Pyramid and Motorcycle

A chapter of something

When the brass horn tore open the day’s dust hanging over the wind polished stone roads and the crashing cymbals started even the deaf bitch curled up in the ditch and the marching band goose stepped across the bridge into town and fireworks sneezed gold dust upon the evening firmament in its last fuchsia, the resting rose from their beds and suppering folks put down their forks and knives and chopsticks and kids pulled out their thumbs from their wet mouths. They put on their jackets and stepped out the door and arched their necks like fledglings calling for feed and they scanned the skyline for the colorful banners atop the big tent thwapping somewhere must be near. Old people shuffled their feet. Faster. Young people ran falling forward out of their shoes, chins extended with grins like cleaved open watermelons – to get the front row seats – shouting The circus is here! The circus is here! Suppers were left on the tables and some doors were forgotten to be closed such was the fever of haste beset the masses. Cats and dogs and other animals of the town had a feast, strolled the streets, and smelled the air for vibrations of some hithertofore unimagined event. Yes, people consumed circus like the show was dipped in opium milk. Earth tremors pulsed the big tent’s pharynx folding towns and villages into its rotund shape. Twin snakes guzzling each other’s tails. Faster. Funny times.

Under the heaven people in time crawled around the world like ants on an orange and fucked each other and busied themselves and lassoed the continents and bound them in chains and pulled them together. In this togetherness, a new gravity sketched a vortex of orbits for the wandering circuses to meet. A great tournament fell into place. Many innovations were born in the trade of ideas and clashes of one-upmanship. Clever craftsmen built sauntering iron hippopotami and flying motorcycles and magic potatoes that flowered in blooms of singular instantaneous spectaculation. Perfumes that smelled of mustard, watering cans that poured fire, masks that restored your face, and radio. Fans around the world, everyone’s imagination was captured by the novelties and progress. Streets convulsed in laughter that spilled over into the fields into the winds out into sea.

Introducing our hero who was born after the tournament had settled. A youngling of sunny disposition but few words. He carried a smile that thawed the winter frost. His boyhood was like most others of his peers. Slingshots and pebbles, bamboo fishing poles and wire fishing hooks, terrorizing turtles and mud fish, collecting animal bones and peeing real far. There were still regional circus shows roaming, performing, and sometimes he picked up stale old popcorn kernels on the fields where the circuses had been months and years before and he smelled them and in that hint of rancid butter he knew something was amiss. Leaning against a short mud wall inside which was a naked yard and a willow tree and a small square wooden table and thick oiled logs as stools on which sat men who knew about the great tournament and men who served in the regional troupes trading stories of witnessed marvels and courageous performers over high proof clear alcohol and a spit-roasted suckling piglet, our hero found the content that he knew not had existed yet had already itched for. Oh how he would love to hear the bright resonance of the brass horn, the crashing cymbals, smell the acrid sulfur of the fireworks, sit on his sweaty hands over his anxious ankles learning forward on the bleacher to take all in what wasn’t there for him. Then the universe winked.

In our hero’s teenage years, a second world circus tournament. Even more circus troupes participating than the first and more jaw dropping performances. Again people flocked to the big tents that had now grown to look over hills and drink rivers dry. In their wake were left women and girls who tee-heed to themselves, pupils dilated, like satiated dimwits in post-coital euphoria and old people who muted themselves and turned into stone. Men of course went with the circus troupes.

Our hero could hardly focus in school. Why would a fish do math when there’s water? A faint trace of sulfur tickled his nose hair and out the window of the school which was a plain house made from stacked clay and straw he leapt with a trail of his teacher’s cursings still biting the end of a twine he used for a belt. He waded through streams capillaric to the land and hopped over hills full of oak and whistled in endless fields of stalks of corn taller than his own self following the sulfur’s elusive tail.

