Judging only by the raucous approval and hushed awe from the audience, Atema would never have guessed that Reed’s Circus of Unique Delights and Exotic Wonders was just another third-rate traveling sideshow. It seemed to her that the folk of these towns their caravan passed through must really have never seen anything outside their desert, to act so impressed by the clumsy acrobats, the quavering quack magician, and the bear they’d had to shave in order to keep alive in this damned heat. It only padded to and fro across the floor, head lowered, pawing at the colored ball it was meant to dance on and draping itself across it with a yawn. The troupe was usually better than this, Atema knew, although it still ranked the worst she’d traveled with. It was this trek across the desert that ruined their spirits—all but one.
“BEHOLD THE MAJESTIC BEAST’S MIGHTY FORM AS IT CLAIMS ITS TERRITORY!” boomed Reed. Ringleader Tummein Reed, the self-proclaimed world-renowned collector and scholar who ran the circus, radiated solemnity and awe as he flourished his scepter towards the bear, which was falling asleep.
“WATCH THE PROUD AMAZON—BIRMUNAI, OUR SAVAGE WARRIOR OF THE JUNGLE—AS SHE CHALLENGES THE BEAST IN THE TRADITION OF HER PEOPLE! IF SHE DEFEATS IT, SHE WILL SCAR HER ARM WITH A HOT KNIFE, EARNING LIFELONG RESPECT FROM HER CLAN. IF SHE FAILS…THERE IS ONLY ONE COST FOR FAILURE.” Birge, who had been born in a farm near the Capital, whipped the bear with a light cord of rope and danced away as it opened its eyes halfway to stare at her. She gave a yodeling, bird-like sound and saluted it with a crossing of her painted arms, which Atema occasionally helped her with when the costumer wasn’t available. The crowd, sitting on flimsy wooden stands under the massive canvas tent, oohed. Birge played with the bear a little bit, getting it to walk up to her and wave its paws in the air, and the fifty-some people surrounding the stage shouted bloody encouragement. Reed gave commentary about the history of her supposed clan and the great beasts they faced in their forest as she spun her dull spear, which was garnished with pigeon feathers dyed in exotic colors. The bear made an unenthusiastic sound that anyone who’d spent more than a day with it would recognize as hunger. It padded towards Birge and swatted her spear, giving her an opportunity to use a flashy spin move she’d choreographed over the past week. After a few more passes, Birge gave it a final poke with her spear, and simeltaneously an assistant unveiled a dripping hunk of meat from beyond the curtain. The bear shot up and loped towards the smell, with Birge darting in front of it to give it the appearance of a chase. The spotlight fell on them, and the crowd screamed and roared simeltaneous approval and terror as Birge ducked and weaved underneath attacks one could almost believe were intentional. It was in the background of this chaos that the final act was spirited in by black-dressed stagehands and laid down with the noise of a feather onto the center of the stage, the dark made darker by the spotlight still following the bear’s chase of its meal. The stagehands slipped away like thieves as Birge and the bear vanished offstage. Then the spotlight dimmed and refocused on Reed. The red stripes on the skinny man’s uniform glared like cinders under the spotlight, and the crowd hushed as he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, silent.
“Our time together is short now, friends,” he said. Gone was the bravado of his stage voice, and his voice was almost soft as it carried through the thin wooden stands. Despite the mediocrity of most of the show’s acts, Atema had to admit that Reed himself was a talented director and actor. His timing was impeccable, his posture and tone radiated solemnity, and most of all, he knew his own troupe. He knew there was only one act in this circus really worth seeing, and in the first hour of every show, he did everything he could to build up to it.
Atema glanced around the audience, their faces glowing a hazy crimson from the reflection of the spotlight. There were a few in the audience that watched every show, who shared a caravan with the circus as it made its way across the desert and chose to see the show in every village they performed it in. This final act, she knew, was the only reason they came back. She could see it on their faces, see the anticipation almost dripping from their mouths.
Reed was saying something about how men had died from witnessing what they were about to see next. That this was a living treasure procured from the farthest reaches of the earth, a sight unknown to humankind before Reed and his troupe had found her trapped in the long-abandoned dungeon of a cottonmouth king. Reed spun the yarn like a fishing rod, dangling the identity of the final act in front of the crowd, flicking it this way and that in front of their noses like a puppeteer, without ever revealing it completely. He told a different story every night, a different adventure, so repeat viewers would always be left guessing what the true story was. Even knowing that the whole thing was made up, Atema was caught up in it by the end, eyes glued on Reed’s straight-backed form as he built in volume and energy, pacing across the stage, sweeping his hands in ceremonial fashion.
