Read “Shadow of the Wheel” here–or on Page and Spine: https://www.pagespineficshowcase.com/david-rogers.html
or hear it read, here: https://visionswithvoices.com/davidsum2019/index.html#shadowtext
Shadow of the Wheel
by David Rogers
They say you can’t breathe the local air after the first of September. If you ask why not, they just smile a little and talk about the apple harvest or which horse is likely to win The Big Race. The Race is the grand finale of the Fall Festival. They look forward to it all summer.
They, of course, are the Locals. Those families whose names are carved in granite on the more impressive stones in the cemetery on the hill. Or those whose names are soon forgotten, who haunt thin-walled wooden shacks hidden by trees along the shore of the lake. On still days, the lake is a mirror. You come to believe that, if you watch long enough, you will see in it the world’s true reflection. The shacks are invisible from spring to autumn. When leaves fall, the leaning walls appear as if by magic. Lost souls come out after dark.
What does it mean to be Local? It’s nothing to do with where you were born or how you learned to make a living (assuming you had to make a living, because you were not among those whose graven names meant they need never labor, manually or otherwise). Still less depends on social niceties, or who is loved or hated or seemingly ignored by neighbors. To be Local is to be expected not to leave.
* * *
When summer people die, it is not usually by drowning or drunken mishaps with fireworks or firearms or automobiles. These happen, of course, and now and then someone drops dead of a heart attack, but by far the most common cause of death for summer people is to get lost in the Labyrinth.
The Lab, as it is called by Locals, is seventy-five feet square on the outside, yet inside, one can walk miles between entrance and exist. If the exit is ever found. It was built as part of Elysium, the defunct amusement park on the edge of town. Elysium closed several decades ago and fell into disrepair that bordered on outright decay. Most of its buildings, if they remain upright at all, feature missing doors, broken windows, caved-in roofs. Yet the Lab remains intact. From outside, on a sunny summer day, when the light hits the the hillside above town at an August angle, the Lab looks innocent enough. Few one can resist its appeal and intrigue for an entire season. A intricate maze with narrow corridors and dozens of angled passages, it once functioned as a haunted-house amusement during the fall, as a novelty the rest of the time. Carnival prizes–stuffed animals, miniature plastic minotaurs, or tee-shirts emblazoned with the big E for Elysium and the slogan “I Survived the Lab!” were given for those who found their way through in less than fifteen minutes.
* * *
The remnants of Elysium lay on the hillside, halfway between Main Street and my summer cottage. I had come to the little town by the lake for the summer, before what I hope would be my last year of graduate school. It seemed like a quiet place to study. Mornings, I worked in the town’s one small grocery store, stocking shelves and sweeping floors. Afternoons, I was supposed to be reading articles for my thesis on paleontology. Instead, my eyes strayed again and again to the beams of the old roller coaster, the constantly changing web of shadows it cast across weed-grown parking lots, and the sundial of the Ferris wheel. The wheel itself had not turned in decades, yet it somehow remained upright under the wheeling sky. The tallest beam of the coaster, positioned so it worked as an immense wooden gnomon, ticked its shadow across the spokes of the Ferris wheel, minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, the inscrutable hand of time, visible and in constant motion.
On an afternoon when it was too hot to stay inside a moment longer, I surrendered and wandered toward the empty park. The cloudless sky was the pure, dry blue that heralds the coming of fall, even while the late summer sun lures the world into complacency. I passed under the shadow of the wheel and approached the Lab, curious to see if the door was locked. Of course, it was not. What could be inside that would be worth locking up?
Inside, the Lab looked surprisingly clean. I had expected to find fast food wrappers, empty liquor bottles, a lonely shirt or shoe left behind by hormonal teenagers. But no. Nothing but a few windblown leaves. The Lab had never had a roof, so the summer breeze sighed along corridors like a ghost.
I turned left just inside the door. The Lab had called to me all summer. I felt I knew the way. Over the weeks, fast becoming months, I had memorized the Park, including every turn and dead end in the Lab. Or so I thought.
My feet in comfortable running shoes made no noise on old floorboards. Afternoon light cut diagonal lines across northern walls and left deep pools of shadow along southern sides. I imagined what the park must have been like, decades ago, and fancied I could smell popcorn, chili dogs, deep-fried doughnuts. Under it all, an foundation of vomit and decay. The murmur of ghosts. Hysterical laughter and genuine screams of roller-coaster riders.
I turned right, went straight past two more chances to turn, and went right again. I was almost back to the door I came in, as I knew from the map of the Lab in my mind’s eye. One wall separated this passage from the entrance. Another left, and I would zig-zag my way across the maze, past siren calls of dead ends, to the exit on the other side.
Half a dozen turns, left, right, and left again, and I should have seen the door. I did not. Perhaps I had miscounted. More turns. Afternoon was becoming evening. Perhaps I had missed a beat, gone left when I ought to have gone right. The shadows along the walls grew deeper. I tried to retrace my steps and start over, to no avail.
Many days seemed to pass.
* * *
The rest of the summer went by as if in a dream. I somehow knew when the horses ran The Big Race, and when apples fell or were picked, the long, wide ladders reaching like arms high in the branches. I knew when leaves fell, dark branches parting the veil along the shore of the lake. I sensed the change when summer people packed cars and closed shutters and locked doors that had been open all season and went back to their dull city lives, all while I drowsed in the Lab.
When at last I awoke and drifted from the corridors of the the maze, a swirl of new red leaves under my feet, the air had a tang of coming winter frost. My thesis and the articles on paleontology no longer seemed important. The academic questions and the summer days when I had nodded over them now seemed like the dream.
On my way back to the cottage that had I left so many long weeks before, I noted with approval that my name had been painted over the door and carved on the mailbox. The box was an architectural, monumental affair, granite and marble, with a small alcove, almost as an afterthought, where the occasional item of news or correspondence from the world beyond might appear, in the unlikely event that anyone remembered my existence. Turning up the sidewalk, I looked over my shoulder at the lake, at Elysium, at the sleepy town abandoned by summer and summer people, and I felt at last as if I had come home.
The air smelled of apples and old grass and hay lofts where horses settled in for the long winter, yet I did not breathe it. I found there was no need.
END
