by Ben Mezrich
“The turn should be right up here,” Charlie’s dad interrupted. “Unless we passed it already. I mean, I guess we could have passed it. But if we passed it, we can just turn around at the next mile marker. Still, I’m pretty sure it’s right up here.”
Charlie closed his eyes, pressing his face harder against the glass. An unintentional smile flickered across his lips. Even with his eyes closed, he knew that his dad was poking at the GPS control panel with one hand while tapping nervously at the steering wheel with the other. The GPS, of course, had been turned off the entire drive over from their house. His dad never used it until they were within spitting distance of their destination. Not because he had confidence in his sense of direction—in fact, quite the opposite. Charlie’s dad could get lost trying to find his way out of a cardboard box. It was just that he didn’t seem to remember the car even had a GPS until it was usually too late.
That was the thing with genius; it often had zero application in real life. His dad was a double PhD in physics and engineering, a tenured professor at MIT, one of the top scientists in New England, and he still had no idea how to work the most basic functions of his two-year-old Volvo. Even worse, he had made this trip at least once a year since Charlie was five. Usually, Charlie’s mom was in the front passenger seat, navigating. Today, Charlie was glad that his mom has been too busy getting her latest paper ready for publication, because it was going to be a lot easier to ditch his dad, rather than both his parents together, when they reached the fair. Not that his mom was any less oblivious than his scientist father. She was Charlie’s dad’s equal in most respects. Two PhDs, in biology and virology, and just as much difficulty in dealing with the most basic elements of day-to-day life. Charlie’s mom could write papers that led to lifesaving drugs for cancer patients, but the last time she’d packed Charlie’s lunch for school, he’d opened up the brown bag to find two uncooked eggs and a piece of toast buttered with cottage cheese.
Even so, the two parents together might have wondered why Charlie had been so insistent on going to the Sherwood Halloween Fair that particular Saturday afternoon. There were still a good eight weeks until Halloween, and though the fair opened on Labor Day, it didn’t really get going until halfway through October. Luckily, Charlie’s dad hadn’t bothered to ask why Charlie had wanted to make the trip. He’d just smiled and retrieved the keys to the car.
“Of course,” his dad continued, still tapping the steering wheel and the GPS, “we could always stop at a gas station and ask directions. But then we’d have to find a gas station. I’m not even sure there is a gas station this close to Sherwood.”
Charlie watched more green go by. There really wasn’t much of anything in Sherwood. The center of town, which they’d passed a few miles back, consisted of a tiny little diner, an even smaller general store, a brightly lit Dairy Queen, and a pair of competing real estate offices. The whole place had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of feel, and the only time anyone mentioned Sherwood was around Halloween.
“Dad!”
Charlie pointed toward the windshield, just in case his father somehow didn’t see the banner a dozen feet ahead, stretched out between two telephone poles. The words themselves, SHERWOOD COUNTRY HALLOWEEN FAIR, fit on the sign because someone had drawn the letters too large, but the orange and black colors made it crystal clear that they had arrived at the right place.
Charlie’s dad relaxed, navigating the Volvo the last few yards, and then he turned onto a packed dirt road. A makeshift parking lot opened up in front of them. At two in the afternoon, the lot was about half full; as the season progressed, the place would become so jammed with cars, they would eventually start turning people away. The fair didn’t have anywhere near the cachet or reputation of the much bigger Halloween carnivals, but for this leafy area, it was pretty much the only game in town.
After they parked, Charlie followed his dad toward the front entrance to the fairground. A picket fence ended in an open barn-style gate, next to which sat the windowed ticket kiosk, run by a handful of teenagers in matching orange-and-black T-shirts.
“Five bucks,” his dad mumbled as he paid the entrance fee. “Seems like it goes up every year.”
