We’d all stopped in our tracks at the fisherman’s first movements, and we stayed there quite a while. Eventually, Ash turned to us and nodded his head. “I have missed you, Rebecca,” he said. “You, too, Elliot.” But he meant Rebecca. He’d always meant Rebecca, and had told me so once, the night before graduation, on one the rare occasions when he got high, just to see. “Count on you,” he’d told me. “Worship her.”
Tonight, Rebecca didn’t respond, and eventually Ash started toward the pavilion and the lights beneath it. We followed. I walked beside my wife, close enough for elbow contact but not manufacturing any. Something about the flapping ray reminded me of our daughter, squirming and jerking as she scrabbled for a hold in the world, and I wanted to be back at our house. In spite of the calmer, sadder way Rebecca had been this past year – maybe even because of it, though I hated thinking that – I loved our home.
“What made the merry-go-round so amazing?” I asked.
“The guy who designed it – Rooff, I think? – he’s like the most famous American carousel builder. Or one of. He did this one in Rhode Island or Vermont, when they broke it up and sold off the horses, they went on eBay for $25,000 a piece. But this one . . .”
In the quiet of the next few seconds, I became aware, for the first time since we’d reached the pier, of the sounds. That wind, first of all, sighing out of the blackness to crash against the fortified city and then roll back. The ocean, shushing and muttering. The boards creaking as fishermen shifted or cast and seagulls dropped out of the dark to perch on the ruined railings. And, from straight ahead, under that darkly gleaming steel hat, an incongruous and unidentifiable tinkling, almost musical, barely audible, like an ice cream truck from blocks away.
“You should have seen their faces, Elliot. You would have loved them.”
I blinked, still seeing the ray. “Really?”
“Rooff – the designer – he made them after his business partner died. His best friend, I guess. To keep him company, or something. I met this older man from the Carousel Preservation Assemblage who—”
“The Carousel what?” I said, and smiled. It really was astonishing, the people Rebecca knew.
“I met him at that open city planning meeting down here a couple years ago. The one about the development of the rest of downtown? The one I came home so upset from?”
“That would be every city planning meeting,” I said. My smile faded, and the musical tinkling from the end of the pier got just a little louder.
“Anyway. These horses, Elliot. They were just . . . the friendliest horses I’ve ever seen. They all had huge dopey smiles on their faces. Their teeth either pointed out sideways, or else they were perfect and glowing. Their sides were shiny brown or black or pink or blue. Their manes all had painted glass rubies and sapphires sticking out of them, and the saddles had these ridiculously elaborate roses and violets carved into the seats. Hooves flying, like they just couldn’t stand to come down, you know? Like it was too much fun just sailing around in a circle forever. The Preservation guy said Rooff installed every single one of them, and every cog of every machine down here, by himself, at night, by candlelight. As some kind of tribute to his friend or something. Said he was a total raving loon, too. Got involved in all kinds of seances trying to contact his friend after he died. Wound up getting publicly ridiculed by Harry Hou-dini, who broke up one of his little soirees, apparently. Died brokenhearted and penniless.”
“Your kind of guy,” I said. And I thought I understood, suddenly and for the first time, just how badly Rebecca’s father had hurt her. Because he’d been her kind of guy, too.
Unlike me.
“Yep,” said Rebecca, and her face darkened again. Her mood seemed to change with every breath now, like the pattern of shadows on the pier around us. “Anyway, this is where we came. My dad’d plop us on the merry-go-round, hand the operator a fistful of tickets, and there we’d stay while he went and . . . well. I’m not going to tell you.”
Ahead, Ash reached the hanging drapes, which, up close, were stained and ratty and riddled with runs. Without turning around or pausing, he slipped inside them. Instantly, his form seemed to waver, too, just like the lights, as though he’d dived into a pool. I stopped, closed my eyes, felt the salt on my skin and smelled fish and Whitewater. And smog, of course. Even here.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because I’m pretty sure you’re going to get to see.” She passed through the drapes, and I followed.
I don’t know what I was expecting under the hat, but whatever it was, I was disappointed. The space under there was cavernous, stretching another thirty yards or so out to sea, but most of it was empty, just wood planking and the surrounding shroud flapping in the wind like the clipped and tattered wings of some giant ocean bird. Albatross, maybe. At the far end of the space, another white curtain, this one heavier and opaque, dropped from rafters to dock, effectively walling off what had to be the last few feet of pier and giving me uneasy thoughts about the Wizard of Oz behind his screen. A mirror-ball dangled overhead, gobbling up the light from the fixture-less hanging bulbs suspended from the rafters and shooting off the red and green and blue sparks I’d seen from down the pier.
Spaced around the perimeter of the enclosure, and making the tinkling, bleeping noises we’d heard from outside, were six or seven pre-video arcade games, and stationed at the one directly across from us, elbowing each other and bobbing up and down, were two kids, neither older than seven, both with startlingly long white-blonde hair pouring down their backs like melting wax. I’m not sure why I decided they were brother and sister. The one on the left wore a dress, the one on the right jeans. Of Rebecca’s grinning horses, the only possible remnant was the room’s lone attendant, who was hovering near the kids but looked up when we entered and shuffled smoothly away from them, head down, as though we’d caught him peeping at a window.
“Come here,” Ash said, standing over one of the machines to our left. “Look at this.”
We moved toward him, and as we did, the attendant straightened and began to scuttle over the planking toward us. Despite his surprising grace, he looked at least a hundred years old. His skin was yellow and sagging off his cheeks, and his hair was white and patchy. His shoulders dipped, seemingly not quite aligned with his waist, and his fingers twitched at the fringes of his blue workman’s apron. It was as though nothing on that body quite fit, or had been his originally; he’d just found the shed exoskeleton and slipped inside it like a hermit crab. I couldn’t take my eyes from him until he stopped in the centre of the room.
“Hey,” Rebecca said to Ash. “You’re good.”
“Sssh,” Ash murmured, “Almost got it. Shoot.” There was a clunk from the machine, and I stepped up next to him.
“We had one of these at the 7–11 by my house,” I said.
Simple game. You stuck your hands inside the two outsized, all-but-immovable gloves on the control panel. The gloves controlled a sort of crane behind the glass of the machine. You tried to maneuver the crane down to the bone-pile of prizes encased in clear, plastic bubbles below, grab a bubble in the jaws of the crane, then lift and drop it down a circular chute to the left. If you got the bubble in the chute, it popped out to you, and you claimed your prize. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone win that game.
“Let me try,” said Rebecca, and slid a quarter into the slot and her hands into the gloves. She got the crane’s jaws around a bubble with a jiggly rubber tarantula inside and dropped it before she got it anywhere near the chute’s mouth.