The Puppet and the Rigger

The elevator in the spice warehouse was old, the kind with a folding gate and a lever instead of buttons. Olaf stepped in with a box of goat milk soap from his sister's market stall balanced on one arm and pulled the lever for the upper loft. The doors started to close.

Then a hand shot through the gap.

"Hold it, hold it, hold it."

The doors ground back open and a man ducked in, half bent over a bundle in his arms. He was gray at the temples, broad through the shoulders, wearing a canvas work jacket with brass rings sewn along the collar. Circus folk, Olaf figured. The bundle turned out to be a puppet, wooden faced, dressed in a tiny velvet coat, and missing one arm at the shoulder. A battered steel toolbox hung from his other hand.

The man straightened up and looked at him.

"Olaf."

Olaf blinked. The soap box nearly slid off his arm. "Carlo. Carlo Mercer?"

"In the flesh." Carlo grinned, and it was the same grin, twenty-eight years later, crooked on the left side. "I knew you were tall. I didn't know you were this tall."

"You're shorter than I remember."

"Everyone's shorter than you remember." Carlo shifted the puppet to his other hip as a kid would carry a dog. "Fifty-two years old and I still look like I fell off a trapeze."

"Fifty-three."

"I'm fifty-two. You were always a year ahead of me, you great lump."

Olaf laughed before he could stop himself. It had been a long time since anyone called him a great lump. Then the elevator lurched. Not gently. It shuddered, clunked, and died somewhere between the main floor and the spice loft, and the lever went slack in Olaf's hand.

They both stood there.

"Well," Carlo said. He set the puppet down on the floor, propped it against the wall, and pulled a phone from his jacket. One bar. He tried anyway, listened, then put it away. "Dead. You?"

Olaf dug his own phone out. No bars. "The walls are two feet thick. They're spice walls. It's a spice warehouse."

"Right." Carlo leaned against the wall and sighed at the ceiling. There was a small light up there, barely on. "I'm supposed to meet a repairman at four. Guy coming to look at a pulley mount on the tent. And he already thinks circus people are flakes."

"What time is it?"

"Half three."

So they had time. Olaf set his soap box down next to the puppet and realized his heart was going faster than it had any reason to. The elevator was maybe eight feet across. Carlo took up a good third of it.

"How long has it been?" Carlo asked. "I would say twenty-nine years, but that sounds made up."

"Twenty-eight. We graduated in ninety-six."

"Twenty-eight years." Carlo nodded slowly. "And the last time I saw you, you were carrying a keg up three flights for a party neither of us wanted to be at."

"And you were arguing with Professor Halden about whether puppetry counted as theater."

"It counts as theater. I won that argument eventually. Sort of." He gestured at the puppet on the floor. "Witness."

Olaf looked at it properly for the first time. It was well made, old, with a hand-painted face and a velvet coat gone shiny at the elbows. The right shoulder joint was a stub of wood with a screw hole in it, and a detached arm lay in Carlo's jacket pocket, sticking out like it was a spare part.

"What happened to it?"

"Kids' show. We do a little one for the towns we pass through. Free, half hour, this fellow here is the villain, sort of. He's a greedy mayor who steals the town's cheese." Carlo crouched, picked the arm out of his pocket, and held it up to the shoulder stub. It didn't fit. He turned it, tried again. Still no. "I've been trying to reattach this arm for four days. The joint socket split. I've got glue, I've got screws, I've got a very patient stagehand, and it keeps pulling loose every third show."

"You could dowel it," Olaf said. "Drill it clean, glue a wooden peg through the joint, let it set overnight."

Carlo looked up at him from the floor. "How do you know that?"

"Because I'm a veterinarian, not a seamster." It came out before he could think about it, which was the story of Olaf's whole sensible life. Heat climbed up his neck. "I mean. I fix things. Not people things. Bones and joints. Cows, mostly. Dogs. It's not the same, but a joint is a joint if you squint."

"A vet." Carlo stayed crouched there, holding the arm, and something in his face went quiet. "Olaf the vet. What happened to Olaf the pre-law disaster?"

"Pre-law was a disaster. I switched my third year. Been a country animal doctor for twenty-five years now." He paused. "Divorced two years ago, if you're collecting the full update."

"I'm collecting the full update."

"Twenty years married. No kids. A house I sold. A dog I kept. That's the whole report."

Carlo stood up slowly. He was close now, close enough that Olaf could smell the wood shavings and machine oil on his jacket. Close enough that when Carlo shifted his weight, his shoulder brushed Olaf's arm, and Olaf felt it as a lit match would feel.

"I'm sorry about the marriage," Carlo said. "And I'm sorry the dog lost the house."

"The dog's fine. She lives with my sister now. Visitation every other weekend, like she's a child of divorce." Olaf heard himself rambling and made himself stop. "What about you?"

"Single five years. Before that, a partner of nine. Before that, a mess." Carlo shrugged. "I've been with the Wandering Phelps circus for eleven years now. I rig the aerial acts. Ropes, cables, harnesses. If it hangs from the top of the tent, I built the thing it hangs from."

"You always liked heights."

"I always liked knowing exactly how much weight a rope can take before it fails." Carlo looked at him. "You want to hear something stupid? I had a crush on you in college. For about three years. Never said a word. You were straight, I thought, or at least you were with Sharon by second year, and I figured why ruin a good friendship."

Olaf's mouth went dry. The elevator light buzzed overhead. Somewhere above them, faintly, came the sound of the market going on without them.

"Sharon and I are divorced," he said. "Have I mentioned that?"

"Once or twice."

"And I'm not straight. I figured that out around forty. Took me a while. I do everything slowly." Olaf set his jaw, because this was the moment, the one he'd been circling for twenty-eight years without knowing it. "Carlo. I have to say something and you're going to have to stand there and let me say it."

"I'm standing here."

"I looked you up three times over the years. Three. And every time I found a circus website with no phone number on it, I closed the laptop and told myself it was a silly thing to do." Olaf's voice stayed level, mostly. "And then you walked into an elevator in a spice warehouse in Wales, carrying a broken puppet, and I felt like I was twenty-five again except this time I know what the feeling is."

Carlo didn't move. "Say what the feeling is."

"I want to kiss you. I've wanted to since the doors closed."

The arm dropped from Carlo's hand onto the velvet coat of the puppet, and neither of them looked down at it.

"Well," Carlo said, and his voice had gone rough. "Ask me properly, Olaf. I've waited twenty-eight years. I want to hear the whole sentence."

Carlo stayed where he was, arms crossed now, waiting. The elevator light buzzed. Olaf took a breath.

"May I kiss you? Carlo Mercer, may I kiss you, here in this broken lift, at half three on a market day?"

"That is the entire sentence?"

"That is the entire sentence."

"Then yes," Carlo said. "Christ, yes."

Olaf leaned in and kissed him. Carlo tasted like tea and something sweeter underneath. His hand came up and gripped the front of Olaf's jacket, and for a man who talked about load limits all day, he held on like the floor might drop out from under them, which, Olaf supposed, it technically had.

When they broke apart, Carlo was grinning. "Twenty-eight years and you kiss like someone who has thought about it a lot would."

"I have thought about it a lot."

"Should've said something, you fool."

"Says the man who also said nothing for three years."

"We were idiots, the pair of us." Carlo laughed, and it was the same laugh Olaf remembered, big and unguarded, filling the little steel box. "Right. Your turn to be interrogated. What happened to you? Because the Olaf I knew at that party in '96 was going to argue