Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  He hates this job.

  Carousel operator for a traveling parking lot carnival. He’s been doing this for a month. This his fourth city. Sleeping in a small tent pitched on slivers of forgotten grass along a series of huge parking lots. Paid in cash at the end of each stop. A share of the take, calculated by people he has no reason to trust.

  He finishes loading another round of kids and parents onto the carousel. Hits the start button. Checks the timer. Closes his eyes.

  Probably, he should be happy just to have a job.

  He opens his eyes. Stares up at the sky through an opening in the roof at the center of the carousel. Hears each sound of each ride and game throughout this parking lot. Focuses for a moment on a barker calling for players. A basketball hitting a rim. The cars of the small roller coaster crashing down the metal rails. A girlfriend screaming as she swings.

  Screaming happily.

  He lowers his head. Looks around again. And between the horses and children moving around him, he sees that the guy running the teacup ride is having a seizure. He’s shaking in place and his eyes are rolling back in his head and there’s spit, white spit, coming from his mouth.

  He’s a teenager, like the carousel operator. Maybe nineteen. Maybe twenty. Black kid. They’ve never spoken.

  The children walking past the black kid on the ground begin to stare. Point. And laugh. Some of them are doubled over laughing.

  The black kid falls to the ground.

  Still the carousel circles the operator. He isn’t sure what to do. But no one is coming to help. He steps up onto the rotating platform, weaving through the stationary animals, then jumping to the ground. He’s landed on the wrong side of the carousel, but runs around it, past the parents and kids all waiting in line. He gets to the teacups. Standing over the black kid and his seizure, is on the ground, shaking, eyes still in the back of his head.

  The carousel operator leans over him. A crowd of people stand around.

  Then the guy stops shaking. Goes still.

  “Did he just fucking die?” someone asks.

  The crowd is silent otherwise. The carnival sounds are quieter here, where the carousel operator leans over the body, the usually uncontrolled noise blocked out by the people all around him.

  The guy is still on the ground. It’s not clear if he’s breathing. His face is covered in snot and white saliva. His eyes are closed. His hands are raised, but frozen, it seems. His legs are too. One knee is lifted. Frozen too, stiff, locked in place by the seizure.

  The carousel operator thinks he should put his hand under the guy’s nose. See if he is breathing.

  “God damn it!” the guy on the ground suddenly screams. Eyes closed, still not moving, except for his mouth. He screams again, “God fucking damn it!”

  People step back. The carousel operator stands.

  In another moment, the guy on the ground opens his eyes. Slowly begins to lower his hands, move his legs. Retaking control of his body. He’s yelling again. “Ep-uh-lepsy!”

  The crowd begins to break apart, moving on. Parents of kids on the teacups are asking someone to make the ride stop. The carousel operator goes to the controls. Finds the shutoff. Is about to stop the ride.

  “Don’t you touch my fucking ride,” the epileptic says to him, smiling as he stands. “No one touches my damn ride, okay? I’m an epileptic. Not a fucking retard.”

  The carousel operator has no idea what to say. He lifts his hands from the controls. He looks at the epileptic. Finally, the carousel operator says, in his quiet voice, “So you’re okay?”

  “You mean other than I almost swallowed my tongue?” the epileptic asks, moving to the controls. “Other than that, yep, I’m fan-fucking-tastic.” He’s slowing the ride down. Breathing hard. Wiping his face with his sleeve. “However, the latent effects of a slight and undiagnosed autism do still color my life perspective. Nor have I gotten laid in months. Not to mention,” he says, wiping his face again, his sleeve damp with snot and sweat and spit, “I haven’t had a goddamned beer all day.”

  The epileptic looks over toward the carousel. Says, in a moment, “Sir, you’ve got yourself a group of very unhappy patrons.”

  The carousel operator turns around. People are yelling at him from their seats in the sleigh, they’re gripping frantically to the poles on which the horses and unicorns are mounted. From behind the fence lining the carousel, parents are waving wildly to their children, telling them to stay calm.

  “I’d get those people some satisfaction right away,” says the epileptic. “Then you and me, later, we’ll see what we can do to get me a lady. And both of us a beer.”

  They stand on cue, all of them, rising without being asked, nodding without being asked, crossing their fingers over their chests, again without being asked. They begin to kneel now, the room filled with a low and wooden rumble as padded kneelers are unfolded from underneath each pew, the parishioners lowering themselves onto those padded planks. A minute later, the kneelers are tucked away again, once more discreetly positioned underneath each visitor to this church.

  The people sit. They stand again. They repeat a phrase, the same phrase, an answer, a response, all of them, young and old, child and parent, they know these motions and these words by heart, it’s as if they’ve known them since before they were even born.

  The two of them head into town. Not the places near the shopping center where the carnival has set up. The epileptic wants to head into town. “The real town,” he says to the carousel operator. “Where the people really live.”

  They hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck. Riding along dark roads toward some bar the driver says they’ll like.

