Circus of the Grand Design Read Online Free Page A

Fabulous Second Century.
     
    At the ticket booth, he handed the man behind the glass a bill. He felt out of place, not yet an official part of the circus, and thought it would be easier to pay than explain his situation. The ticket-taker handed him change.
    "You missed most of it," the ticket-taker said.
    Lewis found his section and walked through the entry into the arena. Scattered clumps of people, at most two hundred, occupied one side only, creating a more theater-like effect than the usual circus in-the-round.
    On the wide oval of the arena floor, a scrawny teenager and a man wearing a black tuxedo shared the beam of a spotlight. Tuxedo man juggled several fluorescent balls. Several feet away from the pair, an overturned fork-lift lay beside a pile of bricks, cinder blocks, and a refrigerator door. The performers seemed oblivious to their dilapidated surroundings.
    "This is too easy!" the juggler said, his voice echoing from the bare concrete. The teenager drew a dagger with a curved blade from a sack at his feet and held it over his head. Someone in the audience gasped when the assistant tossed it to the juggler.
    Lewis walked down the steps to his row. His seat was on the end, directly behind a man and woman with two young boys. His was the only intact seat on the row; the sections to his right and all the way around to the opposite side of the arena had been torn out. He put his bags and the etching in the space next to his seat.
    What kind of circus performed in such a rundown building? He should have called the fire department back in Point Elizabeth. Now he was committed to this...ramshackle operation. What did this imply for his sleeping quarters on the train? Well, it didn't matter. He hadn't signed a contract. If he didn't like what he found he could leave at their next stop.
    "That's more fulsome!" the juggler said, merging the dagger into the flow of objects. "How about something else?" The teenager threw him an elephant tusk, then a French horn. The juggler changed his rhythm, sending one object higher, the next low, then high.
    Amongst the dust and rubble, Lewis caught a pleasant scent, roses and lemons. The juggler began hopping up and down on one foot, keeping the objects moving in the same rhythm as when he had been standing still.
    Best juggler he had ever seen, Lewis thought. He had never much cared for jugglers. A few minutes later, the juggler stopped, dropping the objects one at a time, and Lewis clapped along with everyone else.
    During the applause break, Lewis glanced around the audience. A dark-haired woman in a seat across the aisle was looking at him. Her face seemed familiar. She stared without blinking as though committing him to memory. Her dark eyes and the intensity of her gaze unnerved him. He smiled a weak smile; she kept staring. He tried to stare back, but her eyes overwhelmed him, and he looked away.
    "Thank you very much. Thank you thank you thank you," the juggler said. "And now, if anybody out there has something they would like me to juggle—a shoe, purse, bottle of wine—pitch it down here. There's nothing in the world that I can't juggle and that's a fact."
    The woman's stare crawled over him, probing his cheeks and neck. Act unconcerned, he ordered himself, concentrate on the juggler—and while balancing a bag of popcorn, a small pumpkin, plus a man's boot, the juggler upended the popcorn, showering himself and his assistant with the kernels. The man in front of Lewis let out a howling laugh. A clown rushed out with a broom and the man howled louder. Lewis glanced over at the dark-haired woman; she gazed down at the far end of the arena floor, where a ramp led backstage. He looked too and could see something moving. Though he was relieved to find her staring elsewhere, he was also disappointed, though her concentration on whatever was backstage gave him the chance to observe her. He liked the contrast of her long, dark hair against the green of her jacket. Her hair was tied