“Cures out,” Burroughs said, and recaptured our attention.
Each of the Yachts unsleeved a cure and held it overhead.
Valentine and Duggan had dismounted the carousel. Valentine was standing by the lone, Yachtless handrail, and Duggan a few feet behind him, next to Burroughs. The sirencase, lidless, sat atop the spindle with an easel lamp clipped to one of its walls, the lamp’s arm bent so the bulb, when lit, would shine directly down onto Spotsy. Although the sky was partly cloudy, and the sirencase partly shaded by the easel lamp, Spotsy was now exposed to more direct sunlight than it had been before the mirrored lid had been removed, and the effects of the Vampire were becoming more evident: the cure hid its face behind its hands and shivered while shifting its weight between its leg and its tail and sort of bowing a little or tentatively ducking.
The crowd was pushing forward, tightening up. I pushed forward with them.
Burroughs addressed us. “I’ll only say this once,” he said. “Don’t rush at the siren. You will not get there, you will be removed, and you will never be invited back to the compound. If you start to overload, close your eyes. It’s really that simple. Now, earplugs in.”
Burroughs, his sons, and all the members of the audience inserted their earplugs. I kept mine palmed. I’d never heard a Wailered or Melodized cure.
“Eyes up,” said Burroughs. The Yachts, who’d all been looking at their feet, straightened their necks and stared at the sirencase, and Valentine started turning the carousel—five, six RPMs at most. The spindle, like a record player’s, was stationary, and Spotsy, which was peeking through the gaps between its fingers, and confused, perhaps, by the circling Yachts, added to its bowing/ducking movements some side-to-side swaying. The cures the Yachts held up in their fists seemed to be at least as confused as Spotsy, turning their heads right to left, right to left.
Once the carousel had gone around a couple times, Duggan aimed a remote control at the spindle, Burroughs said, “Now,” and the easel lamp lit.
Spotsy collapsed to the floor of the sirencase. It covered its head with both arms and bucked. Its Melodized painsong seemed intricate, mathy, like a Mozart piece composed for the sitar, but it wasn’t that easy to hear from where I stood (I was, by then, in the middle of the audience). That I could even hear the song at all was remarkable, considering Spotsy sang it into its armpit, from inside that case, while the carousel creaked and the Yachts oohed and awwed as they strained toward the spindle, and their handcuffs scraped and clanked against the rails, and their own cures, squeezed, were attempting harmonies. The Wailer really worked.
I made the decision to block my ears, after all.
By the time I’d gotten the first plug in, Bryce had smashed his cure against his forehead. By the time I’d gotten the second one in, Chaz Jr.’s cure’s head was no longer attached. Lyle lost next: overloaded by mouth. None of them acted as if anything had changed—they continued to strain at the sirencase, moaning.
It appeared that Chaz would defeat Triple-J, who twice brought his cure down before his open mouth. Both times, however, our host resisted, straightening his arm at the very last instant. Just as he began to bend the arm a third time, Burroughs blew his whistle.
Chaz’s cure was dead inside Chaz’s raised hand. Without even knowing (or so the puzzled look on his face suggested), he’d squeezed the life from it.
So that was that. Ulysses was over.
Duggan raised the remote and shut off the lamp. Spotsy’s painsong became inaudible.
Valentine climbed up onto the carousel and dropped his jacket over the sirencase. The Yachts all hunched, dazed and expressionless until Triple-J, once Valentine had uncuffed his wrist, pantomimed an overload-by-mouth, then tossed his cure into the crowd as before, and everyone laughed.
Burroughs raised his stopwatch, said, “Ninety-two seconds—another new record. Lowman was Bryce at seventeen seconds.”
Cheers. Clapping.
“Alright,” Triple-J said. “You think you know what that means, but it’s better than you think. Last seventeen seconds and you get to be a Yacht. Break my record, we’ll have a showdown for captain at next month’s games, but not only that—you’ll get to go home with Spotsy. You can sign up for any of the events as many times as you want til you run out of cures. Duggan’ll be coming around with the clipboard. Good luck to all of you, and thanks for coming out.”
Louder Cheers. Wilder Clapping.
A pressure on my shoulder. A hand. Hogan’s. “It’s time,” he said, “to brunch,” and led me away from the crowd at a clip.
A FORCE AND AN EMBLEM
WE HEADED TO THE opposite side of the compound, to a structure I guess you’d—if pressed—call a turret: five stories overground, round and mineral, it crowned the southwestern corner of the ramparts. Yet it had a domed roof with a whitewashed ceiling, its deck was floored in oaken boards, and the tripods mounted between certain balusters appeared to be for telescopes rather than weapons. So a turret, but a turret in the guise of a gazebo.
Hogan, when we got there, just called it a turret, though. “The turret,” he said, stepping aside, and I mounted the final stair and entered.
In the middle of the deck was a full-size hibachi, at which Fondajane sat, buffing her nails with a pink and purple block.
“Belt Magnet,” Hogan told her.
She set down the nail block. “Belt,” she said, “I’m Fon,” and she held out her hand to me. The angle was ambiguous: to pump or m’lady? Impossible to tell. I settled on what I still think was a pretty clever tactic, given that I had only a moment to contrive it—I’d grasp, start to lift, then quickly withdraw to cover a fraudulent, violent sneeze—but it proved unneeded. As our thumb webbings met, Fondajane closed her fingers and guided me forward to kiss me on both of my overheated cheeks.
“Now would you take a look at that,” she said to Hogan. “He’s a kitten. All atremble. Wouldn’t bite you for a castle made of sardines and yarn.”
“Yes, Ms. Henry,” Hogan said.
“Wouldn’t bite me at least.”
“No, Ms. Henry.”
“I’m trying to be subtle, Hogan.”
“Subtle, Ms. Henry?”
“Subtly granting you leave,” she said.
“I see, Ms. Henry. It was clever how you did that.”
“Don’t flirt with me, now. I might get ideas.”
“I won’t flirt, Ms. Henry.”
“And maybe on your way back over to that circus, drop in at Trip’s and kind of push him along? Belt isn’t here to critique my work.”