Gabriel was fighting with his girlfriend when he got his first glimpse of the balloon man.
He was in Englewood, Illinois, killing time before his bar gig by busking in a local park. Sad, bluesy notes poured from his saxophone, teasing coins out of passing tourists. When his phone buzzed he put down the sax mid-phrase. Soon he was deep into a rerun of The Argument.
He had it by rote, both sides. Sharon's: Live in the present, get therapy, discuss your grief. I love you, but...
His: Give me more time, I love you too...
...doubt seeped in...
"I'm doing my best," he said, trying to pick up the established rhythm. But was he? Hadn't he known the minute they moved in together he'd find himself here?
But now Sharon was scarily off-script, demanding: "Was it really love, ever, or did you just need someone?"
Gabe felt an interior snap, a faultline shearing open. Sudden pain under his left armpit left him gasping.
"I'm out of patience," Sharon said. "You have to—"
"Let go, I know." He thought of cutting his wrists. The idea was more calming than scary.
"Now you're just humoring me."
"No, I—" Then Gabe's eye fell on a slender man in a gray suit. Ordinary but for his huge, floppy shoes and black and white clown make-up, he was selling silver balloons to a gathered throng on the park lawn.
Despite the lack of wind, the balloons whipped back and forth. As Gabe stared, he saw grit shifting within their metallic skins, flattening against the membranes in familiar patterns. Faces.
"Ghosts," he said, startled.
"Ghost, exactly right," Sharon said, continuing a sentence he hadn't heard. "Playing second fiddle to a dead woman—"
"Sorry?"
A balloon bobbed and swirled, fighting its tether. As it spun, Gabe caught a glimpse of a once-broken nose, sharp chin, wide eyes: Rhona.
"Gabe? Am I talking to myself?"
"No, it's something else." He let the unbearable weight of his phone hand drop to his side, and the relationship slipped away, clean as cut hair falling to a barber's floor.
Abandoning the saxophone and his hat full of coins, he set out after the balloon man.
Followed and follower, they headed North on a wooded path between two lagoons, moving in the direction of the Museum of Science and Industry. Each time Rhona's face bounced out of view, Gabe convinced himself it wasn’t Rhona. It couldn't be, could it?
Then she'd reappear.
The balloon man's pace was aimless, but Gabe couldn't catch up. Clots of summer tourists, children, mothers with strollers and purposeful joggers all thwarted him as he tried to close the distance. When a little girl skipped up to the clown, waving a dollar, Gabe's heart raced.
He broke into a run. A gap in the pedestrian traffic opened before him and he plunged in, all but colliding with two elderly, cane-wielding women and their Scottish terrier.
"Sorry, sorry," he apologized, pushing on. The dog yapped furiously and passers-by glared. The little girl got her balloon, sprinting off. The venomous scowl of a grizzled old man burned out at Gabe from inside its silver skin. Rhona's widely-spaced eyes and crooked nose remained in the midst of the bunch of balloons in the vendor's knobby fist.
This was stupid. Gabe opened his mouth to shout. A crowd coming through the front doors of the Museum engulfed his quarry, and there was a series of loud pops. A flashbulb flared, inches from Gabe's nose. Blinded, he lurched...and as he blinked the stars from his eyes, he found his legs fetching up against something hard.
It was a staircase, a wrought-iron spiral curving inexplicably downward, a rust-roughed structure that wobbled under his weight. The museum, the park, and the crowds were gone. It was very nearly pitch black.
Flopping footsteps — oversized shoes — clanged. Squinting, Gabe peered down. The bunch of balloons was circling the rail, obscuring the clown as he descended. Ghostly upturned faces stared at Gabe like hungry goldfish. Rhona was still in the middle of the bunch. Further down, at the center of the spiral, an old-fashioned lamppost with a flickering thread of gaslight offered a hint of illumination.
Jesus, Gabe thought. I've lost it. He sank into a crouch, groping for the comfort of his sax case until he remembered he'd left it behind. All he had was the phone.
The staircase shuddered and creaked as he punched Sharon's number.
She wasn't answering.
"Something's wrong with me," he told her voicemail in a rush. "I just saw Rhona and followed her and now I don't know where I am. I'm maybe hallucinating."
Saying it out loud made it better. Hallucination. Of course. He set a tentative toe on the next step down, hoping the mirage would dissolve, take him back to the real world. Instead, heat billowed up from below, carrying a smell of rotten sawdust and stale beer.
The balloons were getting further away.
"Downward spiral," he muttered, continuing down the staircase. A metaphor for the mental breakdown he was apparently having? He supposed it could be worse — he could have imagined circling a toilet bowl. The thought teased a bubble of mirth from his throat: it was a disturbing laugh, far from his usual dry chuckle.
Looking up, Gabe saw a bloody autumn moon and a sky full of red stars.
