The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(81)
The background’s tinge of red is just enough to bring the color out on her cheeks and a rose flush for the lips, enough to remind us with just a glimpse of her pink, pink tongue that she is vibrantly alive.
There is wind in her hair, that wild silver mane, raised to the heavens and tossed to the side, a Wildewoman out at night on the deck of a ship somewhere in the Atlantic.
And her eyes. They had been the gray slugs of illness for those first months after her stroke. Unrecognizable. And then they’d come back moments here or there, but they seemed to gray over again when stimulus was too overwhelming.
But here, in this photograph, they are two gorgeous moss pools—almost green? could it be?—and glittery and focused, sharp, and she is looking at the camera, at her husband, and she is on her way to somewhere.
I want to feel terror. I do feel terror. I fear that all the bad things I can invent will happen. But then there is this photograph. She is sparked.
And her mouth is open.
In motion.
And there is song coming out.
There are things to say, and there are so many ways to say them.
THE SWORD SWALLOWER
Day 71 of 150
World of Wonders
August 2013
Chris Christ is hunched on a stool with hands as big as truck tires and his two continual streams of black snuff running from the corners of his mouth.
“Tess!” he shouts. “Time to learn!”
He knows every act backward and forward and is a former chimp trainer and knife thrower.
“Stand here,” he says, pointing beside him. His legs are stretched straight and wide from the stool. Maybe this should be a moment of hesitation. I do not hesitate.
He puts one hand on my clavicle and one hand on my forehead. Presses.
“Stand up straight,” he says. “Straighter.”
It’s early evening and there’s a pause in our regular day: a storm. Lightning nearby. It has temporarily shut down the fair.
He pushes my head back until I am staring straight up into the eye of our tent’s center pole.
“You’ve got to be lined up perfectly straight,” he says, “or you’ll never get the sword down.”
*
In India, fakirs, beginning as early as 2000 B.C.E., swallowed swords and walked across hot coals, handled snakes and stepped on broken glass as ascetic tributes to the divine, as assertions of power, connection, and invulnerability. What is a body if you take its power over you away?
In 1912, there was a Dutch fakir, Mirin Dajo, who asked his assistant to pierce a metal foil all the way through his body. It went from the center of his back through his organs and came out the front. He appeared unharmed, creeping up to the edge of the stage for his audience to inspect the foil and skin that the metal came through.
This was not an act of trickery. Dozens of doctors examined him, X-raying his body, asking him to perform various tasks to see if they could spot the illusion. He even jogged around the building. He wanted to prove that his feat was possible only through his ability to withstand the pain.
The doctors decided that he was able to create scar tissue in his body over time by slowly inserting the metal and allowing it to partially heal before inserting it farther. Between performances, he walked around with metal tubes through the holes. A secular stigmata.
Eventually, as the audience’s need for shock increased, he was impaled by three hollow tubes at once, and had his assistant pump water through the tubes so the clear liquid poured out the front of his body, splashing the crowd.
Human fountain! people chanted.
Human fountain!
Human fountain!
After swallowing a sword that nicked his heart, Mirin Dajo died of an aortic rupture in 1946.
*
The way pain works:
When a sharp object presses against our skin, receptors send electrical signals through nerve fibers to the spinal cord and then up to the brain. Some of these fibers run like insulated telephone wires and carry the signals rapidly; others move through weblike neural connections and travel more slowly. The signals move to the brain’s thalamus, which acts as a relay station and directs them to the sensory cortex. The signals are then interpreted by the brain as a sharp pain. The slower impulses, traveling through the weblike neural fibers, become a throbbing ache.
Our brain has total control over our pain signals. When it believes we are in extreme danger, the brain turns the pain signal down so that we are not hindered by relatively minor pains instead of fleeing greater danger.
To train the body not to feel pain, to control thinking about the pain, then, does your brain have to believe itself to be in a constant state of life-threatening crisis?
*
Loose carnie children, dripping rainwater, peek under our tent’s sidewall. It’s pouring. The fair is closed until the storm passes so that nobody gets struck by lightning at the top of the Ferris wheel. Chris has decided it’s time for me to swallow swords. It’s one of the only acts I haven’t yet learned, but we all need to know every act in case anything happens to anyone, the Giant says.
It feels good to put the blade in my mouth.
But good isn’t quite the right word for how it feels to have the metal inside—it isn’t complicated enough. It feels dangerous and important, one of the pinnacle sideshow acts. And it hurts. Something jammed in the throat leads to gagging and the rise of bile. There are three sphincters to pass in the throat and esophagus—a body’s emergency brakes. Do you want to know the secret to all the sideshow acts right now? Ready? Untrain your instincts. Unlearn self-preservation.