When I was six I was given a fuzzy purple notebook. I wrote down everything that I saw and heard in that notebook. It became my best friend. I loved that it was purple, my favorite color, and fuzzy and had a latch to lock up all my secrets. I got it on the morning of a friend’s birthday party. We were going to the city to see The Nutcracker and there was nothing Mom could do to stop me from bringing it. She told me to leave it in the car but I took it with me anyway. I was obsessed with jotting down my feelings, my fears, my everything.
I don’t remember the play at all. I don’t remember what color tutus the ballerinas wore. I don’t remember the music. I don’t remember the cake at the party, the ice cream, the goodie bags. I only remember opening and closing my book. I only remember writing down which girls I hated and how I felt so out of place at the party.
I started keeping a real diary when I was in high school. Our prep school required laptops, and I soon found myself jotting down daily notes of foods I had eaten, fights I was having with friends or family, emotions I didn’t want to bottle up anymore, all in one document. Some of these entries became poems, some short stories, some deleted and forgotten. I was trying to pinpoint the moment I started to become depressed, the exact time in my life when I started overthinking everything and stopped feeling joy. From my research, it was somewhere between my first heartbreak and the time Skyler told me he wanted to die. The span of a decade. I was fourteen when a boy I met at my neighbor’s house stopped returning my calls and I was twenty-four when Skyler committed to getting help for himself. Looking back, it seems like a flash, but like the lights we once shined into the sky, it will last forever. Those years were spent trying to save my brother, trying to replace him in relationships, trying to lose myself in others so I could find him. These essays, love letters to win him back. He is my perpetual motion machine. All he ever had to do to earn my love was to spin, spin.
The first time my ex came to my parents’ apartment was a surprise. He had said he didn’t want to be in a relationship, then a few days later called and said to go outside, to look at the moon. He was standing in the parking lot waving, holding flowers, asking if he could come up. On the way to the elevator Mom stopped me.
“That’s euphoria,” she said. “That’s what you’re feeling right now.”
When we started dating my mom did not approve. She was certain that things would go wrong, as they did, but she had a motherly sense that I should move on. One day when he came over to go to the pool, she came downstairs and asked to speak with him, privately. I had been drinking and parked myself on a chair and drifted off to sleep. I could hear them talking at first, her asking him what his intentions were, him saying it’s not so black and white, then just the ocean, the sound of sleep.
We ignore all advice and take a trip to Orlando only a few weeks after we’d met. It rains on the first day and we stay in bed and nap. In a month, he will move to Los Angeles and in a year I will follow. Many bad things will happen. We will fight in my apartment, in his apartment, in the street, in the car. We will see other people and not tell each other. He will lie and I will hold onto some of the lies, let others go. I will perpetually live in fear of the future, of my relationships dying, of my world coming to an end.
I brush his hair with my fingers and feel grateful to have a man in my life, someone who says he loves me. Everything is perfect, the way it should be, and I don’t care what anybody else thinks. I know he will never hurt me. I am so sure of it.
Space Mountain
It is our favorite thing to do.
Once we hit Tomorrowland, we take off running. Our sneakers bounce off the Disney concrete. Past the mechanical chrome palm trees and the Mickey Pop ice cream stands, swerving at the Astro Orbiter. We keep sprinting, faster. I hurry my little legs to keep up with my brother. One more boost, I think. We’ll be there soon.
We enter under the giant sign—Space Mountain—the queue swooping down toward the control board, mapping out our journey into space. The floor below it is covered with silver balls the size of Cabbage Patch Kids, and they lay out of our reach, leaving me to wonder what they’re made of. Are they light like my Beanie Babies? Are they too heavy to carry like Skyler’s Chrome Edition Buzz Lightyear?
From then on, it’s a race. We zip past each other along the path. In the dark, we swing and climb the route, holding onto the metal bars lining the way, jumping up and down, power-ups. My shorts swish, my sneakers press. He always gets ahead, higher than me on the path, and I watch him ascend.
It is silent when we watch the eye of the hurricane pass. I am eight years old and my brother is thirteen. It is our first August in Florida and we are taking part in our very first hurricane. The power is out. The house is dark. Our parents light candles inside, but my brother takes a flashlight out to the driveway. He shines the light up into the sky.
“When you shine a light, it goes forever,” he says.
“What do you mean?” I tug at my oversized sleep shirt, pulling it down to shield my knees from the wind.
“It bounces around in space for millions . . . billions . . . trillions of light years. Once you create the energy, it keeps going.”
He quickly flashes the light on and off.
“That’s too much! It’s too much light going out there!”
“The galaxy can handle it.”
I trust him, but I still wonder where the light went, when the storm will turn back.
I am too little to ride Space Mountain. My mom and I wait for my brother to return as we stand by the exit ramp. Beyond us, a space station themed gift shop where one can buy Disney pins and pens and autograph books and astronaut costumes and even freeze-dried ice cream. Over the years we’ve accumulated so much of these souvenirs, so much stuff to remind us of happiness that now sits in boxes in the closet.
