P I E R C E

He bounced on his toes, two quick pumps of the heel to release a bit of the tension.  They had a good audience tonight; an attentive audience that was liberal with its adulation, and though the Ringmaster seemed distracted, perhaps even disturbed, The Pierce could feel a winning performance brewing in him.

A bit of wind blew, fluttering the walls of the tent and sending the clean scent of pine shavings into his nose.  The Pierce removed his shirt and draped it over a hook jutting from the partition that separated the performers from the arena. He made a quick inventory of the shiny instruments, his props, on the table before him.  Twelve rods and two blades of gleaming stainless steel lay neatly arranged, equidistant on a sheet of black velvet cloth.  Just looking at them triggered waves of warmth, which ran up his spine to dance at the nape of his neck.

Beside him, the tattooed man mumbled anxiously, already having performed his act but having taken no joy from the gasps, the cries and the applause of the audience.  The Pierce cared little for the stocky man’s distress.  His attention was for a piece of equipment towering beyond the painted performer. 

The machine stood in a nest of sawdust.  Beautiful. The Pierce’s spectacular device.  Tonight’s audience would be the first to witness its use. 

With his eyes locked on the beautiful apparatus, his mind drowning in hot, thick arousal, he massaged oil over his muscled arms, his broad shoulders and his powerful chest, working his skin into a gleaming display.  The other performers, the Ringmaster and the divine bitch who had brought them all together watched this preparation.  Some were amused by his arrogance and narcissism while others followed every stroke of his hand and every glistening trail of oil, wishing it were their fingers, their palm, their flesh preparing his.

Admiration rolled off of him like raindrops, as did contempt.  Hate.  Love.  Envy.  The spokes of perception.  No matter what their opinion of him as a man, they all had to appreciate his skills as a performer.  And naturally, to appreciate his performance, meant fearing it.

No one wanted to go through what Lilia, the fallen aerial artist, had endured.

The Ringmaster passed through the partition to announce him.  The Pierce readied himself, again bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, clearing his mind of distraction.

Distantly, the Ringmaster’s voice rolled through the tent.

“How much pain can any of us as mere mortals endure?  What are the bounds of flesh and bone and nerve?  Are there truly limits?”

In his pocket, The Pierce found the necklace, given him by the Ringmaster on his first night with the troupe.  The amulet tingled against his palm; a simple trinket of ebony stone shaped like a scalloped diamond, hung from a golden thread.  He withdrew the jewelry and draped it over his neck, already feeling its invisible tendrils engaging his nerves and branching out to explore the universe.

“Ladies and gentleman,” the Ringmaster announced, his voice an elegant thunder beyond the partition.  “I present…  The Pierce!”

He raced into the arena, leaping over the edge of the first ring, his arms raised grandly as if his hands could catch the applause, the shouts and the whistles in the net of his fingers.  He bowed.  Turned with a flourish.  From the waist of his pants he withdrew a long sewing needle and held it high for the audience to observe.

The metal sliver twinkled in the light.

The Pierce ran his eyes over the faces in the audience, weighing their humor and interest with a simple glance.  When his attention reached a round-faced woman with a cloud of kinky orange hair, he paused and locked his gaze with hers.  A friend or lover or relative jabbed the woman lightly in the ribs and the audience laughed as her round face burned with blush.

He winked at the woman, felt her heat from twenty feet away, and jammed the needle into his palm.  The woman screamed, clutching her own palm in a panic.  She leapt from the bleachers, knocking aside the friend or lover or relative that had nudged her only moments before.  Tears filled her eyes, and she shook her hand in the air as if to rid it of some nasty adherence. 

With great care, The Pierce removed the needle from his hand, blew on the wound.  The redhead with the round face, ceased her panic and sighed, looked around in confusion and fear and then began to laugh.

The audience cheered.

His next subject, a talkative boy with a sour look dragging down lips fuzzy with smeared cotton candy, felt a sharp jab in his backside, causing him to spring to his feet and cup his buttock in confusion.  The third, a portly man with a bell-shaped face dappled in drops of sweat, shook his head frantically as The Pierce winked at him and drove the steel sewing needle through the crease running down the center of his tongue.

These minor tricks distracted the audience, entertained and frightened them, while a roustabout wheeled out the velvet-clothed table.  When the audience saw the girth and severity of these utensils – his skewers and blades, displayed like surgical tools for an unnatural operation – they gasped and muttered their concern.

But The Pierce was a professional and knew better than to engage his immediate audience in the second act of his performance.  The devices of real injury were not for paying customers.

He returned the harmless needle to the waist of his leather pants and again spun with a great flourish.  He never spoke during his act, never allowed words to undercut the power of his actions.  With a sweep of his glistening, muscled arm, The Pierce introduced his audience to the table and the toys of damage that it held.

