The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [33]
Phoebe turned now to Faith’s bulletin board, a frenzy of newspaper clippings curled and brown with age. Though she’d dusted them frequently over the years, she rarely looked at their contents: stories on the Tet Offensive, the March on the Pentagon, the assassinations. Now she had an urge to take the clippings down, protect them from whoever might come in this room when she’d gone. She began unpinning articles. Some crumbled like ash in her hands. The magazine pages were heartier, John F. Kennedy’s shooting in a series of freeze-frames—Jackie holding the President’s head, then crawling in her short skirt over the back of the moving car—each moment so still, so deeply familiar, like images from Phoebe’s own dreams.
She removed a newspaper clipping and held it in her hands. OAKLAND DRAFT PROTEST, A BLOODY ATTACK BY POLICE-CLUBS, TEAR GAS, BOOTS. MANY ARE INJURED. 20 ARRESTED.
The headline was dated Wednesday, October 18, 1967, a picture below it of three cops in riot gear beating two protesters with clubs. One of the victims, a boy, had just been hit and was falling, knees giving way, head bent—he looked as if he were kneeling to pray. Beside him, Faith was lunging—toward the cops (as she claimed)? Away from them? It was hard to say. A billy club was inches away from hitting her head. The picture had darkened with time, so that even the white hexagonal patch on the thigh of Faith’s jeans (her irrefutable proof) had melted into the basic fact of violence, five people jammed together in what had proved to be a historical conflict.
Phoebe remembered the envy she’d felt, gathering her lunch bag and books for third grade while her sister sat at the kitchen table, a washcloth full of ice on her head.
Barry hunched over the newspaper, cupping one hand around the picture as though it were homework he feared they might try to copy. “That’s you?” he kept asking, skeptically.
“Look at the jeans,” Faith said.
She had gotten in the newspaper. Now she wasn’t going to school, she was going to the doctor.
“Can I see it?” Barry asked.
Faith lifted the washcloth from her skull and leaned forward shyly, offering them her head. Barry set down his books and moved near her, Phoebe following right behind, standing on tiptoe to peer at the wound.
“Wow,” Barry said with relish, parting Faith’s hair for a better view. “Sick.”
Phoebe touched the lump on her sister’s head. It was hot, moist. Beneath the bruised skin, she felt a pulse.
“That’s got to be a concussion,” Barry said.
“I hardly felt a thing,” Faith said from under her hair, and Phoebe heard the excitement in her voice. “My teeth knocked together.”
Barry held Faith’s head in his hands. As Phoebe pressed her palm to the wound, she found her eyes wandering again and again to the newspaper picture. Faith was here in this kitchen but she was there, too, in the news. Phoebe stared at the image: protesters and police, the billy club descending toward her sister’s head like a magic wand.
Months later, Faith read aloud to Phoebe about the general strike in Paris—students wandering the streets pulling the hands off public clocks, stopping time, Faith explained, because time literally had stopped, a new phase of history was beginning. “Think about it, Pheeb!” her sister cried, leaping from her chair and dragging it to the kitchen clock, where she snapped off both its hands. Afterward she seemed unsure what to do with them. She put them in her pocket.
That evening, their mother slid a casserole dish in the oven and glanced at the time. “My God,” she said, “what’s happened to our clock?”
It stared from the wall as if stunned. “I was stopping time,” Faith said.
A bubble of laughter broke from Phoebe’s chest. Then they all were laughing, Faith the most.
“If breaking a clock could stop time,” their mother