The Talisman

don’t remember meetin me before, Jack. You don’t, do you?’
    ‘Meeting you before? Where was this?’
    ‘California – at least, I think we met back there. Not so’s you’d remember, Travellin Jack. It was a pretty busy couple of minutes. Would have been in . . . let me see . . . would have been about four – five years ago. Nineteen seventy-six.’
    Jack looked up at him in pure befuddlement. Nineteen seventy-six? He would have been seven years old.
    ‘Let’s go find my little office,’ Speedy said, and pushed himself off the ticket booth with that same weightless grace.
    Jack followed after him, winding through the tall supports of the roller coaster – black shadows like the grids of tic-tac-toe diagrams overlaid a dusty wasteland sprinkled with beercans and candy wrappers. The tracks of the roller coaster hung above them like an unfinished skyscraper. Speedy moved, Jack saw, with a basketball player’s rangy ease, his head up and his arms dangling. The angle of his body, his posture in the crisscrossed gloom beneath the struts, seemed very young – Speedy could have been in his twenties.
    Then the custodian stepped out again into the harsh sunlight, and fifty extra years grayed his hair and seamed the back of his neck. Jack paused as he reached the final row of uprights, sensing as if Speedy Parker’s illusory juvenescence were the key to them that the Daydreams were somehow very near, hovering all about him.
    Nineteen seventy-six? California? Jack trailed off after Speedy, who was going toward a tiny red-painted wooden shack back up against the smooth-wire fence on the far side of the amusement park. He was sure that he had never met Speedy in California . . . but the almost visible presence of his fantasies had brought back to him another specific memory of those days, the visions and sensations of a late afternoon of his sixth year, Jacky playing with a black toy taxi behind the couch in his father’s office . . . and his father and Uncle Morgan unexpectedly, magically talking about the Daydreams. They have magic like we have physics, right? An agrarian monarchy, using magic instead of science. But can you begin to understand how much fucking clout we’d swing if we gave them electricity? If we got modern weapons to the right guys over there? Do you have any idea?
    Hold on there, Morgan, I have a lot of ideas that apparently have yet to occur to you . . .
    Jack could almost hear his father’s voice, and the peculiar and unsettling realm of the Daydreams seemed to stir in the shadowy wasteland beneath the roller coaster. He began again to trot after Speedy, who had opened the door of the little red shack and was leaning against it, smiling without smiling.
    ‘You got something on your mind, Travellin Jack. Something that’s buzzin in there like a bee. Get on inside the executive suite and tell me about it.’
    If the smile had been broader, more obvious, Jack might have turned and run: the spectre of mockery still hung humiliatingly near. But Speedy’s whole being seemed to express a welcoming concern – the message of all those deepened lines in his face – and Jack went past him through the door.
    Speedy’s ‘office’ was a small board rectangle – the same red as its exterior – without a desk or a telephone. Two upended orange crates leaned against one of the side walls, flanking an unplugged electrical heater that resembled the grille of a mid-fifties Pontiac. In the middle of the room a wooden round-back school chair kept company with an overstuffed chair of faded gray material.
    The arms of the overstuffed chair seemed to have been clawed open by several generations of cats: dingy wisps of stuffing lay across the arms like hair; on the back of the school chair was a complex graffito of scratched-in initials. Junkyard furniture. In one of the corners stood two neat foot-high piles of paperback books, in another the square fake-alligator cover of a cheap record player. Speedy nodded at the heater and said, ‘You come round here in January, February, boy, you see why I got that. Cold? Shoo.’ But Jack was now looking at the pictures taped to the wall over the heater and orange crates.
    All but one of the pictures were nudes cut from men’s magazines. Women with breasts as large as their heads lolled back against uncomfortable trees and splayed columnar, hard-worked legs. To Jack, their faces looked both fascinating and rapacious – as if these women would take bites out of