The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [76]
The outskirts of Munich fell away, leaving countryside, sheep pressed like burrs into folds of green hill, towns like sunny children’s bedrooms filled with cheerful furniture of churches, barns, houses painted in bright pastels and white trim.
“Summertime time time time …” Janis sang, her voice like a piece of burlap slowly tearing in half.
Phoebe looked at Wolf. His eyes were narrowed against the sun. He seemed thoughtful today, brooding almost.
“Do you think about Faith very much anymore?” she asked.
There was a pause. “I resist it.”
“How come?”
He glanced at her as if the question were surprising.
“It makes you sad?”
“It does, yeah. And I don’t trust the sadness,” Wolf said slowly.
Phoebe sensed his reluctance to speak of the past and tried to quell her desire to make him. She couldn’t. “Remember the Invisible Circus?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“Could you—can you tell me what it actually was? I’ve tried looking it up in books but it’s never there.”
Wolf smiled. “That’s funny, that it’s not there.”
It had happened in a church, Glide Methodist Church in the Tenderloin. A Digger event, no publicity, no media, just the night itself with the right people there. The Diggers fixed the place up like a funhouse, all these trippy rooms and colored lights, shredded plastic on the floor, punch bowls full of Kool-Aid acid. The usual thing, in a way, except it wasn’t usual yet, and besides, this was a church, pews, altar, the whole bit. The idea was for everyone to live out their craziest fantasies at once. Meanwhile these “reporters” were taking notes on everything that happened, then Richard Brautigan—no joke, Brautigan himself—would type up the notes into “news bulletins” and mimeograph hundreds of copies that got passed around instantly, so not only were people doing all this crazy shit, but a lot of times they were reading about themselves doing it before they’d even finished.
“It sounds like a dream,” Phoebe said.
“It was,” Wolf said. “That’s exactly how it felt.” He smoked, gazing at the road. “It was all about watching ourselves happen,” he said. “This incredible feeling, standing outside, seeing the thing unfold. Like tripping. I remember thinking, Shit, this is going to be huge. Whatever it is.”
Phoebe wanted to ask what sort of things people did in the church, what Wolf and Faith had done, but felt timid. “What do you think it meant?” she said.
Wolf laughed. “The Invisible Circus?”
“No, all of it. The Be-In … that whole time.”
He laughed again, uneasy. “I don’t know. God, who knows?” He glanced at her. “I have no answers about that time, Phoebe, honestly. Only questions.”
“What questions?”
“The obvious ones, I guess: What happened? Why didn’t it work? Or did it work, but for some reason I can’t see it?”
“What do you mean, it didn’t work?”
Wolf sighed. Phoebe saw she was wearing him out.
“All I know,” he said, “is at one point it seemed clear that if we just kept pounding away like we were, some gigantic force would, like, lift us away. And today, the ones who pounded the hardest are pretty much all dead. So you’ve got to ask yourself: How well was that working?”
“Maybe they’re the ones who got lifted away.”
Wolf’s brows rose. “Possibly,” he said. “My guess is, they’d rather be alive.”
“Why?”
He turned to look at her, tension in his face. “Because my view of death is not romantic.”
There was a long silence. “Anyhow,” Wolf said, “I’m the last person on earth to ask about any of this. I was a bystander, beginning to end.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Well, that should tell you something.”
“Maybe I haven’t met the right people,