Even dragonflies rose over the welcome banner, flew above the brick barricade, and dropped without terror into Dreamland. Mia gripped her park pass in one hand and watched them reappear beyond the barrier, catching an updraft toward the rollercoasters that broke out of the earth. Calliope melodies drifted over the shriek of girders, a nearby coaster coming to rest like some iron locust alighting. Inside the tote bag rubbing her shoulder, the latest round of comments on Mia’s thesis lay unread. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Probably another email from her advisor, mystified by Mia’s erosion into nonexistence. I need you in the lab early tomorrow or Your lack of communication is unprofessional.
She tried not to remember the pride in her advisor’s voice when he’d introduced her to colleagues at departmental mixers—Mia Yazzie, with no known family ever to touch such an institution. Another remarkable specimen, a leftover Native from a rare and fascinating and apocalyptic world. She told herself she was not failing—she was refusing. She told herself that she had done as well as could be expected. Self-directed ambition had its limits.
She waited for Lucas to arrive. They would wander through the park, taste cotton candy and chocolate apples, hold hands, talk about their future living in Virginia, and she would have a day without fear. A cloudless day without that familiar anxious creeping. She would feel the deep balm of those who have finally given up.
Stretching across her vision, the welcome gates of Dreamland narrowed into a funnel humming with neon light. Laughter and screams drifted from beyond the walls. Then she saw Lucas, his pale body striding toward her, carrying a bag that read virginia commonwealth university. The wind blew his red hair, thinner now than when she met him. His blurry reflection moved in the polished green paneling above the welcome banner. He smiled and greeted her with a tight hug.
“An amusement park—interesting choice,” he said.
“Movie dates are boring.”
“Bringing out the inner child? I’m on board.”
“Do you think I’ll die if I go on a rollercoaster?”
He laughed. “With your vertigo? Absolutely.”
“I want to try one,” she said.
“We can just go on the water rides,” he said. Then, as offhandedly as he could make it seem, he added, “Hey, did your advisor get back to you yet?”
“Nope.”
“Figures.” She knew he was trying hard to keep a neutral expression. He yawned and said, “I think I was ten the last time I went to a park like this. I threw up on my dad. It’s more for kids, right?”
“I got a good deal on the tickets.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
Money, again. One of many differences between Californian Prep School Boy and Diasporic Navajo. It followed them often. Like when they traveled to England for his first international conference and she needed his assurance, before entering customs, that she would not be taken out of line at the last moment, removed like a child on a field trip without a parent’s signature. Or when he woke one night and saw her crunching on dry ramen. After a year of dating, she trusted him enough to share her favorite concoctions of poverty. Here was how to end the stomach rumblings. Here was small Mia sleeping through the spasms.
They handed over their tickets and passed through the entrance. The park unfolded into view as they stepped inside, rides all gleaming, Ferris wheels slowly turning as if roasting themselves on a spit, smoke drifting up from food courts. She noticed these things, but they faded in favor of an object in the sky. Suspended against low clouds, a long white rollercoaster hung like a grotesque sculpture. Its tracks writhed, impossibly looped, tracing trajectories no calculus could map. Each parabola rose and plummeted with unnatural whiteness, surgical and bonelike, as if leaching hues from everything near. Hanging on a banner beside the entrance walkway, she noticed an illustrated poster depicting this exact ride. It read: phantasmagoria, grand opening. From her vantage, the ride seemed to have no beginning or end. Her guts twisted as she imagined herself looking down from its apex. The tracks bending, their lips opening wide and vomiting her forth. A fall so primal that you could not say if you remained on earth or if everything—ground and sky, future and past, the tracks themselves—abandoned you.
But today was hers. To give up meant to let go of old fears. She could do whatever she wanted and nothing would terrify her. The finality of her decision would pull every future into a sleepy void. The calm lived there and it would not leave.