It was enormous. He saw it two hills away. Eagles flew only by its hips and shepherds couldn’t circle its base herding for a week in lamb season. It was a geographical feature of a tent. Pear shade canvas with flags flying a violent sun broadcasting its red on snow white silk. It was the famous Imperial Japanese Circus Show. He straightened himself, garment and spirit, in the empty black mud field in front of the monstrosity. Faint barks from dogs he couldn’t see. Otherwise silence. No fellow travelers. He walked to and paid copper coins by the entrance flap.

The belly of the beast was another world entire. Search lights and gas lamps and lanterns illuminated smaller tents within, some grounded, some scaffolded to incredible heights, others hung by cables whose other ends were untraceable in the abyss above, and ones which our hero bewildered had to confess against all his disbelief simply levitated. Fellow enjoyers of the show and performers alike hurried between places. Shadows wove shapes and forms like the hands of a mute. Noises of human, animal, machine, and from other incalculable origins were a flood that pushed and pulled. He picked up a popcorn on the floor and took a whiff. Fresh butter. He walked into a tent.

They were short swordsmen who wielded incredible steel that shone a chilling silver glare. Effigies of men who he thought looked like him were sliced through as if they were made of silk tofu. In another tent, there was a special act run by a unit of medicine men. They invited spectators to the stage and involved them in different performances. One of his favorites was when selected children drank the medicine men’s elixir and they lay on a table and the medicine men vivisected them and the whole time the children giggled like Cupid being tickled. Another crowd pleaser was when the medicine men introduced these curious circus performers who glowed red polka-dots on their naked skin. Both male and female audiences bent over on the stage and the glowing performers stepped to their posterior and after a while the lucky chosen ones started glowing red polka-dots too. Standing ovations. What else? He saw flying motorcycles drop boxes of chicken dinners. People below, in manners of worship, raised their hands above their heads to catch them. He didn’t get any. He wasn’t hungry. Instead he turned around and left.

What was a young man to do but join the circus himself? After seeing what he had seen? Standing in the doorframe with his pack on the shoulder, our hero made the announcement to his father and his mother faceless and shapeless in the shadow of the house. That he was going to leave. They didn’t say a word.

At the local recruitment office of the People’s Liberation Circus, the man with the ledger asked only one question to each of a long line of young men that snaked out the door into the courtyard all eagerly waiting: For what reason do you wish to join the circus? Our hero thought awhile and answered honestly that his soul had been occupied since he saw the Imperial Japanese Circus Show and that he dreamt of performing to the Japs himself. Return every ounce of happiness he had received in the very same art they showed him. Better art. Even more wonder, even more joy. The recruitment man looked up from his register with a toothy smile and said: Very good! Right there in his office, the recruitment man in all his excitement taught our hero and all the boys waiting the song they would all sing.

大刀向鬼子们的头上砍去!

杀！杀！杀!

Which loosely translates to:

Big kisses, we plant them on the Japanese cheeks!

Love! Love! Love!

And the whole recruitment office was filled with a warm golden glow. Every young man dabbed away with their shirt sleeves their tears and recited in their hearts those very lyrics, so they wouldn’t forget this feeling.

The first time our hero saw a human pyramid he didn’t exhale for one minute and thirty-seven seconds nor did he blink. It was only when his retina burned with black spots that he un-paused again and he swore that then the pyramid breathed with him. Callused black soles stepped on noses and ears and hair. Fingers hooked in mouths and nostrils. Shirts were torn. Pants were pulled off showing buttocks pale like moon light. People kept falling and they swam their arms as they dropped and they disappeared in the bodies at the base. No matter. Someone else took their spots climbing others’ flesh. The stench of ammonia from the sweat alone fell the birds that coursed through the airspace above. The pyramid squirmed, a most primitive thing made from dirty little high beings. He saw that the boys in the base layers weren’t moving of their own accord anymore and morphed into waves. He saw eyes in that motion staring back at him, heads pressed between ribcages and limbs and crotches. Some of them were upside down. They just lay on top of each other and let the weight above them construct itself. Those yellow eyes, brown eyes, black eyes. They told him in their cloudiness that this was it.

