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High Wire Act
Feb. 23rd, 2012 05:58 pmImagine, for a moment, being eight years old and watching your parents — your wise, loving, beautiful parents — defy death again and again and show you what the words skill and courage mean. This is at an age when they're still gods instead of men and women, where they can do no wrong and their word is absolute.
Imagine that this is just another night, mostly. The crowds are there, no more or less than usual, and everyone else does their act and manages to make it by without doing anything spectacularly terrible, though the lion tamer does get a bit testy with his whip and the performers (but not the audience) know that the lion's roar isn't completely for show. But the tamer makes it out of the ring to a smattering of applause, and everything's alright.
Now imagine being eight years old on this night, and sitting in a front row seat, watching your parents do a trick they had done a million times before, and watching as your mother goes up into the jump, flips and twists perfectly, and then comes down into your father's waiting arms.
And then the cable snaps.
-
What would you feel? Grief, sorrow, the world ending; you would cry and scream and jump over the barrier to your parents, beating the announcer, the owner, the paramedics to their bodies. You would freeze, then, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to fix this broken arrangement of body parts, these shattered pieces of your idols that you know, instinctively, that you can not — never — put back together.
So you simply scream, loud, piercing screams, on your knees in front of them, silent in the middle of the big tent, where hundreds of people watch, horrified, for what they came here to see. Not exactly, of course — they expected that the tricks would be pulled off more or less — but the main draw of the circus, of the juggling of flames and swallowing of swords and balancing of people, is in the chance of an accident. No one will admit to hoping for one, but everyone slows down at the scene of an accident and rubbernecks their way across, thanking God that they weren't the people involved.
Now they freeze; now they know they've drawn too close, and they find out that they didn't ever want to see what broken bodies look like, didn't want to know the intense queasiness that's caused by seeing arms which bend in the wrong direction and bones that stick out where they shouldn't.
But they can't look away, and all you feel are their eyes, their eyes all on you as your parents hold the audience spellbound for the last time ever.
-
But that's only half the story; it's the part that involves pain and tears and blacking out and being catatonic for the next few days.
There's another half, and it starts a few days before, when you're playing around the outskirts of the tents that are set up and you hear voices coming from near the back gate. Looters sometimes come through here, and you want to make sure that everything's fine, so you head that way, with the righteous knowledge that you are helping the circus speeding you along.
That is, until you come around a corner and see the owner of the circus, Uncle Zeppa you call him, cowering before two well-dressed men towering over him. One of them lashes out with a kick and drops Uncle Zeppa to the ground, clutching his stomach, and you almost, almost call out.
Almost.
But you don't, because you've learned, in your time at the circus, that saying things isn't always the best thing to do, so you say nothing. You just listen to the men, as they say that they want the Boss's money or something bad will happen, and the way they say Boss, you know that he is someone powerful.
But you don't say anything, you simply hide, and you think that you'll tell your parents about it. But by the time you get back to your trailer, you don't; they're practicing one of their acts, and it just isn't a big deal, and you'd create problems.
No one likes those who create problems, Uncle Zeppa says.
-
This is the other side of the story, the crushing, soul-destroying weight of guilt, the knowledge that you could've saved your parents, that you, you killed them, in a way. You could've done something, anything, and told someone, anyone, of what you had heard and seen. But now — now it's too late, now there's nothing you can do, and all you have left of your parents are the pictures and the memories and the dreams, and only the pictures aren't broken.
You change that, pretty quickly.
Now they're all broken.
Too bad it doesn't make anything better.
-
But there's one thing that saves you from despair and self-destruction, one path out of the twin chasms of grief and guilt that threaten to swallow you whole. You see, there's one other person in the world that knows what happened, one person that was there in the audience with you, one person who comes to you a week after and says that he knows.
He knows.
He's been following the gangsters' activities for some time, and he didn't catch that meeting and couldn't stop what happened but he has a plan for how to stop them and bring them down. He has a path out of the darkness, a single, winding, twisting path that you see as a single line, but you're pretty good at keeping your balance by now, aren't you?
What do you do? You join him, of course. You accept his offer to take you in — though not as a father, just as a legal guardian, and you accept that he has a plan for everything. Literally everything, you realize one day to your fascination, and as you keep poking around, you find out who he really is.
You know you've made it when you start going to sleep later and waking up later to keep track of him on his nightly journeys, when Alfred wakes you up in the morning with your usual breakfast, and when he finally, one day, calls on you to join him in his fight against crime.
"Robin," he says, "I need you with me."
And slowly, day by day, you keep your balance and don't fall into despair or self-hatred, and you make it out, until you're on solid ground again, or what feels like it. Day by day, you put on your mask and your costume and you roam the nights, fighting by his side, to avenge your parents, to avenge all the children in the world who have had their parents taken away from them. To prevent that from ever happening again.