_____
Years before his body began dying, Mia’s father took her to Six Flags. On most days, he worked repairing office equipment, traveling hours at a time in his rusted truck from Flagstaff to Thoreau. Why had he taken her that day? She couldn’t remember. His care for her manifested in ghostly flecks of kindness. At age ten, she only saw him once a month because his place in Thoreau had no running water. She had to maintain his lie that the water worked or else the court order would drop to zero visits. The best part of being in his trailer was the fried bologna sandwiches—Navajo steak, he called it. He always said if the apocalypse came, he would survive because he was rezzy and proud.
Before they went inside the park, they spotted an older woman struggling to change a tire in the lot. Her father, six-foot-four and 250, wandered over and twisted each lug until the wheel came free. As he helped her get the spare on, she watched with a mixture of awe and resentment. How could he waste time with this when there was cotton candy inside?
After a day of wandering through the park in stilted conversation, most of which revolved around offhanded comments from him on things her mother had done—leaving him, making him distrust white people again, and so on—she noticed a massive coaster looming in the sunset and stared at its spirals for too long. To her, the peak of that coaster was higher than any butte near her grandmother’s house, higher than where hawks drifted in spirals on desert afternoons outside her father’s trailer.
His hand clamped hard on hers—rough bone against her thin skin, his calluses like chipped turquoise. He said, “Let’s do it.”
The line for the ride stretched and looped back like a python swallowing itself. Her father and so many others crowding toward her. Their sweat-dampened shirts reeking of fried food and adrenaline. She had heard him say many times that Navajo were not afraid of heights. That Natives were used as laborers to build skyscrapers. That it was a genetic gift.
All lies. The wait amplified her terror, seconds becoming hours, then years. Empires rose and tumbled in the oily stench. Her legs shook with terror, an iron tang on her tongue like a bloodletting.
She sat down in line. Refused to stand. To speak. To look at him with anything but the dread she felt suddenly surfacing after years of appeasing his requests, years of trying to change the bad weather in his mind. And though he yelled, no tears came to her eyes. She was like him in that way. His English was broken, his accent rising and falling, and he didn’t have the vocabulary to convince her. Resentment stirred in the canyon beneath the roof of his skull.
“Ungrateful,” he said. “I came here for you. Not me.”
And he pulled her up, confused at her fear. Collected her against his body like ash out of metal that couldn’t burn itself clean. “Scared,” he said to passersby. “She’s scared.” Then he mumbled in Navajo, but she, like the strangers glancing at them, did not understand a word.
_____
Children roaming the walking paths of Dreamland brushed against her, shouting and laughing. Lucas took her hand, squeezing it now and then, probably without realizing, as if to warn her about something. There’s no fear today, she wanted to say. Beside an archway, mushroom-white umbrellas sprouted from the earth. Families hid in the shade underneath. Above them, rollercoaster loops hung like nooses. The riders ascended and dropped into those ropes—screaming then silence, screaming then silence.
They followed the children along a cambered cement path. Soon they saw a refreshment stall helmed by an old woman, her brown face hung over a row of water bottles. A bin beside the stall, stuffed with white containers, sent out the smell of rotting funnel cakes. They moved on, neither speaking. Gradually, a metal canopy emerged from the trees, its banner reading the wendigo. The letters appeared over a painting of an ophidic creature coiling its jawless green body toward a sleeping child, a perversion of Algonquian folklore. From behind the structure, massive yellow spokes upheld a stream of coaster tracks.
“Let’s try this one,” she said. She followed families—rich fathers in their luxury Ray-Bans, their kids with portable fans—as groups moved beyond the six-foot-tall ride safety requirements warning poster. Under the canopy, the summer sun made a wide triangle on the floor. In the cavelight beyond, children moved like phantoms.
“Your vertigo,” Lucas said.
