The Juggler

He tosses the three balls back and forth between his hands in a rhythmic motion. They are pink rubber, fifty cents each at the corner store, with a fresh out-of-the-factory feeling, grainy and cheap. In the two weeks he’s owned them, he’s dropped them only once. They bounced into the street, leaving him splashing into a New England puddle to retrieve them. It was raining then, and passerby stopped to stare at the man with wincing pity, feeling safe and separate under their umbrellas. It is raining now, too. Of course it is. It’s either raining or snowing, or God forbid hailing, when he would huddle under an awning and pull his blanket over his head as pieces of ice were spit down in an off-key melody.

His clothes are soaked and sticking to his body, and his hair lays flat, showing his growing bald spot. The toes of his shoes are worn through, and he feels the rain on his toes. He has a hat upside-down in front of his legs, proudly displaying his 85 cents. Three quarters and a dime. No one is brave enough to give their pennies, even nickels, because how could a man so far gone be saved with petty change? He would have accepted it, though, all for the sake of hearing more coins jangling around in his pockets as he sways back and forth with the rhythm of his juggling. He has a dollar, too, but that he tucks under the hat so it didn’t get wet. His prized possession is under there as well, a worn two dollar bill. Rare. He used to collect them, as a child- he had sixteen in a little box under his bed and he would take it out and show it to friends at parties. This one is less stiff and more used and far more beautiful. He thinks often about the person who gave it to him- he remembers her well. A woman, gray hair, plump face, just a bit older than him. What could have made her, he thinks, give him something so lovely? So rare? Was it offhand; was she one of those people who hands off money without looking at the face on the front? Did she know how much it would mean to him?

Two dollars. He spends the days thinking of all the things he could buy, like a child in a toy store - a bagel from the store, a bag of chips, a pencil. If he saves up three dollars he can buy socks, good ones from the boutique on Main. He knows the exact pair that he would buy- blue, with gold stars, like the pair he got for his eleventh birthday, along with the portable radio and the pretty yellow pen and the action figure. Just seeing them would make him feel like he was back in 1932, blond and grinning, tearing open wrapping paper with six of his friends gathered round. Pretending to be annoyed at the socks- mama, again? Can’t you get me something interesting? And pressing buttons on the radio, hearing it shiver with static. He keeps the two dollars folded in his pocket while he sleeps. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, asphalt against his neck, to check that it’s still there, that no dastardly robber pickpocketed him as he slept. He is waiting for that extra dollar, one that he doesn’t need to spend on food or drink, or juggling. Then, feet warm and blue and gold, gone of the two-dollar bill, he will be rich in its entirety, leaving behind the three pink rubber balls on the sidewalk. That day will come, or maybe it has already happened and he has simply forgotten.

He juggles. A little boy, down the block, pulls at his mother’s skirt, and he can hear – “Please, mommy? Please?” She is young and done up with fancy makeup. She has a mole on her lip, and her face is dry with powder. She is familiar, but if he was to yell out she would turn away and pretend she knows no one. After all, this should have been a fresh start for her and her child, her bumbling young boy, after losing half of everything. The woman glances at the man, anxiously, and looks away.

“We should go,” he hears her say. The boy smiles at her, pleads. He wears a fresh shirt and new shoes and blond hair. He comes away with fifty cents, two shining silver quarters. Shiny people always have to have their quarters in the same condition.

The little boy runs up to him, looking anxious. “I like your juggling, sir.”

“Timothy!” His mother yells. “Get away from him! Go get your ice cream!”

There is an ice cream truck on the corner, playing the familiar jingle. The boy looks longingly towards it and drops his two quarters in the man’s hat, before he can give in to childish hunger.

“Thank you,” the man means to say, but no words come out. He nods instead. He keeps juggling, doesn’t miss a beat.

“Timothy!”

The boy scrunches up his nose. His mother comes marching over, dress stiff and starched. She grabs onto the boy’s arm and pulls him away. She doesn’t even look at the man. He only gets a glimpse of her face, but the curve of the nose, the long eyelashes, the blonde hair- it feels like something has splintered in him. He watches his daughter and his grandson walk away, clothed in safe anonymity.

“I gave you that money for ice cream!”

“I was just talking to him, Mommy.”

“Well, you can’t.”

