Our next stop is Portsmouth.
Portsmouth is on the ocean, which means it will smell different. Otherwise, it will be the same as the last stop, with gray-brick commercial buildings and a gray-brick City Hall and gray-brick. Portsmouth will be the same as every last stop.
This isn’t like the old days, where every city had its own feeling, its own flavor layered in with the asphalt and concrete. These days, every place even smells the same: like an empty cardboard box.
Except for the ocean cities.
Our train car squeals and lurches. Next to me, Morph sleeps through it all. Only at rusted-out breaks in the rails, which totter the cars and shake valuables off shelves, does he shift, pulling me into the cave of his hips with a whisper. It’s not permanent with Morph; it’s not allowed to be. But it’s comfortable, and it’s what we have.
I don’t sleep. I’m supposed to because I’m the Truth Teller and the last teller of truths told me you can’t tell truth without dreams. But most of my dreams don’t deliver the kind of truths that people who come to the circus want to hear, and I’ve found I can do my job as well, or better, if I just open my eyes and keep the dream talk to a minimum.
And so I stay awake, tucked inside Morph’s elbows and hard knees, and I listen for birds. The truth is, I don’t hear very well, and it’s hard to hear anything anyway over the clacks and grunts of the train. But once in a while something comes in, a screech (hawks or eagles, meaning we’re out west) or a hoot (a hooty-hoot is a great horned owl, and if it’s in the late fall it means we’re probably in the Northeast). Our route never varies, but our stops are unpredictable. Cities are forever closing or reopening their gates to us, so we never know where we’ll be or when. This is why I listen for the birds.
Maybe because they still have their trees and nests between our gray walls, birds still have their own regions and patterns. They don’t seem to realize that everything is supposed to be the same everywhere, that bird calls aren’t supposed to act like beacons.
But they do, and I strain my train-deafened ears to find them in the night.
A high “whit whit whit” like a stuttering wolf whistle seeps in from somewhere in the dark. A cardinal, male or female, just passing the time.
I don’t hear another bird call until night breaks. My attention has wandered. I’m thinking about Morph and about the guy who came before him, Slate. Slate was a Wire Dancer who got transferred to a different company a year ago and who liked to chew on my hair in his sleep.
Then—slicing through the gray dawn light, a whining “wheek wheek” catches my ear. I turn to the window, even though the plexiglass pane is blacked-out and I can’t see anything through it. Still, I know the call: gulls. We are nearing the ocean.
I lean my head back, into Morph’s neck. “Hey.” I’m whispering. “We’re getting close.”
He nods. His nose rubs into my hair, but he doesn’t otherwise move. As headliner, Morph enjoys a luxury the rest of us don’t.
I feel the train slowing and soon I hear it, too, the whoosh of the wheels coasting and the shrieks and groans of all eight hundred sixty-four brake shoes clamping. Morph sighs. He loves his sleep and he hates pulling into town. A new town means a new set-up. It means new administrators and new ordinances and new ways for the whole troupe to fall on its face. For the rest of us, it also means a new meet-and-greet, one that will begin, inevitably, as soon as the train hisses to a full stop.
I dig out my iridescent black veil from under our sweaters on the wicker chair in the corner and rap on the veneer wall that divides our room from our neighbors’. On the other side, Celly the Screamer or Harriet the Chemist or one of their nighttime friends raps back: they’re ready. We look out for one another because missing the meet-and-greet can get you reinstituted.
Reinstitution is the Fed’s rule, not Morph’s. However hard he can be on us, Morph would never reinstitute anyone. Because we remember. It’s the one thing that makes us different from the instituted, from the grays.
I take my place past our cot at the sliding steel door and wait as the train slows and slows and hisses and slows. Right before the floor stops moving beneath me, I glance back at Morph. He’s pretending to sleep, but I can tell he’s looking at me through his heavy eyelashes. I give him a nod and whirl the veil around my head. I raise my arms to let the silk fan out. This is for the crowd.