The canopy narrowed into a tenebrous passageway with piped-in sounds of a beast breathing. Spotlit on the ceiling were more paintings of this Wendigo, the artist clearly losing themselves in the work, since now the creature appeared on an ancient Earth, its shadowed body sliding through the boiling landscape. Or maybe it was Hell. Along a thin set of metal stairs, the riders were paused, faces in shadow. She tried to regulate her breathing, four seconds in, hold for seven, out for eight. Sad that a function so natural required taming—breathing was beautiful, except she could not hold it forever. On asphyxiation, an instinct from that ancient world spasmed without her consent.
Lucas studied her face and then grabbed her hand.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re not.”
“Too hot, that’s all.”
They ascended the stairs and returned into sunlight. Ahead, the workers ushered families toward the next train, shoving purple-cushioned lap bars against the bodies of riders. She focused on an elderly couple waiting ahead, their faces in profile against the ride. The man shouted into the woman’s ear above the whoosh of the coaster and the woman nodded without speaking, her eyes unfocused, hypnagogic. Mia felt sick.
The helm of the green train came clicking into position, and a red-faced boy in a yellow Dreamland tee shirt herded the riders along, including the couple ahead of them. The woman’s restraint bar collapsed into her lap. For her safety, she would not move. No seats remaining. The wheels of the coaster began turning slowly. Seconds dripping with viscous weight. Time saying you are still here and Lucas’s hand covering hers. Why should she be afraid? She was giving up and any terror should do the same. Let her ease into some blackness without fear, like a sleeper whose eye movements have begun to change.
She wondered how her expression looked, because now the worker beside the platform was studying her, and she thought of her college graduation, how the teachers had stared at her much the same way, and how her name sounded wrong dripping from the Chair’s mouth, the faculty all shaking her hand with puzzlement, only trying to remember who she was—ah, right, the Native girl!—and what classes she had sat ghostly in. What could they have expected? What sort of mind can grow out of grit from a canyon? It was not malice within them—then or now. Only that same dumb wonder in their faces. Fresh air. Yes, fresh air.
“Need to step out,” she said.
The boy in the Dreamland shirt grimaced as if he expected her to hurl. She felt Lucas pulling her hand, taking her down the stairs, away from the noise and the awful sunlight. She gasped, breathing method forgotten.
Then she began to experience the strangest feeling. The sensation of her consciousness slowing. Not an out-of-body event, nothing like she encountered in medical journals, but instead the sense that the earth—all sensorial details available to her, the dragonflies with their hyaline wings against cement, the smell of hot dogs sweating on a food cart, the sunlight glimmer in spilled soda—belonged to a piece of film, compressed and flattened through a projector, deflated and eerily delayed. She willed her skull to move, to raise so she could look into Lucas’s eyes, and gradually her head did move, but moments after she decided, as if she were watching a film about her life. Like a terrified viewer sitting on a black balcony. She opened her mouth to speak and felt every aspect, her tongue glued briefly to her palate, the click when it detached, the reedy voice that was not hers. Horrific sensation stretching the boundaries of her private theater. Heard herself saying, Let’s go.
_____
Inside a restaurant, in a booth, in the dark. She could not remember arriving. A waitress was leaning down and speaking, dark hair shifting in candlelight. Mia examined the menu with her hands as if searching for braille. She looked at the waitress’s red lips until words began to fill her eardrums.
“Just a salad,” Mia managed to say. The unreal feeling ebbed.
“Hang on,” Lucas said. “We’ll split a steak, please.” When the waitress left, he turned to Mia. “Real food is what you need. Then we can go home.”
Mia had not wanted to ask Where are we? so she was glad he confirmed they were still in Dreamland. Probably in one of the many themed restaurants lining the food court.
What drew her attention was a large mirror above her. The mirror was without adornments, angled so that only the top of her hair appeared within its glass, and Lucas’s profile bifurcated in its bend against the restaurant wall.
He said, “Are you okay now?”
“Yes,” she lied. “Needed water.”
“You scared me.”