  “So let’s talk seizures,” the epileptic says, talking loudly as they sit with their backs to the truck’s steel cab, the warm wind blowing all around them. “I may not have one for another year, I may have one before I finish this sentence.” He looks up, at the sky above the trees around them. The carousel operator finds himself holding his breath. It’s another moment before the epileptic starts talking again. “Either way, if you’re a witness to another seizure, do me a favor. Shove something in my mouth. So I don’t bite off my goddamn tongue. Okay?”

  The carousel operator nods.

  The epileptic nods too.

  Behind them, the road winds slowly away, lost to the darkness and the trees. There are a few mailboxes along the road. But no lights of houses that they can see anywhere.

  “What’s the farthest away you’ve ever gone?” the epileptic asks.

  The carousel operator names the places. He says, beneath the wind, “Drove north for five days just to get there.”

  “Damn,” the epileptic says. “That’s a good one. What the hell were you doing way up there?”

  “Pitching fish,” the carousel operator says quietly. “In a processing plant. Salmon.”

  The epileptic taps his hand on the side of the truck, nodding as he listens.

  The carousel operator thinks he’d like to say more. He’s not sure why. Usually, he hardly speaks at all. In a minute, he says, “Lived in a tent on a hill near a river. Worked seven days a week, twelve or sixteen hours a day.”

  “Damn,” the epileptic says. “And isn’t that the place where the sun doesn’t go down?”

  The carousel operator nods. “Not in the summer. It lasts a couple months.”

  “Damn,” the epileptic says. “Didn’t that fuck with your sleep?”

  Wind blows hair all across the carousel operator’s hard face. But he just lets it pass across his mouth and nose and eyes. “At first,” he finally says. “But then, when you work that much, you can pretty much sleep anytime. Anywhere.”

  The truck bounces over a pothole in the road, their stomachs go empty, and for a moment it’s like they fly.

  “What’s your story?” the epileptic asks. “I mean, what makes a guy go so far up there and do that sort of work?”

  The carousel operator thinks about this for a minute. “Because none of
it’s where I’m from,” he says, his quiet voice still somehow breaking through the noise of the wind. “All of it is somewhere else.”

  “Where are you from?” the epileptic asks.

  The carousel operator tells him. “You know,” he says, “in the northwest.”

  “Mountains and forests and shit like that?” the epileptic asks. “Supposed to be beautiful.”

  The carousel operator stares back at the road behind them, still disappearing into the night. “That’s what people say. But it was just a big, dark city for me. A place where people worked at the port and where it seemed like I would end up working at the port too. Getting some girl pregnant. Moving into some apartment. Losing any picture of another life. Of being something else.”

  The carousel operator hasn’t talked this much in many months. It makes his mouth ache a little. But somehow, this guy makes him talk.

  The epileptic has picked up a small branch from the bed of the truck. He peels dead needles from the stick. One by one. Lifting them up into the air, then letting them fly. “So, okay,” the epileptic asks, “tell me what else do you want from your days left on this earth?”

  The carousel operator closes his eyes. The wind is warm, the cab of the truck even warmer. Still heated up from the sun that shone all day. He remembers being up north. He remembers a truck he rode in, hitchhiking along an empty peninsula, one night, like many nights, going from a bar to his tent near the camp, and he remembers that he loved to be away from home.

  “What I want,” the carousel operator says in that voice barely audible in the open, night drive, “is not to be where I am from.”

  The epileptic smiles. They drive a while. In a few minutes, the epileptic pats his new friend’s knee. “I like that,” he says.

  The driver downshifts as they start up a low hill.

  “Long way to go for a beer,” the epileptic says.

  “I was a bad person there,” the carousel operator says, almost to himself.

  “We’ve all been bad people,” the epileptic says.

  The carousel operator nods.

  Wind blows over and around their heads. The sound of the engine rises as they mount the hill.

  In a minute, the carousel operator turns to the epileptic. Facing him. They’re sitting close together. He says softly, “I can promise you I was worse.”

  At the top of the hill, the truck begins to slow, turning off onto the shoulder of the road. They see a bar in an old wooden warehouse. Cars and trucks are parked in the dirt around it. The two of them hop over the side of the pickup truck. They land on the ground. Thank the driver. The carousel operator offers him a few dollars. The driver shakes his head, then the truck pulls away.

  “So where are you from?” the carousel operator asks.

  The epileptic smiles the wild smile he’s got, crooked teeth and even in the light of the sign over the entrance to the bar, it’s clear he needs to shave. “I can’t possibly remember.”

  The priest moves forward, wearing her blue uniform or is it a costume, passing through the crowds of people pushing toward her. She’s in the street. Walking toward the square. She touches everyone she sees, their hands or arms and some she touches their faces, which they press in her direction, begging, pleading, all they want is to be touched.

  “This bar seems a designated gathering place for the injured and crippled,” the epileptic says, pausing only long enough to drink from his cold bottle of beer. “It’s like you’ve got to have at least lost a limb just to gain fair entry.”

  The carousel operator looks around. The epileptic’s only barely exaggerating. Lost fingers on a waitress. A one-armed man at a table near the door. A woman and her boyfriend whose faces are scarred deeply from forehead to chin, their noses split and the woman is missing an eye.

  “I mean,” says the epileptic, “how the fuck did they both get matching scars?”

