by Alina Simone
Anna bought fifty dollars’ worth of tickets and headed back to the midway. But when she rejoined the crew—now cheering Lamba on at Plinko—she found there was nothing for her to do. Taj and Lauren had gravitated back into their usual whispered consultations; the rest of the crew was busy filming.
Anna tapped Taj on the back and he turned around quickly.
“What?” he said, not altogether happily.
“Do you mind if I walk around and film for a while?”
“All the cameras are tied up.”
“No, I mean, I brought my AVCCAM. It’s in the van.”
Taj considered this for a moment.
“We don’t really need another cameraperson on him now, but if you want to get some B-roll…”
“I was thinking I’d shoot a little of my own stuff,” Anna said. Then, suddenly afraid that if she seemed too excited he might shoot her down, added quickly, “Only if that’s OK with you.”
“We’ll probably need you in a bit. Twenty minutes, max,” he said, handing her the keys to the van and turning back to Lauren.
* * *
The chaos of the fairgrounds soon crowded out her worries. With her AVCCAM cutting off circulation to her shoulder, Anna stumped past the ticket booth and along the broad dirt path that wove through the rides. The greasy smoke and winking popcorn lights, the epileptic fits of the Sky Swat, the Condor, and the Disk-O, combined with theme music from twelve different rides, assaulted her from all sides, congealing into a kind of unholy audiovisual soup. Anna stopped, uncertain of where to go. That’s when she spotted the fortune-teller.
She didn’t appear to be an official part of the carnival. Otherwise wouldn’t she have a booth on the midway? All the fortune-teller had was a blanket, two low stools, and a hand-lettered sign that looked like a toddler’s art project. REAL ESOTERIC TEACHER, it read. She had set up on a sad and weedy little patch of grass just past where the rides ended.
The fortune-teller was eating a German sausage from a foam container on her lap. She looked to be in her late fifties, with hair bleached to the color and consistency of a Dorito. Her dress was black and very tight and, not to be ageist, but Anna found the plunging décolleté more than a little off-putting. Once Anna arrived at the edge of her blanket, she noticed another sign, Sharpie on cardboard, leaning against an empty beer stein on the ground. DONATION, it said. Anna took five dollars out of her wallet and placed it in the beer stein. The fortune-teller immediately removed the bill, regarding it disdainfully.
“For twenty dollars,” she rasped, “I could give you a real fortune. What do you want me to do with this?”
“Um,” Anna began. She wouldn’t have expected such hostility from an unauthorized psychic working for tips on the outskirts of a carnival in Islington, New Jersey.
“How about I just tell you five things?” the fortune-teller said, tucking the bill into her cleavage.
“Five things would be fine,” Anna said. “Would it be OK if I filmed you?”
“Can I finish my sausage?” she countered.
Anna busied herself with setting up the AVCCAM on a monopod while the fortune-teller chewed her sausage. Once she had finished eating, she picked up a pack of fatigued-looking tarot cards lying at her feet. She shuffled the deck and set it down in front of Anna with a bored plop.
“Cut it,” she said.
Anna did as she was told and the fortune-teller began flipping the cards back in solitaire-like rows before Anna: the Wheel of Fortune, the Sun, the Hierophant.
“You are very visually attuned,” she said, flipping back more cards. “Both visually and aurally attuned.”
Well, duh, thought Anna. This statement seemed to apply to anyone whose head came with the standard-issue orifices.
The fortune-teller riffled through the deck faster, throwing cards down on the blanket in a dizzying array at Anna’s feet. Sixes. High Priestess. Stars. World. Twos. Fool.
“You have a lust for life and this leads you to take risks. Unhealthy risks. You must take precautions. I see some kind of abyss in your future.”
