Wick inclined his head to the top of the sixty-foot-tall black grain silo, hand held on this brow to block the morning sun. "This will get us to your father?"
It was a question without rancor, so Jacqueline did not feel annoyed by it. "That wasn't your specific parameter, was it? You asked me where I wanted to go."
He considered the tower again, the lemon morning light finding chips in the paint. He nodded, though it did not seem to be a response to anything she had said. Jacqueline felt strangely leaving the scarabs in the car. Though they may have by their nature brief lifespans, she had no urge to rush them to the conclusion. Houdini crawled onto her shoulder once more, but she suspected the eccentricity of this would not be appreciated within. What if someone were to swat at it, thinking somehow that he was not a sacred beetle charged by her dying father to retrieve her?
She cupped the beetle in her hands, holding it before her chest. "If I put you all in my hoodie's pouch, do you swear to behave yourselves?"
Houdini wriggled, crawling over her sleeve until it had secreted itself into the pocket. She could do without the other four crawling over her, scooping them from the Tupperware and depositing them in her hoodie with no more ceremony than she would give to rocks. They crawled a moment, then were still. When she took her first step, she could tell from the absence of jostling gravity that they each had fastened themselves. It did make their presence less conspicuous.
Wick was a few paces ahead as though it had been his idea to come. No, that wasn't quite it. He was ahead of her as though they had not driven here together at her behest, as though they were more strangers than they were. She skipped up to him, bridging the distance as she tested how secure her riders were (Velcro tight). For a few seconds more than seemed necessary, Wick studied the small pond from which fiberglass fish leaped.
"There used to be eyes up there," she confided, pointing where there was now only black. "Not, like, realistic eyes. Sort of Indian art if you know what I'm saying."
"Buddha's eyes, as though this was a stupa."
"Sure, a stupa," she said, though she did not know this word, only that it sounded appropriately mystical and Southeast Asian. Hindi, she supposed, though the only phrase outside the Western hippie lexicon that had stayed with her was Main ek saphed haathee hoon. She wouldn't know how to write it, only the transliteration into the Roman alphabet. It meant either "I am a white elephant" or "I am an airplane," neither the most helpful information to convey. This pointlessness was why she clung to it. Who needed to be able to ask where one might find the nearest lavatory in Mumbai if one never expected to step foot off the continent?
"There were Buddha's eyes right there," she repeated. "That's why I remembered this place--eyes among clouds. In college, I had a boyfriend out this way, in Phoenicia. I kept telling him that we ought to stop here, kind of joking but actually not." She instinctively hid her hands in her hoodie pocket to hide a fraction from this memory. She absently fingered the smooth objects there a second before recalling what they were, yanking her hands out. "He thought it was silly--maybe it is--so we didn't go. I had mostly forgotten this place, the eyes. Now they are gone."
She was sorry for their lack and her negligence, as though the latter caused the former. It was not an hour's drive from her home. There was no reason she could not have gone in the intervening decade. She was here now, though, so she wouldn't grieve this.
Kaatskill Kaleidoscope, the World's Largest Kaleidoscope apparently (given that the title was trademarked), was a roadside attraction, but Jacqueline could not imagine how many it had attracted. It was not near anything, merely between other things. That was all it needed to be: a spot of weirdness between mundane Points A and B.
According to the sign out front, the Catskill Corners boutique mall had formed around it into "New York's most innovative family entertainment complex." However, the boutique was only a front for a resort for the rich had sprung up, but these were native invasive species in the Hudson Valley. City people moved north to price the locals out of the real estate. It was remarkable that the silo had received nothing worse than a dull paint job.
