The carnival had flattened out like a tarp over the grounds outside the Montana town only that morning, so no one had seen her yet, kneeling next to Venus, spinning an empty coke bottle on a metal cup on the flat of her nose. All the planets in the solar system were represented, except Jupiter who’d come down with the flu and Pluto who passed away in Fargo. It couldn’t be agreed upon to have a Vulcan and Earth was excluded, nobody wanted to see it, bad enough they had to live here. There were seven of them: Mercury, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune. Neptune was the only male, a slim middle-aged farmer named Tal who had three varieties of cancer and cooperated by dressing in the long satin robes of the planets, distinguished by color, with a half circle of stars on his nearly bald head.
Venus with her long white-blonde hair and tender face was the attention grabber of the group. They spent the most on her robe, which was pink satin embroidered in yellow silk. Her headdress, unlike the others, was missing none of its stars and she was given only the finest bottles to spin, recently emptied of exotic, Japanese beers.
Saturn spun next to her, a handsome woman with orange hair and a wide face. Her head was as large as an actor’s and her nose, slightly pug and flat, had the perfect platform for spinning, since it widened toward the tip. She was camouflaged under a layer of clown make-up which included a painted mouth in an unnatural and perpetual smile.
Neptune was a thin girl with black hair and a narrow face. Her chest and body were so tiny that when she stood up, only her face and black slippers demarcated her form. They gave her the smallest bottle to balance on the delicate plateau of her nose, a bottle that held Channel #5 or Shalimar.
The remaining planets were wide-footed women of varying ages who had been in the carnival since childhood, and were raised through the circuit, traveling with the shows from earliest childhood and developing the thick skins of the professional adults who surrounded them, and spoke, even into middle-age, with the hated precocious-ness of only children.
Saturn was by far the best spinner among them. She had come to them out of the circuses of Europe and Asia, her resume floating over several continents like a hot air balloon. She had met Venus in Norway and Neptune in China and they had joined together, conceived the idea of the spinning show, though how they fashioned it in their minds with dimming lights and darkened amphitheatres was not as it was playing out in the vanishing roads of an out–of-town American show with the dust in their robes and the tents flapping and the flies darting in and out of their nostrils and the posters billowing across the blank oceans of flattened grain.
Their last appearance had been in another prairie state, with an infinite, unsettled dust, just as it seemed to come to rest, it would be scattered again by the wind. To be beautiful in such a place was a feat. Normally it carried enough magic just to look clean. Motion, whether physical or mental, was difficult for the dust settled on peoples’ souls like an anchor. The gentle spinning of the planets against stagnation was a kind of magic to the people who gathered to watch.
It was in such towns that Saturn found her following. She did not possess the beauty of Venus or the childlike innocence of Neptune but something about the skill with which she performed and the heavy make-up obscuring her real features drew people to her. They seemed to find something remarkable in her skill and in her camouflage, which they had seen before only in the few remaining packs of wild animals which prowled the parched forests around them. She had a solo, in which she would roll the bottle on her nose and forehead, then over her shoulders and chest and back up her chin to her nose, all the time with her hands resolutely folded behind her back.
So much had changed in a lifetime. Even the trees had turned bad, the blotchy peeling barks with a pus-like juice that poisoned the inside and caused the bark to fall off like scabs. The mountains, with their passages of missing trees looked like giant wounds had opened their sides. They surrounded the town like psoriatic heads. The clouds which had been dim in peoples’ memories as something white and succulent, now gloomed into wispy gray fins, the sun could not in all its strength imbue color in what it touched, and the moon was hidden behind a dense sooty sky. The stars were almost forgotten, so rarely seen that when one suddenly poked its way through the toxic stratosphere it was both feared and celebrated. People forgot that a single star could belong to a constellation – they had lost the constellations they once belonged to, their families, their friends and their jobs.
The world had changed since various armed camps had let their poisons out. Once they existed as a people poised for explosions not the implosions caused by the toxic gases, the stained water and poisoned food, that eventually, after half a decade, lay waste to the cities, most of the people dying from something that gripped them from the inside like a snake around their organs. In the land further out, the animals died, and the vineyards gave birth to mutant fruit, already poisoned by the seepage from the contaminated water supply. It had happened so quickly that everyone was dazed, they walked about in shocked mistrust.
