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BEFORE: Jared's Story

By Gina Detwiler

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Chapter One

On September 2, 1859, a massive solar flare struck the earth’s atmosphere, touching off the biggest geomagnetic storm in recorded history. Telegraph systems all over the world failed as telegraph poles burst into flame and operators were hospitalized with electric burns. Had this storm, known as the Carrington Event, occurred a hundred years later, it would have plunged much of the world into darkness.
Most people did not know about solar flares and didn’t use the telegraph, but what they saw in the sky took their breath away. Brilliant auroras of red, green, and purple blazed as far south as the Caribbean, so bright that coal miners in Colorado got up in the middle of the night and started making breakfast. For a time, the entire world seemed enveloped in marvelous, colorful, undulating light, a celestial cloud of impossible delicacy. A gold miner in Australia described the aurora as a thing of “unspeakable beauty…a sight never to be forgotten.” And then, in a moment of prescience, he added, “The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognizing, the divine immanence. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution.”
I was born on September 2, 1859.
I often wondered what my mother thought as she labored in the home of her husband’s parents in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, a tiny French hamlet a stone’s throw from Switzerland. Did she fear the sort of creature she would birth? For like the auroras that lit the sky over her bed, I was an unforeseen phenomenon, a product of nature turned unnatural, a dreadful secret that must be kept hidden from the world.
My parents were circus performers, and the circus was the perfect place to hide. No one paid much attention to a small child amid half-naked bareback riders, lion tamers, acrobats and dancing clowns. No one noticed that I never seemed to grow, that I was still no more than a toddler at ten years old, although I could talk like a much older child. My parents were part of a small, itinerant circus that traveled the towns and villages of southern France. Provence, Avignon, Nîmes, Bourg en-Brêsse, many more long forgotten now.
A flamboyant gypsy named Maurice Bourgnon ran the circus—his wife, his six brothers, two mistresses and seventeen children made up the bulk of the performers. My parents were among the few hired talent. My father trained my mother to do tricks on the backs of white horses as they galloped around the ring. She wore a white sequined costume with feathery angel wings that flapped as she twirled and flipped. It was the most popular act in the show, until my father discovered a new act that was sweeping circuses all over France.
The trapeze.
My father believed that this was the future of the circus. He built a tall, wooden frame rigged with a swing and began training my mother to do aerial acrobatics. She was a natural and learned quickly, so he built a thirty-foot frame that fit inside the big tent. I will never forget the first time I saw my mother fly on the high trapeze—her effortless grace seemed to me a kind of magic.
Never satisfied, my father built a second trapeze so that he and my mother could swing in synchronization. Their tricks became more dangerous and thrilling, my mother leaping from her swing, twirling in the air and catching my father’s arms. His immense physical strength made their death-defying act all the more awe-inspiring. But it was the image of them together that seared my memory: my father dressed in glittering black, playing the devil to my mother’s luminous angel. They called themselves Lucas and Charmaine, the Divine Duo.
We traveled eight months a year from village to village, living in a cramped, rickety wagon that doubled as our transportation. Later on, the circus traveled by train, but in those early days the railroad system was not as extensive as it would later become. I loved the animals especially: the horses, the dogs, the monkeys, and even the old lion named Nero, so fat he could hardly walk without dragging his belly on the ground. Yet what a roar he could produce before a crowd!
Whenever I could, I helped the animal keepers by filling the water buckets. When no one was looking, I would stick my hand into Nero’s cage to touch the matted fur of his mane. He’d swing his big head around to look at me, his eyes all droopy and bloodshot, and let out a half-hearted roar.
I was supposed to stay in the wagon during the performances, but I often snuck out to watch my parents perform. I longed to be a part of the show. Someday, my mother said. Never, said my father. It wasn’t just because of my size, I knew. Smaller children than I performed in the circus. There was something about me that my father disdained, something that made him afraid.
