“… totally with you,” Julie was saying.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m with you. It’s beautiful, but those houses are just too small down there. It’s not natural.” She smiled at me, and I wondered what I had done to deserve these new people in my life.
“Jump,” said the voice.
Oh Jesus. When were we getting off this thing? A cool breeze moved over my skin, bringing up goose bumps on my arms. The ocean was a long way down, so far I couldn’t hear it, and the beach too, the dark silhouettes of the lifeguard stands. I noticed that our car hadn’t moved for a while. I looked down—the guy had walked a few steps away from the wheel and leaned against the small shack where people handed in their tickets. He reached into it and pressed something, I guess.
Loud music started. That song, “Got to turn aro-o-o-o-ound,” I don’t know what it’s called. Paris would have known. The wheel began to revolve smoothly, and oh thank God, I thought, taking us down into the lights, the glow and the colors rushing up to meet us, so it seemed like we would become light ourselves, dissolve into a million points of brightness.
“This is lame,” said the crying kid in the car behind us.
Paris shook her head, sadly.
We reached the bottom. Oh good, I thought. Finally. But then the wheel started to rise again.
You get two goes, I remembered.
Outstanding.
Julie looked a little queasy too. When we got close to the top, Paris pointed down. “Look how tiny everyone is,” she said.
“I’m trying to ignore that,” said Julie.
I looked, though. I had been focusing on the lights, but now I saw the tiny figures, the thousands of people walking around the piers.
“Have you seen The Third Man?” asked Paris.
“No. What’s that?”
“It’s a movie,” said Julie. “Old. Graham Greene wrote the script.”
“Our Man in Havana?”
“Yeah,” said Julie. “Same guy.”
“Look at Miss Film Studies here,” said Paris, amiably elbowing Julie. “Anyway, the point is, in the movie there’s a spy who’s gone bad or something. The guy who has been sent to bring him back in from the cold meets him in Vienna, and they ride the Ferris wheel. The rogue agent, Harry I think his name is, basically won’t acknowledge that he’s done anything wrong, even though he has gotten people killed. He points down. He says—and I’m paraphrasing—he says, ‘Would you feel guilty if any of those dots stopped moving? What if I gave you twenty thousand for every dot that stopped?’ ”
“Um. Okay,” I said.
Paris leaned forward, took my hand, and pointed to the little people below. “His point being, when you zoom out your perspective, when you look at people from a distance, they’re small and insignificant. It doesn’t matter if they die. What do you think?”
I looked at the people. The wheel was turning slowly; we were just reaching the peak of the arc. “I think they matter,” I said.
“Me too,” said Julie. I noticed that her eyes were closed.
“And me,” said Paris. “That’s what I’m saying. For me, it’s the opposite of the guy in the film. I look down, and I see those tiny people, and I want to wrap my arms around them all, around the whole town, keep them safe, you know?” She put her arms out wide, and we were so high they encircled the town, she was big enough to hold it, the whole place, all the people, all the lights.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Julie’s eyes opened momentarily, and she looked around her with a hooded, half-attentive gaze. “You know what I think when I see those little people?” she said. Red light flashed off the piercing in her nose. “I think I want to get off this ******ing ride.”
A conversation that signifies a lot, and also means nothing at all:
We were walking down the pier, Julie and me. Paris was up ahead, basically skipping instead of walking, like we were in a musical.
Julie was going more slowly, her gait a little unsteady. I realized she hadn’t been joking at all about the fear of heights. But she’d gone on the ride anyway. That registered somewhere, resonated on some taut string in my mind. What she was willing to do for Paris.
I glanced over at Julie. There was a tattoo of the Little Prince on her arm, standing on his little planet, with his rose at his feet.
“ ‘That which is essential is invisible to the eye,’ ” I said.
“What?”
“The fox says it, in The Little Prince,” I said.
Julie smiled. “Oh, yeah. My tattoo. Yep, I love that book. It’s sad, but it’s amazing too. I have the snake on my other arm.”
“Yeah?”
She turned and showed me—the snake swallowing the elephant, making it look like a hat from the side. Saint-Exupéry’s example of how children see things differently than adults, see the magic that adults can no longer see.
“You think it’s true?” I said. “That when we grow up, we see things differently?”