Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"They're taking the Trylon down," Sammy said. "Gee."'

"Which one is the Trylon, now? The pointy one?"

"Yeah."

"I had no idea it was so tall."

"Taller than the Washington Monument."

"What is it made out of, granite or limestone or something?"

"Plaster of paris, I believe."

"We've been doing very well, haven't we? Not talking about my leaving for L.A. "

"Are you thinking about it?"

"Not me. So the ball is the Perisphere?"

"That's right."

"Was there anything inside them?"

"Not in the Trylon. But yeah, inside the Perisphere they had this whole show. Democracity. It was like a scale model of the city of the future, and you sat in these little cars going all around the outside and looked down on it. It was all superhighways and garden suburbs. You just felt like you were soaring over it all in a zeppelin. They would make it like nighttime in there, and all the little buildings and streetlights would sort of light up and glow. It was great. I loved it."

"You don't say. I'd like to see that. I wonder if it's still in there, Sammy, what do you think?"

"I don't know," said Sammy, with a kind of wary thrill. By now he knew Bacon well enough to recognize the impulse, and its accompanying tone, that had sent his friend up to a military installation at the top of the Empire State Building at midnight with a gourmet meal in two shopping bags. "Probably not, Bake. I think-hey, wait for me."

Bacon was already on his way around the low circular wall that surrounded the immense pool, now drained and covered in a sodden-looking layer of burlap, in which the Perisphere once had swum. Sammy looked to see if there were any workmen still around, or guards, but they appeared to have the place to themselves. It made his heart ache to look around the vast expanse of the fairground that, not very long ago, had swarmed with flags and women's hats and people being whizzed around in jitneys, and see only a vista of mud and tarpaulins and blowing newspaper, broken up here and there by the spindly stump of a capped stanchion, a fire hydrant, or the bare trees that flanked the empty avenues and promenades. The candy-colored pavilions and exhibit halls, fitted out with Saturn rings, lightning bolts, shark's fins, golden grilles, and honeycombs, the Italian pavilion with its entire facade dissolving in a perpetual cascade of water, the gigantic cash register, the austere and sinuous temples of the Detroit gods, the fountains, the pylons and sundials, the statues of George Washington and Freedom of Speech and Truth Showing the Way to Freedom had been peeled, stripped, prized apart, knocked down, bulldozed into piles, loaded onto truck beds, dumped into barges, towed out past the mouth of the harbor, and sent to the bottom of the sea. It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and Utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon-he was too young to have such inklings-but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

"Hey," Bacon called. "Clayboy. Over here."

Sammy looked around. There was no sign of Bacon. Sammy hurried, as quickly as he could, all the way around the low whitewashed wall with its rain stains and patchy skin of wet leaves, to the doors of the Trylon, which had led, via an imperial pair of escalators, into the heart of the magical egg. When the Fair was on, there was always a huge line of people coiling up to these big blue doors. Now there were only the scaffolding and a stack of planks. Some workman had forgotten the tin coffee-cup cap of his thermos. Sammy went over to the metal doors. They were heavily barred and padlocked with a thick chain. Sammy gave them a pull, and they did not budge in the least.

"I tried that," Bacon said. "Under here!"

The Perisphere was supported by a kind of tee, a ring of evenly spaced pillars joined to it at its antarctic circle, so to speak, all the way around. The idea had been for the great bone-white orb, its skin rippled with fine veins like a cigar wrapper, to look as if it were floating there, in the middle of the pool of water. Now that there was no water, you could see the pillars, and you could see Tracy Bacon, too, standing in the middle of them, directly under the Perisphere's south pole.

"Hey," Sammy said, rushing to the wall and leaning across its top. "What are you doing? That whole thing could come right down on top of you!"

Bacon looked at him, eyes wide, incredulous, and Sammy blushed; it was exactly what his mother would have said.

"There's a door," Bacon said, pointing straight up. Then he reached up over his head, and his hands went into the bottom of the Perisphere's hull. Bacon's head vanished next, his feet rose off the ground, and then he was gone.

Sammy got one leg over the wall, then the other, and lowered himself down into the pool bed. The damp burlap made squishing sounds under his shoes as he ran across the gently curved bottom of the basin toward the Perisphere. When he got underneath it, he looked up and saw a rectangular hatchway that looked as if Tracy Bacon might just have fit through it.

"Come on."

"It looks pretty dark in there, Bake."

A big hand emerged from the hatch, wavering, fingers flexing. Sammy reached for it, their palms crossed, and then Bacon pulled him bodily up into the darkness. Before he could begin to feel, or smell, or listen to the darkness, to Bacon and to the pounding of his own heart, the lights came on.

"Gee," Bacon said. "Look at that."

The systems that controlled the motion, sound, and lighting of Democracity and its companion exhibit, General Motors' Futurama, were quite literally the dernier cri of the art and ancient principles of clockwork machinery in the final ticking moments of the computerless world. Coordinating the elaborate sound track of voice and music, the motion of the cars, and the varying light-moods inside the Perisphere had required an array of gears, pulleys, levers, cams, springs, wheels, switches, relays, and belts that was sophisticated, complex, and sensitive to disruption. A mouse dropping, a sudden snap of cold, or the accumulated rumblings of ten thousand arriving and departing underground trains could throw the system out of whack and bring the ride to an abrupt halt, occasionally trapping fifty people inside. It was because of the need for frequent minor adjustments and repairs that there was a hatch in the Perisphere's underbelly. It led into an odd, bowl-shaped room. Where Bacon and Sammy came in, at the bottom of the bowl, there was a kind of corrugated steel platform. On one side of the platform, a series of cleats had been welded onto the inner frame of the sphere that reached, gradually, up along the inside of the bowl, toward the elaborate clockwork underside of Democracity.

Bacon took hold of one of the lower cleats of the ladder. "Think you can manage it?" he said.

"I'm not sure," Sammy said. "I really think-"

"You go first," Bacon said. "I'll give you a hand if you need it."

So Sammy and his bad legs climbed a hundred feet into the air. At the top, there was another hatch. Sammy poked his head through.

"It's dark," Sammy said. "Too bad. Okay, we better go."

"Just a minute," Bacon said. Sammy felt a sudden push from behind as Bacon took hold of his legs and more or less jackknifed him up into the cool, huge blackness. Something rough abraded Sammy's cheek, and then there was a creak and a series of rasping sounds as Bacon pulled himself up after. "Huh. You're right."

"Indeed." Sammy reached out along the ground, feeling for the hatch. "Good. You're crazy, Bake, you know that? You just won't take no for an answer. I-"