by Weston Ochse
“I didn’t mean—”
“That’s okay. You’re a metro. Dad says that you guys are barely human anymore. He says you’ve been computerized.”
Sally glared at Amy, then burst into laughter.
“Computerized?”
“Yep.”
“Where are your parents?”
“They couldn’t leave the agro. Blue algae season started last week.”
“And they let you come here alone?”
“Why not? Is it dangerous?” Amy laughed.
Before Sally could respond, a hum sounded.
The train slowed.
They’d arrived.
***
They left the train single file. For the first time Sally breathed the air of Florida and as she did so, she knew that it was getting inside her, changing her, killing parts of her. The very air was deadly, laced with invisible radiation. Soon she’d lose her hair. She’d have to be bald for awhile, like Amy and the others. It would take a long time to grow back. Sometimes she heard it didn’t grow back at all. Whatever happened, her avatar would be her eyes and ears to the –verse until she was back to normal. Sally thought she felt her skin tingling, but she’d heard that it was all in her mind.
The amusement park rose out of the dusk. Night was falling, the sky red and yellow with purple hues. The rides, especially both roller coasters, were studded with lights. Sally felt a tinge of excitement upon seeing the sheer size of the roller coasters. She knew that one was Magic Mountain and the other was Magic Dragon, but which? Water was everywhere. It glowed a bright green from radiation-spawned algae. Larger-than-life robotic animalifications roamed the concourse. Colorful and cheerful, they were a bit scary.
Her parents invited Amy to spend her time with them. Sally didn’t really understand why, but didn’t see the harm. Soon, they were spinning around in teacups, riding a boat down a thin river with attacking robotic hippos and alligators, and herky-jerking up and down on giant mechanical arms. In between rides they walked along the concourse, robotic giant mice with elephantine black ears ran to and fro, trying to hug every child they could find. When they came to Sally, she closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, understanding why the girl walking in front of them broke into tears when it happened to her.
They didn’t eat or drink anything, as was the rule. But they did spend some time in the smell museum. Both Sally and Amy loved the smell of something called pepperoni pizza. They couldn’t’ decide if they liked the hotdog with mustard, relish and ketchup, but found themselves oddly drawn to it. The most interesting was the smell labeled “Ambient Pollution 2015.” They gagged from the stench. Unbelievably this was how the air smelled like back then. The last smell was the best, and was promised to have been a yester-year staple of amusement parks. They called it cotton candy and the merest whiff made the girls grin from ear to ear. They ran back to it seven times before Sally’s parents convinced them to move on.
Finally it was time to go. The time had passed far more quickly than Sally would have thought. Amy from Arkansas Agro had a practical side that made her the perfect foil for Sally’s jokes. By the time they’d left the cotton candy, they were walking hand in hand.
Sally’s mother had defined joy as that feeling you get when you attain that which you most desire. At the time, all Sally could think of was her own hair. But gone were all thoughts of her long locks, replaced by the happiness of being in the moment with Amy. She hadn’t really known what she most desired until she had it. Their differences aside, they were both girls whose daring understanding of the qualities of life created a bond that had cemented over the course of two hours.
But then the bell rang, announcing it was time for everyone to return to the train.
Sally felt a tug on her arm. Amy refused to go.
“Come on. You can’t stay here, silly.”
Amy smiled, then frowned, then smiled again. “Of course I can.” She tried to pull away again, but Sally gripped harder. “Now look who’s being silly,” Amy said.
Sally noticed that those wearing yellow weren’t making any move towards the train. In fact, many of them were turning around and heading towards the Magic Dragon. Sally, her parents and Amy had ridden Magic Mountain four times and had felt their hearts leap and dance inside their throats. She’d reached such heights of joy, she felt her smile would never go away.
But it did.
“Mom, tell Amy to stop playing around. Tell her it’s time to go.”
A group of bald, yellow-suited women stared at her, their whispers lost in the sound of the train’s alarm. They pointed at Sally, gathering like a conspiracy of crows. Sally wanted to scream for them to stop staring at her, but she couldn’t make her mouth work any more. Her throat ached with the effort.
Soon her mother had her by the arm and was pulling her away from Amy, the park and the joy she’d so recently felt. When she was in her seat and the door was shut, Sally realized that Amy wasn’t ever coming back. She realized that Amy had come here to stay.
***
Sally took the orange water with a lot more bravery than when she’d arrived. She’d never thought to ask about the colors of suits. She never thought about not coming back. The orange water cleaned the radiation away, but it could never remove the memory of the little bald girl in the yellow pantsuit, who did nothing more than be her friend. They’d shared cotton candy smells. They’d shared teacup rides. They’d even shared laughter as her mother had broken into song about Puff the Magic Dragon, and the stupid lyrics about little boys, imagination, and the Land of Honah Lee.
In a moment of epiphany, Sally realized that The City of Joy wasn’t named for the living; all along it had been a place for the dying. The joy Amy had found was because of Sally and her parents. The girl wasn’t alone her last day. She’d spent it with friends. Sally felt a spark of delight in that knowledge, perhaps the first grain of happiness that would eventually fill in the emptiness in her chest.
