THE Safety Center is over a decade unchanged, a static relic of a forgotten campaign. It occupies the east wing of the Science and Technology building, which houses little science and technology besides several banks of the latest flat-screen TVs. The building is sponsored by a cable provider. Teenagers walk through the Safety Center for the nostalgia, to nudge their friends and laugh about trips to the fair as kids. Kids walk through the Safety Center and point. “What’s that?” they say to the wall phone with its cord stretched over the active gas stovetop. “What’s that?” they say to the bulky black radio on the rim of the bathtub.
At the end of the exhibit, the kids get plastics fire helmets to strap to their chins, or—more precisely—to use as weapons against siblings. Then Mack directs them to the rows of benches before the stage, seating for Safety Theater 3000. Four-thirty is the last show. The benches are half full with sugar-dosed kids and tired parents happy for the excuse to sit. A smattering of older adults, men with wispy white hair and flag pins the size of silver dollars, have taken upon themselves the duty of auditing the presentation, lest the youth of America be indoctrinated with the liberal safety agenda.
The set is a thin makeshift wall papered with a red brick pattern, FIRE STATION NO. 7 printed above the door. Deon, a fellow firefighter, works a puppet in the window while a recorded voice sings about how playing with matches isn’t clever at all. My co-star has been visiting the beer tent next door and messes up the few lines he has. On purpose, maybe. Backstage, I dress for my part. I’m Hector the Smoke Detector, with a toothy smile, big round eyes, and a red clown nose the size of a grapefruit. The costume weighs a ton and smells like Hoffman’s Hotdogs. Wearing it is like wearing a mattress, and the big black boots make walking more like waddling. If I sit, I won’t be able to stand back up on my own. I wait for my cue, for Deon to bellow, “Hey Hector!” and for the cartoon music to play. Some kids in the far right side of the audience can see me offstage. One stares at me, maybe trying to figure me out, so I wave one of my oversized gloves his way. He gives me the finger.
Not only is this the last show of the day, this is the last Safety Theater 3000 show ever. The Safety Committee has been given a new grant and will remodel the exhibit into an internet safety program. It will be about keeping kids safe online, spotting phishing scams, avoiding predators, and preventing identity theft. No more fire helmets. No more radios teetering precariously on bathtub rims.
It’s time for my cue, but in a moment of creative brilliance Deon substitutes his usual line with “Heil Hitler!” His little joke bleeds some surprised laughter from the audience, but my entrance is met mostly by blank, expectant faces. When will this get fun? they seem to ask.
Most of the kids, I figure, don’t even recognize the Fuehrer’s name. Some audience members—by which I mean the old men—don’t take it lightly. My theme song plays and I lean side to side, the most drastic dance move I can perform without toppling. From the crowd comes a man’s voice: “I didn’t watch my brothers die face down in France for my grandkids to learn about fire safety from some Nazi propagandist!” Leaning on his polished wooden cane, Grandpa hobbles up the stairs to the stage. I wave my arms in front of my giant smoke-detecting face, the best I can do to dispel his aggression. Trying to speak through the costume is like trying to talk underwater. As he cane-steps in my direction, I point to the window where Deon’s puppet was a minute ago, to show that it wasn’t me who made the Hitler remark. Of course he is long gone, probably getting a refill at the beer tent.
“You no-good Nazi-loving mother-ripping…” Grandpa trails off on a string of ancient, dusty obscenities that he probably muttered last in enemy territory, then hoists the cane above his head. He brings it down with surprising strength on my bare shin, one of the few places where the costume provides no protection. Then I’m flat on my back with a throbbing leg and unable to see anything but the distant ceiling rafters. The kids cheer, as if this is all part of the show, the friendly smoke detector assaulted by the crotchety, cane-wielding veteran.
A nasally teenager shouts, “Take that, Germany!” Someone else: “U-S-A! U-S-A!” A flurry of footsteps, and then I’m surrounded. The kids hop on my foam-stuffed body like an overused plaything, worthless except as a weak trampoline. Sneaker heels dig into my chest and hipbones, and one foot lands squarely on my face. The parents are either too tired to do anything about this chaos or too busy enjoying my torment.
Eventually the beating ends—not because anyone comes to my rescue. Perhaps Grandpa had an extra serving of his fiber supplement this morning and heads to the nearest john. The kids know there are better activities at the fair—games to play, prizes to win, gum to pick off the ground and pop in their mouths without a second thought—and stomping on the giant smoke detector gets old fast. The death throes of Safety Theater 3000 are ugly.
I change out of the costume, then tend to my wounds in a restroom at the other end of the building where Maurice is the bathroom attendant. I tip him ten bucks to keep the door locked for five minutes while I clean the blood off my face and shirt. I want to tip five, but a ten is all I have and asking for change from a bathroom attendant is just something I can’t do. I talk my way into a free Hoffman’s Hotdog, then hit the road.
