Circus of the Grand Design (11 page)

Like the search for Cybele. But finding her will be a greater reward than Gold's Leonora. Such an unappealing person. He should show Gold her résumé.

"I had been here for at least a cycle when she arrived, with a retinue—two men in that state of physical health that proves an innate lack of intelligence. The train departed without them, though they had meant, so I heard, to join our crew. I immediately knew this was an omen."

Cybele, a woman of the spring, of orange blossoms. He needed her. Martha had been winter, cold and unforgiving. Spring was his season. His birthplace.

"I'm sure I can trust you." Gold snapped open the briefcase. "I've never shown this to anyone."

He pulled out a book, holding it so Lewis could see the dust jacket:
Glory of the Flat-Chested Woman
. The cover art was a black and white photo of a woman from waist level. Tank top, long, wavy hair, and a python wrapped around one arm.

"I saw it in a bookstore just before joining the circus. I fell in love with the woman on the cover. And the other pictures of her are wondrous. I had to have it. When Leonora arrived, I knew it was her, even though the name in the book is 'Grail.'" Gold rested the book in his lap, caressing the cover photo for a moment before continuing.

"Now, as I said, retinue, sign, dot, dot, dot, but unfortunately I had just become embroiled in a messy affair with Desmonica that has only now played its course. I find myself in the heretofore foreign situation of desiring a woman only half interested in me. You may not believe this, but I'm desperate."

He stood and began pacing. Five steps...turn...five steps...turn. "So what do I do? I've seen the effect you have. Everyone's talking about you. Even Bodyssia."

Talking about him—why? His heart raced. What were they saying? Leonora must have reported his packing. And Dawn could be saying anything, telling everyone that he was coming on to her. He looked back at his etching. Cybele. He didn't care about Gold's stupid crush. "I have to find her."

"This minute?" Gold stopped pacing. "I think she's rehearsing with Barca. What are you going to say?"

No, find Cybele you dolt. He couldn't believe he had said that aloud. What kind of advice could he give, anyway? "I meant you have to find her." Gold ran to the door.

"No, not literally go and find her now. Find who she is as a person." That sounded pathetic, but Gold, nodded and wrote it down. What else could he say? "Do nice things for her. Show a sincere interest. Share something with her that you haven't told anyone else. But don't brag." No way Gold could follow that one. Bragging was like breathing for him. Now, let him go. Good.

~

All Lewis wanted was a few hours sleep. Before Gold had finished closing the door, he flopped stomach-first onto the bed and closed his eyes. What were people saying about him? Maybe he should have asked Gold. He turned onto his back. Cybele, if that was the citrus woman's name—she must talk to someone. After he rested...but now he couldn't rest. Too many questions buzzed through his head, and Cybele's face floated above everything.

He slipped on his sweat pants and a shirt and hurried to the dining car. Now, he
wanted
to see another person, but no one was there, not even Cinteotl. At least there was coffee in the carafe. He took it to a booth and sat down. Cybele should stop teasing him. She had to be close—why not show herself?

It was so hard, being here alone. He put his head down on the table and closed his eyes. No one real to talk to. Maybe it would help if he tried to do some interviews. Work would keep him busy, would prevent them from suspecting his plan to leave. Didn't want to get near the acrobats though. No interview, make something up about them. They had enough already. And everyone talking about him. What could they be saying? He hadn't done anything.

Lewis woke up, startled. Cinteotl had come in and started clattering pans and pounding something. Lewis couldn't believe he had fallen asleep at the booth. How long had it been? The cook might bring him something inedible. He lowered his head again.

The pressure of somebody rubbing his shoulders awakened him. He looked up. Desmonica. Had she been one of the ones talking about him? She stopped rubbing, but kept a hand in his hair. She was giving him her usual pathetic attempt at a seductive smile. "I would love to cut your hair sometime, Lewis."

"Okay." Not her. Not without someone else there to make sure she didn't slip and cut an artery.

"I can't now. I'm on my way to the pool."

"There's a pool?" He looked at her again, this time noticing her billowy green skirt and matching bikini top. She wasn't someone who should be wearing a bikini. All that flab, her fleshy breasts, but at least she wasn't hard, like Leonora.

"Don't you know anything?" She started walking toward the gymnasium.

"I need to see it." Even if it meant being with her. He got up to follow.