At this, Anna perked up a little. It was true that she had a lust for life. Or at least a lust. And hadn’t she taken a number of risks lately? The purchase of the camera? Joining the crew? Taj? During her weaker moments, Anna herself marveled at the speed of her metamorphosis, even wondered whether her behavior was entirely “healthy.” But what about her old life? The tedium of long days at Pinter, Chinski and Harms enlivened only by the occasional smoothie run to Jamba Juice or bitter lunches with Brandon? Collecting spam, was that healthy? Was stagnation healthy, even if it was the de facto mode of almost everyone she knew? Everyone, that is, except Taj.
More cards. The Hermit. Nines. Temperance.
“Vacation plans?” the fortune-teller now asked, picking a loose bit of sausage from her teeth.
Anna shook her head.
“Someone is going to ask you to go somewhere,” she said with a significant look. “It’s very important you take this journey. Consider it a quest.”
“Quest?” Anna repeated dumbly. She did not associate sci-fi vocab with this woman’s gauge of hoop earrings.
“Like a vision quest.”
“Oh!” Anna said, getting it. File under crystals, druids, Arizona sweat lodges intended exclusively for white people.
The fortune-teller passed a hand over the cards, muddying them into a pile. She shuffled the deck again and laid down the top card. The Magician. Draped in a red robe, the Magician held what looked like a double-ended dildo aloft in one hand. The fortune-teller shook her head.
“Not good, kiddo.”
“No?”
“You are a good person, but that doesn’t mean that people always treat you the way they should.” Now the fortune-teller was looking directly at Anna, who couldn’t help but notice her lipstick bore only the vaguest relationship to the actual borders of her mouth. “You give too much, and people take advantage of that. Am I right?”
Anna nodded.
“There is a man,” the fortune-teller continued. She glanced back down at the cards. “Married?”
Anna shook her head.
“Boyfriend?”
Anna shrugged, thinking, shouldn’t she be the one asking the fortune-teller things, not the other way around? Then again, what did she expect for five dollars?
“But there is a man?”
Anna nodded.
“Well, watch out, honey,” she said, tapping the Magician’s dildo.
“Is it bad?” Anna felt her throat tighten. She reminded herself again that a make-out session on a rooftop and a grope under the Tilt-A-Whirl did not necessarily constitute the underpinnings of a permanent union.
“I don’t mean to be Debbie Downer, but yeah, probably bad. I’ve been doing this a long time. Get yourself a cat, that’s my advice. Unless he’s taking care of you.” The fortune-teller swept up the cards, giving them a desultory shuffle. She eyed Anna shrewdly. “Is he taking care of you?”
“Is who taking care of you?”
Anna looked up, surprised to see Taj staring down at her, a Zi8 in one hand, corn-on-a-stick in the other.
“Well, there you go,” the fortune-teller said. “You sure you don’t want a real session for another fifteen? I do palmistry, tea leaves, crystal ball, numerology—”
“But that was only four things!” Anna said.
“You really owe yourself a deep reading, hon,” the fortune-teller went on, as though she hadn’t heard. “It usually costs forty-five, but I can tell you’re a good person, and it’s not a good time for you. I’ll do it for thirty, OK? It’s a lot cheaper than a therapist.”
“We have to get back,” Taj said to Anna. The fortune-teller’s face fell back into its default sulk and Anna guiltily stuck two more dollars into her beer stein.
As they made their way back down the midway, Anna wondered exactly how long she’d been gone. There was no sign of the crew at the Bottle Ring Toss or the Puck Shuffle or Down-A-Clown and mos
t of the concession stands had already shuttered. Empty carousel cars swung in the night sky. If earlier the crowd had struck her as gaudy, the few passersby that remained looked as forlorn as figures in an Edward Hopper painting, casting long shadows under the sulfur lights.
“How are you?” said Taj, suddenly taking her hand.
“Sad,” Anna said, feeling happy her hand had been taken.
He squeezed her hand.
“Me, too,” he said. “Want to make a suicide pact?”
“Ha.”
A lone drunk guy being whipped to a puree in the Orbitor howled somewhere above them. Anna wondered whether he would bring up the fifty bucks. Why was being easy so hard?
“Why are you sad?” Anna said.