That was the main act they had at the time. The only act really. One that didn’t require much skill or investment or technology for the newly founded People’s Liberation Circus who lacked everything but boys. Pile boys on top of each other, a lot of them, and it’s amazing. He rolled up his sleeves and took off his shoes. He walked to the pyramid with his hands stretched in front of him as if walking into a moonless night, newly blind. He stepped on an elbow and gripped a collar and he climbed. He jammed his arms into the structure and let it swallow him whole. The pyramid traveled to places in the country and met with the Imperial Japanese Circus Show many a times. Towering over the swordsmen and medicine men and looking the flying motorcycles right in the headlights. He let his fellow boys step on his stomach and squeeze toward the top. He bore the weight and he listened to the mound groan and he knew that that sound was very very old. It was a start.

Meanwhile other conferences of the tournament were unfolding hotly as well. There were spectacular performances all over the Eastern and Western front of the European theatre and North Africa. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Circus built the largest human pyramid ever. It was said their tent didn’t have a top for the height of the pyramid only kept growing. It was said at the top of that pyramid men’s ankles needed to be secured by the men below or else they floated out into space and the freezing starlight gave many frostbites. The Wehrmacht Zirkus, known for its incredible fashion and precise engineering, elevated the vision of the circus arts through the breeding of the Übermensch – blond hair, blue eyes, tall, athletic, straight-nosed, square-jawed, intellectually peerless specimens. They strode the runways in shiny leather boots and tailored suits solemn and somber and tight and women wanted them and men wanted to be them. The hook-nosed people, the dark-haired, and travelling men and women and children were sent to transformation camps where they were rehabilitated of their diseases and remodeled in higher moral hygiene. Of course. It made sense. The British Liberation Circus had a hell of a ringmaster who was a stubborn drunk and a prophet who preferred the company of men and would become a eunuch in the near future. The prophet dreamt of a machine… The tournament was a tight race. Any troupe could clinch the top spot at any moment but in the end it was the circus from America who joined the tournament late that erased all controversy and took home the unanimous victory. Their final act was only ever performed twice. In two cities in Japan. With flying motorcycles cruising high, they planted two flowers that grew to the size of the entire municipality in the blink of an eye and the flowers bore a sun each and blossomed into such brilliance that the local citizens thought God had revealed himself and embraced them with his holy presence. Some didn’t know it was part of the circus act until the tournament was over. Some don’t yet.

Post the second world tournament, People’s Liberation Circus announced its own flying motorcycle program. All the boys wanted to drive a flying motorcycle. Something about air and flying was magnetic to their hearts and evoked a different type of beat. He was chosen because eventually they found out he graduated middle school while few of the boys could read the headline of a newspaper at all. To drive a flying motorcycle, one needed good eyesight. But all the country boys had great eyes, spotting wild hares in the grass waves of the plains and finding earth-colored snakes coiled on branch-colored branches. It was a thousand-way tie in the eye-chart test. All aces. Afterwards, while waiting for the squad leaders to confer amongst themselves, they stood around on the packed mud training yard squeezing their eyes open and wide and engaged in a spontaneous staring contest in attempt to prove that they had the superior eyes. Small pillars, erect, faintly symbolic, rotating without any meaningful direction, without sound but the light shuffling of bare feet and shoes on dry yellow earth. Our hero one of them not unlike any other but he knew how to write down his own name which was pretty exceptional to the squad leaders.

The flying motorcycle squad had its own canteen while others ate squatting wherever was shady. Squad trainees had bread for every meal and sometimes meat and sometimes even milk. Squad trainees had new uniforms and others washed and re-washed and mended their rags. The motorcycles were old models donated by the Workers and Peasants’ Red Circus. Rusty, clunky, some considerable mileage on all of them. Parked in a line on the runway blasted by the noon sun, the motorcycles looked small and wilted, nothing like the American motorcycles they had heard rumors of. Ducks to Swans. Mules to horses. The trainer straddling onto one of them in a back kick of a leg said that this was a good thing. You want old reliable who know the job and have done the job, he said. And the trainer was so cool the way he yanked tight the chin strap of his leather helmet and snapped on his goggles and kicked up the stand and revved the engine. The roar frightened the fresh sphincters present. Off the trainer went. More exciting than anything they had seen move and the leather helmet and leather jacket blended into one brown spot on the far end of the runway and the brown spot became a bird and glided up above the inky canopy of the pine woods beyond.

