“Child,” he said, shaking her gently, made mild by memory, “what are you doing? It’s damned dangerous here.”
“I come here all the time,” she said, staring into his face. She saw a stocky man with a gray braid over one shoulder and an Enforcer’s badge on the other. Enforcers were mysterious, almost legendary creatures. She had no answer for the question he had asked. She didn’t know what she was doing in the Swale. She came there, that was all. She sometimes thought she came here to get away from … whatever she wanted to get away from. Other times she thought she came here because of what was here. Though she lacked sufficient vocabulary to define the place, she could feel its essential nature. It suited her because it was like herself.
“Not a good place to come ever, much less all the time,” he said.
She was moved to attempt explanation. “It’s … it’s like sort of secret,” she said. “Or like the shrines. Sort of like me too.” Struggling to understand the nature of the Swale, she had come up with amorphous concepts of taboo and sacred things.
“What’d you mean, like you?”
She shrugged. What she meant was, special. What she meant was, holy, but she didn’t even have that word. What had occurred to her was that perhaps the reason she was here alone and not with other people was that she was different. Destined for something extraordinary. The idea had come from nowhere, sneaking into her mind bit by bit, like a little warm breeze, thawing her chilly heart. Being different would explain a lot of things, like why nothing worked out for her like it did for other people. She wasn’t sure she really believed the idea, even though it was comforting. Comforting ideas didn’t always—or even very often—work out, either, so she hadn’t dwelt on it much. Still, she didn’t disbelieve it, not yet. She could be destined for some particular purpose, maybe, and if so, she wouldn’t be harmed by haunting the Swale as ordinary people might be. Coming here—it was almost a test!
“My name is Zasper Ertigon,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Fringe,” she said. “Fringe Dorwalk.”
“There are better places than this, Fringe,” he told her.
“Where?” she asked him, intrigued. She had been looking for better places as long as she could remember.
Their friendship began with that question. Remembering his own youth, he did not waste time in admonitory lectures. Instead, he showed her some better places, safer at least, like the way to get into Ahl Dibai Bloom’s gambling house from Tyme Street, without going through the Swale. Ahl Dibai Bloom, bobbing up and down on his elevator legs as he did when he was amused, said he could use a young person to sweep the gambling rooms and stack the bottles, winking at Zasper over her head as he hired her for this duty.
After that, Fringe spent a lot of time at Bloom’s, often when Zasper was there, mostly listening as they talked. Zasper told her a censored version of his life as an Enforcer, and she talked artlessly about herself, as though about a stranger. Little by little, he came to know who and what she was, though there was little enough he could do about that. Enforcers who had left off being Council Enforcers to become provincial Enforcers were just that. They had no great status, except among old colleagues. Still, they had a certain reputation and were not often interfered with. Habitués of the Swale, at least, soon learned that Fringe was Zasper’s bit of harmless amusement and better left alone.
Freak shows were still current on Earth toward the end of the twentieth century, though less fascinating than in some former times. Television had made freakishness a commonplace; the National Enquirer and its ilk had made aberration a matter of mere momentary titillation, of no more duration than a headline. The world’s fattest woman was only a person with a glandular disorder. Human skeletons were merely anorexic. The seal woman was a thalidomide baby. Bearded ladies and giants were no longer fantasy but matters of endocrine malfunction. A child born with an extra leg, the result of an incomplete twinning, would have had his supernumerary appendage amputated at birth. Elephant men had been reenacted on Broadway and in the movies. Dwarfs and midgets were merely little people who could take the roles of Munchkins or Time Bandits or small furry spear-carrying Ewoks in Star Wars epics. In cosmopolitan places, in urban areas, where the abnormal was ordinary, wonder at the bizarre had been lost.
In rural areas, however, eyes still widened and mouths still gaped. There the birth of a two-headed calf was still cause for a visit from the neighbors, hexing was a day-to-day possibility, the evil eye a fact. There credulity reigned and one of them was born every minute, fair target for the one-ring sawdust circuses, the dog-and-pony shows, still playing beneath canvas, their often dilapidated but brightly blazoned trucks moseying from smallish town to smallish town, their performances long on smaller animals and acrobats and totally deficient as to elephants or tigers. There, the snake charmer was still good for a three-dollar admission, and the cooch dancers brought out the boys who had no local topless bar for their after-work delectation. There, though the glitter was tarnished, the glamour faded, and the repair budget was always in arrears, the authentic aura of circus enchantment could still be found.
Mulhollan’s had all the essentials, albeit on a small scale: taped calliope music tootling over the P.A. system, the whir of a cotton-candy machine, the shout of the straw-hatted ticket seller from
