Saint Odd (12 page)

I wanted to open my eyes to study hers, but I didn’t. “So I must look a little like your brother.”

“You don’t look anything like him. But you have an Ethan quality about you.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It’s the best thing.”

“You’re embarrassing me here.”

“That’s something Ethan would say.”

She worked quickly, and in ten minutes or so, she told me that I could look, whereupon she gave me a large hand mirror.

Around my eyes, she had painted a harlequin’s mask. Otherwise, from hairline to jawline, she’d drawn a pattern of black and white diamonds so perfectly straight-edged in spite of the contours of my face that it had the effect of making my features all but disappear into that rigid geometry. Even Stormy would not have recognized me.

“A harlequin is a clown,” I said.

“More accurately, a buffoon. When I asked how you would like to look, you said, ‘Different. Very different.’ I can’t imagine anything more different from what you are than a buffoon.”

I met her stare and said, “Have you ever had a dream that came true, Connie?”

She didn’t immediately reply. She took the mirror from me and put it on the table. She met my stare and held it and at last said, “Only once. I don’t dream all that much.”

“Was it a dream about a flood, a whole town drowned in it?”

She glanced at her mother, who had finished with the second teenager and was working on a ten-year-old girl while the child’s parents watched with delight. None of them were paying attention to us, but Connie lowered her voice anyway. “No. Not a flood. It was a dream about … about this guy who walks in here and wants to look ‘Different. Very different.’ ”

Her expression was so solemn that I believed her.

“Dreamed it just last night,” she said.

“I told you to surprise me, and you just did.”

“In the dream, I knew the guy was in trouble, he had enemies.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Probably you shouldn’t say anything. If you did, maybe your trouble would become mine.”

I nodded, took out my wallet, and paid her.

As I turned to leave the tent, she said, “Don’t worry. Your own mother wouldn’t know you.”

I said, “She never has.”

Painted to deceive, I set out in search of what I did not know. The vast majority of those attending the carnival didn’t sport a mask from Face It; however, there were enough of us that no one seemed to be especially interested in me.

I walked the fairground midway, where the Whip lashed its riders this way and that, where the Caterpillar enveloped screaming patrons in darkness as it slung them around a track a thousand times faster than any real caterpillar could move, where the Big Drop lifted its gondola two hundred feet into the night and then released it in what seemed to be an uncontrolled free fall, and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience.

It’s difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business.
Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide.

The carnival blazed, every ride and many other attractions decorated with low-watt bulbs, neon tubes, blinkers, and twinklers. Strings of colored lights overhung the U-shaped concourse. At the curve of the U, mounted on a flatbed truck and reliant on a chugging gasoline-powered generator, two massive swiveling spotlights threw their beams into the heavens, revealing the bellies of an armada of clouds, like dirigibles, invading silently from the southwest.

In spite of all the colorful lighting that had been crafted to attract patrons and to put them in a celebratory mood, the carnival had an air of hostility and menace that, I felt sure, was not merely my perception. Within all the dazzle and glitter and bright fake glamor, a hidden presence lurked, a watchful darkness that observed and hated and waited, a presence I had not sensed six years earlier.

Although the warm air was richly scented with the aromas of buttered popcorn, candy apples, cotton candy, the cinnamon and sugar and fried dough of churros, nevertheless, as I threaded through the colorful tapestry of people on the concourse, there were times when a delicious aroma suddenly soured. For just a moment, cinnamon had a sulfurous edge and the popcorn butter smelled rancid, as if under all its pretense of good healthy fun, the carnival was a dangerous swamp in which moldered and festered things too horrific to contemplate.

The fun house featured the giant face of an ogre, twenty feet
from chin to crown, nearly that wide, a dimensional sculpture of such imaginative detail that it managed to be scary at the same time that it was pure hokum. Periodically a roar issued from its open mouth, and with the roar came a forceful blast of air that traveled about twenty feet into the promenade, surprising people who encountered it for the first time, mussing their hair and startling them so that popcorn was dropped halfway from box to mouth.

The ogre’s crazed eyes rolled in their sockets, but I knew that I was being paranoid to think that it was watching me in particular.

The ballyhoo of pitchmen, the clatter and whoosh of the rides, the interlaced melodies of scores of different songs associated with various attractions, and the chatter and laughter of a few thousand voices appeared to inspire bright-eyed delight among many of the patrons. To me, it sounded like a shrill discordant symphony to which I might expect to see a horde of bodachs quivering and capering in an ecstasy of anticipated chaos—though I had not glimpsed even one of them among this multitude.

Within ten minutes I came to a large tent where flamboyant lettering emblazoned on the canvas above the entrance promised
ALL THINGS FORETOLD
. In smaller script under those words appeared the come-on
33 OPPORTUNITIES TO LEARN YOUR FUTURE
. The words were encircled by symbols associated with soothsayers and oracles through the ages: a pentalph created with five interlaced
A
’s, an ankh, a quarter moon encircled by seven stars, the palm of a hand with a single eye gazing out from it.…

I hadn’t needed psychic magnetism to lead me to this place. I
had half convinced myself that I would discover the cultists in the carnival, but my truest reason for coming there, more unconscious than not, had been to learn if the fortune-telling machine, Gypsy Mummy, still dispensed predictions.

As on that well-remembered night six years earlier, a sawdust floor had been spread wall to wall. It lent a woodsy smell to the arcade. Thirty-three machines of prophecy were arranged in rows, some quaint contraptions dating to the 1940s, others of recent invention.

