LITMIR.BIZ

      Backstage, property men pace the set with pots of glue and gilt paint, touching up the plywood throne, the receding archways and corridors stenciled on the drop. One of them peers through a part in the curtain. I walk into the wings, see Jonson’s boy rehearsing on the olio. Jonson sits stage left in the front row, smoking a Hermosa and drinking from a tin flask. The boy stub-toe walks along the edge of the stage, then launches into a series of heel scuffs and buck breaks, turning the lip of the boards into a ledge, lurching as though he might topple forward. Each time it seems he’s gone too far, he reels himself back, pantomimes relief. It’s a balance act, designed to take control of the audience’s breathing, to make them gasp and laugh in quick succession. I glance at Jonson. He’s watching me watch his son. He smiles, nods toward the stage, raises his flask. I shift my eyes back to the boy. He’s near the center of the olio now, standing with one leg locked, ad-libbing with his active foot. There’s technique and sweat, but nothing an audience would take for effort. The manager is right. Runt letters won’t hold the boy’s name much longer.

      I pick up my valise, head to my dressing room. The contortionist is seated on a wood stool, stripped to his underclothes, rubbing down his legs with a rank-smelling poultice. Twenty years of double splits and slides have left his spine scuted like a reptile’s. We’re bookends on the bill, opening and shut, something for people to look at while they walk the aisles. In the days of nickel theaters, Roy took the stage at six feet tall and ended his act coiled inside a shallow water bucket. Now he works with a trunk the size of a child’s coffin.

      Kill ’em? he asks.

      They ran off, I say.

      He grimaces, leans back on his stool, waits for a spasm to pass. Our patter is just noise where the questions should be. How many jumps before we’re struck from the rolls? Is it all just luck and pull, or is there something we should have understood years ago? I flip through the back pages of a dated Variety while he wrangles into an aqua body suit. It isn’t long before the house boy rings his bell and Roy stands.

      Merde, I say.

      He nods. As he shuts the door behind him, I see he’s left the middle buttons of his suit undone.

      I have time until it’s my turn again. I angle Roy’s stool under the door knob, open my day bag, lift out a spare hook and balance it on my knee. From the socket, I pull down an eye-dropper, a glass vial, a doctor’s needle. I thumb the top from the dropper, work the needle through the nipple. I transfer two beads of silver-blue liquid from vial to dropper, then put the cap back on with the syringe in place. I insert the needle beneath a nub of bone in my stump. Eyes shut, I feel a warmth spread through my body, another person’s skin enveloping my own.

      Roy returns, sweating through his suit.

      How’s the house? I ask.

      Handcuffed.

      He looks me over.

      You might want to lay off, he says.

      Off what?

      All right, he says. Not my affair.

      I wait in the wings with my back to the stage while the audience applauds the boy.

      On the olio, I stare into the spot, unblinking.

      My hotel room is just a bed and window with floors and walls that don’t stop the smallest sound. I shut the curtain, jostle my stub from the hook, peel off the stump sock. The flesh beneath retains an impression of the gauze. I blow the sweat dry, chafe away flecks of dead skin.

      I swallow a soporific, then fall backwards onto the bed. I can’t push the boy’s act from my mind. Anyone who’s spent time on the boards can see him inventing, testing, searching for something his body won’t do. The audience is just so many faces sloping upward. Subtract them and he’d still perform.

      My pulse starts to stutter, my muscles spasm. I get up, drag the copper bed frame so it’s blocking the door, unlock my largest valise. There are trails of boric acid leading from where the bedposts used to be. The valise is packed with prosthetics—seven in all—different colors, different shaped hooks. I pick one up, slide out a glass vial. The blue is still dark, still swirling around the silver. I pull a rag from a second socket, turn it over until I find a spot that isn’t stained. I flick off the stopper, touch the vial to the rag. With my finger on the back side of the fresh stain, I rub the rag over my gums, the roof of my mouth, the underside of my tongue. I stand the vial on the floor, take up my canteen, spill a drop of vinegar into the silver-blue liquid and replace the stopper.

      I lie on the bed and wait, my lips burning. Soon, there’s a burgeoning in my right wrist—a sprouting. I feel flesh and bone brushing aside soil, joints flexing and stretching their way through dirt.

      In the morning, I head out with a package of six vials, one in each pants pocket, one in each sock. I’m wearing my street prosthetic—a hook with little curve, straight enough to cut like a knife. I take the money I was told to spend on a taxi, buy a half-pot of coffee, four eggs over easy, a small stack of pancakes. The girl behind the counter eyes my hook. I use it to slice through the buttered and syruped batter, then lick the metal clean. She stops staring.

      I find the street number written in white along the side of a forest-green porte-cochere. The concierge looks up from whatever he’s reading. There’s a cicatrized gash circling his neck above the collar. I stroke the palm-sized fronds of a potted tree while he places the call.

      The buyer is waiting in the hall, smoking a cigarillo and wearing a bathrobe with no sash. He takes a wallet from his pocket, thumbs through the bill fold. His hands look as if they’ve been pumped full of water and rubbed raw. His chest is spotted with white stubble. I glance up the hall. There’s a peephole drilled above each knocker.

      Inside,

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