Mom asks me what I want to do next, and I always point to the castle on the map, even though there is no ride or attraction there. I just want to go to the castle. To see it, be there, live there, stay a while.
She says, “Yes, we’ll see the castle, and then we have to go visit Mickey!”
I continue studying the map, the colorful illustrations of the park. I find Tomorrowland, the big white tent.
“That’s where we are! Skyler’s in there now.”
Then, always as if by magic, he appears. Up the escalator and down the hallway. He is always coming back to us.
He lights up outside the local theater. He has pre-packed weed into a cigarette. I keep looking over my shoulder, nervous. He doesn’t seem to care.
“No one cares.” he says. “I work here. Quit worrying.”
“Okay.”
“Last week I burned the popcorn, and there was a fire, and I’m still here.”
He takes a few hits. He motions for me to come closer, hands me the weed cigarette. I’m afraid someone might see. I don’t want to go to juvie as Mom always warns me, but I inhale and exhale with a laugh.
“I’m excited for the movie.” I hand it back.
“Me too.”
People walk by, but he just stares at them. They keep moving. He gets higher.
We are Disney people. The kind who go for any old reason: hurricane warnings, three-day weekends, holidays, “sick days” spent away from our prep school three hours south. The CD spins in the dark blue player on my lap. I only listen to *NSYNC or The Marshall Mathers LP in the backseat on the way up. My mom drives and talks to my brother about things I don’t understand—Homecoming dance, applying for medical school internships, why dad is always gone. I lie down in the backseat and look out the window, a constant stream of telephone poles against a colorful sky. I try to name all the colors in my head—baby blue and robin’s egg, lavender and violet, a slight string of light pink. My mother drives, my brother says something funny, and I fall asleep until we get there.
My brother walks around school with his sunglasses on, drinking a Coca-Cola. He only walks in straight, definitive lines. He’s too smart and only has to take
two classes a day. After that he can walk to his car and go home, or wherever he wants to go. Sometimes, like now, I see him walking across the Four Hundred building. I step out of my classroom to get a drink of water, or to just get out for a second because I hate school, I don’t like what someone said to me that day, or I don’t like feeling how I do, and I see him walking.
He’s my hero, getting to leave school early, before it’s over. He’s even graduating a year early. He doesn’t see me, but I watch him and wish I could walk next to him, be with him, leave with him.
The walls are lined with tubular windows that look out into space as I follow my brother up. Constellations on the ceiling twinkle and spin as rockets fly by. I always read the safety warnings. Even though none of them pertain to me, I think maybe someday they could—pregnancy, high blood pressure, other conditions that could be “aggravated” by this adventure. If something bad happened, which one would it be?
When I was too small to ride, my brother would stuff tissues into my Sketchers to make me taller.
“I need to get up there.”
“You will, we can do it,” he would always say.
I’m seventeen, and I take some friends to the movies. We smoke in the car on the way, and I put saline drops in my eyes to shrink the red when I park. My brother says he can get us in for free. We walk up to the window, and he’s there in his suit jacket a few sizes too big. His hair is a little longer than usual. Jet black tufts fall in his eyes. He looks like he might be asleep. I knock on the window. He jolts. My friends laugh. I step closer. Hey, it’s me. He’s sweating. He wipes it off his forehead with the back of his sleeve. The sweat keeps pouring. His lips are cracked. He leans up on the microphone and struggles for a breath of air.
“Are you high?” he asks.
Once we get to the loading zone, my brother and I plan our seats. He says the back goes the fastest, insists we get rows five and six. I agree. I want to go as fast as possible, I tell him. In truth, I’d be happy riding the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover all day. I’d be happy slowly inching my way through the park. I don’t tell my brother that, though. I just stand on top of the number five and wait for the next car.
When it comes, we sit and the lap bar lowers down. The shuttles hold six people, single file. They are gray and white with dark blue cushioned seats. He sits behind me in the back and makes sure the flight attendants don’t press his lap bar down too far. I always make sure mine clicks down to the maximum depth to hold my body in tight.
“Space shuttle, this is flight safety. Please keep your hands and arms inside the car, and remain seated while in motion. You are clear for launch.”
I can’t sleep. His room is across the hall from mine, and I can see a blue light glowing from the TV screen. His door is cracked open, and I go in. He’s at his desk with a full bowl of plain Chex. His hand lingers over the bowl.
“What are you watching?” I ask from the doorway.
“Neon Genesis Evangelion.” He sits up, startled, then settles back. “Want to see something?”
He brings me over to his wall of Lego sets. There is a set staged with pirates fighting, and he picks up a small brown treasure chest from the scene. He pops it open. Inside are a few different colored pills: yellow, green, blue.
“What are those?”