“But-“

“He’s just a good-for-nothing drunk. You should leave him alone.”

“But he was juggling-“

“How about I go buy you ice cream? From the nice place on the corner.”

“All right.” Unhesitant, and in an hour, a day, the boy will forget all about the poor, disheveled homeless man on the corner, juggling three rubber balls with the skill of a circus performer. There are too many others doing the same thing. Too many people to be fascinated with, to take up the space where the man once was. Too many other feet that will stand under that blue awning, on that street, wishing for the same things that he did. Because you can’t expect a young boy to know, of course, but didn’t something fracture inside of him too, even a little bit? Enough that he wouldn’t stand in front of his grandfather and look at him as a stranger?

The man misses one of the balls and it bounces towards the ground. It rolls off the slanted sidewalk into the puddle in the gutter, then rolls further into the drain. “No, no, no,” the man mutters, and runs to the street and bends down, peering down into the darkness. It’s gone. He realizes ruefully that he will have to replace it with the shining fifty cents from his grandson, and then the cycle will continue. Like Timothy was only there in the past, like he’s less than a memory.

He picks up the two quarters in his hand for a moment and stares at them. Passerby brush past the man holding two pink rubber balls in one hand and fifty cents worth of coins in the other, disheveled, broken. He gathers up his hat, his two-dollar bill, his money, folds it all up in the raggedy blanket. A silly precaution, really. He slings the blanket over his shoulder, like he’s a child planning to run away from home, twelve years old with only bread and clothing. The sight is far too familiar to him. Except in his experience, it was a girl, long blond hair tied up in a knot, nightdress on, map in her hand with a crude pen line drawn to grandma’s. Sneaking away in the early hours of the morning, being watched from the window, eyes too drunk to stop her. Watching her disappear into the trees, watching her fade away. Letting her fade away.

The cashier looks at him with a grim kind of pity-disgust as he hands him the two quarters and takes a rubber ball. A group of boys, teenagers, stare at him as he unfolds the blanket again, sets up. A sad man, a hermit crab, or maybe a snail, carrying his house on his back, moving locations every week or every time he gets kicked out- “Hey- you can’t sleep here! Get up! Get up!” Roused at two o clock in the morning by an angry shopkeeper, waving a broom, accented English. Or poked in the neck with a stick- “hey, get out, man. Go find yourself somewhere else to sleep.” They all blur together, and he jumps from one location to another, not allowing himself to become familiar with the buildings and the traffic and the colors of the sky. They are too difficult to let go of.

He tosses the balls in his hands again. He wonders how much longer he will have to keep juggling- until his arms give out, surely. Years from now. Perhaps when he is an old man people will feel more pity for him. Now he’s in between years, young enough to be blamed, old enough to wonder where his wife and children and grandchildren are. He has been the subject of too many dinner conversations, roast chicken, steamed carrots, rich people dinners. They feel comfortable in their detachedness. Where is his family, doesn’t he have anyone, how can anyone have no one? He is not the subject of dinners made of stolen cans of green beans and coffee. He is too close to reality for them. He is less of a caricature and more of a man.

The teenage boys watch him as if he is telling a joke, waiting to laugh. Every expression he makes, every head tilt towards the ground, make them chuckle or snort or gasp in unison, like it’s all an inside joke he is yet to understand. “Hey,” one of them yells at him, and the others dissolve in laughs.

“Hey. You. Can you do anything else, man? I’m getting bored of your act.”

The man blinks. “I-“

“Can you climb? Acrobatics? You can’t be a one-man-circus who only juggles.” He is the leader. The others stand in synchronized groups behind him, echoing his words. “How ‘bout you climb that building? The one behind you. I’ll give you fifty dollars.”

And he will, too. He’s not lying. He looks rich. He’s wearing a clean white pressed shirt and black slacks and fancy shoes. A nice hat. He could spare the money. He pulls bills out of his pocket. They are crisp, like he stole them straight from a mint.

The man, just for a second, thinks of all the things he could buy with fifty dollars. He could buy a new shirt and pants. A new blanket. Maybe he could go back in time, years back, and pay for a better hospital, or even an abortion, and they would have avoided so many bouquets of funeral roses, and so many bottles of beer.

