The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(109)

It was that easy.

For the first two months, I had been a bally girl on the teaser stage, and then a month as an inside performer, mostly box jumper and mic talker, and then, suddenly, miraculously, I am the electric woman.

Electra the Electric Woman is not a good girl. She’s not a girl at all. The electric woman plays dangerously and loves it.

“It’s entirely safe,” Tommy said as he showed me the electric chair the day before I was to perform it. “You won’t feel a thing. We used to have the girl light a cigarette off her body, and you won’t even have to do that. Health nuts these days hate cigarettes.”

I nodded confidently, always working on my fearlessness.

“The only problem with the electric chair,” Tommy said, “is when it’s raining outside.”

“What happens then?” I asked.

“Usually nothing,” he said. “If it’s flooding, we’ll cut the electric chair act. If it’s just raining, there can be some small surprises.”

“Shocks?”

“Little ones. But they don’t feel like you think they would. They’re soft.”

I am standing behind the curtain as Red finishes his blockhead act, thinking through Tommy’s warning, listening to the dim plops of rain hitting the vinyl tent. Red says, “This next act will also take place on this stage, where you see this fine and most unique piece of furniture.” His storytelling is so rehearsed after years on this stage, he almost sounds like a recording. Words blur together. “Every prisoner on every death row affectionately calls this thing Sparky.”

I take the final steps up to the stage as I hear, “Let’s welcome Ms. Electra,” and part the curtain like this moment is my nineteenth rebirth of the day.

Scattered applause.

The vinyl curtain falls closed behind me, and now I stand beside Red, forty or so people looking back and forth between us. Over eight million bolts of lightning strike the earth each day. There’s so much wattage out there. Currents buzz beneath each leaf, inside all the open mouths. Red talks to the crowd and I stand with my hands on my hips, let them try to guess whether I feel any fear, what kind of person I am. The face I put on is confident, this half smile, this squinty-eyed woman who knows what kind of wattage she can withstand.

“Do you know who invented the electric chair?” Red asks the audience. Silence. “Thomas Alva Edison. Do you know how many are still in use? Forty-seven.”

This chair is not one of them. We want them to assume it is.

I know this game. I know they know that I am about to be filled with something that can kill me. Why does this turn them on? I stand with my legs parted.

“I wonder,” I’d asked Tommy when he first showed me the chair, “if there’s any chance the electricity might stay inside you?”

“You won’t become electric,” he said.

The woman who knows how much wattage she can withstand, and then takes more.

What was better, to be safe or to be alight?

*

“Let’s flip the juice,” Red says. I step forward, swinging my hips, wink, take four sideways steps, hinge, and sit down on the electric chair, my bottom on top of my flattened palm. I adjust my angle so I lean back just a bit, casual. Unworried. My palm’s skin against the metal plate beneath me. A direct conduit for the electricity. New audience members duck into the tent and shake their wet umbrellas into the grass. Rub their eyes like cartoons. Red reaches behind the chair with a small drop of clear snot about to leak from the nostril that has just been filled with metal. The rain continues outside.

He flips the switch. I’m electric.

“Now watch Ms. Electra illuminate this bulb with the very tippy top of her little head,” Red says as he brushes the glass across my forehead. My face grows goose bumps as the bulb slides across the skin. It’s as if the electricity demands that each pore stand at attention. Not pain, exactly, but a sharp flick that translates internally instead of externally, a pinch that makes me feel very awake and sit up a little straighter.

I sit down firmer against my hand. I want to be sure each finger and my full flat palm are connecting with the metal plate, soaking up as many electrons the Tesla coil produces as I can so I can conduct it without disruption. I only feel the electricity move through my body—light pinpricks, like when your foot is just waking up after having been asleep—when I don’t get enough. When it can’t easily pass all the way through. And when it rains.

I’ve been performing this act for two weeks. One light summer storm brought sprinkles, and it made the electricity feel alive inside me. Lighting up wasn’t just something I knew was happening by watching the audience’s delighted faces. I felt it move inside me. I knew I was part of something larger, something stronger, something that spans the earth.

Red walks across the stage, a child screams outside, and I put the light bulb I’d been hiding in my shorts into my mouth. Press my tongue against the ceramic insulator, around the base, my teeth clamping around the fuse. Would it be so bad to become all the way electric? I know this may not make sense, but the rules of physics and fantasy were performed away on those stages. Can you hear a story about yourself as an electric woman over and over and not believe the story a little, too?

My tongue connects to the base of the bulb and my mouth fills with static and my teeth shiver in their skin clamps and a small pool of blood, no, water, grows from the side of the tent onto the stage. I hold the bulb in place and Red comes over to touch it with his finger and I light up. He completes the circuit. There’s a glowing miracle between my teeth. I can feel the tickle of something great passing through me. Cameras are out and clicking at us.