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H O U S E S I N M O T I O N
Just when it was getting good, when it was all going headlong down, The Reckoner rammed to a full stop. It wasn’t until rescue arrived that Stunter acknowledged his neighbor. Her name was Dawn.
“Any plans for your big settlement?”
The woman was all tracksuit wedged into the arcade-colored chair.
“Moving. For one.”
“If we ever move.”
They were watching the sun rise down, a blot of glow steaming light off whichever county’s trees these were. Upside-down water tower. Upside-down man-made lake. Upside-down steel, tubular and bow-legged. The pivots swayed like meathooks.
“I’d move if I weren’t between houses right now,” Stunter said. “You can see it from here.”
The Tercel, parked in Yosemite Sam Lot B, not the tour van, which in Taz, had been broken into during the night by the Six Flags cleanup crew. They waved up at the band on the rollercoaster while they did it, laughing, and playing Nearer, My God, To Thee: Unplugged on their equipment. And the band had videoed the whole thing with giddy delight, cheering “SUE! SUE! SUE! SUE! SUE! SUE!”
“I’m going to get this whiplash checked out and then I’m going to take my settlement and then I’m going divorce him,” Dawn said. “Then I’m going to move.”
“Divorce turned me around,” Stunter said, refusing to admit that whether or not he was being sarcastic was completely up to him. “What’d he do?”
“He’s not even an architect. He writes about architecture.”
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” Stunter agreed. “But that’s not what I meant.”
Staying stuck seemed to consume a slow, leaden trickle of the universe. Mechanical knuckles cramped under the weight of clutching everybody. The passengers were too many groceries bought on credit, on too long a hike home, and the humane thing to do was called catch and release.
At the bottom, firefighters and police were waving a cherry-picker up to where The Reckoner’s line once started.
“He actually framed: Architecture Is The Art of Balancing Everyone’s Needs. And I’m like— hello? What about me? What about my needs? He was always spinelessly overcompromising but it’s like, Do you not want any of this?” meaning her rhetorical sexuality, and she blew her bleached hair out of her face for the seventeenth-millionth time. “Can you imagine if we’d had kids? They’d be upside down, too!”
Grouped among the black-dyed band taking up the two cars ahead was an old fogey still trying to keep his Callaway hat on. As could be expected, the band had elected themselves chief spirit summoners and were still, this early in the morning, after so long a night, ministering to the locally tyrannized with a DJ set off a smartphone, cover waived.
“I gave them that acid yesterday afternoon. How are they still going?”
Supposing the middle to be safest had landed them locked into the loop’s apex. The punks, who had yesterday been too scared sit up front, were now locked in a face-off with straight down. They egged on what waited for them on the ground, in the ground, the way punks should, pogoing, grooving, and wrestling the restraint like it was just another instrument. Their joy swayed the framework ever closer to collapse. The young and elderly backing up the rear, and the Mormon family reunion in the matching t-shirts sitting up front were the closest to home. An overnight security guard had requisitioned a paddleboat shaped like a swan from the Life, The Beautiful Adventure Tunnel but its neck wasn’t long enough to reach the coaster’s dip twenty feet above the lake. After requisitioning phone numbers from each dangling daughter, he set about reading the little ones Goodnight Moon off his phone when it began to rise over Skull Mountain. Then all throughout the night, the guard discussed, with the head of the household, how to go about replacing the front brakes on a ‘95 Chevy Silverado until dew sweated from his badge. He provided an impressive array of insights for what not to do from the top of a folding ladder balanced between the oarlocks, eating the Cheetos he tried throwing the lower riders, but which inevitably ended up back in his lap. The official rescue operation waved and whistled from their carnival of running lights ashore, occasionally shouting almost guys, almost re: the ETA of Six Flags technicians, who had already gone into overtime and wouldn’t be able to troubleshoot The Reckoner until the start of the next pay period. Temperatures dropped after the park closed, so nobody had slept. But nobody had died, either. So in a way, the ribbons of steel track made the horizon appear gift-wrapped.
