During the hot, burning days of August, when the sun was no longer yellow but a red disk of furious judgment, the town would awaken from its Catholic slumber into its yearly mechanized ritual of unchained motion and drunken expression. We called them fiestas, but they were more than fiestas, they were rotating spells cast in metal and sweat. Children with sugar-stained lips and adults with the hollow eyes of failed prayers gathered under the thunder of the Chicago, that great iron Ferris wheel, an old rite of vertical longing.
The Chicago spun like the outer spheres of Saturn in rebellion, flinging bodies skyward then back down into the ever-present dust of Salvadoran afternoons. Each pair of riders (lovers, siblings, ghosts) sat enclosed in fragile metal wombs, held aloft by arms that seemed to reach out from a futuristic nightmare. Screams echoed not in pain but in ecstasy, terror, or the elusive true ecstasy of pure terror. This was the August Mass, sanctified not by priests but by engineers and rust.
In one corner, overlooked by most, a staircase rose. Not a real one but an image, clipped from a forgotten architectural plate, pasted amid scraps of advertisement and pagan muscle. It led nowhere, and yet it led precisely to the heart of the matter. Plate 15, the number of the Devil in a reversed Tarot card. Fifteen: the convergence of boundaries and transgressions, the sacred number of the false flash of light.
Above it, the red sun burned into a bright blue sky like the seal of a long-banished archangel. Was it Lucifer himself? Was it the blood eye of God watching his own body in reverse, a three-dimensional mirror that we called reality? In any case, between lies and light there is only one stairway, and it is always broken.
"The Devil," said the mural whispering in the background, “is a riddle of light.” For who else can fabricate such convincing illusions of truth but the one who has held truth in his very mouth and chewed on it for eons? His realm was not hellfire but reflection; mirrors stacked within mirrors, until all that remained was a fragile semblance of certainty. He would whisper in our ear at the Chicago’s apex, when the cart halts midair and everything is suddenly silent. For that instant, the ride becomes the sacred suspension of thought itself and that is when we are most receptive.
Then there were the “carros locos”, the mad cars; two by two like Noah’s beasts, smashing into one another in a dance of pointless violence. The laughter there was different—lower, raw, less divine. It was the laughter of bodies, of friction and collision, not ascension. The Chicago took you up; the carros dragged you sideways, into chaos. But both were governed by the same unspeaking principle: the surrender of control.
Wherever God dreams, the Devil interprets with a flourish. Wherever we rise, he ensures we fall again, not out of cruelty, but to teach us the sacred comedy of eternal cycles. Ascent, descent, rotation, impact. Truth, lie, staircase and sky.
And so we children would rise each year into that August heat, offering our curious innocence on the altar of spinning machines older than our minds, watched over by the red sun of the Risen Light.
***
There is a kind of noise that exists beneath the surface of noise, beneath the reverberation of invisible presences. That’s what I heard that day in the library, when I closed my eyes not out of piety or exhaustion but to initiate contact. The stairway had followed me there; into the narrow aisles where old tomes whispered in their decaying alphabets, and it stood behind my eyelids, as always, like an unfinished invocation. Plate 15 again. The devil’s number, the crooked ascent, the red sun somewhere overhead, invisible but insistent.
When I stopped looking, the world came closer. Not the world of ideas, but the layered rustling of pages, the low mechanical sighs of fluorescent light, the scuttling insect-click of heat expanding hidden ducts. My mind, naturally arrogant, tried to identify, analyze, name… but if I refused to play, if I simply listened, the veil would inevitably ripple and allow me a glimpse.
What I heard behind the noise was not absence, but a kind of attention. Something was listening back. Or rather, many somethings. They pressed against the edges of my perception like moths at a windowpane, neither friendly nor hostile. Beings not dressed in flesh but frequencies in the static; some tangled, some clear, some purposefully ambiguous.
Not all beings wear bodies I came to find out. The staircase proved that much. It exists in every room that can be called a room; especially those rooms where minds are quiet, where attention becomes sacrament and pulses with sustained energy. The staircase is an interstitial technology, built from the same material as poems, prayers and quiet regrets. It connects floors that don’t appear on any architectural diagram. When you close your eyes and begin to truly listen, you are already at the threshold of the first step.
There, between thought and sensation, I met an old watcher. It did not speak to me. It did not shimmer or rise. It pulsed with a patience I have never encountered in any human. It had waited for me to forget enough of myself that I could begin to listen to the sound of his secret communications. I had brought it into being by surrendering my need to understand and categorize.
