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That's why on a Friday afternoon in October, I'm beside Linz in the seats of the Bellagio theater in Vegas, where Cirque puts on O, its aquatic-themed spectacle. Before I try out some of the death-defying acts in the show, I want to make sure I won't really have to defy any death. Linz punches in my weight and the height at which I am going to dangle from a suspended boat-shaped apparatus into an app on her phone. She puts her hand on my knee, assuring me that I'll have 10 times more protection than I'll need. I have no idea what she's talking about. I just know that upstairs in the massage room, there's a dry-erase board that reads, "Need meds? See Manu, your friendly neighborhood pharmacien!" I also notice that her app fails to ask certain crucial questions, like "Can the magazine writer in question touch his toes?"
Before getting into the bateau featured heavily in the movie and the live O show--it's a steel-framed boat that swings three stories in the air--I have to pass a swim test. It's just a couple of lengths and five minutes of treading water, and I'm pleased to pass it easily and even more pleased to find out Cirque's quartet of Mongolian contortionists--who have spent a half hour making fun of the fact that I can't touch my toes--needed a lot of coaching to get through it. After the test, I swim below the boat, where 11 spandexed performers in whiteface stand ready to flip around on parallel bars. Nearly all of them are short, East European former Olympic gymnasts. None seem afraid of heights.
One of them drops a rope ladder into the water and tells me to climb up. Once I do, I try not to look down, as head coach--pharmacien Manu Durand cheerily yells directions at me from the seats below. Suddenly, the gymnasts start pushing the boat back and forth on its cables, which I think is some kind of hazing technique until I realize it's part of the act. Linz, who is reviewing my performance from the seats, writes down, "Love the realness of the terror." Then Jozsef "Beast" Tokar, a Hungarian with enormous muscles and a shaved head who plays the strongman, has me climb down a steel beam to the bottom of the boat, where I sit on his lap. I consider telling him that what I want for Christmas is anything but death.
Suddenly, Tokar leans back, hangs upside down from his knees on a steel bar and swings me from his hands, holding my wrists. As I float back and forth like a trapeze artist, first by both hands then by one, our hands slipping slightly but inexorably from each other's wrists, I learn an important lesson: all those movies in which a non-circus-strongman hero holds a guy by the wrists over a building for a few minutes while they chat about how much they mean to each other are totally ridiculous. At this point, I hint strongly that I might have had enough of my acrobatic audition, and Tokar drops me into the water. But when I pop up, to my shock, I want to do it all over again. It turns out Cameron was right.
I try a few other Cirque roles. Maurizia Cecconi, a former Italian Olympic synchronized swimmer and current Cirque swimming coach, coaxes me through some synchro tricks. Danut Coseru, a gymnast I met on the boat, teaches me to march like one of the Buckingham Palace--style guards who parade around the pool, but embarrassingly, even walking with my arms akimbo tires my muscles.