The Invisible Circus (12 page)

“She was actually here, in this room?” Phoebe said, overjoyed. “I can’t believe it.”

“I’m not saying for sure, you understand me,” Karl said, resuming his sewing. “She was here maybe one minute.”

But a minute was enough, a minute was everything. Spellbound, Phoebe watched Karl’s hands sift among his silks and linens. “She was here,” she said.

Though the sun was still high, it had a worn-out feeling about it. Karl pried open a nugget of tinfoil, breaking off a piece of something brown and damp-looking inside. He placed it in the tiny copper bowl of a long Chinese pipe, lit, puffed, and passed the pipe to Phoebe. The smell was strange. She took the pipe and deeply inhaled the soft smoke, sweet inside her throat. God knew what it was. She returned to her spot on the cushions and passed the pipe to Nico, who accepted it halfheartedly. Karl did not resume his sewing. He leaned over the pile of fabrics and looked straight at Phoebe for what seemed the first time. Yet even now his gaze was absent, as if her face were merely a resting place for his eyes.

“Do you ever miss those times?” Phoebe asked.

“What times?”

“You know. The sixties.” The term sounded foolish.

Karl sucked at the pipe, eyes narrowed. “It was good,” he said, breathing smoke. “Like falling in love. Sure, you want the beginning. But you know already the end.”

Phoebe took the pipe. The smoke was soft as felt in her lungs. “What’s the end?” she asked.

Karl shrugged. “Same like everything,” he said. “Goes too far, becomes the opposite.”

Phoebe puzzled over this. She tried passing the pipe to Nico, but the boy waved it away impatiently. He looked dreadful. Phoebe was suddenly very high, and not a high she recognized. The room appeared smeared. She blinked to straighten out her vision. “Opposite of what?” she said, her voice seeming to waft in from a distance.

Karl lifted a pile of fabric scraps from his lap and set it on the floor. Then he spoke with sudden intensity. “You want peace, finally you take guns to find it. Use drugs for opening your mind so everything will come inside—now you think only where to get more smack. You love to live, but you die and die and die—so many dead, from that time,” he said. “Like your sister.” And as he looked at Phoebe, something opened in Karl’s eyes like a camera shutter, as if, for a moment, he actually saw her.

Then he looked away. Phoebe took a long hit of satiny smoke from the pipe. The fishy canal breeze filled the room. Things becoming their opposites, yes, she thought, it made sense. Karl’s voice sounded oracular, the single and absolute voice of truth. Opposites, she thought, yes …

Nico broke the thread of her meanderings. He lurched from his seat and crawled toward Phoebe across the cushions, his face gray, moist with sweat. Revolted, Phoebe tried to draw away but achieved this only by faint degrees, her motion stalled by the drug.

“Look,” Nico said, smiling uneasily. He was still on all fours, his face thrust toward Phoebe’s. She smelled a terrible sweetness on his breath and thought of hospitals, the sweet smell that covers death. “So look, okay?” he said. “I am brought you here.”

Phoebe turned to Karl, expecting him to heap scorn upon Nico for this grotesque performance, but Karl was sorting with renewed absorption through his heap of fabrics. “Yeah,” she finally conceded to Nico. “You brought me …”

“So now, if you have some money, I have none.”

“Money!” Phoebe said. She turned again to Karl, but clearly he’d removed himself from this discussion. “Why should I give you money?” she asked, more querulously than she would have liked.

“Because how you would come here without me, yes?” Nico said in a high, trembling voice. He looked ready to explode.

Karl was sewing again, cocooned in the whir of machinery. Clearly he’d seen this moment coming, agreed to it beforehand. Some larger plan was revealing itself. Phoebe felt a shudder of awful comprehension, as if a part of her had known all along, and been silenced. Alone in an apartment with two strange men, in a foreign country. Her heart clambered against her ribs, but her stymied brain lagged behind it, thickened by the drug. “Well—how much?” she asked Nico.

“Maybe, let’s say fifty guilders?”