  In a moment, his new friend offers slowly, “Maybe they were riding on the same tractor?” He’s drinking beer too.

  “My bet is they were going at it in some hidden stand of corn,” the epileptic says, leaning close and almost whispering, “and then a god damned combine came charging through.”

  The epileptic has started laughing loudly.

  His friend the carousel operator thinks it’s funny too. But he can only barely smile.

  He’s a couple beers ahead of the epileptic.

  He can’t help counting. Where he grew up, you counted.

  The bar is in a building that was once a warehouse for cotton. The ceilings are sixty feet high, and there’s farm equipment everywhere. Rusted plows. A massive scythe. Bushels of cotton. The tables are wooden, built of planks seemingly stripped from a farmhouse or a barn. A ladder reaches all the way to the rafters. How can there be a ladder that tall?

  “How much of this you think was brought in here as decoration?” the epileptic asks, looking around. “And how much was simply left here when someone decided this warehouse no longer served any functional agricultural purpose?”

  The carousel operator looks around. Says quietly, “Not sure.”

  The bartender changes the channel on one of the televisions behind the bar. There’s video from a helicopter. A city whose streets are being washed over with water. No sound. But there’s music playing in the bar, some sort of blues. Dark and slow and loud. On the television, cars are barely visible in the water, on their sides, turned over. A few trees stand. There are bent streetlights and dangling utility poles. There are the shells of broken homes. There are buildings whose doors run with water. The video cuts to a river breaking through its banks. The video cuts to a lake overflowing an earthen wall. The video cuts to a highway, cars, being pushed aside by a heavy, low rush of thick and filthy water.

  “What the fuck happened?” the epileptic asks.

  His friend shakes his head.

  “Do you have a phone?” the epileptic asks.

  Once again, his friend shakes his head.

  In the bar, some people watch the television. The bartender does. A few people sitting near them. But mostly the thirty or forty people here sit drinking their beer, staring toward one of the other televisions that show car racing, church sermons, and on one of the TV’s there’s baseball.

  The kid and the epileptic watch a cell tower fall. A smokestack. An oil rig, in the Gulf, they see it slip into the water, steam and smoke and flames erupting, then extinguished. On the television, oil rises to the surface of the waves, the video now showing how it coats beaches and boats and animals.

  “What the fuck happened?” the epileptic asks again.

  The carousel operator only stares.

  The epileptic turns to the bartender. An old guy, gray-haired, his pale face lined and sinking down toward his weathered neck. “What the fuck happened?” the epileptic asks him.

  The bartender glances at him, then turns back to the television.

  The epileptic leans toward his friend, the carousel operator. “God damned backwoods,” he says. “Ask him what happened.”

  The friend doesn’t understand. He shakes his head. “What do you mean?”

  “You ask,” the epileptic says. “That’s the way it works.”

  The carousel operator shakes his head. “What?”

  The epileptic smiles some. Pats his new friend on the arm. “You’re a good man,” the epileptic says.

  The epileptic is black. His friend had forgotten that.

  The carousel operator leans forward. Looking at the bartender. “What’s going on there?” he asks and has to think to raise his voice. “On the TV.”

  The bartender glances at him. In a moment says, “This was days ago. Wake the fuck up. There was a hurricane. Then an earthquake. Which then combined,” he starts, turning away, walking toward a back room, “with the unimaginable wrath of God.”

  The epileptic turns his head, looking around the room. At the people drinking beer. At the scarred man and his girlfriend playing pool and at the group playing darts. It’s loud he
re, the music grinds, the epileptic still looking around the room.

  “And they say we work in a carnival,” the epileptic says.

  The carousel operator glances around the room. The epileptic finishes his beer.

  “How many people,” the epileptic asks, “how many people you think died?”

  His friend shakes his head again. Shrugs. “Don’t know. A lot.” He drinks. Says, “A hundred?”

  The epileptic turns back to the television. More video of neighborhoods being washed over with water, homes collapsing, cars pushed side to side, against one another, people in boats overturned by the mess of debris in the water itself, a mass of boards and trees and people, made liquid by the water flowing everywhere.

  “No, no,” the epileptic says, shaking his head, staring at the TV, but now he closes his eyes, his voice almost a whisper, talking to himself or maybe it’s that he prays. “That water, that violence,” he says, “I’m telling you, that sort of thing killed thousands and thousands and thousands.”

  Candles burn, on altars, each one part of a carefully positioned arrangement.

  A star, a circle, a cross, a square, the candles burn as the people talk, quietly, even as all of them close their eyes, reciting lines each reads from papers they hold in their hands.

  A man, not much older than the two of them, now pushes up to the bar, asking for a beer. He’s a big guy in a check shirt, and he’s got a soaking load of dip in his front lip. The epileptic is pushed from his stool, almost falling on his friend, the carousel operator.

  His friend thinks the epileptic will get mad. Push back. But he doesn’t. He just rights himself, standing aside. Smiling. Waiting for the man to get his beer.

  The carousel operator and the epileptic watch the television. Still no sound. Slow blues on the stereo now, a singer who’s nearly screaming.