The boys are trying to suppress their laughs. “All right,” the man says, and they all go ohhh, like he’s making a challenge. Their leader pulls out a video camera out of his bag, sets it up, presses record.

The man looks up at the building. It is five stories tall. An apartment building. Window ledges jutting out narrowly from the white brick. It has stopped raining by now. He wonders, just for a second, what he got himself into.

“So?” One of the boys says. “You gonna do it or not?” The others nod in approval: “Yeah, yeah.”

The man drops his three rubber balls into his hat. He wedges his foot onto a low ledge. Reaches up and grabs a brick, sticking out by barely an inch. There is gum on the underside. He hoists himself up. His body, thin, clings to the building. He reaches up farther, stretching himself so his shoulder groans in protest. For a second his feet leave the ledge, then he pulls himself up, placing both feet carefully in a space where a brick has fallen off. The man looks back for a second- he is barely four feet off the ground, but already a small group of people have caught on. They gather around him in a semicircle, whispering to each other, like any louder would be disrespectful. He sees the unfamiliar faces look into his eyes like he is an old friend. He sees the coins, dollars, in their pockets. He sees their hungry mouths and cameras.

He hoists one foot onto another ledge. Shifts slightly to the right so he can grab onto the side of a window. The man thinks about the people who live there, whether they will see him, realizes it doesn’t matter. None of that matters to fifty dollars. He pulls himself up again. He must be seven feet up now, just above the heads of the watchers.

It becomes methodical. Moving inches to the side, reaching towards bricks, feet and hands grabbing desperately onto ledges. Feeling the ridges under his fingers, judging whether they’re deep enough to hold onto. Pulling himself up. Letting his hands or his feet leave the brick, hang in exposed air for a moment, hear all the gasps. The whistles. The cheers as he brings himself up another foot. His face inches from the brick, jaw firm. Feeling the ache in his stomach. Scraping his wrist as he reaches upwards. His shaky breathing. His arms, far too old for this. His chest, marred by alcohol and cigarettes and breathing in the smoke in the city air. The wind blowing through his ripped t-shirt. He realizes he is nearly halfway there. It has been fifteen minutes. In a way, it is like juggling. Patterned- right left up down. Repeat. He is moving slowly. It is colder up here, and the wind is bitter and cruel. It has started to rain again, gently.

He knows he has an audience now- he can hear them, murmuring with every move he makes, shuffling every time his arms tense. Preparing for his fall- all too scared to move, to reach to catch him. He twists his head around, his gray hair whipping wildly in the wind. He sees them: a crowd of people, looking up at him. Thirty, forty, all relishing in the deliciousness of his danger. Children, even, mouths open in a collective o. The leader of the teenage boys has his camera angled up, and he is laughing. The man looks straight into the lens. It looks like a great black eye. He wishes for a second to see his daughter in the crowd, his grandson, but he does not. They are long gone. Perhaps they have forgotten him by now.

He is hanging there, both feet on an exposed brick, one hand on a ledge. The next brick is a foot above him. He knows he has to reach it, and he does, pushing himself for a moment, until for a split second he is suspended in the air, not touching anything but the wind. The audience gasps, sways- what a marvelous show! And he grabs onto the brick at the last moment, his muscles tensing. He is breathing quickly. He is holding on by three fingers, dirty and slippery with rain. He pulls himself up, and the circle of people far away on the ground sigh in disappointment and relief.

It comes to him in jolts, the fact that he is perpetually half an inch away from death, and he shudders in the air every few minutes. He is ten feet away from the top. He is so close. It is cold, and it is raining harder now, so much that if he were to look down he would see a blanket of black umbrellas held up in protection. He doesn’t look down. His legs are shaking, and his shirt is sticking to him, flapping like a flag. The noise is of rain, and yelling from below, and the hum of the city in the background, a peaceful monotone. It is that drone that he holds onto tightly, and reminds him why he is here, clinging onto the wet front of a building with his scarred hands. A small drop of blood from a scrape trickles down the building, collecting dirt and disappearing in the rainwater.

And suddenly he is two feet from the roof and he is wincing into the sky. He is reaching his hand up and clutching onto the edge and he’s feeling the brick under his fingers. He’s pushing himself up and his muscles are straining and he’s collapsing onto the top of the building.

