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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 his skin after they kissed him. Some of the women were no younger than his mother; others seemed only a few years older than himself. Jack’s eyes grazed over this needful flesh – all of it, young and unyoung, pink or chocolate-brown or honey-yellow, seemed to press toward his touch, and he was too conscious of Speedy Parker standing beside him, watching. Then he saw the landscape in the midst of the nude photographs, and for a second he probably forgot to breathe.
    It too was a photograph; and it too seemed to reach out for him, as if it were three-dimensional. A long grassy plain of a particular, aching green unfurled toward a low, ground-down range of mountains. Above the plain and the mountains ranged a deeply transparent sky. Jack could very nearly smell the freshness of this landscape. He knew that place. He had never been there, not really, but he knew it. That was one of the places of the Daydreams.
    ‘Kind of catch the eye, don’t it?’ Speedy said, and Jack