• • •
I don’t expect my beating at the hands of Grandpa and hell’s children to by the worst part of my day. Sara waits at our apartment and we will fight when I arrive. I know because we fight every night. It is the same argument every evening, just with different words, as if our argument is a story that was written in Latin and is now interpreted every night by a different translator with a different sort of appreciation for the language. Though our fight will be entirely verbal, it will hurt far more than being walloped by Grandpa’s walking stick, because I love Sara. She’s worked her way into my heart the way a worm burrows into an apple, ruining the fruit. Each sharp word I say, every insult and passive aggressive subtext, hurts me as much as her. But I’ve figured out a way to make it stop: if we just keep fighting, eventually I will hate her more than I love her and causing her pain won’t affect me at all. Or it will even feel good.
It’s almost nine when I get home. I find the door unlocked and a pile of blankets and pillows in the recliner on top of what I must assume is Sara. I think she’s asleep, which means a momentary postponement of our fight, perhaps a double-header beginning tomorrow afternoon. The only light in the apartment, besides the blue aura from the TV, is the faint yellow stovetop bulb, which shines like a spotlight over two crusty slices of pizza. Sara ate the other six slices, I know, and there’s a mostly empty two-liter of root beer on the kitchen counter. I pour it down the sink, then toss the extra slices in the garbage. I’m not hungry, and Sara doesn’t need the extra calories.
A wooden chair sits in the middle of the kitchen floor, directly beneath the smoke detector, which hangs open. The battery is missing. Sara likes to char the pizza.
“How long have you been home?” She pokes her head out from under a pillow.
“Not long,” I say.
“Did you throw out the leftover pizza?” There’s a heavy undertone of accusation in her voice. She already knows the answer, just wants to hear me say it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks for saving it, but I’m not hungry.”
“You could have put it in the fridge,” she says. “I would have eaten it.”
I know. That’s why I threw it in the garbage.
“Sorry,” I say. When I step out of the kitchen and into the living room, Sara sees the bloodstains on my collar.
“Jesus,” she says. “What happened this time?”
I could recount the whole story, even spin it into a morbid joke to make Sara smile, but I just don’t have the energy. I settle for, “Kids. Just some rotten kids.”
With the rest of her body still buried beneath the mound of fleece and cotton, Sara shakes her head. “Sometimes I don’t understand you.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “What’s there to not understand?”
“You don’t have to volunteer all the time, you know. Someone else could be the punching bag every once in a while. It’s bad enough that I have to worry about you not coming home, that I have nightmares about your body being pulled from a burned-out building.”
Of course she doesn’t understand my desire to be useful, to be productive, because she never volunteers to do anything. Ever. Sara doesn’t even work anymore, not since a forklift crushed her left foot. Now she collects disability checks. Technically she’s still employed at the hardware store, but she’s always prepared with a doctor’s note when they call.
“What did you do today?” I ask. The purpose of the question is to highlight her uselessness. I already know what she will say.
“Nothing,” she says. Only she says it like a victory, not like something to be ashamed of. She says it like work is an unnecessary evil that she defeated long ago. It’s painful how much better than her I am.
“At least I wasn’t beat up by elementary students.”
“At least I’m not swaddled in blankets like an infant all day. Did you use the grownup potty today, or do I need to change your diaper?”
She scowls at me for a moment, then bursts up from the recliner, creating a barrage of pillows and blankets. One blanket drapes over the TV, and a throw pillow nearly knocks the fish bowl off the end table. “I don’t have time for this bullshit,” she says, and then limps toward the bedroom. She exaggerates that limp. I just know it.
“Of course not,” I say. “Your job requires a lot of dedicated time. How many hours a week do you suppose it takes to open an envelope? And watch what you do with those pillows. Just because you’re slowly killing yourself doesn’t mean you have to take out Mr. Gibbles. He never hurt anybody.” Every word comes out of my throat like a dry heave. I stop, because now I’m only talking to a closed door.
• • •
The next day I keep a running count of mullets and neck tattoos while people-watching, but lose track somewhere in the forties. This is the last day of the fair, and my day off, so I do what there is to do. I stand the suggested four feet away as a woman wearing a gas mask with a microphone talks her way through spray-painting a canvas with a city skyline made of dark greens and blues. I listen to midway merchants heckle. I drink an oversized smoothie and get a discounted refill. I sit in the colonnade and use my imagination to jump into other people’s lives. There’s a face-painted little girl being pulled along by her mother, a young woman with lines around her eyes and a comfortable scowl. Life for that girl, I think, is good most of the time. She probably aces her spelling tests and has friends to talk to at school. Her mom puts smiley-faces of mustard on her sandwiches and love notes in her lunchbox. There’s a man with sagging jeans and a half-buttoned grey sports shirt. He looks like he needs a smoke. I don’t smoke—never have—and don’t know what it feels like to need a cigarette, but that’s the vibe I get from this guy. It’s something about the way he scratches his neck tattoo and pats his back pocket, like he’s lost something important. On the Top Spin ride, upside-down people scream.
