead in the winds. I dressed slowly, putting on whatever my hands could find
about me in the dark. The room seemed to have grown smaller as I had slept. Quietly I left
it, locking the door behind me and coming out into the dim, burnished light of the hall.
What I would remember of this night would come back to me in flashes, stuttering images
that would hold, burn, and fade, one into the other. I was lonely: I wanted to visit Mrs.
Callaher. I climbed up the building's dark stairways, past dusty corridors lit here and there
along the walls by a bulb that hadn't burned out. The topmost chambers were darkest of all,
without lights or windows: I heard the rain and the thunder about me there and tried to
sense where I was in the dark.
Mrs. Callaher's nights always began this way, in uncertainty. No one was ever called or sent
for. One simply made one's way up into the dark, to narrow passages where one might turn
a corner and suddenly be nowhere at all, at a rusted iron ladder rising up a concrete wall,
or at a door slightly ajar leading to a maze of somber portraits. The lady's apartments were
far beyond the reach of the building's ancient elevator, so high over the city that the streets
below were often lost under a sea of clouds. Others might be with Mrs. Callaher whom I
might not want to see, but it was also true that my own solitude unnerved me: like a child
who hid in cupboards from a familiar monster, I dreaded yet itched to peer from a crack in
the door.
I knocked at what I thought must be the right entrance, judging by a damp, familiar smell in
the air and the vague sound of voices within. As I stood and listened for a reply I became
aware, slowly, of what seemed a deep vibration coming from the stone walls of the
building, all around me in the dark. Realizing what it was, I couldn't believe my luck.
Towering into the storm's winds, the edifice was picking up a new tune from the skies: an
aerial circus of approaching planes. Never before had they flown to us into the mouth of a
thunderstorm. I was delighted, whatever the impending destruction might be. And I
congratulated myself as well for having waited until just the moment of their arrival to
climb up into the clouds to see them.
Edward Carras flung open the door and stared out at me. His dark hair was wild, wind-
tossed; a vague light framed him. "Where have you been?" he cried out. He seemed beside

8. himself with an excess of feeling. "Clara Brown's here, and all the planes are coming. We've
all been here without you!"
I looked past him into Mrs. Callaher's dark rooms, out to the glinting wall of lead-paned
windows at the end of them, set high with colored trefoils, which stood between the lady's
visitors and a moonlit field of clouds. The storm was below: wisps of its substance drifted
to the glass, toward the silhouettes of Corona Dizen, the actress Clara Brown in a short
pelerine cape, and the bearded gentleman Corona and I had met the night of Clara's
performance, among others. Mrs. Callaher lay on a raised bed overlooking her guests,
propped up with pillows in a recessed nook of the room. Shelves of bound leather books
rose up the walls behind her, their gilt bindings edged with moonlight. Mutely, slowly, she
was raising an arm toward the others, as if to warn them of something. But they all had
turned their backs to her: they were listening to the bearded man sing a little song about
the wind and the rain, a tumbler of dark port wine raised in his hand. Corona stood apart
from the group, gazing sardonically at them with her own drink by the windows.
Occasionally she turned to look out over the clouds. As Edward brought me into the room I
could see the planes for myself, massed far in the distance, where the edge of the storm
flashed over the sea's horizon. "They've been gathering there all night," Edward told me, his
voice strained and hoarse. "There's more of them than we ever imagined."
Just as Corona, Clara Brown, and the others gathered about the bearded gentleman turned
to look at us the white gleam of the clouds beyond them curled upward like an onrushing of
ghosts. Mrs. Callaher made a strange, choked sound from her bed, reaching toward them
but unable to rise any further. Corona was wearing a black strapless evening gown and
thought, perhaps, our attention was directed toward her. She smiled back at us as the maw
of the clouds turned in a rush of gathering motion behind her. The bright mist flickered
with shadows, filling the room, and then, all at once, a dark shape took form rapidly behind
it.
Somehow-and here Corona and the others turned just in time as the spectre appeared
before us-time was altered just then from an abstraction to a force, generated by rapid
images on the nerves. We all stood back from the windows, watching as a World War IIera
fighter plane hung suspended in the winds some fifteen feet out from us. Its turbofan
engines sucked the mist; its bulky silver wings shuddered. In the gunnery cage behind the
pilot a scarecrow of a man in goggles and a leather flight helmet aimed a rifle at us, cried
out something, and fired.
