Free Lives of the Circus Animals by Christopher Bram

hung in the distance, praising one play while it secretly damned another, as fresh as a wound, as permanent as a house. It had gone up only two weeks ago. Caleb stared at it long and hard, telling himself that he’d stop seeing the sign in time.
    You fail, but you go on. You think you’ve overcome failure. But it remains under your feet like the water of a frozen lake where you happily skate. But a sudden change in mood can drop you through the ice into the freezing water.
    Failure spoiled everything. It even spoiled success. His new play was misunderstood—he knew that—but maybe success too was a misunderstanding. Except there he was misunderstood in his favor. Because the worst part, the cruelest thing about this great joke of a billboard across the street—one could almost hear it whispering, “The Times hates your play, the Times thinks you’re stupid”—was Caleb’s fear that Prager was right. Chaos Theory was bad, a pretentious, talky mess, its tenderness phony, its author a fraud.
    â€œFuck this!” said Caleb. “Fuck this stupid fucking mind-fucking shit about motherfucking—!”
    He swung his fist against the brick parapet. The blow hurt, but notenough. He grabbed the fist in his free hand so he wouldn’t swing again. He stepped back from the edge. He turned, then turned again and marched down the terrace to the door. He hurried inside and slammed the door, as if the billboard might be following him.
    He began to pace the apartment, snapping on lights, then the television, anything to get him off this vicious train of thought.
    Success was a lie, money was a lie, this apartment was a lie.
    He shook his head, his arms and shoulders, trying to shake this craziness out of his body.
    He should walk away from the lies and return to real life. Except he knew only lies and make-believe, nothing real.
    No. Ben’s illness had been real. And his death. And maybe, just maybe, his love.
    Yet Ben’s love had never seemed as real as his death. Love gained full reality only after it was lost.
    He stopped in front of the television. He stared at it but saw no images, only a conflagration of colors and light. He turned it off and dropped into the soft leather chair. He drew himself into a ball.
    Here was Ben again, in a cubicle of the ICU, a body so wasted it was nearly flush with the mattress, a man reduced to the beeping of a monitor, the clicking of numerals on the IV, an occasional breath fogging the clear plastic face mask.
    This was only hospital porn, a code for sorrow as phony as a twelve-inch dick. The real experience was deeper, more difficult to describe: three years in and out of hospitals, months of hope lost, regained, then lost again. And not just Ben but others—so many others. And not just strangers but people they knew. Yet misery didn’t love company, it hated it. And as Ben became less Ben-like, more alien, less lovable, his death grew more desirable. Until late one afternoon the monitor stopped beeping. His face changed color, the last tension of self relaxing into soft blue shadow. And he was gone. The body was taken out. And he became Ben again. Almost immediately. Because he could be remembered, not just as ill, but also as complicated and human, a large, affectionate, quiet man who had never needed Caleb’s love as much as Caleb needed his.
    That was six years ago. Before money, before success. Calebthought he’d worked through grief, but he’d merely crossed over it on a bridge of success. And now the bridge had fallen.
    He lay on his side in the chair, closed his eyes, and clenched his teeth. He refused to play this game tonight. He would not use old grief to justify self-pity. That’s all this was. One big pity party, as their mother would put it. He’d become an open wound of self-pity.
    He took a deep breath—and laughed. He actually found a laugh inside his chest, a good, bitter bubble of noise.
    No