Axis of Aaron (20 page)

“Maybe the city paid for it.”
 

Aimee nodded. “Okay. You’ve convinced me. I’m wrong, and you’re right. You have successfully argued Aaron’s Party into nonexistence. Impressive.”
 

Ebon had been irritated when she’d said that, then had told her he was going for a walk. Aimee hadn’t been offended. She’d seemed more amused by his blubbering attempts to argue the existence of a carnival a few miles upshore in the town she’d lived for her entire life.
 

“A walk to the north?” she’d asked, her voice singsong and mocking.

 
Ebon had grunted, then headed out.

As his feet paced the sand, the past’s shadow hung low overhead. Oppressive, bearing down on him like a living thing. He felt caught somewhere between then and now, unsure even as his feet began to move what he might see when he reached the pier. Would he encounter the truth that Aimee knew for sure? Or would he encounter his own equally vivid reality, wherein he’d seen the empty pier with his own eyes?
 

Beyond the crescent bay where Aimee’s grandparents had built their cottage, the shore bent back into a shallower depression. The town had built the Aaron’s Party pier inside that depression, protecting it at both the north and south ends by large stone breakwaters. Ebon knew it well; he’d walked the beach under that pier hundreds of times during his teen years. The carnival, though, wasn’t usually his destination on those walks. Because once it stretched beyond the pier, the shore again bent back and the cottage-strewn beach surrendered to a rock shelf. It was
there
that he’d always been bound, when he wanted to be alone. It was there that he’d found his solace time and time again, on the long expanse of Redding Dock.
 

During those endless summers, Ebon had come to think of Redding as “his place.” It was anyone’s place, of course, but few — if any — others claimed it as Ebon had. It was farther north than most walkers walked, and inhospitable to boats and fishermen alike due to a shift in water depths, currents, or something else in the years since it had been built. As a result, the dock was always empty, with no one around. It wound impossibly far into the bay, built mostly atop a sandbar, its length meant to stretch into deeper water to compensate. As a kid, Redding Dock had been Ebon’s place for thinking — for musing on what was and what he hoped would one day be. He’d walk its length, dangle his toes in the water, stare out across the bay, and talk to himself. Out loud, most times, because no one was around to hear him.
 

On his way back from the dump a few days ago, he’d stopped Aimee’s truck at the overgrown path between Redding and the road. He’d pushed through the brush, then followed the long, unchanged red dock to its end. He’d sat beside the same graffiti-carved bench he’d always sat beside and dangled his now-longer, now-adult legs in the water. He hadn’t spoken aloud. He hadn’t even really thought. He’d just stared across the bay, toward the mainland, toward the pier where Aaron’s Party no longer was. It had been exactly as Captain Jack had said. The pier was empty. He could see the ticket booth’s skeleton and the extra pillars engineers had added to support the Danger Wheel’s weight. But that was all.
 

At least, he
thought
he’d seen the pier empty. He was almost sure of it.

He hadn’t stood from the dock until nearly full dark that night, mosquitoes beginning to bite and his imagination beginning to flinch at what monsters might swim in the black water that swallowed his ankles. He’d walked back to Aimee’s car by moonlight, refusing to turn his head south again toward the pier that had been scrubbed of memories. That night they’d played two-handed euchre with the television and radio off, mostly silent. She’d touched his hand once or twice, as if sensing his melancholy.
 

Now, walking north from Aimee’s in the growing heat, Ebon felt strangely weak. He’d done his mourning for Aaron’s Party. His favorite pet had died while he was away, but Ebon, on that day at Redding, had seen its corpse and made his peace. The loss of Aaron’s Party was supposed to be behind him, and he was supposed to have moved on. But it seemed the Party wasn’t behind him after all, and now Aimee was toying with him. Her words had felt cruel. She’d told him that his beloved pet
wasn’t
actually dead. It was in the backyard same as always — old and decrepit and as good as dead, but there to mourn forever nonetheless.
 

