Numb (4 page)

I looked at the gray tent, the pole, the heavy flies
buzzing around me. Yuri's eyes danced back and forth between Mr. Tilly and Caesar. Mr. Tilly smiled and nodded, then waved with the back of his hand, mouthing, “Go on, go on.” He was a fat, bad mime.

I looked at Yuri and said, “Just open it up.”

Yuri, his big moment about to be over, smiled and bowed to the camera and unlocked the door. It swung back just wide enough for me to step in and then, just that quickly, I was in Caesar's cage. Thirty feet long and ten wide, probably illegal for a cat his size. Everything outside dropped away. Caesar at one end, me at the other. He stood, turned in the cramped end, and swayed back and forth. His eyes didn't leave me. I felt like his little red meat wagon.

I heard heavy breathing, my own. Caesar and I couldn't break eye contact. Muscles twitched along his ribs and flanks. Jesus Christ, he was big. What was I thinking, calling him old and skinny? He was the king of the jungle, for God's sake. The cat stopped swaying and stared straight at me.

He took a step forward.

“Holy crap!” someone shouted. I realized that I had stepped forward too. The cat took two more steps, and so did I. Our eyes were still locked. We were connected. He'd hypnotized me, or me him. Either way, I sensed our destiny in that cage, that long walk to each other, straight ahead. We reflected each other. At heart I was the big cat and he was the skinny amnesiac. No option but straight
ahead. I took a step and he did too. He panted heavily through his mouth; his tongue lapped at his nose, then hung limp. He started a deep moan that grew to a roar, a yell, nothing like in the movies. I put my arms out at my sides and shouted back.

“I'll meet you halfway,” I yelled. I felt sick from the whiskey.

We moved closer. Only ten feet separated us. His growl grew to a purr.

“Here, kitty kitty…” I whispered. I suddenly remembered a nursery rhyme:

I was glad it wasn't about a lion.

Caesar stood before me, head low, tongue nearly to the ground. A horrible growl erupted from him. The muscles in his toes clenched, claws digging into the wood beneath him, tendons tightening as his legs tensed. He fell onto his haunches, back arched. He bellowed and began to vomit on the floor. The reek of bile and blood washed over me. Chunks of half-digested meat and fat poured out of him and spread across the wood, over my shoes. Caesar gulped air, strings of saliva and foam hanging from his mouth. Then he collapsed forward.

I stepped back, slipped, and fell on my ass. Caesar, startled, batted me with one paw, his claws hooking immediately into my thigh, but he couldn't manage any more, not even a growl. With closed eyes he rested in the mess he had made.

Pandemonium swept through the audience. Screams and shouts tore the air. People ran for the exits, others toward the cage. The spaces between the bars became solid as faces and bodies pressed up against them, practically trying to get into the cage with Caesar and me.

“I'm stuck,” I said to the crowd. “He's got his claws in my leg. I can't get them out.”

Mal and Yuri stood next to the door. Mal grabbed Yuri and pointed to the tent flap. “Get a vet.”

An hour later a vet showed up in a tuxedo and white leather sneakers. He wore a plastic boutonniere and his breath smelled of toothpaste. Mr. Tilly ran in with him.

When Mal saw him, he said, “Who was getting married?”

“My daughter,” said the vet.

The crowd pressed in harder around the cage. They'd grown quiet except for those complaining about not being able to see, or those claiming that they were being crushed against the bars.

Mr. Tilly grimaced as he watched the vet take in the scene through the bars of the cage. Before him lay Caesar, half-open eyes rolling back and forth, and me with the lion's claws deep in my thigh. The vet turned pale
and said, “Holy Jesus.” He walked to the wrong part of the cage and had to be led to the cage doorway.

The vet rubbed sweat from his forehead. “How did this happen?”

Mr. Tilly said, “He went in to feed him.” He had stayed on the other side of the cage. His eyes darted between me and the vet. The vet approached and knelt beside Caesar's head. He talked to him gently.

The vet, his eyes dark and wet, said, “I think he's dying.” Then he looked at the claws in my leg. “You came into the cage to feed him? Why would you come into the cage?”

“I was here to wrestle him.”

“No he wasn't, no he wasn't.” Tilly shook a fist, like a villain in a silent movie. “Why would you say that?”

The vet didn't pay any attention to Tilly. “Wrestle? Was he drugged?”

“No,” Mal said. “But he was supposed to be drunk.”