"I'll be busy doing my laps. Performers have to maintain their fitness you know."

Want to see the damn pool, not your flabby ass. If she got that figure by maintaining fitness, he didn't want to see what happened when she did nothing.

"After your swim, I can interview you for the program." He might as well make a pretense of work—if they were talking about him, it would get around.

"Oh, I suppose. You sure are pushy."

He glanced at the tattoo on her shoulder, a wasp, not a butterfly. As they left the dining car, Cinteotl waved his cleaver at them and pointed to a large squash on the counter beside him. Squash would be good later. Stay away from fermented slop though.

In the gym, Miss Linda sprinted around the jogging track. Lewis waved to her but she didn't respond. When they reached the lounge, Desmonica took him to the laundry room; at one end was a narrow door that he had assumed was a storage closet. She opened it. A wrought iron circular staircase led to a room about the same size as the lounge. The rectangular pool was about thirty feet across, with a green-tiled bottom and a tile walkway around it.

Lewis lay on a lounge chair and looked up at the ceiling—a skylight, cloudy like all the windows. The legal pad was still in his satchel; he pulled it out and wrote: pool above lounge. He would modify his train diagram later.

Desmonica dove into the pool. He closed his eyes and listened to the rhythmic slapping of her arms and legs. So far from home now, worlds away from his life with Martha. "You need to do something interesting so you can tell me about it," Martha had demanded of him a few months ago. He was lying on their couch. Not knowing what to say, he had stared at the ceiling.

"You bring nothing to this relationship," she said.

"I was supposed to bring something?" She had left then, stomping out in her work boots and slamming the door.

She should see him now, see this crazy train and all the people on it. He was glad he had left her to face the investigation into Are No's fire. Maybe the two of
them
would get together. Are No's insurance would pay for a new, even more hideous beach house, though still with no heat for guests. They would sit on Project Poseidon II drinking wine and making nasty comments about him.

How long would Desmonica be swimming? Tired of waiting, he went down to the lounge for a book. He pulled out one with a yellow spine—
Historical Development of the Calculus
—and flipped through the pages. He was about to put it back when a diagram caught his attention. Something about parallelograms and instantaneous velocity vectors. Maybe that was what Dillon used to drive the train. That was it—-mathematics—this book, other books, would tell him everything. First, he could make his diagram of the train accurate. Those immense rooms. Wasn't there some way to measure things like that by taking sightings and angles? The preface said that calculus was the principle quantitative language of Western science. He needed something definite like that.

Walking back to his seat by the pool, he stepped on something soft, and looked down. Desmonica's bikini top. She was about a third of the way across, swimming on her back. He stood at the end of the pool, staring at her. She looked better in the water. Harder to see the fat. He didn't think she had been naked when he left.

He sat back on the lounge chair and opened the book. Chapter one was about Babylonian and Egyptian geometry...the fertile crescent...
A
=7/9
d
²
. He read on: "The priests of Cybele could calculate the volume of a prism." The
same
Cybele depicted in his etching? He wondered who she had been. Maybe that wasn't the citrus woman's name after all. But her lips were the banks of the rivers. He would have to wait for her to explain. He looked over the book at Desmonica, now swimming on her stomach. Funny how she could swim for so long and still be fat. "The concept of area is inherently more complicated for curvilinear surfaces in space than it is for plane regions."

Desmonica's curvilinear surfaces had considerably more area than anyone else's on the train. Oh no, she was getting out—all that naked flab at once. She walked up the pool steps; her breasts rose and fell as she caught her breath. She had transformed, rolls of fat gone, melted away in the water.

"I just can't get enough swimming," she said, her words an out-of-breath gasp. She threw herself on the deck chair beside his and lay on her back with her eyes closed.

Impossible for swimming, or anything, to take weight off so quickly. Hadn't she been fat on their way to the pool? He looked at her sleek legs, stomach, breasts, arms.

"I get this great feeling, like I'm floating in the air, if I just concentrate on my stroke." She raised her arms and pantomimed a swimming stroke. He watched her breast bob with the movement of her arms. Would it be okay to touch her? Not in a sexual way, no interest in that with her, but...was she real? She must be taking some kind of weight loss steroid. He looked away, wishing she would put her clothes back on.