The first night in a new state was always the hardest for the carnival managers. The audience could be rowdy depending on what they were using. Many new varieties of escapism had come into being, drugs and fermentation’s unknown before, potions that would have killed a normal man. Sometimes they would jeer at the show inside the one lopsided tent. The carnival didn’t have the money or skill for a trapeze, but they did have a trampoline where somersaulting acrobats leapt so high in the air, they would sometimes brush their heads against the top of the tent. There were clowns who rode rusted tricycles, tall men on stilts pretending to be giants, and wheezing acrobatic acts from Russia. There were bare back riders whose horses were too exhausted to gallop and a couple of emaciated elephants whose hides sagged so much around their empty bellies that they rolled across the floor, sweeping up the sawdust. Everything looked bruised and battered. Even the chimpanzees looked like they were suffering from a blood disorder, their faces yellowish under the flaking fur, their eyes glassy and sunk deep in their skulls. They were dressed in tattered children’s clothes and walked about the tent aimlessly.
There were no lions or tigers but there was a ringmaster, his white face exaggerated by make-up. He had a broken whip and a spotlight. The audience, who sat in rows of folding chairs in the Big Tent, barely paid attention to him. It was hard to judge what they had come looking for or the nature of the distraction they found in the things that moved in front of them, but the ringmaster always said afterwards it was like being in the Roman Coliseum, no matter what town or city they were in. He would, at a crucial moment in the show, when the tempers ran high and the various acts were done, direct them to the show outside the tent, in a shallow yard bounded by Styrofoam blocks. There they would find a sword-swallowing chieftain from Vanuatu, a triple-jointed Albanian and finally the bottle-spinning solar system, which was the spiritual center of the show, the movement from the physical to the metaphysical, as he knew, all good shows should have.
Venus, with the blue glitter on her face and long gleaming hair was the first to catch their eye. Hers was the only unblemished face many had seen in years and others in a lifetime. Neptune next to her, was like a gentle puppet from a childhood show. Her small feet and hands, her large moon face created for them the perfect image of a child who was lost or had ventured out of the house while still asleep. Her eyes were vague and dreaming, they did not open very wide, and her mouth looked too small to fit anything inside, except perhaps a frozen string bean.
The two men who managed the carnival, Karl and Tobias, both fat in the bloated sense and drinkers of the old school of corn liquors and moonshine, looked vulnerable: if you stuck a pin in them, they might go blowing across the prairie like deflating balloons. Tobias had been, as he liked to say it, a priest in another life who left the fold as his congregation thinned and died. Some said it was a loss of faith that sent him on his way but others, like Karl, insisted that he had grown too fond of the wine he drank from a silver chalice during the canon.
Karl and Tobias met in a bar in Kansas City, or what was left of Kansas City, one night five years before. Karl was already hitched to a traveling circus, a tamer in a show that was heading west. The men shared a drunken vision, deciding to open their own show. Tobias as a priest was a born showman. He burned his Cossack that very night on a flaming car and both men found their dream survive through their hangovers the next morning, perhaps because they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
But neither of the men, despite their lustful natures, ever approached the women in the solar system. In fact, Karl recognized them as a commodity, even the drunken ones who’d traveled with the show for years. Once they were transformed to planets, they became untouchable, as unappealing as a nun to him. And for his part, Tobias, was always in one way or another so inebriated that sex rarely crossed his mind anymore.
There was not a spotlight in the tent, but two powerful lanterns were operated by Karl and Tobias for the planets. They would station themselves on three stumps, racing the lights around the spinners, making in the twilight a contrast with the otherwise formless dusk and their painted elliptical bottles.
The first night in a new town was always the occasion for Karl and Tobias to do a great deal of drinking. The lanterns would likely sway, the beams of light they aimed might collide and bounce off each other, sometimes illuminating an insignificant detail like the fold in a robe or the bend in a hand and the audience would wonder if a new trick was to come forth from there.
For once, Tal didn’t drop his bottle, and there was thunderous applause at the end, or as loud as it could get with perhaps 80 people clapping thin hands in the flatlands. The crowd un-spooled as the planets stood up – they circled round them in quiet awe, especially Saturn, who, once the managers left them, would stand up on a Styrofoam pulpit and sing a capella ballads about the path to light and the beauty on the inside. The audience would stand transfixed, although they had no idea what she was singing about – for all they knew about their insides were organs singe-ed by bacteria and rare cancers. They had abandoned their churches, and their souls had died with their memories, attached in their minds to some faraway place, removed by time and distance. They didn’t wish to fit their ragged bodies into a pew-they didn’t want to look that closely at one another or hear the raspy voice of a preacher.
