There Is No Wheel Read online

“You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he said. “There isn’t time for discussion. The Tony Express leaves the station in one minute.” He placed the folded shirt on her shoulder, then turned around. “I won’t look.”

  He studied the room she’d been trapped in. It was filled with flower pots and plastic tubs in which various green things were growing, some with little yellow blossoms. The room smelled like a sewer. There was a medicine cabinet on the wall, and pipes where the tub and sink had been. The rope was tied to the base of a shattered toilet, beside which sat a basin of clear water. Above this was a small window, through which he could see the night sky. He was on the wrong side of the building for the big show.

  She touched his shoulder, lightly.

  He turned. She wore his shirt now, which made her seem smaller, and there were tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know if this is really happening. I’ve had . . . I’ve been having dreams.”

  “The Wolfman used to say, ‘Some dreams you gotta ride.’” He pointed to his back. “Hop on.”

  Tentatively, she wrapped her arms around his neck. She smelled earthy, and her skin felt oily and hot against his. He lifted her. She was light, all bones and skin.

  “Don’t flinch,” he said, and stepped onto the rope. She flinched, tightening her grip on his throat, her legs clamping around his waist. He moved cautiously, his feet listening to the messages the rope was sending. It wasn’t good. Individual strands of the hemp were popping and snapping. The pipe in the hall was pulling free of its braces. Move move move move.

  “Alley-oop!” he cried, jumping forward. Esmerelda shrieked. He landed in the doorway and stumbled into the hall. He pried her arms off his trachea. “We made it. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  She dropped from his back, trembling, laughing, crying.

  “G-God. Oh God,” she stammered. “I’m out. I’m out. I can still get to safety.”

  “You’re as safe as you’re ever going to be,” he said.

  “No!” she cried out. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know? How can you not know? There’s a comet that’s going to hit near here. A big one! We’ve only got until May 8 to get to—”

  “That’s today,” he said. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  She turned pale. She placed a hand against the wall.

  Tony grabbed his stuff and headed for the stairs.

  “C’mon,” he said, racing up the steps two at a time.

  Tony opened the door to the roof. The sky was black and silver, with a thin sliver of moon. A dozen comets streamed from the direction of the vanished sun. And to the east, a bright star, brighter than the moon, with a halo filling half the sky.

  “Wow,” he said.

  He looked back. Esmerelda was halfway up the stairs, looking at him.

  “Come on,” he said. “You don’t want to miss this do you? This is the kind of sky I dreamed about as a kid. A sky full of mysteries and wonders.”

  Esmerelda shook her head and turned, but didn’t leave.

  Tony shrugged. What did it matter if she didn’t watch? He thought it strange, but then, everybody always thought he was strange, so who was he to judge? He’d planned to be alone anyway. But now that he had an audience, he was overcome with the need to talk.

  “When I was ten, Mom bought me a telescope to see it,” he said. “The brown star, I mean. Way out there, beyond Pluto. It wasn’t much to look at. Scientists got all worked up, talking about how fast it was moving, where it had come from, where it was going, and all the damage it was doing by altering the orbits of comets. But in the telescope, it just hung there, a boring coffee-colored dot.”

  Tony sat down, his back against a chimney, the humidor in his lap.

  “It’s an exciting time to be alive, don’t you think?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Tony opened the humidor, revealing the syringe. He lifted it, and looked at the sky through the fluid-filled glass. It swirled with memories.

  “You know how kids want to run away and join the circus?”

  She didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure she could hear him.

  “It works the other way around, too. My folks, my older sisters, they were the Flying Fiorentinos, Aerialists Extraordinaire! Pop had big plans for me, being the first son. He had me training for the high wire while I was still in diapers.”

  Tony ran his finger along the old scars on his arm. “When I was about fifteen, the circus got a new snake lady, Satanica. Twice my age, but open-minded. She was a junky. Wasn’t long before I was hooked, too. You can handle snakes while you’re in the haze. Hell, the snakes like it. But junk and the high wire don’t mix well. Pop got Satanica busted. I ran off that night to visit her in jail. Never got to see her. But I never went back to the circus.”