Imagine that this is just another night, mostly. The crowds are there, no more or less than usual, and everyone else does their act and manages to make it by without doing anything spectacularly terrible, though the lion tamer does get a bit testy with his whip and the performers (but not the audience) know that the lion's roar isn't completely for show. But the tamer makes it out of the ring to a smattering of applause, and everything's alright.
Now imagine being eight years old on this night, and sitting in a front row seat, watching your parents do a trick they had done a million times before, and watching as your mother goes up into the jump, flips and twists perfectly, and then comes down into your father's waiting arms.
And then the cable snaps.
-
What would you feel? Grief, sorrow, the world ending; you would cry and scream and jump over the barrier to your parents, beating the announcer, the owner, the paramedics to their bodies. You would freeze, then, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to fix this broken arrangement of body parts, these shattered pieces of your idols that you know, instinctively, that you can not — never — put back together.
So you simply scream, loud, piercing screams, on your knees in front of them, silent in the middle of the big tent, where hundreds of people watch, horrified, for what they came here to see. Not exactly, of course — they expected that the tricks would be pulled off more or less — but the main draw of the circus, of the juggling of flames and swallowing of swords and balancing of people, is in the chance of an accident. No one will admit to hoping for one, but everyone slows down at the scene of an accident and rubbernecks their way across, thanking God that they weren't the people involved.
Now they freeze; now they know they've drawn too close, and they find out that they didn't ever want to see what broken bodies look like, didn't want to know the intense queasiness that's caused by seeing arms which bend in the wrong direction and bones that stick out where they shouldn't.
But they can't look away, and all you feel are their eyes, their eyes all on you as your parents hold the audience spellbound for the last time ever.
-
But that's only half the story; it's the part that involves pain and tears and blacking out and being catatonic for the next few days.
There's another half, and it starts a few days before, when you're playing around the outskirts of the tents that are set up and you hear voices coming from near the back gate. Looters sometimes come through here, and you want to make sure that everything's fine, so you head that way, with the righteous knowledge that you are helping the circus speeding you along.
That is, until you come around a corner and see the owner of the circus, Uncle Zeppa you call him, cowering before two well-dressed men towering over him. One of them lashes out with a kick and drops Uncle Zeppa to the ground, clutching his stomach, and you almost, almost call out.
Almost.
But you don't, because you've learned, in your time at the circus, that saying things isn't always the best thing to do, so you say nothing. You just listen to the men, as they say that they want the Boss's money or something bad will happen, and the way they say Boss, you know that he is someone powerful.
But you don't say anything, you simply hide, and you think that you'll tell your parents about it. But by the time you get back to your trailer, you don't; they're practicing one of their acts, and it just isn't a big deal, and you'd create problems.
No one likes those who create problems, Uncle Zeppa says.
-
This is the other side of the story, the crushing, soul-destroying weight of guilt, the knowledge that you could've saved your parents, that you, you killed them, in a way. You could've done something, anything, and told someone, anyone, of what you had heard and seen. But now — now it's too late, now there's nothing you can do, and all you have left of your parents are the pictures and the memories and the dreams, and only the pictures aren't broken.
You change that, pretty quickly.
Now they're all broken.
Too bad it doesn't make anything better.
-
But there's one thing that saves you from despair and self-destruction, one path out of the twin chasms of grief and guilt that threaten to swallow you whole. You see, there's one other person in the world that knows what happened, one person that was there in the audience with you, one person who comes to you a week after and says that he knows.
He knows.
He's been following the gangsters' activities for some time, and he didn't catch that meeting and couldn't stop what happened but he has a plan for how to stop them and bring them down. He has a path out of the darkness, a single, winding, twisting path that you see as a single line, but you're pretty good at keeping your balance by now, aren't you?
What do you do? You join him, of course. You accept his offer to take you in — though not as a father, just as a legal guardian, and you accept that he has a plan for everything. Literally everything, you realize one day to your fascination, and as you keep poking around, you find out who he really is.
You know you've made it when you start going to sleep later and waking up later to keep track of him on his nightly journeys, when Alfred wakes you up in the morning with your usual breakfast, and when he finally, one day, calls on you to join him in his fight against crime.
"Robin," he says, "I need you with me."
And slowly, day by day, you keep your balance and don't fall into despair or self-hatred, and you make it out, until you're on solid ground again, or what feels like it. Day by day, you put on your mask and your costume and you roam the nights, fighting by his side, to avenge your parents, to avenge all the children in the world who have had their parents taken away from them. To prevent that from ever happening again.
