A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online Page A

hammer centering on a nail. And others are less like rides than science experiments, Spirographing people through a complicated trajectory of loops and curves and rings-in-rings that Kevin could never reproduce on paper, not with a million tries. There is a game that involves dropping five metal disks into the outline of a circle that none of them can figure out how to win. There is a vendor wearing faded blue overalls who is selling fresh fruit and fried pickles. Kevin spends a good chunk of his allowance on a foam lizard attached to a long leash of coat-hanger wire, which scurries around like a live pet even if it does cost him four dollars. Four dollars, he thinks. That equals five comic books with three cents left over. Four dollars, which equals something like eleven candy bars. So much money. And he is so sure he will mislay the lizard in the tide of the crowd that eventually he does.
    “How you doing with Mr. Lizard over there?” Bateman asks him, and Thad tries out a half-formed joke, “Mr. Lizard’s World,” and that’s when Kevin realizes it is gone.
    “I lost it.” His eyes are as hot as coals. “Damn it, I lost it. Stupid fucking unbelievable shit. I cannot fucking believe this.”
    Kenneth corrects him: “It’s right there in your hand, Kevin. Jesus.”
    And he’s right—it is.
    And the UFO whirs past overhead.
    And the riders scream their midair screams.
    And later he is inside the Gravitron, pinned to the cushion by centrifugal force, his scalp tingling under his hair, his feet floating up from the footrests, as the wall spins faster and faster. He can see himself in the mirrored column at the center of the platform, his jacket batwinged open beneath his arms. Beside him, a woman in a Panama Jack shirt tied in a high knot to display her stomach hollers along with the music. He looks on, first in the mirror and then in real life, as the tassel from her pants slides past her navel like a raindrop rolling up a windshield. She has the fallen-into-bed posture of a model in a perfume ad. It seems barely possible—a magnificent contest between gravity and centrifugal force—that the tassel will stretch far enough to slip beneath her shirt and touch her breast. Somewhere in back of the mirror, Sarah Bell is watching him tilt his head so that he won’t get caught staring. She can tell what he is thinking. Anyone could.
    After the ride, Thad distorts his face, making Pringles lips, and in his Goon voice, all strange and pipey, says, “I want to eat a fried pickle.” The Goon voice is a total mystery. Kevin has always assumed that it is somehow connected to the Goon from Popeye, that great bald brute with the banana-squash nose, though how or why is hard to fathom. One thing: using the voice allows Thad to turn any remark, no matter how ordinary or sincere, into a joke. “I’m pretty sure that disk game is rigged, y’all.” “My dad said he was gonna kick me in the crack of the ass.” “I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna ask Annalise out.
No, Thad. But we can still be friends, Thad. Go away,Thad. Go away and leave me alone
.” The voice is his superpower. It reminds Kevin of Shadowcat, his favorite X-Man after Wolverine, whose intangibility lets her phase through walls and force fields.
    Shane says, “Who would want to fry a pickle in the first place?”
    “Whoever, I want to shake that man’s hand.”
    “I want to shake his pickle.”
    “I want to pickle his shake.”
    “I want to fry his hand.”
    “Oh my God, did you just go, ‘I want to
fry
his
hand
’?” Kenneth says, and it is two points to Kevin for the winning line.
    Everyone else is sidetracked by the funnel cakes and corn dogs, but Kevin and Thad continue on to the fried pickle stand. Sometimes Kevin has no idea why he says the things he does. Why, for instance, as the two of them eat pickles from a paper plate behind the trailer, where a giant fan thickens the air with the smell of cooking oil, does he nudge Thad with his elbow as