Blake ran the Zipper: sometimes the throttle, but mostly he locked people into the cages and let them out again when it was over. In his camper he had a whole shoebox full of crack pipes and hash pipes and so on that had fallen out of people’s pockets. He picked them out of the grass or gathered them from the cages after the people got out.

He found other stuff too, change, a tooth on a string once, a kid’s retainer, rat-tail combs. Change and pipes were about all he kept, though.

Once he found a barrette, this plastic hair clip thing. He kept it in the pocket of his army coat. He put his hands in his pockets when he stood around, and he stood around a lot. One hand always played with the barrette, repeating one same pattern of movements.

The girl it was from was miles away, he had seen that when he opened the door of the cage for her, seated her with some other girl, and closed the steel bar and secured it across their nice laps: she just suddenly had that look. It was impossible to say in advance who would have it. Of all the people in the world, some just suddenly had the look when he made eye contact. They couldn’t be described beforehand or classified in any other way.

Logically, you could just take your hand out of your pocket and reach out your hand and touch anybody who was that close, as you helped them into the cage perhaps, or closed the bar across their legs, making sure it was locked. But for the look. Suddenly, they weren’t there; they were in the cage, but they weren’t close.

The door slammed shut and they took off and spun lightly and violently in quick, little circles in their cage, which was itself fastened to a large arm, and the machine rotated the arm in its own large circles, all these various rotations controlled by the man at the throttle so that the patterns described by the people in their cages were sometimes very elaborate.

The barrette clicked open with a springy action, and clicked shut again, unseen in Blake’s coat pocket. It had hundreds of tiny teeth, mow mostly full of lint. She had dozens of them, surely.