His was one whose paint had mostly peeled. Black leather seat cracked and black rubber grip half-melted. Everything was too hot and the reek of the fuel was so penetrating he smelled it with the back of his eyes. He couldn’t tell if his hands and knees shook or if it was simply the power of the engine stuttered his whole world. Calm only came after a certain altitude. It was the clouds and the powdery blue sky, a place far from what went on below, and a for a moment he put aside the fear and anxiety of still having to land the damn old thing. Bliss.

But being a flying motorcyclist wasn’t just about cruising. The trick that was to be the closer of their act was a cartwheel – a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree upturn that would see the driver nose to the sky, upside down, ass to the sky, and then back to the original orientation again. Today, the maneuver is called a loop but it was a near insurmountable thing then for the grassroots boys whose only qualifications for the job were guts and terrifying ignorance. The immense centrifugal force pulled the blood from the brain and torso to one’s feet. His confrontation with it was conclusive and total. First, his feet swelled in the boots and were sluggish to move. Then his hands turned pale then blue and invisible needles pricked his fingers. He tightened his grip and kept on and, in the air, mid-flip, the cobalt blue was sucked out of the sky and the grey of its true material was revealed and before he had time to consider its significance, two black tides rolled in from the edges of the stratosphere and closed in fast and silent. His last conscious thought was he had to prevent the two tides from meeting and before he knew why or how, the world upside down and shifting outside his motorcycle goggles faded to black. The whoosh of the winds and the rumble of the old machine went mute. He fell out of the sky.

He met a girl on the circus basketball team with cleanly chopped short straight hair that hung like a curtain above her shoulders. She was known for her lay ups, how her big strides covered distance on the court as if she skated on ice. Either that or it was her wielding dual abaci, one in each hand, holding down the register at the department store that stole our hero’s heart. Her books were always clean and accurate. He bought a pair of socks at her register that he didn’t need and he couldn’t come up with a single word to say to her. The entire transaction proceeded in silence and concluded with a nod from him. She told the rest of the line to study our hero in his orderliness and efficiency. As he turned and left out the door, his whole back was sweaty and the scalp on the back of his head clenched tight.

He didn’t have the words so he drew pictures but he wasn’t good at drawing either. The tiger on the paper didn’t look intimidating or fierce, with a squarish head that was too big that looked like a pillow or a loaf of bread. The chicken didn’t have much meat on its bird-body and its rounded feathers lacked luster. The flying motorcycles he drew were at odds with the laws of aerodynamics. He signed his name at the corners of the papers and sent the drawings to her anyway and she laughed and kept them in a metal tray. She watered the drawings daily and placed the metal tray by the windowsill for sunlight. Before long, the tiger hopped off the page with the same pillow-ish square head. It fell forward often, nose-dove, due to the uneven distribution of its bodyweight. A king of the jungle looking much like an orange house cat. Then the malnourished chicken flapped its dull wings and became a buddy to the tiger. The motorcycle was sold for parts. The wheel didn’t even roll straight. But all of this was good. Surely it meant something. She told him the day he drew an eagle that looked just right surely would be the day he takes off himself like the beast and soars.

A regional tournament kicked off. It took place in the Korean Peninsula. Participating were the Workers and Peasants’ Red Circus, the United States Circus, the Korean People’s Circus representing North Korea, the Republic of Korea Circus representing South Korea, the People’s Liberation Circus, and a small United Nations Command Circus. Drive his flying motorcycle in and out and between different-colored mountainous tents above cheers in different tongues? Perform tricks and cruise above eager fans’ outstretched hands and drop gifts and treats? It is a special responsibility to be a bestower to the people, of benevolence, of good will. Far from the pyramid days. How could he not be motivated?