Actually, it had been five dollars a ticket for as long as Charlie could remember, but complaining about the fee was one of his dad’s favorite rituals. Charlie’s parents often complained about money. With two tenured professor salaries and only one child, they were far from poor, but they’d always found comfort in the practice of living on a strict budget. Charlie had definitely inherited some of their conservative ideology; he had been saving most of his weekly allowance for years, and now there was a cardboard box under his bed with almost nine hundred dollars hidden inside. Jeremy, the only person who knew about the cardboard box, had often asked Charlie to take the stacks of five- and ten-dollar bills out when he came over, just to see what they’d look like piled up together on Charlie’s bed. Most months, Jeremy didn’t get an allowance; Jeremy was one of a handful of kids at Nagassack Middle School who was there on student aid. Jeremy’s dad was an assistant manager at the local Shaw’s supermarket, and his mom had left nursing when she had given birth to Jeremy’s baby sister.
“You can’t put a price on fun, can you, Dad?” Charlie responded as they stepped past the ticket booth and looked out across the fairground.
And indeed, if you were putting a price on fun, the Sherwood Halloween Fair would’ve been on the low end of that monetary scale. Aside from the assorted booths hawking cotton candy, roasted peanuts, foot-long sausages, and Halloween friendly balloons depicting everything from ghosts and witches to cartoon characters, the only two true highlights of the fair were readily visible even from the front entrance.
Directly to Charlie’s left, just inside the gate, was the Haunted Hayride. Basically the hayride consisted of a tractor hauling an oversize wagon piled with hay. The ride lasted about ten minutes and followed a figure-eight dirt track that stretched out across the farmland adjacent to the parking area. Assorted papier-mâché dioramas dotted either side of the track, things like skeletons hanging from trees and scarecrows dangling from iron hooks. But the real haunting was enacted by a handful of teenagers dressed as ghosts, who were getting paid to run alongside the wagon, shouting at the passengers inside. The ride was actually pretty scary—until you turned about eight years old; then it was just plain uncomfortable, bouncing around that hard flatbed, hay jabbing at any exposed skin, while teenagers yelled at you.
The second main attraction was on the far side of the park; Charlie could just make out the top of the enormous Ferris wheel from where he was standing next to his dad, and he had to admit, it was pretty impressive. Strung with thousands of multicolored lights, at night you could see the Ferris wheel through the trees from miles away. The fact that the carnival even had a Ferris wheel was pretty surprising; there weren’t any other rides to speak of, unless you counted the ponies in the petting area off to Charlie’s right. But the Ferris wheel was enough to keep people coming back, even if they had to wait thirty minutes in line for the eight-minute journey.
“What time did Jeremy say he was going to meet you?” Charlie’s dad said as they both moved through the open gate.
“Two,” Charlie answered. “He’s probably already on line at the wheel. We’ll wave to you from the top.”
Charlie didn’t feel good about lying to his father, but he wasn’t quite sure how to explain what he was really doing at the Sherwood Fair. The truth was, he didn’t even know why he was there. The more he thought about the strange meeting at the vending machine, the less he understood. More than once, he had decided to ignore the whole incident. But eventually, his curiosity had gotten the best of him.
“And you have enough money to enjoy yourself until we meet back at the car?”
Charlie patted his jeans pocket. He’d brought thirty dollars from his stash, more than enough for a hot dog, ice cream, and maybe a couple of rides on the wheel. Although he couldn’t
imagine that Finn and Magic had invited him to the fair to take a ride on a Ferris wheel.
“Okay, man. You know where to find me when you’re done.”
Charlie’s dad gave his shoulder a squeeze, then wandered off toward the concession tent. Charlie felt another pang of guilt as he watched his dad go; he knew that lots of kids his age didn’t have nearly as much independence as he did. Part of that was probably because he was an only child; sometimes his parents went out of their way to make him feel like they were his friends and not just authority figures. And the other part was because his dad was on the older side; he’d had Charlie when he was in his early forties. Or maybe it was just his dad’s “absentminded professor” personality. Whatever the reason, Charlie had a lot of freedom, and he didn’t usually abuse the privileges that came with it.