“Something’s not clicking with the dreams,” Taj said. “Conceptually. Gilman was onto something when he rejected me. He could smell it.”
“I love the dreams.”
Taj shook his head. “It’s stock.”
“No! I had this great idea once, too.” She made a spontaneous decision, plunging into the cloudy waters of unsolicited revelation. “I wanted to write a book about late bloomers. Kind of a compilation of inspiring success stories, you know? But someone else beat me to it. Your dream thing, it’s a great idea and no one else is doing it.”
Taj took this in as he gnawed the last kernels off his corn-on-a-stick.
“What’s funny about that is nobody actually feels inspired reading those stories.”
“Of course they do,” Anna said. “I do.”
“No, you don’t. Just think about it. How does reading those long, glowing profiles in The New Yorker make you feel?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Bad, right? Jealous. Scared. Insecure.”
Anna wasn’t sure, but nodded anyway. Taj’s voice, his knowing tone, felt like a hand at the back of her head, forcing her to nod.
“Know what people really find comforting?” Taj continued, “Failure. Humiliation. Defeat. That’s what makes people feel better.”
“You think so?” she said.
“Think about it. Nothing brings people together like a good scandal. Nothing makes them happier than to see someone fall from a great height. Hell, even a footstool!”
“Well, I guess everyone’s had a bad experience at some point in their lives…”
“Anna, it’s genius.” Taj stopped suddenly, his eyes ablaze with a strange new light. “A humanist angle on humiliation. That’s the missing piece! We are the ninety-nine percent!” He grabbed her and kissed her so hard on the mouth, she didn’t even have time to breathe or to properly parry with her tongue, could only stand there like a wind sock with her arms thrown stupidly behind her back. When she finally opened her eyes, one of the hoodies was there.
“Sixteen!” she said, so surprised she momentarily forgot the unspoken rule that only Lauren and Taj were allowed to call people by their speed-dial number. How long had he been trailing them?
“Hey,” said Sixteen, pretending not to notice the moist ring around their mouths, “We need the keys, dude. We’re locked out.”
Shit, Anna had forgotten she was the only one with keys! They hurried back to the parking lot, where the rest of the crew sat slumped against the van. Seeing her, Lauren said nothing, simply held out her hand with barely suppressed annoyance. She unlocked the back hatch, and Sixteen and Fifteen started loading the camera bags and tripods right away. Anna remembered her phone and pulled it out to check her message. It was a text from Brandon asking about lunch on Friday. She tapped back an assertively lowercase, unpunctuated reply to signal her newfound busyness. When she finished her text, she wandered over to Sasha, who she noticed was emanating a somewhat friendlier vibe.
“Privet!” she called in cheerful Russian. Sasha said nothing, but waved his glowing cigarette in response.
“So did that guy ever fall in love?”
“Sort of,” he said.
He made a motion for her to follow him. Together they walked to the other side of the van. And there was Lamba, asleep on the ground, his face resting between the legs of an enormous Tweety bird.
16
When Anna looked at herself in the mirror the next morning, or more accurately, when she examined just the top of her head, she found herself experiencing a panic that could be described as life-choices dysmorphia. Even though she’d unquestionably moved from “inaction” to “action,” and from “boredom” to “excitement,” hadn’t she also moved from “security” to “insecurity”? Her bank account was dwindling while her gap was growing. When gripped by doubt, she’d taken to rereading a particular e-mail from Mr. Brohaurt, just to remind herself of what things had been like pre-Taj, under the regime of Pinter, Chinski and Harms. She padded out to the kitchen, took a seat in front of the laptop, and moused over to a Gmail folder labeled “Thing.” There was only one thing in the “Thing” folder, a message from Chad Brohaurt. Subject line: Detailed Instructions.