The train halts and settles backwards. I’m used to the jerks and heaves of our home in perpetual motion and I’ve braced myself for the stop. Even so, I’m still wavering when the steel door slides open and the gray dawn light floods my eyes.
I anticipated it, but the ocean air smacks me like a hard memory. It’s salty and it’s strong and it presses against me, its wind like whispers whipping at my lips, my ears.
In our doorway, separated from me by three millimeters of wall, Celly and Harriet and, I see without moving, Maxer the Crocheter stand posed. They’re a little cramped, all three of them crowding in the narrow space, and Maxer is crouched down low, hunched against Celly’s legs, as if she’s in mid-scramble.
I hear them all breathing: standing placid is no easy task, especially in the ionic atmosphere of a meet-and-greet.
A crowd of grays stands back on the platform. Locals always come to see us arrive. They don’t clap or cheer. They just watch. Somewhere among them is their Mayor or Council Chair, their Fed-authorized figurehead who will approve or disapprove our entry into the city. If approved, our train will trundle forward and set up in a clearing off the tracks a mile or so further down. If disapproved, we will move on, and Morph will have to answer for it.
The circus is a grand experiment. It started as a rebellion, but the Feds overtook us, and now they’re testing: can we work together? Exhibit human vitality without corrupting the locals? The Feds have their hypothesis, and we have ours. And in the space between, we perform.
Fortunately, the grays get antsy for us, for something other than the thousands of Fed-supplied entertainment stations, so the Feds tolerate us. And most cities don’t rush to disapprove us. Still, there’s always a chance.
I browse the faces in the crowd, looking for an opening, a toehold of interest. But all the faces are round and flat and none of the eyes are warm.
Racz the Biped’s piccolo will start in less than a moment, and then our dance will begin: slow, weightless, quiet. We will be mesmerizing in color, contrast, collarbones. We will be mythic and sculptural.
I strain to hold my eyes wide open, taking this one stolen beat of stillness to look at the world beyond the crowd.
It’s gray and it’s square and it’s exactly the same as the last city. Only the smell is different. This one smells like sour brine.
But: graffiti. That, too, is different, in that there is some. On a top corner of a two-story gray building is one painted white spiral.
I squint at it and almost miss my cue.
But Celly whistles, soft as a breath, and I snap to. Then, in one mournfully high note—don’t ask me which; I have no ear for music—Racz’s piccolo bisects the salty sea air. Our murmuration begins.
We step onto the platform as one. We are slow, careful, soft. But soon enough we burgeon, expansive, and then we erupt. We are just under wild, vibrating and pullulating, our bodies moving through the salted air. The dance is choreographed and not. The most important element, Morph says, is the tension between emergence and stillness, although sometimes he says it’s between surprise and forgetfulness. Either way, our job is to invite the crowd into our world without involving them, and that’s not something you can fully plan.
“You’re choosing to live,” Morph once said. “So live.” He was talking to our whole company and we all nodded, our eyes wet and serious. When it’s just Morph and me alone, he worries over whether any of us is actually living, whether aberrance is just an abstraction, and I like that side of him better. But when it’s time to dance, I have to think of him in the other way, as our director of ceremonies directing us to live.
I slip between gray bodies, careful to not make contact. The rows of people are the same as all the earlier others, with their soft, gray clothes and soft, gray faces. No one smiles anymore, not even when the circus pulls into town. They’re not in line waiting to delight at our boxcars and our colors and our mind tricks. They’re in line because we are different and because they can’t wait to let that terrify and reassure them.
We spin until the piccolo cuts out. Racz likes jarring moments: it’s part of the surprise. I try to still and try to meet the eyes of anyone in the crowd around me. But they all look north of my eyes, just to the left of connection.
Except one. A few paces away stands a man, tall and poised with wild hair. He is a little less gray than the others. His eyes irradiate and when they meet mine they pull on me with a force that’s tighter than any muscle, tauter than any rope.