Charlie waited until his father had reached the concession tent and had become absorbed by the menu hanging over an ice-cream counter before he started on his way deeper into the fairground.
The farther he went into the carnival, the more crowded the place became. Mostly kids—mostly teenagers, at that, in pairs and in groups. A large portion of the other kids were dressed like him, jeans and sweatshirts, light jackets, but a few were definitely getting into the spirit of the thing. From face paint, all the way up to the kinds of costumes you had to go into the city to buy. Television characters, political figures, and then all the standards: witches and goblins and monsters of various sizes and shapes.
Charlie was so busy looking at all the costumes, he almost walked right past the wooden sign hanging between two poles, set about eight feet off the ground, pointing toward the entrance to a brightly colored tent. Charlie almost laughed out loud, thinking that he was more like his father than he realized; really, the sign should have been hard to miss. It was at least five feet long, and the letters emblazoned across the wood were in a font that was supposed to mimic Old English:
Midway Games
Being the kind of kid that he was, Charlie had headed straight to the school library after his chance meeting with Finn. He’d heard the word before, “midway,” and he had a vague idea of what it meant. Midway games were essentially carnival games, the things he’d been playing since he was little, the games that most kids looked forward to when they went to fairs and carnivals. The ring toss, baseballs thrown at milk bottles, coins thrown at ceramic plates, fishing poles used to catch plastic fish, water guns shot into the mouths clowns, etc., etc., etc. But even knowing the definition of the word—well, it seemed like such a strange thing for Finn to have mentioned as a meeting place at the Halloween Fair. So Charlie had decided to add to his knowledge with a little extra research.
It hadn’t taken him more than twenty minutes at a computer in the library to find out pretty much all there was to know about midway games. He had been surprised to find that they dated a whole lot further back than he’d realized, all the way to the Renaissance, a time period near the end of the Middle Ages that conjured up visions of lavish artwork and royal courts often throwing elaborate masquerade parties. At some point during those elaborate royal parties, it turned out, jousting and swordfights had given way to simpler games involving cards, wheels, balls—things that people could play that didn’t lead to loss of limbs.
Hundreds of years later, these games made their way to America. Then, in the late nineteenth century, the city of Chicago was home to a World’s Fair, during which the first Ferris wheel debuted. The modern versions of the Renaissance games had been set up to entertain the people waiting for their turn on the wheel, and from that moment, the name Midway stuck, in tribute to the area of Chicago where the fair had taken place.
Midway games had become standard at every fair, carnival, and circus. Charlie didn’t know anyone who hadn’t tried his hand at tossing a ring around the neck of a bottle at least once, or knocking a pyramid of milk bottles down with a baseball.
Stepping through the threshold of the tent, Charlie felt a familiar tweak of excitement as his eyes took in the various games spread out across the tent’s vast interior. The first thing that struck him were all the colors, from the huge stuffed animals that hung in tethered clusters above the various gaming booths, to the lights that were strung along every table, post, and pole in the tent. So much color, it was almost hard to concentrate on any one thing for very long. Adding to the visual cacophony, the air was thick with the mixed scent of cotton candy, spilled soda, and sawdust from the floor.
Once he’d gotten acclimated to the scene, Charlie began to chart out the area around him. Ever since he was little, he’d had the strange habit of seeing the world numerically; looking around the tent was like looking at a scene as if it were drawn on graph paper. Three squares to his left was a ringtoss setup, a waist-high counter overlooking a low platform covered in dozens of empty soda bottles packed tightly together. Three kids were playing the game at the same time, tossing plastic rings toward the tops of the pins, as a carnival worker, a “carny,” watched with a bored smirk. Hanging from the ceiling, three imaginary graph paper squares above the pins, was one of the many elevated jungles of stuffed animals: monkeys, lions, tigers, and even a couple of oversize giraffes, a few swinging so low on their plastic tethers that the kids playing the game had to toss the rings at ridiculous angles just to avoid hitting them.
