Mr. Jay lit a candle so they could prepare. It was early. Dawn watched him from her snug tangle of blankets. He hummed cheerfully to himself before turning to her.
“Get up sleepy!” he said, his teeth sparkling in the candlelight. “If you’re waiting for the sun to rise I might as well go without you.” He laughed. “It doesn’t come up in the City of Light.” His face became quizzical as he hovered close. “Which has to make you wonder why they call it that.” Mr. Jay kissed her forehead where she lay by the cubbyhole.
He walked to the table humming and started making breakfast. Dawn rubbed sleep from her eyes and crawled to her feet. Her belly grumbled.
“Maybe they mean the food!” she said, suddenly ravenous. “I’ve never felt so thin and airy and light.”
“That’s because,” Mr. Jay said over his shoulder, “you didn’t eat your supper, or much of it.”
“I’m sick of fish.” She pulled her socks on, and looked in a pack for her shoes. Since the Change, animal flesh did not stay dead, so people ate various exotic mixtures and pastes of plankton and fish.
“Imagine how the fish feel!” Mr. Jay laughed and scooped some sort of mucky substance into a bowl. “Oatmeal this morning.” He pointed to the pack beside her. “Sugar, please.”
Dawn dug into the pack and grabbed a plastic container. She carried it over to Mr. Jay while she kicked and wedged and shoved her foot into her right shoe.
“They go on easier if you untie them.” Mr. Jay took the sugar and sprinkled some on her oatmeal before handing it to her. “It’s cold but I soaked it overnight. You’ll have to use your imagination to enjoy it.”
But Dawn was too hungry to care about a thing like that, and soon dug into the porridge, enjoying the sugary sweetness on top. As she ate, Mr. Jay crossed the room, found his top hat and put it on.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” She asked looking at his hat. It was worn and patched, and had a frayed edge along the back that Mr. Jay hid by wetting his fingers and twirling the fringe around the wire frame.
“What?” Mr. Jay glanced over, pulling his coat on. It was a ragged shambles of a thing, but matched the hat just fine. “Oh, food.” He shook his head and pulled the coat tails out behind him. “I’m not much of a breakfast eater, dear. You know that! Wakey wakey!”
Dawn giggled as Mr. Jay waggled his head, and mimicked what he had told her were fine and gentlemanly ways, with his shoulders and legs stiff, and his elbows bent. He walked across the room and twirled, then twisted the end of his moustache.
“You look the fine figure of a man, Mr. Jay!” Dawn said with a giggle.
“It’s only fitting…” he said. “That I wear this to conjure up notions of the things that were. It’s all in the subconscious.” He slipped his gloves on and bowed with great flourish. “They may not even know it, but it’s there. Teaching them to see it is the hard part. And, as entertainers my dear, we’re obligated to employ all the trappings of our profession to accomplish that. A few loose threads will never overpower the imagination.”
“Conjurer” was what he sometimes called himself, but Dawn had seen people in books dressed like him who were called “Magicians.”
“I answer to either,” he once said with a laugh, “but I don’t pull rabbits out of hats.”
For now, they were “Entertainers.” Dawn had heard it referred to as busking, but what they did was go to street corners where Mr. Jay would do magic and entertain. People would gather around to watch and give them money. Mr. Jay often said it was a hard way to make a buck but that it beat working for a living.
Mr. Jay turned to her from where he was putting some food in a smaller pack. “I could do with some coffee though. When you are through, little princess. So chop chop! You still have to get into your costume!” He held up the fake beard.
As a forever child and being a rare and wonderful thing, as Mr. Jay called her, Dawn was forever in peril of capture. It wasn’t that people hated forever children, but the government still caught any they found and kept them in orphanages for their own protection. Dawn heard rumors of it from other forever children at the Nurserywood. Some said they had escaped from the government, and if they spoke about it at all, it was in hushed tones, with fear on their faces.
So to go out in public, Dawn had to go disguised as a midget. She held the collection basket for Mr. Jay and took great pride in her part of the ruse, because she had learned to disguise her voice and otherwise carry off the charade without discovery.
“Avoid real midgets.” Mr. Jay had warned her. “Most people are afraid to look at a little person for more than a glance, but a midget or a dwarf, he’ll see you eye to eye and know.”
Her costume was a multicolored patchwork of bright materials that covered her body completely. Mr. Jay called it “motley.” It came with its own broad padded shoulders and potbelly sewn into place. The boots she wore rose to her knees and curled up at the toe. Each toe was graced with a small bell-just as her cap bore on each of its five points. To complete the illusion, Mr. Jay would painstakingly affix the dark brown beard to her cheeks and chin. She hated the glue he used to stick it on with, mostly because it stank and partly because he called it “spirit gum.” Dawn could never bring herself to ask what that meant.
