The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(82)
There are five big caged lights hanging from the tent’s center poles that emit a soft buzz against the storm-dark. The wet earth smell has, for a moment, overtaken the funnel cake and corn dog grease that hangs in the air all day.
A wrong wrist twitch and the sword inside might pierce my lungs. Might nick my heart. I feel some relief as I stop imagining the pain of others and, instead, live inside my own potential for catastrophe. As I look for the divine.
“Think of the blade going down your throat like it’s a big stiff prick,” Red, who swallows swords in the inside show, tells me. He can slide twelve down his throat at once. He holds seven Guinness World Records. It says so on his van.
“And the gag reflex, think of that as just the pubic hairs tickling your throat,” he says, winking. Tommy has folded a coat hanger into a sword for practice, which he made by straightening a wire hanger all the way out, doubling it, then twisting a handle. Mimicking him, I lick both sides and tilt my head back, let the metal rest on my tongue. I choose a little danger.
Anything can happen to anyone. Last season, the knife thrower flung his blade at the board and it landed in his longtime partner’s thigh. She was taken to the hospital for stitches, but thirty minutes later, when their act came around again and she was still gone, another cast member had to go stand on the board. She had to know how to go stand on the board as if she didn’t know how blood looks falling down the angles of fishnets. Had to know how to immediately erase memory. That’s the predictable kind of crisis in this business, of course, and the predictable victim. But there is a whole carnival of bodies being whipped through space on big machines and sex and meth and the momentary elation of being the object of attention under those bright stage lights, and the truth is, there are potential crises all around at every minute.
I heave. My throat’s gag keeps catching and I cough hard, waiting for the vomit to rise. When I pull the sword out the quarter inch it’s gone down, the metal has flecks of white and clear fluid on the tip.
“Relax your throat,” Chris says.
“Some people are naturals,” Red says. He watches me attempt a few swallows and cough. “Some people aren’t,” he says, staring me down. Rain is falling up from the ground.
I’ve tried and coughed the hanger sword out twenty times. It’s hard to tell how far it’s gotten, but I don’t think I’ve even passed by the first gag sphincter.
“This is the one,” I say. I lick, puff my chest as I lean back and the tip hits my sphincter and I keep shoving it in anyway, and then I feel something rising and pull the sword and double over and retch.
“Half-inch down,” Chris says. I try to high-five him still buckled over, but my hand doesn’t even reach his plane of vision.
*
An hour earlier, state police had come into our tent and ushered the last lingering audience members out.
“When the lightning hits, the last place I want to be is at the top of the big wheel,” one of the cops says. “And the second-to-last place is in this circus tent.”
It’s true that tents get picked up in storms, tossed around like a flap of loose skin and deposited far away. It’s true that there are all those tent stakes holding the thing in place that could also get tossed into the air and land on any person at any time doing anything.
“We’re about to get a real bad one,” the cop says. “I’d put your people somewhere safe,” he says to Chris and Tommy.
“Girls,” Chris says as the cops leave, “I want you all in your bunks. Stay in the trailer. You’ll be safe.”
“Chris—” Sunshine starts, but he holds up his hand to her.
We wait in the trailer for a few minutes, the lightning and thunder getting louder and closer, the men’s voices coming through the slits in the trailer’s walls. They are closing everything up, getting the insides of the tent and backstage storm-ready. I eye my empty trail-mix jug, feeling glad that earlier that day, though I’d started to squat over it beside my bunk to pee, I’d decided to just stop drinking much water in general, and held it.
We stay put. Well, briefly. But then Sunshine goes into the tent where there is more space to make a phone call, and Cassie goes to show Brian the juggler something on her phone, and pretty soon we are all back in the main tent, the rain coming down and the thunder cracking outside.
And that’s when, giving up on his initial directives and finding ways to pass the time, Chris tells me it is time to learn how to swallow swords.
Tommy folded the hanger sword for me a few weeks back, and I’ve practiced based on his instruction, the tips he gave me while we stood out on the bally stage on slow days, but I haven’t practiced much because there’s so little time for anything. Plus, it’s not a thing that’s easy to explain, or read about. It’s something you just keep doing until you get it. I’d think about it during the day, while I was onstage inside one of the illusions. I’d fantasize about being center stage with a sword deep in my body and a wowed audience instead of sitting on a chair as a four-legged woman while they looked at me, annoyed. Doing something that the audience would find so attractive and repulsive both, doing something memorable. But by the time the show closed at night and I’d been performing for sixteen hours, I had no desire to practice new acts.
“Don’t worry, Tess,” Tommy says later, patting my shoulder. “It took me years before I could get the sword all the way down.”