You could use two controls to operate a mechanical claw—the Hand of Fate—to fish among a collection of small painted, numbered wooden balls in a glass case. Once the claw seized a number, you could press the corresponding digit on a keyboard, whereupon your fortune would be dispensed to you on a printed card.

You could seek your future on a video screen, where for fifty cents you would be dealt seven virtual playing cards, facedown, from which you were to select three, then seven more from which you were to select two, then seven more from which you were to select another two. When all the cards you chose were then revealed, the machine printed under each its meaning and combined the seven in a single prognostication.

Or you could instead choose any of thirty-one other contraptions that would, with machinelike indifference, tell you if you would have a long life or a short one, a happy marriage or one of wedded misery. Fifteen or twenty people were sampling the various oracles, moving on to another if they didn’t like what the first had prophesied.

In the center of the tent, on an elevated platform, a cashier sat within a small circular desk, changing dollar bills into quarters
when she wasn’t reading a Nora Roberts romance novel. Even before I went looking for it, I was certain that I would find what I sought, and so I got change for two dollars.

At the back of the tent, where it had been on that long-ago night, Gypsy Mummy stood as if she’d been waiting six years just for me.

Roughly the shape of an old-fashioned phone booth, the machine stood seven feet high. The lower three feet were enclosed, and the upper four featured glass on three sides. In that display case sat a female dwarf in a costume of the kind Gypsies wore only in old movies starring Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi, or Boris Karloff. Black ballet slippers. Black silk pants. A red-and-gold scarf for a belt, a red-and-black scarf tied around the head. She evidently liked jewelry: two necklaces, a pendant, several rings with large stones, and big dangling earrings.

Gnarled and withered, her bejeweled hands rested palms-down on her thighs. Her fingernails were green, perhaps not with polish but with mold.

Her skin appeared to be as crisp as paper, wrinkled and yet stretched so tight across the skull that it seemed as though at any moment it might split open from the stress. Her eyelids and her lips were sewn shut with black thread.

According to a plaque, here before me sat the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf, a renowned fortune-teller in eighteenth-century
Europe, so accurate in her predictions that she’d been summoned before royalty in three kingdoms to consult with monarchs. In truth, the figure had most likely been sculpted by a low-rent artist who worked best when inebriated.

Regardless of its origins, whether mummified flesh and bones or clay and wire and latex, there might be some magic in Gypsy Mummy. The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.

On the night that Stormy and I had come here, when we were but sixteen and expected to grow old together, a man and woman in their early twenties were already consulting Gypsy Mummy. They appeared to be mystified by the predictions that they received, though the meaning seemed clear to us.

Each time they fed a quarter to the machine, the woman asked, aloud, “Gypsy Mummy, tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”

Johnny read the cards as he received them. The first declared
A COLD WIND BLOWS
,
AND EACH NIGHT SEEMS TO LAST A THOUSAND YEARS
. Thereafter the machine produced
THE FOOL LEAPS FROM THE CLIFF
,
BUT THE WINTER LAKE BELOW IS FROZEN
, followed by the even more ominous
THE ORCHARD OF BLIGHTED TREES PRODUCES POISONOUS FRUIT
. They were not pleased with Gypsy Mummy, but by the eighth card, they were more annoyed with each other than with the mummified sage, bickering over their interpretations, which in every case failed to grasp the most obvious meaning.

With our first coin, Stormy and I received
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
. We didn’t spend a second quarter. There was nothing else we needed to know.

In the six years since my previous petition to Gypsy Mummy, the machine had been modified to require two quarters per fortune. When offering their divinations, even deceased Gypsies needed to account for inflation.

“How long do I have to wait,” I murmured, “before your promise to me comes true?”

For fifty cents, I received a card that offered no prediction on either side.

I supposed that in any stack of pre-printed fortunes put into the machine, there might be a blank or two.

Another fifty cents got me a second card with not a word on it.

Wondering if I had been expected, if someone might be watching me right that minute, I looked around, but the other patrons were preoccupied with their claptrap prophets. The cashier had her nose in the romance novel.

I studied the stitched eyelids beyond the glass. Stormy used to insist that after we received the card so desired by Johnny and his girlfriend, the mummified dwarf had opened one eye and winked. It made no sense that sewn-shut eyes could wink, especially when the coarse black thread wasn’t broken. Whether the wink might have been a moment of magic or whether it was nothing more than a little fantasy that Stormy wanted to believe, I never questioned her claim because it gave her such pleasure to think it had happened.

Again I asked, “How long do I have to wait before your promise to me comes true?”

I paid two more quarters, listened to them clink into the machine’s cash box—and received a third blank card.

After a fourth of the same, I pretended interest in some of the nearby soothsaying contraptions and waited for someone to feed coins to the Gypsy.

Maybe ten minutes passed before two girls, about fourteen years old, approached the machine. Each spent fifty cents for which she got a printed card that she shared with her friend. They conferred over the meaning of their fortunes, giggled, and then swapped cards, each apparently preferring the other’s future. They wandered away, sharing the popcorn.

Neither girl had spoken aloud to the Gypsy, as instructions above the coin feed directed, and I’d had no opportunity to see the messages on their cards, which they took away with them. Clearly, however, they had not received blanks.

You might say that it was just a machine, that the cards were stacked in the mechanism in no particular order, that getting four blanks for two bucks was nothing more than happenstance. All of that is rational, and certainly in the case of the two girls and others who consulted Gypsy Mummy, your point would be irrefutable. But in my life, uncanny things had happened to me with some regularity, not just related to my ability to see lingering spirits and to find my way by psychic magnetism. Because of my other experiences, I could not be shaken from the belief that the four cards without fortunes would have come to me if I’d consulted Gypsy Mummy hours earlier or hours later.