"Excuse me, Mr. Publicist Person." He turned his head until he could see her. She had lowered the back of the chair and was lying down with her arms raised, as though reaching for something above her. "Aren't you supposed to ask me questions now? I've got a busy schedule, you know."

He flipped to a new page. "Do you know anything about the mechanical horse, where it's from?"

"No." She dropped her arms and turned onto her left side, away from him.

Stupid—one of the first rules of interviewing he had been taught was not to ask yes/no questions. The wasp on her shoulder had black wings with a red body. Another tattoo began at the base of her spine, the outline of a sun with jagged rays. He reached toward it with his right hand...real sun, the smell of grass and earth...

"Okay then. Gold said you started out as a dancer, tell me about—"

"Did you have to mention that stickhead?"

"I'm sorry, I forgot you two had been involved. What type of dancing was it?"

"Where are you from? I had a scholarship. I studied under some of the world's finest ethnographers." She popped up from the chair, kicked it back a few feet, and did a handstand. Then, still on her hands, she lowered her legs into a split and walked her body around so that her crotch was in front of his face. The dark mat of hair drew him. He leaned closer, experiencing, with a suddenness that startled him, both an erection and the desire to push his tongue into her.

She lowered her legs and sat beside him on his chair. "Now hey"—she waved a finger at him—"how much of this stuff are you going to print? I haven't told János about when my parents died in a zoot crash and I had to have sex with their sleazy estate lawyer."

Haven't told your interviewer yet either, lady. "János is your new boyfriend, one of the acrobats?"

"The
best
of the acrobats. So strong, yet gentle. Never violent, or loud, and he truly cares for me as a person instead of a vehicle for sexual favors. Of course that doesn't mean we haven't had sex, because we've had great sex."

Her eyes half-closed with either exhaustion from her swim or her feelings for János. Never violent or loud. So she must have a high pain threshold. Or likes it that way. Damn circus people...no, it wasn't them—he was a prude, a sedentary fool who settled with a woman despite incompatibilities, instead of sailing off on life's adventures. Well, that's what he was doing now. His urges regarding Desmonica's exposed vagina—he had never done that with lips or tongue. Fingers yes, but the other, the idea of it had always disgusted him. Prude. That described his past, but no longer.

Without saying anything, he left Desmonica in her János-rapture and headed for the dining car. He had to eat something, no matter how strange. His last good meal had been the locobird stew, or whatever it was. Why didn't Cinteotl make something like that again? Lewis could think of nothing but food—acres of barbecued chicken, tables covered with lasagna. Chips and guacamole. Lentils.

In the distant recesses of the gymnasium Bodyssia was lifting weights, with her broad back toward him. He wanted to exercise too, be strong like these circus people.

Cinteotl stood behind his counter. "Highland squash cake, nutritious and delicious. Vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron, fiber, protein, antifungaloids." He handed Lewis a plate and plopped a gray-white rectangle onto it. The cake was browned and crisp on the edges, glutinous inside with chewy reddish bits. Lewis forced himself to eat all of the rectangle. It didn't taste like any squash he had ever had. Probably best not to ask what the reddish bits were. At least it wasn't as bad as the fermented slop. He doodled on a blank page in his legal pad, drew an awkward picture of the mechanical horse. Too bad Desmonica didn't know anything about it. Not surprising though. The people here only knew what was in front of them. Finding out about the mechanical horse interested him more than getting to know these new companions of his, these performers. He would try Floyd Perry. If Perry took care of his own horse, maybe he was responsible for the mechanical one as well.

"So who the hell are you?" Perry's voice was small, like his body, with a raspy edge. Lewis introduced himself from the doorway. The room had the clean, hard scent of metal, and the mustiness of old books. Returning to his work, Perry picked up a hammer and hunched over a small anvil on his metal desk; he banged on a sheet of brass. Metal racks held rolls of foil-like metals, copper, brass, and aluminum. Beside the neatly made bed, the sheets looking tight and firm as the rolls of metal, was a gray safe that served as a nightstand. Books were piled beside the safe, their warmth out of place amongst the metal. Perry put down the hammer, placed the beaten sheet against the cover of a hardback book, and bent it over the edges to form a solid shell. He lifted the book and held it out, then brought it closer until the cover was about an inch from his eyes. The gleaming metal reflected his thin, pinched face.