Merry-Go-Round, Never Broke Down
“Come on, hurry up!” your daughter yells, tugging desperately at your hand. “I want to ride the merry-go-round!”
“I know, I know. Stop pulling” you say to her – dragging yourself along on tired, aching legs. “We’re going, calm down!”
“But they’re closing soon,” she pleads. “We have to get there before they stop!”
Happy that the day is finally coming to an end, you figure one last ride can’t hurt. Right? Besides, it’s only the merry-go-round. This is the easy one. Not like the nauseating tilt-a-whirl, the rickety roller coaster, or the demonic, gut-wrenching pirate ship. No, this will be nice and relaxing to finish off the day.
As you’re led along past the countless parents, crying children, and loitering teens, the big domed pavilion housing the carousel looms over the center of the park. You hear the calliope music penetrating through the crowds; the sound mixing with the smell of popcorn, cotton candy, and the bright flashing lights. All of them assault your eyes and senses – all add to the carnival-like atmosphere of the small amusement park.
“Last call,” yells the ticket-taker over a loudspeaker.
“Come on!” your daughter cries again. This time her yank hurts, making you wince in pain.
She leads you towards the Fast-Track lane to the left of the main queue.
Glad you paid that extra five bucks now, aren’t you?
The doe-eyed ticket collector looks at your arm band and waves you on through. The carousel slows, the poled horses stop cranking just as the machine grinds to a halt. The happy music continues to pump out of the decorative band-machine within the middle of the contraption.
“Yay!” your daughter yells with delight, hopping onto the wooden platform. “We made it just in time.”
You follow her onboard and towards two open horses near the inner potion of the ride. The beating of the base drum, the crashing of the cymbals, the rolling of the snares, and the piping organ echo about the canopy – making it hard to think let alone communicate. The festive music compliments both the corniness and the timelessness of this old ride.
“This one, this one’s open. I want this one!” she jumps up and down, pointing to one of the poled horses. You help her hop up upon the saddle of the ornamental animal, all the while observing at the detail applied to the ancient fixture. “Right there, right there – get on,” she demands, indicating the open horse for you just next to hers.
Hoping to have enjoyed the ride from on one of the non-moving benches, you comply with her wish with a shrug, hulling your aching bones up onto the horse and tightly grabbing hold of the thick brass pole. You look about at the old carousel. Acrylic paintings surrounding the top of the machine depict all types of circus animals – elephants balancing on balls, lions jumping through rings of fire, bears riding tricycles, monkeys dancing. You marvel at the skill applied by the hands of some long-gone artist.
In the center area of the ride, the non-moving portion, you spy the band-machine, playing the calliope tunes from punch-paper fed rolls. It sort-of reminds you of a player piano in one of those old western movies. A flywheel at the top of the machine turns the floppy, dried-out belts and greasy gears – pumping the drums, crashing the cymbals, and keying-up the registers on the organ’s pipes and bells.
Wurlitzer 146-B Automatic Band Machine – North Towanda, NY – 1924, the name plate reads.
Glancing to your right, you see a little girl and her mother sitting on the horses next to you. The little girl stares at you with blank expressionless eyes. You smile at her, but she doesn’t respond – she simply leans her head against the pole. Poor little thing, you think. She’s so tired but must get in this one last ride. Then you peer over at her mother. She has the same worn look on her face. She cocks a small friendly smile your way and tries to say something, but stops before uttering a word. To your left and just behind your daughter, is a young teenage couple, sitting hand in hand on one of the motionless coaches – the one you wish you were occupying this very moment. They’re holding hands and staring at each other, yet they aren’t smiling, as one would expect of a couple in love.
Your attention on the young lovers is broken by the carousel operator. He walks up over the platform, past you and your daughter and the other patrons, then steps down in the middle near the control lever. He’s an old man with white hair and a big belly bulging through a dirty, worn-out blue work shirt. Seriously, by the looks of this guy I would say he’s even older than the carousel, you think to yourself. He glances up at you with cold eyes, as if he heard your thoughts. Then, without a word, he pulls on the lever engaging the transmission. The great machine groans and slowly starts moving. Your daughter screams and laughs in delight as the horses start cranking up and down with the accelerating platform. The pulsating hiss of compressed air joins in with the music as you roll about the circle.
“Here we go! Here we go!” she shouts happily.
You smile as the cool breeze generated by the turning carousel swirls up through the canopy. The smell of carnival food, together with the sounds of your daughter’s joy make you feel like a child yourself once again. Closing your eyes, you absorb the motion of the old ride swinging you around and around with the music – the way it has for generation upon generation.
Half expecting the acceleration to stop, you notice that the carousel continues to move faster and faster. The music becomes more rapid, louder, distorted. You feel the beat of the base drum in your chest and the whistling of the pipes echoing through your mind, like some distant memory. Opening your eyes, you get a weird feeling; like you no longer have a sense of time – a feeling that you don’t know how long you’ve been riding. The outside world seems to slip away. Your daughter shrieks in joy beside you.
But something is changing.
Something on the ride is different. Things start to move around you in abnormal ways. The park outside becomes a blur, then dark, then invisible. Looking up to the paintings above you – the animals – the animals begin to trot and swing about. They dance hypnotically to the pulsating music. Lions are jumping through hoops. Elephants are balancing on one leg atop balls. Bears wearing little fez hats are riding tricycles about in rhythmic figure-eight patterns.