It took a moment for this information to sink into the vet's head. Finally he said, “What a bunch of assholes.” Caesar growled in agreement and tried to open his eyes. “Why the hell would you do this to an animal?” The vet knelt in vomit without concern. “I'd like to know where you get off.”

“We've got it on tape, if you would like to see.” I smiled weakly, feeling like the asshole he thought I was.

They set about removing the lion's claws from me. Caesar lay there, eyes rolling and vomit and blood caked
around his mane. Tilly held the lion's paw, and the handler, his eyes full of tears, plucked the four claws from my thigh. The jagged cuts bled, and, as Mal pulled me away from the lion, Darla approached. She glowed, lit from behind by sunlight through a gap in the tent flaps.

“My God,” she said. “God God God.” She helped me stand and Mal ducked under my arm. As I limped out of the cage the crowd applauded.

“Why are they clapping?” I asked neither of them in particular.

Mal looked at me, mouth turned down. “Are you kidding?”

Darla followed us as we dragged my leg back outside, then said to Mal, “Take him to my trailer so I can patch him up.”

In her trailer Darla had pictures from magazines cut out and stuck to the ceiling with masking tape. Irregular rips of tape held the pictures. Men and women smiled down at me. They threw knowing, meaningful looks over their shoulders and shimmered with their own beauty. They were all dressed better than the three of us.

Darla slapped my uncut leg. “Hold still, dammit.” She knelt before me with a needle and thread, straddling my ankle. She'd sewn up two of the cuts and had two to go. The green thread crossed back and forth evenly across the wounds, pulling them shut.

Mal leaned against the bathroom door. “Where'd you learn to do that, Darla?”

“I was in nursing school once.”

“No shit.” He leaned over her, looking down at my leg, then gave me a thumbs-up and a wink. “Lookin' good.”

“Get outta my light,” Darla ordered.

“I'm outta here. Gonna go check on the big cat.” As he stepped to the door, he smiled at me and gave a nod toward Darla, his grin wide. He propped the door up against the side of the trailer as he left. I wondered how I would pay to have it fixed.

She poured hydrogen peroxide over the cuts again. She had used a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol already. White foam bubbled over my leg. For a long time, perhaps from the first time I'd seen her, I had wanted to spend time with Darla. Now here I was, alone with her in her trailer, with my pants undone and bunched around my ankles. The eight-inch lacerations were unexpected, as were the sewing-thread stitches, but I would take what I could get.

She looked up at me. “You don't feel that at all, do you.”

“No.” I cleared my throat, tried to think of something to say. “So, you were a nurse.”

“I don't like to talk about that,” she said without looking up. The needle jerked through my skin, the torn edge pulling back and away as she ran the thread
through it. I looked into the red of my leg. It was like a landscape. White bubbles of peroxide glistened like clouds.

“Sorry about your door.”

“You already apologized.”

Desperate for something to say, I looked around the bed. She watched my eyes. She said, “I know. I got a lot of pictures.” She smiled.

“You sure do.” The pictures covered every inch of wall around the bed, across both sides. Without thinking I asked, “Doesn't The It mind them all?”

The needle stopped, then tugged again slowly. It felt like Morse code in my skin.

She didn't say anything. I closed my eyes and thought about the afternoon rainstorm and how close I'd been to her lying on the ground.

She concentrated on the wound. As it closed up, the red growing smaller—a seam in me—I felt her pulling away. By the time she snipped the thread I still hadn't thought of anything to say, to cover my tracks and take me back to a minute before. I felt like a boulder that had smashed through her roof and now someone had to come and break me into a million pieces to take me away, bit by irregular bit. She stood and dropped the thread onto her table.

“I think that will heal up okay. We'll take those threads out in a week. Keep it clean.”

I looked down at the green lines that crisscrossed
the lion's claw marks. I reached to the floor, grabbed my pants, and pulled them up as I stood.

“Thanks,” I said.

She didn't say anything until I got to the door.

“Get some rest,” she said.

As I walked away I felt tugging, as if Darla still held the threads in my leg.

I slept for a few hours. I got up and the sun had just set. The stars had begun to appear and the only light from the trailers was the blue flickering of televisions. I walked to the main tent and found Mr. Tilly talking with the vet. Turned out that old Caesar was of an endangered breed: a Barbary lion. He would be taken away from the circus and given to a preserve somewhere in Florida. The vet had arranged it.