Like that he was on the ground, standing in the dim pool of orange gaslight. The hissing lamppost was one of a patchy line that followed an ill-maintained boardwalk to a small shack and a gate with a single turnstile. The gate broke a high stone wall, over which the top half of an enormous Ferris wheel could be seen, circling. Some trick of the light made its spokes appear red-hot.
The balloon man was just sauntering through the gate into what was unmistakably a carnival. Through the break in the wall, Gabe spied a sea of tents. Off-key carousel music clashed with the growl of a rollercoaster, with its accompanying chorus of shrieks.
"Ticket?"
Momentum had carried him to the turnstile. A black girl, perhaps nine years old and dressed in an old-fashioned Girl Scout uniform, had her hand out in expectation.
"Pardon me?"
She cracked her gum in annoyance. The balloons were bobbing away between the tents, getting further away.
"Mister, I ain't got all night."
Gabe tried to push past the child, to hop over the turnstile. She grabbed his forearm with irresistible strength, turning it palm-up and swiping her candy floss over his wrist. The fibers smoked where they touched him: there was a smell of acid and a blister rose on his forearm. Swelling to the size of his fist, the skin mottled and blackened, scorched first into indecipherable patterns and then into something recognizable: a printed rectangular ticket. "Admit one," it read.
Setting the candy aside, the girl pulled out a straight razor.
"Stop," Gabe objected, but he couldn't pull free. With a swipe of the blade, the girl cut the blister off at its root. The amputated flesh shriveled and flattened, becoming a ticket in fact, though the patterns of Gabe's skin remained visible in its weave. Its ends were curled, ever so slightly, like the fatty inedible edges of a piece of well-cooked bacon.
Humming with satisfaction, the girl used the razor to trim the edges square. "Go on in, Mister."
Speechless, Gabe cradled his arm. Blister-juice ran down his palm, drying into cobwebby strings. A raw rectangle of skin was now missing from his forearm, pulsing hotly. The veins in his wrist looked huge, balloon-fragile, and very close to the surface.
"You want in or not?" The Girl Scout stood aside to let him pass.
Gabe pushed through the gate, eyes seeking the balloon man. "I need to find that clown."
"I ain't seen which way he gone," she told him. "Best you start with Miss Fortune Teller. You meant to find Skinner, she help you with the path."
She pointed to a wobbling soap bubble the size of a small bungalow that shivered and roiled between two ramshackle tents.
"Try the fortuneteller?"
"Misfortune," she corrected.
"Am I dead?" he asked.
The Scout licked one of the cut-away pieces of Gabe's skin. "Nope. Fresh as new milk."
"Okay," he said, stomach churning. As hallucinations went, this one was getting increasingly grotesque. "Uh, thanks."
"Wait! Can you pay?"
He blinked at the girl, feeling stupid. Shaking her head in fond-seeming disgust, she handed him a flour sack. "You need tokens first, you gonna try the attractions."
"But this is empty."
"It is, you ain't. Tell the bag the saddest thing you know."
He walked a few steps, turning halfway so his eye was still on the girl — and her razor. Drawing a deep breath, he whispered, "Two years ago tomorrow..."
He couldn't go on, but it was enough. His breath condensed to red mist, forming small octagonal coins. Translucent, ruby-red, they were all impressed with a familiar image: a girl mourning beside a gravestone. It was Rhona's tattoo, the one she'd never talk about.
As the coins snicked together in the bottom of the sack, Gabe's heart lightened. For a second he was in daylight again, standing on the steps of an Illinois museum, phone clutched in a deathgrip, ear pressed sweatily to Sharon's terse voice: "Dammit, Gabe, stop babbling about Rhona's body art and tell me where you are."
"Hold back the last one!" came a shriek — the Girl Scout. Something cool and flat was sliding between his lips. Gabe bit down, tasting blood and pomegranates. Tears smeared his vision, and vertigo whirled the daylight away.
"Swallow it," the voice instructed, and he did. Blinking hard, he rubbed his eyes, bringing the Ferris wheel swimming into focus once more.
"That was close," the Girl Scout said.
"Thanks." Panting, he stared at the wheel. It was massive: each car looked big enough to hold fifty or sixty people. He guessed its radius at over a hundred feet, though it was sunk into a pit, making it harder to judge. As cars cycled up from below-ground, they carried with them a load of molten metal or stone, which spilled over the edge of the pit. As the wheel cycled, steel beams gnashing and squealing, it fed this stream of lava, which flowed off beyond the Midway, a malignant brook lined with scorched trees.
"Digging itself deeper," the girl muttered, following his gaze. "Take us all down with it, we don't pull in some new suckers soon."
"What do you mean, down?" A ramshackle rollercoaster encircled the Wheel's pit, cars prowling up and down like sharks, occasionally derailing and plunging into the flames.
"Mister, you after the balloon man or not? I told you where to go." She gestured with the razor, looking fed up.
