Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer’s trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in their ten-billion-year slumbers.
It was into this junkyard, this trash heap of mechanical avarice, greed for toys, and love for great ravening monsters, guillotined heads, and unraveled tarbaby King Tut bodies, that I picked my way.
Everywhere were vast low-lying tents of plastic covering creations that only in time would Roy reveal. I didn’t dare look.
Out in the middle of it all a barebone skeleton held a note, frozen, on the air. It read:
CARL DENHAM!
That was the name of the producer of King Kong.
THE CITIES OF THE WORLD, FRESHLY CREATED, LIE HERE UNDER TARPAULINS WAITING TO HE DISCOVERED. DO NOT TOUCH. COME FIND ME.
THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG. YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. TURN LEFT AT CARPENTERS’SHEDS, SECOND OUTDOOR SET ON THE RIGHT. YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE WAITING THERE! COME SEE! ROY.
I looked around at the tarpaulins. The unveiling! Yes!
I ran, thinking: What does he mean? My grandparents? Waiting? I slowed down. I began to breathe deeply of a fresh air that smelled of oaks and elms and maples.
For Roy was right.
You can go home again.
A sign at the front of outdoor set number two read: FOREST PLAINS, but it was Green Town, where I was born and raised on bread that yeasted behind the potbellied stove all winter, and wine that fermented in the same place in late summer, and clinkers that fell in that same stove, like iron teeth, long before spring.
I did not walk on the sidewalks, I walked the lawns, glad for a friend like Roy who knew my old dream and called me to see.
I passed three white houses where my friends had lived in 1931, turned a corner, and stopped in shock.