  Against the bright sky, the waves of heat from the roof shimmered and danced. Tony sighed.

  “I hate my Pop. He never gave a damn about me. I was just part of his act. A prop or something.”

  He looked back at the stairs. Esmerelda sat in the doorway, her back to him. She had her face pressed against her knees, her arms locked tightly around her shins. He readied the needle. The star of the east blazed bright now, casting shadows. If his watch was right, and he’d taken a lot of care over the years to see that it was, and if the astronomers were right, and their track record through all this had been pretty good, there were nine minutes, forty seconds left.

  “Three years ago, I got off the junk,” he said, tying the thick rubber tube around his arm. “But I made sure I’d have one last dose. Because the best moments of my life were spent floating on junk, curled up in the arms of my snake woman. That’s what I want to take with me. How ’bout you? How do you want to spend the rest of your life?”

  Esmerelda spoke, her voice tense and angry. “At least you were born before they found the rogue star. My folks knew. And they brought me into the world anyway.”

  “Some people didn’t believe,” said Tony, closing his hand tightly around a wad of tissues, watching his veins rise. “And some people hoped for the best.”

  “They said God would take us away,” she murmured. She wrapped her hair around her fists as she talked. She looked at him, her eyes flashing in sharp little slits. “I tried. I can’t believe in God. How could they? How could anyone?”

  “My Mom believed,” said Tony, placing the needle against his skin. “Probably will to the last second. If she’s even still alive.”

  “I killed mine,” she said.

  “What?” Tony moved the needle away from his arm.

  “My parents. On my thirteenth birthday. I slit their throats as they slept. The night the comet hit the moon.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I should have killed myself.”

  Tony sighed, and opened his hand. “Come here.”

  She shook her head.

  “I think you need this more than I do,” he said, holding the syringe toward her.

  Her eyes fixed on it. She wiped her cheeks.

  “It will help you,” he said. “You still have a few minutes left.”

  She rolled to her knees, and crawled toward him, keeping her eyes fixed on the roof.

  “Here,” he said, meeting her halfway, pushing up her sleeve.

  He’d only used a needle on another person once before, long ago. But the skill came back easily enough. She gasped as he pushed the plunger in.

  “Now breathe deep,” he said.

  It worked quickly, like he remembered. He rolled her over onto his lap, and she opened her eyes to the dance of the comets. He watched her as she watched the sky, for the longest time. He dared not look at his watch. If he didn’t look at the watch, time would stand still. Eternities could be hidden between seconds. At last, she smiled.

  “Mysteries,” she whispered. “And wonders.”

  Tony lay back, lit a cigarette on the first try, and looked at the dark spaces between
the comets. The black shapes curled like vast snakes. He recalled the boom box. He’d forgotten to play the music. But things don’t always go as planned. A lifetime of practice won’t keep the wire from snapping. When you fall, you relax, and let the net catch you.

  Silent As Dust

  The Company I Keep. I’m judging a talent show in the attic of Seven Chimneys. The theatre is a maze of cardboard boxes, gray with grime. The moonlight through the round window serves as our spotlight.

  First up is Dan, a deer head with five point antlers and a startled look in his glass eyes. Dan sings “Jailhouse Rock” as a blue grass ballad, accompanied by Binky, a sock monkey with a quilted banjo.

  Next comes Professor Wink, an ancient teddy bear with one eye and half his fur. Professor Wink is a juggler, keeping aloft a crochet mallet, a broken lava lamp, and the ceramic manger from the Christmas decorations. When all three items are in the air, he grabs an old bowling ball and tosses it into the mix with a cool grace that earns him points.

  The last act is Tulip. She’s a baby doll with no left leg. Her act is to climb high into the lofty rafters of this old Victorian attic, then leap. She unpins the threadbare dishtowel someone diapered her with long ago and flips it into a parachute. She drifts toward the floor, reciting the Gettysburg Address. For her finale she lets go and dives into a white plastic bucket full of nails.

  Tulip is an unusually talented baby. Also a noisy one. She lands with a clatter.

  I hold my breath.

