The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [34]
Faith took the clock’s hands from her pocket and set them on the counter, useless things, like insect legs. “I love you, Mom,” she said.
Jealous as Phoebe felt, she was transfixed by everything her sister did, dating the Hell’s Angel while she and Wolf were apart, Zane, he was called—everyone appalled because of rumors Faith had repeated about the Angels’ initiation rites, which included killing a man and drinking a woman’s menstrual blood. Then Zane appeared at their house in a leather jacket that groaned and squeaked each time he moved, as if it were alive. He seized a quart of milk from the refrigerator and drank it straight from the carton, gulping in a kind of trance until the carton was empty (which was better, Phoebe argued later, than putting it back in the fridge after he’d already drunk from it). Then he crumpled the carton in his fist and placed it in the garbage pail with surprising gentleness. Their mother forbade Faith ever to see him again, but Faith vowed with a passion quickened by adversity that she would move to Alameda, where Zane lived with five other Hell’s Angels. She was sixteen and a half. Their mother gave in.
Zane’s motorcycle had seemed to Phoebe the pure embodiment of evil, a black-silver machine the Devil himself might ride, snorting, throbbing, belching sour-smelling fumes that wafted in through the windows of the house. In envy and revulsion she watched her sister straddle the seat and peel away, her hands buried in the thick leather of Zane’s jacket. One Saturday, when their mother was at work, Phoebe followed Faith down to the street and begged to be taken along. “Baby, no, Mom’11 murder me alive,” Faith said, but Phoebe persisted, finally aiming her whining appeals at Zane himself, until he ordered them both to shut up and lifted her onto the seat.
By the time they hit the highway, Phoebe was paralyzed with terror—not of crashing so much as the speed itself, which seemed likely to pulverize her. Wind pounded her head, yanking her hair—which she pictured leaving her scalp in tufts—and forcing itself inside her mouth so her cheeks flapped against her teeth. She tried to scream, but the wind shoved her voice back down, gagging her on it. In agony Phoebe clung to Zane’s leather jacket, and even the man inside it, while Faith sheltered her from behind.
On a cliff they finally stopped. Phoebe’s knees had locked, and Faith had to pry her loose from the bike. The world felt still enough to break. Phoebe gaped at her sister, awaiting some acknowledgment of the horror they’d just suffered, but Faith’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. On shaking legs Phoebe followed her sister and Zane to the cliff’s edge, stared down at the glittering sea and promised God she would never, never again ride on a motorcycle. Yet strangely, as the peaceful minutes passed, Phoebe found herself recalling that terrible speed and beginning perversely to long for it, not so much with her brain as with her lungs and stomach and legs—unthinking parts of herself that had adjusted to the machine’s gnashing rhythms and now craved them. Gradually her hunger sharpened, a deep, inexplicable urge for the very thing she dreaded—for the dread itself. “Come on,” she finally cried. “Let’s go more.”
At these words Zane’s face parted in the first and only real smile Phoebe ever saw upon it. He squatted beside her, handsome, scary, his eyes oddly spent, like burned-out flashcubes. His breath on her face was boozy, medicinal. Rather shyly Zane asked Phoebe her age. Nine, she told him. He started to laugh, a rusty untried sound like an old car door swinging open and shut. “Nine years old, shit,” he said to Faith. “She’s gonna end up crazier than you.”
Riding back, he really let fly, showing off for his crazy girlfriend’s crazy little sister, leaning into such drastic turns that Phoebe’s ear seemed nearly to graze the pavement.
For weeks after, Phoebe would lie in bed thinking jealously, achingly, of Faith and Zane sawing the world in two on that bike, the violence of its speed, the