Though he stroked the stainless steel shafts, tweaked the points and fondled the edges of his props, it was at this moment that The Pierce sank into himself, retreated from the big top and the audience, who looked on in horror at his splendid skewers and blades.  His consciousness became mist, which rolled like swamp fog from his mind and into the ebony amulet resting against his oiled chest.

From there, he rode the tendrils and currents far from the fairground and the tiny city it serviced; he drifted over desolate plains, rushing rivers and dense forests; he navigated metropolises and suburbs, seeing loving families embrace and vile felons at work.  But always, his journey took him to those places he had been before – a house on the outskirts of Detroit, where his wife had adored many men, but never him; an office of towering glass where a lumpy man ridiculed his employees, using humiliation as a training manual; a sprawling home on Lake Michigan, where the man he’d called dad, grew ancient and tried to forget he’d ever had a child.

All of this happened in less than a moment, not even a blink, and the audience was only aware of The Pierce and the adoration he heaped on his dangerous props.  He lifted one of the skewers, and his eyes fell on a terrified young woman who trembled and clutched at her husband while the audience groaned in anticipation.

In his mind, he was with his faithless wife.

Again, she was playing hostess to a pleasant-faced stranger.  The Pierce could smell the man’s cheap after-shave and feel his coarse palms on his back as if he and his wife shared the same skin. 

He jammed the skewer through his vascular forearm.  The woman in the audience shrieked…

And then laughed in embarrassment when no pain accompanied the performer’s penetration.

But in his head, he heard the scream of his wife, saw her jerking free of the man embracing her.  The Pierce lifted a second skewer and drove it through his neck, satisfied with the retching sound that filled his ears. 

He felt none of the pain.  He did not bleed nor did he scar.  For him, the skewers brought only warmth and longing for more advanced damage.  The heat erupted in his belly and coursed from his groin to his brain, growing hungrier and hotter as the needle-sharp rods slid through his skin, bringing him to the edge of climax, while far away, the woman he had married – long before the circus – stumbled and writhed, searching for the source of her wounding.

As he neared the end of his second act, The Pierce turned slowly to show his audience that the gleaming metal rods had indeed impaled him thoroughly.  Four silver shafts climbed his left arm; four his right arm.  One skewer for his neck.  Each pectoral had been punctured, so deep that only tiny twinkling bits of metal were visible on either side of the bulging muscle.  The last narrow spike he traced over his shining belly…

And then drove it horizontally through the meat of his abdominal muscles.  In his mind, a final gasp sounded before his wife crumpled into unconsciousness.

He approached his audience.  They shied away, cringing yet enthralled.  The Pierce encouraged a young man, a man that looked very much like the enthusiastic student he had been himself so many years ago, to touch and manipulate the metal rods jutting from his body.

The young man acquiesced.

The Pierce trembled.

Back at the velvet-draped table, he slowly removed the skewers, lifting each for the approval and applause of his audience before returning the rods sleek and unstained to the fabric.  All of this he did while recalling the traveling part of his mind, leaving behind the slumping body of a woman who had made him feel irrelevant.

He had not engaged his wife in the act for many months, but this was a special night – his spectacular device was to be unveiled soon, very soon – so The Pierce was calling up the people that had been so influential in his development.  Any number of faces from the past were available to him; through the filaments of the talisman at his neck, he could find and engage anyone he chose.  In his last performance, he had located a bully from his childhood and had taken great joy from the cries, this now-middle-aged man had voiced. 

On some level, any level, did the adult version of that bully know why he was being punished?

Furthermore, did it matter?

The Ringmaster and his divine oracle bitch had seen the greatness in him.  A lifetime of abuse – endured, amassed and stored away – had certainly shown on his face, in his eyes.  On the afternoon he had first encountered the troupe, he must have looked pathetic to them.  Like the rest of the audience, he had simply been milling around outside of the tent, waiting for the show to begin – the circus, a necessary distraction to cleanse him of life’s filth.

Less than an hour later, shirtless and exuberant, he had entered the ring, no longer the cache of a world’s disappointments named Samuel Mason, but a performer that demanded attention and respect.

The Pierce.

He had loved the divine bitch back then; how could he not love the instrument of his ascension?  But once he had joined the troupe, once he had agreed to her whispered contract, she never again spoke to him.  Though he had attempted on many occasions to engage her in conversation, she simply turned away, ignoring him in the way that so many others in his life had ignored him as if she couldn’t see the incredible thing he had become, though it was she that had made him.

 Soon, he thought, he would engage her in his act so she might understand the wonder of what she had created.

But not tonight.  Tonight was unique and needed to be executed with precision.

