Substantiation, Act 1: The Funhouse Mustapha Mond
Disclaimer: This is my latest attempt at narrative fiction, which hopefully will wind up better than those in the past. (If, following this, you dig on the style, you're out of luck; but if you want to paw through the style-less skeletons of my literary closet, do a search for the cutely overwritten "blues of summer," or the mercifully aborted cry-for-help I called "very little fanfare.") Anyway, I've been thinking about writing something of a ghost story lately, which this may or may not wind up being. One way or the other, if smut's your goal, I'm probably not peddling what you're looking for. Ask me before your reproduce any of it, or just drop me a line. XmustaphamondX@hotmail.com
It's the last day of the county fair, and my sister begged, so I take her.
She's still young enough to enjoy the experience, genuinely. I think I won't.
"Why didn't you invite some of your friends too?"
She twists in her seatbelt so it digs into her tan neck. Her Bambi eyes say it all.
"Don't mess up your dress, now. You're probably too young to sit in the front anyway."
"That's why I like it when you drive."
She takes after me, at least as far as personality. We both have a carefree way about us, like life is one long riverboat ride. Though maybe she's still too young to tell at this point.
Today, she has the window down, letting her Indian-corn hair get tossed around like a windsock.
My hair is black, unluckily enough, and I keep it short. She also has petite features. You might see her and think of one of those Dutch porcelain things old-ladies have on mirrored shelves.
Our mom is pretty much the same, a graying version. As for me, nobody knows where I got my looks. Maybe the mailman; Mom isn't talking, and Dad just snickers when I ask.
I'm heading off to college for the first time ever in a few weeks. As we pass out of town and into the country, a curious thing occurs to me. This might be my last one of these trips.
It's Sunday so traffic is light, just a few folks taking their time back from church. Maybe because of my earlier thought, I take the back way, down an old road that winds through some hills and gullies. We pass a spot where Dad and Mary and I used to hunt for fossils. Once I found a complete trilobite in shale. It's probably tucked away in some drawer, if it still exists.
"Will there be any cute boys there?" Mary is digging into the glove box, looking for the hard candy that Mom sometimes hides there.
"Like, for you or for me?"
"Either."
"Aren't you a little young for boys?"
She sticks out her tongue. "I matured early. Everybody says so."
"Well," I say.
"So?"
"Well, there might be. But this is the sticks, remember? There's probably a lot of toothless types, fat men in NASCAR caps, fat boys in WWF gear. And you remember the other thing I told you?"
Loudly: "When we're in public, you only like girls."
"Good. Now try and keep that in mind."
She finds a piece of something, reddish and melted into a sticky paste, oozing out of an ancient wrapper. When she puts in her mouth I grimace a little.
"It's cool to have a gay brother."
"Queer, honey, queer."
"What's the difference?"
"Ask me when you're older."
"I'm old enough now!"
I turn onto the second to last road. Spread out on both sides are honest-to-goodness farms, a few even with old-fashioned farmhouses, painted white and peeling.
More charming for the disrepair. Short green plants stand in neat rows. Soybeans; I guess they can't escape progress even out here.
"I still want to know. What's queer?"
I sigh. "I guess it's just I don't like the monolithic identity that goes with 'gay,' it just feels like a much more prescribed role than 'queer.' Yeah, queer opens a much more fluid personal space, almost like a label that in turn subverts the whole idea of labels, and "
Mary asks, pointing, "Do you think that's a pony or a horse?"
"Pony," I say.
Seven and a half minutes later we pull in, directed by a young kid in a neon orange vest, between an ancient pick-up, so rusted I can't even make out the brand or factory color, and a silver Pathfinder with temporary plates. There's no room to open our doors, so we climb over the seats and out the hatch back. I'm five bucks poorer for the parking.
County fairs are always free, but some are more free than others.
"What first?" We're at the rough half-way point in a peanut-shaped fairground, with rides to our south and animals to the north. According to an event sign, Ralph Stanley played the previous night; I curse my luck. Apparently there's a destruction derby tonight, well after we'll leave. More cursing.
"Animals. And stop cursing."
We make the rounds. The poor critters are just as bored as me. It's late summer, and the heat has lost some of its bite; today in particular, a thin blue sky and seventies. Here and there clouds inch across the horizon like amorphous snails, out over the far ridges. Strolling through the stalls are other folks, mostly country types with pinched eyes and cigarette-yellow skin, but there are a surprising number of clean-cut suburbanites (or at least their country cousins), not to mention the occasional black or latino family. When I used to come as a kid there weren't any migrant workers, and I wonder how I should feel about the change, and how I actually do.
A sow unleashes a flood of urine into her hay. Mary peeks over the edge of her stall and watches in studious silence.