Two squares to Charlie’s right, there stood a standard milk-bottle game: another waist-high counter, this one facing an expanse of dirt that ended in a small stage, on which stood a pyramid made up of six oversize milk bottles, three on the bottom, two above that, and one on top. A teenager was standing by the counter, holding three baseballs in his hands. As Charlie watched, he threw the balls one at a time at the bottles. His first two throws missed entirely. His third caught the bottom left bottle directly in the center, and the kid shouted with joy. For a brief second, it looked like he’d win the game, that all six bottles would go down, but when the dust cleared, one of the three bottom bottles was still standing, and the carny shrugged. As the kid turned away from the counter, dejected, the carny began restacking the bottles.
Charlie moved deeper into the tent, passing more games, mentally graphing everything he was seeing. Next to the ringtoss was a horse race waiting for players, consisting of eight water guns lined up next to one another above another low counter, each facing a target that, when hit with water, made a little wooden horse move across a scoreboard hanging along the back wall. A teenage carny with a microphone stood by the dormant horses, ready to announce the game. Just beyond the horse race, Charlie saw a basketball toss, a hoop high up on a wooden frame, in front of a group of teenagers arguing over who was going to chance a shot first. Charlie watched as they finally came to an agreement, and the biggest of the group took aim, hurled a basketball in a perfect arc at the hoop, only to shout in anger as the ball ricocheted off the rim with an ugly clang.
“Don’t feel bad for him, Charlie. LeBron James couldn’t make that shot in ten tries.”
Charlie turned to see Finn off to his left, lounging back against one of the waist-high counters, which overlooked what appeared to be a coin-toss game. Charlie could hear oversize coins bouncing off ceramic plates on the other side of the counter as a pair of older kids with their backs to him played the game a few feet to Finn’s left.
“It doesn’t look that tough,” Charlie finally responded. “The basket isn’t nearly as high as a real one.”
“Oh, it’s not tough. It’s impossible. Or nearly impossible. The hoop isn’t a circle, it’s an oval. An optical illusion, really. Makes you think it’s closer than it is, and that the ball is small enough to go through easily.”
Charlie watched as another shot clanged off the rim, this one bouncing so high, it smacked another group of stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling. Then he crossed to where Finn was standing.
“I guess I never noticed,” Charlie said. He could feel his nerves going off, and he felt incredibly self-conscious around the older, more self-assured kid. Finn
was dressed pretty much the same as he had been before, leather jacket, dark jeans, but this time he was wearing a Red Sox baseball hat low over his eyes, and his hands were jammed into the pockets of his coat. He looked different, somehow, but Charlie couldn’t quite put his finger on why.
“You’re not supposed to notice. You’re supposed to think you can win. That’s how all these games work, Charlie. It’s all about perception.”
Finn glanced toward the two teenagers a few feet over at the counter, their backs still toward Charlie. Charlie followed his gaze. The teenagers were leaning forward, taking turns tossing gold-colored coins at the shiny porcelain plates that were glued to multitiered platforms spread out across a large rectangular area below. No matter how the teenagers tossed the coins, the results seemed to be the same; the coins were noisily bouncing and ricocheting all over the place and eventually landing on the packed dirt floor beneath the platforms. A carny was standing beneath another hanging bloom of stuffed animals, watching with a smirk on his face. The teenagers didn’t seem to mind that they kept losing; they were both laughing as they played, and when one ran out of coins, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pink ticket, which the carny exchanged for three more of the oversize coins.
“So,” Charlie said when Finn finally turned his attention back in Charlie’s direction. “What exactly are we doing here? And where’s Magic?”
Finn smiled.
“He’s around. We’re here to win prizes, like everyone else. Maybe a nice giraffe to keep you company on the ride home?”
Charlie wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, but before he had to think of something to say, Finn leaned in close.
“Oh, and when you see Magic, you don’t know him.”