The Return of Les Incassables — Version 2
From a hotel room in Paris
“I just need two hours,” Anas the acrobat said as he pulled his white gloves over his elegantly long, dark hands. Three others were sitting in various spots inside the small hotel room, but they knew he was speaking more to himself than to them. They listened anyways. “We’ve been studying the viral behavior for years. Social media is the answer that we could never have predicted, and the world has become the perfect audience simply begging for this kind of a performance. The time has come; we’ll get our 5 million eyes. I just need two hours.”
“What if it’s not enough?” Francis the writer was sitting on the windowsill overlooking the streets of Paris with a view of the Eiffel Tower beyond. His olive-toned, wiry arms were crossed over his chest; his hazel eyes were fixed on his commander. The other two in the room caught their breath, waiting anxiously to see Anas’s reaction.
The older man paused his preparations and regarded Francis, his hands poised on the collar of his white coat. “If what is not enough, exactly?”
“The time, the flare, the costume, any of it! What if it’s the wrong location? What if you need two and a half hours? What if you get the 5 million we need in only one hour and half of them dwindle off by the time you get to two? What if something else extraordinary happens, and no one pays attention? What if — ” Anas silenced him with a single motion in straightening his coat; the snap of his collar against his chest thundered a sound too big for its mass, filling the small space. Slowly, he turned to face the younger man, and regarded him with a gaze that pierced his soul.
“Francis… ” Nastajia the dancer began, as though to calm an impending storm.
But Anas interrupted her. “Not to worry, my dear.” He gave her a humorless smile. “He refuses to understand, but that will soon change.
“You were not there when this was taken from us,” he said. He slowly crossed the room towards Francis, gesturing to a dazzling blue flower that glowed from its perch in his chest pocket. “The life of Les Incassables is in our magic, and you were not among us when it was truly ours. You were only born centuries later, and your gift was passed to you from another — your mother, I do believe.” Francis’ lips pursed at her mention, but did not open.
Anas went on. “What you have now is an imitation, the exhale of the breath of life that once coursed through our veins. You never performed with us in the throne rooms of kings, nor felt the rush of light that flowed through our bodies when our gift allowed us to be unbreakable. You were never whole; you don’t know what it is to be broken.
“The curse that took this light from us was a death sentence; how could one ever fit 5 million eyes into one theater? But by the time we could even consider building something greater than the Grecian amphitheater, they began hunting us down in earnest for having the potential, however dormant, to do something they couldn’t understand. Not only was the effort impossible, it was dangerous even to try.
“But now — ” Anas’ voice caught in his throat. His eyes rose from Francis’ stunned expression and regarded the Parisian view beyond the glass divide. “Now,” he began again, his voice softer as his dark eyes surveyed the streets teeming with tourists, “we have a stage that houses audiences of billions. We have a society that promotes and fights for the things it once hated. We have the means by which we can be alive again.” He had held his hand out in front of his face. It was shaking, and he closed it into a fist. “We can truly perform again.
“If it’s not enough,” he had said, his voice again commanding as he turned back to face Francis, “then I’ll die. The magic that lives inside my veins will betray me in the midst of a performance, as it has betrayed several of my family, our family, who tried to break the curse by force, or thought it better to die by their art than by its lack. But I have lived too long, and buried too many friends, to not take an opportunity to break free from the chains that have held me and my brethren.” He opened his hand, where the light image of a blue flower danced upon his fingertips. “The flower lives. And so will we.”
Later in the afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind heavy skies, casting a gloom over the room where Francis sat at his computer, considering the task before him. It was simple enough: send one tweet. At a precise time, with one click, he was to send one message to a following he had fostered for the past five years. By doing so, he would tip the first domino of an elaborate design that had taken fifteen years to set up, all to revive a life he never lived. The result would either be the success of a reawakened past, or the failure of a great loss that could never be undone.
He couldn’t understand it; he didn’t want to understand. He had helped because Les Incassables had become his family after his mother died. But he was afraid to feel a power that could change his life as he knew it. It was either to gain something he had never lost, or else lose the only father he ever had. He couldn’t understand why the risk was worth it.