They entered through the gift shop, the Kaleidostore. Though the hour was early, a few people lingered around the gift shop, peering into handmade kaleidoscopes that cost twice what they ought to. They were not the sort of cannabis-perfumed soul who one might expect outside so bizarre and potentially spiritual a locale, instead resembling women who could scream themselves raw complaining of not enough cinnamon on their low-fat, half-skim/half-soy, decaf, chai, espresso latte, and their children who had more extracurriculars in preschool than Jacqueline had managed in the whole of her high school career. Just looking at them made Jacqueline's chest tense. The scarabs fidgeted as though sensing this.
These people were not here for the Kaleidoscope, but the boutique offerings would go no further than letting Jayyden and Kyly break something beautiful, unique, and otherwise useless.
Wick dawdled over a tiny tube in a glass box near the exit -- the World's Smallest Kaleidoscope, not trademarked.
Jacqueline sidled up to the counter.
"When is the next show?"
The young woman, freckled and languid, looked up from her phone. "When you give me $5. We don't have a schedule, just when people wanna go in." The way she said this, Jacqueline understood that people did not want this as often as expected. "Are you waiting for anyone else?"
"Just him."
"$10, then."
Jacqueline handed over the bill. The girl said to give her the signal when they wanted to go in.
"This is the first cathedral of the third millennium," said Wick when she stepped beside him. This was a borrowed phrase, a quote said with a vague melange of disdain and amusement, a claim bolder than the largeness of a mirrored tube.
He held up a pamphlet for her to skim. It revealed nothing that could surprise her (a project from a psychedelic artist in the 1960s who designed it and a Catskills developer whose quarter of a million-dollar investment paid evident dividends). It was once the Riseley Flat Farm, back when that was a more lucrative endeavor than hosting a kaleidoscope forty feet in diameter.
Far more than two (and the scarabs) could have fit in the Kaleidoscope. There were sloping padded boards with neck supports along the wall, but she was not interested in these. She knew where the connoisseur of the experience should be: dead center on the floor. She scooched the beetles from her pocket, allowing them to crawl over the front of her shirt for a comfortable view. Shouldn't they be allowed to appreciate the show? She bunched up the hoodie and put it as a pillow on the unsurprisingly dusty floor.
She imagined that Wick was too dignified to reduce himself to the floor as she had. He sat a foot from her despite the ample space and padded boards on the edges.
"You are going to crane your neck something awful, and you have all this driving to do."
He looked down at her, saying nothing, but his expression conveyed that he had reason not to worry about a neck ache.
"Scarabs navigate by the Milky Way," he intoned after a moment. "Such lowly beasts -- present company excluded, of course -- and the stars beckon them." He peered up as though he could see the galaxy in the mirrors. "I wish I could know how they will understand this experience."
As the light dimmed, an announcement chimed. "Make sure to move your head from side to side."
The show, called Metamorphosis, was a cycle through the Hudson Valley seasons, which she had seen every year since she was born, but felt that she had missed critical aspects, having never seen it sped up and fractured through a mirrored pyramid over her head. (She could not tell how far above the mirrors started; everything tapered and scattered into fractals that she could hardly understand if they were flat.)
"Why are we here?"
Jacqueline turned her head to Wick for only a half-second, not caring to miss the show overhead. His expression remained stolid, his eyes locked at the sight overhead as though he had not spoken. In the dark, his sclera was black as oil on marble, the fractured reflection giving him an animation that could have been mistaken for amazement to the casual viewer.
"Big kaleidoscope," she answered finally. He wanted something more profound from her, she knew. She did not have something deeper to give. This was the first thing to pop into her head when he asked, so she said it. It was not unusual for her to limit the filter between thinking and speaking.
He said nothing more during the show. It was not long enough to breach a more philosophical conversation, though she was peevish that he had wasted even a few seconds of it on a question she knew she was meant to ponder. It was rude, is that it was.
The show ended abruptly such that she hesitated to sit up, thinking that it might be an interruption and not a closing. She put the hoodie back on, and the scarabs crawled inside without her having to tell them.
They emerged back into the Kaleidostore. Freckles looked up at them -- how a solitary fragment of glass remained un-shoplifted with her divided attention was a mystery. "Did you like the Kaleidoshow?"