Sally ran her fingers through her hair, as she always did when she was nervous. Only this time, strands came away with her fingers. Her hair was starting to go. Soon, she’d be like Amy. But instead of a death warrant, her bald head was more a souvenir of the experience. Sally wondered if she’d look pretty with no hair. She wondered if she’d look like Amy. She wondered if she might just make her avatar appear the same.
She sat back and remembered her last glimpse of The City of Joy. Just before the train had pulled away, heading back towards civilization, Sally had keyed the vidscreen to life. She’d watched the line of yellow-suited people as they’d snaked towards the Magic Dragon. She’d searched the crowd, hoping to see her friend one last time. Eventually she spied her, two tiny arms raised in rapture as the cars carried the sick and damned through the twists and loops of the roller coaster, onward, upward and downward, and on past joy to forever.
***
Story Notes: I wrote this story in one sitting as well. I was having a conversation with someone and someone said, “Imagine if Florida becomes unlivable because of all of the hurricanes.” It got my brain ticking and before long I had the idea of the setting. But as far as the theme, that came right out of the childlike innocence of the cartoon movie character Puff the Magic Dragon. I apologize if I tricked you into reading a science fiction story. It was one of the one’s I’ve written of which I am most proud.
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 16
Redemption Roadshow
(Espectáculo de Redención)
Starring the Long Cool Woman, the Burned
Man and the souls of our beloved dead
“Never get on a bus with a burned man and a woman who can speak with the dead unless you are prepared to hear things that will singe your soul.”
– Sonoran Desert Herald
An IMAX Presentation
“After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac
before him and bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat
there
for a very long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the
right and god-made sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.”
From Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
Dolan Gibb sat at the counter and nodded when the waitress asked if he wanted coffee. She poured with a flourish, then placed a menu in front of him. Dolan glanced over it to see if they'd added anything new, but he really wasn't hungry. He never was when he patrolled this stretch of I–10.
Too many memories.
Too many regrets.
"How ya doing, Officer?" came a gruff voice from next to him.
Gibb turned and regarded the grizzled trucker with the Coyote's baseball-style hat perched high on his hairless head. Jake Robinson. Gibb had known the trucker for over ten years. They weren't friends, but ran into each other about once a month. "Same as I ever was, Jake," replied Gibb. "And you?"
"Not bad. Pulling a load of avocadoes out of San Fernando. Bound for Tucson tonight."
"That's where you live. Right?" Gibb asked.
"Yep. Gonna see the wife for the first time in a couple weeks. Been so long, I may have to re-introduce myself."
Gibb nodded and sipped his coffee. He held back the obvious reply because it was so obvious. Instead, he watched the truck stop patrons out of the corner of his eyes, aware that his presence was a deterrent to delinquency. Seventeen years as an Arizona Highway Patrol Officer had taught him that less is more. So as an alternative to stalking around like a rookie, he sat and soaked up the bright lights and the ambience of the restaurant. His shift didn't end for six more hours, so he needed the light. He needed the company, because there was nowhere a person could feel more alone than in the desert at night. There was nowhere as dark as a desert at night.
"You see them lights over by Burnt Well," Jake asked, digging into a double helping of cherry pie.
"Where? What lights?" Gibb resurfaced from his malaise.
"Burnt Well out west of Buckeye," Jake said. "There was a bunch of lights down in the wadi near where them crosses were planted last year.
"That where the kids died after graduation? The minivan?" Gibb asked, already pretty sure of the answer. Still he had to ask. Shrines to the dead along Southwestern U.S. highways almost outnumbered the cacti. In fact, the number seemed to have increased in recent years. When he'd first began working as a highway patrolman, it was only the occasional cross placed by some Mexican Catholic to bless the ground a loved one had died on. Now it seemed as if crosses grew out of the ground. Almost every fifty feet was a shrine placed in memory of some driver who'd lost control of their vehicle, or fallen asleep at the wheel, or been the victim of a drunk driver, standing like mileage markers for the dead along the highways of the living.
"If you mean the kids from Luke Air Force Base, then yeah. Must have been twenty cars there when I passed by last night."
"Did you see what was going on?" Gibb asked.
"Naw. I was passing a double-tanker and only glimpsed the goings on for a second."
"What's the word about it?" Gibb asked, meaning had there been any chatter on the radio.
"The others are saying it was that comatose woman," said Jake, his eyes bright as he finally delivered the news he'd been getting around to.
"The who?"
"You know. She was all over the news last month when those folks out by the Salton Sea made off with her body for a spell. La Mujer Fria Larga de la Muerte is what the locals call her. But us white folks call her—"
"The Long Cool Woman," Gibb murmured, the words coming out slowly as he remembered who she was. "What's she doing around here?"
"Depends on who you ask," Jake said, as he stood and flipped some bills on the counter. "Some say she's here to help the dead. Others say she's here to take people's hard earned money."
The waitress refreshed Gibb's coffee. He added cream and watched as it swirled within the darkness like a ghost trying to hide. Gibb never did like to talk about the dead.
