He sipped his pilsner. The smell of frying pork nauseated him. He should have asked for a glass of seltzer water. He should have returned to the druggist and bought some aspirin. A few tables away, a father sat between two young girls in matching dresses and floppy blue velvet bows. One of the girls clambered to her feet on her chair, put her hands around her father’s neck, and kissed him. Her father made a face, covering his mouth like Chaplin’s clown, then pecked her cheek as both girls pealed with laughter.

He watched them, suffused with an ache that was inextricably twinned with a darker longing. For an instant he saw his sister’s face, smiling as she clung to him in that filthy room, the soiled mattress where he’d cried inconsolably as he clutched a scrap of his sister’s dress. She don’t need that shimmy now.

“Papa, look at me!” the second girl cried, reaching to kiss him, too. “Papa!”

He quickly looked away before they saw him watching them. The dreamy warmth he’d felt just a short time again dissolved into dread. How could they not notice him? How was it possible he could sit here and not be surrounded by leering, horrified onlookers, the way every other monster in the park was?

It wasn’t possible, he knew that, even if he stopped. And he couldn’t stop, any more than they could stop beckoning him, with their eyes and flower-garden dresses. The dread ballooned inside him, and the mad thought that he should seize that girl now, no one would recognize him, no one knew who he was…

He fumbled for one of the bottles of Dr. James Soothing Cordial from the paper sack, A miracle of the modern Medical Profession, and drew the bottle to his lips. Took one swallow, then another, and replaced the bottle.

He returned to the midway, weaving slightly. The cordial was stronger than he’d anticipated; he’d adjust the dose when he used it on the lemon drops. He licked his lips, gingerly stroked his mustache, and idled along with the crowd toward the Great Lagoon. People mobbed the water’s edge, pointing gleefully as boats raced down the Shoot-the-Chutes, the women on board clutching their hats and screaming. Boys leaned out over the Lagoon, splashing one another. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. The water smelled fetid. Discarded watermelon rinds and paper wrappers floated on its surface. You could get sepsis from touching it.

He moved on. He noted a number of policemen in the crowd—Chicago cops, not the dolts employed by the amusement park. He was unconcerned: there were enough Negroes and vagrants and Gypsies to blame for a thousand murders.

He smiled. His head felt as though it had been pumped full of laughing gas. He was invincible, invisible. A white man in a hat and an ice-cream suit.