Phoebe was too stoned for arithmetic. It seemed like a lot. She opened her purse and took out her wallet. Only seventy guilders remained of the money she’d changed at the station that morning. “Here,” she said, handing Nico two twenty-five-guilder notes. Through the sleepy flow of her thoughts certain piercing worries were beginning to penetrate—time, banks, paying for the hostel—like the prickling of a numbed limb regaining sensation. But more painful still was her injury over Karl’s betrayal, his willingness to abandon her to this parasite.

Money in hand, the whimpering Nico became a man of action. He sprang to a shelf obscured by wandering Jew and opened the lid of a black lacquered box. There was a sudden pressure in the room. Phoebe felt it bodily, a ripple of sickness, a faulty quiver in her heartbeat. But she was afraid to move, to call attention to herself in the smallest way, for fear of causing an explosion.

Nico returned to the cushions holding a syringe. Of course, Phoebe thought. Of course. She stared at the rug, hearing the babble of Karl’s sewing machine. Here was the underground world, here it was; after a lifetime of stolen glimpses, she was right in its midst. A sense of deep inevitability bore down on her. Nico sat on the cushions near her, holding a teaspoon to which he added liquid from an eyedropper. He flicked a plastic cigarette lighter and held its flame beneath the spoon. A faint, sweet burning filled the air.

Karl left his sewing machine and knelt beside Nico. He filled the syringe with the liquid from the spoon, then yanked the yarn belt from his Turkish pants and knotted it tightly around the boy’s arm, just above the elbow. He took Nico’s forearm in his hands and held it, touching the tiny eruptions of scabs with the gentleness of a doctor. Phoebe turned away, her amazement eclipsed by horror, but as the seconds passed, she felt compelled to look again. She whirled back around. Gently, almost lovingly, Karl pushed the needle into Nico’s flesh.

Karl eased the plunger down. Nico’s eyes fluttered shut and he sighed. When Karl withdrew the syringe, there was blood at the bottom. He set it on a windowsill. Nico gazed at Phoebe, his face so peacefully settled that for the first time all day he looked his real age. “Cheers, okay?” he said softly. His eyes kept falling shut, despite his valiant efforts to keep them open. Again and again they closed, Nico rocking slowly forward, then catching himself, jerking back, drooping to one side and jerking straight again. He looked like a jack-in-the-box.

Karl moved close to Phoebe. She noticed his forearms were scarless, full of long rivery veins. He touched Phoebe’s shoulder in the same gentle way he’d touched Nico’s arm. No, Phoebe thought, no, but she was so tired, the drug had sapped all the energy from her body, and now a part of her longed, like Nico, to shut her eyes and hand herself over. Karl pushed her backward onto the cushions, stroking her hair, glancing toward the open window, where a church bell rang faintly. Then, in a swift, effortless motion he flattened himself on top of her. Phoebe lay still, not paralyzed so much as dulled. Someone was calling out instructions; she strained to catch them. Nico continued bobbing from side to side, teetering between sleep and wakefulness. Phoebe wished she could lay him down flat. Karl began to kiss her, pushing his tongue deep inside Phoebe’s mouth, pressing himself to her leg. From below the windows she heard children. She wanted Karl to stop, but the fierce efficiency of his desires seemed to muffle her own. In a single, fluid gesture, he lifted her skirt and eased aside her underpants. She felt his bare hand.

Phoebe shrieked, and the hand withdrew. Nico’s eyes blinked open. He stared at Phoebe, seeming about to speak, then was folded helplessly back into sleep.

“Hey,” Karl said, moving his long body to one side of Phoebe. “Hey, so relax.” He touched her bare thigh. She saw the shape of his penis through the Turkish pants and began groping for support, wanting to stand now, certain even in her murky state that no redemption awaited her. But she couldn’t stand, Karl was making it hard to balance. “Hey,” he said, as if Phoebe were a cat lost among the cushions, and even now she felt a longing to believe he was somehow good, if she could just … find her balance … Karl’s breath at her ear—No. She clawed the cushions, the struggle giving her focus; for an instant the murkiness cleared and she felt a charge of bright terror—No! She had to stand up, a sound was moving through her, up toward her throat. It emerged painfully, like a bubble breaking. “Stop,” she cried, a strangled sound, then louder, “Stop!” fighting him now, fumbling to her feet, but Karl just laughed and leaned back looking up at her, not even trying anymore, his laugh not cruel so much as surprised that a stupid, meaningless thing was costing him this much trouble.

