Axis of Aaron (22 page)

Ebon heard a noise and looked back to see the Danger Wheel beginning to turn. It didn’t grind with rust; it turned as smoothly as it always had, as if it wanted to move and resented inertia. Instead of hearing the grate of metal on metal, he heard the smooth spinning of wheels, the meshing of cogs, and the distant, delighted screams from riders at its top. The Danger Wheel wasn’t like a normal Ferris wheel. You went around, but then you went up and stayed there. Ebon tipped his head back, watching it spin. A large red circle of metal girders, eight smaller circles around the periphery, each with a car making slow revolutions. He could smell popcorn. He could smell cotton candy.
 

It’s not really here. Or it is here but
shouldn’t
be. The pier was empty. Nobody builds a carnival in just a few weeks, and nobody would ever rebuild a closed one. It would take an impossible amount of time, like remodeling a house.
 

Behind him, the carousel began to turn.
 

Ebon stepped back, aware in a distant, technical way that he should be afraid — for his sanity, for his sense of reality, for his violated sense of what was and should not be. But when he looked at the carnival, it was like he was seeing two images overlapping, both equally solid and equally ephemeral. It was like smoke atop smoke — one image of the dead carousel and another crossing its lines and colors that showed the carousel revolving. In one image, the horses appeared fresh and bright. Bright under the lights anyway, because night had begun to fall. He’d left the cottage midmorning, and it was past sunset now.
 

Get out. Get
out!

But he didn’t want to get out. Atop the conflicting visions of the carousel and Danger Wheel — and now the game stands and the area by the railing where artists had set up easels and tables for face-painting — Ebon saw a dozen other random memories of events that, like what was happening now hadn’t actually occurred. His boat ride with Captain Jack. His first night in Aimee’s cottage. Seeing the woman with red hair and no discernible face, then losing her in the island’s twisting, shifting streets. Holly cheating on him, Holly dying. Himself betraying Holly right back, then running away. Richard Frey, his big hands and solid arms, towering above him. Sandcastles in the sand. Houses in the sand, just as temporary.
 

He blinked. A sense of missed panic swept past him like a car brushing his sleeve on the side of a busy expressway. He was suddenly afraid.
Very
afraid. But Ebon wasn’t afraid of the carnival, because it was just a rusty old place around him: carousel horses lying on their sides in disrepair, the Danger Wheel forever frozen, the game stalls fallow and empty. Only now was he feeling fear at all, and the fact that it had taken so long to arise was the most frightening of all.
 

There’s something wrong with the town
.
Get out. Not just out of Aaron’s Party, but out of Aaron itself
.
 

That’s ridiculous,
he answered the voice. But it wasn’t, and he knew it. His heart was beating faster than it should, standing on a boardwalk in late morning’s full light. His hands were shaking tattoo rhythms against the legs of his cargo shorts.
 

He remembered falling into the sand as the horizon tilted. He remembered heading west, yet ending up east. Ebon remembered impossible rooms, impossible timelines. Two women, one of whom he knew while not knowing at all.
Three
women, if you counted the ghost who slept in the bunk above him as he obsessively read her journal, bringing her back to life each evening. Hadn’t he heard the bunk above him creak at night? Holly hadn’t been shy when she’d spoken to her raw and uncensored journal. Hating himself, Ebon had read about her dalliances with an erection. Above him, the old bed had creaked, a soft, almost-there voice asking if it could come down and help him out, for old times’ sake.
 

It’s not you. It’s Aaron.
 

Ebon ran.
 

This was a mistake. It was
all
a mistake. He shouldn’t have told Aimee how lost he felt after Holly’s death, how he wasn’t sure what to do with his life. It had been tantamount to asking her if he could come home, if “home” truly was where the heart lived. He’d known full well what she might offer; they’d been chatting for months and growing closer by the day. He’d sought her out just for kicks. She’d found him randomly one day when he’d been least expecting it. They were close enough by then. She’d been talking about fixing up Richard’s house since he’d died, and had mentioned it even before he was gone. For years.
 

