Staring out at me was a photograph of a merry-go-round horse, tipped sideways as it was hauled out of its storage closet by movers. Its front teeth were chipped and aimed in opposing directions below the oversized, grinning lips, and its lifted hooves seemed to be scrambling frantically at the air.
LAST ROOFF HORSES SOLD AT AUCTION, read the caption.
I flew through the story that accompanied the photograph, processing it in bits and pieces, while fragments of that tune – the one from the pier – floated free in my head but never knitted themselves into something I could hum.
Once, these vibrantly painted, joyous creatures spun and flew on the soon-to-be-razed Long Beach Pier . . . The last great work of a grieving man . . . His final carousel, populated with what Rooff called “The company I crave” after his longtime business partner and reputed lover, LosAngeks nightclub owner and kgendary gambler Daniel R. Ratch, took his own life following a decades-long battle with a degenerative muscular disease in September of 1898.
The reclusive Rooff and notorious Ratch formed one of the more unlikely – and lucrative – financial partnerships of the fin-de-siecle era, building thousands of cheaply manufactured carousels, fortune-telling machines, and other amusements of the time for boardwalks and parks nationwide. They envisioned the Long Beach Pier as their crowning achievement, a world unto itself for “All the laughing peopk . . .,” in Rooff s memorable phrase at his tearful press conference following Ratch’s death . . .
Rooff completed only the carousel and the now-infamous Lite-Your-Line parlor before being fired for erratic behavior and the agonizingly slow pace of his work . . . He disappeared from the public record, and his death is not recorded.
There was more, but the words had stopped making sense to me. Shoving the paper away, I sat back in my chair. The trembling started a few seconds later.
I can’t explain how I knew. I was thinking of Rooff under that hat, hidden by curtains, working furiously in the candlelight, chanting his dead lover’s name. I think maybe I’d always suspected, hadn’t admitted. But Ash had made it back to Oakland, hadn’t he? And we’d made it here?
Then, abruptly, I was up, snatching my keys off the hook next to the kitchen sink and fleeing toward our car, while that incomplete tune whirled in my head and the whole last night with Ash spilled in front of my eyes in kaleidoscopic broken pieces. I don’t remember a single second of the drive down the freeways, couldn’t even tell you whether there was traffic, because all I was seeing were the homeless men and the sores on their arms and the way their mouths moved as they chanted their rhyme. Then I was seeing the ray flapping in midair, lifted out of the waves just as we passed, as though the whole scene had been triggered by our passing. The disappearing blonde children, the arcade machine attendant’s graceful shuffle and the sound he made. The rose-petal poker chips. The tinkling machines. The glide of the rollergirl, and the skater kid’s moonwalk, and the American flag man. And the poodle-skirt women’s perpetually smiling faces. Most of all, their faces, and it was their laughter I was hearing as I skidded into that giant, empty parking lot and jammed my car to a stop and leapt out, hoping, praying.
Even the streetlights were gone, and the dark pier jutted crookedly over the quietly lapping water like the prow of a beached ship. No magician’s hat. Nothing on the pier at all. Overhead, I saw stars, faint and smeared by the smog, as though I were viewing them through a greasy window. Behind me, the new old city, safely shut down and swept clean for the night, rocked imperceptibly on its foundations. A wind kicked up, freezing cold, and I clamped my arms to my chest and crouched beside my car and wished I’d remembered a jacket, at least.
Finally, I let myself think it. Sortwhatl’d been hoping. Which had been what, exactly? That I’d find the auctioneer still here? That the movers would still be emptying the last pieces out of the warehouse, and maybe I could . . .
“What?” I said aloud, and slammed my palms against the pavement and scraped them badly. Do what? Pick up my friend’s body like a cigar store Indian, tie him to the top of the car, bring him to our house, which he’d never seen, and prop him on our little porch in our choice of vests? Maybe bring along a poodle-skirt woman so we could make set-pieces?
Staggering to my feet, I took a huge breath and let the ocean air cut my lungs. In my pocket, I realized, I’d jammed the newspaper article, and I removed it now, uncrumpled it, ripped it to pieces, and set the pieces flying. Rebecca could never see that article, could never know what I was thinking. It was bad enough – it was flat, fucking murder – that we’d left Ash down here. I didn’t even want to imagine how she’d react when she realized what really might have happened to her father.
How did it work, I wondered? Were Rooff s ghosts, or machines, or whatever they were, selective about the company they brought him? Had they let us go, or had we refused? Had Ash known, before it was too late, that he had a choice? Had the rest of them – the rollergirl, the flag man, the kid, maybe even Rebecca’s father – chosen to stay, because it was bright and musical and happy in there, and smelled of the sea?
It was almost light when I fumbled my car door open and collapsed back into the driver’s seat. I could be wrong, I thought. I could go home right now and find Rebecca with the kitchen phone dangling from her ear, smiling in the way she didn’t anymore as Ash told her where he’d vanished to this time and she spooned minced carrots to our child. But I didn’t think so.
Not until I was off the freeways again, just pulling into our little driveway, did it occur to me to wonder where, exactly, Rooff s last merry-go-round stopped. At the edge of the white curtain? Or at the end of the pier? The ray could have been part of it, and the fishermen, and the beggars, too. Or maybe they’d just wanted to be.
I stepped out of the car, felt the stagnant L.A air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor’s windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street, wind-chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and also almost sweet. Because I realized I might be underestimating the power of Rooff s last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still – Rebecca, me, the whole crazy, homogenizing coast – bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone’s favorite people and places inevitably do. Until, finally, we are just our faces, smiles frozen bright as we can make them, hands stretching for our children because we can’t help but hope they’ll join us, hope they’ll understand before we did that there really may be no place else to go or at least forgive us for not finding it. Then they’ll smile back at us. Climb aboard. And ride.
KIM NEWMAN HAS WON the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award.
His novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSR (with Eugene Byrne), Life’s Lottery and the acclaimed Anno Dracula sequence – comprising the title novel, plus The Bloody Red Baron and Judgment of Tears (aka Dracula Cha Cha Cha). An English Ghost Story is currently being developed as a movie from a script by the author, while The Matter of Britain is another collaboration with Byrne.