“Why does he hate me?” I asked my mother once.
She hugged me, told me not to worry. “You will grow. You will be strong. It will just take you a little longer.”
I decided to prove to him I could be a performer, that I was worthy of being his son. One early morning I went into the big tent, climbed up the rope to the top of the trapeze. My breath caught as I stared at the floor below—it was much farther down than I had expected. I wasn’t afraid. I felt exhilarated. I grabbed hold of the bar and swung into the air. It was glorious, that feeling of flying, untethered to the earth. I swung and swung, pumping my little legs, going up so high I could touch the top of the circus tent with my feet.
I don’t know how long I was swinging, for then I heard a cry from below. “Jean-Luc! Jean-Luc! What are you doing? Someone help!” Other voices soon joined the first. And then my father’s voice.
“Jean-Luc! Take my hand!”
He had climbed up the rope and stretched out his arm, ready to grab me when I swung close to him. His face was a mask of fury and I knew what I was in for if he caught me. So I let go. I heard screams and gasps from below—there was no net. I felt the air under me buoying my descent. I spread my arms and did a flip before landing on my feet.
Dozens of people stared at me in shocked silence. What I’d done was impossible. Yet it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to me.
“Jean-Luc!” My mother rushed to me, gathered me in her arms. She was trembling. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“Why not?”
“You could have been killed!”
“I don’t think so.”
She gave me a look I’d never seen before, one of abject terror.
I tried to obey my mother, but I was hooked on the trapeze. I learned to be more secretive. I went to the ring while my parents slept and the gypsies were laughing and drinking in the ringmaster’s wagon. I swung until my arms ached, trying to imitate my parents’ most difficult tricks. The dark didn’t bother me. I loved it—sailing through a void.
For many weeks I went undetected. But then one night Monsieur le Blanc, the lead clown in the circus, came out of the shadows after one of my more spectacular landings, clapping his hands in slow rhythm. In the ring, Monsieur le Blanc, or “Blanky” as he was known on stage, wore a loose white shirt with a red ruffled collar, and leggings speckled with large red flowers made of tulle. With his face smothered in white paint, he wore a white, cone-shaped hat with a tassel. He was an excellent mime and also performed funny acts with his little dog, Sniffy. Sniffy didn’t like me, and growled whenever I came near, so I stayed away from them both.
“Look what I have found.” The clown leered at me. Beside him, Sniffy growled low and bared his teeth. Without his makeup, Blanky’s face was mottled and much older than I expected, his smile wide and virtually toothless. “Such a little boy doing such marvelous things.”
I backed away, but he kept closing the gap between us.
“How talented you are. Why do your parents hide you? Why do they not let you perform?”
I didn’t answer.
“I guess they don’t think much of you, do they? Perhaps they would allow me to make you a part of my act. I’ll make you a costume, just like mine. Petit Le Blanc. You’d be in disguise, no one would know who you are. You could do tricks, all sorts of tricks. I know you can. Leaping and balancing and flipping. I’ve been watching you for many nights. You will soon be the star of the show. What do you say?”
I still said nothing, just shook my head. The man’s breath was rancid, his face so close to mine I could smell the greasepaint in the folds of his skin.
“You do not speak? Well then, perhaps I must tell your father about your escapades in the night.”
I shook my head.
“I think I must. He should know what his little boy is up to.” The way he emphasized little chilled me. “I think I could make a nice arrangement with him. I will keep silent, as a good clown does, if he allows you into my act. What do you think?”
I stared at the ground.
“No voice! My, my, my. You will make a very good clown. Let us see what your father has to say.”
He hurried off, Sniffy at his heels.
That was the last time anyone saw Monsieur Le Blanc. He did not show up in the breakfast line the next morning. His clown friends laughed, thinking he had drunk too much the night before. But I knew better.
The ring master was enraged at the clown’s disappearance. How dare his best clown desert the circus in the middle of the night, with no word to anyone? There were those who suspected something unfortunate had happened to Monsieur Le Blanc, but no one went looking for him. No police report was filed. The circus simply moved on.
My father never spoke of the clown. But from that night on, he made me sleep in an empty animal cage with a padlock on the door.

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