"Misfortune teller. Right." Knees weak, he tottered off toward the soap bubble. Inside he found a woman with the chocolate-brown eyes of a hound seated at a small card table. She wore a red silk parody of a tuxedo and pink fishnet stockings. Full black hair fell in curls to her waist, covering the tears in her stripper's outfit. Her tail wagged as Gabe paused outside the soapy barrier.
"Uh...the girl at the gate says you can help me find the balloon clown."
"Come in," she said. Gabe laid a finger tentatively on the skin of the bubble. There was a shock of electric current and it popped, gusting out an overwhelming reek of wet dog and cheap perfume.
"Sit, please," she said, gesturing at a gaily-painted wooden toadstool. As Gabe obeyed, a new bubble formed in the center of the table, expanding until it was the size of a crystal ball.
"Two sorrows, sir."
"Pardon?"
She waggled two fingers, looking at his flour sack.
"Oh — these?" He passed over two of the ruby-colored coins. Turning away, she shoved them up her nose, then dabbed at the resulting nosebleed with a tattered lace handkerchief.
"Hold up your hands," she said. Her voice was low and mournful.
Gabe obeyed. The exposed part of his wrist throbbed dully. He was beginning to think it might not be so bad to check into a psych ward. Spit up that last coin, beg Sharon to help him before this went any further. She'd do it; trying to Humpty Dumpty him back together was the whole basis of their relationship.
"It's been two years," the fortuneteller said. "She was dancing as you played 'Summer Mornings' and her heart stopped. She reached for you and dropped to the floor. A moment later the phone rang, but you were holding her wrist. You were staring at her dead arm." She peered into the bubble, with its delicate scrim of colored patterns. "You were...screaming."
Gabe's jaw clicked shut, so suddenly it caught a small nip of tongue.
"You didn't answer the phone."
"What does that have to do with—"
"She was dearer to you than breath," the fortuneteller said.
"Yes."
"And she tried to leave, to spare you this pain."
"She loved me," Gabe said. "It wasn't hard to change her mind."
"Now she has left and you follow her still. You have a life, a career, a woman who wants to bear your children. Sharon can stay with you, as your old love could not. Here at the fair you might purchase some control over your future."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, for example...you could ensure a long, pleasant lifetime together. You could decide to die first, so you need never mourn your new love. Or you might pay to make your eventual end — or hers — peaceful and painless. That's a very popular attraction."
"But Rhona is here."
"Rhona is dead and you are not."
He touched the raw patch of skin barely covering his veins. "If that's the only obstacle. . . "
"There's always another obstacle," the fortuneteller said. "Rhona is Skinner's creature. Your dying will not free her."
"Try to understand," Gabe said. "Sharon's...we don't have a deep connection. She's my nursemaid. What kind of fate is that for her?"
"You aren't listening." The fortuneteller shook her head. "Here you can change your circumstances. Our blacksmith can forge love-bonds; it's child's play."
"Why would I do that?"
"You have a chance to build genuine happiness. In yourself, in another. It's more precious than you know."
"I do know — I had it, remember?"
"Have it again, sir." Her dog's tail wagged.
It was good advice. Gabe tried to imagine it. Being sincerely content with Sharon — she'd be delirious. He tried to hitch his failing spirits to the idea...but there was no uplift, no desire. "What I want is to find the balloon man."
Mournful basset eyes reproached him. "Skinner roams as he pleases. He's a fox, hard to corner and a con man to boot."
"Look, I know you're trying to help me, but—"
The fortuneteller sighed. "Perhaps if you win a doll, it will help."
"Thank you." Rising, he stepped away from the card table. She offered him a limp doggie handshake but did not meet his eyes.
Win a doll. Gabe found the games of chance easily enough by following the raised voices of the barkers. First was a shooting gallery, a tent backed by shelves of milk bottles, each containing a figurine. Most depicted soldiers and cops from a variety of cultures, but there was a healthy sprinkling of civilians, too. Gabe scanned them, his gaze lingering on a flower child wearing a baseball cap, a young Chinese boy in a white suit, a Napoleonic infantryman with no bootlaces, and a terrified bag lady with a big revolver in her hands.
"Shoot a man, win a dolly." A sallow old man brandished a pistol, breaking Gabe's contemplation of the bottles. "Shoot a lady, win a parasol. Three bullets for just one sorrowful coin."
Shuddering, he walked on.
Next to the pistol range was a dart board whose targets were inflated medical gloves; upon the palms of these were painted caricatures of people in hospital beds, on operating tables, at home on couches and palettes. "Release the sickly, win a prize," purred a butch-looking woman at that booth, opening a hammy fist to reveal three rusty darts. "Come on stud, it's public service. Three darts for a coin."
"I don't know if I can kill—"
"What, you some kinda wuss?"
"Fish for the drowning!"