The man’s cheek is pressed against the damp grainy concrete of the roof. He coughs, once, and his whole body shudders. He lets the rain shower down on him, pooling into a puddle around his neck, and his hands are limp. People are cheering from below. His feet are dangling off the edge of the building and his toes are meeting cold five-stories-up air, and the rain. He is breathing so heavily it’s hurting his chest, and though it’s November, he feels warmth rushing through his body in a flood.

One by one, he is able to move his limbs, and he stands up slowly, wobbling. He is greeted by a cheer from below, a hoarse, surprised noise, a who’s that man? noise, a what is he doing up there? noise. It is a welcome sound. He figures it’s the most noise that’s been made for him since his wedding, where he kissed the red-lipstick lips of his blushing wife; where she drank two glasses of wine and he was young enough that he only needed one; where they went back to their room and she kissed him through her veil and vomited on the hotel room floor and cleaned it up with her white gloves. Where she sat down on the clean bedsheets and told him and he laughed then cried, and he lay there all night looking at her stomach, still flat enough that you could believe nothing was there. His vision is blurry and he wipes his eyes.

He is met by the clouds, first, and they are heavy with gray rain. It is raining, lightly, and the sun from far away peeks out like an apology. The tops of the buildings look odd to him. They are a forgotten mirror-city, inverted colors, seen only by those lucky enough to be in the air. He should not be looking at them. He looks down and he sees them- a crowd- umbrellas tilted back, faces pointed towards the sky, smiling and squinting up at him. They wave their arms and umbrellas and cheer, pointing like he’s a celebrity. He sees the group of teenagers, the boy waving fifty dollars like a prize and laughing. A mother is carrying a baby and she waves the baby’s little pink arm. The man feels a pang of what he never knew. But it is far down, so far down that he can’t see their expressions, just circles like blotches of paint on a canvas. They could be anyone, and they are all the same, backup singers in the chorus of a scream that they point towards the clouds. They could be his daughter, or his wife, bloated pale body and gray cheeks and clear tubes dangling from her still hands and after-pregnant belly.

The man laughs. He seems so far from the bottom, from his ragged blanket and juggling balls, and the black eye of the video camera. He could stay up here forever. The people seem years away and so much smaller, like plastic figurines. Even the yelling is quiet to him. He sees the future, just for a minute: he climbs down, takes the fifty dollars, and when it all quiets down he goes and buys a nice shirt and pants, and goes in for a job interview at the nearest restaurant. And they hire him, and he has money, and when he buys an apartment he goes and finds his daughter. And she sees him, dressed up for a housewarming party with his work friends. Maybe she has her son with him. Maybe she has a husband too, and a daughter, a baby girl. She hugs him and apologizes, with her blond hair tied up in the same way her mother did. She drinks wine and he drinks water.

People are reaching up their hands, beckoning for him to come down, and reluctantly he walks back over to the edge. He gets on his knees, seeing the ledges jutting out from the side of the building like jagged teeth. He is not afraid of heights, but it is momentarily disorienting, being so high up, with so far to fall. And maybe that woman with blond hair is his daughter- no, she is too tall, her hair too short, and she is wearing a blue petticoat where his daughter wore brown. It seems like a century ago when she dragged her son away from him without looking back. And maybe that little boy is his grandson, but it can’t be, because he looks much too young and he is alone, and his mother would never dare to repeat history. The man’s hands shake a little bit, a product of his age and the wind and that he hasn’t had enough money to buy a drink for four days. He is tired.

He sees the future again. He climbs down, pulls the fifty dollars from the boy’s hand with ravenous hunger. He packs up his things in his ragged blanket and makes the four-minute walk to the liquor store and he buys four bottles of cheap vodka and he is in a daze for the next few days, until he wakes up on the cold concrete outside a store and vomits into the street. And he lets the bottles lay there like dripping corpses, and he doesn’t cry, and he picks up the three pink juggling balls and promises himself that it will never happen again. He knows what this means. He knows what fifty dollars will entail.

The man shudders, and suddenly the cheering from below seems more like screams, raucous yelling and waving of arms and video cameras tilted straight up, covering faces. They laugh like they’re looking at a malnourished zoo animal, comical in its skinniness and the ribs poking out from fur. The man’s shirt blows in the wind, and he bends down slowly, turns around, stretches down a foot over the side of the building. He touches a ledge with the tip of his exposed toe, then, grasping onto the top of the building with his frail fingers, he begins to climb down.