Tonight, the world would be introduced to his spectacular device.

First though, he needed to complete the second act of his show, the portion of his act where the blades found rest in his eyes. 

He cast a glance to the wings and saw the cool smile cutting the Ringmaster’s face as his fingers danced around the brim of his satin hat.  Beside him, the oracle turned away the moment The Pierce’s eyes fell upon her.  His disappointment rose and fell like a crashing wave but quickly receded when he saw the roustabouts wheeling his device into the mouth of the partition.

 The Pierce bent low, arms outstretched in a grand bow before he spun away, his arms twirling like the rotors of a helicopter.  He ended this startling dance by rising onto the toes of his left foot, his right leg thrown back, his arms arched dramatically like the wings of a bird in mid-flight.  He held the position, one second, two seconds, three seconds, until the audience was convinced he had been turned to stone, and even then he maintained his pose, one second, two seconds.

Finally, he released himself from the position and glided back to the table, where he lifted his blades for the audience to see.

The blades, hooked and silver, like the talons of a great metallic dragon, cut the air before him as he left the ring and approached his audience.  He took a flier from the hand of an anxious woman with the pinched features of a sparrow.  With a grand sweep, he used the blade to cut the paper in half.  Then, to affirm the lethality of his props, he drove both blade points into the wooden bleachers on either side of the girl’s bony hips. 

She yelped and giggled and drew back.

The Pierce worked the blades free and returned to the ring.

Again, he melted into himself, letting that part of his mind that journeyed become misty and susceptible to the currents of the ebony stone.

For this part of the act he returned to the glassy office building, where long ago he had been eager for knowledge, had wanted nothing more than to prove himself competent and valuable.  In this building, while barely more than a boy, fresh from college with the bubbling excitement of possible accomplishment fueling him like a drug, he had encountered Don Cortland whose management techniques bordered on sadism.

Cortland, a joyless doughy man, built like Raymond Burr, was a disease, a cancer that spread and ate and killed the self-esteem of all in his presence. 

Back then, The Pierce had been known by a different name, Samuel Mason.  As Samuel he accepted fault and blame because life had equipped him for nothing else. 

Now, he drifted through the wispy tendrils sweeping into the universe from the decoration on his chest, seeking that man’s shadow.  The audience watched his lithe dance, the waving of his blades, the steps of his feet – a brief dance of only a few seconds.  Then, he swept into Cortland’s office.  The man was working late.  Arthritis cramped the hand he had wrapped like a claw around his Monte Blanc as he signed a low pile of checks.  Cortland had grown a white beard since The Pierce’s last visit when he had engaged the executive in the running of the skewers.

Quickly now, The Pierce thought.

He brought the hooked blades up to his face, placed the points against the soft sponge of his eyeballs.  The audience began to rumble.  “He can’t,” one woman said quite audibly.  “Oh, this is just wrong,” a man cried.

Drowned in lust for what was to come, The Pierce pulled the points away from his face…

And drove the blades into his eyes.

Far away, at the tip of the amulet’s tendril, Cortland gasped, struggling for breath to fuel his scream, hands clutching his eyes, his body jerking frantically from the invisible misery that had befallen him.  The audience was silent.  The Pierce made a slow, blind turn, unable to see through the gleaming silver obstructions embedded in his eyes.  A hesitant clap was followed by more silence.

The Pierce removed the blades, left Cortland’s convulsing body behind, blinked several times and clicked the instruments together to show the audience that they were indeed solid, and had witnessed something grander than illusion. 

They erupted in applause.  Shouts of appreciation filled the tent.  The blur of clapping hands fell over a hundred faces, all sharing expressions of awed good-humor.

But their accolades lasted for only a handful of seconds as the roustabouts wheeled out The Pierce’s spectacular device.  With the sight of it in their eyes, the possibilities flooding their minds, their capacity for approbation was numbed.  He had expected this reaction when creating the apparatus; he had known that after what the audience had already seen, already felt, that the appearance of his grand contraption would strike them into paralysis.

It was called Impalus, a seven-by-four-foot grid of metal bars laid out and welded into an iron lattice.  At every junction where metal joined metal, a tapered, steel spike jutted a full foot from the plain of the table.  Two dozen spikes in all, spaced barely five inches apart.  The inspiration for Impalus had come from stories he’d heard of nail beds, employed by Hindu cultures.  But The Pierce had no intention of simply lying on these spikes.

Once the roustabouts had positioned the device in the center of the ring, The Pierce made a great act of proving its integrity.  He clinked the eye-blades over the tips of every spike, and even asked an audience member, the cotton candy smeared boy, to come into the ring and give the rods a good tug.  Lancing the tip of his thumb on one of the centermost stakes, the boy scurried back to the bleachers to wriggle close to his mother and suck at the tip of his wounded digit.