Turning smartly, Gabe pursued this last cry to its source, a delicate-looking boy in a sailor's hat who presided over a tank filled with unstrung marionettes, each sunk in the water, weighted by loops of steel. Their wooden bodies flopped to and fro, sinking and surfacing, string-bound knees bending as they touched bottom. Wood arms flailed in the currents. Their puppets' faces were as intricately carved — as individual — as the figurines in the shooting gallery and the medical glove cartoons.
"Fish for the drowning?" repeated the boy. Water drizzled from his nose and mouth, running in rivulets from his scalp to plaster his fair hair to his cheeks and neck. Barnacles clung to his boots.
"How come you're saving people? The others are apparently playing to kill."
"Just the nature of the fishing game," he gurgled, proffering a fishing rod. "Three tries for a sorrow."
Gabe passed over a red coin. It turned to flame in the boy's palm, steaming his skin dry.
The fishing game was one he remembered from childhood visits to real fairs. Players cast their rods into the drink, trying to catch one of the puppets' metal loops with a magnet. Working delicately, it was just possible to pull the weight to the surface. . . but the slightest hand-tremor or unexpected shift in the water's currents could just as easily pull it free, sending the marionette down again.
It took Gabe fifteen tries, five precious coins. As he handed over the fourth the boy, dry now, went so far as to say: "The dart game's really much easier."
Ignoring him, Gabe kept fishing. The little figures rose and sank, puppet arms churning. He caught them one by one, then cursed as they slipped away.
"Go for the half-dead ones circling the bottom," advised the sailor. "They've got less of a chance anyway."
"Fine." Angling for the corner, he captured a girl-puppet in a Victorian corset, carefully lifting her over the tank's glass lip as water gushed from her tiny, gasping mouth. As his hand closed around her, she turned into a kewpie doll with Rhona's crooked nose, a girl dressed in feathers from the waist down. A tiny silver bikini barely covered her breasts. Miniature tattoos adorned her arms. On the left, a girl knelt, all but crushed by grief as she wept over a grave. On the right was an ordinary candle.
Gabe's flesh crawled. The candleflame was out, smoking faintly, just as the one on Rhona's arm had been after she collapsed. Temporary, grief-induced madness, he'd believed at the time. The cheery familiar whisk of painted flame, so often kissed, inexplicably snuffed when she died. He'd even smelled smoke.
The doll's plastic skin was warm to the touch. Gabe gazed into her waxy face, hoping she'd tell him what to do next. When she didn't, he spoke to her: "I'm trying to find the clown — Skinner?"
The Rhona doll did not respond.
Frustrated, he strode down the fairway, nearer to the Ferris Wheel with its outpouring of lava, past the painted plywood boards with holes cut for tourists to poke their faces through... assuming there were any tourists, and assuming any would want a picture of a loved one flayed alive, or hanging from a gibbet. The doll gave him nothing. He held it out, imagining that maybe her hair would wave in the non-existent breeze to indicate a direction. He tried balancing her upright on the ground, in case she could walk. Instead the doll collapsed, pitching face-forward with its arms outstretched.
With a choked sob, Gabe picked her up, brushing rust-colored mud and sawdust from her face and smearing it, so that her flesh became soiled and darkened. Now Gabe noticed that its hair was styled as Rhona's had been in her coffin. Instead of feathers, she wore the simple green dress she was buried in. A whiff of rot escaped the plastic body and her eyes slipped shut.
"One of mine, is it?"
Gabe started. He had wandered up to a tattoo parlor.
The tattoo artist was a slender, chain-smoking beatnik, complete with black turtleneck and a moss-encrusted black beret. Her workplace was a silver morgue gurney surrounded by massive shards of broken mirror. The silver glass formed a mosaic of images, each a tattoo, each bleak in theme: sinking ships, burning planes, assaults, executions, murders. A bloody banner in front of the table declared, "Anything But Tatt."
The artist had a man on her table, an ordinary middle-aged fellow, white of skin, strapped down tight and sweating freely. In her hand she held a woodpecker, rat-a-tatting it wetly against his chest. As her hand moved over her — victim? customer? — the red and white plumage of the bird leached to a sickly gray. In time it went pasty and limp; she tossed it and switched to a hummingbird.
On the morgue table, the middle-aged man was mumbling, "Just not cancer, please, I'll pay anything, I watched Daddy get eaten by tumors, sweet Jesus anything but the cancer. . . "
Gabe looked at the drawing outlined on the man's chest: a disease-raddled old man. He asked: "The tattoo stops him from getting sick?"
"Every painting is a promise, man," the woman said, flicking cigarette ash over her fleshy canvas. "I inscribe this cat's worst nightmare, his concrete fear of living decay, his cancerphobia onto his flesh. . . and that prevents its actualization."
"A promise," Gabe repeated.
"You got it." She dropped the bleach-white hummingbird onto a pile. "You look like the Lonely Traveler type." She waved a languid finger at a cluster of images: people meeting death in isolation, with nobody to love or comfort them. Gabe swelled with a familiar ache. He coughed more ruby coins into his flour sack, diligently remembering to bite down and swallow back the last of them.
