I parked the bike between a DeSoto and a Studebaker, and as Edwin and I began to walk straight ahead toward the invisible rides, my mind plunged and burst with memories. To the right of the parking lot, past the shady picnic grounds and across a black road with a double yellow line in the center, lay the curving beach itself. We had never gone swimming there, since a day at White Beach was barely long enough for only the rides, but we had picnicked under those trees, listening to the nearby noises of the invisible amusement park and the less interesting shouts from the beach, mere static to the park’s music. Indeed the name “White Beach” summoned up neither whiteness nor sand but bright yellows and reds and the plunge of a roller coaster, the bursting open of spookhouse doors. Edwin and I walked on. That, incidentally, is the kind of unspecific sentence that used to make Edwin gnash his teeth or giggle when he came across one in a book: “Time passed,” “she said,” “he killed the Indian,” “they walked on.” But the modest biographer on his humble slope cannot aspire to the heights of fiction; Edwin and I walked on. The parking lot with its gleaming cars passed gradually into a miniature forest, and as we came out of the trees I stopped in confusion.
We were standing at the edge of a wide dusty space, like a vast abandoned parking lot, on which a number of odd-shaped structures were scattered about. On our left stood a long low windowless building painted dull red and attached to a row of black posts by means of a long narrow roof. On our right stood a white many-sided structure that seemed to be composed of garage doors with rows of little high windows and a low, cone-shaped roof. Some half-dozen other buildings, mostly white, spread themselves to the tree-fringed distance. A few people were strolling about in the bright summer light, wives and husbands arm in arm, an occasional little boy, all of them kicking up clouds of dust, peeping in windows, peering under doors, pointing — haunting the place, I couldn’t help thinking; and for a second I thought: I have fallen asleep on a bright white beach beside some distant ocean, and this is my sad, sad dream. “Where the devil are we?” I exclaimed roughly. Edwin, sniffing allergically and pointing a languid finger, said: “Isn’t that the merry-go-round?” And as he pointed I recognized the small white many-sided structure with its cone-shaped roof. And suddenly I recognized in the dull red building with its row of posts the vast bright arcade that we had always passed through first on our way to the bigger rides, an arcade that once had contained a shooting gallery with its row of chained rifles and its dipping ducks, a dart-and-balloon booth with shelves of shining radios and tall stuffed animals (and the invisible shelf under the counter that contained the only prizes we ever won, the glass ashtrays, the painted fans, the straw tubes that trapped inserted fingers), a stand where pink spun sugar whirled in a circular vat and collected magically on paper cones to form cotton candy, and at the very end, which my memory had imagined to be blocks away, the spookhouse itself with its two sets of swinging doors and its painted ghost. Even at the age of eight I had known that White Beach was a small amusement park, yet in the summer of 1953 I was stunned, stunned I say, to see the long arcade of my childhood shrink to a dwarfish old age. I glanced at Edwin. His eyes were squeezed shut as his mouth opened for a sneeze. Hiding my disappointment, I hurried across the hard ground toward the old merry-go-round; under a blazing sun the points of my polished shoes kicked up little mushroom clouds of dust. I was just tall enough to see through a dusty pane. In semi-darkness, on the motionless round platform, the painted horses stood frozen, their hooves raised, their heads lifted or jerked to one side. I turned back to the blinding light. Edwin, coming up beside me, glanced into a window and quickly glanced away. His eyes tightened to lines; he sneezed. “Let’s go,” he said. “My handkerchief is soaked. My allergy is killing me. I have a terrible headache.” In the bright light his pale face and neck seemed almost white against his dark hair and dark zippered jacket, as if he were a black-and-white photograph, slightly overexposed. In one hand he held a sopping handkerchief; behind his flashing lenses his eyes gleamed with an unpleasant moistness. Altogether he did not resemble one’s notion of the youthful American writer. “Yes yes,” I said, “in two seconds,” and hurried across to the little arcade. Edwin followed. At the end where the spookhouse used to be, two boys were lying on their stomachs and peeping under the wide locked door; an old man wearing a gray uniform chased them away. “Ourselves,” I murmured. “What?” said Edwin. “Forget it,” I said, remembering how he and I had once dreamed of being inside that black scream-filled chamber and suddenly turning on a powerful overhead light, revealing what we imagined to be a vast clutter of tracks and cars, and astonished people staring open-mouthed at walls filled with cages, niches, statues, skeletons, levers, gearwheels, treasures. As we passed the lowered, locked door — but where were the swinging doors, the outer tracks, the operator’s booth? — Edwin said: “Forget what? Say” (turning to the old man in gray) “wasn’t there a roller coaster around here somewhere?” The old man eyed Edwin suspiciously, and turning to me said: “Ain’t nothin’ but a motor there now, son. Back o’ them trees there, over thataway.” He was what Edwin called a living cartoon. Thanking him in appropriate cartoon fashion (“Thanks, mister”), I hastened around the corner of the building, followed by sniffling Edwin. Here the hard sand began to sprout clumps of grass and occasional clusters of bushes and trees; some hundred feet away a strip of tall grass banked a narrow creek, an inlet of the sound; across the water lay a flat grassy waste containing a row of spherical white oil tanks and two tall radio towers rising crisscross in the rich blue sky; and on the hazy horizon, where the sky looked bleached, the stalks of distant smokestacks blossomed in white. “Edwin!” I cried, “don’t you remember!”