“Oxys, the most amazing thing ever. Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“What is this show?”
“It’s about the end of the world. It’s a Mecha show. This boy was chosen by an organization named NERV to control a giant machine called an EVA to fight off the Angels. It takes place in an apocalyptic Tokyo.”
He moves to his bed. I follow and sit on the edge.
“Look at the fucking moon, Britt.”
A giant moon glows on the screen. A symphony plays and a boy inside a machine fights. I want to understand it but I don’t. I want to trust that he knows what he’s doing, like he always did, like he always does. He nods out. After a while, he falls asleep, and I shut off all the lights. I put the treasure chest back with the pirates. I leave the TV on. The blue light illuminates his room, the sound of symbols travels. I leave the door open.
We blast through a blue neon tunnel. A mirror at the end of the tunnel makes it appear infinite. We climb up at an angle, past the Mission Control Booth. Earth is a flat circle on the ceiling. Our shuttle shoots into the black: planets, stars, meteors, comets. We curve through twists and barrel down hills, we drop with speed into the silence.
Some friends are over on the weekend. We roll a joint in my room, and they ask if my brother will come outside with us. I knock on his door. He’s there in his pajamas: plaid pants and an oversized L.L.Bean t-shirt, torn-up and barely hanging onto his body. He throws on a sweatshirt and comes outside.
We smoke on the sidewalk and walk down to the cul-de-sac. The December air is cool, especially for Florida. I start to get dizzy. My friends leave, and I go back to my room. I sit on the edge of my bed and feel like I’m falling, dropping, dying. I can’t breathe. I’m sinking into the room. My room is a box, and I’m shut inside. I can’t tell anyone the secrets. I’m fixed in fixation. I’m the reason. I want to explode. I feel the space between my room and his. I feel the heaviness of my body drifting to the floor. There’s no gravity in outer space. It’s just an illusion, I think, I’ll be there soon.
I float to his room, and the door appears locked. I start to cry in silence. My tears shatter the space. I slump down in the dark against the door. It opens.
He’s at his desk, making lines of cocaine with credit cards. He looks at me like he knows something, like he wants to tell me something. I wait there for what feels like forever. His eyes are blank.
The ride finishes in a red swirling wormhole that turns black and globular. The shuttle slows down as we turn into the Space Port. I am breathless, ready to go again.
He tells me about the supermoon. He says to look outside tonight, another summer night at my part-time job over college break, and I’ll catch it.
In between taking orders from a table and pretending to take a smoke break, I go outside. I search for the moon. I walk farther away from the restaurant and imagine my brother on his balcony in Aventura, standing there with a pack of Marlboro Reds, burning through each one as the blue sky fades to black.
My manager shouts at me from the back door. “Where are you going? What are you doing?”
I slip into the parking lot, beyond the rows of cars. My walk turns into a jog, then a run. I need to see it. I must find it. It is my mission, my debt to him, because I can’t tell him what it means to be his sister, but here in the night sky I can be with him for as far as I can reach.
The moon rises above the trees. I see it glow. I watch it radiate.
The lap bar comes up. He jumps out first. I climb out after him, always trailing right behind.
I’m twenty-two. I take too many Oxycodone the first time I try them, a bottle left over from an eye surgery that I kept, just in case. It’s my senior year, and my friends are out on the porch drinking. One of them gets an incoherent text, so she comes inside. I tell her to call my brother.
She calls him and puts me on the phone. He’s not mad or scared. He understands. He says, “You’ll be okay. Just try not to fall asleep. Eat something, anything, and get outside, get air.”
I wish I could walk upstairs and go to his room and play Mario Party for a couple hours, like I did the first time I ever got high. He kept me company, nursed me back down. I feel far away from my body. I’ve lost my mind somewhere in this house. It doesn’t seem right here: the brick staircase, the wet leaves on the ground, the smell of Svedka and Bud Light.
I think he says, “Get up,” but it’s, “Go outside.” He says I can call back if I need to, but I don’t. I sit outside on the porch for a long time. I stay there until it gets dark. I stare up into the black.
We step out of the shuttle. A moving platform takes us up, past a display from the Tomorrowland Express. The platform take
s us back to Earth, where our mother is waiting. She’s standing outside of the gift shop with our jackets hung over her arms. In a few years, the ride gets remodeled, shuts down for months, and Tomorrowland becomes a spot we will pass over. There even comes a time when we no longer go to the parks at all. But for now, we see our mom and run toward her, her bounce of blond hair, bright pink lips.
She smiles, asks us how it was. We always want to do it again.
Biographical Note
Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She is a Critical Studies instructor at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts where she teaches Archetypal Psychology, Applied Logic and Critical Thinking, and Creative Writing. She was the 2017 Nonfiction Award Winner for Red Hen Press, as well as the AWP Intro Journals Project Award Nominee in 2015. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.
The Perpetual Motion Machine Page 10