The woman's eyes gleamed with greed.
Gabe held out the kewpie doll, showing her the candle tattoo. "You say you did this?"
"If that's Skinner's Rhona, yeah."
"What does the candle promise?"
She grabbed a struggling pigeon and resumed work on the man's chest. "When Rhona's time came, she slip-slid away. No pain, no woe, no warning, there one minute and then just gone, bubble burst, plug pulled, a candle winked out in a huff and a puff of summer breeze."
The doll sighed, a rotten little squeal.
"I need to find her," he said, offering up a coin. "I need to talk to Skinner."
"One way to catch Skinner, one way only," she said. "Gotta ride the coaster. Up, down, back again, spin and coil—"
"I get the idea," Gabe interrrupted, queasily eyeing the coaster. It was ancient, rotten. He could see breaks in its rails.
"It's not too late," the artist advised. "Leave the doll, give me your sorrows. I'll make you a promise or two; pretty up that golden skin, stack your personal deck, buy you some fame. You could go back to the dayworld without fear of death or life..."
"You tricked Rhona," he said. "You didn't tell her you'd take her so soon."
"She knew what she was getting into, man." The pigeon in her hand rattled feebly.
"What about the other tattoo?" Gabe asked. "The grieving girl?"
"I have to concentrate on my paying customers," she crooned, bending to her work. The man on the morgue table groaned, whether in ecstasy or pain Gabe wasn't sure. "You do find Skinner, ask him to bring me some canaries."
He thrust out the flour sack. "Answer me."
The artist's face transformed then, into something gigantic and steely, vulture-beaked, with mirrors for eyes. Her roar, when it came, was the sound of brakes squealing into car crashes, of fires consuming trapped, screaming victims, of bullets smacking into bodies as maddened rioters tore unlucky cops limb from limb. The sound sent Gabe running blindly away, eyes streaming, the Rhona-doll clutched in his fist.
Skinner. The rollercoaster. He was running straight toward it, floaty and almost drunk, barely aware of his legs. He skidded to a stop just shy of a safety fence that, laughably, surrounded the thing.
A burn victim, six feet tall, carrying an M16 and wearing military dogtags, was holding out a scorched hand, palm out, to stop him from going further.
"I have to ride that thing," Gabe said.
"Five sorrows, then." Its boots were mired in a crimson puddle.
Gabe paid and it pulled the gate aside. There was a shower of sparks as a coaster car pulled up to the platform, wheels shrieking against the rail. Swallowing, he climbed inside. There was no safety bar.
"This is nuts, this is nuts. . . " There was a bit of chain fixed to the car's bottom. Tucking the Rhona doll into the crook of his arm, Gabe groped for it, pulling hard; it wasn't loose. Bracing his feet against the floor, he wedged himself as firmly as he could, winding the chain tightly in his left fist and hunkering down.
"Have beaucoup fun, cherry." The burn victim blew him a kiss and winked its poached left eye. It threw a lever and the ride started, slowly at first, grinding up to the highest rise in the track one bone-rattling jolt after another. At the top, Gabe was even with the top of the Ferris wheel. Looking down, he saw the pyroclastic lake upon which it floated, a bubbling red cauldron that was eerily enticing. The chain in his fist had a curling burr, nail-sharp. He thought briefly of dragging it along the delicate, half-exposed veins of his wrist.
But no — Rhona needed him.
Then he was no longer teetering at the top but plunging downward.
Gabe screamed, the sound congealing into small chalky granules of dust that dried and choked his mouth. They hovered in the air as he fell, yelling, clinging to his Rhona doll with one hand and the chain with the other.
The car hit a break in the rails. Flipping, it fell end over end. It slammed through a brace of wooden support struts, righting itself with a jerk and then dropping safely onto a lower section of track. There it rattled into a vicious curve. Gabe slid on the rough wooden seat, howling out clouds of dust as splinters pierced his butt through the meager protection of his jeans.
He closed his eyes, grabbing for memories of Rhona; on summer mornings she would curl up in a patch of sun, just like a cat, and demand that he play her something, anything, while she woke. The joy she took in dancing, in eating, in sex. She knew she'd never suffer, a voice whispered, as the car whirled sideways, as white gritty cries flaked off his lips and were ripped away by the breeze. All that confidence, just because of one little promise, one lying candleflame tattoo....
Hot wind tore at his fingers, prying at his hold on the chain and on the doll both. Gabe pushed away his glancing thoughts of the tattoo artist, instead hoarsely reciting the names of dishes Rhona had loved: paprika chicken, moussaka, lentil soup, lamb tejine. Dates, lovemaking, a trip to Turkey, eating lemon squares in Paris, the rainy summer night when they lay on the couch watching a thunderstorm and planning their future....
