The Hour Between Certainties

I don't believe in any of this, and I was there. Both things are true and I've quit trying to make them shake hands.

It was the tail end of August, a Tuesday, on the two-lane between where I'd failed to be by thirty-nine and where I was expected Monday morning. I know that road. I want that on the record, because everything else in this account is deniable: I have driven that road in rain, in tule fog, at 2 a.m. with a dying alternator, and there is nothing on it. A gas station that closed when I was in high school. A seed elevator. Forty minutes of dark with a radio preacher underneath it like floorboards.

For six years I had been rehearsing something on that road. Out loud, some nights, to the rearview mirror, which never once invested. I'd gotten good at the rehearsing. That's the humiliating part, how good you can get at the rehearsing.

The lights came up on the left where the seed elevator should have been. Not headlights. Fair lights, strings of them, gold, sitting low on the horizon the way lights sit on water. My first thought, my honest first thought, was heat lightning. In August. At night, holding still. Which tells you what a mind will reach for before it reaches for a midway.

There was a gate. Grass parking with dew on it and no other cars, and then, when I looked again, some other cars, the way there are always some other cars. I turned in. I'd like to tell you I remember deciding to.

You could hear it before you could see the end of it. Canvas doing its slow breathing, a generator that might have been crickets, a calliope playing something I knew every word to and have not been able to find since, and I've looked, I've called two record stores and described a melody to strangers like a crazy person. Kettle corn. Rain that hadn't started yet. A man at the gate in a red jacket took nothing from me and stamped the back of my hand with a little blue door.

"Last attraction's at the far end," he said, as if I'd asked. "Booth one's free."

I need to be careful describing the midway itself, because this is the part I still test myself on at two in the morning. It was not strange. That's what was strange. No two-headed anything, no mirror maze, none of the upholstery you'd order from a catalog if you were building a haunted carnival. Plainest, kindest midway you ever saw. Six games on the left, food wagons on the right, and every game was one I could have sworn I'd played before, the way places in dreams are places you know. What was off was smaller than all that. The barkers didn't bark. A real barker calls to everyone; it's volume, it's math. These called one person at a time, and not by name. By cargo.

The one at Booth One looked at me maybe two seconds and said, "Six years is a long time to rehearse, friend. Ring the bell and I'll believe you."

I played. Don't ask me why that worked on me; it worked on me the way it works on everyone, is my guess now. The games were ordinary, and that's what I need you to understand, because it's where the whole thing gets you. A ring toss, regulation in every particular, except one bottle in the back row would not take a ring. Not off a bounce, not dead-on, not when the man ran out of patience with my throwing and set a ring down over it by hand. It slid off like water. He watched me watch that. "Some answers won't hold a ring," he said, and gave me my plate anyway. A strength hammer that didn't care about strength; whatever I did with it, the slot fed out the same card, machine-printed, the ink still warm: A FINDING IS TRUE WHENEVER IT IS SAID. It meant nothing to me then. I have it memorized now the way you memorize a phone number you never wrote down in time.

By the sixth booth I had a pocketful of little tin plates, one per game. Nobody was at the sixth booth. A stamp on a chain, a shelf, and a voice from somewhere back in the dark of it, one I'd hear again before morning, though I didn't clock that then. It told me to stamp the last plate myself, so I did, and a number came up in the tin. I asked what the number was for.

"Depends how far you get," the voice said. "Go on. The questions know you're coming."

The questions were a corridor of eight stalls, lit like confessionals, if a confessional could be friendly about it. In each one a card, a pencil stub, a slot. I won't walk you through all eight. They were not clever, and that's the terror of them. What is it. Who is it for. What breaks if it never exists. Questions a bright twelve-year-old asks you at dinner, and I sat in stall four shaking like the pencil owed me money. Six years of rehearsal, and the plain questions took me apart like a watch. Somewhere between five and eight they put me back in a different order. Not better, necessarily. An order where I could find the ticking.

Then the strip just ended, the way a hallway ends in a dream, and there was a rope line with nobody in it, and somebody standing at the rope the way lighthouse keepers stand at rails, and behind the rope, in a building too big to be behind anything, the Factory.

Here's the thing I'd tell you even if you stopped reading now: I'd heard of it. So have you. Maybe not the name. But the machine that makes the impossible thing real if you can just say the thing plainly, you've heard of that your whole life. It's the shiver when somebody asks so what's your idea? and your mouth opens and the safe words come out instead. That shiver is about something, and the something was sitting at the end of a rope line, brass, patient, one door in and one door out, quieter than a church, with dawn leaking under the far door like light under a bedroom door when someone's up before you.

