For Some Amusement

I went down to the amusement park with a group of friends.  We walked there on foot.  As we rounded a corner, the park loomed before us like some grand metropolis of whimsy.  There were bells and lights and freshly painted airplanes, ice cream towers and huge spinning pinwheels.  The most prominent sight was a ride called "The Zeus", a roller coaster that wound around a bronze statue of the Greek god that was a few hundred feet tall.  He stood at the center of the coaster, scowling and gripping a lightening bolt in his fist.  I pointed at the statue and told my friends, "A thousand years ago, it would have taken them centuries to build something like that.  The project would span generations.  They would have ended up beating half the workers to death for stealing morsels of bread before the thing was done.  Now, they probably just flew a few helicopters over the site and squeezed the whole thing out of a giant tube."

Inside the park, we somehow all got separated from one another.  I explored the place on my own.  To my surprise, there weren't really separate rides with people standing in long lines.  It was more like a playground of interconnected oddities.  I climbed a ladder down a blue metal tube, feeling like I was descending into the bowels of a submarine, and I found myself among a choir rehearsing in the stands of a baseball game.  I navigated a hall of mirrors and ended up behind a circus tent where I peaked under the canvas and saw an acrobat doing tricks and handstands on the head of an elephant before a breathless audience.  There were truly amusements at every turn.

At one point, I came to a dead end.  The path that I had followed led me to a round courtyard that was closed on all sides, except for the way that I had came.  I turned and followed the path back to a library of dusty storybooks that I had just passed through.  There was a man in a black top hat behind the desk, and he lifted his head as I approached.  He pulled his face into a long, exaggerated frown and said, "Excuse me, young man!  You simply cannot come through this way!" From the exaggerated expression and the way that he was drawing out his words, I could tell that he was trying to do a very crude impression of a stuffy librarian.  Still, he was serious and steadfast in his refusal to let me pass.  I would have to find another way.

So I took another path.  This one took me through a sort of grotesque parody of a hair salon with warped, distorting mirrors and hairdressers with giant scissors.  As I got to the back of the shop where a bunch of women were sitting under the hair dryers reading magazines, one of the women, wearing what was clearly a very fake curly blonde wig, lifted her head and started shrieking at me.  I recognized the face of the man in the top hat.  In fact, he pulled away the wig and replaced it with the hat as stomped his way towards me, shaking his finger and saying, "No!  No!  No!  Not this way." I stumbled backwards and ran back out of the shop.

Down every path, I eventually met with the man in the top hat.  He was wearing a monocle as he conducted an orchestra.  He twisted the ends of a fake mustache into sharp points as he baked a cake for a cooking show.  He blew a whistle dressed as a referee, kicking dirt at me and driving me back.  I had no other way to go.  I kept ending up back at the round courtyard.  I had only one more way I could try.  It seemed normal enough.  It was an abandoned office building, filled with dismantled cubicles and wires hanging down in places where the ceiling tiles had been removed, like someone had been working on the electrical system.  The prosaic nature of the place gave me hope.  I thought that maybe this was some neglected part of the park's administration, rather than part of the park itself.  Maybe this could be my way out.

But already I was on guard when I saw a maintenance man in blue coveralls standing on a ladder, working on one of the light fixtures with a screwdriver.  I tried to creep by him, but just as I was about to slip by, he yelled, "Hey!" My heart caught in my throat.  But then he just said, "Can you hand me that five sixteenth wrench?" Slowly, carefully, I handed it up to him, my fingers trembling.  He took it without looking back at me.  He just said, "Thanks" and started loosing a bolt on the light fixture.  I took a long breath.  But as I started to walk away, I could hear him laughing softly under his breath.  I stopped in mid-step when he said, "Not a chance buddy," and I knew it was him.  I knew it was the man in the top hat.