Anna,
Here are your instructions: Start with any of the 4 source files. As I showed you on screen, do the following: Look in the 3rd, 4th, & 5th major column headings: For each “Multi Unit” in column 3, look under “Tenancy.” If there is a number in the last sub-column, headed “MU,” COPY & PASTE that entry into the first table of the target file headed “Theme: Individually Parceled Properties.” Copy & paste it into the middle column labeled “Housing Tenure” IN THE APPROPRIATE PERSPECTIVE based on what is indicated in the 5th column of the source file. Keep working down in each perspective, starting under the last entry. Add more rows for each entry as you need to. Then, copy & paste the “Indicator” from column 1 of the source file into the 3rd column for “… Indicators Addressed.” In the source file, if an entry has a number under “Owner Occupancy” in the sub-column headed “H,” COPY & PASTE that entry into the SECOND (last) table of target file headed “Theme: Co-op and Condo.” When you’ve finished one source file, move on to the next until you’ve done them all.
I hope this clears things up.
Cheers,
Chad
She read the message three times, pressing on past the point where it froze her brain, smote her individuality, bored her to the brink of suicide. When even that process failed to Reposition her Disposition, she called Leslie.
“He made me stop and look at this woman with him,” Anna said, dismally aware of exactly how whiny this sounded. “He wanted me to agree she was hot.”
“Did you consider that as a filmmaker, that might just be how he processes experience?” Leslie was deploying her maddeningly calm “mom” voice. “Through an aesthetic lens?”
“But I want to be the pretty one.”
“Maybe you are.”
“He never told me I was.”
“It’s a lot easier to say something like that in abstract about a stranger, behind their back, than to someone you care about, to their face.”
“He doesn’t care about me.”
“Why do you always think that?”
“And I’m not pretty. I’m fat.”
“Don’t you think this is more about your own insecurities? If you actually thought you were pretty, you wouldn’t care about that girl.”
“No, I would,” she said. “I would totally care!”
This is how Anna ended up accompanying Leslie to her hot yoga class. Leslie thought it would be good for her to “engage in a physical discourse with her self-image.” Anna, having nothing better to do that night, agreed. She took the Q express train to Herald Square and met Leslie outside the Chakra Shack in midtown. The powerful smell of foot hit her halfway up the stairs. It was so humid you could have grown mushrooms on the landing. Leslie met up with her on line at the front desk.
“So what did you bring to wear?” she asked, giving Anna a quick scan.
“This,” Anna said, indicating her sweats, T-shirt. “Nothing.”
Leslie looked at her, alarmed. “You’re going to die. It’s a hundred and five degrees in there.”
There was no w
ay Anna was going to wear one of those kiwi-size stretch bikinis.
“I’ll be fine.” She smiled at Leslie. “I like it hot.” At this Leslie raised both eyebrows but said nothing. The guy in line ahead of them was taking forever.
“Do you want to work for money or for yoga?” she could hear the receptionist asking.
“Uh, I want to work for yoga, for money.”
“I mean, do you want to trade hours for free yoga?”
“What if I just trade hours for money, and then money for yoga?”
This exchange went on for five more minutes, and when at last they reached the desk, Anna bought a coconut water and a tube of electrolytes to go along with her mat and towel rental. Her introductory class was free, so why not splurge? They made their way to the changing room, which was tastefully decorated in bamboo and stone tile. Leslie peeled off her clothes with a professional ease, revealing a body unmarred save for a few stretch marks and a cesarean scar. Of the two of them, Leslie had always been the prettier one. But recently Anna had noticed time was carving a pair of parentheses on either side of her nose, as though her face were whispering, Psst! By the way, I also have a mouth. Looking at Leslie now, Anna felt she had a chance of catching up.
She waited on the bench, observing the bitter trade-off between boobs and body fat enacted in live flesh all around her. Sure, their bellies and thighs were flat as Pyrex pans, their faces chiseled into bas relief, their bodies offering no resistance to the superior tailoring demands of spandex, but undressed didn’t they look a bit, well, mannish? Last she checked, men still enjoyed a nice rack and a serious backside, Anna thought with no small satisfaction. Leslie was right to bring her here—yoga was already doing wonders for her self-esteem.
“—because when I have sex, there tends to be a lot of, you know, clenching,” one of the women was saying.
