8: The Boardwalk

So that left Weena and me with a long afternoon to kill. Going back to my house didn’t seem like a good idea, what with the excitement about the sea lions, and with Diane Simly wanting to evict us.

“What are those immense machines?” asked Weena, pointing at the bright structures of Boardwalk. “Is it a, a fish-cannery?”

“Oh, come on, Weena,” I said. “It’s an amusement park.” She looked doubtful. “I’ll tell you what,” I continued. “I’ll take you on some rides.”

“Amusement park,” echoed Weena, thinking this through. “Of course. I rode on a Ferris wheel as a girl. And I’ve frequented Funger Gardens in Flimsy. But this one—so very many machines.” Another pause. “How clanking and inhumane our Earth has become.”

“You say there’s an amusement park in Flimsy too?” I asked, wanting to lighten things up. We were headed along the oceanfront, Droog still on his leash. I still didn’t really understand what or where Flimsy was—or why Weena seemed so unfamiliar with the modern world.

“But in Flimsy there’s no machines at all,” she said. “No bustling assemblages of clamps and screws and wires and paint and rust. We use zickzack and kessence instead. Have I told you this?”

“You’ve hardly told me anything, Weena. What are kessence and zickzack?”

“Kessence is like aether. A subtle substance, a higher energy. Zickzack is more complicated. The jivas construct things from it. Zickzack is akin to—to hyperdimensional origami. Zickzack is a piece of space that’s been folded or stretched or glued.” Her hands moved rapidly, molding a shape in the air. “For example—take a slab of space and attach the inside to the outside in a certain way. And then anything that tries to pass through the slab bumps into itself coming back out—and it has to stop. In this fashion one makes a zickzack wall.”

“Hold on—I don’t get how the jivas can just start bending and gluing space.”

“The jivas and the yuels of Flimsy see the world as if it were a bolt of cloth. They think in higher dimensions. A jiva can reach into the mural that is our cosmos and reconnect the zones.”

I mulled this over as we continued walking. “Those zickzack walls—they can be any shape at all?”

“You see to the heart of the matter, Jim. A wall can be a tube, a block, a strut. My skeleton is enhanced with zickzack braces, and my muscles are strengthened by zickzack bands. Many of the clothes in Flimsy are zickzack as well. By use of diffraction gratings, the jivas can make zickzack of any color. Folded space is a universal construction material.”

“What—what about a lightbulb?” I blindly challenged. “Where do your lamps get their juice?”

“In Flimsy, a lightbulb is a ball with its outside connected to the inside of a ball that stays near a glowing local sun,” said Weena, proud of her experience.

“All right,” I said, pondering the image. But, as usual, I had to wonder if she was putting me on.

By now we were at the Boardwalk entrance. A sunburned woman and her husband were staring suspiciously at us, overhearing our odd conversation.

“How about if I buy us some tickets for the rides?” I asked Weena. “How many do you want to try?”

“All of them?” said Weena, with a smile. “We have considerable time. But I must confess that I brought no money. I expected we’d proceed directly to the Victorian house, and thence to Flimsy.”

I hesitated, remembering the slim contents of my wallet. But, hey, if I was about to leave this world, there was no harm in running up my credit card. I got us all-day passes.

Dogs weren’t really allowed around the rides, so I walked down the stairs from the midway to the beach and settled Droog in a shady spot with a paper cup of water. I attached his leash to the steps so no meddlers would assume he was a stray although, really, I could have left him unleashed and he would have waited perfectly well.

Weena and I started with a ride that appeared fairly tame—it was a plastic pirate ship that swung from a tower like a giant swing. I didn’t remember ever having gone on this particular ride but, come to think of it, I hadn’t been on any of the Boardwalk rides for fifteen years.

“Can you handle this?” I asked Weena.

“I’m an adventuress,” she said as we walked up the gangplank together. “My lover Charles and I were on wilder rides at Funger Gardens in Flimsy. I recall a ride that turns people upside-down. That is, a chute loops around and dumps you into a pavilion whose space has been flipped over. The pavilion is open all around, and the sky is up and the dirt is down because of a space-gluing. So it appears as if you’re falling towards the ceiling. And a hysterical voice warns that if you touch the ceiling, you’ll explode.”