I backed away and the man's laughter got louder and louder.  I shook my head.  There was no way out.  The top hat appeared from no where and the man slipped it onto his head as he climbed down from the ladder, turning back to me and literally grinning from ear to ear, his teeth gleaming and his mouth opened to cartoonish proportions.  He stomped towards me, pounding each foot down for exaggerated and menacing effect.  I back away, still shaking my head, until I butted against a wall.  There was a window beside me.  It was open to air the room.  It was the only path I had left to take.

I closed my eyes and hurled myself from the window.  I felt myself falling free out into the air, my stomach gripping with nausea as I dropped.  I saw the concrete ground rushing up at me.  But just as I braced myself, a giant umbrella suddenly popped open below me.  It spread wide, spinning with blue and yellow stripes, and it caught me as I fell.  I landed with a bounce, and then I slid off the side of the umbrella and landed feet first on the ground.  I found that I was near the entrance to the park.  There was a gift shop there, and I saw my friends inside, browsing the racks of souvenirs.  I wanted to go in there and see them, find out what had happened to them and how we had all gotten lost.  But I just stood there shaking, the light glinting off of every surface, the crowds flowing past, everything, everything spinning around me.

Out to Sea

I had a job in an office and I couldn't stand my boss.  There was a woman that I worked with who hated the boss even more than I did, and she had managed to steal the boss' briefcase containing all of his important papers.  She wanted to dump the briefcase in Lake Erie where he would never find it.  We drove out to the lake, and I pulled the front of the car right out into the edge of the water.  It was a cold winter day.  The beach was deserted and the sky was overcast and a rough wind swept in across the lake.  We climbed out onto the hood.  We had put a few bricks into the briefcase to weigh it down, and I held it out past the front of the car, dangling it from the tips of my fingers. 

I was just about to drop it when the woman stopped me and said, "Wait!  It will probably just wash right back up onto the beach if we dump it here.  You should take it farther out." I suggested taking it out just past the point where the bottom dropped off sharply, where the water was much deeper.  The woman agreed, so I swam out into the frigid water, dragging the briefcase behind me.  I could see the woman on the edge of the hood, waiting for me to swim back, waiting with her heels perched on the bumper and her chin resting on her hand.  I waved to her when I got out to the right spot, and she waved back.  The buoys that usually marked where the bottom dropped off had been taken down for the season, and I had to feel the way to the edge with my toes.  I didn't want to stray too far over the line.  I inched my way as close as I could, and then I held the briefcase out into the water as far as I could stretch my arm and I let it go.  I could feel it's weight drop away as it drifted down into the cold depths.

I turned to swim back to the beach, my feet teetering on the edge of the drop off.  I regained my balance, and I was just about to lunge forward into the water, when a big wave came and pulled me back hard.  I knew I had been washed out past the drop off, and I was flailing about wildly now, trying to get a foothold, trying to swim back to where I could still touch bottom.  But every time I gained a few feet, another wave would come and pull me farther out.  The woman was standing on the bumper now, straining to see me out there in the water.  I gripped the surface, trying to swim back to her, but she just receded smaller into the distance as I got washed away.  Finally, I gave up the struggle and the water seemed to grow calm around me.  The land was completely out of sight now.  I rolled over on my back and floated and drifted with nothing but the expansive water around me and the grey sky above.

The Caravan

I was lying on a bed under the shade of a canopy tent that had been set up on the desert plain.  I was recuperating after a traveling caravan had found me wandering in the desert, lost and nearly dead from thirst.  Every time I woke up there was a fresh glass of cool water perspiring on the table beside the bed next to a paperback book someone had left for me to occupy my mind with.  I took slow, drowsy sips of the water, and then I usually drifted back off before I was able to take much interest in the book.  Little by little, I took stock of my accommodations.  The bed had a thick frame with gold spires for posts.  It seemed a bit too permanent and cumbersome for the makeshift shelter of the canopy tent.  There was a large area rug spread out on the ground beneath the bed.  There was a long oval dressing mirror nearby, and a number of steamer trunks had been stacked up behind the bed to form a barricade against the sand and the southern wind.