But when Saturn sang it touched them in a place they had long forgotten. Pure of note and tone she was almost, as she stood in front of them, a thing of myth. Venus and Neptune on either side, voiceless and beautiful, were like the seraphs in a church panel. The night became a cathedral and the sagging tent their purgatory, the price they had to pay to be coughed out into heaven.
The same people came to the show night after night, their lashes falling on their cheeks, their hair covering their clothes like moldy fur. Saturn had made another success! Tobias and Carl counted out at night the barter that was used as payment and Saturn would retire to the rusty trailer she shared with Neptune and Venus and try to sleep with her head still vibrating. They rarely spoke, but in the mornings, Saturn would brush their hair, holding the thin strands against her hand and gently pulling the wide-toothed comb through, careful not to dislodge a single silky strand. She oversaw their dress as if she were their mother, making certain that they wore the proper shields against the dust storms, and that their laces were tied, and their fragile arms and delicate torsos were properly wrapped.
Sometimes at night, Saturn would sing to them, but her words were not the same as the songs she sang to the people who came to the show. Instead, she sang of the places she’d been, the young girls who whored themselves on the streets of Shanghai, the gutted camels on the edge of the Sahara, the poisoned crocodiles in Bermuda, the capsized boats in the Bay of Bengal, her voice sweet as she sang of these things, of the fossils washed upon the beach of civilization, the tar black wings of the sea fowl and babies floating in thickened canals, still inside their birth sacs. Yet her music came from the folk tunes of the century before and her skill was in the rhyme, which she seemed to make up as she went along:
India, the palace snake
In the swamps, a home he makes.
Till the acid forced him out.
Cut his heart and burned his snout
In Bali, children’s heads are torn.
Their mothers pale, their hearts forlorn.
Their fathers with their facial tics.
Their uncles’ wounds and cuts they pick.
Perhaps Neptune did not possess enough skill in English to understand the parables, but Venus snorted at the rhymes like a pony and threw her hair across her face in disgust.
Saturn never took her make-up off and if you looked closely, you’d see under its layers a band of small bumps, that stretched across her cheeks and rose over the bridge of her nose and between her eyes. If you looked attentively at her eyes, you’d see that their whites were not white at all, but a purplish shade and the blue green of the iris were a lens over some darker tone.
But no one came close. Only Venus had crossed the field around her, and she was, with her horse-like eyes and blonde lashes, quite near-sighted.
Saturn’s head, so perfect for spinning, was not well-balanced on her neck so that when she wasn’t spinning or knocking her head about to the repetitive rhythm of a song, it made a slight palsied motion on her neck, like a golf ball unsettled on a tee.
The show was slowly moving east. Five days in the prairie town and they had collected all the populace could offer them in barter: short-wave radios, soap, fruits, caviars and olives canned in the last century, batteries and gasoline for the trailers and cloth for the costumes and trampoline. Money itself had no value and credit cards did not exist. In payment for one of her songs, a man had slipped Saturn a perfect white pearl. That night she dropped it in Venus’ tea, but she was already fast asleep before she reached the bottom of the cup.
The next town was in the badlands of South Dakota, the winter there was a dry breathless thing. People lived in Styrofoam teepees and had no antidotes to spare. But still they came to the show, offering instead the shrunken skulls of neighbors and leather pouches made of malignant breasts. They were admitted but the carnival stayed only one night. There were rumors that the townspeople crawled about at night, hunting for human flesh. The next day they crossed the frontiers of Minnesota, which in January was warm and vacant. People offered the rusted blades of their ice skates and tires of their otherwise deceased cars but those weren’t things that Karl and Tobias had much use for, and they weren’t admitted to the show. Instead, they performed for one person, a child who had brought them, swaddled in his pocket, a diamond from his mother’s buried jewelry case.
They moved on to Michigan, which was a rumble, bodies of cars buried with their owners in deep mud graves and haggard widowers who paid in widow’s lace and Vicodin. Three chimps succumbed to the air there, the gasoline flames and the closed nuclear plants slowly burning a grid to the earth’s center.
“That stuff will make us glow in the dark if nothing else will” Karl said, as one of the bare back riders vomited bile into her soup and fell face forward into the bowl.
Buffalo, New York was a deserted field with roofs peeking out only a foot above the ground like eyebrows, lending expression to a land without population. In Albany, old democrats brought them shoeboxes full of metals and antidotes. All five nights were attended by the suffering, their smoky lips turned down in forgotten smiles, their fingers cracked with arthritis and their eyes crusted over with mucous. When they clapped at the end, some of their fingers fell into the icy mud at their feet.