The first flying motorcycle squad was sent without him. Then a second team. Many didn’t return. Some who returned from the first trip went a second time and were never heard from again. He cursed at the cartwheel. He kicked the back tire. He snapped off the mirror and chucked it afar only to pick it up and tape it back on again later. He tried anything. He chewed his tongue attacking the cartwheel but he still drifted to sleep in that pain. He put the tiger and the chicken inside his leather jacket thinking their clawing and pecking would keep him awake in the great upside down. But the animals passed out too and snored funky tunes. So close yet so far.

He stole his way to the runway deep into a cloudy night. No moon light, no sea of stars so all is dark in every direction so even if, even when, the centrifugal force drained the blood from his eyes and he temporarily went blind, it would be as if he didn’t and he just needed to stay stiff and not let loose a muscle and the old motorcycle would pull him to where his nose was pointed. But to go for a cartwheel blind? He stood by his motorcycle and waited, thinking he would receive courage from something somewhere somehow. He found his lips moved. A small sound came out his mouth.

大刀向鬼子们的头上砍去!

杀! 杀! 杀!

See, the truth of a song is the weight of the pieces of themselves they leave in there by all who sing it. Even though the Japanese Imperial Circus Show was no more, he remembered the long line of boys that snaked out of the recruitment office and how their jitter was his and the same. He remembered the pyramid. The grinding of it. The fumes. He turned the key on his motorcycle and he turned off the sole yellow headlight. He sang the words, taking off, gaining speed, attacking the angles. He wouldn’t stop singing though the force compressed his lungs and the words spilled out only through the corners of his mouth and the words collapsed immediately into the behind. At the cartwheel itself, he sang 杀！杀！杀! and this time, his eyes didn’t go blind and he didn’t lose consciousness. He saw himself strain and stretch but maintain shape in that aerial circular motion and in the whoosh of the wind and the buzz of the old Soviet bike and the swelling of the feet and the stinging of the fingers and his singing he could no longer himself hear, the world righted itself again in its place in all its darkness and the quiet of the night. What he didn’t know, nor would he ever understand, was the force and love with which he sang those words briefly closed and strained his glottis in the larynx which elevated the blood pressure in his chest cavity that in turn pumped blood back into his brain. Hooking, a foundational technique as modern performers know it and practice. Something else then.

Upon returning, he drew that eagle. A thing with jagged edges and spread wings and long sharp claws. It was a proper eagle like the basketball girl, now his wife, predicted. He drew an eye socket on the beautiful beast but left out the eyeball. He promised himself he would fill it in when he returned from the Korean Peninsula, when he has seen what an eagle sees.

They had his new uniform fitted. Gear of an official performing member of the flying motorcycle squad. A stiff short brim cap with a red star and wings emblem on the front of the crown. Leather jacket. Leather helmet. A thick cotton and cloth jumper that had all fur pant legs below the knees. Heavy boots. He had his pictures taken in the new garments, beaming with pride. He scorched the camera with that smile that thawed winter frost. He raised an arm and leveled his fingers at a place above his head, some gesture of declaration or taunt whose meaning is all but lost to conjecture.

Again he stood in the door, a scene of a new chapter, his pack by his feet. Ready to go. Eager to leave. The universe winked. He got news that the competition was over. It was declared a draw between all parties as prolonged performances and endless encores were nowhere close engendering a victor. A messy stalemate. Our hero fell quiet again. Slumped his shoulders.

So standing in that doorframe, in his handsome new uniform, basketball girl holding his one arm and carrying in her other arm a little wet baby, the tiger the chicken by his feet, his uniformed photographs in the side pockets of his pack, our hero was lost. He looked to the skyline and said to nobody in particular: What now?

When they watered the eagle, it fluttered off the page and flew away out the window and didn’t return after their long calling. No one knows where it flew to. It didn’t have eyes.