—for my memory had preserved the little creek as a vast lake, toward which the roller coaster plunged on its most fearsome dip. Behind a cluster of tall bushes stood all that remained of that towering nightmare of tracks and screams: a peeling shed with broken windows, housing four-foot-high black generators with sinister corrugations. A little sign read: DANGER ELEC. “To think,” I said, turning to Edwin, “that”—but he was twenty feet away, walking off with his white handkerchief hanging from his fist. Reflecting once again upon the coldness and aloofness of the creative temperament, I resolved to leave my friend to himself and pursue my own investigations. I walked toward the building whose arcade was invisible and whose irregular concrete back was now facing me; a number of high windows, all broken, held fragments of glass shaped like puzzle pieces. The windows were all above my head. Grasping the concrete ledge of one, I pulled myself up and stared. At what? At a wooden partition, against which leaned a bicycle with rusty handlebars. I dropped down and tried a window on another side: only the wooden partition, striped with light and shadow. I dropped down. My palms were stinging; here and there the flesh was torn. Below my hands I saw my broken shadow, stretching along the ground and standing up suddenly against the concrete wall. With a kind of feverish melancholy I abandoned the spookhouse windows, and in the dazzle of a perfect day, as I walked to the front in search of Edwin, it seemed to me that he and I were nothing but a couple of spookhouse skeletons, surprised by light. Through the perspective of the archway I saw him, framed in a polygon of light, seated with his back to me at the edge of a concrete basin. Again I walked along the shady archway, and as I stepped through the polygon into the sun I saw that the basin was about two feet deep and fifty feet long, shaped like the state of Nevada. Weeds pushed through the cracked concrete floor and in one corner a small tree was growing; crumpled cigarette packs, popsicle wrappers, wooden ice-cream spoons, bottlecaps, smashed soda bottles lay scattered about. Edwin sat with his right leg dangling over the side and his left foot resting on the edge, his left knee raised; his left elbow rested on the knee, and his left fist leaned against the side of his tilted head. I walked up behind him and was about to address him when suddenly, as I watched, bright green water rose from the weedgrown floor and filled the concrete basin, long wooden dividers formed a maze, red motorboats with white steering wheels rode into the shining distance along green avenues that trembled with spots of yellow light, while at the dock under the shadow of a wooden roof Edwin and I watched the waiting boats, vast at our toes, knocking up against the sides in the greenblackness of the shadowed water. With one hand resting on top of his pole, a man in a t-shirt waited for us to get in. It was too late to turn back because of the line behind us and Mr. and Mrs. Mullhouse watching with little Karen from behind the rail. As we stepped down onto a rocking sputtering floor we noticed a thin trembling coat of water, our boat had a leak, we were going to drown in the dirty green water that was fifty feet deep but already the pole had given us a push, already we were set afloat, already we were entering a dark tunnel, we were going higher and higher, pressed back in our seats we gripped the bar with aching fists and climbed steadily up in blackness until at last, at last, a glimmer of gray in the distance, oh hold on tight, a twist to the left and the bright sky blinding us as unbelievably we still climbed up and up, staring fiercely at our red-spotted white knuckles that seemed to be bursting through the skin, pretending we were anywhere else but miles in the sky, knowing it was death to look but looking anyway at the hideous tracks, the little red motorboats, the field at the edge of the crystal water, and as the track leveled out a scream came from the car in front of us, a girl’s hair streamed, for an instant we were poised at the top of a tall dream waiting for the fall, then our shirts billowed out behind us and in the clattering rattle we clenched our teeth as through the spaces in the tracks, faster and faster the ground rushed up to meet us until we saw with the distinctness of a photograph three tall blades of grass sticking up through the bottommost tracks, and as we crashed into the ground the doors burst open and we entered a house of screams, jerking along on a crazy track where luminous skeletons rose in their cages till strings brushed our faces and we burst through the doors into the sky, leaning over the side and watching the shadow of our plane flying under us in a long slow circle, floating along smooth grass, rippling over a bench, passing like a black ghost among the bright crowded mall aflower with pink cotton candy and yellow and red balloons, standing suddenly upright against the side of a ticket booth, again floating along smooth grass, rippling over a bench, passing among the crowd as a child begins to scream and faces turn upward to watch a red balloon rise lazily over the spookhouse roof into the bright blue air, growing smaller and smaller above its dangling white string until it becomes a bright red spot in the sky, and as we come to a rocking stop at the top of a towering wheel oh see below the manikin faces, the dollhouse roofs, the diorama trees, the shining mirror of the motorboat pool, the blue line of the creek, the distant fields, the white oil tanks, the crisscross towers, the line of factory smokestacks blooming, and as we float slowly down, an odor of mustard and sauerkraut mingles with the taste of pistachio ice cream in a sugar cone, carousel music rides in bright circles as brass shells pop from cocked rifles, red tickets stream as all the colors of a summer afternoon glow like a glossy postcard, shimmer in memory like a color transparency projected in darkness onto a sparkling white screen. And as the lights went on, there was Edwin, sitting at the edge of a shrunken weedgrown basin, his hair rumpled, his skinny wrist sticking out of his jacket sleeve, and pierced by memory I cursed the blue day, as now again, seated in lamplight, shut in a heated room, I curse the unending night. “Edwin!” I cried, “a penny for your thoughts!” Whirling, as if he had not known I was standing behind him, he looked up through his dusty lenses with a frown, and wiping his nostrils, reddened by allergic discharges, he said testily: “Can’t we go now? I have a splitting headache.” You were always so cunning, Edwin.