“Whose voice?”

“It’s the pavilion talking. Pretty much everything in Flimsy is a little bit alive. In fact Flimsy herself is a living organism.”

“How big is Flimsy, anyway?”

“She’s larger than the universe—and smaller than what you call an electron. That baffles you, no? The world is a mystery.” We settled into our seats, and tight bars swung down over our laps.

The cool ocean breeze blew across us; the mist was drifting away. I was happy to be on a ride with a sexy, offbeat girlfriend. For now I’d stopped thinking about Val. Maybe everything Weena said was bullshit, but at least I was alive. “Is there more to the story about the upside-down ride?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” exclaimed Weena. “On my first time through it, an enormous fat man above me really did explode—his scraps scattered all over the pavilion. Of course then Charles told me that the exploding fat man was only a fake, grown by the yuels running Funger Gardens, similar to a soap bubble, and that the man explodes hundreds of times a day. So!”

The horizon tilted weirdly as the ship swept expansively to and fro. Belatedly it occurred to me that going on the Boardwalk rides might not be a great idea for someone who’d just been in the hospital with a brain problem. But with Weena laughing at my side, I set aside my cares.

We went on a few more rides, then we hit the snack bar. We ordered fried squid, fried artichoke hearts, a hot dog, and a couple of beers—and carried them down to the beach where Droog was waiting. We fed him the hot dog.

After our own meal, Weena and I lay there cuddling, staring at the wrinkled sea and the ultramarine sky. We even napped for an hour. I was facing more kinds of doom than I could keep track of, but somehow this afternoon I felt mellower than I had in a long time.

“Thanks for all this,” I told Weena. We were awake now, watching the sinking sun and petting Droog.

“Would you like a demonstration of zickzack?” asked Weena.

“Sure. Make us some beach chairs. You know, low chairs with no legs.”

“I can do that,” said Weena.

She flexed her fingers and gestured in midair. Tendrils nearly too fine to see crept from her fingertips. The air shimmered and glinted as something took shape upon the sand. I saw mirrored tubes, connected by glittering panels like fabric. Weena squinted and muttered to herself. The panels took on colors, candy apple red and cadmium yellow.

And now our beach chairs were done.

Gingerly I touched the red chair. The material was smooth, with the soft feel of—a fingertip. It was as if my own hand were pressing back at me. My mind was thoroughly boggled.

“Sit!” said Weena, flopping down.

We sat together for a while, letting the time slide by. I was very comfortable. Soon it was nearly seven o’clock. We had a half hour till our meet with Chang.

The sun was still slanting across the waters, but the Boardwalk’s colored lights were coming on. I had a sense of exhilaration, as at the beginning of a great adventure.

“Before you got here, I thought my life was over,” I told Weena.

“You’re exactly the right person to be our cosmic postman,” she said warmly. “A hero who’s ready to battle with complete abandon! And I won’t forget your quest for your lady fair.”

“Too bad that yuel scares the shit out of me.”

“You are modest,” said Weena. “That’s heroic, as well.” As always, her eyes were unreadable. “Is it time to meet the others?”

“We have time for one more ride,” I said, pointing up towards the Boardwalk. “How about the Big Dipper?”

“That clickity-clack lattice of wooden beams and rusty rails?”

“The Boardwalk’s fabled roller coaster, yes,” I said.

I herded the doubtful Weena into the very first little car of the Big Dipper’s little train. The cars rushed through a darkened arch, then up the wooden hill, higher and higher above the beach. The streaming air was damp and salty, the colors rich in the setting summer sun, the sounds a mesh of screams and rattles and carnival music and breaking waves. It was wonderful.

But now we inched around a U-turn and faced the drop, far steeper than I’d remembered. We shot down, then up, then down, then up and around another turn. Weena looked ill, she was clutching both hands against her stomach.

