Eighteen
Painted to deceive, I set out in search of what I did not know. The vast majority of those attending the carnival didn’t sport a mask from Face It; however, there were enough of us that no one seemed to be especially interested in me.
I walked the fairground midway, where the Whip lashed its riders this way and that, where the Caterpillar enveloped screaming patrons in darkness as it slung them around a track a thousand times faster than any real caterpillar could move, where the Big Drop lifted its gondola two hundred feet into the night and then released it in what seemed to be an uncontrolled free fall, and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.
It’s difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide.
The carnival blazed, every ride and many other attractions decorated with low-watt bulbs, neon tubes, blinkers, and twinklers. Strings of colored lights overhung the U-shaped concourse. At the curve of the U, mounted on a flatbed truck and reliant on a chugging gasoline-powered generator, two massive swiveling spotlights threw their beams into the heavens, revealing the bellies of an armada of clouds, like dirigibles, invading silently from the southwest.
In spite of all the colorful lighting that had been crafted to attract patrons and to put them in a celebratory mood, the carnival had an air of hostility and menace that, I felt sure, was not merely my perception. Within all the dazzle and glitter and bright fake glamor, a hidden presence lurked, a watchful darkness that observed and hated and waited, a presence I had not sensed six years earlier.
Although the warm air was richly scented with the aromas of buttered popcorn, candy apples, cotton candy, the cinnamon and sugar and fried dough of churros, nevertheless, as I threaded through the colorful tapestry of people on the concourse, there were times when a delicious aroma suddenly soured. For just a moment, cinnamon had a sulfurous edge and the popcorn butter smelled rancid, as if under all its pretense of good healthy fun, the carnival was a dangerous swamp in which moldered and festered things too horrific to contemplate.
The fun house featured the giant face of an ogre, twenty feet from chin to crown, nearly that wide, a dimensional sculpture of such imaginative detail that it managed to be scary at the same time that it was pure hokum. Periodically a roar issued from its open mouth, and with the roar came a forceful blast of air that traveled about twenty feet into the promenade, surprising people who encountered it for the first time, mussing their hair and startling them so that popcorn was dropped halfway from box to mouth.
The ogre’s crazed eyes rolled in their sockets, but I knew that I was being paranoid to think that it was watching me in particular.
The ballyhoo of pitchmen, the clatter and whoosh of the rides, the interlaced melodies of scores of different songs associated with various attractions, and the chatter and laughter of a few thousand voices appeared to inspire bright-eyed delight among many of the patrons. To me, it sounded like a shrill discordant symphony to which I might expect to see a horde of bodachs quivering and capering in an ecstasy of anticipated chaos—though I had not glimpsed even one of them among this multitude.
Within ten minutes I came to a large tent where flamboyant lettering emblazoned on the canvas above the entrance promised ALL THINGS FORETOLD. In smaller script under those words appeared the come-on 33 OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN YOUR FUTURE. The words were encircled by symbols associated with soothsayers and oracles through the ages: a pentalph created with five interlaced A’s, an ankh, a quarter moon encircled by seven stars, the palm of a hand with a single eye gazing out from it.…
I hadn’t needed psychic magnetism to lead me to this place. I had half convinced myself that I would discover the cultists in the carnival, but my truest reason for coming there, more unconscious than not, had been to learn if the fortune-telling machine, Gypsy Mummy, still dispensed predictions.
As on that well-remembered night six years earlier, a sawdust floor had been spread wall to wall. It lent a woodsy smell to the arcade. Thirty-three machines of prophecy were arranged in rows, some quaint contraptions dating to the 1940s, others of recent invention.
You could use two controls to operate a mechanical claw—the Hand of Fate—to fish among a collection of small painted, numbered wooden balls in a glass case. Once the claw seized a number, you could press the corresponding digit on a keyboard, whereupon your fortune would be dispensed to you on a printed card.
You could seek your future on a video screen, where for fifty cents you would be dealt seven virtual playing cards, facedown, from which you were to select three, then seven more from which you were to select two, then seven more from which you were to select another two. When all the cards you chose were then revealed, the machine printed under each its meaning and combined the seven in a single prognostication.
Or you could instead choose any of thirty-one other contraptions that would, with machinelike indifference, tell you if you would have a long life or a short one, a happy marriage or one of wedded misery. Fifteen or twenty people were sampling the various oracles, moving on to another if they didn’t like what the first had prophesied.
In the center of the tent, on an elevated platform, a cashier sat within a small circular desk, changing dollar bills into quarters when she wasn’t reading a Nora Roberts romance novel. Even before I went looking for it, I was certain that I would find what I sought, and so I got change for two dollars.
At the back of the tent, where it had been on that long-ago night, Gypsy Mummy stood as if she’d been waiting six years just for me.