I wonder if I knew him once. Part of the Complacency is that we don’t remember where we were once we leave. Even in the circus, it takes months for the effects to wear off, and by then nobody remembers where they’re from. The only one who would know is Marl the Singularity, and he’ll never tell. He says it’s cleaner that way—or, at least, less complicated, and less likely to cause us to shatter in our hometown and get the whole company martialled. In any event, Morph agrees and so none of us knows our origin.
Not that it matters; all the cities are the same.
The piccolo keens again and again we whirl; we whirl and whirl and skim. But I lose pace for a second as I try to locate the tall man, to seek the spark of his eyes as beacons among the gray cloud of onlookers. I don’t see him. The music grows louder and sharper, faster and I hear a hiccough, a hiss—a gray to my right, a woman, sucks in air and another one, a child of seven or maybe eight who’s alone (all children are alone) shrieks with his mouth closed, and I’m whirling and I see Maxer and Marl in a non-touching tangle but still I’m looking for the tall man, the man with the wild hair, and I stumble, just a tiny bit, just a wobble, but my arm grazes a gray and I overcorrect and step on—a crack? a shoe cord? a finger?—and still I can’t see the tall man and if I fall I could get us all reinstituted—
A nondescript woman in nondescript gray steps forward. She raises one hand.
We hush. I am on the verge of toppling, but I strain and remain upright.
The woman nods.
I am facing the crowd but I hear through the air behind me: Morph appearing on the roof of the train.
I know where he is without looking, without having ever seen it before. Because I was trained in Truth Telling and I know how to watch with my ears and nose and with the hairs on my skin. I know that Morph is resplendent. I know that he is captivating. When he moves, conjuring his glass spheres, freeing them to dance as iridescent bubbles on the air, he is more than a mesmerizer: he is a medium, giving the crowd glimpses into the colors of their own memories. I know that this is why he is here, born and on this train: the grays think Morph is here to amaze them, to thrill their senses in the ways that can only happen in person. But it’s not. It’s to activate them.
This is what Morph knows and the Feds do not: that we are not entertainment. We are a reminder of something nobody remembers.
The crowd looking back at us is weeping.
Not vocally, not expressively; some of them don’t even have tears. But they all shine with the sharp edges of loss. The silent, shrieking child lowers his lip. A deep keening emerges from his insides.
At that moment, Morph shatters his glass spheres and smoke enfolds us of the circus. The meet-and-greet has ended. We disappear, silent as serpents, onto the train.
Our vanishing looks like magic, but it’s not. Most of us are near the train when Morph appears and we know how to leap aboard silently. It’s the first skill you learn when joining the circus, when you’re running away and racing to board the train just as it departs: do it silently, because anyone who doesn’t gets forced off by Marl.
Except this time I falter. In a crack in the smoke—though Morph’s smoke never cracks—I see the tall man. The light in his still, brown eyes. I exhale once, and in the space of that breath the smoke clears in front of me.
I stand alone on the platform.
The tall man fades into the crowd. None of the faces around me are anything other than gray. In their eyes, I find nothing but aversion.
My misstep could get us all martialled. I have to make this look planned.
I say to the grays, none of whom are weeping now, “I know you all.” I say it like it’s true.
Then I spin and my silk surrounds me and I disappear into the car as the door slides closed.
Outside the thin wall, the crowd does not cheer. Cheering is not why they are here. They are here to witness and to feel satisfied that they chose accord over discord, that they chose the life of the rational, of the comfortable, and not the preternatural life of the incongruent.
But on the inside they entreat us, and they promise themselves they will remember us, and then they go home and they pretend not to count the seconds until opening night.
***
The tent has gone up and it is magnificent. A swirl of color, it rises in the forest clearing like an imaginary, patchwork castle. At an hour before dusk, the only remaining set-up is getting the crown on the tent. The crown is the tent’s top tier, and it’s a breathtaking one. It is a gilded dollop of frosting, an anachronistic onion dome that soars to tree heights in defiance of the gray-box architecture filling the cities.
