The Grand Ballast (2 page)

He went to his knees in
front of Kilroy, his fingers working the brass button of Kilroy’s
fly. Kilroy grasped and released handful after handful of his hair.
The calliope music in Bode’s mind was his guarded secret, like a
sinister plot against the quiet room.

“
It will
be hard without the Haze.” Kilroy ran his fingers lightly over the
crown of Bode’s head.
Cotton
candy,
Bode remembered suddenly.
Should’ve gotten cotton candy.
“The world is cruel.”

“
I know it is,” Bode
whispered, and began to perform.

THE STAR
ATTRACTION

Then.

There had been something
between them once—secret and grand and blooming always.

Bode had worked at a
theater called the Little Comet. He had danced in a nothing-special
sort of revue—hand painted backdrops, minimal lights, and paltry
crowds. Few people watched live theater anymore, unless the
performance contained extreme violence or inventive sex. The world
was chipped and jaded, a ghost town where passion had once lived,
where people had once created and dreamed and wondered. Yet Bode
remained defiantly enamored of being alive.

He credited this to
dancing. A wakefulness spread through his body when he moved. An
energy too big to contain, that spilled out onto his surroundings
and let him mark the world privately, like planting a tree or
throwing a coin into the sea.

He didn’t think about love.
Few people did. Familial love was useful, necessary, but romantic
love impressed no one. The modern world was based on practicality,
not feeling. There was no story people hadn’t tired of, no feeling
that didn’t seem common and uninspired. No car fast enough, no
confection rich enough, no natural wonder stunning enough to lift
the world from its lethargy.

And yet, there were those
who tried.

A mountain range in the
west had white, ashy soil, and cliffs that were jagged and sharp
sided. Years ago a team of artists had climbed for two days, laden
with paint, and then spent a week staining the peaks red so the
range would look like a set of bared, bloodied fangs. People grew
new types of plants, bred new species of animals. Created massive,
frantic works of art. Anything to stave off boredom.

Bode knew the Little Comet
was doomed, but he figured he’d perform there as long as he could.
He danced, and he trained the novice dancers. Some of his students
were wonderfully passionate. They believed the old world with its
appetite for art and the unexpected wasn’t dead, just sleeping.
Bode found solace in the theater, in the company of like-minded
people. But it was difficult, performing night after night for half
empty houses.

He had a solo at the very
end of the revue where his character saw the specter of his dead
wife and swept her into a waltz that took them spiraling across the
empty stage, awash in blue light. The suite that played was
called
Vehemenzi’s
Waltz
. Partway through the dance, the
woman playing the ghost would vanish from the stage, leaving Bode
to waltz alone. It was a complicated solo that required him to
imagine a second set of feet, to feel the weight of an invisible
body in his arms. To believe
in the story
so deeply that self-consciousness couldn’t touch him. But even when
executed near-flawlessly, the solo barely seemed to move its
scraggly audiences.

One night after the solo,
when Bode had stopped in the follow spot, sweat running down his
forehead, he glimpsed a striking face in the second row. Saw it for
only an instant before the lights faded. Pale and serene. Spectral.
The applause was dismal, and yet it seemed to shake the theatre as
Bode walked backstage.

***

The next day, Bode taught a
jazz class. When it let out, he crossed the shabby red carpet of
the lobby and was stopped by a soft, “Excuse me.”

He turned and saw that face
again. White and calm, almost blurry, an illusion of light around
it that was cinematic, entrancing.

The man wore a red fox
hunter’s jacket and black trousers. His blond hair was perfectly
straight and curled under his chin. He clutched a bouquet of purple
roses with sharp-angled petals. Point-petaled roses had been
popular in Bode’s parents’ day—a flower bred to have sharp petals
and blunt thorns.

“
These are for you.” The
man held them out. “I so enjoyed your performance last
night.”

Jessie, the Little Comet’s
director, walked by and told Bode she was ordering Chinese if he
was interested. She didn’t even wait for an answer; just headed on
to her office.

