The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [46]
Phoebe walked in the direction of the youth hostel. She passed a small stone church, dandelions tossing in its graveyard. The long, crooked street blurred. She stopped to rub her eyes and suddenly felt that her sister was very near, not a memory or an echo but Faith herself—laughing, reaching—what else but her sister’s presence could explain the excitement Phoebe had felt since arriving in London, the swell of promise? It was Faith who brought these feelings, who always had. And Phoebe knew, then, that her journey would only be complete when her sister had finally revealed herself. Faith would simply appear, burst from nowhere as when she lost patience during games of hide-and-seek, exploding the stillness by leaping from behind a curtain or beneath a couch, announcing, “Time’s up, you couldn’t find me.”
A coldness broke in Phoebe’s lungs, like inhaling helium from a balloon. She froze mid-step. From across the street a tall, eccentric house leapt at her in flashes of orange brick. She searched the grainy air, half expecting to see the familiar form of a skinny leaping girl with dark hair. An old woman hobbled by, clutching a frilly black umbrella, and as the woman passed, so did the feeling, unmistakably as a wind shifting course. Phoebe resumed walking, a weakness in her legs, an odd, buttery flavor at the back of her throat. It was raining. Yellow squares of light had appeared inside houses. From a high window came the sound of a piano, notes floating down solid as leaves, then vanishing. The rain felt so good, the wet dress clinging to Phoebe’s legs. Her old life was gone. Gone forever, the years alone in San Francisco, years of waiting, looking for a sign, they had floated away like the thinnest dry husk, leaving Phoebe newly born in a strange land.
ten
Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, Amsterdam is the be all end all. London was nothing compared to this. Wolf and I are crashing in an empty building where all these squatters have been living for months. The cops dont do one thing it’s the opposite, they’re our guardian angels. We’re like a family, everything is spiritual and when someone leaves maybe you won’t ever see them again but so what, even in that little time you can still love them. At night the stars are so pretty. Love, Faith
Phoebe stayed in London a week. But the longer she remained, the more the thrill of her surroundings seemed to fade. She began to fear that her own presence was erasing her sister’s, blurring it to vagueness. Simply to go where Faith had been was not enough, to stand there, flanked by other tourists, groups of singing children—not enough. Phoebe worried that her own hesitating nature had kept her from making some crucial leap, entering fully the danger and intensity of that first day, with the bomb threat. She left London determined to push herself harder.
She arrived in Amsterdam in the morning with two Australian sisters, Diana and Helen, whom she’d met on the overnight boat. They left their bags in the train station lockers—check-in time at the youth hostel was not until afternoon—and walked to the Dam, Amsterdam’s central square. Phoebe noticed a number of young people asleep on the shallow concentric steps surrounding the War Monument, a giant white cone that brought to mind a pillar of salt. She watched with interest as they shook themselves awake, coughing, rolling cigarettes, finally tottering to their feet and stretching skinny arms toward the sky so their tie-dyed shirts lifted up and their shrunken bellies met the sun. She felt a burst of excitement. These were hippies.
All morning Phoebe thought of the sleeping hippies while she trekked with Diana and Helen through the Rijksmuseum, looking at paintings of moist-eyed burghers in stiff lace collars. At two-thirty, when the sisters returned to the