Nightmare Carnival

Jem stepped away, tried the next tent along. Again the signboard was blank, the lantern on the pole dark. When Jem peered in, he saw just the central mast, the solitary spot, a sad scrappy patch of sand, its exhibit long abandoned or, as Jem thought about it, waiting to arrive. Another kind of truth in advertising really, the promise of other days, other possibilities, that or a memorial for what had once been.

Jem felt an odd emotion building, realized it was quite possibly dread, though dread as a concept, dread without the fear. What was he missing? Things were going on that he wasn’t tracking properly.

He kept on to the next attraction in the alley, taking care with the guy-lines and tent-pegs, and it occurred to him for the first time that simply taking care not to stumble was keeping him focused, kept him paying attention, as if to offset the remaining effects of the obligato.

THE THOUGHTFUL GLASS OF WATER this latest signboard read, and as Jem reached it a middle-aged woman in pink tutu, fishnet stockings, and black Doc Martens, hair coiffed in the most striking fuchsia dreadlocks, made as if to hold the already open flaps aside, gesturing to the feature within: a wooden pedestal with a single glass of clear fluid resting upon it.

“Time out, luvvy!” she said in a passing imitation of a Cockney accent. “You can pee behind the vans whenever y’like, but we need other kinds of refreshment, right? Dinner’s later, all of us together, but for now drink your fill.”

“Why the ‘Thoughtful’?”

“People ponder it like you’re doing.”

“Any takers?”

“Rarely. But they don’t get the prize.”

“There’s a prize?”

“Made you thoughtful again, see. Working already. Quench your thirst.”

“It’s my first time round. Maybe later.”

“Right you are. Press on.”

Jem did so, determined to get it over with. How long he’d been at it he had no idea. It was full night now, the sky filled with stars, streaked with the occasional tektites rushing down.

The next signboard read THE MERMAID, and this time it was Mally by the entrance, still in her flimsy evening finery.

“You know the drill,” she said as Jem stepped inside.

He’d expected someone in a tank, one of the women in a mermaid getup, so what he saw threw him: a large plasma screen showing stars, space, the glowing curve of the world as if seen from low-Earth orbit. Not a still either, he realized, but possibly recorded footage from a station like Skylab had been. In the soft lighting of the tent the effect was powerful, like looking through a window.

“Mally, I don’t get the connection. Where’s the mermaid?”

“I keep asking myself the same thing,” Mally said.

Jem sighed, tired of the trickery, of how off kilter all this was. Why couldn’t they just say what they wanted, spell it out? Let him be on his way?

But there were so few exhibits to go. Without a word he continued along to a signboard reading THE CHEERFUL EXCHANGE OF GASES, whose “attraction” proved to be just as frustrating, as elusively annoying as the rest, nothing but a small tree in a terracotta pot, one of those topiary things like a green ball on a stick. It stood on a low pedestal inside plastic dust-curtains arranged like a makeshift shower stall.

A man in his forties, looking like a pastor in a black suit and plain white shirt, waited inside the entrance, and gestured grandly toward the booth. “Put your head inside, brother, and take a breath of God’s clean air the way it was intended.”

“Just take a breath?”

“Easy in, easy out, friend. One of the Lord’s sweetest gifts. Clear your head. Won’t take but a moment.”

Jem said nothing, just turned and left. Two to go. Only two.

Maybe the obligato was wearing thin. He was feeling unsettled, anxious, vaguely frightened now, more and more aware of how wrong it all was, though the next signboard distracted him a bit. THE ISSUS TRIP, it read, which immediately had Jem recalling his high-school history classes, and how Issus was the town in ancient Turkey where Alexander the Great had defeated some Persian king or other. Curiosity had the better of him. What could it possibly be this time?

Inside he found two large art prints side by side on easels, each under a warm yellow spot, and both dealing with that historical event. A mature-aged woman in spectacles and worn dove-grey suit immediately stepped forward like a museum curator or matronly tour guide.

“On the left we have the Alexander Mosaic dating from around 100 BCE,” she said, “originally from the House of the Faun in Pompeii but presently in the Naples National Archaeologica Museum. It shows Alexander the Great and Darius III in conflict at the Battle of Issus in 333 BCE. On the right you see Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1529 painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus, long regarded as that artist’s best work and presently in the Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich.”

That concluded the presentation, though the woman remained to one side as if ready to answer any questions her visitor cared to ask.