Dawn tightened her Tweety to her chin. Speedy, who Stunter used to blocked out the blinding sunrise, was doing a Cliffhanger bit on him rather than the other way around. The old Callaway duffer in the row ahead toked on Stunter’s last spliff and passed it back to the band playing an artifacted miniature of:
♫ I USED TO THINK THAT THE DAY WOULD NEVER COME / THAT MY LIFE WOULD DEPEND ON THE MORNING SUN ♫
Because the duffer didn’t know the words, he asked for a turn. The song was abruptly terminated. Stunter couldn’t stop crying. His character looked down on him with contempt. Drones had delivered these oversize plushies tied up in ten gallon bags to riders at random around bedtime last night in lieu of shock blankets, which couldn’t be guaranteed to drape safely in such a gravitational crisis. Many plushies perished. The security guard was currently fishing Elmer Fudd out of the water feature with a blackjack.
♫ AHM HANGIN’ BAH A MERMENT HERE WAITH YEEEEW! ♫ and the punks followed suit yarling along with old Art.
“Listen to him singing,” Dawn spat. “That was our song. We danced to that song, at our wedding.”
“That’s Art?” Stunter knew the band was starting to sound estranged already.
“I just don’t want to die before I get a chance to tell him I don’t love him anymore.”
“Tell him now. Shout! Let it on out! This is Dawn’s Day.”
“I mean to his face.”
“You will,” and Stunter leaned over to give her a pat on the shoulder. Because there was an empty seat between them, he couldn’t reach that far. “Just tell him why, okay? Because I still don’t know.”
“What is there to know but no?”
~ ~ Yeah, so when we get back, uh. Trunt is gonna take over on bass. If that’s cool. ~ ~
“I got fired again,” Stunter said. “They fired me after our last show,” and he began welling up again. “But here I am! Always game to ride, thinking something might change! I’m,” he snorted back. “Was. With the band.” Stunter was the only one poor enough to get stuck wearing his own merch, proudly, but this pride soon transitioned away from the anachronistic brand screenprinted upon him and into last night’s vomit which had articulately overwritten it.
“They did not.”
“They came here to celebrate. What am I doing here? Why do they do this to us?”
“I wish I was with him right now just so I could divorce him,” Dawn said. “Right here. The way they split everybody up is unbelievable. It’s worse than Delta. Why would they design the seats into threes? Just paint a hex on it. And who’d that kid, did you see him? Doing our seating assignments? What’d he think he was, God? My architect writer husband couldn’t even argue with God. I swear, if I die alone…” and she wagged her so-help-me into the sticky mist.
“We’re not going to die,” Stunter said through a mouthful of his own stomach.
“Oh, now you tell me.”
“If I didn’t say it now it definitely wouldn’t survive.”
“Say it, honey. Say it all.”
“It’s all my fault, Dawn,” wriggling out his rum from a zipper pocket. “It is. I’m the one who told Art to go sit with the band. As revenge. I thought it’d be funny, I thought he’d ruin the whole ride. Who am I?”
Concrete waited to burst open their brains and bones, the only faces they’ve ever had, with imminent ordinariness. Death had sliced Stunter free from the pulp of his life, trimmed his essence into something like the fatty oils that did all that psychedelic spiralwork on the surface of greywater. His brain, the drain, was clogged. Stunter had spent every night closing the dish pit and zoning on lipid radials trippy with freedom, because once he fingered the clogs loose ‘til the grease gurgled Gone, in a belching gasp of hollowed-out tin sink, he got to clock out. Change. Possible only after things are over.
He shivered into what little shirt he had.
“Don’t leave him,” and Stunter broke into tears. All his body’s blood was lodged into his sinuses.
“This was supposed to be Our Little Honeymoon,” Dawn cried back. “But you ever know how suddenly you look up on a Monday afternoon and they're just… The Moon?”