He should have stayed in the city. His apartment was thick with memories, and had been even after he’d purged it of Holly, moving everything she’d owned or loved or touched (save the journal, which he’d found at the bottom of her end table drawer) into storage to sort later. He simply couldn’t deal with her yet; his feelings about his longtime girlfriend and short-time wife were too conflicted. Did he love her? Did he hate her? Did he miss her, or did he finally feel free?
 

The island was pushing him away. It knew what he’d done, how he’d made a decision without meaning to make it by fleeing. Aaron wanted him to go home. To face what could only be met eye-to-eye. To cull Holly’s belongings, force himself to remember all of her. The touch of her long-fingered, often colorful-nailed hands on his chest in the mornings. The scent of her hair. The way she looked when she first woke, before insecurities sent her into hair and makeup for an hour, to make her “presentable.” She’d always looked the most raw, the most naked and vulnerable to him then. Without the dark eyeliner, the foundation, and the lipstick — with her hair a mess, as if she didn’t give a shit — she’d always been a different Holly.
Ebon’s
Holly: the one he didn’t ever, ever have to share with the world.
 

This was insane. He must be losing his mind.
 

Ebon reached the fence at a sprint. He groaned as he grasped it, certain that a predator was about to catch him. But as he clawed the links in panic, he glanced back to see nothing. The rides were dead and still, the games stalls unoccupied. The ticket booth was home to a giant roll of admission tickets, coated in dust that lifted in a harsh ray of sunlight. In one concealed corner, there was a clutch of empty bottles and a condom wrapper. Your average abandoned pier carnival that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
 

One foot up. The other foot up. For a manic second, as Ebon swung his foot over and straddled the fence, he was sure the tines on the top would dig into his crotch and snag him, leaving him to dangle by the testicles, wounded where it hurt most, because his past had yet to release him. But he cleared it easily, and a moment later found himself panting outside the locked fence, looking at the same no-help sign:
Closed
. And Ebon added,
… due to lack of existence
.
 

But Aaron’s Party wasn’t going anywhere. It was solid as a steel beam, maddeningly real, maddeningly shut and abandoned, maddeningly sad. He wanted to touch the
Closed
sign again as a reminder of the place’s corporeality, but he was already half-convinced that his earlier memory — the one he’d seen from Redding Dock — had been manipulated. How long ago had that been? He couldn’t remember. Had it been a few days? It felt like longer. But if he couldn’t even remember
when
he’d seen the pier empty, why was he so sure he’d seen it at all?
 

The woman holding the sign by the side of the road:
I’m for rent
.
 

Bullshit. He was remembering correctly this time. He’d made millions since he’d last seen Aaron, and he owed it all to remembering the details. He saw life in color, every hue a waving flag in his mind. The last time he’d been to Frankie’s Restaurant there had been a woman at the next table wearing an aureolin shirt, too bright for the room, especially against her slate-gray slacks. The water glasses had carried a slight azure in their glass bellies, ice cubes catching cobalt, scarlet, and celadon from diners’ wardrobes as waiters passed them. Even their lives carried their own signature hues. Aimee’s was an adventurous emerald green. Holly had lived a fire-engine red. And Ebon’s own life was the faded blue of a chambray work shirt.
 

And the pier, as seen from Redding Dock’s muted crimson planks, had consisted of faded grays and tangelos, like a jut of earth springing toward the water. Concrete stanchions below had been the gray of ashes. He’d seen the wash of planks from a distance, places where the rides had once been — where the decking was brighter, once protected by machinery.
 

“It’s fine,” he said, staring at the
Closed
sign in defiance. “It’s all fine.”
 