She finished her porridge and then turned in her chair for Mr. Jay to apply the beard and make up her face. He continued to hum as he did so, smiling occasionally at the faces she made.
Though they were meager earnings she gathered in her collection basket, they were able to afford the essentials. And Dawn really loved being an entertainer, costume or not. It allowed her to go out in the streets with people and dance and carry on like she was normal. Otherwise, she spent her days in the shadows. Years ago, she had started coming up with her own tricks. Her body though a child’s was as nimble as a cat’s and decades of living in it had made her dexterous beyond compare.
While Dawn handled the acrobatic part of their act-mainly to keep the crowd’s interest and guard the collection basket-Mr. Jay would prepare for his next bit of magic. He always did that with great flourish, his whole body taking on a rigid, sticklike stance, and his face going flat, eyes looking inward. Dawn was never sure how Mr. Jay actually did his tricks but he had told her that it was a fine art that relied on misdirection as much as it did magic. Regardless, he would come out of his “Gypsy trance” as he called it, and go about the crowd mystifying them with tricks like guessing a person’s name, and their parents’ or friend’s, or he would do other more exotic things. It depended on the crowd; some were easier to please than others.
The pair had traveled a long way with their entertaining, and had performed now so many times that Dawn found herself improvising effortlessly-Mr. Jay had said that this was simply her subconscious having fun with it.
“You don’t want to get bored with entertaining, Dawn. What would be left?”
And she rarely ever felt butterflies in her stomach anymore. As long as Mr. Jay was nearby, she felt that she could do anything.
Today was a little different. This was their first full day in the City of Light. He wouldn’t tell her why they had come to the City, but he assured her that the money would be good if they could get the prime locations. Mr. Jay had already scouted out locations to work.
“And I might even find some old friends,” he said cheerfully.
Dawn didn’t care about any old friends as she struggled into her costume. She had already seen enough of the City. True, the size of it was awesome as you approached it, but when you were in it, the levels above weighed heavily and the only breezes blew off cars and buses or came up from sewers. There was a constant feeling of crowding.
She could not shake the nagging sense that her run in with Yellow-skin and the thin men was just a shadow of worse things to come. And the streets in the City were so big and numerous, and there were so many people, there were just too many places a forever child could get lost. She knew she’d be worried about losing Mr. Jay the whole time.
“Come along, Dawn. You wrinkle that forehead of yours any more and you’ll look like a road map.” Mr. Jay chuckled and twisted her nose. He looked her over. “And how are you today Mojo?” That was the name of the midget she played.
She patted her forehead with the back of her hand nonplussed.
The action made Mr. Jay laugh out loud. “Forever child or not, Dawn. There’s a woman in there somewhere.”
“Stop it!” she scolded, hoping to end the teasing right away.
“Yes, of course.” He smiled and regarded her with such a loving gaze that she immediately cheered up. “Now, will you be warm enough? These February winds can chill you through and through. A Winter rain’s expected…”
“Of course I’ll be warm enough.” She almost stamped a foot but remembered that Mr. Jay only said those things out of habit. “But thank you anyway.”
Mr. Jay picked up his walking stick, and shouldered his bag of props. He always carried extra things with him-packs of cards, bottles and string and cups-anything he might use in one of his tricks. And he always had some packets of mixed nuts and a stick of bread that never seemed to run out. “We’ll have to hurry. I found an excellent corner last night but it’s quite a distance uptown.”
They made their way out of the hideout and then along a rickety stair that took them to the exit of the abandoned building. A dirty mist hung in the air over the street. “I hope you don’t mind, but we may have to ride a bus to get there while the pickings are still good.” She looked up at his face as he talked, but its expression was hidden by the gloom. “We want to catch the workers at their first coffee break-and there’s a good collection of hotels and office buildings nearby that we can work until they’re back on the streets at lunch.” The fog blew into Dawn’s face and left droplets in her beard. She shrugged at her friend’s face.
A mixture of excitement and apprehension ran through her as they made their way to the bus stop. Other shadowy shapes joined them on the dark sidewalks: heads down, collars pulled up, with shock on their faces when Dawn stepped out of the gloom. The idea of performing in front of a whole new bunch of people was as exciting as it was frightening. She gripped the first two fingers of Mr. Jay’s right hand. As long as she kept her hold on him, she would be all right.