Gradually, he relaxed and began commenting on the park, laughing at the ride names. The steak arrived and they ate it and he watched her. He talked of the year they graduated, the time shortly after when her father died, how chaotic life had been, how this summer had already vanished. Then he cleared his throat a few times and looked at his hands. She knew he was going to ease into a speech, one she had anticipated, one he had already scripted. When he seemed convinced she was okay, he sighed as if about to lift heavy luggage.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” he began, “about your PhD, your research interest . . .”
In the mirror, steam from the kitchen floated into the hallway. His reflection shifted as he leaned. A long screaming, distant and without known origin, came through the walls.
“. . . the mental world is so complex. With cancer, we can see it on the MRI. With the brain, we have so many different conditions . . .”
She concentrated on her empty plate. Would hunger disappear too if one knew a death was coming? A craving made the earliest microbes engulf others. Hunger was the track on which the body rolled. And what if her terror also had such ancient origins? Entwined within the structure of her world. Riding along her thoughts like the dips and camelbacks of a rollercoaster?
“. . . it’s true that infants from low-income families have less gray matter. Worse memories. But when does it occur? Prenatally? I just was a bit confused on your focus . . .”
She looked into the darkness of the hall leading to the restrooms and thought of her father’s final months, stuck in the back of an apartment in Virginia. Rolling his oxygen cart with one hand, holding a cigarette with the other. Years of mutual neglect making them almost strangers until the end, all duty. Her father on the balcony, smoking, his once-huge biceps turned to branches. You take care, he would say when Mia left in the morning, and How was your day? at dusk. Midnights hearing him moving through the apartment. Mia half-dreaming and asking of the dark, Who’s there? without a response. Then finally him refusing to use his walker, slipping in the kitchen, the blood spreading outward, coloring his gray. Delirious riding to the hospital, him speaking only in Navajo. His tone gentle, an alien sound. The doctor saying ischemic strokes are . . .
One day in the long weeks after, her father saying, I should have taught you our language. You speak with too many teachers. You believe what they say. It’s all you understand—
“. . . your advisor knows the ropes. If they say it’s not working, they’re probably right. Look, I can’t pretend to know how far you’ve come . . .”
There it was again, the slowing, the echoing. It started in her stomach this time, made the bit of steak she swallowed spin inside. She looked in the mirror. He was speaking. She heard his voice. But in the reflection, his lips were not moving.
“. . . and I know you’ve worked so hard. It’s hurt me to see it. When your father died, I thought . . .”
His lips absolutely still. But then, within the mirror only, his skull began to turn. He was going to look at her. She did not want him to see. She loved him, but he was different and the woman who sat here was vanishing. And when they connected, when they saw each other, she would slide farther into this distortion, and a bit of flesh with her mannerisms would take her place. His reflection trembled because she was shivering. Air. Fresh air again. No, more than air alone—she wanted sky and distance from the earth.
She felt herself choosing to stand, felt herself say excuse me. She entered the dark hallway and stumbled into the restroom.
After dousing her face with water, she leaned against the sink. Looming above a trash can, a window showed her a view of Phantasmagoria. Only a portion of its white tracks was visible, suspended above green, coiled like a rag wrung of water. Without warning, a group of riders flashed through, a train car farrago that veered and trembled in the heat. Screams entered the window seconds after.
She left the restroom and stood in an alcove for a moment. When a waiter walked by, she followed after, doubling his movements, hoping Lucas would not see her leaving. A food cart came rumbling her way, and she matched its speed, following beside it until a sign said exit. She told herself not to look in his direction, not to look in the mirror. Invisibility arrived so rarely when needed.
_____
Wandering between families, the humidity making moisture on her skin. Beneath her shoes, circles painted with arrows helped crowds of children navigate, but they meant nothing to her. She spotted Phantasmagoria to the north. The rest of the world seemed to flicker and dim.
She kept its lift hill in sight as she walked, stopping here and there to look back. Lucas was probably beginning to tap his fingers against the table. Soon, he would start to worry. He worried about her a lot.
