Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

But everyone was looking upward. Clara pointed. James shielded his own eyes and tried to find what they were all gawking at.

There. Along the highest roofline of the huge, steeply roofed house, a man and a boy were walking with exaggerated high steps, crossing the dangerous distance between one cluster of chimney pots and another. The man had a sort of quiver strapped to his back and from that vessel rose various brushes and strangely apportioned brooms.

“Chimney sweeps?” said James, astonished that Clara had dragged him out into the hot sunlight for mere chimney sweeps.

“Watch!” cried Clara Hay.

James saw that there might be some tension in watching the man and boy move carefully along that high, narrow roof beam, since they were almost sixty feet up and the Camerons’ roof was far too steep to stop their fall if either one slipped.

Suddenly James and the crowd gasped as the boy did a forward cartwheel on the narrow ridge and the man, letting the quiver dangle by its strap so the brushes would not fall, did a handstand behind the boy, his hands on the slippery slate slabs on either side of the apex.

The two were odd-looking creatures. Both man and boy—he might have been eleven or twelve, no older—were rail thin and dressed in black sweeps’ clothing that seemed several sizes too small for each of them. That was a deliberate effect, James noticed, since the socks and shirts protruding from the cuffs were red-and-black striped for the skinny man and green-and-black striped for the boy.

The strangeness was enhanced by the fact that the grown chimney sweep had orange hair spiked up into a column, rather like a Mohawk Indian’s vertical queue, while the boy’s spiky hair, stabbing out in all directions, had been dyed a bright, Kendal green. The man’s face had been painted white—a skull—and the eyes were lost to sight in black paint. The boy’s face was painted all white save for the narrowest strip of red on his thin lips. The effect—at least for James—was disturbing.

Suddenly the almost emaciated-looking boy took the quiver of brushes from the scarecrow man and crouched low as the skull-man leaned forward over the boy, tumbling in a perfect somersault along the three-inch-wide ridgeline, and then immediately got to his feet and bent over as the boy jumped up onto his back.

The crowd let out a gasp and low moan and some in the front stepped into those behind them, as if seeking to get out of range for when the man and boy fell.

James felt a sense of unreality fall over him like a cloak as he watched the red-and-black-striped man—his long, white fingers looking truly skeletal—remove the covers to the triple-chimney at the end of the ridgeline. Fingers moving in a blur, working together, orange-haired-man and green-haired-boy used a loose bit of rope to tie those coverings tight at the base of the chimney.

Then the skeletal man—his black shoes looked almost like ballet slippers—leaped straight into the air until his legs were far apart, the shoe-slippers on opposite sides of the four-foot-wide triple chimney.

The crowd gasped again, like a single organism, James thought (he had gasped as well, although not out loud), when the boy simply threw himself into the air sixty feet above the ground, his arms ahead of him like a diver leaping from a cliff into the sea. But there was no water below the boy, only a six-story drop to hard soil, grass, and stone walks.

The tall sweep with orange hair caught the boy in mid-air and held him, the boy’s terribly thin arms still stretched straight forward, his legs rigid behind him, until suddenly the scarecrow adult swung the skinny lad until his arms and head were pointing straight down into the narrow chimney aperture. It was only then that James noticed that the adult sweep and boy sweep were attached at the waist with two strangely knotted ropes, rather like two Alpine climbers roped together on the Matterhorn.

The skull-faced tall sweep let the boy’s torso and legs slide between his long, stick-white fingers until all of the boy save for his lower legs and feet had disappeared down the impossibly narrow chimney. The grown sweep let go of the boy’s ankles and the crowd moaned in unison again until they saw that the skull-faced adult sweep now had both ropes in his hands. The man began lowering the rope, first letting it slide through one hand, then through the other, and all the while he was leaning further back from the vertical on the narrow chimney pot ridge, letting the boy’s slight weight balance him as he continued backward until it seemed impossible that he might ever pull himself upright again.

James turned away.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” asked Clara Hay. “Exhilarating!”

“Extraordinary,” managed James, not wanting to hurt his hostess’s feelings. Those few seconds of watching had given him a sense of vertigo followed by nausea. What an insane species we are , was his only coherent thought.

“They call themselves the Flying Vernettis,” continued Clara, obviously not noticing James’s sudden paleness. “Father and son, Lizzie Cameron thinks. They have been doing their chimney-cleaning this week for only a few of the finest houses, for the finest families, and Lizzie has been impatient all week for them to get to her house.”

“Extraordinary,” James said again, not turning his gaze back to the spectacle as the crowd gasped and groaned again at some new impossibility.

“Lizzie says that they’re ever so efficient,” continued Clara, speaking to James but looking back the other way. “They close every room off before clearing and cleaning the chimneys—and heaven knows some of these older houses need such a clean sweep—and she says they lay newspaper across everything in the closed-off rooms before the actual dusting.”

“Extraordinary,” said James. He focused his gaze on the White House across the street to the south. “I believe I shall take a brief walk,” he continued. “I shall see you later this afternoon or evening, Clara.”

Clara did not respond. Her hands clasped tightly together as if in prayer, her mouth open, she was totally absorbed in whatever death-defying absurdities were occurring high above her on Lizzie Cameron’s rooftop.

Later, even many years later, Henry James could never quite explain, even to himself, exactly why he chose to do all the things he did in the hours that followed. If , he would invariably add to this particular mental query, it was truly I who chose to do those things . It was more the behavior, he felt, of a poorly drawn character in a sensationalist Wilkie Collins or H. Rider Haggard novel.

Luckily he’d brought his silk top hat and walking cane despite Clara’s tugging and urgings when leaving the house, so he did not have to go back to the Hays’ home. James turned east on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked briskly, refusing to turn his head as the crowd on Lafayette Square Park gasped or oohed or aahed.

The Flying Vernettis was precisely the kind of idiotic American showmanship and bread-and-circus nonsense that had kept James in England and Europe all these years. A chimney sweep risking his son’s life, if indeed the boy were his son and not some orphan the sweep had picked up from an orphanage and trained, to perform idiot acrobatics sixty feet in the air for the approval of the likes of the Camerons and Lodges and Hays and the dour Henry Adams. James would not have been surprised if President Grover Cleveland and his wife weren’t on the front lawn of the Executive Mansion and gawking as broadly as the social elite in Lafayette Park.

America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use properly.