“Get out of here,” he said.

Clutching her purse, Phoebe tottered down the narrow hall, past photographs, drawings under dusty glass, the shadowy kaleidoscope of Karl’s life. She opened the door and careened down the curving staircase to the lobby, half expecting him to pursue her, but no, he wouldn’t. Outside, the light broke painfully against her eyes and she reeled, thinking she might be sick. There was a pain between her legs, a burning, as though he’d chafed her.

Phoebe rounded a corner, half ran, half fumbled alongside the canal until she was gasping for air. When she noticed people watching her, she slowed to a walk. She felt a horror of being discovered, as if fleeing the scene of her own crime. For some time she wandered without direction, trying to still her panicked breathing. She thought of going to the police, but she’d forgotten where Karl even lived, had never known in the first place—doubtless the reason for all the twists and turns she and Nico had taken on their way. And anyhow, what did she have to report? Drugs were legal in Amsterdam as far as she knew, and Nico hadn’t robbed her—she’d given the money freely. But why? Why not leave the apartment right then, when things started to turn? Why go there at all? It was her own behavior, more than theirs, that Phoebe couldn’t bear to recall—so vulnerable, so easy. She saw this now with a painful clarity. And of course they’d seen, too. To people like them, a weakness like hers must be obvious, must cling to her like a smell.

Beneath everything else lay a single, terrible fear, worse than the needle or what Karl had done to her: the possibility that he’d lied about Faith, had not really known her at all. Phoebe’s mind touched this thought and instantly veered away. It wasn’t possible. She’d seen in his eyes that he was serious.

Still, the adventure had been a failure. An unmitigated disaster. It would never have happened to Faith.

After nearly an hour of aimless wandering, Phoebe asked directions back to the train station and managed to find it. Discovering her backpack still in its locker seemed to her nothing short of miraculous. It was seven o’clock; she’d missed the youth hostel check-in by hours. She prayed that Diana and Helen had saved her a place.

The youth hostel was full. “First come first serve,” said a kid behind the desk, and place-saving was not allowed. The travelers lounging near the check-in desk looked like advertisements for happiness. “There are many hostels in Amsterdam,” said the kid behind the desk.

Phoebe headed back to the street. Her hands shook as she turned the pages of her guidebook, circling names of other hostels, finding their locations on her map. She marked three spots, then rested on the curb, overwhelmed by the prospect of carrying the heavy backpack even one more step. Her mind reeled again and again back to Karl’s apartment, as if to lessen the horror through repetition, find some new redeeming aspect of the memory.

Finally Phoebe hoisted herself to her feet. Though the sky was still light, it was evening now, the air heavy with a dreadful sense of too late. She walked ten minutes to a second hostel and found that one full, too; without pause she spun back around and began plodding toward a third, this one back in the direction of the train station along a wide, arid boulevard. Streetcars rattled past, empty and beige. The bottom floor of this hostel was a public bar. Phoebe wove among tables to the owner, whose hands glistened with something from the kitchen. He wiped them, leaving streaks on his apron. Yes, they had a bed; Phoebe nearly folded with relief. His son, a red-haired, insolent boy of about twelve, led Phoebe to a room filled with bunk beds. It smelled of mildew. She longed to open a window.

She was given a top bunk at the very end of the room, beside a window of rippled factory glass. A ring of dirt surrounded each pane like frost. Carefully Phoebe spread her sleeping sheet across the mattress and rested her backpack against the windowsill. The shower was down the hall and cost extra; there were no doors or even curtains on the stalls, but the room was empty. The floor felt slick. Phoebe went back to the bar and paid for the bed and a shower. The owner was smoking a joint as thick as a finger, and offered Phoebe a hit. She refused politely. She would leave Amsterdam tomorrow.

A long, vigorous shower improved her spirits somewhat. It was eight-thirty, and through the frosted glass by her bed she saw darkness finally falling. She took everything of value from her backpack, including the bottle of Chanel No. 5, and stuffed it in her purse. She went back outside.