On the inside, of course, the crown is practical: part crow’s nest, part invisible perch for Morph, part origination point of all the ropes and unfurlings and pyrotechnics that turn our performances into the stuff of myth. Dozens of pinholes in the crown allow in moonlight, which will reflect off mirrors inside to spotlight performers. If there’s a brain center to our performance, it’s the interior of the crown. Yet, if there’s a symbol of our company, an image that the performers and crowds alike hold onto, it’s the crown glowing gold in the sunset. When the crown settles in place on top of the primary tent, as performers we all feel it in our bones: we have begun.
I’ve been with the company for a year and a half, and I’ve never missed a crowning. Most performers don’t miss it, even though it’s not mandatory and personal time is tough enough to scrounge. But set-up is a cacophonic flurry, and all performances are public. The crowning is just for us.
I join Celly, who’s standing with Marl and others. Morph worries nearby, yelling for more people to man the ropes.
“It’s like a fish on a line,” Marl tells us, not for the first time. “I fished as a boy.”
“Not me.” Maxer is nearby. Her eyes are distant. “I played with lambs.”
They don’t know for sure. We all make the best guess at who we were, at the events that formed us.
The crown lifts higher, and the workers grunt and yell until it is at height. It is a golden raindrop, embroidered in millions of strands of metallic thread and set with hundreds of thousands of tiny crystal beads. It reflects and refracts and today, in the orange-purple light of the setting sun, it dazzles.
When the ropes drop, we celebrate. Some performers hoot, some holler, some say a prayer; we all keep our own superstitions, but it feels good to keep them in company.
I reach out and squeeze Celly’s hand; she squeezes back. She never speaks between performances, and I know next to nothing about her. All the same, I love her like she’s a part of me. Someday, I’d like to know her story.
As soon as the crown is secured, we break. Morph, though, remains. He’s looking at the tent, his expression distant and tired. He’s avoiding me.
I don’t reach for him; I can’t. Outside of our train car, he’s Headliner Morph, Morph my boss, Morph the man with the thousand crushing concerns. While the rest of us were setting up, Morph spent the afternoon with the City Planners and Council. Touching him right now would be like a river trying to flow back up the mountain: it just wouldn’t work, and it would make things muddy. But I can wait.
He finally looks over at me. His face is lined, thin; as threadworn as the walls of our train cars. Marl crosses past the tent and Morph waves him down. But as Morph passes me, he says in a tight, bitter voice, “No more surprises tonight, Keller. Tight as a tick.”
I don’t respond.
Morph’s responsibility over us weighs on him like an anchor. But, if I’m not in any trouble with the local council, then he doesn’t need to lecture me. I already know I screwed up.
Finally Morph steps towards me. “Better get ready: you’ve made yourself headliner tonight.”
I cough over my surprise. “But truth telling—it’s not performative, you know that.”
He grimaces. “That’s what Marl said. He thinks you should stay on the train tonight. But this was the only way I could convince Council that your little stumble was part of the show. Congratulations.” Then he’s moving off, updating Marl and the other team leaders on the city’s requirements, on their rules and asks and unique bans.
I don’t wait for the update. Marl will let me know if anything else pertains to me. For now, I have to change: it’s ten minutes to first curtain and I’m still in my ragged downtime sweater. I already hear the crowds, the push of locals wordlessly making their way to the forest.
***
Tonight’s crowd is restless. They fill the large tent with their whispers and rustles. Though every city feels the same, audiences each have their own flavor. Some are noisy, some overwhelmed. This one is on edge: during our opening act, they startle easily, they laugh too loud, they cough against their gasps. Likely, they’ve never seen anything like us before.
It’s not surprising; before I saw us, before the night I ran away to join, I’d probably never seen anything like us before, either.
Still, it’s aggravating. A crowd that overreacts can rub off on the performers. In the second act, our people start making missteps. Arabelly misses her second twist off the ribbons, Gorg lifts Lalla instead of Cardo. By the end of the first half, most of the acrobats and strongpeople have stumbled or stepped out of line. The crowd can’t tell, but they can probably read the performers’ mounting frustration. Tonight the heat within the tent feels like a convection oven.
And then the lights go black.
The audience stirs and moves, wary. But a glimmer high above, in the hips of the crown, makes everyone look up.