"What do you think?"
Gibb shrugged. He hadn't thought much about it.
But by four o'clock in the morning, that's all he could think of. Why was she here? What made this stretch of road special enough for the Long Cool Woman to come to?
Gibb had seen television specials about her for years, but had treated them as if they were hoaxes. Like the headlines in the Weekly World News at the checkout stand of the grocery stores, the reports of a woman in a permanent coma who could converse with the dead were just too much to believe.
It wasn't until one of the learning channels ran a special that he'd even paid attention. On the program, they'd shown a black and white photo of a smiling five-year-old Mexican girl. Then the photo had faded to a video of the same girl in a hospital bed. She'd been struck by lightning and been rendered comatose.
The doctors said that she'd never recover.
But she had.
Sort of.
Somehow along the way she'd managed to rise and speak in the voice of her dead uncle. They'd tested her and she'd known things only her uncle could have known. Medical specialists had dismissed it, but the religious nuts had come from everywhere to see what else she could do. One of her cousins pointed out that she was in the same hospital bed her uncle had died in. No one paid attention to him.
That had been forty years ago.
Now, her living body was being carried all over the Southwest and, if one was to believe the talk on the street, used as a conduit between the living and the dead. Not all the dead, but those who'd died so violently that their souls were unable to travel to whichever place they were destined to go. The television show Gibb had seen had ended with a recent video. Her face had matured to middle age. She'd grown to become a woman, filling the long, black dress that covered her as she lay on the portable pallet.
Gibb remembered how still her face had looked.
He remembered how dead she'd seemed.
He remembered how he'd thought of the zombie flicks of his youth.
Gibb considered the place where the kids from Buckeye had rolled their minivan. Not too many things more violent than that. If the Long Cool Woman was real, he wondered what she was saying this night. He wondered if the parents were there, unable or unwilling to deal with the deaths of their children.
Gibb could relate. His heart beat faster as he pulled the highway patrol car to a stop beside a mile marker east of the Old Republic Mine, the number 43 of the marker reflected in the halogen headlights.
He hadn't been able to eat after he'd spoken with Jake. He hadn't even wanted to come here, but it would have been childish and irresponsible for him not to. He stared at a lonely white cross protruding from a small concrete base about a dozen feet off the road. The name engraved on the metal plaque on the front read Stephen Jones. Gibb knew the name without reading it. After all, he'd paid to have the shrine placed there. He swallowed a lump, before it could escape and gritted his teeth.
Gibb radioed in the stop and got out of the cruiser. He approached the cross, knelt down and pulled the weeds that had begun to encroach. A Twinkie wrapper had found its way nearby and this too he picked up. He noted that the paint was chipping and made a mental note to get a pint of paint and put it in the back of the cruiser.
Looking once again at the letters of the man’s name, a lump once again formed in Gibb’s throat. After all these years, the guilt was as fresh as it had been that day it had all happened. The shrine was the least he could have done for killing the man.
***
From a Text on Philosophy: Existentialism is as much a way of life as it is a philosophy. It is a life-view where the individual is ultimately responsible for his actions. With man at the center of all things, it is up to each individual to create an essence out of the facthood of his own existence
***
Gibb slept fitfully the next day. When his shift began that night at seven o'clock, his was the first car out of the lot. He left the barracks in North Phoenix and sped
toward the California border. Somewhere along that 120 mile stretch of highway, the Long Cool Woman was resting. He switched his police scanner to roam so he could also eavesdrop on the truckers.
Gibb wasn't sure what he intended to do, but he felt compelled to see the Long Cool Woman. He'd spent seventeen years feeling guilty. If the news and television hadn't exaggerated in their reports, perhaps she could free him from bonds that had kept him from living the life that he'd intended to live. At the very least, she could tell him if Stephen Jones had passed on to a better place.
Perhaps.
A silver Corvette shot by at 110 miles per hour. Gibb flipped on his siren and radioed dispatch. He floored the Crown Victoria and nearly grinned as his 650 horsepower supercharger chewed the distance between the sweet-lined Corvette and an ugly $500 ticket.
Anything to occupy his mind.
As he’d been doing for seventeen years.
His father had once told him that to be responsible was the epitome of manhood. “There’s responsibility for country, for family, and for one’s actions,” he’d said on more than one occasion as he waxed poetic in the cool desert night after too much wine. “Being responsible to the country is the easiest. All one has to do is to serve. Whether it’s as a soldier or a teacher or even a garbage man, as long as it contributes to the general welfare of society, that’s all that matters.”
Radio dispatch returned with no wants or warrants on the corvette and the driver, Greg McGill. Just another middle-aged tweed with too much money and not enough sense to keep his testosterone from dripping on the accelerator.
The Corvette swerved between the rear of a tomato truck and the front fender of a South Carolina Cadillac, barely avoiding becoming the missing link between the two. Gibb took the shoulder, spitting gravel as his tires sought traction. As he passed the Caddie, he glanced at the horrified faces of the septuagenarians behind the wheel. By their expression they were ready to stop for the day. They might even turn around and go back to the land of mint juleps and courteous drivers.