“Hey, Hector.” It’s Lucy. She sells fried dough buried in powered sugar from a booth on the midway. I can’t get enough of that stuff. Lucy’s teasing me. She knows my real name isn’t Hector.
“Hey, Lucy,” I say. “How’s business?” She works at carnivals and fairs all over the state, and the New York State Fair is her biggest event of the season. From September to May, she works as a substitute teacher, and she’s only a few credits shy of a master’s degree and a permanent position. Lucy’s ambitious, hardworking, and that’s something I can get behind.
“It’s good,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere. Jen’s about to take over for the night. Want to get a beer?”
We wait in line at Danny D’s behind two guys who both sport mullets and neck tattoos. I pay for the beer. Lucy orders chicken fingers for us to share. The plastic picnic table we choose is slightly damp, hopefully from being scrubbed recently with disinfectant. The sun is going down, and the temperature with it. The greasy chicken and beer sits surprisingly well in my stomach full of strawberry-banana smoothie. I feel good. I feel like I could take a punch and not even feel it.
Lucy tells me about her son. He’s five years old and she hasn’t seen him since he was born. The adoptive parents send pictures and a letter every year on his birthday. This year, she says, for the first time, her son wrote part of the letter.
“That’s great,” I say.
Lucy nods and finishes her beer. She’s not beautiful, but she’s attractive. Skinny and exotic—in a backwoods, bow-legged kind of way. She wears a short denim skirt and a white t-shirt with the Fancy’s Fried Dough name and logo on the front. Her shoulder-length brown hair is tied back, and her teeth are white and straight. “So what’s going to happen to Hector?” she says.
I don’t know right away if she’s talking about the character or me. “Who knows,” I say. “He’ll probably get hauled to the dump first thing tomorrow.”
Lucy frowns. “That doesn’t seem right. I mean, you’ve had a pretty good run.”
It does seem like an injustice, throwing out a staple of the fair after more than a decade of loyal service.
“Hey,” she says. “I’ve got a bottle of 151 in my car. How about we give Hector a proper burial?”
In twenty-seven minutes we find a little patch of nowhere off Highway 481 and set up a black folding chair for Hector. It wasn’t hard to swipe him from the Science and Technology building. He was right where I left him the day before, unattended. We sipped at the Bacardi on the way here, and now we pass the bottle back and forth and feel pleased with our choice of location. The sun is almost behind the horizon and the wind has picked up speed, as if it is going to storm.
“We should say a few words,” Lucy says, her voice somber and insincere. She grins.
“We gather here today,” I begin, “to celebrate the life and death of our good friend Hector the Smoke Detector.” Hector’s curvy smile and wide eyes are the same as ever.
“He was a good smoke detector,” Lucy says, and she pours an ounce of the Bacardi over Hector’s head.
“He knew how to take a sneaker to the face,” I say. Lucy hands me the bottle and I splash some on Hector’s face.
“Maybe he even saved a life or two,” she says. “Hector’s a fallen hero.” Lucy steps up to the giant smoke detector and straddles him with her bony legs. She fills her hands with his cushy exterior, leans over him, and shakes her shoulders back and forth in front of his wide, disbelieving eyes. She spins on a toe until she’s facing away from Hector, then grabs her ankles and thrusts her ass in his face, exposing the tight black panties beneath her denim skirt. I take another pull from the bottle and cheer, demanding more. Lucy faces Hector again and peels off her Fancy’s Fried Dough t-shirt, under which she wears a little black bra. Though she’s giving Hector the lap dance, I feel like I’m the one in the chair. Am I not the fallen hero? Lucy motions for the bottle, so I hand it to her. Mouth full of rum, she mimics hula-hooping over Hector, then parts her lips and lets the bitter drink pour over his giant face. The last drops dribble down her chin.
I hand her the lighter.
Orange flames ribbon against the dark pink sky. I move closer to the pyre and let the heat flush over me. On the other side of Hector, Lucy’s face glows in the light of the fire. When she steps around to my side, she grabs the back of my neck and pulls my face into hers. I force my tongue between her lips. Our mouths burn together. Then we separate and howl and dance like savages. It’s all part of this funeral rite: the death of Hector, of my fidelity, of my life with Sara.