With a last spine-shattering jerk, the car stopped. It derailed, skidded and tipped, dumping him in a shaking, retching heap before a pair of oversized shoes.
Gabe tried to lift his head. Finding himself too weak, he settled for rolling onto his back.
The balloon man's lips were a straight, serious line belied by the broad smile painted across his face. He was using an upturned hand-bellows to catch the white grit that had been the byproduct of Gabe's screams, decanting it and pouring it into the flaccid skins of deflated silver balloons.
"Quite a ride, my good man, quite a ride!" He offered a white-gloved hand. Rejecting it, Gabe crabbed backwards on hands and feet until his back hit the soldier's legs. Moisture from the red puddle seeped into his pants, stinging as it reached the splinters in his ass.
"Are you who I think you are?" he said, teeth chattering.
"Who? The devil?" The man shook his head. "Nothing of the sort, I assure you."
"Then this isn't Hell?"
"Not so far, sir. More of a shoal, not even an anteroom, really. Hell's cloakroom, if you will, or garden-shed. Though if the wheel has its way we'll be pulled down soon. We haven't been luring in the custom, you see."
"Custom."
"Our peculiar specialization lies in doing business with those who love the dead." One of his balloons swirled and resolved into a face: Rhona. "Ah, there's my girl. Say hello, love."
Getting to his feet, Gabe held out his bag of coins. "Just tell me what I have to do."
"Do, young sir?"
"To get her back."
"Rhona bought herself a quick, painless death long before she met you, dear fellow. She belongs here now."
"To you?"
"Yes indeed."
"Why not to the tattoo artist?"
"I bought your girl off dear Farina for a flamingo and two Cornish hens. She's a very popular attraction, but the overhead on tattoos is a tad high. Wishes, you know."
"But..."
"Tut-tut, dear man. Don't waste your breath arguing about what can't be changed."
"Can I stay here with Rhona?"
"Well...that might be done. Allow me a quick peek at your wherewithal." Skinner peered into the bag, clucking. "Oh, no, I don't think that will do."
"Take it all," Gabe said.
"My good man. Do you know what these coins represent? Why you forget this place when you cough up that last bitter red penny?"
"Someone said they were...sorrows."
"Indeed. This place thrives on pain."
Gabe laughed darkly. "If that's the case—"
"Ah, certainly, you're full of pain at the moment. Dark salty gobs of it. But if I give you back your love? How will you pay your rent when your heart is full of joy? How will our little fair retain its necessary ambient sadness if you're honeymooning about the tents and singing love songs on the main stage?"
"You're saying we can only be together if we're unhappy?"
"Bit of a conundrum, I'm afraid."
"There has to be some way."
"Do yourself a favor, young man. Give me that sack of pain, let go of that last slim coin. I'll release the balloon. Rhona flies up, you return to the dayworld. Your memory of this place will fade swiftly, and—"
"I can't."
"Dear fellow. You might yet lead a useful life."
"Do I need to die, is that it?" He grabbed for the Rhona-balloon, but Skinner did a quick shuffle-ball-change and ended up a yard away.
"Dammit! I'm not so stupid I don't know you lured me here. Stop trying to pretend you're a nice guy who has my best interests at heart and tell me what you want from me."
"That's better, sir — now you're thinking. The answer is this: what we need most is the dearly beloved dead. Bait, like your Rhona, to lure down living customers."
"You're asking me to kill people?"
"Considering that you couldn't even bring yourself to release a few sick souls at the darts game, sir, I consider that an unlikely prospect."
"What, then?"
Skinner inclined his head. "As I said, the rent here's paid in pain. Yours, hers...or somebody else's. If you were to sow some grief somewhere else, create misery sufficient to offset your own pleasure — well, then you might stay here."
"I couldn't do that."
"Your current relationship suggests otherwise," the balloon man said, expression keen. "How much coin do you think we might mine from Sharon's heart?"
"Leave her out of this," Gabe said. "I don't want to, but I will walk."
Skinner shrugged. "You need not cause pain to anyone you know."
"Right. How would I even begin to make strangers miserable?"
"You're a musician, aren't you? It's a powerful thing, the right tune at the right time. What if you play us a gig or two?"
"Play songs," Gabe repeated, suspicious.
"Just so."
"Sad ones?"
"Obviously," said Skinner. Inside the balloon, Rhona's brows furrowed — an expression of worry? A warning? "What I'd particularly like to hear is the song your Rhona was dancing to two years ago."
Gabe's breath caught. "'Summer Mornings' isn't sad."
"Isn't it?" The balloon man blinked innocently.
"I want to talk to her," Gabe said.
"As you wish." Skinner pressed the balloon against the lips of Gabe's kewpie doll. She inflated to human size, her skin becoming stretchy, plasticized. She now bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a sex doll. The balloon itself shriveled.
Rhona's mouth moved. She started to rise, to float away, and Gabe caught her.