Beyond the foot of the bed, there was an old weathered piano that was only partially under the cover of the canopy.  Once, I woke up to find three young men at the piano, one of them seated on the bench and the other two hovering over his shoulders.  They all wore white shirts and brown suspenders.  The young man at the piano played a short lullaby.  The keys fell with a dull thump as dry and dusty as the desert itself, but the sweet and soothing melody was still faintly discernible.  The young man to left of the piano player remarked, as a matter of passing trivia, that the song was famous for having no meaning.  The young man on the right said that the song had meaning just by virtue of being a song, and he insisted that all songs had meaning.  The piano player thunked a few random keys, and then he settled the debate by saying that the song had no need for meaning.  It had a feeling, and that was enough.  I was content to leave the argument to them.  I just lay there listening to their chatter and the flapping of the canopy in the wind.  I was weak and tired and down to simple things.

When the time came for the caravan to move on, I was deep into the paperback novel that I had been given.  My strength and energy were coming back to me.  Everything was being packed up all around me, but I hardly paid any attention.  I only noticed that the canopy had been taken down due to the new light that fell across the pages of the book, simmering gold against the black ink.  The bed was disassembled, the frame stacked in three separate pieces and the mattresses loaded onto a truck bed along with all of the steamer trunks, expect for the one I'd taken for a seat as I huddled over reading. When everything else was packed and ready to go, they took that last trunk out from under me, and I climbed into the back seat of one of the cars and we pulled away leaving no traces in the barren plain behind us, and I turned another page. The book was a classic comedy of manners, playing out in drawing rooms and on verandas over endless rounds of tea.  I was engrossed in the subtlety of it, the sly hints, the covert gestures, the spare glances.  I felt like I was going to meet these very people somewhere on the road ahead, and I had a sense that I had been given the book to prepare me for this meeting.  I had to study.  I had to get all the moves down, all the right words.  I had to be ready.

Grandmother's House

My wife and I were driving through the old neighborhood and we passed my Grandmother's old house.  It sat empty and abandoned amid the bustling community of stores and shops and offices that had sprang up around it.  It was an isolated spot of desolation, a lingering smudge of the past.  The rotted boards were falling off the house and the paint had nearly chipped and peeled off completely.  Even the leaves in the trees were dark and wet with decay, and the yard was a mire of mud and debris.  I was amazed that the place was still standing, that it hadn't been swept aside by the progress surrounding it.  It was like a piece of death with deep, tenacious roots, something fixed and stubborn that they had been forced to build around.

I pulled up into the dirt driveway and insisted on going inside.  My wife was reluctant to go in.  She leaned forward and stared up through the windshield at the forbidding facade of the house and the cracked boards near the peak of the roof where bats were probably making their home.  I told her that we'd just be a minute or two, and I was already climbing out of the car.  The front door was unlocked.  The knob was rusted and it nearly came off in my hand.  We passed through empty rooms pervaded with dampness and mold.  We could hear voices coming from somewhere in the back.  I heard my grandmother's voice, saying something about the inevitability of death and despair.  We came into the room and found her sitting around a table with some friends, playing cards, like some afternoon gathering of the dead.  She looked younger, younger than I'd ever seen her, younger than I remembered her being even when I was a child.  There was color in her hair.  Her face was bright and clear, bearing none of the lines of age.  She looked up and smiled warmly as we walked over, and everyone else at the table turned and looked at us.

I felt like I was put on the spot.  For lack of anything else to say, I remarked that even though I'd heard her saying something about death and despair being inevitable, her being so young, her being here at all, would seem to prove otherwise.  All the ladies at the table rolled their eyes and made a bunch of sighs and dismissive gestures, as though I were putting them on, and they all turned back to their cards, waving me away with their hands.  Only my grandmother got up from the table.  She said she had something to show us.  She led us out the back door and off the back porch of the house.  She led us out into the back yard, and we stopped a few paces from the porch and turned around.  It appeared that the house had been resurrected, as well.  There was a fresh coat of yellow paint.  All the boards were straight and even.  Everything had been repaired.  The weathervane had been replaced.  It stood like a masthead on the peak of the roof, the rooster and the arrows mounted against the clear blue sky.  I stood gaping at it, baffled.  Were we seeing it all from some new angle?

