I peek behind the curtain at the audience from a southern town in the Up-Mountains, a quiet place used to the comings and goings of Gomorrah but no less delighted with our visits every few years. They wear simple clothes and, due to the harsh mountain winter, coats buttoned all the way up from their knees to their necks. They chatter about the last time they visited Gomorrah and other acts they’ve seen earlier tonight, like the fire-juggler who wears all black or the swan dragon at the Menagerie.
I search the front row for Nicoleta and then spot her at the end. She wears her light brown hair down and wavy, and she laughs and whispers into the ear of her date, a gorgeous girl of mixed background, a charming smile and delicate, feminine features. Whatever joke Nicoleta told must have been crude, as several visitors around them turn to glare, which only makes the pair laugh harder. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Nicoleta grin like that.
The patrons have no reason to expect a young woman in such casual clothing to be the Festival’s proprietor.
On the opposite side of the backstage stands Hawk with her fiddle and Unu and Du with their drums. Beside them, dressed in scarlet satin robes, is Luca. He nods at me, my cue to raise the curtain.
The music plays. The curtain rises. And Luca struts onto the stage, his cloak swinging behind him. The silver piercing he usually wears in his nose has been replaced by a deep amethyst for the show. “Welcome to the Gomorrah Festival’s famous Freak Show,” he says in his practiced performance voice, meant to project across the tent. “I’m Luca, the show’s manager, and I’d advise anyone of faint constitution, or those who’ve recently filled their stomachs with treats, to leave now. The show is filled with horrors, and there’s no need to add to them by overturning your food in the second row.”
He pauses to let the music fill the tent. Hawk, in addition to playing her fiddle, sings an eerie aria. The audience members watch the stage with apprehension and curiosity, exactly the way Luca wants them.
“And now, without further ado, let the show...begin!”
Thump. Thump.
“I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine,” Luca says. He sits on the edge of the stage and casually crosses his legs, as if completely unconcerned by the near-earthquake thundering behind him. He smiles the dimpled smile that I’ve pined over agonizingly for the past six months. “He comes from the Forest of Ruins. A rare half man, half tree.”
Tree emerges on the stage, and most of the audience leans back in their seats. Tree glances at me for a moment, and I smile at him as if to say, Go on, you’re doing magnificently. He waves at the audience without me needing to control him. He even grins.
“Wonderful, isn’t he?” Luca says. “You’ll notice that, even in winter, his leaves are still a vibrant green. Could I have a volunteer to come onstage, then?”
No one raises their hands. No one ever does.
Luca jumps off the stage. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You, there.” He points at a frumpy woman with his walking stick. “You look like you could do with some flowers.”
She shakes her head vehemently.
“Nonsense.” He takes her hand. “I simply won’t allow it. My friend Tree will be upset, as he would very much like to present you with a flower.” He hoists her up and leads her onstage. She trembles from the attention and more so the closer she walks toward Tree. Luca points his walking stick up toward Tree’s head, at his impressive mess of branches and leaves. “There, see, there are flowers. Would you like to pick one?”
The audience cheers. Encouraged by their enthusiasm, the woman nods. She reaches up and plucks off a pink blossom from one of Tree’s branches.
Adding more participation to the show was Luca’s doing. It’s been one of his better ideas. His other idea involved having his old assistant pretend to run up to the stage to kill him, only for him to miraculously come back to life, but that had our audience screaming and running out of the tent. Now Luca remains alive throughout the entire performance.
“Thank you, Tree,” Luca says. “And now, I’d like to introduce my next friend, who I assure you is gentler than he looks. Crown, would you come out and greet our cheerful audience?”
While Tree joins me backstage, Crown walks out, leaning against his cane. He carries two heavy wooden boards with his other hand.
“You were great,” I whisper to Tree, who smiles. I sit on the ground at his feet, looking up at the shade of his leaves and recalling a time when he could pick me up and swing me around. When it was only me and Tree. “You’re still my bud, you know.”
He picks off a flower and hands it to me. I slip it behind my ear.