He took a few steps backward, keeping his gaze through the fence. Just before he turned to walk (too fast, too panicky) back to the beach, he saw a teen girl, her hair a mess, standing at the foot of the Danger Wheel. Behind her was a big man with reddish-blond hair, his solid hand on her shoulder.
 

Ebon ran. Down the sloping beach, through a stubborn patch of weedy beach grass, past the pillars that held the pier (The
empty
pier? He didn’t want to look up and find out) aloft. He just wanted to reach Aimee’s cottage. He wanted to repair the kitchen electrical circuit. He wanted to paint the new studio upstairs. He wanted to fix the bad patch on the roof. He wanted to do anything other than think about Aaron’s Party. Gone or dead, there was no reason to return. He’d had his times at the seaside carnival, but they were over now and weren’t going to return. He never needed to wonder about this place again. He could forget it, except that the problem was Aaron, rather than its Party.
 

You shouldn’t have come.
 

Or perhaps the problem was Holly. Maybe you could run … but never from yourself or your baggage.

Ebon felt his chest heaving. He wasn’t used to running, and he wasn’t conditioned for it. He wasn’t a kid anymore, and in barely passable shape. He looked down, watching his feet, trying to keep them moving. Then they splashed in water, and when he looked up he saw nothing but the ocean ahead. The waves were rolling, despite the calm day. There was no breeze, and yet whitecaps were forming. He’d turned toward the ocean somehow, now the waves were shoving his feet — not to push him away, but like bullies toying with a weak target.
 

He turned back down the beach, toward Aimee’s. Again at a run. Out of breath, feeling lightheaded. His head sagged, and again Ebon felt his feet splashing. He looked up, felt the push, and backed away. But this time when he tried to steer himself back toward Aimee’s, Ebon realized he wasn’t even on the west beach. He was at the lighthouse on the island’s south end, near Aaron’s proudest landmark.
 

He looked up.

The opposite of New England nautical, the lighthouse was all struts and girders like an Eiffel Tower, its sloping risers covered with something durable and white, as if the famous French structure had been dipped in icing and left to dry. Ebon, his lungs panting, knew there was a staircase in the thing’s middle, behind a locked door. At the top, above the massive light, was an iron shape that looked like a script letter T, looping circles at each of the letter’s three ends. Looking down, Ebon realized he was standing on rocks rather than sand.
 

He spread his arms, angry at the lighthouse, at the water, at the beach, at the island, at the ghosts that dogged him.
 

“What the hell is wrong with me?”
he yelled.
 

Water swelled. The waves were insistent. A breaker crashed into the boulders and sprayed the air.

“Just let me go home!”
 

Another wave, this one larger. Ebon backed away, but not in time. The spray flattened his hair, made his shirt stick to his skin. The wind was picking up, clouds taking their place in front of the sun.
 

He looked at the lighthouse, seeing the tangle of trees and brush behind it. There was no way through; he knew that from years past. To reach the lighthouse, you had to walk along the western coast, climbing boulders and spanning deserted beaches. The eastern coast this far south, open to the ocean, was a suicide march with no clear path. It was the west coast or nothing. But as Ebon watched, larger waves mounted and became like a storm surge, driving hard against the rocks, burying the strip of beach, licking the trees and impassable tangles of growth. He could stand where he was, in a relatively flat area. But he couldn’t leave.
 

Bullshit.
 

Feeling both brave and stupid, Ebon went in his only possible direction: into the water. If he couldn’t walk out of here, he’d swim, and dare the ocean to stop him.

He knew it was a mistake the second he hit the water. A riptide yanked him away from shore down below while the roiling of the surface shoved him toward it, stretching him like salt water taffy. The water became fathomless too fast. He lost his footing and found himself adrift, kicking or flailing becoming his only options.

He tried to swim along the shore, parallel, as they taught you to when grabbed by a current. But the waves were too large and oppressive. He could struggle above them when they didn’t break, but more often than not they did, slamming the rocks to one side. The wind increased; the troughs and peaks of the waves grew farther apart.