Bode stared at the flowers
a moment before taking them. He looked at the man. “Thank
you.”

“
There’s something very
beautiful about the simplicity of your act.” The man ducked his
head and rubbed his ear, as though embarrassed. “It’s hard to find
performances like that anymore. Spectacles.” He looked up. “We have
spectacles these days. But…what you do is art.”

Bode, who hadn’t known
whether to be insulted when the man called his act simple, now felt
pleasure unfurl and stretch inside him. “Thank you,” he repeated.
“It was good of you to come. We don’t get big crowds.”

The man offered a sliver of
a grin. “Then I think it’s all the more wonderful that you work at
your craft with such passion.”

Bode hadn’t really thought
of it as passion. He just knew that moving to music was better than
not moving to music.

The man held out his hand.
“Kilroy,” he said. “Kilroy Ballast.”

MR. LEIN’S PRIVATE
LUST

In the coffin car, Bode lay
on top of Long John. His arm was wedged between LJ’s body and the
coffin wall. There wasn’t enough room in each coffin for more than
one person, but Bode liked to get in with LJ, and Mr. Lein usually
let him.

LJ was deep in the Haze. He
had one arm slung over Bode, but Bode had put it there,
orchestrating LJ’s illusory companionship the way a child might a
tea party with dolls and stuffed animals.

Bode nestled closer to him
and listened to him snore. Then he made his confession: “I’ve
stopped taking the pills.”

LJ snored again.

“
LJ?”

The train glided through
the night, rattling only when Kilroy desired it to. The cars were
old-fashioned wooden wagons with THE GRAND BALLAST painted in
scrolling gold letters along the sides. To look at the cars, you’d
think you’d stumbled on a circus train from long ago. But the train
glided so smoothly along the tracks that at times you didn’t
believe it was moving at all. If Kilroy wanted to make the wagons
creak and judder, he could do so with a press of a button. He liked
to do that when they passed through a town. He’d turn the sound
effects up too, and the Grand Ballast would hump along, its wheels
whining and groaning.

LJ didn’t do more than
grunt when Bode rolled over onto his back, his elbows pressing into
LJ’s stomach for a moment as he got comfortable. The iron grate
over the coffin made Bode feel like he was in a sewer. The only
moonlight came from a broken slat in the wagon roof. It was over
Kayak’s coffin, so whenever it rained, they were all subjected to a
string of curses from the contortionist.

“
You should stop taking
them too.” Bode said to the ceiling. He twisted his neck as best he
could to get a glimpse of LJ’s skin. LJ was sweet and tall and lean
muscled. Though he was no child, he sometimes looked very young in
sleep. “Yeah? You wanna know what the fuck’s going on, don’t you?
You don’t want him to own you.”

They weren’t owned, not
exactly. Bode knew that much. He listened to LJ’s
heartbeat.

Unlike some of the X-shows,
the Grand Ballast didn’t obtain its performers through coercion or
bribery. Belvedere Farm used prisoners—gave them a choice: rot in
jail or join the show and get paid. And Vice on Ice in the north
promised shelter and three meals a day to the homeless in exchange
for their participation.

Kilroy had gotten a couple
of contracts signed through flattery. But flattery wasn’t the half
of it. Kilroy Ballast described magic, and you saw it. Things
disappeared, changed, collapsed, or grew based on the rise and fall
of his voice, the way his breath hit your ear, the way his hands
moved. Kilroy
believed
the things he said. That was his gift—that in any given
moment, he spoke the truth. That truth might not last, might
shatter like a stale tooth against bone as soon as he was done
speaking. But in the moment, you believed him, and he believed
himself.

The X-shows, Kilroy had
once told Bode,
were
art—art that people knew how to appreciate. People had grown
bored with everything but violence and sex. X-Shows offered both.
Coprophilia, hardcore S&M, erotic mutilation and extreme body
modifications… And there were few enforceable laws about how X-show
directors had to treat their performers.