"Gabe..." A hiss of escaping air, like a leak.
Rhona. He tried to embrace her, but it felt all wrong, dirty even. Instead he held her at arm's length, staring into her plastic eyes.
"Do you want me to do this?"
"I'm not allowed to say," she said.
The burned soldier who ran the rollercoaster was leering at them. Turning away, Gabe whispered, "I've missed you."
"I didn't mean to go away so soon."
"He says we can be together. If that's what you want—"
"This is your choice, Gabe, not mine."
"It should be us choosing."
"When I died, 'us' ended."
"Playing a sad song now and then doesn't seem so much. But there's a catch, right?"
No answer.
"Fine, it's up to me." With a sigh, he ran his thumb over the grieving girl tattoo on her vinyl arm. "Can you tell me about this, at least?"
Rhona's neck crinkled as she turned her head to look at it. "It was after my sister died in a car wreck. She was in agony, for weeks, and then suddenly she was brain-dead. I had to sign the forms to take her off the respirator. My parents were gone, and I mourned, too long and too deeply. Like you, Gabe.
"Then I found my way here. I met Farina. I couldn't bear to lose anyone again, so I asked her to spare me that. Asked her to arrange it so that I would die before anyone I loved could leave me."
Gabe closed his eyes. "You were dancing to 'Summer Mornings,' and then you fell. I was trying CPR and I saw the snuffed-out candle on your arm. Then the phone rang."
"It was my best friend from college," Rhona said. "If I'd answered the phone she'd have told me about her bone cancer."
"If I go now, you lose me," Gabe said. The inflated doll twisted her face away. "If you can't bear grief, loss, then I shouldn't leave."
"It's complicated, Gabe."
She didn't want him to go, he was sure of it. Gabe turned back to the balloon man. "A few sad songs? That's all there is to it?"
"Where's the harm in tweaking a few heartstrings, sir?"
"Tweaking," he repeated. "How hard? For how long?"
"You tell me," Skinner said. "How would you share out your broken heart? In quarter portions? In eighths?"
Ridiculous question. What fraction of his months of sadness might be bearable? "Slivers," he said at last. "Hundredths. Everyone who heard me would feel just a little worse — a little blue. Can you do that?"
"Of course," Skinner says. "It's something music does anyway. Pulls at the moods, tugs the soul up and down. No lasting harm done, and your rent gets paid."
"That sounds like an obscenely good deal," Gabe said.
"Yes. I am in fact making you a very generous offer. But if you've got qualms, you can still go back to the dayworld." Skinner flicked his fingers against Gabe's chest. A red coin burped up from within, balancing on his tongue. He saw the Illinois sky, felt something plastic wedged between his teeth and the weave of a paramedic's blanket under his head.
No. He bit back the coin. "I want a tryout."
"Pardon?"
"I want to see how it works. What if I play the song once?"
An unctuous smile from the balloon man. "Indeed sir, that sounds very reasonable."
His skin crawled; it was too easy. He searched Rhona's immobile face and found no clues. "What do I do?"
With a flourish, the clown pointed at a small podium, bathed in a spotlight's glow. A coal-black saxophone — not his own — rested lightly on a stand at its forward edge.
"Come on, love, your man's got work to do." Skinner took the Rhona doll, tucking her into the crook of his arm so she couldn't float away.
Gabe stepped from the muddy ground to the stage. Stretching, he picked up the horn, blew air into it to warm the metal, took out the reed and lay it on his tongue. It felt odd, leathery. Screwing it back into the mouthpiece, he blew a scale. The notes had a sound like dark-roasted coffee, of smoke-dense nightclubs and fine leather chairs.
The balloon man tossed a coin into the bell of the saxophone. "Go ahead," he said.
Gabe began to play.
He hadn't played 'Summer Mornings' in two years, but he still knew the intro by heart. The opening notes came slow, robbed by tragedy of their usual tripping pace. The Midway flickered behind an unexpected rush of tears, and when they cleared Gabe was in a market in Rome, playing to a weary girl as she led a horse along a dusty track. She stopped, face stricken, and the scene became a battlefield, where a trio of haunted men were arguing in a foxhole. A fourth stood off to the side, ear cocked, listening.
Gabe went everywhere and everywhen, playing to slaves in Egypt, to a suited astronaut walking on the surface of an impossibly massive space station, to a bunch of teenaged boys playing stick-hockey in a Toronto neighborhood. It was always the ones with the sad eyes who heard him, the ones sliding to the edges of the crowds, the ones talking to tearstreaked mirror reflections. Shivering wrecks standing on ledges and bridges raised their heads to listen; a man knotting a noose from the solitude of his threadbare couch hummed a few notes of the chorus. Gabe played on, pouring days and nights of grief into the saxophone. Liquidly flowing from one phrase to the next, he went to a thousand different places, ten thousand. Each change offered him just enough time to see the listener, to catch the widening of eyes as his notes reached out, caressed their spirits, and dragged them just a little deeper into despair.