Ebon suddenly wondered if he wanted to see the carnival after all.
 

He’d been fifteen years old the last time he’d seen it. The Danger Wheel had been new then, its shock-red paint as brilliant as blood on a stage. The whole place had been vibrant — the perfect embodiment of summertime. Its planks had radiated a dull heat, Sno-Cones and ice cream being the only antidote. The air above Aaron’s Party had always been filled with joy — the kind that wore swimsuits under clothing and sand between its toes. He’d never seen it in the off season between summers. He didn’t know what it looked like empty. Seeing it not just vacant, but abandoned and decaying, might break his heart more than not seeing it at all.
 

He paused and fell a few steps back toward Aimee’s, realizing he didn’t really want to walk right now. If he simply admitted she was right rather than feeling the need to prove her wrong, this errand would be unnecessary. He closed his eyes, his face turned away from what he feared seeing.
 

But:
No.
 

He
had
to see. He had to touch the entrance gate and hear the echo of absent noise. He had to smell the rotting boards, and sense the psychic squalor of a place that had always been bustling, but now had turned to bones.
 

He sighed, then rotated to again face north. And began walking.
 

Twenty minutes later, Ebon rounded the crescent’s lip. He didn’t need to look up once he was past the obstructions to sense what was in front of him. The carnival was as large as life, demanding his full attention.
 

Even though he’d tried to steel himself, seeing the place in ruins unsettled Ebon’s core. He walked up the inclined fork of the path, away from the beach between the pillars, and made his way toward the entrance. His heart pounded double-time to his footsteps, booming like a tightly stretched drum.
 

He’d been wrong.
 

He must not have been looking at Aaron’s Party from Redding Dock, that was all. There must be another big pier around here somewhere, something he’d forgotten. It was
that
empty pier he’d seen, not this one. He’d just been a kid the last time he’d been to the Party, after all. He hadn’t been driving back then, and hadn’t experienced the quantum leap in orientation that came with needing to steer a vehicle from place to place without getting lost. Back then, his landmarks had been his grandparents’ place, Aimee’s house, Aaron’s Party, and Redding Dock. Whether there was anything else on Aaron (or whether his landmarks’ order on the coast was as he remembered, or whether he was wrong about the distances between them, or whether Aaron’s Party was even visible from Redding Dock or vice-versa), he couldn't be sure.
 

Someone had erected a trashy-looking chain-link fence at the carnival’s entrance. Front and center was a large gate run through with a rusty chain, a similarly rusty padlock binding its links. A simple sign — faded red on dulled white — hung from one of the gate doors. It read simply,
CLOSED
.
 

Ebon walked along the fence, touching it with a sense of unreality. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t being kept
out
; the carnival’s invisible occupants were being kept
in
. If he was still, he could almost hear them from a decade and a half in the past: the nonsensical chatter of children with nowhere better to be, the frustrated denials of parents who’d been dragged along, telling their wards that they didn’t need more cotton candy or to settle down and stop running. If Ebon closed his eyes, the day’s warm sun almost fooled his senses. The Party was still in full swing. He felt like he could walk forward and not encounter a fence. There would be a boardwalk and chatter, the noises of barkers and instrument calliopes, the grinding chatter of ride wheels against their structural members. Hollering riders, cheering their summer of freedom.

He opened his drooping eyes, focusing again on the fence. It wasn’t high or topped with barbed wire. Was there any chance the abandoned carnival hadn’t become a makeout spot for Aaron’s teens? Anyone could get over the fence easily. Even an old man like him.

Feeling his age, Ebon slid his toes into the chain links and, without tremendous effort, hopped over and onto the boardwalk. In one nook, he saw a trio of discarded beer bottles and a condom wrapper. Yep, the teenagers had found it just fine.
 

He stood tall and looked back through the fence. The day was warm and bright. The shadows on the ground looked sharp enough to have been cut from the sun’s cloth by trees overhead.
 