“Now, I’m looking for two volunteers this time,” Luca says. He chooses two small boys sitting near the back, who look more than pleased to have been chosen. “Each of you, take a board. This one is thicker, you see. Knock on them. Hit them. They’re quite solid, aren’t they?”
“What’s he gonna do with them?” the one boy says.
“Crown, tell them, what are you going to do with them?”
In his feeble, elderly voice, Crown says, “I’m going to punch straight through them.” I love that line.
The first boy, with the thinner board, holds it out for Crown. Crown takes off his glove, revealing his long fingernails, and slices clean and straight through the board. The boy gapes and shows the hole to the audience.
Crown moves on to the second, heavier board and does the same. The audience claps.
“That’s wicked,” the first boy says, and Crown winks at him.
“My next friend goes by the name of Hawk because...well, you’ll see why.” Luca peers backstage. “Hmm, we seem to have misplaced her. Where—”
Hawk screeches from outside the tent and then flies in through the visitors’ entrance behind the audience, swooping onto the stage. The audience shrieks and then chuckles nervously and straightens their hats once they see her, a young girl no more than fourteen.
“Hawk is a very talented fiddle player,” Luca says, “but her greatest virtue is her singing voice. So we’re going to have her sing for you.”
While Hawk sets up her act, I slide into the dressing room, where Kahina sits, as she does during all our shows now that her snaking sickness has finally cleared. She brings baskets of treats.
I pop a licorice cherry into my mouth. “He’s improving.”
“He’s been delightful,” she says. “And did you see Nicoleta’s date? I ran into them outside. A really sweet girl, she seems like.”
Hawk clears her throat and begins her song. It’s a sad one, the same she sang at Blister’s funeral, which serves as a memorial during our show for Blister, Gill and Venera. Her lyrics speak of friends who have gone for the night but will return in the morning, and every time, I need to fight back my urge to cry. Until I see Luca onstage, with Hawk, Tree, Crown and Unu and Du watching from backstage, and I’m reminded of the family that I still have here with me. It’s what Kahina has often told me to do.
I return to my spot behind the curtain just as Hawk makes her exit. Luca sits again in the center of the stage, dangling his legs off the edge. “How am I doing as the manager?” he asks. “I’m rather new. The previous manager is on to bigger and brighter things.”
The audience claps for him, and Nicoleta laughs from the front row.
“I used to work in this other show. People paid to try to kill me. You can imagine why I was eager for a new position.”
This only gets a few laughs, one being from Luca. He’s the only one who finds his morbid jokes amusing.
“My next friends come in a pair. They actually believe they’re funnier than I am,” he says, straightening his cloak. “But I’ll let you decide for yourselves.” He stands up in an almost-jump. “Unu, Du, I think the audience could use some lightening up.”
Unu and Du step onto the stage to begin their new comedy routine, which has proven much more popular than their previous dancing one. They tell their jokes in a rhythm to match their drumbeats.
Luca steps off the stage for a few moments and stands beside me. “How am I doing?” he asks. He grabs a cup of water and chugs it.
“You’re marvelous,” I say and kiss his cheek. “You really are quite the performer.”
“I still think we could have a dancing routine. Once, you know, you obviously practice up a bit—”
“Hey, I’m a fantastic dancer,” I say, elbowing him in the ribs.
“You’re terrible. But it’s all right,” he says. Behind us, the audience laughs at one of Unu’s jokes. Most of their punchlines involve insulting each other. Shockingly, their routine was not difficult for them to come up with.
“I thought, after this, we could go watch the fireworks,” he says. “All of us. You, me, the whole lot.”
“First you join our show, and now you’re planning family outings,” I tease.
“But it will have to be fast. The Leather Viper wants to have tea again. He claims he has a juicy secret about the ex-lover of the Cougar that I’d love to hear—”
“Tell Ed I’d love to go, but I promised Nicoleta I’d meet her new girlfriend.” Over the past few months, Luca has been steadily introducing me to more and more people in Gomorrah, particularly in the Downhill. Gomorrah is my home, and I should know more people in it. It’s nice to wave at the man who provides my family with produce or to stop for a conversation with the palm-reader across the path.
