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Dick drops the dime into the little leather money pouch he wears and pulls a souvenir ”Flying Graysons” postcard out of the box. “Is it for you or a sweetheart?” he asks, the way his dad taught him to. Most of the time it’s women or little kids who buy these and act all giddy when he signs it to them, putting a flourish on the D and the G the way his mom taught him to.
The man pulls his hand back at the question. “Actually, can you make it out to Bruce?” He turns to the man standing, glowering, at his side and smirks. “Evidence that you had a good time.”
“Harvey.” There’s a tired warning in the answering growl but Harvey doesn’t take any notice of it. Dick shifts his smile to Bruce who offers a tired one in return. The other man’s playing a joke, Dick thinks, because Bruce doesn’t look like he’s having a good time at all. He doesn’t look like he’s ever had a good time in his life – just another one of those rich people Dick sees in every city; tense and unhappy and spoiled for everything. He scratches his pen across the card anyway. Harvey’s paying, not Bruce. “Well, we’ll make sure you have a good time tonight. If my dad’s quadruple somersault doesn’t impress you, nothing will.”
Harvey elbows Bruce and winks at Dick like they’re working together. “That’s what I told him!”
“Harvey…” Bruce growls again but the exasperation in his voice sounds more like resignation this time. He takes the postcard Dick’s holding out and slides it into the inner pocket of his overcoat. “I’m sure your somersault will be very good.” The words sound like he’s reading them off a page.
Dick beams back. “It’s the only one like it in the world!”
Harvey’s still grinning as he links his arm with Bruce and pulls him over to the Big Top.
Dick takes the dime a small girl is holding out to him and smiles, dropping it in the leather money pouch he wears. He slides a Flying Grayson souvenir postcard out of the box. “Who do I make this out to honey?”
***
Inside the canvas, Bruce releases the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He’s trying to take Harvey’s treat in the spirit it was intended, but more and more it’s harder and harder for him to turn his thoughts away from work. Everywhere he turns, the human body is impossible to escape. But he has to. He knows.
He’s been to the theatre, the surgery, the circus before. He’s seen all the tricks the human body is capable of, and treated the outcomes of those it’s not. But to walk into the Big Top is to walk into another world. One where wild animals can be tamed, girls dance in rings of smoke and fire, and the human body can break free, if only for a moment, of its limits.
He’s there to be stunned and stupefied. He came to be amazed.
Or, that’s what Harvey kept telling him after he announced their visit. “You focus too much on the bad side of things Bruce; you’ve got to look up sometimes.” He’d had to bite his tongue. Harvey’s a prosecutor and Bruce knows he sees plenty, but it’s all reports and photographs in files. By the time something gets to Harvey’s desk, it’s already over, and all that’s left is the blame.
By the time they’re watching the boy and his family swing and catch each other high above the crowd in acts of increasing danger, he’s almost managed to relax into it, to accept the spectacle for what it is. Not imagine them lying sprawled on the sawdust below.
The ringmaster prowls around the edge of the ring. “And now,” he calls through his megaphone, his voice clear all the way to the back of the crowd, “the Leg-en-dary Fly-ing Gray-sons” will perform a feat so daring, so outrageous, so superhuman, few others have ever attempted it, and no others have ever survived it!”
The lights dim until the only bright spot is aimed at the man standing high up on a platform.
Bruce is one with the crowd now as they all lean forward, creeping to the edge of their seats, leaning up on tiptoes to see the acrobat bow towards them.
“Defying Death, Defying Gravity, Mister Grayson will turn not once, not twice, not three, but four times! Four times in the air for you without the aid of a safety net. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight you will believe a man can fly.”
A clown with a drum beats a tattoo, the rhythm gripping all their hearts as the net that’s hung below the poles the Grayson’s have swung between is rolled up and tied away. The spotlight stays on the solemn proceedings until the last second, then spins in wild circles across the tent before landing back on its target. The light sticks to Mister Grayson as he jumps from his platform and swings out once, twice, into the wide empty space above them. For a moment it seems as if that’s all he’s going to do.
The drum stops and silence fills the tent but Bruce’s heart keeps beating.