“I don’t want to be alone anymore. I can’t handle any more rejection in my life. I can’t. It’s all I’ve ever fucking known,” and he was weeping openly now, blood filling his head with ideas, engorged arms limper than animals slipping through a claw machine. “That’s all I fucking want. Just some stability. I just want to stay up here. I don’t want them to rescue me. I wouldn’t even deserve it. I’m not gonna come down. I don’t want to. Not back to moving. I’m gonna say, Leave me here. My job fired me for going on tour and now my band fired me for being a speed freak and I’m sick of touring because I always fuck up the songs when they’re new and they’re always the best ones but I suck at bass and I don’t want to go home because I probably don’t even have enough gas in my car to make it out of the parking lot,” and he finished off the pint of Captain Morgan and flung it overhead at the EMTs eating honeydew on the ground.
The bottle got stuck in the sky.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. My life is over. Again.”
~ ~ You’ve got that settlement coming, baby. Take a deep breath and repeat after me: settlement. Settlement. Settle. Mint. ~ ~
“I told him!” Dawn continued. “I don’t want to go on this ride. But Art’s on this whole new kick. Because he knows! Art knows I’m bored. Art knows I’m about to do it. And you think a theme park is what’s it? When did I ever ask for a theme? He was like, It’s for research. This is his first roller coaster because he’s trying to prove something. Every other one he just took pictures of. He set up an easel outside the Looney Saloon and painted the bumper cars while bae ate funnel cake. Suddenly everything’s kinetics this and kinetics that. He’s starting up a Kinetic Firm. I’m like, Which is it?”
“What am I going to do?”
“I told Art, I said to Art, I said, You're gonna kill the world before you save it. A drain. On everybody's resources.”
“Dawn, don’t say that.”
They’d been upside down for so long that their tears ran into their hair and dripped onto the Mormons below. Occasionally, they winked up as if at an incontinent pigeon, but otherwise received the grief with grace. Cherry Cordial on vox ahead passed Art a Dramamine through a kiss. Then he yelped, ♫ THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE! ♫
“I’m not stupid. I’m a bassist, I can hear love even when it’s beating over a ravine.”
“That’s right!” Dawn yelled along to the song. “You’re not!”
“‘I can’t date anyone in the band,’ she said. ‘It’s you or me. I made a mistake.’ It’s always the broke who pays.”
The cherry-picker was zooming in its mechanical mosquito sound over the lake.
“That’s it,” Dawn screamed, pummeling the air. “I’m taking you to Fiasco’s Tuscan Authentiria for breakfast. You, on me. It’s the only posi review Art ever gave. You’ve got one of those metabolisms I bet I could feed ‘til Kingdom Come.”
“Has anyone figured out a way to pee on this thing?”
“I’ll pee with you,” Dawn said, adjusting her tracksuit. “In solidarity.”
The lift was telescoping closer. A firefighter with a megaphone urged everyone to please just hang in there. Then the whirring sound powered down, voltaically crestfallen.
Click. Click. Click.
“You got to be shittin’ me. 10-35, switch to Channel 2. Yeah, I’m stuck. Lights went out. I don’t know what happened. Controls are out. I can hardly move my mouth.”
County officials re-dispatched the drone to help troubleshoot with the firefighter on the cherry-picker. Halfway up, its rotors locked and wouldn’t rise another inch. Six Flags early birds were rubbernecking outside the front gate. Someone in a Red Sox hat knew a few of the dangling hostages. He pelted them with rocks but they all stuck to the air.
“What’s your group called, sugar?”
“Invoice,” Stunter said. “We’re really going to go places.”
“What?” Dawn yelled, hair now in a full-blown freakout. A roaring helicopter had descended above their shoes, but was struggling in place, idling like a Playmobil on a glass-top coffee table.
“I SAID WE’RE REALLY GOING TO GO PLACES.”
“YES WE ARE, SUGAR.”
“WILL YOU HOLD MY HAND, DAWN?”
“HOLD MINE, BABY,” and Dawn flexed her outstretched fingers the way toddlers do when it’s time to cross the street.
“IT WON’T REACH.”
“I KNOW. JUST PRETEND.”
“PRETEND WHAT?”
“PRETEND ART’S IN THE SEAT BETWEEN US,” and the rotors blew loose the surrounding box elder seeds and their music of little downward spirals.
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