My injury finally healed, but the experience led me to write the story of the Great Rolando, circus aerialist extraordinaire.
I suppose Rolando’s character could be categorized as “the man who learns better.” What do you think?
THE MAN WHO
HATED GRAVITY
The Great Rolando had not always hated gravity. As a child growing up in the traveling circus that had been his only home, he often frightened his parents by climbing too high, swinging too far, daring more than they could bear to watch.
The son of a clown and a cook, Rolando had yearned for true greatness and could not rest until he became the most renowned aerialist of them all.
Slim and handsome in his spangled tights, Rolando soared through the empty air thirty feet above the circus’s flimsy safety net. Then fifty feet above it. Then a full hundred feet high, with no net at all.
“See the Great Rolando Defy Gravity!” shouted the posters and TV advertisements. And the people came to crane their necks and hold their breaths as he performed a split-second ballet in midair high above them. Literally flying from one trapeze to another, triple somersaults were workaday chores for the Great Rolando.
His father feared to watch his son’s performances. With all the superstition born of generations of circus life, he cringed outside the big top while the crowds roared deliriously. Behind his clown’s painted grin, Rolando’s father trembled. His mother prayed through every performance until the day she died, slumped over a bare wooden pew in a tiny, austere church far out in the midwestern prairie.
For no matter how far he flew, no matter how wildly he gyrated in midair, no matter how the crowds below gasped and screamed their delight, the Great Rolando pushed himself farther, higher, more recklessly.
Once, when the circus was playing New York City’s huge convention center, the management pulled a public relations coup. They got a brilliant young physicist from Columbia University to pose with Rolando for the media cameras and congratulate him on defying gravity.
Once the camera crews had departed, the physicist said to Rolando, “I’ve always had a secret yearning to be in the circus. I admire what you do very much.”
Rolando accepted the compliment with a condescending smile.
“But no one can really defy gravity,” the physicist warned. “It’s a universal force, you know.”
The Great Rolando’s smile vanished. “I can defy gravity. And I do. Every day.”
Several years later Rolando’s father died (of a heart seizure, during one of his son’s performances) and Rolando married the brilliant young lion tamer who had joined the circus slightly earlier. She was a petite, little thing with golden hair, the loveliest of blue eyes, and so sweet a disposition that no one could say anything about her that was less than praise. Even the great cats purred for her.
She too feared Rolando’s ever-bolder daring, his wilder and wilder reachings on the high trapeze.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of! Gravity can’t hurt me!” And he would laugh at her fears.
“But I am afraid,” she would cry.
“The people pay their money to see me defy gravity,” Rolando would tell his tearful wife. “They’ll get bored if I keep doing the same stunts one year after another.”
She loved him dearly and felt terribly frightened for him. It was one thing to master a large cage full of Bengal tigers and tawny lions and snarling black panthers. All you needed was will and nerve. But she knew that gravity was another matter altogether.
“No one can defy gravity forever,” she would say, gently, softly, quietly.
“I can,” boasted the Great Rolando.
But of course, he could not. No one could. Not forever. The fall, when it inevitably came, was a matter of a fraction of a second. His young assistant’s hand slipped only slightly in starting out the empty trapeze for Rolando to catch after a quadruple somersault. Rolando almost caught it. In midair he saw that the bar would be too short. He stretched his magnificently trained body to the utmost, and his fingers just grazed its tape-wound shaft.
For an instant he hung in the air. The tent went absolutely silent. The crowd drew in its collective breath. The band stopped playing. Then gravity wrapped its invisible tentacles around the Great Rolando, and he plummeted, wild-eyed and screaming, to the sawdust a hundred feet below.
“His right leg is completely shattered,” said the famous surgeon to Rolando’s wife. She had stayed calm up to that moment, strong and levelheaded while her husband lay unconscious in an intensive care unit.
“His other injuries will heal. But the leg . . .” The gray-haired, gray-suited man shook his dignified head sadly. His assistants, gathered behind him like an honor guard, shook their heads in metronome synchrony to their leader.
“His leg?” she asked, trembling.
“He will never be able to walk again,” the famous surgeon pronounced.
The petite, blond lion tamer crumpled and sagged into the sleek leather couch of the hospital waiting room, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Unless . . .” said the famous surgeon.
“Unless?” she echoed, suddenly wild with hope.
“Unless we replace the shattered leg with a prosthesis.”
“Cut off his leg?”
The famous surgeon promised her that a prosthetic bionic leg would be “just as good as the original—in fact, even better!” It would be a permanent prosthesis; it would never have to come off, and its synthetic surface would blend so well with Rolando’s real skin that no one would be able to tell where his natural leg ended, and his prosthetic leg began. His assistants nodded in unison.
Frenzied at the thought that her husband would never walk again, alone in the face of coolly assured medical wisdom, she reluctantly gave her assent and signed the necessary papers.
The artificial leg was part lightweight metal, part composite space-manufactured materials, and entirely filled with marvelously tiny electronic devices and miraculously miniaturized motors that moved the prosthesis exactly the way a real leg should move. It was stronger than flesh and bone, or so the doctors confidently assured the Great Rolando’s wife.
The circus manager, a constantly frowning bald man who