The shot shattered one of the panes. "Jesus!" Edward shouted. We looked around to see if
perhaps Mrs. Callaher had been hit; but she remained propped among her pillows as
before, though more alive now, gazing fiercely from her bed toward what was now a scene
of swirling mist behind us, the plane plummeting away. Edward grabbed a small pistol
from the mantel and fired several shots toward the machine's descending shadow,
scattering the glass from the windows in all directions until one of the men grabbed his
arm and forced him to drop it. "They shot at us!" Edward cried incredulously, struggling
with fury but little strength to free himself and retrieve his smoking weapon. "Let me go,
you goddamned ape!"

9. I thought of grabbing the gun to put a stop to any further mischief, but reflected that in
doing so I might be set upon as well, perhaps by the bearded man himself. A cold wind
rushed in through the broken windows, loosening bits of glass and sending them sailing
towards us. Edward was brought down violently to the carpet in a wrestler's stranglehold,
his burly vanquisher puffing and letting out short grunts as Corona beat on his back with a
shoe and screamed at him to let go. Then there were more shots, automatic fire rising up
the building. The fighting stopped; we all turned to the shattered wall of glass, holding each
other steady in the wind. Creeping to the windows, I had just enough time to see the flash
of the guns below in the clouds when the plane itself rose from the mist, banking away from
the building at the last moment in a steep arc toward the moon. I tried to catch my breath
then, but as soon as I'd sucked a mouthful of the visitor's scorched air another shadow rose
toward us out of the vapors: a vast, ancient skeleton of a plane emerged, wobbling on
double wings that seemed stretched from animal skins, blankets flapping from its open
cockpit. Suddenly it was flying out of control, right at us. Clara, Corona, our two former
adversaries and the others broke and ran from the windows, with me behind them,
tripping over a decanter of port wine en route and tumbling over one another to the carpet.
It was as we lay there, looking back helplessly through the room's wild shadows, that we
saw Mrs. Callaher sitting up in her bed in the glow of the moonlit sky, lifting a black
revolver toward the massive ghost filling her windows. She fired, repeatedly, as it rose past
us: then the wall of glass collapsed before her and the storm rushed in, like a flock of birds.
We knew then that she was going to live forever. We would wait for her money in vain. The
wind blasted about her, blowing scraps of newspaper and tarot cards and dust and little
leaves and petals into her bed as she fired again and again into the tempest. I think she was
laughing at the storm. Corona, Edward, and I, heaped in a far corner beyond Clara and the
strange, bearded man, watched her anxiously, huddled close like rats. A spark had been lit
in the old woman, catching in bones of old oak and hickory for a long winter's blaze. The
ether of all her old movies went up around her in a vapor that night, never more to dampen
her spirits. Facing into the wild wind, her white hair flying back from her face, she
contemplated a future of journeys-burro rides down the Baja coast, balloon flights high
over the Boreal forest-not a bleak death among curious strangers. We watched her for
some time, imagining her future, before we even realized that she had put a hole through
our bearded companion, and that he lay beside us as dead as you'd want him.
The planes harried the tops of the buildings for another hour, though none so close as to
attack us again, flying out at last toward daybreak in squadrons over the sea. I would learn
downstairs that morning from the old men at breakfast that they had come not only from
the Great Lakes that night but also from as far away as Nova Scotia and Ireland, even
Norway. The planes had gone on to terrorize the Balkans across the Atlantic, en route to
the Middle East and Persia, if the drifting broadcasts of the amateur radio operators could
be believed. There was nothing, apparently, that anyone could do about it. On our side of
the ocean the gun batteries sank away in deepshadowed ruins twined with sea grapes,
abandoned years ago to hermit crabs and spiders. God only knew what arrangements were
on other shores. As for the world's air forces, those who held forth in the dining room
believed that these flying circuses were all that was left of them, taking orders from
nobody, mere wreckage circling the globe.

10. We can't choose the world we live in. But as I walked the streets that morning in the early
sunlight, pausing at a plaza of quaking white petunias to look up to the great equestrian
statue of General Luther Rollins-one of the planes had crashed just beyond into Jackson
Park the night before and was surrounded by a knot of onlookers-I recalled decisions I'd
made only vaguely in recent weeks and found a startling resolve in them. A thin, stooped
man in black trousers and an old T-shirt peered down into the smoke-darkened windows
of the plane, holding himself steady against its crumpled fuselage. Children climbed up onto
the plane's wrenched wings, rocking the whole structure gently. Was there someone
inside? This was all that Edward was asking for, after all, to be saved from plummeting God
knows where his misfortunes would take him. Thousands fell around us, perhaps, yet he
was the only one within my reach: should I snatch my hands away from him as a matter of
principle, to be fair to everyone? Should I wait, perhaps, to make a better choice?