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“Now,” he intoned, coming to a halt on stage. “Behold with me.” He stepped back, the red lights switched off, and white lights snapped into focus on the center of the stage. There, in a glass tank the size of an elephant’s coffin, was the mermaid.
As soon as the lights turned on, she kicked with her tail and exploded out of the water, flipping backwards in a spray of glittering rainbow color, making a high arc with her pale hands with their delicate fingers splayed above her head, almost touching her tail, then diving back in with barely a splash. The water was a murky turquoise, with tangled seaweed rising from the smooth stones at the bottom of the tank. At Reed’s direction, Atema had helped plant them, and it really did look better, she thought, when you could see little more than the mermaid’s outline in the water. It gave each audience member the feeling of being on the hunt for this exotic creature, this jewel too precious for human eyes. And more importantly, the thin covering Reed held over the viewer’s direct gaze upon the mermaid allowed the possibility, however much the opposite was evident during the show, that the mermaid was not, in fact, the genuine article. And the mere possibility of the mermaid’s inauthenticity was enough for most viewers to believe it the morning after.
Atema forced her eyes away from the mermaid as she leapt up again in a spin, arms outstretched, droplets glimmering as they fell and splattered against the stage. Instead of looking at her, Atema searched for a face in the audience. There was a certain kind of audience member who tried to sneak peeks of the mermaid after the show, or the morning before they left for the next town. This was an annoying, but common occurence for most cast members, but with the mermaid it was particularly troublesome because of both the frequency of such cases and the fact that the mermaid was not a girl in a shiny bag, but really a mermaid.
There were certain signs one could watch for before such an incident. Some of it was profiling—men in their thirties and forties were especially common, many of them bespectacled or balding (never bald)—but mostly it was how they looked at the mermaid. There was a certain kind of childlike wonder, an innocence that seemed out of place on their near-middle aged faces, with their snotty children tugging at their sides, their wives squinting warily at their unfamiliar expressions or looking down, tending to the children.
The boy Atema was looking for now was perhaps fifteen, always alone, but had attended their past few shows, and held that same expression every time. It was only a matter of time, thought Atema, before he came slinking through the camp, hunting for a peek of skin beneath tail, or a costume hung out to dry.
He was a strange boy. Atema had seen him around the caravan—waiting stiff and aloof from the crowd at the wells in the morning, sitting primly on a rock as he chewed the dried meats that each traveler carried as provision, wandering at night among the campfires, eyes roving from one group to another, searching for a spot warm enough to lay down his bedroll. Those like him, who crossed the desert alone and penniless, slept on the edges of a fire’s light and warmth—not close enough to another fire to be shoved away on suspicion of thievery, not facing each other, wrapping themselves into cocoons so that they looked like wind-cut mounds of sand when the fires burned low.
Atema wondered how a fifteen year old boy could look the way he did when he looked at the mermaid. It was different than the others, she thought now. Rather than hope or astonishment, the boy looked on her with a wide smile across his face, a laugh floating out of his throat every now and then. It was so at odds with his demeanor outside of this tent that it was as if he, like the performers, had transformed for the show.
Atema did not count the mermaid as one of the performers. As she watched her dance just beneath the water, teasing the audience with a flash of hand or tail or miraculously wavy hair, she knew there was no acting going on here. She did not even know if the mermaid had ever really understood what a performance was. No, the mermaid was only doing what she had always done. Atema had watched her do the same when she first met the mermaid under the cold, black cliffs on the northern coast. The dance had been a greeting then, a question, an invitation. Do you believe in magic? the mermaid seemed to ask. Atema had not responded, then, but now a fresh batch of humans did every night.
Finally, the mermaid did a triple backflip in the air, and it appeared that the workers in the shadows deemed this a proper finale, because the spotlights slammed off right before she hit the water, so gracefully you couldn’t even hear the splash. When the lights returned, they were a dim red haze on Reed, who was standing off to the side. Reed addressed the audience, quietly so as not to disturb the marvelous dream the mermaid had woven over them with her simple act of existence. As he did so, the stagehands in black snuck onstage again and wheeled the tank out of the tent. Dim lights filled the room and the crowd shuffled out in silence. When the curtains closed on the last of them, the workers paused for a collective breath, then all the lights snapped on. It was time to clean up the mess.