The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [133]
“Yes.”
“How did it happen?”
“It came to me,” she said. “I just knew.”
Wolf wanted to ask what exactly she knew but was afraid of breaking the spell, making it all disappear. They looked at the view.
“Beauty is close to God,” Faith said. “That’s why the beautiful things are so dangerous.”
“Is God dangerous?”
There was a pause. “Yes,” she said.
“I always had my doubts about the guy.” Wolf was dying to hear her laugh.
“God is the end,” Faith said, “there’s nothing else.” She turned to Wolf with a look of wonderment. “All this time, what were we ever searching for?”
“Christ only knows.”
There it was—the laugh. “That’s right,” Faith said. “He does.”
At that point their companions straggled onto the scene, and Wolf had a jealous fear of all that nice food getting eaten up. He and Faith left the wall, and they all sat down to eat.
“Where?” Phoebe asked. “Here? Where we are?” It didn’t seem possible.
“Right by this church.”
“Did it—how did it look?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I remember it bigger. Higher or something. The wall.”
When he’d stuffed himself, Wolf had leaned back against the church and dozed awhile. A stirring woke him. He opened his eyes and saw Faith standing on top of the wall, her back to him. “Get the fuck off there!” he’d shouted, scrambling to his feet.
Faith flinched, startled, then turned to look at Wolf, the wind pounding so hard he was amazed it didn’t shove her right off. “Stop,” she said calmly.
Instead of pulling her down the way he’d planned, Wolf reached up and took Faith’s hand. It was warm.
“I’m thinking,” Faith said. “Just let me think.”
“Think down here.”
“I can’t,” she said, this absolute calm in her voice, to the point where Wolf thought, Hell, am I the one who’s acting weird?
He held her hand, warmed by the strength of her grip. “Let me go,” Faith said.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” she said. “Trust me this time. Everything will be good.”
Wolf clung to her hand, to that strength. He wanted it. Faith towered above him in her torn flapping jeans and lacy blouse like some mythic creature from the prow of a ship. He felt dwarfed. The world was their event, but it had worn him out. Faith gazed at the horizon, then turned back to Wolf. “Now,” she said. “For a minute. Let go.”
Wolf let go of her hand and backed away. The rest of them were propped against the church, watching Faith sort of goggle-eyed. The whole thing felt unreal. Wolf was terrified but riveted, too, in the grip of something bigger than himself. He leaned against the church. Faith stood on the wall. She had such guts. Someday we’ll look back on all this and die laughing, Wolf told himself, die when I admit how goddamn scared I was, and he felt himself reaching for that time, that calm, sweet place out ahead. Faith shielded her eyes from the sun. Wolf kept having the urge to sneak up behind her; the wind was loud enough so that she probably wouldn’t know until he was on her, pulling her down—he thought of that and rejected it time after time because it seemed low, so undignified against the vision of Faith alone on that wall facing the sea and open sky, something pure, almost noble in the sight of her, and Wolf found himself thinking, If I let her do this, the whole craziness will finally be behind us.
“She looked back at me,” he said. “I saw her face and I knew, I jumped up—” But before he could reach her, Faith had spread wide her arms and dived off the wall into the sea.
Wolf’s swallowing made a prickling sound. Phoebe wondered if he might be sick again. She felt sick herself.
“Dove,” he said. “Not a sound, not a shout. We sat there totally stunned—this sense of the inconceivable having happened—and suddenly I thought, Jesus Christ, this is all some fucking joke, she’s hiding behind the wall, there’s some ledge I didn’t see, and I ran over there ready to grab her, but when I looked down I saw her shape on the rocks and I started screaming …”
He fell silent. “So what did you do?” Phoebe said, the words seeming to come from her chest, not her mouth.
“Well,