My uncle was staging an underwear exhibition that afternoon. It would be the perfect
chance to approach him publicly. Normally he remained sequestered at the heart of his
department store, at the bottom of a wide sloped theater of two-way mirrors and wall-to-
wall carpeting where he sat at an octagonal desk terminal, smoking his cigars while gazing
up to the gilt-edged secrets of the ladies' dressing rooms. And it should be known that his
store was a favorite among the women of the city precisely because of its ornate fitting
rooms, their polished glass walls ricocheting amber-lit images of his cherished customers
like telescopes to heaven. Each time I was summoned to my uncle's throne room I felt like
smuggling a hatchet in my trousers to yank free at an unguarded moment, to dash up to the
mirrors and smash to pieces the bumptious fraud of his illusion. But I couldn't see
frightening the ladies, crashing through their very spectres with a raised tomahawk. The
walls were soundproof as well: all around my uncle as he chatted to one of his cronies on
the telephone, keeping me waiting before him, they would look in, young girls adjusting the
straps of their bathing suits, full-figured brides in white slips attended by nervous matrons,
slack-mouthed bombshells hoisting jeans, their tawny hair falling about them as they
zipped themselves up. In my uncle was the marriage of Freud and P.T. Barnum, and he
pursued his opportunities to the limit, gazing to each of the windows as he talked with a
slight turn of his swivel chair, the smoke curling up from his noxious cigars, softly blowing
rings to innocent girls and old stooped women alike. Going through the store's
correspondence, complaints of broken toys and torn dresses and puppies who sat alone in
corners and wept, that morning in my little cell of an office high over the streets, I thought
of what I could say to my uncle on Edward's behalf. When I called my friend at his office in
the financial district, he wasn't there; I finally located him in his room, hung over,
disguising his voice over the phone.
"He's not here right now-" came a whisper, as if from the far end of a drainpipe.
"Edward, it's me," I said, raising my voice in an effort to jar him from his lethargy. "We've
got a chance to see my uncle this afternoon when he'll be very distracted. I think we can get
you a new job today."
"Oh," he said. There was a long pause as he thought about this. "I need some coffee."

11. "Well, come down to my office and I'll make you a pot." I listened to the groan of his
bedsprings, the slow struggle of rising into the centrifugal force of gravity, lifelong inertia,
the roller coaster ride of stimulants and depressants. "Don't wear anything clever," I said to
him, hearing a pause in his breathing as he listened to me. "And don't make me wait for
you."
When he arrived his tie wasn't done right, his hair was crooked, and he'd gashed himself
trying to shave. I led him down the hall to the bathroom to show him what he'd done,
holding him before the speckled mirror over the sink to see himself. He smiled a little,
nervously, then coughed up a mouthful of something: bending gingerly to the drain, he
quivered as I held his arms. "It's all right," I whispered to him. "You'll do fine."
After a light lunch downstairs we crossed to the building across the street, riding my
uncle's splendid escalators through shifting vistas of glass and chrome amid the
Wednesday shoppers to the gallery on the store's fourth level. Rising under a bower of
roses, we joined a hushed audience there under lights turned low. Ahead of us, on a bright
grassy clearing sprinkled with buttercups, an assembly of vine-clad nymphs and fauns held
hands. Small finches lit in the budding branches over the youths, flittering excitedly under
the hot stage lights as a strange music of woodwinds and voices played around them. In the
midst of the revelers a man and a woman knelt before one another, the woman in a loose
camisole, her partner clad only in clinging leather briefs. The young man, his long dark hair
wet to his shoulders, lost himself in caressing, kissing the smooth body before him; the
woman's fingers spread into the mass of curled hairs up his stomach and chest. An
announcer appeared then, a small, chesty woman in a lacy baby-doll shift carried bodily by
a man in chains. She pursed her lips to a round cherry, resting one hand on the neck of her
consort and raising a microphone with the other. "I love everybody!" she exclaimed, the
audience warming to her in ripples of applause. "Now what do you think of that?" It was
when she alighted from the man's arms before the lovers that I caught a brief glimpse of my
uncle behind the dais, the gold curtains billowing slightly from his movements. "And now
here's sweet little Brenda Darwin," the announcer continued, "in the prettiest pink corselet
you've ever laid your eyes on, followed by a caveman from Borneo . . ."
We slipped into the curtains to the right of the audience, approaching my uncle slowly
down the narrow passage between its billowing folds and the high concrete wall behind it.