What does this have to do with the Chicago ride? With the carros locos? With the Devil who speaks in riddles of light? Everything.
Both noise and silence are gateways. And in the carnival of this world, where children are flung into the sky and crash into one another for amusement, there are observers; some old, some embryonic; watching the endless spectacle of meat and motion. They gather near magnetic nodes: staircases that go nowhere, circles that spin in place, the moment before orgasm, the instant before a scream.
We are not the crown of creation. We are not even the architects of our thoughts. Thought is the final veil in the most subtle of processes. It tries to protect us from the full impact of naked perception. It wraps meaning around sound the way skin wraps around bone. But if you remove it; slowly, gently… if you remove this excess layer of meaning, you begin to hear the real chorus, the endless counterpoint.
And so I sat with the staircase behind my eyes, the red sun burning quietly behind my skull, and the watchers pressing softly into me. There was no real fear. No names or labels of any kind. Just a glimmering sense of a cosmos busier than I had ever imagined. I had taken the first step.
***
The Devil has always been at the carnival. I am certain of it. Not in the whispering guise of temptation, nor in the form of a horned stranger playing a flute, but as an ambient intelligence behind the gears, behind the laughter, behind the shivering tension between pleasure and collapse. For me, he wore the mask of the Chicago, the great Ferris wheel. He did not ride it; he was the thing itself: spinning joy and dread into a single ecstatic loop.
Each August, when the rides emerged from their rusted coffins and the lights flickered like minor stars beneath the blue, uncaring sky, I would go and stand near the base of the wheel and I would listen, not to the voices of the children, nor to the hawkers shouting over the noise, but to the machinery itself. The groan of the gears. The cough of misfired electricity. The subtle, sacred clicking of metal deciding to hold together at least one more time.
And there I would feel His presence; not as a threat, but as a question, a riddle made of pure motion, a long spiral stairway made of repeating cycles of tension, wish and ephemeral resolution. Wasn’t that what the Devil was all along? God’s introspection turned back upon itself? A strange loop within the mind of the divine?
An old text says: The Devil is the most beautiful truth of God… that’s why he can tell the most profound lies, the ones that are impossible to distinguish from the truth, the ones that are too painful to deny.
And the Chicago wheel whispered lies with every revolution: “You are rising. Finally, higher than ever. Rise above it all…” But of course, you were only revolving and you were already on your way back.
The carros locos were his lesser aspect; tiny fragments of his dismembered logic. They did not promise ascension, they promised chaos. Two by two, like the forgotten animals of an ark that never arrived, they slammed into each other while the riders laughed in that terrified, masochistic way that made me wonder if the body, too, was a kind of lost prayer.
Not all beings wear bodies. Some are made of laughter. Some are pure ethereal architecture. Some are lies shaped like detailed instructions.
One August, in the moment between impact and silence, I saw him; not with my eyes, but with some new organ that had grown behind my ribs. He was in the depth of the dark smoke, within the shining sparks, in the ache of the adolescent who had been kissed too early or not at all. He was beautiful, because he had no need to be real. He simply was. The reverse stairwell. The eternal spinning wheel. The whispered phrase at the back of the moving skull.
And He was not alone. There were others with him; entities that had no interest in our stories; some older than dust, some created last week; some kind; some terribly confused; some drawn to the spinning lights like astral moths to a pulsing sigil. I could feel them pressing close when I closed my eyes; not to speak, not to harm me, but simply to witness. Because that’s what the carnival is: a threshold, a sacred ritual in motion, a secret show of gods in the skins of humans, enacting collisions and risings, falls and reversals, in looped performance. Circling, circling…
And for a moment, I understood. The Devil doesn’t punish us. He watches. He records. He repeats. And he laughs. Like the wheel. Like the stairs. Plate 15 is everywhere.
***
Each time I rode the Chicago, I secretly hoped it would fail. Not out of a death-wish or some kind of blind cruelty, but because I believed (as children often do) that only catastrophe would break the transcendental veil that embraced us; that only collapse would make visible what had always been present but hidden: the Other Watchers, the unbodied crowd, the ones whose awareness turns corners before you do, the ones who wait, patiently, at the top of staircases that lead nowhere.