Tilly saw me limping at the entrance and yelled, “What the hell you doing up? Rest that leg before it falls off.” I hadn't seen him angry before. His face reminded me of Caesar's before he vomited.

I walked back out into the trailer area and got turned around. I found myself standing between two trailers that hadn't been near each other earlier. There would be no reason to move them around, I thought, and I leaned against one to get my bearings. Nearby a fence separated us from another field and, looking at the sporadic growth on the other side, I realized where I stood. I had wandered into the empty spot where Darla's trailer had been. She was gone.

The It left with her. He'd probably fled because I knew he was a fake, and Darla had left with him because what else could she do? Certainly not stay and stitch up holes in my body as I slowly pinned myself to the circus and drained out a trail of blood as it limped toward its sad end.

“
THIS WAS SUPPOSED
to be my night off,” I said to myself.

Mal spun the claw hammer around his fingers like a cowboy pistol trick. “Hey, if you aren't enjoying this, why watch?” I was unsure whether he aimed this remark at me or the guy vomiting into his book bag. Mal brought the hammer down and the second nail went through the delicate stretch of skin between my pinkie and ring finger. He almost drove the nail flush to the surface of the bar, and I wondered how difficult it would be to get out.

The man vomiting had bet Mal that I couldn't take a nail through my hand without screaming. He sat on a bar stool with his back against the bar. Sweat ran off his nose and he might have been crying, though it could have been the strain of puking. I'd grown accustomed to
this sort of reaction to my act. Some fell ill, no matter how much they wanted to see me get pierced.

“I guess you are numb,” he said. He clutched his bag to his lap. Small black spots of my blood peppered it.

Redbach, the bartender, said, “Do you think so?” His gut stuck out the bottom of his shirt, which read
ASK ME HOW I FEEL
. He pulled at his sideburns, one of his annoying nervous habits—along with an eye twitch and laughing at inappropriate moments—and laughed. He pointed at the bar and the guy laid down everything he had in his wallet. Eighty-seven dollars. Then he stood and started to leave.

Mal called after him, “Hey, don't forget to come see the show. Numb here has a staple gun trick that will make you piss.” The guy didn't look back. He walked out onto Avenue B and into a windy New York City night.

“And tell your friends,” Redbach added. I barely knew Redbach. He tried too hard to be my friend. He was the type of person who would suggest jumping off a bridge but be the last to leap off himself. On the other hand, Mal had always backed me, or so I kept telling myself, based on his willingness to stand by me in the Caesar incident, his “quit Tilly's circus” camaraderie, and his steadfast support as we struggled up the East Coast to New York, all because of a strange slip of paper I'd found in my pocket connecting my suit to an East Side costume shop. I already had a following in the city in the freak show crowd because of him, his efforts to sell my act, to
hawk for me at every bar and impromptu sidewalk show. His own act held no crowds—New York apparently had no appetite for fire-eating.

After the vomiter left, Mal told Redbach he should go out on the street and charge people to come in and see me nailed to the bar. Redbach hit the door and started calling out to a small crowd at the corner.

“I'm not in the mood,” I said. “Pull these out.” I looked at my right hand. The flat tops of the aluminum nails poked out the back, just above the meat between the thumb and forefinger and next to the pinkie, and purple indentations surrounded the punctures. An ashtray on the bar almost touched my ring finger. It stank. I pushed it away with my free hand.

Mal tapped the hammer on a bar stool and pretended not to hear me.

“Pull them out,” I said.

He wouldn't look at me. “We can make some extra cash.”

Outside, Redbach shouted, “Come see the man who can't feel pain. He's nailed to the bar, right inside. This is not a trick. Watch as nails are stuck into his hands and feet. Maybe drive one in yourself.”

If I could have pulled myself away from the bar, I would have walked out. “Who the hell does he think he is, saying that?” Redbach's dive bar didn't get any business, no matter the night or desperation of passersby. The only reason he made any money now was because
Mal suggested our little one-man freak show would be a draw and Redbach agreed. We, meaning I, had performed three times in nine days. The first performance had been for an audience of four. The second for twenty. A line jostled out the door on the third night. This was supposed to be a night off. The holes in my hand from the last show, close to these new ones, hadn't closed up entirely and they began to bleed a little.

“I want to go back to our shitty little hotel room and clean these out,” I said.