He looked out of the one window in his small hotel room. It had begun to snow gently, and the Eiffel Tower stood proudly high above the city, its form hazy behind the curtain of snow. The longer he looked, the farther away he felt, until the Tower was no longer in his vision, but a pile of rubble in the streets of Turkey that was once his childhood home. Nothing was playing in the headset he was wearing, but he began to hear the softest hum of a melody he had heard only once a long time ago, sung by a voice he had almost forgotten.
“Francis, are you ready?” Francis jumped in his chair, stunned by Nastajia’s voice that suddenly sounded in his ears. His mother’s form, arms raised, black tresses draped down her back, mouth open to the twilight sky, flashed across his vision.
He coughed, composing himself. Yet he still was not truly there. “As ready as I’ll ever be.” A nervous laugh to drown out the song that echoed in his memory.
There was silence. “She would be proud of you.”
No words could soften the image of her sudden collapse. He felt as though he was fifteen again. “Is he in place?”
A small sigh. “He’s climbing now.”
Francis opened his browser to his Twitter page. It was 2:52PM. His self-built analysis platform counted two thousand active followers of the three thousand total across the globe. He had sent a tweet @NYTimes in response to one of their art articles, wetting their appetite for something spectacular. The retweets sang in harmony to the ghostly melody.
“The eagle has landed.” Another voice, Weiming the actor, sounded in his headset. “Lights!” At its peak, the song suddenly stopped. Her lungs had exploded.
Nastajia was the one who had found him, but it was Anas who had told him about the curse. He never knew until then that she could never taste death unless her power was the one to create it for her. How none of them could. “Camera.” A click of a shutter.
With this, Francis could help to bring her song back to life. “Action.” The final press of the computer keys.
His latest Twitter post read: Some guy in white is about to jump from the Eiffel Tower! #insanity #thatshtcray.
Exactly two hours later, the internet was ablaze. They called him “The Man in White,” and pictures and videos of Anas’ striking figure had gone viral across several social platforms and news stories. Francis had open on his monitors several different newscasts live streaming the spectacle. Rescue efforts had been launched but failed — the man refused to leave his perch. Fire trucks crowded the base of the tower while helicopters flew above.
The BBC had the Paris city officials in an interview, where they begged, dumbfounded by the situation, that someone would identify this man and bring him down. The shot then fixed on the white-costumed form of Anas, his leader, the man who became more like a father to him. Francis then watched as The Man in White laughed with a joy he had never seen before, before he fell without warning from the Eiffel Tower.
The only time Francis had watched Anas practice was when he was eighteen. It was in a dark theater in Spain, and he had secretly followed the man who led Les Incassables, hiding in shadows whenever Anas would look over his shoulder.
He had hidden in the seats of the theater, and watched as Anas stretched and warmed up his lean, muscular body. Then, after Anas climbed to the rafters, Francis watched in awe as the man performed beautiful acrobatics with unparalleled grace from pole to pole along the ceiling of the theater. Every so often he would pause, as though in a dance, arching his body in feats of amazing strength before continuing to soar. Francis had never seen anything like it before. But what he was seeing now, almost ten years later on his screen up close, was on a level far beyond that.
Flying — the one word that came to his mind as Francis watched Anas weave his body down the parapets of the Eiffel Tower. In and out of the metal structure he flew, adding grace and skill to an art that was almost lost. Francis leaned forward in his seat, as enraptured as the world by the show. Suddenly, he laughed with a joy he never felt before. He understood: this is what it was to perform.
The song his mother sang before she died echoed in his mind as he watched Anas make a final dive from the tower’s final platform. He did not reach for the tower’s frame; Anas plummeted to the earth. Francis’ hands clenched against his thighs as the crowds in the plaza below the tower screamed in panic. The melody became louder as the officials scrambled to try to save the mysterious acrobat. The soprano reached its peak —
Then Anas disappeared. The cameras showed a trampoline that was besides a balled-up net, and a single blue flower. The cameras spun, looking for the man, but he knew they wouldn’t find him. Tears fell from Francis’ eyes, and he sat back in his chair, deaf to the world’s applause. All he could hear was his mother’s voice, singing her song’s finale in glorious victory.
Then from behind him, an emotional voice he knew so well: “The flower lives again.”