The freaks Kilroy had
assembled could all do something unique with their bodies. Could
perform a filthy act no one had seen before, or make an old act
seem new again. Kayak could contort his body so that it made you
sick and horny at the same time. He could get his dick in his mouth
and suck himself to a messy orgasm, then hold his cheeks spread and
spit the cum into his asshole. He could feed his limp cock into his
ass and fuck himself with the head while he slowly placed his
ankles behind his neck and interlocked his toes.

The trapeze artists,
Roulette and Sibyata, were splendid. They soared through the air
and wound up in any number of compromising positions on the bars:
Roulette with his face pressed to the soft dark triangle between
Sibyata’s legs; Sibyata straddling his neck upside down, swiping
her tongue across the hollow of his spine. For their finale, they
did a duo roll around on the static bar, and Roulette ended up with
his cock inside Sibyata, and they swung there, fucking twenty feet
in the air, heaving into their headset mics.

The snake charmer, whose
name Bode could never remember, pretended to woo a mechanical
snake—a blunt headed, smooth, steel beast named Harold that Mr.
Lein had built. Lein controlled Harold via remote backstage. The
snake eventually slithered between the snake charmer’s parted
cheeks and entered him, and man and machine writhed
together.

It was Mr. Lein’s job to
clean the snake. Mr. Lein hated his job.

Bode’s talent was deep
throating. He was, Kilroy said, “extraordinary” at it. He could
take any cock down his throat, no matter how long or wide. Two,
three at once. Could suck while his nose was pinched shut—finish
just before he passed out from lack of oxygen.

He shouldn’t have been
Grand Ballast’s star attraction. That honor should have gone to
someone with real talent, like Sibyata or Roulette. But Bode was
more beautiful than the other performers, and in the ring, Bode was
the one Kilroy drew the most attention to.

“
Ladies and
gentlemen…”

Perhaps audiences liked the
simplicity of Bode’s act.

There was one other
performer—Dee, a high-wire walker who didn’t travel with the rest
of them. She had an agent who shuttled her to each performance in
his fancy car. Bode wasn’t sure how she’d arranged that with
Kilroy, since Kilroy liked to keep his performers on a short leash.
And right now, Bode couldn’t remember what Dee looked like. Had a
vague image of lace dresses and wide-brimmed hats. He batted at the
last of the Haze in his mind, but couldn’t get it to clear.
What
did
Dee look
like? Brown curls…lipstick…

He couldn’t get any further
than that.

Bode poked LJ, who smacked
his lips softly in his sleep.

Sometimes LJ pushed through
the Haze. Sometimes he and Bode talked.

Tonight, though, LJ was
out, and Bode began to wish he were in his own coffin.

He dozed, jerking awake
when the train stopped. The door to the coffin car opened. Mr. Lein
stood in the doorway, a bulbous silhouette in the
moonlight.

Mr. Lein was a
slick-foreheaded former tax lawyer who hoarded trash in his private
car. Once a day he took fistfuls of wrappers and cigarette stubs
and stale slabs of sweet roll and greasy fry baskets and cupped
them in his palms, then stepped out onto the deck and scattered
them to the wind.

Mr. Lein walked over to
LJ’s coffin and peered down at Bode. His eyes were

dark and dry looking, like
flattened gobs of tar on a sidewalk. He stood there, his breath
thickening and snagging, until a single drop of sweat fell from his
nose onto Bode’s cheek.

Then he unlocked the grate
over the coffin. “Mr. Ballast wants to see you.”

Bode’s throat still ached,
and his body went rigid at the thought of seeing Kilroy again
tonight. “Fuck him and what he w—”

Mr. Lein grabbed his arm
and hauled. “Get up.”

“
Tell him
to fuck himself. Tell him I’m not his
thing
.”
Fuck
felt foul coming out of his
mouth, strung on his lips like vomit.