Gary exists.
"The size and age of the Cosmos
are beyond ordinary human understanding."
Gary is a man.
Gary knows something about the circus, and he knows something about the cosmos.
"Lost somewhere
between immensity and eternity
is our tiny planetary home."
Gary worked at the Gingham Heights Circus and Fairgrounds.
Gary has a deformation. A harelip, and his mother didn't have the time the money or the heart to get it fixed, what with Gary's father being a no-good-dirty-rotten-bastard.
Gary doesn't know his father's name, but he knows he was a no-good-dirty-rotten-bastard.
"In a cosmic perspective,
most human concerns seem
insignificant, even petty."
Gary, his face scared the children who'd come to the Gingham Heights Circus for the beauty of the acrobats and the jugglers and the trapeze and the animals and the pretty-faced tightrope walkers. They didn't come for harelips.
Gary, he cleaned and swept the animal cages.
Gary, Dealer of Dung. Master of Manure.
Gary, he sometimes helped pitch the smaller tents when he wasn't having that pain in his left arm. It hurt often, perhaps a relic of some complication from a difficult birth. The doctor had mumbled some nonsense about ulnar deficiency, but neither Gary nor his mother really knew what that was.
Gary stayed at the circus permanently, living and sleeping in an old Airstream next to the rows of animal cages in the back lot.
He liked to hear all the grunts and roars at night, the pacing.
They were constancies.
He also liked one of the tightrope walkers.
Gary had a small television.
One night he invited the tightrope walker over to watch a show. He wondered what might impress her, what might make her pale brow furrow.
He decided they would tune in to the latest episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, even though Gary knew nothing of the subject.
Kind at heart, the tightrope walker indulged him, but was still unable to hide her boredom. Her side of the couch sagged. The cosmos were of no concern to her. Her only worry was that formidable distance between the rope and the ground, and making certain it remained a foreign and unfamiliar space.
Gary, though. Simple, harelipped Gary. He had to blink often; specks of dust and gas from this boxed and televised galaxy seemed to be getting in his eyes. Carl and his questions. The piano, the synthesizer. Carl in his spaceship.
Lying in bed that night he remembered the red hints of blisters that swelled around her taped palms. The inflammation. He remembered the rope burn, the quiet bruising. The way her skinny knees would crack when she walked after sitting for a time.
He thought it was perhaps like the sound of Pangaea shattering from the core out, the reverberating crack of a supercontinental rupture, or the boom of the Cambrian explosion, or the unnatural hum he thought might pervade the galaxy should canals be built on Mars, the brittle wail of an extraterrestrial fracture, sounding each time her joints would fail her,
each time they would fail the tightrope walker.
"Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us --
there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice,
a faint sensation, as if a distant memory,
of falling from a height."
The tightrope walker, she pitied Gary.
And the ringmaster, he had a secret.
Gary -- you see, he saw the two of them, the ringmaster and the tightrope walker, he saw the two of them behind the lion's cage one night, pressed up against a barrel of hay. Increasing in rhythm, limbs splayed out abstractly across the animal feed Gary would be required to handle early the next morning.
He saw them thrusting on the other side, through the iron bars of the cage, the lion's body spread idly in one corner, a single massive paw turned inwards. Its eyes met Gary's, unblinking.
He thought of the one time she'd given him a pair of her silk underwear, how she'd set them in his calloused hands. He'd felt quiet shame in his disappointment that they were clean, smelling of newly washed linen instead of what he'd imagined she might smell of. (Honey, maybe. The special kind, though, that he gave the black bear the nights they'd make it leap through the flaming hoops he always felt were too small.)
And all the other carnies, all the acrobats and freaks and sword-swallowers, how they'd speak of this. How Gary would have to hear of the tightrope walker and the ringmaster as he shoveled feces, flies crowding his face. The indentation in his lip, beneath his nose.
His arm would begin to hurt.
The other night as the fire-breathers took center stage in the main tent.
The other night as Gary discovered the Cosmos.
He thought of the one time she'd given him a pair of her silk underwear, how she'd set them in his calloused hands. He'd felt quiet shame in his disappointment that they were clean, smelling of newly washed linen instead of what he'd imagined she might smell of. (Honey, maybe. The special kind, though, that he gave the black bear the nights they'd make it leap through the flaming hoops he always felt were too small.)
And all the other carnies, all the acrobats and freaks and sword-swallowers, how they'd speak of this. How Gary would have to hear of the tightrope walker and the ringmaster as he shoveled feces, flies crowding his face. The indentation in his lip, beneath his nose.
His arm would begin to hurt.
The other night as the fire-breathers took center stage in the main tent.
The other night as Gary discovered the Cosmos.
"And yet our species is young and curious
and brave and shows much promise.
I believe our future depends on how well
we know this Cosmos in which we float
like a mote of dust in the morning sky."
- Carl Sagan