As he flickered elsewhere, they were reaching for the pills, for the guns. They were taking off their helmets and walking toward the entrenched enemy position. Gabe tried to stop the song and failed. He played on, and the balloon man dropped all of his ruby coins — all but the last — into the bell of the saxophone.
Around his mini-stage, the sulfurous air was cooling. The sky lightened and the ragged tents of the Midway began to repair themselves. Under the burned soldier's feet, the crimson mud dried, filling the air with blood-scented steam.
With a screech of metal gears, the Ferris wheel groaned to a stop.
Gabe held the last note until he was out of breath, then staggered off the podium, letting the sax fall from his grip. It coiled, reed flicking like a tongue, then writhed back up to its stand.
"All those people..." He choked, throat full. A fat sapphire coin landed in his palm.
"That'd be a regret, dear fellow," Skinner said. "You're a rich man, at least for the moment."
"You tricky bastard," Gabe gasped, bringing up another coin with a painful cough. "Some of them might've made it. You said you'd let me try out."
"And so you have. You wanted to stay, Gabriel? Well, you've paid for a good long while now. Fair's got bait for years, and you shan't need to perform again for some time."
"I'm not performing again."
"We'll see how you feel when the rent's due and the wheel is turning, my good sir. In the meantime, enjoy your honeymoon." Skinner kissed the inflatable doll lasciviously, smearing black and white make-up all over her face.
"Hey!" Gabe grabbed for her, and again Skinner eluded him.
"Doesn't learn, does he love?" With that, Skinner pressed a familiar loop of gold into Gabe's outstretched hand: Rhona's engagement ring.
"What's this?" he said.
"Keys and pink slip."
Glaring, he took the ring. The diamond had a coppery inner glow.
"Ah yes, the light here does tend to the reddish end of the spectrum," Skinner said. He released the Rhona doll and she started to rise. Gabe had to jump up to catch her foot before she could float away.
As he hauled her back down to eye level, he saw that Skinner was already twenty feet away.
"Good luck, lovebirds." With a tip of the hat, he sauntered around a corner and was gone.
Gabe coughed again. Blue coins pattered to the ground.
"Gabe," said Rhona. The doll was wearing that dark green dress and a pair of high-heeled shoes. The helium lift of her created perceptible pressure against his restraining hand.
"I killed those people," he said.
"You didn't know. And you did it to free me," she said. "Focus on that, love."
"Okay. Yeah. It's over, right?"
"It could be," she said, plastic eyes impassive despite her urgent tone.
"Keys and pink slip. He gave you back."
"It's good to be free of him."
"I believe it." With that, he slid the ring onto her finger. The upward tug of her body ceased, and she gasped. Vinyl stretched and popped, and underneath, Rhona was flesh and blood once more.
With a trembling hand, Gabe reached out and mussed her carefully styled hair. Her scalp was cool to the touch, but she felt like skin, like life.
"What did you do?" Her face was drawn, nervous. Afraid he'd leave her after all? Looking away, she bent to snatch up the blue coins he'd dropped.
"Rhona?"
"We'll need every cent," she said softly, still avoiding his gaze as she poured the regrets into his flour sack.
Gabe took his lost love's hand, peering into her troubled face. "It'll be okay, Rhone. We'll stay here and — I don't know, make ourselves useful."
"Right." She smiled, but her lips trembled.
"That is what you wanted, right?"
"Of course," she said, and he saw the lie. She'd thought he would free her. Let her go, let her fly up, soar away to her sister and parents and her damned dead friend Betsy.
"You..." he said, stunned.
"I loved the dead too, remember?"
"Maybe if you took the ring off," he said, but his hand was wrapped around hers, preventing it.
"Oh, Gabe." She kissed him lightly, and it was just as he remembered, the bend in her nose like an electrical contact against his skin. Something in his chest eased a little, despite the dense press of blue regrets within. "It's fine, Gabe, really. Thank you."
"Skinner said we couldn't be here and be happy."
"Listen, we'll make do. There's an empty booth on Huckster Row." She wound her fingers in his and grinned.
Despite everything, he found an answering smile. "What would we sell?"
"Cups? Scarves? My parents went to the garden shed of Hell and all I got was this stupid T-shirt?"
"Snowcones, maybe?"
"I could enter the prize fights," she said, rubbing black make-up off her face. "I'm a tough customer, you know."
"We don't have to decide anything just yet, do we?"
"No, there's time." Rhona shook the bag of coins. "Come on, let's take in the sights."
He let her lead him into the thickening crowd, feeling tottery and off-balance. It was a feeling that would diminish, he suspected, as he got used to being here.
Beyond the turnstile and the stone wall, a line of suicides stretched past the gaslights and up the wrought-iron staircase that led to the dayworld. They were all humming the same lively tune.