The noise is almost too much, a hoarse celebration- people yelling “Come down! Come down!” And newcomers are whispering, thinking the man above can’t hear.

“What’s he doing up there?”

“Dunno. What’s he- does anyone know why he’s up there?”

 “Harry bet him a fifty that he wouldn’t make it up.”

“Damn!”

“I know. I know, man.”

They pity him. He can hear it in their raucous voices, their questions. Their worry. The man feels sick, knowing that the pity is what’s kept him alive the last twenty years. Knowing that by now, all he is is other people’s feelings- he is the poor man, he’s the no, I don’t know my grandpa, mom doesn’t like talking about him, he is, you’ll end up like him if you don’t focus on your studies, he is I have a dollar, should I-? He lives within others. He is not himself.

The man’s breath comes jagged and short. His foot misses the ledge and he slips, scrabbling against the damp wall- his audience gasps, sighs once he manages to grab on. His feet are propped up against smooth brick, and he is holding on by one hand. He takes a second to breathe deeply. The next ledge is just a few feet away. He looks down. Four stories, past the umbrellas, past the watching eyes and the cameras. Three pink juggling balls, lying neatly nested inside his hat. The two-dollar bill is peeking out. He feels like he can’t breathe. His fingers strain white with the pressure. He realizes that he’s going to fall, and he realizes what he can do about it. He can prop his foot up on the ledge next to him. He could hoist himself back up to the next ledge, or move to the side and grab onto a space where a brick is jutting out.

He doesn’t. It seems almost too perfect to him, and suddenly he’s thinking about his wife, the way her fingers had turned white in the coffin. How the baby in his arms was crying and how much he hated her at that moment, hated his two-week-old daughter for letting this happen. How he went home that night and put the baby in her crib and how he used his wife’s life insurance to buy vodka, and how he got drunk enough to forget about the baby until halfway through the next day, where his hands shook as he fed her formula. How twelve years later he cried in his empty house and the room where his daughter had been, and the toys and books she had left behind. How his landlord was standing in front of his door two months later with a notice of eviction, and how he slept on the streets for the first time, his head against the concrete and his cold hands.

The man lets his feet slip off until he is holding on with just his fingers. He takes a jagged breath, and remembers this moment- the heavy wet air, the screaming below, the scrapes on his fingers, the cameras. He lets himself fall, and he drops like a stone through the air.

People part, their umbrellas tilting back in unison. They leave him a circle as he falls, and he splatters the boy’s fifty dollars with blood as he hits the pavement. There is silence for a second. Again, they are thinking. Another one of the city’s casualties. A single pink-dripping-red juggling ball rolls through two pairs of legs and into the street.

Five miles away, his daughter unlocks the door to her apartment and lets her and her son in. They are greeted by a tall, brown-haired man who kisses his wife on the cheek and ruffles the hair of his son. “I got you a present,” he tells Timothy. “Can you guess?” The little boy shakes his head. “All right, then, I guess I can’t give it to you.”

“Daddy!”

“Okay, okay. Close your eyes.”

Timothy stretches out his hands and squeezes his eyes shut.

“No peeking.”

“I’m not!” 

The man grins at his wife as he places a pink ball in his hand. “Open.”

The boy opens up his eyes.

“The advertisement says it can bounce all the way up to the moon. Do you believe it?”

“No way.”

“Wanna go try it out? I know you wanted it, I saw you looking at in the store the other day.”

“Yeah!”

“What do you say?” His mother reminds him.

“Thanks, dad.” He takes the ball from his hand.

“Not inside!”

The boy groans and heads back outside. His father looks at his wife and smiles. “I knew he’d love it. And it was only fifty cents, too.”

The woman smiles back at him. Timothy has forgotten about the juggling man on the corner, but she has not.

The next day, she reads about a homeless man who fell off the side of a building. She skims past the article. She doesn’t think about her father. Instead, she turns to the next page. There is a small column about parenting advice, and she devours it. She puts her hand on her slightly swollen stomach. It’s going to be a girl- they found out last week. They have already started putting up a nursery.