However clandestine and impossible an enterprise it might hitherto always have been or seemed, loving men came naturally to Sammy, like a gift of languages or an eye for four-leaf clovers; notions of denial and fear were, in a very real sense, superfluous. Yes, all right, so maybe he was in love with Tracy Bacon; so what? What did that prove? So maybe there had been further kissing, and some careful exploitation of shadows and stairwells and empty hallways; even John Garfield would have had to agree that their behavior since that night in the lightning storm, on the eighty-sixth floor, had been playful and masculine and essentially chaste. Sometimes in the back of a taxicab, their hands might steal toward each other across the leather banquette, and Sammy would feel his small, damp palm and bitten fingers absorbed into the deep, sober Presbyterian fastness of Tracy Bacon’s grip.
The previous week, when they were at Brooks being fitted for new suits, standing side by side in their BVDs like a before-and-after advertisement for vitamin tonic, they had watched the salesman leave the fitting room, and the tailor turn his back, and then Bacon had reached out and grabbed a handful of the wool of Sammy’s chest. He had fitted the hinge of his fingers into the notch of Sammy’s breastbone, and run his palm down the flat slope of Sammy’s belly, and then, hardening his blue eyes with an innocent Tom Mayflower twinkle, darted his hand into and out of the waistband of Sammy’s briefs, like a cook testing a pot of hot water with a pinky. Sammy’s cock retained, to this moment, a furtive memory of the imprint of that cool hand. As for kisses, there had been three more: one just outside the doorway of Bacon’s hotel room as Sammy was dropping him home; one amid the dark latticework under the Third Avenue El at Fifty-first; and then the third and boldest, in a back row of the Broadway, at a showing of Dumbo, during the pink elephant bacchanal. For here was the novelty, the difference between the love that Sammy had felt for Tesla and Garfield and even for Joe Kavalier, and that which he felt for Tracy Bacon: it really did seem to be reciprocated. And these blossomings of desire, these entanglings of their fingers, these four nourishing kisses stolen from the overflowing stand-pipe of New York’s indifference, were the inevitable product of that reciprocity. But did they mean that he, or Bacon, was a homosexual? Did they make Tracy Bacon Sammy’s boyfriend?
“I don’t care,” Sammy said, aloud, to Mr. Frank Singe, New York, the world; and then, turning back to Bacon, “I don’t care! I don’t care if I get the job or not. I don’t want to think about it, or Los Angeles, or you leaving, or any of it. I just want to live my life and be a good boy and have a nice time. That all right with you?”
“That’s fine by me, sir,” Bacon said, knotting his scarf against the chill. “How about we go do something?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. What’s your favorite place ever? In the whole city, I mean.”
“My favorite place ever in the whole city?”
“Right.”
“Including the boroughs?”
“Don’t tell me it’s in Brooklyn. That’s awfully disappointing.”
“Not Brooklyn,” Sammy said. “Queens.”
“Worse still.”
“Only it isn’t there anymore, my favorite place. They closed it. Packed it up and rolled it right out of town.”
“The Fair,” Bacon said. He shook his head. “You and that Fair.”
“You never went, did you?”
“That’s your favorite place ever, huh?”
“Yeah, but—”
“All right, then.” Bacon hailed a taxicab and opened the door for Sammy. Sammy stood there a moment, knowing that Bacon was about to get him into something he was not going to be able to get out of very easily. He just didn’t know what.
“We’re going to Queens,” Bacon said to the driver. “To the World’s Fair.”
It was not until they had reached the Triborough Bridge that the driver, in a dry monotone, said, “I don’t know how to tell you fellas this.”
“Isn’t there anything left?” Bacon said.
“Well, I seen in the papers they been arguing about what to do with the land, between the city and Mr. Moses and the Fair people. I guess some of it still might be there.”
“We’ll keep very low expectations,” Bacon said. “How about that?”
“I’m comfortable with that,” Sammy said.
Sammy had loved the Fair, visiting it three times in its first season of 1939, and until the end of his life, he kept one of the little buttons he had been given when he exited the General Motors pavilion, which said I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE. He had grown up in an era of great hopelessness, and to him and millions of his fellow city boys, the Fair and the world it foretold had possessed the force of a covenant, a promise of a better world to come, that he would later attempt to redeem in the potato fields of Long Island.
The cab left them off outside the LIRR station, and they wandered along the Fair’s perimeter for a while, looking for a way in. But there was a high fence, and Sammy didn’t think he could get over it.