“I heard she’s a charm-worker with a successful shop in the Downhill—”
“She doesn’t look like she’d be from the Downhill.”
“We all know Nicoleta prefers a bit of the wild side when it comes to her romantic interests.”
The audience claps as Unu and Du’s act ends. The second they are offstage, they resume their bickering. Their latest argument is about a lucky coin they recently commissioned—the Illusionist. The attack stats are rather pitiful, but the defense leaves little to be desired. And, as the only one of its kind in existence, it’s a collector’s piece. They forgot to ask for a second, so they keep debating about who it belongs to.
Luca quickly breaks apart from me and returns to the stage. “And now, for the final act, I’d like to introduce you to the Girl Who Sees Without Eyes.”
I make my grand entrance, wearing my floor-length black cloak, red sequined mask and brilliantly violet lipstick.
“How do we know she doesn’t have eyes if we can’t see under the mask?” a woman in the front row asks haughtily. “She should take it off.”
“Honestly, you should at least take her to dinner first,” Luca scoffs.
I hold my breath. This isn’t the first time the audience has asked, and I’ve done it before. But I will freely admit that it still scares me.
I untie the ribbon in the back, let the mask slip off and shove it in my pocket.
The audience gasps, and then the room goes quiet. My back sweats a little. I remind myself that my face isn’t a deformity. It’s magic. I am magic.
“Where would we like to go today?” Luca asks the audience. “A rainforest? To the stars?”
Before he can make another suggestion, I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “No, I have something special planned. Tonight, I’m going to take all of you on a tour though Gomorrah.” The planning part is a lie. I never plan out my routines. But I did have the idea ten minutes ago, which, to my mind, counts as preparing.
The audience quiets, waiting for my act to begin.
The room around us changes to the field just outside Skull Gate. It’s nighttime, and the black glittering eyes of the skull twinkle in the starlight. Its mouth gapes open wide, and we enter in a rush through the dark tunnel, soaring past the ticket booth and into Gomorrah. Vivid colors of pink, purple, red and black greet us all around, from the flags that wave above the tents to the costumes of the performers around us—jugglers, beast-tamers, shadow-workers. The night sky is invisible, cloaked by the cloud of smoke that always covers Gomorrah like a mist. But it’s a mist that smells of licorice and cigars, spiced cider and rum. We speed and spiral around the Uphill, past the Menagerie tent, where the roars of a dragon thunder over the festivities, past the caravans of jewelers and fortune-workers, past the fence of spikes and bones separating the Uphill from the Downhill.
In my mental sweep of Gomorrah, I pass the tents and caravans of people I now know. The owner of the Menagerie. Kahina. The Leather Viper. Yelema. Zhihao. But to the visitors, they are merely nameless silhouettes in the ever-present smoke. Before I met Luca, that’s what they were to me. I felt like an outsider in Gomorrah, never a participant.
I could show the audience this part of Gomorrah, but I know they’re not here to learn about the secret lives of orphans and businessmen, prettywomen and charm-workers. They’re not here to learn about what happens backstage. My Gomorrah is a home. Their Gomorrah is a show.
The Festival comes alive in a rush of opium smoke, the blinking lights of dancers, the smell of pastries that stick to your fingers, the thundering of the fireworks. We spin around Gomorrah as if on a carousel, going faster and faster until even I am dizzy, and the world has become a kaleidoscope of purple, pink, red and black.
But soon the colors fade, because dawn is drawing closer, and the light of the sun peeks through the smoke shrouding Gomorrah. The fortune-workers pack away their spirit boards. The fire-workers change out of their glittering costumes. Gomorrah children run home with leftover sweets in their hands, waving to their neighbors and any remaining visitors. The Festival quiets as morning arrives, settling into bed, still windswept with the feeling of desire and anticipation for the next night, when Skull Gate will open once more.
* * * * *