It took them, all told, only two weeks to finally land in New York City, where they spread out into the park, putting out a potion first to kill the rats.
The city was a dangerous place to be. There was still an active conflict, both inner and outer, between small warring parties, but it was also where the goods were best, brought over on the steamers from places not yet fully purged, like the Canary Islands or Reykjavik. Karl and Tobias saw an opportunity worth its danger. They would stay only one week and then go south, bypassing New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington, for there were nothing but scavengers in those places, finally landing in Virginia for the start of their southern tour. They’d go through Mobile and Biloxi and then let the whole thing end in New Orleans where the black market was thriving and where they might, if they had collected enough goods by that time, be able to barter their way into retirement.
Mercury started vomiting the first night in New York, just after they’d put down stakes. She vomited up the fibers they had come to eat, like the bark of cedar trees and the jerky made from walnut shells. The spasms went on until morning and then ceased with her death.
It was the way Karl and Tobias had seen most of them go and normally they took little notice of it, friendships were rarely formed and after all she was one less mouth to feed but because she was a planet the loss was more conspicuous. New York was known to be a tough place for carnivals, the only form of live entertainment left. They had stoned their dancers and sprayed their opera singers with lei. Karl covered Mercury’s stiffening body with a piece of tarp, thinking he’d drop the body later in one of the old subway stations to avoid a fine. Tobias did his usual pantomime of a prayer over the body and finished by spitting on it. Tonight, they had no choice but to go on with the show and tomorrow they could address the question of finding a replacement or face shrinking the solar system still further.
On Saturn’s reputation alone, five hundred people had collected on the shaved lawn outside the big tent on opening night, paying in every conceivable currency: antidotes, watches, caramelized apples, computers, leather, coconuts, video cameras, glass eyes, embalming fluid, insulin, vaporizers, penicillin, mirrors, Swiss army knives, frozen butterflies, and false teeth. They were already angry by the time they filed out of the big tent after the first show, a few were calling for their barter back. They had killed a bear because he was too weak to stand on his hind legs and two dogs had met their death as well, higher than the usual numbers. Karl saw the death toll climbing as people poured out onto the Great Lawn where the stage had been set for the spinners. The space was cordoned off by oil drums and the planets, in their satin robes and halo of stars attached by wire to their heads, formed a half-circle on risers made of Styrofoam.
It was nearly dark – the kind of pitch black that was unknown in the city before the wars when it had an electric skyline. Now the tall buildings were abandoned, there was no longer any trade and the lights had died as well. The wars were not taken seriously before the lights went out. And then when people were swathed in darkness, their teeth jittered out of their mouths, and they felt surrounded for the first time by a kind of godlessness. Central Park felt like the center of a moonless forest and Karl and Tobias had had to hire a third man to hold the lanterns for the planets. People sat cross-legged on the ground, or lay on their sides, moving out the bramble and bits of animal dung from under them. They had to continuously shift their limbs because their bodies were covered in sores and welts which made it impossible to lie in any one position for long.
Tal had recently become too sick to perform, his cancer having progressed to his lungs. He frequently coughed up green paste and dropped his bottles. The lesser planets, Pluto, Mercury and Jupiter started spinning together after a secret cue had passed between them and Karl. He could feel the audience’s bile rising as Pluto’s seltzer bottle wobbled on her broad nose. Fortunately, their part in the act was a short one, their sole purpose was to warm the audience up, give them a taste of what was to come.
There was a general intake of breath when the light found Venus, a scattered applause as she placed the bottle of creme de menthe on her nose and began her revolutions. Her skill though obvious, was in no way superior to other spinners they’d seen. Still, with her long white hair and pale bleached face, she was interesting to look at. When Neptune met her light, they put their heads forward in interest, her face was so seamless and flat it was amazing that she had found a ledge in which to hook the bottle of Sangria. But it was when the beams landed on Saturn with her painted clown’s face which seemed to merge with her bottle at an oblique angle, that the crowd went wild, forgetting their violent impulses and tossing their wigs in the air to signal their approval. Karl fixed his light on her as she began with a smooth rolling action, the tip of her nose caressing the bottle of creme soda, which was her trademark and the other planets, which no one had even bothered to count, faded invisibly into the night, a stray reflection from one of their bottles occasionally catching the light.