“Here,” Bacon said, crouching behind some shrubs and arching his back. “Climb on.”
“I can’t—I’ll hurt you—”
“Come on, I’ll be fine.”
Sammy scrambled up onto Bacon’s back, leaving a muddy footprint on his coat.
“I have mystically augmented strength, you know,” Bacon said.
“Oof.”
Sammy tumbled and dangled and fell into the fairgrounds, landing on his ass. Bacon launched, hoisted, and dropped himself up, over, and down the fairground side of the fence. They were in.
The first thing Sammy’s eye sought out were the monumental Mutt-and-Jeff structures, the soaring Trylon and its rotund chum the Perisphere, symbols of the Fair that for two years had been ubiquitous throughout the country, working their way onto restaurant menus, clock faces, matchbooks, neckties, handkerchiefs, playing cards, girls’ sweaters, cocktail shakers, scarves, lighters, radio cabinets, et cetera, before disappearing as suddenly as they had flourished, like the totems of some discredited Millerite cult that briefly thrills and then bitterly disappoints its adherents with grand and terrible prophecies. He saw right away that the lowermost hundred feet or so of the Trylon was covered in scaffolding.
“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. Samm
y 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 façade 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—”
Sammy heard the metallic chirp of the hinge of a cigarette lighter, the scrape of its flint, and then a spark swelled magically and became the flickering face of Tracy Bacon.
“Now yours,” he said.
Sammy lit his lighter. Together they managed to generate just enough light to see that they were camped far to one side of the display, in the middle of a wide, forested area half an inch high. Tracy stood up and started toward the center. Sammy followed him, protecting the flame. The surface of the floor beneath their feet was covered in a kind of rough, dry artificial moss that was meant to suggest vast rolling hills of trees. It made a crunching sound that echoed in the high empty dome. Every so often, though they tried to be careful, one of them stepped on a model farmhouse, or crushed the amusement district or central orphanage of a town of the future. Finally they reached the major city, at the very center of the diorama, which had been known as Centerville or Centerton or something equally imaginative. A single skyscraper rose from a cluster of smaller buildings. All the buildings looked streamlined and moderne, like a city on Mongo, or the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. Bacon got down on one knee and brought his eyes level with the top of the lone tower.
“Huh,” he said. He frowned, then lowered himself and leaned forward on one arm, slowly, taking care not to extinguish his flame, until he was lying flat on his belly along the ground. “Huh,” he said again, grunting it this time. He lowered his chin to the ground. “Yeah. This is the way. I don’t think I would have liked just floating over it near as much.”
Sammy went over and stood beside Bacon for a moment. Then he eased himself down on the ground beside him. He folded an arm under his chest and, inclining his head slightly, squinted his eyes, trying to lose himself in the illusion of the model the way he used to lose himself in Futuria, back at his drawing board in Flatbush a million years before. He was a twentieth of an inch tall, zipping along an oceanic highway in his little antigravity Skyflivver, strea
king past the silent faces of the aspiring silvery buildings. It was a perfect day in a perfect city. A double sunset flickered in the windows and threw shadows across the leafy squares of the city. His fingertips were on fire.
“Ow!” Sammy said, dropping his lighter. “Ouch!”
Bacon let his own flame go out. “You have to kind of pad it with your necktie, dopey,” he said. He grabbed Sammy’s hand. “This the one?”
“Yeah,” Sammy said. “The first two fingers. Oh. Okay.”
They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, with Sammy’s sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon’s mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.
ON THE LAST DAY of November, Joe had a letter from Thomas. In an execrable left-slanting hand, he announced, employing a sardonic tone that had not been present in his first letters from Lisbon, that the old tub—after a series of delays, reversals, mechanical failures, and governmental tergiversations, had finally been cleared—yet again—for departure, on the second of December. More than eight months had now passed since Thomas’s journey from the Moldau to the Tagus. The boy had turned thirteen on a cot in the crowded refectory of the convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmel, and in his letter he warned Joe that he suffered from a mysterious tendency to start rattling off paternosters and Hail Marys at the drop of a hat, and had become partial to wimples. He claimed to be afraid that Joe would not recognize him for the spots on his face and the “apparently permanent pubertal smudge on my upper lip that some have the temerity to call a mustache.” When Joe had finished reading the letter, he kissed it and pressed it to his chest. He remembered the immigrant’s fear of going unrecognized in a land of strangers, of being lost in the translation from there to here.