Rounding a corner, she passed between a group taking photos in front of a three-meter-tall plastic ghost, its eyes elongated slits from which lantern light emerged, and the group did not react to her. Then she reached the beginning of a queue.
Faceless families were serried from the start of Phantasmagoria’s loading platform, a black structure stretching twenty meters across, and at its apex two boys in Dreamland tee shirts herded riders deeper into another opening, one she could not yet see. Beyond them the tracks rose from the earth. There was nothing else built on this side of the park, so the people all stood in the grass watching the riders like a stretch of supplicants waiting for a sermon.
Plenty of time to turn back. Since leaving Lucas, the doubling feeling had diminished. Still not gone. That day at the amusement park with her father, how had it ended? She could not remember. With him mumbling on the ride home maybe. Him gripping his forehead and saying hózhó nahasdlii over and over. What had his voice sounded like? She couldn’t remember. A child in front of her laughed without fear, her teeth clean and white.
The line continued inching forward. Finally, she came to the front gate. A worker asked, Are you alone? and she had to say yes. The worker couldn’t hear over the screaming. She repeated herself. The gates opened and she walked up a steel platform on shaking legs into a pinched tunnel. She passed into that deeper blackness.
On the tunnel walls illuminations moved in kaleidoscopic patterns, stick figure beings turning in circles, strolling through a sinuous version of Dreamland, strolling through this same tunnel, their eyes following her as if she conjured them herself. The tunnel’s blackness wore itself like a grieving thing—projections of multiple magic lanterns. The shapes with their flat, art nouveau faces opening into ravening mouths. Her father spoke of hunger like that too—full of strange desires like Mia’s later schooling, ideas and letters abstract to his mind. What use would such textbooks ever be? Looking only at his world, rejecting Mia’s fancy words no longer meant for him. The rasp and thirst inside him where pride had blown into clay and dust. And when they argued over stupid things in her apartment during his last days, he said that hearing her yell at him was like hearing a coyote cry in your sleep—teeth and wind.
As she sprinted ahead, the tunnel darkened further and the figures undulated against the floor and ceiling, trailing after her steps. Her body shook as another ride returned to base. An aromatic smoke filled the tunnel and a worker appeared out of the haze and grabbed her shoulders. He was going to look in her eyes, see her terror, and ask her to leave. Instead, he leaned into her until she could smell his breath and shouted, “Please double check if your pockets are empty. No phones. Do you have any sensitivity to light?”
Where had her tote bag gone? She shook her head at the man and was allowed to pass. She exited the tunnel and stepped on the final platform.
Parked ahead was Phantasmagoria’s train, three floorless rows of ten seats, each seat with a shoulder restraint yawning open, each row affixed to the next with thick, bonewhite joints. Her stomach lurched. Floorless meant her legs would dangle freely. She would dance all over the park, over Lucas, over even the dragonflies. She followed behind another couple and their child. To her left was an empty seat. Front row.
She fell into it, a black cushion adorned by a chest restraint, red and reflective in the dim light. She willed her hands to move and saw her bitten fingernails wrap around the steel grips of the restraint, saw the pad closing toward her body. She felt a partial click. When she leaned, her lock moved. Was she imagining its weakness, almost imperceptible? She decided to push her body forward. Again came a tape delay between what she willed and what occurred, so she watched her body convulse like one who has died, and the apparatus budged again. Another worker checking the restraints gave hers the lightest pull. He hesitated, but his face showed no emotion. Then he moved on. She wanted to scream, but her voice rose slowly as if from the bottom of a well.
The steel plates beneath her feet retracted. The gate blocking the ride tilted, then fell to the side. Phantasmagoria ascended the lift hill. Her legs dragged through the air without her will. She shut her eyes, and a breeze moved over her torso. The clicking of the tracks.
“Okay,” she said.
