The giant Ferris wheel stopped and the car at the very top containing the man and the woman swung slightly back and forth. Then the first pink bunny came flying out of the car.
You could see them way up at the top of the Ferris wheel, the woman and the man, stopped up there, just sitting, swinging gently back and forth in their seat, and every so often one of the pink bunnies comes flying out and falls to the ground of the carnival, which is silent because everyone has gone home and most of the lights are off and all the rides have stopped except for the Ferris wheel, which has stopped with just those two at the top. They had arrived 20 minutes earlier and the guy had an enormous bag with him and the woman was dressed in an elegant gown, like an evening gown, and the guy was in a tuxedo, and she held, quite incongruously, an umbrella, and they paid their money, it looked like it was pre-arranged because the rest of the carnival was already closed for the night but the Ferris wheel operator had kept the lights on after the last load, and he’d closed the gate and put a closed sign up but the thing was still lit up. And those two show up and the guy in the tuxedo hands him something–a ticket, maybe some bills–and he puts them on it and they go around a few times and then he stops it with them at the top, and the seat is slowly swinging in the breeze, and with the inertia of the wheel stopping, and then one by one these pink teddy bears are raining down out of the seat, the guy is throwing them down every minute or two.
I stood there in the dark watching this. I had gone deaf the previous year so I could not hear what was said, I could not hear the generator engine though I remembered what they sound like, I could not hear any shouted commands, I could not hear the sound of the teddy bears landing on the ground or on the roof of the Bearded Lady booth closest to the Ferris wheel, or the creaking of the metal as the Ferris wheel ground to a halt, or the conversation the operator seemed to be having with someone on the telephone, or the birds or the automobiles out on the highway or the occasional passing truck that I could see with my eyes but not hear.
My instructions were to simply watch. The person who hired me knew that I had gone deaf and indicated he really just wanted the pictures, so from the dark enclosure of the Haunted House booth I focused the telephoto lens on the Ferris wheel chair and I could see both their faces, oddly enough, because they were facing in my direction, and every so often I saw him reach into the enormous bag he had brought, and pick out another teddy bear, and she would kiss it, and then he would hurl it out of the car and it would float through the air, tumbling, across the neon tubes lighting up the superstructure of the Ferris wheel. The first one he threw tumbled and then hit the superstructure and bounced inside under the wheel, where the platform was. But the next one he threw outside, and it flew and landed on the roof of the Bearded Lady booth. He threw them in all directions, one by one, and through the telephoto I could see that she was laughing, and then she threw one, and it went in my direction and for a minute I felt like she had looked right at me, like she had seen me standing in the dark in the window of the Haunted House booth, photographing them.
It had been another soundless day in a long succession of soundless days since the sudden onset of deafness a year before. I envied those who had been deaf for years and had learned the deaf language and seemed to fit in. I had been, in addition to an investigator, a musician with a side practice as a speech therapist so it was a shock to lose it all so suddenly but that was what I had been handed so I was doing the best I could, which was not well at all, honestly, as there is so much sound you take for granted, so much nuance in a yes or a no, so much nuance in the sound of the wind, or the sound of traffic, how a person accelerates in anger or in calmness, how a boy kicks a can or a man talks to his dog, how the sound of a television on in a cheap hotel room tells you where the watcher was born and raised and even sometimes what ship he was on in the Navy, though at a certain point that became more about my other trait, my documented capacity for extrasensory perception, my intuition so penetrating and uncanny that I myself could have been in the circus had I not preferred the life of a private investigator who plays piano in a seaside restaurant three nights a week.
I watched them for a full hour. It was remarkable. I knew who they were, of course, I knew her of course, she was the most famous woman in America at the time and it always amazed me how she could go unrecognized but she was a mistress of disguise I guess you’d say, and the fellow with her was a nobody, her chauffeur I’d find out later.
My correspondence with the client the next day via text messages consisted of the following:
Why stuffed animals?
I don’t know.
How many stuffed animals?
At least 20. I counted. He threw them all out of the bag, one every two or three minutes.
OK, so, it was Valentines Day.
Yep, I said, knowing the client was touchy but I said it anyway, and even my “yep” could have a sarcastic edge to it, I knew that.