  Darcy’s voice from the room below: “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear that.”

  “Ish muffin,” Eric mumbles, on the verge of sleep. The mattress creaks as he turns to face Darcy. “It’s an old house. It has noises.”

  “Something’s moving in the attic,” Darcy says.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What if it’s a raccoon? They carry rabies.”

  The light flips on beneath me. Thin pencils of light shoot up through cracks. I creep across the rafters, light as a breath, placing my weight with practiced precision on joists I know will not creak. I hear Eric and Darcy in the hallway, near the pull-down stairs. I reach the main chimney and slither behind it, into the shaft that leads to the basement.

  The springs twang as the attic steps are lowered. Light chases me as I drop into the passage and wedge myself against the bricks. I go corpse quiet. I’ve taught myself not to cough, fart, belch, gurgle, or sneeze. My breathing is soft and silent as cotton gauze.

  Eric has clicked on the single light bulb, with its dangling chain. The bulb is coated in cobwebs; a burning smell wafts across the attic. I’m upside down in the shaft, behind five feet of brick. The yoga practice pays off. I don’t feel strained. I’m free to follow the conversation as Eric pokes around, griping to Darcy, still in the hall. A bright beam flickers around the top of the shaft. He’s got a flashlight to supplement the bulb. If he looks in the hole behind the chimney, my presence will be difficult to explain. As he draws closer I see the ancient red brick surrounding me. I normally make this journey in utter darkness.

  “This is stupid,” he says, mere feet above me. On the surface, he’s talking about the search. But I hear the subtext in his voice. For two weeks they’ve been arguing about having a baby. Darcy’s ready, Eric isn’t. Every conversation is colored by this central disagreement.

  “Keep looking, please,” she says. My sensitive ears place her at the foot of the stairs.

  “What if I find something?” Eric grumbles. The light diminishes as he turns away. “Suppose there is a raccoon up here. Then what?”

  “Stomp on it,” she says, half-joking, I think.

  “It’s not a spider.” He sounds exasperated. He’s moving around, nudging boxes with his feet. “In fact, it’s not anything. It’s the house. It’s old. It creaks.”

  “I know what I heard. It wasn’t the house.”

  “Maybe it’s one of the ghosts,” Eric says, moving closer to the chimney again. “I don’t recall anyone dying in the attic, but it’s easy to lose track.”

  Suddenly, there’s enough light in the shaft I can see my shadow spilling down the long wall before me. This is it. “Oh my God!” he shouts, as the light jerks away. “You won’t believe what I just found!”

  “What?” Darcy asks, sounding scared.

  “My old sock monkey! Mr. Bojangles!”

  Oh, right. The monkey was named Bojangles. Where did I get Binky from?

  “I’m coming down. An army of raccoons could hide up here. We’ll call an exterminator tomorrow. Have him put out traps, if it makes you feel better.”

  “Okay,” says Darcy.

  The light clicks off.

  My breath slides out of me in a long, gentle release. I loosen my grip on the brick and slink my way back down the shaft toward the cellar. I’m tempted to go back to the attic. That stupid Tulip and her noisy landing almost got me caught. I’d like to pull out her other leg. Fortunately, there’s still a sane person sharing my brain that knows, deep down, I was the one who threw Tulip into the bucket. From time to time, boredom puts me in tight spots.

  My name is Steven Cooper. I’m a Seven Chimneys’ ghost. I’ve haunted the place for three years.

  If haunted is the right word. Since, you know . . . I’m not technically dead.

  Could Have Been a Tour Guide. It can get confusing talking about Seven Chimneys. There’s the town of Seven Chimneys, a little speck on the map an hour’s drive from Charlotte. The town has barely two thousand people, most living in mobile homes or old millhouses. The core of Seven Chimneys is a picturesque village that reached its prime a century ago, with a main street dominated by a dozen Victorian mansions restored by wealthy Charlotte refugees looking for the laid-back, small town life.