The Keeper looked at the blue door on my hand, and the plates, and then at me, longer than either. The voice from the sixth booth. I told you I'd hear it again.

"You can sit and hear the tales," the Keeper said. "Most do. Or go to the plate. The line behind you is longer than it looks, but it's a patient line."

I sat. I heard the tales. The maker, the freight, the painter, the four-dollar auction; the welder, the Reviser, the Borrower, Cora. If you've read them you know them, but hearing them at the far end of that midway at that hour is a different thing, because the Keeper keeps looking at you the whole time. Filing you. Somewhere in the drawer of the gone-before there's a card with my number on it, and I could feel it being written, in pencil.

Then there was no more sitting to do.

The plate is about the height of a lectern. The brass over it says the four words. The lever hangs on the right, and the grip is hickory, and it's worn glossy. I stood there long enough to understand what the gloss was. It isn't pulling that wears a grip like that; a pull is half a second. It's the hands that rest there, deciding. Years of deciding, oiled into the wood. That detail is the one I'd keep if I could keep only one, and it's the one that makes me sure I was there, because I couldn't have invented it, I'm not that good, I've had six years of evidence that I'm not that good.

I took out what I was carrying.

No. Not that part. I've been forthcoming to a fault in this account and here's where it stops, and not because I'm ashamed of the sentence, and not because it's a secret. The Keeper said one thing to me at the rope, and I understood it immediately and I'm passing it to you whole: don't tell anyone the sentence before you pull. After, it belongs to the world, shout it off a roof if you want. Before, it's the only thing you own.

So the sentence is mine. The space where it should be is yours.

I wrote it. I read it once. It was not the best version of it, and I heard the Reviser's tale again in the Keeper's voice, and I did not read it twice.

I pulled.

I'll do a poor job with what happened next; everybody does a poor job with the middle of their own hinge. The machine didn't roar. The lights didn't dim. A midway's worth of gold string lights held perfectly steady while the largest thing in my life happened, which struck me as rude, and correct. There was a long quiet with gears in it somewhere. And under the gears, and I will swear this on the road itself, a ticking. Close, unhurried. Like a watch held to your ear by somebody who loves you.

And a subtraction. That's the only word I've found that holds it. Something went out of me that had weight but no contents, a full suitcase that turns out to be packed with tissue paper, and the tales had told me exactly who it was, so I stood there and waited to grieve him. Out of respect. Six years we'd driven that road together, him talking me out of it at the seed elevator, every single time, reasonable as a pharmacist.

I couldn't find the grief. I've looked since. There's a smooth place where he used to be. Like the grip.

The far door opened on actual weather.

It came out. The whole animal, head to hoof, mine, built to the one sentence I finally said. No larger than what I said, no smaller, no kinder to my vanity, and it looked at me the way a called thing looks at its caller. I'm not going to try to write that look. That look is the wages, and wages are between you and the machine.

The Keeper put the bridle in my hand and said what I now know gets said to everyone, and it loses nothing that way: "The door is the last part of the machine."

I led it out. Weather, grass, my own dumb car sitting in ordinary sunrise with a parking ticket's worth of dew on the windshield. And when I turned around, and I want to be exact here, because this is where these stories always go soft: there was not nothing behind me. There was a fairground. Empty field, mowed strips, post holes, one string of dead bulbs down in the grass. It looked like a place a midway had left years ago. My shoes were still wet from crossing it lit.

The stamp was gone off my hand by the time I got home. The tin plates were still in my pocket. The numbered one sits on my desk, and people pick it up and ask what it's from, and I say a fair, which is true, and they put it down, because a little tin plate is nothing. Unless you know.

One more thing, and I put it here because there's nowhere else for it. The car radio was tuned to an AM station I have no memory of ever choosing, gospel and grain reports, and it's still tuned there. I've left it. I couldn't tell you why.

The animal's in the world now. Out in daylight, in weather, being used by strangers, stumbling some days and standing back up, and it doesn't miss me, which is how I know it's real. People ask how I finally did it after six years, and I give them a version with no midway in it, where the word decided does all the lifting. They nod. It's the shape they ordered. And it's true, by the card's arithmetic; a finding is true whenever it is said. It just isn't whole.

But you asked, and you've read this far, at whatever your own hour turns out to be. So here's the true shape, and then I'm done.

There's a road you know, and you're wrong about it. There's an hour when the lights come up on the left. Booth one is free, the questions are plain and they already know you're coming, and at the far end there's a hickory grip wearing glossy under the hands of everyone who stood where you're going to stand, deciding what you're going to decide. The brass above it says four words. I'd tell you to hurry, but the place runs on the carrying, so take your time. It'll find the road you're on...

Call it, then pull.

Here ends the third story.