Two more bumps and she collapsed against me, retching into my lap. Amid the partly digested food was a gently glowing object shaped like a pitty-pat squash—a flattened orb with a ruffle around its girth. It was hard to imagine how something this big had squeezed out of Weena’s mouth. The thing had alternating stripes, and a long tail trailed from its base.

“My jiva,” moaned Weena. “She popped out. I shouldn’t have eaten all that fried squid.” She retched again. “What nasty food you people eat.” Her face was pale and lined.

The jiva stirred in my lap, swelling a bit larger, taking on fresh colors as the sunlight played across her. She canted this way and that, as if examining her surroundings—not that she had any visible eyes. With a few gentle motions of her supple tail, the jiva vacuumed Weena’s vomit off my legs. The tail was covered with fine hairs, like a radish root—and now I recalled that Weena had shown me the tip of it sticking from her navel yesterday. She’d called it an ovipositor.

“Don’t let that thing put eggs in me!” I yelled, shoving the jiva into the Weena’s lap.

“This is my dear Awnee,” said Weena, feebly petting the jiva. Without the jiva, Weena looked shockingly old. “Don’t hurt Awnee’s feelings. She can be dangerous. You should have left my zickzack rejuvenation props in place, Awnee. Please come back inside.” Weena leaned over the jiva, opening her wrinkled lips.

Stubbornly the jiva wrapped her tail around my leg. I felt a telepathic connection with the creature, and for a moment I saw as if through her mind. The amusement park was a foreshortened construct of planes, like a cardboard model. I could pick up a sense of Awnee’s emotions as well. She didn’t like our alien world. She felt miffed and peevish.

Right then we swung through a final neck-wrenching turn. The cars were clattering back towards the loading platform. As we coasted to a stop, the jiva unwound from my leg, twisted free of Weena’s grasp and floated into the darkening sky like a child’s escaped balloon.

Weena hobbled down the stairs and into the open space of the Boardwalk midway. Looking bereft, she stared after her lost jiva, who was drifting inland over Santa Cruz. “Oh, Jim,” she quavered. “I’m crushed. I can’t teep properly without Awnee. And—” She gestured at her wasted body. “Don’t look at me. That spiteful Awnee. Jivas can be so cruel.”

“Maybe—maybe Awnee is looking for her children,” I said, trying to comfort Weena. “Didn’t you say they’d hatch today?”

“Well, yes, that’s a good possibility,” said Weena, brightening a bit. “Of course. She’ll return after I call forth the three new jivas. Dear, dear Awnee. She’s never let me down. We’ve been together for about a century—ever since I found my way from Earth to Flimsy.”

That gave me pause. All week I’d been gloating about my hot new girlfriend. And now—oh, this was impossible.

“What?” said Weena, seeing some of my feelings in my eyes.

“So how old are you, really?”

“Oh, I suppose one might call it a hundred and thirty or so. But it’s impolite to ask a woman her age.” A dry cackle.

“Um—are you still up to meeting the Whipped Vic crew?”

“Indeed,” said Weena. “But I require your aid. I seem to have some rheumatism in my hips. Awnee had been padding my joints with zickzack.” He voice took on an aggrieved, whining tone. “It would have been quite simple for Awnee to leave her patches in place. But she likes to teach me a lesson. It’s insufferable. I’m very close to the Duke of Human Flimsy, you know, and my lover Charles is the court Wizard, and I’m helping Charles with his monumental Atum’s Lotus project, and—”

I quieted her down, trying to carry on as before. It was so weird to have my new woman friend turn incredibly old. And a little pathetic to hear her bragging about her supposed status in some possibly imaginary world.

“Let’s go buy that bottle of tequila for that surfer dude Header,” I suggested as we inched our way out of the midway. “Before we meet them at the Perg.”

“One request,” quavered Weena. “Don’t tell these young people any of our secret plans. Let my enemies puzzle about my next step. It’s a game of nerves.”

“Fine.” Not that there was much I could tell. Weena’s ever-changing stories were a confused jumble in my mind.