BRIGHT SARASOTA WHERE THE CIRCUS LIES DYING
I remember how you used to stand at the window staring up at trees on the hill, watching the storm bend them, only a bit at first, then ever more deeply, standing there as though should you let up for a moment on your vigilance, great wounds would open in the world.
That was in Arkansas. We had storms to be proud of there, tornadoes, floods. All these seem to be missing where I am now—wherever this is I’ve been taken. Every day is the same here. We came by train, sorted onto rough-cut benches along each side of what once must have been freight or livestock cars, now recommissioned like the trains themselves, with eerily polite attendants to see to us.
It was all eerily civil, the knock at the door, papers offered with a flourish and a formal invocation of conscript, the docent full serious, the two Socials accompanying him wearing stunners at their belts, smiles on their faces. They came only to serve.
Altogether an exceedingly strange place, the one I find myself in. (That can be read metaphorically. Please don’t.) A desert of sorts, but unlike any I’ve encountered in films, books, or online. The sand is a pale blue, so light in weight that it drifts away on the wind if held in the hand and let go; tiny quartz crystals gleam everywhere within. At the eastern border of the compound, trees, again of a kind unknown, crowd land and sky. One cannot see through or around them.
They keep us busy here. With a failed economy back home and workers unable to make anything like a living wage, the government saw few options. What’s important, Mother, is that you not worry. The fundamental principles on which our nation was founded are still there, resting till needed; our institutions will save us. Meanwhile I am at work for the common good, I am being productive, I am contributing.
That said, I do, for my part, worry some. This is the fourth letter I’ve written you. Each was accepted at the service center with “We’ll get this out right away,” then duly, weeks later, returned marked Undeliverable. It is difficult to know what this means, and all too easy to summon up dire imaginings.
To judge by the number and size of dormitories and extrapolating from the visible population, there are some four to five hundred of us, predominately male, along with a cadre of what I take to be indigenous peoples serving as support: janitorial, housekeeping and kitchen workers, groundsmen, maintenance. Oddly enough for this climate, they are fair, their skin colorless, almost translucent, hair of uniform length male and female. From dedicated eavesdropping I’ve learned bits and pieces of their language. It is in fact dangerously close to our own, rife with cognates and seemingly parallel constructions that could easily lead us to say, without realizing, something other than, even contrary to, what we intended.
The indigenes speak without reserve of their situation, of what they’ve achieved in being here, and not at all of what came before. They appear to relish routine, expectations fulfilled—to thrive on them—and to have little sense of theirs as lives torn away at world’s edge, only jagged ends of paper left behind. Popular fiction would have me falling in love with one of them, discovering the true nature of the subjugation around me, and leading their people to freedom. Approved fiction, I suppose, would write of protagonist me (as someone said of Dostoevsky’s Alyosha) that he thought and thought and thought.
As I write this, recalling the failure of my three previous missives and a rare conversation with another resident here, I realize just how close we’ve come to a time when many will scarcely remember what letters are.
Kamil taught for years at university, one of those, I must suppose, composed of vast stone buildings and lushly kept trees whose very name brings to mind dark halls and the smell of floor wax. Unable to settle (“like a hummingbird,” he said), Kamil straddled three departments—music, literature, and history—weaving back and forth, seeking connections. On a handheld computer he played for me examples of the music he’d employed in the classroom to elicit those connections from young people who knew little enough, he said, of any of the three disciplines, least of all history. Truth to tell, I wasn’t able to make much of his music, but the title of one raucous piece, “Brain Cloudy Blues,” stays with me.
I remember when you told me about circuses, Mother, the bright colors and animals, people engaged in all manner of improbable activities, the smells, the sounds, the faces, and then explained that they had gone away, there were no circuses anymore, and the very last of what was left of them lay put away in storage in the old winter quarters of the greatest circus of all in a town faraway named Sarasota.
Are we all in Sarasota now? There are further chapters in my life, I know. What might they be like? When someone other than myself is turning the page.