But we went back inside and found new life there as well, new carpet, new furniture.  My whole family was there, preparing for a party in the dining room, hanging up streamers and lighting candles at the center of the table and laying out plates and silverware on the white table cloth.  They were all younger versions of themselves, years stripped from their faces, ages of disappointments cleared from their minds.  The house was the way that I remembered it now, and I showed my wife around.  I showed her the place where I would always hop the bannister rather than walking all the way to the end.  I showed her the hidden back stairway, the one that we all thought was some kind of secret passage.  I showed her all the best spots upstairs where we would hide whenever we played hide and go seek.  I showed her my favorite spot in the guest bedroom with its slanted roof and gabled window.  I showed her the high view of the town from the window, told her about watching the distant lights out there in the dark.  I showed her how I would hide under the bed, feeling the heat blowing up through the vent.  I could feel it even still.

As we came back down the main stairs, I saw a young blonde-haired boy sitting in a huge plush chair that had been placed in the hallway in front of a small black and white TV.  I knew this boy was me.  He sat there watching cartoons, totally absorbed.  He didn't even notice us there on the stairs.  I could hear voices coming from the living room across the hall.  My mother and brother were in there, sitting at a table by the window.  They were arguing about something.  I could hear it in their voices.  I could hear the stress and frazzled nerves along the frayed edges of their sentences.  But the boy just sat there watching his cartoons.  I could remember that.  I could remember sitting there on a Saturday morning, catching snatches of adult conversation.  I could remember people at the window just like that, like a snapshot of strangers from another life, never knowing what it was all about.  I remembered this being the shape and shade of my earliest impressions, everything a whisper along the peripheral edges of a world of cartoon honks and rattles and whistles.  I remembered being that boy.

It was time to go.  Our minute or two had long since passed.  I went to the window, and I could see that one of the new stores that had grown up around the area had a flea market with stands and shops set up along a thoroughfare paved with red bricks.  One of the stands was selling sunglasses on a revolving rack.  My wife and I went over to check it out, and we stood at the counter, goofing around with the sunglasses, holding them up to see the evening sky through their tinted lenses.  I looked over and the house was still there, still freshly painted and new.  The sun had dipped behind the house now, and the weathervane stood sharply black against the rich medley of clouds and colors.  I felt like we had stepped out someplace else.  I felt like it would all be different now.  It would all connect back to this, leading on to endless fascinations, embarking from some exotic bazaar somewhere on the surface of the Earth in the darkening shadows of the day.

Something Furry

I was walking along a dark road at night when I spotted a small matchbox on the pavement at my feet.  There were soft mews and other plaintive little noises coming from this matchbox.  I knelt down and scooped the thing up in my hand.  There was a little clump of grey fur sticking out of the end of the box where the cardboard tray protruded slightly.  This clump of fur looked very dry and stiff and dead, but I could still hear the sounds coming from the box and feel a slight tremor from something moving around inside.  I began to carefully slide the tray out with the tip of my fingernail.

 

Doing this caused a great deal of agitation inside the matchbox, enough to knock it from my hands.  As it landed back on the pavement, I saw a dark little form skitter away from it.  It was just a shapeless lump of grey fur.  It was hissing angrily now, making sharp snorts and wet snarls.  It skittered all over the pavement and it kept circling around my feet in a way that was making me break into my own agitated dance there in the road, simultaneously trying to stamp on it with one foot while avoiding it with the other.  The thing latched onto my shoe and I could feel it scurry up under my pants.  I could feel the tickle of its feet moving up my ankle, and then the sharp sting of its teeth as it bit into my calf.