"It was short," Jacqueline said. This was not a value judgment, merely a statement of fact. After so brief a time, she did not know if she enjoyed it, only that she'd had enough of it. She could not imagine the circumstances under which she would care to return, except a fit of curiosity with another driver between some A and B.
"Everyone says that," noted Freckles. "I don't know how long would be good. Maybe if you got really high and we played -- I don't know -- at least something modern, you know?" She scratched the back of her neck as though just discovering that it existed. "Used to be Nixon and real sixties stuff, so this is an improvement. We have three shows that we alternate. If you come back another time, maybe you could see another and make up your mind?"
Freckles didn't mean much of this, particularly not the inquisitive inflection of her last statement, but she had said this so often that it must come automatically.
"Yeah, maybe," answered Jacqueline, though she knew her response was not required.
"Would you like to join our Kaleidoscope Club?" asked Freckles.
"Why would I do that?"
"It's ten percent off purchases of $100 or more, and you get a discount on the resort."
One could easily see how a fancier person could waste a thousand dollars on glass tubes, enough to make this membership worthwhile. She was grateful that she would never have to be this sort of person and told Freckles as much, which earned Jacqueline only an indifferent shrug.
She did not feel the show justified her investment of time and dollars, so she poked about the Kaleidostore.
She sat before a kaleidoscope that refracted the world on the other side. She caught her reflection, shifting her head until it shattered her face into a splintering pattern. She stuck out her tongue -- only proper -- and began moving her head around to make herself eight cyclopses when Wick sat across from her, a dozen of his face surrounding him.
"How did your mother die?"
Jacqueline jerked back from the aperture. "Shit, buy a girl a drink."
He gave a half step more space. "Pardon?"
"Is this what you godlings do? Act as though you utterly lack tact?"
He considered this. "No. I am given to understand that it is something I do, but I cannot generalize."
He seemed-- not abashed. Not chastened or anything so humble, but aware how brusque this question had been. It was enough.
"Stupidity," Jacqueline answered, having often reduced it to those few syllables. She liked that it startled people. It did not startle Wick, so she continued, "She smoked basically since I was a kid -- never around me. She loved me and always told me it was an awful habit, and she would throttle me if I ever picked it up. I still associate the smell of ash with her. It took forever to get it out of the house, even though she usually smoked on the porch. It comes up from the wood on hot days, and it's like her ghost visits me." Jacqueline noticed Freckles' ears perk at the word ghost and moved out of earshot. "The story from there is the opposite of special: She got a cough, tried to refuse to go to the doctor for a month. When I finally got her to make an appointment, he told her that she had lung cancer. They operated, cut out most of a lung, and she recovered just long enough for them to figure out that it had metastasized to her brain. You can't cut out too much of a brain without killing someone and" -- she'd told this part of the story around ten times, but it still always caught in her throat -- "and it wasn't a part she could have survived. She decided not to try to fight it, not spend the rest of her life some wax-dipped skeleton. It was all palliative care from there. She got to be a real bitch. I don't know if that was the tumor or just no longer seeing a reason to give a solitary fuck when it wasn't going to do her any good. She was furious at herself and sometimes at me, but she loved me. I helped her out for about a year, watching her die in slow motion. Then she was dead."
He breathed slowly.
"See? Not special."
He shook his head. "There is not a life and surely not a death which is not unique and unrepeatable. My sympathy for your loss."
"Yeah." She neither accepted nor appreciated this, having heard the phatic proclamation from a room full of people who may have thought that they meant it. When people said this, they wanted some response from her that would have given them a way to ease their guilt at having had any part in her pain, of continuing to live in a world where others did not. "I'd like to go."
"You're sure?"
Jacqueline cast another look around the bright paint and mirrors. "Yeah, whatever drew me to the Kaleidoscope isn't here."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.