After the audience had been completely absorbed by the magnificence of his device, The Pierce crossed to Impalus and grasped a long iron handle.  With a quick cocking of his arm, the table fell back into a horizontal position. The Pierce jabbed a finger in the air, pointing to a platform suspended fifteen feet above, secured to the thick trunk of a tent pole.

With another sweep of his hand toward the teeth of Impalus, he seemed to be explaining to the audience: I will leap from there, and land here.

A blond woman in navy blue stretch pants, gathered up her three children and noisily descended the bleachers.  The fat man, whose tongue had taken a stinging in the first act, rose from his seat and then seemed to change his mind.  He sat back down, looking extremely uncomfortable.  The sweat that had dappled his face earlier was now a slick on his forehead, like the sheen of oil that covered The Pierce’s body.

The heat was on him so strongly that The Pierce could barely breathe as he approached the tent pole and locked his hands on the ladder rungs.  In climbing, he lost himself for the third time in the currents of the ebony charm.  Following its tendrils like blood through an artery, he gushed toward the night’s final engagement.

Already he had tormented his wife, a woman that had made him invisible; he had tortured Cortland, a man who had made him small; and now, he would seek out the final corner in the triumvirate of his pain, the man who had torn open The Pierce’s esteem, worked it to a wound like a curious finger worrying soft fabric.

Where are you, Dad?

He climbed onto the platform as he continued to pulse through the tendrils of the black bauble.  He oozed into the lakeside mansion, drifted up the stairs to the dark room…

And found it empty.

No, he thought.  Not tonight.  Where are you?  You have to be here. 

The Pierce writhed in the current, though the audience only saw him lifting his arm high in the air to seek their encouragement.  He stood motionless at the edge of the platform, arm raised like the statue of a victor, and on the sawdust below Impalus reclined.

Where are you?

He flowed through the upstairs halls, the bedrooms, the sewing room.  Downstairs he drifted in and out of the kitchen, the dining room, the den.  A light drew him deeper into the house, to an open door and to his dad. 

On the bathroom floor, the man that had prepared his son for life by telling him all that he would never be looked as small and as fetal as a newborn child.  The old man said nothing, smelled nothing, saw nothing.

He would feel nothing.

As if thrown forward by a river of cold grease, The Pierce was expelled from the tendril in the same moment he recognized his dad’s death.  He stood on the platform high above his spectacular device.

His body quaked, but not with provocative anticipation.  His lust had been washed away by the river of freezing grease, leaving only fear, confusion and the last wound inflicted by the grand bastard, who had managed to deny his child everything.

The audience grew anxious, agitated, that he should take so long with his teasing preparation.  The Pierce gazed down on his Impalus.

No longer the confident performer, The Pierce was reduced to a man named Samuel Mason, a frightened man who had been seeded with inadequacy in his youth, only to have found it grown jungle-thick in adulthood.  A lifetime of pain and humiliation rolled over him like a current, dragging him down and away from the arena of his glory.  The audience began to jeer, to shout challenges.  Sweat dripped into Samuel’s already moist eyes.  He searched the tapestry of faces, his audience, for some buoyancy to which he could cling but their disapproval was the material of the current pulling him under.

Like so many others, they expected him to fail; they wanted him to climb back down the ladder – a small, nothing named Samuel – and slink into the wings.  Already they began to laugh at his fear, at his pain.

But why should he have to suffer this alone?  Why should he have to suffer at all?  He’d paid that tax for too many years with nothing but his own invisible, small self for comfort.  He had no intention of enduring this pain alone.  Not now.  Not anymore.

The Pierce threw his arms wide, like a high diver in the moments before he executed the swan.  He melted into the amulet, spreading himself through a hundred different tendrils until he had captured every member of the audience.  He engaged them all.  He leaned forward.  He leapt.

Atmosphere gripped him, held him motionless.  One second.  Two seconds.

Then gravity demanded his body and the atmosphere discarded his weight, throwing him like a stone toward Impalus.

Thoughts pushed into his head with the rushing air through which he fell.  A vague curiosity rose in him.  Would each member of his audience feel the totality of the pain to come, or would it be divided between them, each taking a fraction as their own?

He realized that he didn’t care, just so long as he was required to feel nothing.

Impalus rushed up to him.  Touched him.  Accepted him.

Flesh parted and bones snapped to accommodate the numerous spikes penetrating him before his body crashed to a stop against the metal grid.  Legs, arms, torso, head.  The shafts ran through his body. The spike that speared his cheek and dislocated his jaw kept him from turning his head to assess the crowd’s reaction.

But he didn’t need to see it in their faces.  The performance was a success.

There was no pain.

For him, there was no pain.

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