Over funnel cakes, under the corrugated tin roof where the picnic tables are, Mary asks, "When are you going to get a boyfriend?" Flecks of powdered sugar dot her lips abstractly.
"Haha." I chuckle, hearing the syllables of my laugh. There's no one around, save a lost grandmother sipping lemonade through a flexy-straw, and her hearing aid doesn't seem to be plugged in. Literally, the thin white cord is dangling down the side of her face, its tip coiled on her shoulder. "Remember what we talked about, Mary?"
She shakes her head no.
"How we're not supposed to mention things in public?" I'm whispering; she looks at me blankly and sucks her lips into her mouth. "Fine. The answer to your question, of when I'm finally going to get a koi pond, is that I'll get one once I get out of our cramped little house, where dad might forget how much he loves me and kill the koi, and also once I get to college, where hopefully the koi won't all be assholes."
On the racetrack, a few horses trot by, and Mary starts paying attention to them.
Once the food has digested, we make a beeline for the amusements.
We pass our time with a few rides, a few games. I manage to put a baseball through a wooden clown's mouth, winning a thing in the process. The thing is vaguely a snake, coated in shiny black hair; for no particular reason it reminds me of fresh viscera.
The man behind the counter carny has his chin tucked into his chest, like he's about to charge at me. I suspect his trick may need more fixing.
Mary, predictably, picks the green cotton candy, for the sheer novelty.
We wander aimlessly while she peels off great flakes and, open-mouthed, lets them dissolve on her tongue.
Out a ways past the last Whirl-A-Car, where a few trees have managed to cling to the yellow fairground soil, we find a strange building in the shade. Though clearly visible from the fair proper, it is nevertheless outside some sort of obvious periphery, beyond the border of the fair's natural curve. We are the only people around; even the dirt seems relatively free of footprints.
The building, which seems to extend back a ways among the trees, is little more than a barn, albeit low-ceilinged, with wide slats of cedar as uneven scales all over the facade. It was once red; now the only serious color is a giant, symmetrical eye painted above the door in blue, crudely, so that streaks like tear drops run down the wood grain. A sign reads, "Funhouse."
"Looks like fun."
"Let's go in, can we please? Please? Please?"
"There doesn't seem to be anyone here." This is true.
"C'mon," Mary says. "I was getting bored with rides anyways."
There's no stopping it. We go inside. The door creaks, exactly like it should. Mary hiccups. Then she tears a hunk off the cotton candy stick, ravenously.
In the gloom of the entryway, a small old man sits in a wicker chair. Its back is little more than a few fibers of whatever used to be there, so he is hunched over, staring at the floor.
We can't make out his face.
Without looking up, "Two dollars each." I pay.
We make our way inside, past another set of doors. The interior seems to be partitioned off, but in strange ways, with walls here, curtains there; even the sunlight falling through the cracks in the ceiling barely penetrates the shadows among the cloth, under the overhangs, the strange geometric shapes projecting out
The temperature rises as we wander, and what looked like a building seems, somehow, to have expanded, the way a cathedral does when you finally get inside. There are branching corridors, some passageways that shrink to a single point as you walk them.
The illusion, I must say, is wonderful. Mary is holding my left hand with both of hers. She clutches tighter as we pass into a black room, so low I have to duck to get across. Silver etchings web all six surfaces, but I can't make out any patterns.
"How much further?" She asks.
"Not much."
With that we step into a hall of mirrors, and my breath is sucked away.
Maybe I've been to something like this before, but the feeling in this place, in the claustrophobic space, with the weird lines of sunshine slanting occasionally down, is sheer uncanniness.
There are a thousand of me echoing out into the dimmest dark, the place where vision fails. The old map phrase pops into my mind: Here there be monsters.
Mary lets go and suddenly our images fragment, and blur like a kaleidoscope. She takes a few steps, then a few more, and suddenly vanishes. Around a corner or something. Now it is just me.
I feel naked under the gaze of my countless reflections, the only fleshy copy in the infinite universe contained in these few cheap carnival mirrors. What would I feel, I wonder, if I were the reflection, looking back on the original? Jealousy? Hatred? Or just, pity? I match my stare straight ahead, and wait.
And my reflection moves. Or rather, something moves it, and suddenly there is a different person standing where I should be. In an instant I notice two things: his reflection is only showing in the one surface, nowhere else among the thousands of my clones, and he is tremendously beautiful.
"Look for me," he whispers, and fades back into the image of my gawking self.
End note: See, that wasn't so bad, was it? Again, write me, you bastards: I'm about to graduate and they say you never get compliments post undergrad.
XmustaphamondX@hotmail.com