by Laura Roman.
On a Saturday night, if you find your way into the Musée Mécanique at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, you will see the original owner’s son weaving through the aisles on roller skates, gliding from machine to machine as though he were skating through the annals of another century.
Around him rises a delirium of sound: bells ringing, tinny calliopes wheezing, gears grinding, mechanical orchestras coughing themselves awake.
Depending on your disposition, the noise becomes either a cacophony or a symphony.
The machines themselves are relics from the turn of the century: fortune tellers, peep-show viewers, strength testers, automaton musicians, an opium den with a dragon, rusted carnival games with chipped paint and cracked glass. Some were salvaged from Playland-at-the-Beach, not far from where the old Sutro Baths and the Cliff House stood, before the great amusement park vanished into memory and sea fog.
And at the center of them all stands Laughing Sal.
She towers behind glass in a wooden frame, enormous and vaguely unsettling, with red curls, freckles, a gap-toothed grin, and enormous painted cheeks frozen in permanent delight or agony, it is difficult to tell which.
Laughing Sal sits somewhere in between being a clown or a madam.
Her creator clearly borrowed something from circus clowns and vaudeville madams alike. She leans slightly forward when she laughs, as though the laughter itself is pulling her toward you. Children stare at her. Adults avoid prolonged eye contact out of superstition. And everyone remembers her afterward.
No one knows exactly what Sal thinks.
Or whether she thinks at all.
But for over a hundred years she has observed and watched San Francisco change all around her.
She watched sailors stumble through Playland drunk on shore leave before the First World War.
She watched boys with slicked hair and nervous hands bring girls there after dances in the forties.
She watched hippies drift through the park in the sixties, smelling of patchouli and salt air and revolution.
She watched tourists arrive carrying disposable cameras, then Polaroids, then flip cell phones, then tiny glowing rectangle phones that consumed their entire attention span for hours and hours.
The city transformed itself over and over again, shedding skins like a serpent, only for the new skin to quickly whither and be replaced.
But Sal remained.
Laughing.
Always laughing.
Some nights, particularly when the San Francisco fog rolled in low across the Wharf and the tourists had thinned, the museum took on the feeling of a cathedral powered by electricity. The machines blinked and hummed in the darkness like mechanical saints. Coins clinked into slots, ancient motors groaned awake, animated paper mache faces and masks. And the entire building breathed.
That was when people began talking to Sal.
Not intentionally at first.
It started when a dockworker once stood before her after midnight and confessed he no longer recognized the city where he had been born.
A widow whispered to Sal that she still dreamed of her husband every Thursday night – the night they used to go dancing together at the old Verdi Club in San Francisco’s Mission District.
A teenage runaway sat cross-legged beneath her wooden cabinet one winter evening, and asked aloud whether a person could simply disappear and begin again, somewhere else in the world.
Sal answered each of them the same way.
By laughing.
And over the years, stories accumulated.
People swore her laugh sounded different depending on who stood before her. Some heard mockery, while others felt comfort.
One elderly woman claimed Sal’s laughter contained sorrow so deep she had burst into tears in the middle of the arcade.
A musician insisted that Sal’s laughing rhythm changed slightly after earthquakes.
A little boy once became hysterical because he said Sal had stopped laughing long enough to wink at him.
The museum employees dismissed these stories publicly. Privately, though, none of them liked closing the museum alone. They felt an eerie presence around Sal.
Especially Edgar.
By then Edgar was an old man himself, though still capable of gliding through the arcade on roller skates with eerie grace. He had spent so much of his life, from when he was a child, among the machines that he moved like one of them: fluid, repetitive, eternal.
He knew every cracked panel, every broken spring, every hidden compartment. He could identify a machine’s malfunction by its sound alone.
And he hated facing Sal or speaking about her, especially after dark.
One rainy evening near closing time, I wandered into the museum with no real destination in mind.
I had spent the day walking through San Francisco feeling displaced by it – by luxury towers, empty storefronts, self-driving cars, venture capital billboards, and young billionaires speaking in acronyms, insisting that their new startup names had to be five letters or less.
I wondered what had happened to the city I moved to 15 years ago, where, in my neighborhood of old Nob Hill, Hitchcock still lingered, and Kenny at the University Club made martinis to spec several nights in the week.
And then there was my walk home around the corner from the University Club, to a 1912 apartment that used to be inhabited by Chinese poets, on a little alley street where Bruce Lee once lived.
The city no longer felt like a city to me, more like an OS or operating system pretending to be one.
But inside the Musée Mécanique, time malfunctioned. It seemed to stop in a way, and I found solace there.
I drifted through aisles of forgotten amusements until I found herself standing before Sal.
Sal’s enormous mouth opened, and the laugh erupted from somewhere deep inside her wooden bosom.
HA HA HA HA HA.
Children nearby squealed with delight.
I felt something else entirely.
Recognition.
It was absurd, of course. Sal was a machine – an artifact, a collection of gears, painted wood and paper. A construction of someone’s imagination made many years ago.
Yet I could not shake the sensation that Sal was not laughing at me. Sal was laughing at history itself.
An observer and a recorder, in her mechanical and time-frozen way. Sal was sympatico to me.
Sal laughed at human beings and their endless certainty that their moment in time would somehow endure.
Silly humans.
The Gold Rush men had believed they were building permanence.
The railroad barons Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker believed it.
The hippies believed it.
The tech billionaires believed it.
Every generation arrived convinced it had invented the future.
And still the fog returned each evening, still the sea battered the cliffs, and time pressed on.
And still, Sal laughed.
Long before the city filled itself with machines pretending to understand humanity, there was Sal.
She had been performing emotion for over a century. Laughing on command, eliciting feelings from strangers, reflecting human longing back at itself through gears, recordings, electricity, and repetition.
And perhaps that was what unsettled people most. Not that she seemed alive. But that generations of people had responded to imitation as though it were actual consciousness.
There were stories about the source of Sal’s laugh.
One version claimed it had been recorded from a woman confined to an asylum sometime in the early twentieth century. No one seemed able to verify the story anymore. Like most things surrounding Sal, the truth had dissolved into rumor, nostalgia, and fog.
But I could not stop thinking about whether this was true.
Because if the story were true, then somewhere inside the machinery, beneath the gears, bells, motors, and cracked paint, survived the echo of an actual human being.
Not simply laughter. But suffering, hysteria, joy, madness.
A machine endlessly replaying the emotional life of a forgotten woman long after everyone who imprisoned her had passed on.
I returned again to the musee the following Saturday. And the Saturday after that. And the Saturday after that. Somehow, and for some reason not yet identified, I found comfort being in the musee, and being in Sal’s presence.
Eventually Edgar noticed me lingering near Laughing Sal, Saturday after Saturday.
“You hear it too,” Edgar said quietly one night while tightening a brass fixture nearby.
“Hear what?” I said.
Edgar looked up at Sal.
“The sadness underneath.”
Edgar wiped grease from his hands with an old rag.
“My father used to say these machines survive because they need nothing from us. They do not need approval, any sense of relevance, and not even reinvention.”
Edgar glanced around the arcade.
“People wear themselves out trying to become new versions of themselves every five minutes, every decade, every century. But these old things…?” Edgar shrugged. “They just keep being what they are.”
Sal had watched dreams rise and collapse for more than a century. She had watched people come seeking wonder, escape, distraction, romance, meaning, hoping for some kind of meaning or permanence. She had watched entire eras disappear into dust.
And still she remained behind the glass.