Lulo our Wire Dancer, the one who was traded for Slate, stands shimmering in mid-air. A piercing high note from Racz’s piccolo plays—a striking recall to the meet-and-greet—and Lulo starts moving, floating. For all I know, she’s flying. I see the wire dancing every performance, six or seven nights a week, and, still, it hypnotizes me.
I don’t know how the wire dancing works. I should, because I need to know the truth. But I haven’t fully come into it yet, into interpreting and connecting. For me, truth is layers of haziness. I can sense the layers, at least, which is why the old Truth Teller chose me. But I don’t know if I’ll ever remember what the layers mean.
And, anyway, according to Slate, wire dancing isn’t a matter of truth; as with all our talents, it’s a matter of faith.
Just above Lulo, a dark figure emerges: Morph. Swathed in black velvet fatigues, he’s almost invisible to the eye. But the crystal spheres he revolves in his hands glint, twinkling and sparking above Lulo.
The crowd, at last, goes silent. No one even shifts. The only sound under the tent is the whorling and clinking of Morph’s crystals as they against one another in his palms.
Suddenly, the sound changes. A heavy clunk: one crystal sphere has collided with another. Then one sphere gleams. It catches a slim beam of moonlight and it shimmers, chasing gravity in its long fall to the ground.
A crash.
I’ve never seen Morph drop a crystal before; I’ve never seen him drop anything.
The crowd is silent, breathless. I can tell no one knows if the drop was intentional, and even the performers wait to see what will happen next. But Racz is a professional and he keeps his piccolo going.
In a shaking, shrieking note, Marl’s alto flute joins in. This is my cue. Marl and I blocked out tonight’s timing and I tremble from my toes as I try to retain it. I step into the arena, just as plumes of fog belly in and our floor lights begin to glow. Like other discreets, I typically don’t have a role in the main performance after the opening, and usually by now I would be squeezing in a last moment of watching Morph before hurrying to set up my booth. But tonight I’m headlining.
I waddle into the center of the arena. My costume is wide-skirted and black-plumed with a giant headdress that spills down my back. Alza the Dreamer says I’m made to look like a pigeon, but I’ve never seen an iridescent black pigeon before.
I trundle forward and raise my arms—
But no one is in their place. Lulo and Morph haven’t descended yet, and Gorg and Cardo and the other strongpeople aren’t behind me. Racz’s piccolo cuts off first, then Marl’s flute dies back. Under my boots, crystal shards crunch into the rocky dirt floor.
The crowd has risen to its feet. No one speaks. A light blinks on in front of my eyes.
A man’s voice crackles, splitting the space between us like a spear of lightning: “Tell me a truth.”
The man approaches and when he steps out of the light and becomes more than a silhouette, I see he is tall and wild-haired and tracing his hand over his heart.
He is the man from the meet-and-greet.
“Stop!”
A woman, the small woman, the woman who was gray and nondescript at the meet-and-greet, the one who approved us, stands on her seat and her voice is a shriek, a command. It rings in our ears then dies in the heavy ocean air
The man, however, does not listen. He steps towards me.
“A truth,” he repeats.
Morph drops gracelessly next to me and lets go of the rope that rappelled him down. At my side, he hisses. His head twitches, a shake: No. Don’t.
“Who was your father?” the man asks.
He shouldn’t know the word “father.” Even I take a moment to register the word, to remember its definition. These days—the only days I’ve ever known—families don’t exist. Adults live alone. Children are raised by a revolving mass of instructional media operators.
“Enough.” This time, when the Mayor speaks, her voice is sharper. Yet it trembles. Like jelly. And no one—no other council members or grays—stands to support her.
Still, I know better than to speak.
But if this man is remembering, if he’s grown immune to the Complacency, why is he calling attention to it? He should be sneaking off in the middle of the night like we all did, rushing and treading and slipping away to moor himself on the caboose of our train, not announcing himself to the whole city.
I can’t see him well in the dark, but I feel him waiting. Sending pleas through the air. He is desperate. His fear is bigger than one man’s, more far-reaching than one life.