  The grandest of these mansions is Seven Chimneys, the house, with thirteen thousand square feet of towers, wraparound porches, and decorative woodwork. Seven Chimneys isn’t a true Victorian home, since the building started shortly after the Revolutionary War. Three brothers, the Corbens, released from George Washington’s army, traveled to the then-nameless town and built homes close together on a single acre lot. The Corbens prospered, churning out doctors and lawyers and inventors over the coming decades. The three homesites sprawled, as slave quarters were built and kitchens added on. Eventually, the houses merged together into a single Frankenstein mansion with seven chimneys.

  Sometime before World War One, Franklin Corben, the railroad king, prettied up the place with a Victorian façade and extensive remodeling on the interior, adding electricity, plumbing, etc. Parts of the house in poor repair were walled off.

  The hidden rooms, the dead spaces, became useful during prohibition. Behind a secret panel in the library, there’s a well-stocked bar and a slate pool table that I don’t think Eric knows about. He does, however, know about the wine cellar that had its entrance bricked over, with only a hidden trap door inside a pantry to give access. He was the first person to show me the coal chute at the rear of the house that leads to a furnace, and behind the furnace the narrow tunnel that leads to a bathtub in which actual bathtub gin was fermented. The place is covered in dust and spider webs now, forgotten by history. But not by me.

  A Close Call. I’m down in the root cellar doing yoga with Professor Wink. I’m naked; I haven’t worn clothes in two years. My pants got snagged once in the chimney and I was stuck for two days. Up above, I can hear a bustle of activity. Eric is kind enough to let the locals hold weddings at Seven Chimneys. The floor boards thud and bump with their movements. It’s hard to stay tuned onto Eric and Darcy. They’re talking about getting a puppy. Of course, the puppy conversation is only a substitute for the whole baby thing.

  I’ve warmed up with the Cobbler’s pose. Now I bend into the once impossible Camel as if I’m made of rubber. Professor Wink, even boneless, can’t hold this pose.

  “It’s not like we’re here most of the time,” Eric argues. “A puppy needs attention. It needs time that we don’t have.”

&n
bsp; “We can make time,” Darcy says. “There’s more to life than work. A dog will keep us focused on what’s important.”

  “Maybe after my schedule changes, but that’s no time soon. Look, the world will still be full of puppies a year from now. Let’s think about it then.”

  Someone heavy walks overhead and I miss Darcy’s response.

  The artfully named “Half Lord of the Fishes” pose has me twisting my torso around to the point I can see my bony, callused butt. It’s hard to believe everything I know about yoga I learned from a picture book I swiped from the library.

  After a few minutes I realize I’ve completely lost Eric’s and Darcy’s voices. I’ll have to wait to find out if they’ve decided anything.

  I finish my routine in the so-called Corpse pose, flat as a flounder, every muscle in my body in a state of utter release. Professor Wink is good at this one.

  Then I realize someone else is here. I look toward the stairs and find a little girl standing there, staring. She’s wearing a white, frilly dress; she looks like a flower girl. She’s quiet, quieter than me.

  We watch each other for an uncomfortably long time. I’m anticipating her scream. Any second, adults will rush down the steps.

  Then, to my great relief, she silently turns and walks up the steps, vanishing back into the shadows. Probably, she’ll tell people about the naked ghost in the cellar. I’ll be part of the folklore. It’s a living.

  How I Use the Bathroom. I’m not always hiding in the attic or under floorboards. Thirteen-thousand square feet, occupied by two people, means a lot of the house never gets looked at on a daily basis. Eric and Darcy have three housekeepers and a crew of landscapers, but none live onsite. Eric’s an ER surgeon; he works insane shifts at Charlotte General. Darcy’s a corporate acquisitions attorney and is out of town half the time. If they did get a puppy, they’d probably hire someone to watch after it.

  Once the cleaning crew finishes their daily duties, I’m free to climb up from the cellar and roam around the main part of the house. I use the bathroom in the small toilet near the library. Since it’s Tuesday, I shower. I stopped shaving when I moved in. A pale, wild-haired man stares back at me from the mirror. I’m thin as Gandhi. My body has become a grand collection of calluses. It’s a yogi’s body, the body of a holy man, limber and tough and purposeful. What that purpose may be eludes me.