She looked to her right. The child beside her smiled, blond hair already pooling backward with gravity. They had not yet reached the apex, but the girl seemed ready for what followed. Wanted the fall because it was amicable to her. There were rails and safety checks and assurances from family and constant monitoring and a clear future.
The slowing of time again. Except now Mia felt herself moving even further backward, her mind flowing down as in a seesaw while the coaster ascended. The snapping of the tracks. Seconds, years, tumbling backward. Her body rising. A tree branch blocked out the sun and there was her father again in the doorway.
They reached the apex and began to move straight across a flat platform. The clouds split by the white rails. One glance below, long enough to see people staring. All of Dreamland began spinning immediately. But there. A tall man below. Lucas? No. He was different.
“Okay,” she said.
The drop approaching. The clouds all white and clear and her erasure almost a visible part of the tracks, a drop somewhere in time where she would no longer be. A tornado could not pull her off this path. A hurricane could not rip her from this chair. Sweat broke over her body despite the breeze. No give to this seat. She had imagined it, hoped for it. A ride designed to survive even the death of its makers. Designed to torture her, because it knew she was coming long before she did—it was her providence and it watched her poised in a place before birth, watched her grow into this body. The makers added in a pause. Right at the drop. The clicking ended and she viewed the world below, the empty coliseum for children’s shows, the patchwork paths cut into earth, the forest beyond, and she had time to wonder who once occupied this land. Then the drop. The crowd of riders let out a sound as if becoming a single being.
To fall! Such sensation. The delay disappearing. Catching up to herself and then wrenching into the future. They plunged and the grass rushed toward her at terrible speed, g-forces pushing her backward even as the drop ended and they spun into a horseshoe loop. Then a hammerhead turn where screaming surrounded her and she succumbed to its sound and shouted a stream of nothing. Her legs kicked and danced with the mindless surges of a jumper after impact.
They came to an inverting loop and the world turned upside down and her hair fell below her. Over a promontory into a still lake they flew, their shadow passing over hints of spume. They spun back around and came to a rising hill, trees running by like melting paint. They rose and she screamed again because the makers had made a last descent and they plunged into a cave, the world vanishing.
Light from magic lanterns again flickered against the cave walls, then disappeared. Only black now. A wind flowed through the tunnel. She saw herself on the tracks, saw her hands rising over her head. The ride unraveled into nothing-stitched seams with no sense and finally no memory. No advisors or failures or meetings or expectations. No rasp of her father’s oxygen mask swinging low from frayed leather. No hint of his eyes looking at her in the rearview mirror, his face a map of weatherbeaten bone. Mia could no longer feel any of them, and whatever words she held against them disappeared. All the edges went out of her mind. What came back was an ache, not quite inside her but somewhere at a slant so that she could almost touch it. She thought there was someone beside her, another body in the empty seat, and she asked the dark who’s there? and felt an overwhelming calm. Something solid of herself was living within its boundaries. The wind caressed her fingers.
When they flew back into the afternoon, the coaster screeched against the rails, and the couplings clanked, and everything began to slow. The starting platform was the same. Phantasmagoria stopped. Beside her, the child stretched as if from a long nap.
Such a deep slumber. Mia stood and that eerie sensation ebbed again and then vanished. She stumbled down the lift platform, across the grass, back toward imitated civilization. She let her body collapse onto a park bench. Lucas had likely begun searching the park. Her tote bag was lost somewhere.
It didn’t matter. She sat and looked at the sky full of shifting gray clouds. They clung thick around Phantasmagoria, smaller than it seemed before. She tasted bile still clinging to her teeth from that last plunge, and sweat clung to her neck so each swallow was slow and ceremonial. A cool sensation touched her cheeks—at some point she must have been crying. And she understood that what she felt on the ride, she would be allowed to feel again. Maybe any time she wished. Another life seemed to be appearing all around her. Coming into existence as if by a strange projection. And she felt grateful, so grateful. Families and fathers and kids and Dreamland workers walked by the bench. She looked through them for someone to thank, but she knew there was none among them who understood.