The spectacle of the models, the honeyed, dizzying glow of skin touching skin, had made its
impression, especially on Edward. Inching his way along the wall he would suddenly tip
toward the curtains and I would have to grab him by the arms to steady him. "Control!" I
whispered in his ear, holding him back from the murmuring hum of the crowd. "It's just like
driving." Now and then we'd gone for rides in Mrs. Callaher's huge shadowy car, ancient as
Hiroshima, out into the country down midnight roads skirting the floodlands. The years
had misaligned this wonderful machine, and more than once I'd yanked us from the brink
of headlong drives down slopes of poison ivy and honeysuckle. And that was Edward's
problem, it occurred to me: he was unable to follow a straight line. It didn't matter that
failed men were being hoisted aboard ships and sent off to slaughter. It wouldn't matter if
he was walking a bar high over a lake of smoking lime. I could only pray that if we ever got
to my uncle, Edward would manage somehow to keep a straight face, speak coherently

12. when he had to, and try to follow what my uncle was saying. Nobody knew math anymore-
Edward would appear like an improbable angel, drifting from the heavens to dandle on my
uncle's knee and read through his disarrayed ledger books. But my uncle was not a subtle
man. If Edward behaved like a fool, my uncle would more or less assume he was one and
would brush him aside.
But as we came upon my uncle peering through a break in the curtains at the end of the
stage, I relaxed somewhat on this count. The man was in an even finer mood than I'd
thought he'd be-hearing us approach, he turned to us with a sly grin, his round pink cheeks
and little eyes all aglow. His smile disappeared into his mustache; for a time he stood
balanced before us, short and stout, the dark pinstriped suit he wore giving him the mien of
a port authority captain-a smiling, gentle sot, not knowing just what to say, taking Edward's
hand in both of his as I introduced them. "It's good to see you, Edward," he rasped out
warmly, his voice spare and hushed. "How do you like my little show here?"
"Well, sir," Edward said, rather brightly I thought, "you've certainly got their attention."
I thought it best here to tell my uncle what Edward did for a living, and mention that he was
thinking of moving on into retail work. My uncle absorbed the information quietly, nodding
as he looked to Edward.
"How's the stock market?" he asked suddenly. He made an unsteady motion with his hand,
waving it a little, to indicate he wanted Edward to speak, not me.
Edward paused. It seemed like a bad moment for him. "Well, sir, it's havoc," he said
forebodingly. "Society's a by-product. You think you're in the clear, and then some guy next
to you-starts throwing up."
My uncle growled in assent, smacking his lips. "Ah, what does it mean?" he muttered. He
turned to peer through the curtains, scratching his head. A woman in a shimmering
brassiere and garter belt was sitting back with her hands behind her on the runway, her
long legs dangling over the audience, cooing to the front rows. A priest in a flowing white
robe decked with flowers stood behind her, tossing great red blossoms from a brass bowl
over the heads of the audience.
"I feel so good!" the woman shouted, her breathy voice amplified all around her. "How do
you feel?"
"It stopped meaning a long time ago," Edward answered, turning over what my uncle had
said like a black worm under his tongue. "You're a despicable man," he went on abruptly. "I
think you'd rape your own mother if you could-"
"How's that?" My uncle turned around again vaguely, a little too far at first; he took hold of
Edward's arm to steady himself, his glance falling perplexedly on me for an instant, as if he
couldn't figure out who I was. "I get dizzy just watching this stuff," he told Edward,
confidentially this time. "How do you feel?"

13. Edward had been doing fairly well, I thought, and so had my uncle, but I could see now that
both their attention spans were reaching their limits. I might have a minute, two at the
most, to work with their souls. As the audience broke into gentle applause behind us, I laid
a hand on each of their shoulders, turning my uncle a bit so that he was facing Edward.
"He's ready to start living a better life," I told my uncle. "And I've brought him to you
because I think a good man should work for a good company. And this," I said, gazing back
and forth between them, fondly but deliberately confusing each with the other, "just might
be as good as it gets-maybe the best man you'll ever know."
My uncle looked shyly at Edward; Edward stood quietly before him. Suddenly, my uncle
took him in his arms and they embraced. Pilgrims in dark coats and hats were emerging
now from the curtains behind the models, with pistols in their hands. "We'll find a safe
place for you," my uncle murmured, patting Edward on the shoulder and turning his eyes
wistfully away. Though his gaze was immediately caught again, like a child's, by the curious
spectacle of the pilgrims stealing quietly among the trees toward his buxom idols, he
seemed profoundly, almost sadly moved. "It's the least we can do for you, son," he said.
"God knows, it's little enough we can do."