this stops mid-flow (an advanced warning), but I got tired.

Voice = Neecie, who has been the only other voice besides Sparrow

***
It took Monsieur six months to figure out what the real business of the circus he had joined was. It took him only slightly less time to find a circus to join in the first place.

Once, everyone wanted to see the freak show. They wanted to ride the ferris wheel, buy cotton candy and make sticky-faced love behind the tents. During the big depression, when everybody was depressed and needed considerable cheering up, traveling circuses, while not common, were certainly more frequent.

It really isn’t that hard to understand. Everyone needs miracle in their lives; it’s what we live for, why we write books like the Bible to make us seem more important than we end up feeling when we wake up in the dead of night and ask ourselves the silliest question in the universe. During that hour’s silence, don’t we just pray for miracle, if not in a new entry, then in an indubitable realization that everything is drenched up crazy and real? That we can depend on this life.

And that was what the circus was for. Bright lights, giddy, beer and the opportunity to shoot balloons while the summer wafts crickety and bent-shadowed around us. We want the littered floor, the Diablo clowns, the bearded lady, something scratching out with a boo, releasing that deep reserve of adrenaline from behind the foreign dam. We want the structures to tumble, the greasy men to flirt with us and move levers that lift us higher than we’ve ever been before. Who hasn’t seen that scene in Dumbo—the one with the train screaming through the night, the tents going up in the rain, the straining heaves of men with sledgehammers pounding on wooden pins—and not been touched? We love people who work out in the rain. While not glamorous to do, certainly glamorous to think about. We live in their mystery, invent it for our own needs.

But, as Monsieur found out, after the depression ended, people just stopped looking for their miracle. They became taciturn and mellow. They felt like they shouldn’t ask for too much or maybe that bomb would drop, the one that would sweep upwards and out and create new miracle by burning shadows onto walls. You sometimes get superstitious about what is meant by miracle when you realize that intensity only comes in all forms, and how you have to pay for what you get. Anybody who has been loved in a passion knows that if it dies, it dies in a passion. Couldn’t the passion of life be the same? Yes, the fifties, when fear started canceling out the importance and people started locking up their houses even though nothing was really any worse than the thousands of years of primordial violence and primordial kindness we have grown up through like sprouts in the mud.

When you look at it this way, the sixties were downright predictable. People were wild with pent-up miracle-desire, and thus acted like twenty year-olds after years mourning a bad break-up. That is, humping and jiving any miracle they could find. Making God with shrooms and acid and whatever else filled that deep empty with potential answer. My father, the great doomsayer of modernity and youth, tells me that nowadays we have our placebo-for-ennui television, which spends great amounts of time on other people’s miracles and thus gives vicarious meaning to those too lazy to find it. But, as I like to point out to Taro, every generation has its own fight. Miracle-search can still be found in punk mosh pits, the dens of tattoo and piercings, the dance floor, yoga meetings, maybe down on the beach where everybody loves to go get drunk and scream loud. It finds itself in the way I escape from my new bedroom window at night, climb the plum tree that we were told rains fruit in August, and listen listen to the sound of every human being breathing and dying and being born and having sex and being beaten and hugging and everything. It finds itself in Sparrow’s flight and Fish’s tinkering. It finds itself in the sadness Muebla laps from the lips of spinners.

But none of that was enough for Monsieur, who had just been kicked out of his family for too closely resembling an epileptic or a chicken. He wanted something bigger than the routine search. He wanted to dedicate his life to insanity the same way that monks dedicate their lives to meditation. He had a crop, and what more signal could he ask for that he was born to do something similar to Superman or Napoleon or any of the hugess normal people tell themselves they can’t touch? On top of this, he had just finished reading a Flannery O’Connor short story and it injected into his head that the romantic southern circus life was for him. I mean, after all, he had a skill.

So, he hid in his best friend’s barn and started to practice.