There was a sense of the supernatural in the sawing motion of Saturn’s head, as if it were attached by a lever to her spine, her bottle creating great crucifixes and geometries in space as it turned in all possible angles and directions and a great, inhuman velocity started to build. She wore the spinning bottle as an extension of self, a crystalline reflection of pure form, her body containing in its skill a symmetry that had been coughed out of the world at the start of the first war.
She continued to spin, she was like a singer holding onto a note, or a swimmer holding her breath under water. The audience watched her, a planet glowing in the vast reach of space, a world within herself, and they responded as if they had suddenly found their way home.
Out of the chaos and darkness of the lost years, out of their lack of connection to each other and the particles of matter that had made up their being, they recognized in Saturn the essence of who they were. They saw an order that had once governed their movements, a fate manifested in the skilled hands of the acrobat and a simplicity that no germ or stray plague could upset. They leaned close to each other as they watched, huddled within the night sounds of the park: the roving dogs and humans, the occasional glance of a passing truck and the birds who had not died but mutated on the wing. They swept close by and burned their shadows into the ground.
Saturn went on and on, Karl holding his tired wrist with his other hand, every so often the light shook, and shadows leapt from her and formed ghosts. There was a trickle of blood running down the middle of her face and out from one ear and still she spun, so fast that it all became a whirl of light, out and out in rings around her, a mad ring of colored gases, encircling the audience, lifting them up and away from the roots that had bound them to the planet under their bodies. They were in a rapture of light and order, they reclaimed their center of gravity and once again, the order of the universe was restored and their souls re-aligned with their bodies. The earth itself felt different under them, as if it had finally bled out its poisons.
And their memories returned to them, the layer of things that had happened during the wars and the other life, resting under it so peacefully, as if preserved in amber: Families, skies filled with constellations, cities that had things moving inside them, locomotion. They felt it all again, the shape of what they had lost and they cried, not the way they usually did because of irritation from a chemical but with great racking sobs that were for themselves.
After about thirty minutes, without warning, she stopped, the bottle falling off her face and thudding to the ground. And the audience landed with drying eyes upon the earth. She stood up, her costume clinging to her thighs and her head shaking like a mad dog’s. She put her arm across her waist and curtsied. There was the sound of mad clapping and then a thunderous applause and rush forward, perhaps they hoped to touch her, but she had disappeared. They wandered around for hours afterwards crisscrossing the same spot where she had performed as if it were Lourdes, the impression of her knees preserved in a slab of Styrofoam.
Saturn, meanwhile, slipped away, following a trail of white hair and tin stars Venus had left for her. She followed it to an abandoned subway station that bordered the Park. Neptune and Venus had climbed over its gate, and sat together, like huddled children at the bottom of the stairs. They had taken her things in a small suitcase, one bag for her bottles and the other for her make-up and when she saw them, she quickly climbed over the gate and descended like a fallen angel, her steps fluid and swift.
Once the crowds had cleared in Central Park, when it was already past midnight, and they had finally given up on finding Saturn, Karl had reached out again with a single bead of light and stretched his nose against the earth until, a strand of Venus’ hair stuck to a nostril. He had found their empty trailer and suspected they were off to join a rival show, the circus which was due to open in the abandoned lots of Madison Square Garden. He would have to bring them back and he had with him something he had just gotten that night, a revolver as an entry fee from a visitor. He followed the trail of hair out to the other side of the park, where he lost it in the garbage-strewn streets.
Saturn, Venus and Neptune walked through the city and witnessed the decay, people throwing money from terraces, the spotted children running around like gangsters and decorative facades that had broken off the face of buildings and shattered to the pavement into a million parts. The air was thick with a kind of green heaviness. They hailed a cab which crawled along the streets while haggard groups of people pelted the taxi with stones, until they finally grew tired and fell away.
About an hour later they reached their destination: the wharves on Twelfth Avenue. With the precious antidotes in their bags, (which they had collected from Karl’s trunk and replaced with lime), they would book a passage on a freighter heading to New Guinea. There was the myth of an unmolested land there, of tribes who had not been the targets of chemical fights and of animals whose milk was still pure enough to suckle their young.
There they would start a show, a new one, they would be the stars of the Big Dipper, and they would spin and cast their reflections upon the grieving earth.
Pia Quintano is a New York based writer/painter who sometimes writes slightly futuristic prose. She received a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship in fiction and her stories have recently appeared in Havik, Lunch Ticket, Atlas &Alice, Hoxie Gorge, LETTERS Journal and Willesden Herald. She shares a small apartment with a small, demanding menagerie.