Sara. I say her name aloud and feel nothing—except the fire and the rum and the freedom. I’ve finally burned her out of my heart.
“Did you say something?” Lucy asks.
“No one,” I say. “Nothing.”
• • •
Save the basement. That’s what we firefighters say when there is nothing we can do and a job is a total loss. And sitting on the hood of my car in the fairgrounds parking lot, trying to sober up for the drive home, I can’t stop thinking it. Save the basement.
Lucy has a fair in Dansville next week, and another in Binghamton after that, so she won’t be around for a while, but that’s just fine. There is no commitment between us.
My drive back to the apartment lacks ambition. I stop for yellow lights, wave other drivers ahead at four-way stops. I am on the precipice of the grand finale, the fight to end all fights. I hold the news of my cheating on Sara like a loaded pistol in my waistband. I’ll use it if I need to. I’ll hurt her more tonight than ever before.
From outside I can see that the lights are on in our apartment. That’s a little different, but it’s when I step inside that I realize something fundamental has changed. Pushing in the door doesn’t give me the same sensory effect as opening a fridge full of month-old leftovers. Instead I am welcomed by a warm aroma, something familiar. Coffee? Chocolate?
Both. On the kitchen island there’s a carafe of steaming coffee and a plate of chocolate biscotti. “I thought you might be tired,” Sara says. She wears a tight-fitting v-neck shirt and a pair of dark blue capris that hadn’t seen the outside of her closet yet this year. She pours a mug of coffee for me, then snaps a piece of biscotti in half and nibbles on one end. The coffee is the perfect temperature when I take the first sip. Sara dips the biscotti in my coffee and offers it to me. I take a bite.
For the next two hours we sit together on the couch and listen to a classic rock station through a countertop radio. We drain half the carafe and finish two more biscotti. She asks about my day, and I tell her everything up until Lucy. Sara excuses herself to use the bathroom. When she returns with a slight limp, I offer to rub her feet. She’s thankful and trades me a shoulder rub.
“Mr. Ryan called tonight,” she says.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah, and I’m going back to work on Monday.”
“Monday?” I say. “This Monday?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Is that okay? We didn’t have anything planned this week, right?”
“Right,” I say. “It’s just so soon. You’re sure you’re ready?” But I know she’s ready. She looks alive tonight. Maybe it’s just seeing her without the cold glow of the TV screen, but her skin lacks its normal pallor.
“It’ll just be part-time at first, until I get back into the swing of things,” she says. “It’ll be good for me.”
Who is this woman who serves coffee after eleven and rubs my shoulders while we listen to Led Zeppelin? I didn’t cheat on her. I cheated on the lifeless troll that was living in my apartment, the one who used TV as a life-support machine, who was allergic to natural light, a heartless, inhuman thing. What happened to that woman? Cheating on her was no sin. It was necessary for my survival. For my sanity.
A smile washes over Sara’s face. “I got you something.”
“You bought something for me?”
“No,” she says. “I made it.” She leaves the room, then returns with her hands behind her back and makes me close my eyes. She takes my hand in hers, and when I open my eyes again I find a bracelet on my wrist. It’s made of black and red twine, clasped together by a loop around a glossy white seashell. It’s something I would have worn as a much younger man.
“You don’t like it,” she says.
“No, it’s awesome,” I say. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Sure you do,” Sara says. “You deserve a lot for putting up with me all this time.”
I shake my head, but she scoots closer and rests her forehead on my shoulder. There’s a boulder in my gut. I’d forgotten how she can make something special out of something so ordinary. Coffee and biscotti becomes an intimate evening. A t-shirt and capris are transformed into an alluring outfit. A bracelet weaved with twine becomes a treasure.
Maybe this is an illusion. Tomorrow she could take it all back, call Mr. Ryan to say she can’t work yet, recede into the recliner and order Chinese takeout and leave the sweet and sour sauce on the end table.
“Since you won’t be in the show next year,” Sara says, “maybe we could go to the fair together. I’d like that.”
Next year. I feel three hundred and sixty-five days fall from the sky and bury me. I see how simple it is to shut up and let time blur the facts. Sara doesn’t ask what I did tonight after the fair. Maybe she doesn’t want to know, or she assumes something close to the truth and is offering me a free pass. Considering the amount of remaining chances to do the right thing, I decide that it’s okay to let this one mistake be put to rest.
“You’re going to miss being Hector, aren’t you?”
I nod. But I hope to forget him soon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Michael Duncan lives with his wife in Liverpool, NY. His fiction has appeared in various places around the internet, most recently at Necessary Fiction. He works in a warehouse.
LF #044 © Thomas Michael Duncan. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, July 2013.
Image from The Noun Project.