He looked back into the carnival and wondered why he’d hopped the fence. What exactly did he plan to do here?

He walked down the planks, passing the ticket booth. Inside, he could still see a dust-covered roll of orange rip-tickets — the kind that could be split down the center to leave the venue a receipt after the customer got his half. The roll was against a back counter, protected from the weather. The booth’s front, where the circle in the window hadn’t been shuttered, wasn’t as pristine. The counter had warped and peeled, its edges yellowed and black with mold.
 

Ebon, looking at the tickets now, felt a commonplace sense of time travel. Nobody had touched that orange roll for well over a decade. The last time anyone had, there’d been a person manning this booth. A ticket seller (probably a kid of seventeen or eighteen) had ripped Aaron’s Party’s final ticket, then set the roll on the counter, probably not even realizing that that final rip would be the Party’s last. And there the roll still was, waiting for the next taker to buy his way inside.
 

He kept walking.

The place was in deplorable shape. Most of the metal had survived beneath its paint, but much had flaked and rusted. What passed for the pier’s midway had once been lined with food carts and sham stalls where hucksters had operated games. The game runners at Aaron’s Party had been summer kids, like the rest of the carnival staff. Ebon remembered those kids as having a different (and, truth be told, less oily) feel than carnies at the fair back home. Here, anyone who played a game won. Prizes were worthless (dollar store junk, small plastic tennis sets, squirt guns that broke the first time you used them), but the runners had always given them out. When kids missed balloons with darts or couldn’t toss rings onto bottles, the runners let them try again. Games cost a dollar apiece, and prizes were worth fifty cents at most. Everyone came out on top.
 

Ebon headed toward the Danger Wheel, its enormous shape down at the far end of the pier. He lingered at the whirling teacups (paint faded and peeled, the machine’s visible guts rusted rather than greased, hydraulic arms clotted and frozen) and the crappy little Tunnel of Love, which was nothing more than a fifteen-foot oval track that went behind a curtain on the return trip. Nothing had been properly stowed or put away. The games even had a few ratty stuffed animals still in their nooks and crannies, and deflated latex ghosts hung on the balloon-popping game’s pegs. Everything looked as if the staff had simply walked away one day expecting to return the next, but then the gates had closed and they’d never come back.
 

He walked to the pier’s edge, then looked out across the water. In the summer, this area had been lined with face-painting tables and caricature artists working at easels. They, at least, had taken their wares home and left the space clear. Now, with the tables and booths gone, Ebon could see the water. But the ghostly absence of activity was as ominous as the open ocean beyond, and looking across it made him feel unsettled.

Again, Ebon wondered why he was here. He’d come to answer the question of the Party’s continued existence, but he’d verified that from the sand. He hadn’t needed to come up to the entrance, and he certainly hadn’t needed to trespass.
 

He didn’t have an answer, yet somehow felt compelled to stay a while longer anyway. Being on the pier was like stepping through a memory. Everything around him was crisp and bright (though the vivid colors of the past had been traded for ghosts of their former hues and a forest of sad browns), and yet it didn’t feel real. He kept touching things to convince himself of its presence. He wasn’t a kid, and neither was the carnival. And yet it was as if he could sense all those lost summers still here just below the surface, their essences steeped into the deck like wood chips soaked in mesquite. A million sandal-clad feet had crossed these boards, their owners giddy with laughter, heads alight with joy and carefree mirth, stuffed with the thrill of immature romance. A million memories had been forged on this wood, among these rusted machines and dilapidated stalls.
 

Turning around, Ebon sighed.

It wasn’t fair that the machines and stalls had quit on those old memories. The Party had a responsibility to endure forever — to remain an anchor point for the souls it had touched as they wandered into the mire of adult life and adult responsibilities. Aaron’s Party had been a place where people came to be happy and forget themselves. Old times decayed, but the Party should remain as a reminder of those times, keeping them alive beyond the veil.