I'd started this night just hanging out in our hotel room, a two-bed room at the St. Mark's Hotel. There must have been a sale on glossy school-bus yellow because that was the color of the recently painted room. Paint fumes and mildew smells from the bathroom drove me to wander the hallways. I struggled to make the Coke machine stop stealing my quarters. When the heavy blond woman behind the bulletproof glass tapped the handwritten sign that read no alcohol in the hallway, it was time for me to get back to the room. I wasn't drinking alcohol, but I didn't argue.

In the room I hadn't known what to do with myself, so I ended up just staring at our little black-and-white TV with the speaker-wire antenna that ended with a coat hanger wrapped in aluminum foil and taped to the only window in the place. This TV had followed us ever since we ran away from the circus and headed north from Texas. Over three weeks we had hitchhiked and
made rest-stop bets for rides in the back of eighteen-wheelers. Whenever we stopped Mal would hook up the TV and find a channel with reception. “Someday we'll be on TV,” he'd say. When we finally reached New York City, we did street performances to scrape together the money for a week in the shit hotel we were in. And since then, for almost two weeks, I'd been driving nails into Redbach's bar with sad regularity and looking through the Yellow Pages for the clothing rental store that might be the source of the business card. I'd visited a dozen during the days and called more in the evenings. None used cards like I'd found. That night I called a few more until I realized the hour, too late for any of them to be open. I couldn't concentrate on TV, and the paint fumes were dizzying, so I'd wandered over to Redbach's under the deranged theory that I could go in and just have a drink.

When I'd arrived, I'd found Mal talking with Redbach and a guy with a huge green knapsack. He laughed, his arms swinging. I heard Mal say, “It's gonna be amazing. Nobody has ever done anything like this.” Then he saw me and his eyes darkened. Before I sat down Mal told me the guy with the knapsack didn't believe I could do what I could do. The betting had started, and now I was nailed down again.

“Listen,” Mal said. “We showed that loudmouth, and you're here—”

“I'm always here. All we ever do is sit in this place.”

“I mean, as long as you're already nailed down, why not?”

“You started this. That guy was just having a drink, and you started all this. Now get me off this bar.”

“He said you looked like a pussy.”

“You asked him if I looked like I'd ever been nailed to a bar. What was he supposed to say?” My arm tingled, probably due to a nail against an artery or vein. My legs creaked. I could hear voices outside bartering prices with Redbach. People would be coming in any second. In the mirror on the other side of the bar I saw myself, a skinny blond white guy without enough to eat and too little sleep, nailed to the bar. I wore the Batman tee one of the roadies had given me before I'd left the circus. Mal had been given the complementary shirt, red, with Robin's
R
in a black circle over the right breast. As far as I knew, he'd never worn it. His dreadlocks, unwashed and uncontrolled, danced with his reflection in the mirror behind Redbach's bar, the hammer wagging in his hands. If I looked tired, he looked exhausted. Until then, I hadn't noticed how out of it Mal looked.

People started coming in, and Mal said, “What the fuck are you gonna do? Call tuxedo places all night? Shut up and enjoy the free booze.”

He took on the role of carnival barker, a ghastly imitation of Mr. Tilly.

“Come on in. You want to see the man who feels no pain? You might not have read about him in the papers,
you might not have seen his picture in the magazines, but you can be sure you will someday. Don't ask for his autograph, though. He's pretty nailed down at the moment.”

I hissed at him through my teeth. “I'm not in the mood, damn it.”

Mal shot me a smile and said, “That's your problem, isn't it?” The floorboards groaned as more people stepped into the bar.

A woman with a crew cut and a lip ring asked, “Does it hurt?”

I looked up at the TV that hung over the bar. It received the same shit reception as the set in our hotel room. It had the fuzzing in and out of faces so you couldn't see any details, and I thought that it might as well have been a show about me because it displayed everything I felt. Unfocused, unclear, uncertain. I drifted back to Texas and an overheated trailer as I waited to go onstage, and a spiel Mr. Tilly had written for my act over a year ago leaked out of me.

“None of this hurts. I can't feel a thing. No one knows why. Maybe it's all in my head, or maybe it's in yours. I don't know. All I know is, it's hard to scratch your nose with your hand nailed down.”

I always thought it silly, but when I started performing in the circus, Mr. Tilly said I needed a way to introduce myself to the audience. I'd been saying it twice a day, three times on Saturdays, ever since.

