“The man needs to eat.” Owen rolled his eyes and thumped Adam on the back. “When it comes to caloric intake, my friend, you’ve come to the right place.” Owen led Adam over to a large stall where I could practically taste the grease and burning sugar, and it made my mouth fill up with spit. “They will fry anything here,” Owen explained.
“We’re wasting time.” I tapped my pen on the cover of my notebook. “Our background research tells us that long-term memories are influenced by the emotion experienced when creating the memory as well as the feelings experienced during the memory retrieval,” I said, beginning to tick through the steps of the scientific method. “Our unknown variable is whether we’re actually causing Adam to re-experience a buried memory from his own childhood or whether this is a new memory altogether. I think for the purposes of the experiment, we have to assume we’re combining the learning experience with the emotion of retrieval. I can study the effects under both assumptions when I analyze the data.”
Owen looked up at the sign. “Fried Oreos. Fried cheesecake. Fried honey bun. Fried butter.”
I scanned the fair. “Now, how to test our hypothesis.”
“Tor, what do you want?” Owen nudged me.
I glanced at the menu. “Does everything have to be fried?”
“Owen said that you fried me, too, Victoria.”
I glared at Owen. He scuffed his shoes in the dirt and whistled, ignoring the fact that I was shooting lasers through his head with my eyeballs. After a few moments of deliberation, he ordered us four fried Oreos and a corn dog to share.
“Now can we please get back to the experiment?” I stomped my foot impatiently.
Owen stooped down to whisper in my ear. “Pro tip: You might not want to refer to the human standing beside you as an experiment. It’s tacky. Here, have a corn dog.” He shoved the stick between my fingers.
For his part, Adam took in the fairgrounds slack-mouthed and blinking rapidly. A tattooed carny with a giant mallet offered him a chance at a swing to ring the bell. “First one’s free,” he said, leering. Adam skittered back.
The corn dog burned my mouth, and I handed it off to Adam to devour. “We should do something that combines a strong physical sensation with a strong emotional one,” I said.
“Relax.” Owen pulled a wad of tickets from his pocket. “I know exactly where to go.” Sometimes, I could swear Owen had never met me at all. I didn’t do relaxed. Especially when I wasn’t in control of all the variables.
Still, we followed Owen past the food stalls and the fair games. He doled four tickets out to Adam and me and tore off two more for himself and, at the front of the line, handed them to the Ferris wheel operator.
We piled into a three-person bench with me crammed into the middle. The operator pulled the bar down over our laps, and the ride lurched to life, jolting us back into our seats. “Hey, I remember this,” I said. “My dad took me on this Ferris wheel when I was a kid.”
“See?” Owen’s eyebrows shot over the rims of his glasses. “It’s working already.”
The ground swept out from underneath us. The pull of gravity planted me to the bench. We arced clockwise, out and up. Our feet dangled. Adam’s hands tightened around the bar and twisted. He pushed as far back into his seat as he could go.
“How far into the sky are we going?” he asked.
Below us, the fairgrounds shrank to a pocket-sized scale. “All the way to the top,” I said.
He grunted.
I leaned forward. I liked the view looking straight down where the angle was the sharpest and most thrilling. Adam reached his arm in front of my chest and pushed me back into my seat. The bench swayed in response.
“Be careful, Victoria,” he said. His voice was strained.
“I’m with him,” Owen said. “Don’t rock the proverbial boat, please.”
“This was your idea,” I reminded him.
The horizon sank lower and lower as we soared over the tree line. Our trajectory began taking us backward as we began to reach the crest. At the top, the ride jerked to a halt.
“Adam?” I glanced over again and found that his eyes were squeezed shut so tightly that wrinkles reached all the way to his temples. “Adam, open your eyes.” He shook his head violently and the trolley car swayed. “Adam, this won’t work if you don’t open your eyes.” But I already knew that the experiment was working, because the emotion he was feeling was fear. Fear was useful. Fear was good. Fear kept people from running out in front of buses and diving off cliffs. My mind raced with the possibilities of what else I might be able to evoke in Adam. Were the primal responses easier to unearth? If I tried, could I make Adam very angry?
I brought my thoughts back into the bench dangling high above the ground. One thing at a time.
Hands still wrapped in a death grip around the safety bar, Adam peeled open an eyelid, followed by his other. He stared out of the chairlift. Up here, the music couldn’t reach. The metal creaked and groaned. Our bench swung gently in the breeze.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I—I don’t know,” he said.
I put my hand on his. “You do know. Tell me what you see,” I coaxed him. “Describe it to me.”
He shifted his weight in the seat. “I see,” he paused, “dark.” Another pause. “With little lights.”