Plate 15 again. Always Plate 15. It hangs in the back of my memory like a discarded Tarot card from a deck that was never printed. Not a card, but an architectural heresy: a stairway suspended in false geometry, leading up and down simultaneously. The red sun like a sacred sigil behind it; an orb of initiation or blood.
The red sun rises in August. It’s not a metaphor, it’s a lens. During the carnival weeks, when the gears squeal and the screams lift in secular hymns, that sun is the hidden deity. It is older than the city, older than the metal rides, older than the blood inside your body. And it doesn’t rise by itself; it is raised by attention, focused energy turning the nothingness into presence.
Each shriek from the Chicago is a candle; each collision in the carros locos is a drumbeat. Each teenager pressing lips to lips behind the tents is a vow in the Devil’s dialect.
Not all beings wear bodies. Some wear systems. The mechanical rides, whose blueprints no one could ever quite trace, were altars in disguise. Every bolt is a binding; every rotation is a rite. Who tuned them originally? Who turned them on at the start? You think it was the municipal workers? You think it was diesel and voltage? I say no. I say it was the hungering presences, old and tangled, who rose each year when belief took shape as steel.
And I stood nearby and listened. I listened to the shrieking silence between gears. I listened to the breath of the staircase. I listened to the endless cosmos listening back.
Because the carnival was not only amusement for me, it was an arrangement; a call to attention, a moment when children and old men alike aligned their spirits, unknowingly, with patterns deeper than individual memory.
They all believed they were riding for fun. They believed they were crashing into each other out of a need for freedom and chaos. But I saw the choreography differently. I saw cogs in a ritual engine, like insects summoned to a glowing spiral. And always the red sun behind the image. Just watching. Like Him. The Riddle. The Beautiful Lie. The Architect of Loops. He doesn’t punish. He doesn’t offer bargains. He simply invites you to go for a ride.
And those who ride the wheel with open hearts, those who see the impossible staircase not as escape but as entry, they are forever changed. Not improved. Not saved. Just… opened. Like a door in the sky no one else remembers drawing.
***
Every August was a rehearsal. Not for death but for descent. The rides were the sigils, the children were the offerings. And the air itself was thick with fried oil and horn blare and piss; it was a thin membrane easily torn by our focused attention. And once torn, something was bound to step through.
You might have seen him. You might have brushed past him in line. He smelled like copper and clove. He carried a pocketknife and a handful of tattered prayer cards. He did not smile, he observed. He may have spoken to you once or twice; softly, rhythmically, like someone reciting something memorized centuries ago. He might have asked: “Do you see the staircase?”
It wasn’t a metaphor.
Behind every ride, behind the torn tarps and the concession stands with names like "El Gusano" or "Fantasmita," behind the great blue-painted walls near the Chicago—there it was: the same staircase from Plate 15. Pasted into reality like a clumsy collage. No one could say how it got there. Or who built it. It was always just there, like gravity.
And you could climb it, but only during the carnival. Only when the red sun was high. Only when you were ready to hear the Devil’s version of Transcendence.
He spoke to me through the joints of the Chicago wheel; in the slow creak of the carros locos slamming like atoms into temporary meaning. He said: “There is no truth that cannot be inverted. There is no ascent that isn’t secretly a descent in disguise. Each scream is a syllable in the unspoken ritual. Each ticket stub is a page from the secret gospel of eternal recurrence.”
***
We all laughed, certainly. We all felt alive. That was the genius of it. The Devil doesn’t hide in the shadows. He wears the cloak of pure light. He uses our joy as camouflage. The children laughed hardest just before the machine broke. And yes, it did break. Once.
I remember that year. A boy flew from the Chicago like a forgotten angel. His body didn’t bounce when it landed. It crumpled. And above him, the staircase flared red in the sunlight, more solid than it had ever been. The police saw nothing. The workers packed it all up that night. But I saw. I saw the riddle being written in blood, in meat, in the language of sharp truth disguised as random accident.
And I remembered the whisper: “Where else does a lie come from if not from the Truth?”
The Devil I would now say is a mirror. He doesn't lie to trick you. He lies to show you all that you have never seen. And that year, I finally climbed the staircase. It didn’t go up. It went sideways. Through the torn poster. Through the fabric of August. Through the skull of my younger self and into the watching Eye that hovers above the face of all gods and all failures.
The red sun blinked once and everything I had ever mistaken for real turned inside out, like a carnival ride folding itself back into the void. Plate 15 closed behind me and everything disappeared, until next August.
