The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [50]
“She was actually here, in this room?” Phoebe said, overjoyed. “I can’t believe it.”
“I’m not saying for sure, you understand me,” Karl said, resuming his sewing. “She was here maybe one minute.”
But a minute was enough, a minute was everything. Spellbound, Phoebe watched Karl’s hands sift among his silks and linens. “She was here,” she said.
Though the sun was still high, it had a worn-out feeling about it. Karl pried open a nugget of tinfoil, breaking off a piece of something brown and damp-looking inside. He placed it in the tiny copper bowl of a long Chinese pipe, lit, puffed, and passed the pipe to Phoebe. The smell was strange. She took the pipe and deeply inhaled the soft smoke, sweet inside her throat. God knew what it was. She returned to her spot on the cushions and passed the pipe to Nico, who accepted it halfheartedly. Karl did not resume his sewing. He leaned over the pile of fabrics and looked straight at Phoebe for what seemed the first time. Yet even now his gaze was absent, as if her face were merely a resting place for his eyes.
“Do you ever miss those times?” Phoebe asked.
“What times?”
“You know. The sixties.” The term sounded foolish.
Karl sucked at the pipe, eyes narrowed. “It was good,” he said, breathing smoke. “Like falling in love. Sure, you want the beginning. But you know already the end.”
Phoebe took the pipe. The smoke was soft as felt in her lungs. “What’s the end?” she asked.
Karl shrugged. “Same like everything,” he said. “Goes too far, becomes the opposite.”
Phoebe puzzled over this. She tried passing the pipe to Nico, but the boy waved it away impatiently. He looked dreadful. Phoebe was suddenly very high, and not a high she recognized. The room appeared smeared. She blinked to straighten out her vision. “Opposite of what?” she said, her voice seeming to waft in from a distance.
Karl lifted a pile of fabric scraps from his lap and set it on the floor. Then he spoke with sudden intensity. “You want peace, finally you take guns to find it. Use drugs for opening your mind so everything will come inside—now you think only where to get more smack. You love to live, but you die and die and die—so many dead, from that time,” he said. “Like your sister.” And as he looked at Phoebe, something opened in Karl’s eyes like a camera shutter, as if, for a moment, he actually saw her.
Then he looked away. Phoebe took a long hit of satiny smoke from the pipe. The fishy canal breeze filled the room. Things becoming their opposites, yes, she thought, it made sense. Karl’s voice sounded oracular, the single and absolute voice of truth. Opposites, she thought, yes …
Nico broke the thread of her meanderings. He lurched from his seat and crawled toward Phoebe across the cushions, his face gray, moist with sweat. Revolted, Phoebe tried to draw away but achieved this only by faint degrees, her motion stalled by the drug.
“Look,” Nico said, smiling uneasily. He was still on all fours, his face thrust toward Phoebe’s. She smelled a terrible sweetness on his breath and thought of hospitals, the sweet smell that covers death. “So look, okay?” he said. “I am brought you here.”
Phoebe turned to Karl, expecting him to heap scorn upon Nico for this grotesque performance, but Karl was sorting with renewed absorption through his heap of fabrics. “Yeah,” she finally conceded to Nico. “You brought me …”
“So now, if you have some money, I have none.”
“Money!” Phoebe said. She turned again to Karl, but clearly he’d removed himself from this discussion. “Why should I give you money?” she asked, more querulously than she would have liked.
“Because how you would come here without me, yes?” Nico said in a high, trembling voice. He looked ready to explode.
Karl was sewing again, cocooned in the whir of machinery. Clearly he’d seen this moment coming, agreed to it beforehand. Some larger plan was revealing itself. Phoebe felt a shudder of awful comprehension, as if a part of her