Your daughter laughs manically with pleasure. The carousel moves faster, the horses crank up and down – their heads kick around and they whinny and snort.
Feeling as though you’re hallucinating you look over to the other people on the ride. They are staring back at you. Their eyes are sunken into their heads. Their hair is long, dirty and matted. Their skin is pale and dusty. The little girl on your right – the one with the blank expression…she is old, far older than you. Her back is hunched over at an impossible angle, her shoulders are resting upon the pole, her mouth hangs agape, reveling missing teeth. Her mother beside her is nothing more than a shrunken mass of a skeleton. With another climbing motion of the horse, her bones crumble and fall to platform floor – dust rising as they pile like dry-rotted kindling.
Your daughter laughs. “Faster! Faster!” she yells, “How fast do you think we can go? Just how fast can it go?”
You try to focus as the carousel screams around its circular track – the Wurlitzer pounding the hokey tunes. The ornamental horses’ legs begin to march – hooves beating against the wooden boards in step with the bass drum, like some horrible march towards a wasteland eternity.
Looking past your daughter you see the teenage couple, still hand in hand, but now no longer gazing at each other. Instead, their stares are trained directly towards you. They are pointing and laughing hideously at you. Their eyes, bulging and inhuman, have become red and white swirls, spiraling circularly towards vacant pupils.
Jerking your head away from the terrible sight, you try to let go but can’t – your hands are welded to the brass pole. You cannot move – your whole body is fused to the ceramic horse. Feeling that you are going to be sick, you begin to wonder just how long you’ve been on this ride.
Hours? Months? Years?
You look back to the grotesque little being to your right – she is raising a bony hand towards you, mouthing something but no sound escaping her dusty jaws. Even if it could, it would never drown out the insane music. She tries to lean towards you but instead falls off the horse, crashing to the ground in a heap of dust and rags – just like her mother only moments before.
Was it only moments before? Or was it decades, or centuries in the past?
The merry music keeps playing, the carousel keeps turning.
Looking back up you see all the other riders reaching out to you, pleading for help. But you can’t help them – you can’t even help yourself. You are stuck on the ride, like a mouse on a glue-trap. You make eye-contact again with the operator – he is grinning a wide toothless smile towards you. His eyes too have become like the teenagers – bulging red and white and swirling wildly. They momentarily enthrall you in a hypnotic trance, but you break free with all your strength.
The top of the carousel pavilion has disappeared into a swirling vortex of black clouds – funneling so far into the sky you can’t tell where the ride ends and forever begins. You fear that any moment that you, your daughter, and the whole lot of riders will be sucked up into the heavens above.
Or is it Hell above?
Part of you wants it to happen.
Your daughter again screams out in delight. “Giddy-up! Giddy-up!” she yells to her horse, slapping in across the back. The horse whinnies and its legs kick out in rapid running motions, all the while as it moves up and down along its pole.
You feel you can no longer hold on – you feel the darkness creeping towards you. The cyclonic motion of the carousel is sucking the very life out of your body. But just when the last bit of energy is taken from you. Just when you are about to give up and lean against the brass pole and sleep, the carousel begins to slow. You feel the drive-shaft release and the platform begins to coast in free motion. Then the brake is applied and the machine slowly slides to a smooth stop – the Wurlitzer playing its tunes all along.
You take a deep breath. You try to remove yourself from the horse but can’t – you’re too weak to move a muscle. All you can do is lean your forehead against the cold brass pole in front of you and take deep breaths.
“Again, again,” your daughter yells out from beside you. You want to say ‘no’. You want to say that you must go now while the ride is stopped, but you have no strength – no ability to do any of the sorts.
Slowly turning your head, you see a father and son step forth to the two open horses next to you – those which the ancient mother and daughter had just fallen from. They move up and he lifts the boy onto the horse directly beside you, stepping on piles of rags and bones that were once a little girl and an adult woman – he doesn’t seem to notice.
The little boy bounces up and down in anticipation, as his father takes the horse beside him. The boy turns, looking at you. He waves and smiles, but you can’t wave back, you can’t do anything except stare blankly back at him.
The operator slowly shuffles back across the platform, turning and twisting to avoid bumping his big belly against the horses and poles. Momentarily making eye contact with him, you see his eyes are normal once again; you see the regret in them, the sorrow, the age. He quickly looks away and steps down to the controls. Yanking the great lever, he puts the carousel back in gear and the ride lurches forward. The band machine switches music rolls and a new march begins to play.
“Yay,” yells the little boy beside you.
His father laughs at his son’s enthusiasm. “Yay, here we go buddy.”
You can no longer look at them.
The snare drums crack and the organs pipe up as the eternal machine again picks up speed.
Round and round we go…Where we – No – When we stop, nobody knows.
Beside you, your daughter screams out in joy. But it’s different, something has changed – her voice is no longer the same. It’s deeper, raspy, more mature.
You turn your head and look to her. You make eye contact with your daughter – your little girl. But the face looking back to you is no longer the child you once knew – the wild eyes, the long silky hair, the soft innocent skin. No, the face looking back to you is that of a mirror – that of a person as old as you were when the two of you first boarded the ride.
Twenty-seven years ago.
And the bass drum continues to beat, the cymbals crash, and the organ pipes out a happy festive tune. The way it has since your daughter was young, since you were young, since the previous century was new. And the way it will long after you’ve turned to dust, just like all the others. Because at this place, in this time, the Merry-go-Round will never break down.