Eleven months later, he was sitting down with seventy Mexicans to a Father’s Day feast. Monsieur had been learning Spanish, but was basically limited to understanding every tenth word and piecing together a semblance of meaning from that point. What he was understanding from his ten-percent forage was that Mexicans were crazy in love with parties and connections and making lots of noise. Those of you who have attended one of these parties as I have (being one-fourth a direct result of this particular fiesta) know that nobody can underestimate the power of a Mexican party. Latin Americans everywhere have taken up the gauntlet of the Native American potlatch; they will give better than any other giver has ever given in the history of givinghood. There is no greater generosity than those of my Latin lineage, but it is almost suspicious with its ostentation. Are they trying to have a good time, or are they trying to prove something? The apparent answer: who says you can’t do both at once?

Yes, Monsieur had spent five months scouring the newspapers for word of a circus, any circus, while pitching forkfuls of hay down from roving trucks on those types of days when sweat glands are seriously contemplating throwing in the towel. In order to survive these unbearable temperatures (having originated from the Midwest and traveled progressively hotter), Monsieur had been employing his crop for less ritzy feats of greatness. In the morning, Monsieur would go to the trough and fill up for the day camel-style. He’d start work with an internal cavern that closely resembled the embryonic sac we erupt from. (Indeed, he used to joke with Mafer that if she wanted to give up the egg, he could birth their children. They had a multitude of jokes discussing the way his throat skin would stretch over the form of the curled child, what it would be like for the baby to kick, just how far his mouth could dilate under the right kind of pressure, and how the breathing techniques their doctor recommended would need to be adjusted). His throat gurgled and sloshed and the other men and women working would advert their eyes under the impression that they were seeing something not quite decorous. Only the children would stare, and it would be that type of stare that starts staring, notices itself staring (especially when mom taps the cheek lightly but seriously), stops staring, and then continues staring in quick stare glances, the type where continuity between stare and look-away is created via imagination.

These were his days, and his nights were spent running down to the town, buying a paper, and scouring every advertisement, every editorial, every article for sign of his self-chosen future. And after two and half months of catching any kind of fieldwork that was handy, Monsieur finally came across an article mentioning the Maldano Cueva Rambling Show of Wonders. It didn’t particularly catch Monsieur’s attention that the article was regarding an unsolved murder that occurred under the eaves of the ring toss directly at the moment when the audience screamed at the Scary Part of the Tiger-Walking Act. Instead, what he noticed was that the rigmarole wasn’t exactly called a circus, which had better potential for him becoming part of a Freak Show. He spent the rest of that evening packing his bag and touching up on what he hoped would be his auditioning act.

As a direct result, Monsieur was shoving extremely frosted cake into his mouth six months later, while holding within his crop the seven jalapenos he had “eaten” to impress the family. It was a messy interaction of dietary juices, and he was starting to turn quite red and sweat as the family roared and blustered around him. In fact, he was starting to get dizzy.

When you’re dizzy at a Mexican fiesta, the best option available is to focus, second by second, on the minutiae of features surrounding. At that moment, Monsieur was repeating under his breath, “Don’t leave the party early, and whatever you do, don’t throw up,” at the same time he was noticing how his main boss, Jose Ricardo Maldano Cueva (Ricardo to the employees and Cardito to his family), was extremely extraordinarily fat beyond belief, and in addition, missing three teeth on the left side of his mouth. Monsieur wondered why he had never noticed such a fact before.
Next to Jose was the bearded woman, his wife, Marina, who had tucked her beard into her dress for the occasion. She was feeling gregarious and sexy, and was wrapping crisped pigskin around a tender cut, while laughing at her beer-blustering husband. And everyone else at the table—Mario, Max, Mariola, Maria Fernanda, Marita, Maritza, Mauricio, Maria Elena, Marlo, and Silvia—was either hijo or sobrino or tia or tio, except Monsieur who seemed to fit in, despite being relatively incapable of speaking Spanish, white as the underbelly of a dolphin, and at the moment, extremely sick to his holster.