The man launches himself, spinning upwards away from his trapeze. Turning once, twice, three times as if he really has found a way to free himself from gravity.
Bruce leans up until he’s standing, and feels something in himself letting go too.
***
When he was younger, Dick was allowed to stay up to watch the evening show and then his mom would put him to bed, tucking him in and giving him a kiss that left her stage paint behind on his forehead. Now he’s older he’s expected to help out with the clean up, getting started on the smaller jobs that need to be done of an evening and hardly ever getting to see the main event.
He can hear it through the canvas though – Archie “taming” his lions. The crack of the whip, the gasps of the crowd; it hasn’t impressed Dick in a long time. He knows how the lions are kept half doped and have never even been close to being wild. It’s pathetic.
But the people come to see raging beasts turned into kitty cats, and he guesses that if you start off with an expectation, sometimes you just won’t let yourself see past that. And it’s the same no matter where they are. One crowd is every crowd.
“What we do is too big for them,” his dad tells him. “Because we don’t have lions and tigers and stories about Africa. They can believe all that because it seems impossible. What we do is too big for them. Because they want to see something brought down, they don’t want to see someone go up.”
That’s the conversation Dick’s replaying in his head instead of watching his feet, instead of not tripping on a rope. He relaxes on instinct – there’s no point in learning to fall if you never fall, and prepares for the impact that doesn’t come.
Hands catch him instead, pulling him up right.
It’s the guy from earlier. He doesn’t look as hard anymore, but changed in that temporary way that everyone is after a show.
“I’m a doctor.” He says in apology as he lets Dick go, then reaches out for him again. “Here, let me…”
Dick brushes himself down, brushes off the concern. “I’m ok. Not even a graze, see? Doctor, huh? I bet you see some real sights doing that.” He nods back towards the tent, where the man should be. “Not staying for the lions? They’re real man-eaters, I’ve heard.”
Doctor looks back at the tent then away, rubbing the back of his neck. The stars in his eyes are wearing off, Dick can tell. “I saw your act. It was very good.”
Dick holds the laugh in the back of his throat. This guy probably thinks he’s seen everything, but he’s not seen anything. And maybe he’ll leave the city one day, but he’ll definitely never leave the ground. “I told you. It’s the only one like it in the world.”
***
The wonder’s mostly worn off by the time Harvey drops him at home, even if the embarrassment of being caught by the circus boy hasn’t.
In the darkness of the study, Bruce follows the lights of Harvey’s car as it swoops too fast down the driveway and the narrow lane in front of the house and then finally disappears, swallowed up by the night.
With the lights on, the reflection of the room behind him smothers his view through the window. Without them he can see right down through the hills that surround his neighborhood – mansions containing the wealthy sufferers of gout who still exclusively only want his father attending them – through to the city, down to the slums. To the poor clinic they fund with the gout money; the place where he spends his days and where everyone he catches, he catches too late.
It’s the price of being a Wayne, he knows. He’s heard it countless times, that raising themselves up is meaningless if they leave everyone else on the ground, that service is an honor. He knows; but it’s an honor that’s wearing on him; the endless parade of poverty and the ills it brings. Knowing that even when they lift someone up, it’s only a matter of time before they fall again.
He squeezes his eyes shut, scrubs the bridge of his nose between his fingers. Conjures up the colors of the circus, the scents. The way Harvey had dragged him there, unwilling to go even though he’d wanted to. How he’d wanted to see something wonderful for a while, and had managed, nearly, to not see in his mind how it would have looked if the man had failed, his rope had snapped, the hands that caught his had been less strong or capable.
But he hadn’t, and they had been.
He pulls the little postcard from his coat and stares at that instead; the boy swinging towards his parents, hands out to theirs, ready to be caught. The boy has scrawled Enjoy! across them. He looks at the card hard enough that when he puts it aside and returns to the window he can still see them in it, swinging high above the tiny lights of the city. His heels lift as he stretches up as if to join them.
And then the vision is gone and he’s standing in the study alone.
Bruce searches across the night’s skyline, but the lights have gone out on the circus and he can’t see them through the dark.