The woman with the lip ring snorted and inspected
my hand. “Fantastic,” she whispered. “I want to buy you a drink.”

Mal stepped behind the bar and poured me a whiskey. I took the drink and said, “Fifteen minutes is all you get,” then I poured the shot down my throat.

People took turns walking up to examine the nails in my hand. Some of them pulled out cell phones and began to call people to get them to come see me, or snapped photos or videos.

“I don't know the name of the fucking place,” said one man into his phone. Across the back of his head a tattoo read kamikaze. “Just get the fuck over here. You'll freak.”

People bought me drinks, and after ten minutes I was sweating alcohol. Too distracted by the redhead with the low-cut shirt and scratch marks between her breasts who pressed into me as she leaned over my hand, petting it softly around the nailheads, I didn't know how long Mal argued with the skinny guy near the end of the bar. The redhead cooed over my hand. This was another typical reaction to me. I'd seen people light up like they'd never been so moved when they saw me take a nail in the hand, or a staple in my back or thigh; people smiled in a way that said they hadn't smiled in years. Women like this one found it reassuring, I guess, like I somehow understood them or had been through what they had.

I realized that Mal and the guy were arguing about me. Mal's eyes, flickering between lazy and disturbed,
begged for it to get out of hand. He had a hint of a bored smile. He often mistook boredom for “passion for drama.”

“What you are saying, pal, is such bullshit,” Mal said.

“This is a scam and you know it. This guy's just got piercings in his hands, and you've got everyone thinking this is some shit. I want my fucking ten back now.”

“No, you don't. You want to give me another fifty and put a nail in my friend yourself, don't you.” Mal handed the guy a nail and then turned to me and said, “Put your left hand up there, all right?”

“No.” I said, “I want to leave.”

Mal leaned across the bar, grabbed my left ear, and pulled it to his lips. “Listen,” he said. “I could give you a hundred and one reasons why you should do this. Because you can. Because they want you to. Because they have paid for it. But I'm not going to waste my time. Put your fucking hand on the bar or I won't pull these nails out and you'll have to rip them out of your goddamned hand yourself, you shit.”

Where had this guy come from? I wondered. He couldn't be the same person I'd come up the coast with. Definitely not the same guy who'd protected me in Texas, who'd demanded a reason for me to go into a lion's cage. His eyes were dark and he fidgeted with the hammer like it was hot. He smelled like whatever kept backwashing out of our tub.

I tried to step back but could only reach as far as my nailed-down arm would allow. Mal returned my glare. He looked down for a moment, then said, “Listen, man. We've been too fucking poor for too long. Let's just take their money, all right?”

My pulse drummed in my ears. I felt like a child who, despite being right, was ignored. My friend, my supposed protector, was using me for his own gain, trying to convince me it was for me and ignoring my complaints. For a moment I imagined that I had the nerve and the strength to pull hard enough to rip the nails out of the wood or to pull my hands free, tear the nailheads through my skin. I knew it wouldn't hurt, but there was still a part of me that understood some level of self-preservation. As the idea came to me I became weak and gave in. As always, Mal ran the show.

The crowd watched. A breathy, salty smell rolled off them. With one hand Mal held out the hammer to the skinny guy, and with the other he took a wad of crumpled bills. As Mal placed a nail against the skin of my left hand between the forefinger and middle finger, the guy raised the hammer above his head. If he had had anything to drink, I couldn't tell. He brought the hammer down in one perfect blow and drove the nail through my hand and into the bar.

The redhead held my glass for me and I took a sip of my drink, then she sipped it, like we were taking communion. Nailed down tight, my fingertips and palms be
gan to focus on the rough grain of the bar. I couldn't move my hands, so I soaked up what little of the wood bar I touched, like a sponge, and, as I did so, I could read my fortune in it, like a palm reading in reverse. I saw my future: I was out of this bar tonight, and I would never be back.

The crowd around us watched quietly. The room must have had sixty people inside. The sweat and stale beer odors hung on to us all, and traffic noise blared in from the street. Outside, Redbach shouted for passersby to pay to see the freak inside. Mal pulled another nail, clenched it between his lips, and took out a third. The second was driven between my forefinger and thumb. Quickly, and with one sure shot of the hammer, he put the last through between the pinkie and ring finger. Little pools of blood seeped out along the bar and mixed with the beads of condensation falling from my glass.