When the crowd moves forward, it dissolves into the park, little wandering circuits. Now you can break away, you think. If you can get past the Wonder Wheel and back onto the street there has to be some apartment left empty where you can take refuge.
You walk carefully past the whales and the roller coaster, down the maw of the Wonder Wheel. The metal corrals are full, but the crowd is so quiet that you can hear the creaking carriages as the wheel stops and the doors open, and the line moves forward all at once, like a worm surging over the grass.
The girl operating the wheel has green eyes, bright and clear, and you’re so surprised that you stop in your tracks. You startle her (bad sign, the last thing you need is to draw their notice), and when she looks at you she sucks in a breath like she’s about to call out to you, but remembers herself and flips the switch instead. As the wheel lurches into motion, a chorus of half-hearted groans floats down from the cars.
You wait in line, snaking closer, and when you’re at the center of the line and the car swings into place you step aside and let the ones behind you haul themselves into the carriage, their slack jaws swinging back and forth as the wheel carries them away.
“How many of us are left?” she asks under her breath. Her legs are trembling; you wonder how long she’s been trapped here, pulling the lever back and forth. It’s taken you since yesterday to get this far; has she been trapped here all that time?
“I don’t know how many,” you say.
(It’s a mercy not to tell her the truth about what the city looks like now; what good would it do her to know that it’s too late?)
“Help me,” she says. Her eyes are bright and fixed on you, and the panic is starting to set in. You know what she’s feeling; you had this same desperate hope, just for a moment, when the two men ran into the train car. You almost stood up.
(Once you get their attention it’s all over).
You can’t help her; they would notice if the wheel didn’t stop.
“I’m sorry,” you say, and walk slowly between the cars, threading your way into the departing riders and out the wheel on the other side.
“No,” she says softly, and then louder, more shrilly, “Help me! You have to help me! Fuck you, come back!” but by then they’ve noticed her.
You sit in the nearest photo booth, safe behind the flimsy curtain, until all the sounds have stopped.
You sit there for a long time, looking down at the edge of the curtain, watching them pass slowly back and forth.
You don’t know where you can go. You can’t swim very far. You’ll need a boat, you think.
(You can’t drive a boat. You can barely swim. You sit in the booth a long time. You do not admit you are stranded. How can you?)
Outside the booth, through the little spaces between the bumper cars, you can see that the streets are crawling with them. There’s no escape there. You have to keep going the way that you came.
In the arcade, three children are playing basketball. The balls fly away from the tips of their fingers in a waltz beat, one-two-three, and they scoop up the next without looking; their blind white eyes never move from the basket.
Amid the sound of the bumper cars, you walk out up the ramp, under a banner printed in bright block letters: Deno’s Wonder Wheel: Open This Year, and the Next, and the Next, and the Next, and the Next…
At the top of the ramp you risk a look behind you; the girl is still standing at the Wonder Wheel. Now she’s milky-eyed, one hand on the lever, the other hanging slack at her side. The top of her head has been opened like a soft-boiled egg.
You turn away too fast; you have to steady yourself before you keep walking out and up to the boardwalk.
(Don’t glance over. You must look straight ahead.)
On the boardwalk, the adults are absently feeding the children, their little mouths mechanically chewing. It looks like funnel cake, but you know better by now what they eat, and you don’t investigate.
The sun is blazing. The whole place is starting to smell like a fish market.
Out on the beach it’s easier to walk the way you should; the sand sucks at your feet, forces you to be slow and careful.
Some of them are walking out into the water. They walk straight out until the water’s too deep to stand in, and when the current takes them they give in, float with arms and legs loose.
(You remember, suddenly, the summer you were ten years old and the kid a few doors down from you drowned in the pool in his backyard. For the rest of the summer none of the neighborhood kids were allowed to go out of sight of their parents, which ruined everything your friends had planned all year.
They moaned all summer about how boring it was to have to stay so close to the house. You agreed.
You were tired all that summer, because whenever you closed your eyes at night you imagined that kid in the moment before he fell into the water, when he had just begun to lean forward, when it wasn’t too late for someone to pull him back and save him.)