“My father was nobody.” The words fall from my mouth like rain.
“Keller!” Morph’s hiss is a claw, shredding me to stop.
The man’s body softens. His shoulders slump. His hand moves over his heart, tracing an invisible spiral there.
“See?”
I can’t tell who the Mayor is speaking to, but she sounds both loud and strangled, triumphant and afraid. “The Complacency is intact.” She motions to the tall man. “You,” she says, “come with me.”
No one seizes the tall men—there are no police in the cities—but he moves toward her anyway, his body a sagging suit.
The haze around his darkness prickles the corners of my eyes.
“My father—” The words tumble out and I can’t stop them, because there aren’t any police in the cities but there are executioners and if I can help this man—or give him some peace—then I must do it. “He was a postman.” The haze is flexing and I can’t tell if I’m remembering it or hearing it in the whispers of the air, but I can see his history, our history, written all around. It’s my purpose to speak truth and resisting it now would go against my every neuron, would fight against the very currents of my blood. “Back when there were postmen. His father loved dogs and growing tiny potatoes and when he said he was watching football he was playing music with his best friend Elijah.”
The tall man stops moving. A fleet of audience members stands. Even in the dark, I see the three letters on their shoulders: they are Feds.
The tall man is realizing his mistake, we both are; but I can’t stop.
“Complacency remains!” The Mayor is screaming, shrieking again, her voice sharp and etched with ravines of despair.
In another life, she could have been one of our Keeners.
“This is an isolated problem! No one else is showing signs—” The Mayor’s words cease when one of the Feds pushes past her to enter the performance ring.
I turn to Morph. He’s so much older than I ever realized. We all are. He’s borne this burden of us, of memory, for so long. “Your mother had her pilot’s license. She used to take you flying, in secret, before the walls—”
“Keller,” he whispers. It’s the last word he’ll ever say; I see that, too, and the memories floating in his eyes. He never forgot. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
I reach for his hand. For once, in view of others, he reaches back.
A teenager in the front row has stood. She is afraid but facing me anyway. I call to her, “Your grandmother was a pediatrician and she was a poet her whole life. She used to dance on the yellow tiles in her mother’s kitchen. And yours—” I face the next person, a middle aged man, and I’m yelling myself hoarse, “your father was a house painter who brushed your name into every wall he ever painted. And—”
A Fed seizes my shoulders.
“I’m sorry.” The Fed speaks through a thick throat, through years of forgetting. His eyes are hard but they are full. “But no one wants your stories, liar.”
He squeezes my arms to my chest, and then a woman from the Fed crowd joins in and squeezes at me, too.
I try to breathe because I need air to speak, to tell the truths that are demanding to be told. But the man and the woman and now the rest of the crowd don’t want to hear them.
Morph looks at the Mayor in the crowd. His eyes are watering, and he regrets what he’s about to say. Still, he says it. “We accept your fate.”
Behind me, a streak of orange flame erupts into the air.
Somewhere in the tent, Celly screams like an unleashed wolverine.
Fingers at my neck dig like rodents, like snakes trying to burrow in. I can’t breathe and I doubt I ever will again. The man and the woman are squeezing me, squeezing the truths back in. But it doesn’t work that way.
I meet their eyes and I see that they know: that they will kill us, that this circus will end, but that they will still see. At night, in their beds, after they have turned off their entertainments and media, they will lay under their covers and see under their eyelids a man pulling his potatoes and a woman as a girl dancing in a kitchen. They will all see, and they will remember.
The tall man I can’t see; he’s vanished again, or fallen, and I hope that he’s escaped. That his spiral will grow.
Above and around us, the tent burns in whorls and it undulates, a corona of flame. I find the Fed’s eyes over mine and hold onto them. He’s waiting for me to succumb.
He doesn’t know, does he? About death and truth and what can never be killed?
Despite the heat and the smoke and the desperate, savage hunger in my body for air, I dare myself not to blink. Let him see. It’s my last and best thought, and I realize how wrong I was not to dream when I had the chance. Let him see everything.