While they ate jambalaya and sipped beer from jelly jars, he asked about her parents.
She described her father in detail-handsome, a charmer, a silver-throated smoothy. But Janek received no clear impression of her mother. She came across, from Gelsey's description, as a shadowy presence in the house- secretive, withdrawn, ineffectual and plain.
'I don't think she had much influence on me,' Gelsey said. 'I'm strictly my father's girl. He was a scam artist and so am I. He built the maze; I paint pictures. So, we're both visual artists, too.'
'Did he think of himself as an artist?'
'God, no! He'd laugh at the idea.' She told Janek about other works created by other maze artist-craftsmen: the Watts Towers in Los Angeles; an elaborate tile complex in Washington; a wall constructed out of empty beer cans in Key West, Florida.
'There're hundreds of these huge lifelong projects around the country.
The men who create them, like my father, usually start out without a clear idea of what they're doing. But something drives them. They see something vaguely in a dream, then set out to construct it… out of masonry, metal, wood, tile, glass, whatever material they know how to use. These projects speak to people because they're obsessive. You look at them, sense the design and know they're the product of a single person's mind. You marvel at the work put in, the scale, the ambition.
Few people have the will to devote a lifetime to something so grand…
Instead of borrowing Aaron's car, Janek signed out a police Ford from the Sixth Precinct. Driving out to Newark, he and Gelsey didn't talk much. He liked being with her, sitting beside her in the car. She aroused his affection in a way few young women ever had. Perhaps, he thought, she reminded him of his mother-there was something about the set of her eyes.
'What's it like to live above a maze?' he asked as he took the turn that led to Richmond.
'Most of the time I forget it's there.'
'But there're times when you don't forget.'
She nodded. 'Then it feels strange. Like living on top of a bomb.'
He wondered if her forays into the city, spurred on by rain, had been attempts to add excitement to an otherwise quiet life. It occurred to him that for her to live above the maze was akin to an orphan living in the house in which his parents had been killed. People normally flee the scenes of injurious family crimes. But Gelsey had stayed on. He wondered why.
As they passed the entrance to the park, he asked her if there was a way they could get inside.
'This summer some kids cut a hole in the fence.' She pointed ahead.
'About a hundred yards up the street.' He stopped where she showed him.
'Want to go in?'
'If you like,' she said. 'It'll bring back memories.'
They got out, she crawled through the hole, he followed, then, at her suggestion, picked up a stick in case they ran into dogs.
He was less impressed with the decay than he had been the previous morning. He guessed this was because the high afternoon sun made the ruins of Richmond appear flat, while the rising sun had endowed them with a sorrowful, romantic glow. But there was still something fascinating about an amusement park in an abandoned state. They didn't make them like Richmond anymore. The new ones were glossy and plastic.
Richmond, with its patina of ruined, rusted rides, and broken, weathered sheds, would make a fine setting, he thought, for a post-nuclear holocaust film, As they strolled through the weeds, he told Gelsey about Walter Meles and how he had hated touching Walter's monkey's paw. Gelsey didn't remember Meles-when Janek and his father had come out to Richmond, she hadn't even been born. Still, she listened with attention, and, when he finished his story, shook her head.
'Most everyone who worked here was injured somehow,' she said.
The fun house was shutted. The alcoves, on either side of the door, which had contained the mechanical Laughing Man and Laughing Woman, looked forlorn without their cackling patrons of joy.
'Remember how they sounded?' Gelsey smiled. 'Scratchy. Very scratchy.'
The huge painted smile that adorned the front had faded but still was visible. One of the walls, however, had fallen down. When Janek looked in he saw no mirrors, rolling floors, bats on wires, giant spiders' webs. There was no spooky lighting or scary sound effects.
The fun house was but a shell.
Gelsey said, 'When Dad was here this place looked great.'
As they strolled, he tried subtly to guide her toward the tunnel of love. Finally, she seemed to catch on.
'Want to see where my mother worked?'
'If you'd like to show me… '
He remembered the attraction well. Most customers were young hand-holding couples. One boarded a boat. He had shared his with his balding father. The boat was then pulled by a mechanical system into a pitch-black tunnel. Here the air was close, the humidity intense, the environment a jungle at night: glossy plants, mechanical alligators, chained up live monkeys and parrots screeching out of the gloom. As one's boat passed through, along a meandering circular path, the darkness overwhelmed. But he remembered the high-pitched giggles and deep throaty laughter of lovers urging each other to greater intimacies.
He also remembered wondering what it would be like to thrust his tongue inside a girl's mouth.
The tunnel, like the fun house, was seriously decayed, but they found the cement bed that had been the river, and the remains of the chains that had hauled the boats. The tunnel entrance was still defined, although most of its ceiling had collapsed. Gelsey led him into the ruins, then pointed at a shed in the center.
'That's where Mom sat. The control booth. She could see everything from there. If things got out of hand, she'd turn on the lights.'
'It was so dark in here, how could she see?'
'She was used to it. The way the place was set up, if you were in the booth, the lamps in the foliage silhouetted people in the boats against the walls.' Gelsey paused. 'I think she lived in a state of darkness anyway.' Back in her loft, he asked if he could stand on the catwalks again. She was pleased that he was interested.
'I think last night Sue got a little freaked out,' she said, opening the trapdoor. 'Especially when we went down to the floor.'
'It's really tough to look at nothing but yourself.'
'If you're not pleased with yourself, very tough,' she agreed.
Standing in the dark on the catwalks with the blazing lights on below, he was dazzled again by the rigorous symmetry of the maze. But there were places, he observed, where the ceilings were not transparent.
Gelsey explained that, for structural reasons, her father hadn't been able to roof all the mirrored corridors with one-way glass. Also, there were backstage and service areas between the sections.
'Is there a map?'
She smiled, pointed to her head.
He couldn't believe there was nothing on paper.
'Didn't your dad work from a plan?'
'He made it up as he went along.'
To Janek that seemed impossible; the maze was too well designed. Gelsey explained that her father had built and rebuilt portions many times, constantly correcting his work.
'I do the same thing-get an idea, sketch it on canvas, then, when it doesn't work, adjust a little here, a little there, erase this, add that, until I find my way to something I like. '
'But without a plan, how do you know which mirrors are doors? To me they all look the same.'
'They are the same. Otherwise you wouldn't get lost. But I've been through it so many times, I know which ones open and which ones don't.'
She paused. 'Sometimes when I'm down here I try to lose myself by closing my eyes and whirling around. But after a few minutes I'll recognize a mirror combination or a turn in a corridor, and then I'll know exactly where I am.' She explained that the door mirrors, identical to the stationary ones, were disengaged by touching them at a point exactly five feet off the floor. Once sprung, they were easily pushed open. When pushed back, they relocked.
'When I was a kid, and opened them all up, my father thought I was a genius. But it was easy. Want to know
