I will bring this down.
The Assassin turns and walks past the Cascades, each towering plume of water a different color of the rainbow, then takes a seat on the wall of the Fountain of Abundance to wait.
The Kodak fiends are hiding them in their wicker baskets. Or shoeboxes, if less prepared. Word has gone out about the extra charge at the gate, a squad of sharp-eyed boys collecting fifty cents per camera, but with so many visitors blithely carrying their own food onto the grounds for bench picnics it only makes sense to smuggle your Brownie or Bull’s-Eye past them. Harry sees the devices everywhere, pulled out to snap the family grouping in front of one of the Exposition juggernauts or immortalize a comrade with his arm around some Midway exotic or a sweetheart precariously astride a dromedary’s back, then quickly nestled back into their hiding places. There is no hiding Mr. Edison’s apparatus of course, and immediately upon hauling it from the gondola Daddy Paley is surrounded by shutter bugs and small boys wanting to examine it. Ensconced in Luchow’s Nurnberg restaurant with the machine at his feet, a platter of steaming wursts and a nickel draught before him, he gives Harry leave to explore until the President comes at noon.
“Find us some good views,” he says, flicking excess foam off the beer with a finger. “But I don’t want to lug this thing up any stairs.”
The mirror maze at Dreamland is no good, of course, not enough light and the problem of seeing the camera itself in reflection. Sig Lubin’s Cineograph parlor is next door, peddling their copycat views and counterpart boxing dodges, a bold venture considering Lubin himself has fled Philadelphia for foreign climes, avoiding indictment for patent infringement. Or perhaps he is only hiding out in the Gypsy Camp or the Streets of Mexico or sweltering with the sled dogs in the Esquimaux Village. Their own Mutoscope parlor is doing lackluster business so far, what with a live Fatima undulating her torso only one door over in the Cairo Bazaar.
Even here, in the mildly salacious Midway, there are twice as many women as men. Young and old, rich and relatively modest of means, in pairs and groups, a few dowagers squired about on wicker-seated roller chairs, women with picture hats and rented parasols strolling, observing, judging. “The American Girl,” as the periodicals like to label her, is here in abundance, and Harry can’t help but think of the fun it would be for Brigid and her sisters to do the Pan. He casts a professional eye up at the Aero-Cycle, a kind of giant teeter-totter with a revolving wheel full of screaming enthusiasts at either end. Perhaps a view from a distance, then the dizzied, excited passengers dismounting — but to film on the ride itself seems pointless, too many axes of motion for a viewer to keep a handle on. Those roller chairs, though — remove the old biddy and replace her with a camera operator, the device rigged just above his lap somehow, with a trained man to push him, and they could approximate a long moving shot on land similar to what they just filmed on the Canal—
Something to consider. Harry hurries under the wildly swinging armature and pays fifty cents for a Trip to the Moon.
Several dozen spectators gather in the darkened Theater of the Planets, their guide, a basso-voiced gentleman with riding goggles perched on his forehead, lit dramatically from below while the screen behind him glows with the whorls of the Milky Way.
“We are about to embark on a journey,” he intones, “to a landscape on which no human foot has ever trod.”
At least not since the last twenty-minute tour, thinks Harry, as they are led into the Airship Luna by the crew members. It is a beautifully designed fantasy, with multiple wings and propellers and large open portholes to see out from.
“Please steady yourselves, ladies and gentlemen,” suggests the guide, wearing a fancifully adorned football helmet and with his goggles pulled down over his eyes now. “We have some inclement weather reported over the Buffalo area this evening.”
It is not evening outside, of course, but as the wings begin to flap madly and the body of the Airship tilts and shakes, rear propeller buzzing as it picks up speed, what they see below them outside the wind-blasted portholes is the Pan-American Exposition at night, lit up in all its electric glory, surrounded by the city of Buffalo and yes, that must be it—
“Those are the Niagara Falls down to your left, ladies and gentlemen,” announces their guide from his pilot’s seat. “One of the Great Wonders of our own dear Earth, to which we bid a fond adieu—” and here a sudden swift upwrenching that causes the ladies to gasp and grab out for their men, Harry with a sudden pang, missing her here, his Brigid, not so much on this Midway as anywhere on the grounds, pointing things out to her, listening to her beautiful laugh, sitting quietly, perhaps, in the Botanical Gardens, floating in a gondola with his hand in hers—
“We’re going to fall!” cries the matron sitting beside him, hugging her bag tightly to her chest. “We’re going to fall and smash to the ground!”
“Mind yourselves, fellow adventurers, we’re passing through a storm!”
And a storm it is, the wind moaning past, a cloud bank enveloping the Luna, lightning flashes and the boom of present thunder, even a few drops of precipitation whipping in through the portholes and then—
The passengers sigh as one. Through the front panel, beyond the guide at his controls, the full moon sits like a giant pearl in the suddenly clear night sky, sparkling stars beyond it.
“There she is, dead ahead,” calls out the guide. “Our destination, ladies and gentlemen. The Queen of the Heavens.”
It grows larger and larger as they approach, a wonderful illusion, thinks Harry, looking around at the delighted, awe-stricken faces of his fellow passengers. Méliès knew it from the beginning — the viewer will soon tire of what he can already see, with all its color and immediacy, in the world. Even our actualities with the original fighters instead of Lubin’s counterparts, our rushing trains and fire wagons, our scenes of exotic or everyday wonder, are illusions, are a series of still photographs, devoid of color, flashed rapidly on a screen to fool the human eye. But treat that eye to something that could never exist—
The light in front of them grows blindingly white as the moon’s surface fills the panel.