The first tent he reached was warmly lit but empty, its lantern and signboard dark. After peering in at the single mast and the small patch of desert under a single yellow spot, he moved on to the next in line.
This one’s lantern showed a single word on its signboard: TIMEWISE, and the smiling long-jawed man in straw boater, plaid jacket, slacks, and the shiniest shoes to one side of the entrance immediately greeted him.
“Evenin’, guv. Welcome to the show.”
“I just go in?”
“Do as you please, guv.”
Jem entered the warmly lit space, saw the single yellow spot illuminating a wooden stand a bit like a lectern. Its only feature was a single throw switch set into a vertical board at the top. The labels ON and OFF were marked clearly in black letters on white.
“What do I do?” Jem asked. “Throw the switch?”
“Do nothing, if you’ve a mind,” the man said. “Or throw it. Some do. Some don’t. Makes some folk feel things are happening if they do.”
“There’s no wiring.”
“There’s always wiring, guv. Could be hidden in the stand, under the sand. Could be a placebo. Makes some folks feel good to throw it. Empowered, you know.”
“But they waste time deciding.”
“Clever, but there’s more to it. They stand to get forever. We’re dripping with clocks. Got ’em all over us. Fingernails growing. Hair. Whiskers. Hunger. Lots o’ clocks. Constant reminders. It’s a Yes/No. Throw the switch! Stop the clocks! Maybe that’s it.”
“Live forever!”
“Free of time! Absolutely!”
“But the heart is a clock. That’d have to stop too.”
“Got me. It would.”
“So much for forever.”
“We’re all just hydrogen atoms being clever, mate. Being this or that. We all go there.”
“That’s the forever?”
“Surely is.”
“No choice at all really.”
“None I’d make. But face it. Some people are thoughtless, careless. Don’t know why we have seasons. Why planes fly. This is for them. You always get some.”
“So you’re culling.”
“Trimming the bush.”
“No thanks.”
“Come back anytime.”
Jem left the tent, moved on to the next. Its signboard read MUM ON THE SOFA, and there was no one by the entrance this time. But when Jem looked inside he saw exactly what the sign promised: a woman in her late sixties wearing a house dress and apron sitting on a sofa knitting and watching an old-style television set. The sound was turned right down, the screen showed only static, but the woman seemed to be watching it intently until she saw him. Then her eyes lit up and she smiled broadly.
“Come in, dearie! Big night ahead. Set a spell. Plenty of room.”
Jem stayed where he was in the entryway. There was something in how the woman’s eyes had brightened too gleefully, in how her grin had spread and locked in the flickering light of her TV, so much like Mr F.’s. Overdoing it, but intentionally, he suspected, and Jem had the sudden notion that if he sat down beside the woman, started watching her white TV snow, he’d never get up again.
“Maybe later,” he said. “Lots to do.”
“Always is,” the woman said, sounding genuinely disappointed.
Jem moved on, passed another empty tent — same lonely spotlight, same spread of empty sand and scrub — then found himself outside one of the larger attractions.
SKYLAB LAND, the sign read, and when Jem stepped inside he saw four tall box pedestals, two to each side of a throne-type chair toward the rear. On each rested what looked like a piece of old grey-white insulation paneling, presumably meant to be scrap salvaged from Skylab when it came down in the late seventies. The figure on the throne was tricked out in what was meant to be a spacesuit of the stuff: incongruous pieces glued and wired over an old ski suit, complete with a makeshift helmet. The pitted and frosted faceplate concealed the wearer’s face entirely.
As Jem moved between the pedestals, the figure stirred, started his spiel. “Skylab was the United States’ first space station.” It was a male voice, one that sounded a lot like Mr F.’s in fact. “Set in place in 1973, abandoned in 1974, completed 38,981 orbits, finally fell to Earth in August 1979. NASA meant to go back, have one of the newfangled space shuttles move it to a higher orbit and reuse it, but that never happened. The station came down. This attraction celebrates its homecoming.”
“That’s it?” Jem asked.
“That’s it. You’re welcome to examine the exhibits.”
Jem glanced at the scraps of metal and plastic, whatever they really were. “Are they genuine?”
“Can’t say. I just wear this, give the spiel.”
“Maybe another time then. Other sights to see.”
“Always are.”
Jem stepped outside to find the sky completely dark now, all traces of light gone from the western horizon. Without a midway to give him his bearings he became disoriented, found himself in the alley he’d been in earlier in the day, facing the signboard reading THE WAIT.
Now the flaps were fixed back. Warm light shone from within. The stocky man by the entrance had an impressive handlebar moustache — fake surely — and wore a showman’s purple velvet suit with embroidered lapels. He immediately assumed his role.
“Evenin’, Mr Renton. I’m Grips Aston, and this is—”
“The Wait.”
“Surely is. Step in.”
Jem ignored the invitation, again settled for what he could see from the entrance. In the middle of a space the size of a family living room, a spotlight illuminated a single bentwood chair.
Jem laughed out loud at the absurdity of such a payoff. Truth in advertising again at least, like MUM ON THE SOFA, though hardly an attraction. Sit in the chair, become the exhibit.
“You’re welcome to take a seat,” Grips Aston said with not a touch of irony, voice as smooth as driftwood left in the ocean just long enough. “Rest a bit. Big night ahead.”
“Have to check out all the attractions. You know not to slow me down.”
The big moustache twitched. “Jem, let a guy do his spiel, okay? I’m meant to say it to anyone who shows up.”
“Even specials like me?”
“Especially specials. It’s only temptation if it works, right? And I’m a genuine Aston. Old circus name down under. Give a guy a break!”
“Another time, Grips.”
Jem stepped away, tried the next tent along. Again the signboard was blank, the lantern on the pole dark. When Jem peered in, he saw just the central mast, the solitary spot, a sad scrappy patch of sand, its exhibit long abandoned or, as Jem thought about it, waiting to arrive. Another kind of truth in advertising really, the promise of other days, other possibilities, that or a memorial for what had once been.
Jem felt an odd emotion building, realized it was quite possibly dread, though dread as a concept, dread without the fear. What was he missing? Things were going on that he wasn’t tracking properly.
He kept on to the next attraction in the alley, taking care with the guy-lines and tent-pegs, and it occurred to him for the first time that simply taking care not to stumble was keeping him focused, kept him paying attention, as if to offset the remaining effects of the obligato.
THE THOUGHTFUL GLASS OF WATER this latest signboard read, and as Jem reached it a middle-aged woman in pink tutu, fishnet stockings, and black Doc Martens, hair coiffed in the most striking fuchsia dreadlocks, made as if to hold the already open flaps aside, gesturing to the feature within: a wooden pedestal with a single glass of clear fluid resting upon it.
“Time out, luvvy!” she said in a passing imitation of a Cockney accent. “You can pee behind the vans whenever y’like, but we need other kinds of refreshment, right? Dinner’s later, all of us together, but for now drink your fill.”