Joyland (26 page)

Chris had been bored by everything — including the Frankenstein house. Everything except the arcades. Later, in consolation, he had told her, “Think about that poor guy opening the door all day, again and again. I bet he makes four dollars an hour to say ‘Unh!’” Tammy had laughed through her tears, though just a few minutes before she had had no choice but to stand in the dark and scream. She screamed until the woman in the booth let Chris back in to fetch her. He had dragged her out by her elbow, hissed in her ear, “Shut up! Shut up! You’re out already. It’s okay. I’ve got you,” his breath simultaneously loaded with spit, affection, and embarrassment.

Then they had all walked behind the Falls, and Chris had acted bored again. Bored and wet. He had wanted to get a Polaroid of himself in a fake barrel going over a painted plastic Falls, but Mr. Lane had said it cost too much, and that he and Tammy should take one picture — together.

“Bloody hell,” Chris had said.
No, that’s not right,
Tammy thought. Syntax Error. It was Chris’s pre-British era. It wasn’t Mick Jagger. It was “Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus Christ! Can’t I do anything without her?”

On the fake wood cart before Tammy sat the computer, the Lanes’ vacation this year.

**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****

64K RAM SYSTEM 389II BASIC BYTES FREE

READY.

Tammy stared at the screen. Ready. Was she? For what?

Grade Six, and the final week before it. That day, they had posted the lists at the school. Every year, Tammy and Chris had walked down together to find out if their teachers would be the ones they expected, to see who had passed and who had been held back after all, and especially, whether there were any new names. New names were like snowflakes. They hit your tongue, sparkling and cool with promise, even though by the end of the first semester, these new people would be regular and grey. But there was not even that perfect, day-to-day dulling to look forward to. Not one. Everything was the same, but different. Samantha’s name hadn’t been there. A long row of letters formed a string of useless information.

There was this, the Commodore, and the blinky square — the “cursor” — waiting for a new language.

Tammy typed LOAD, pressed play, watched the screen go blue. Listened to the screech of — what was it? data? information? memory? understanding? — something loading. She waited for the machine to find whatever it was that it was looking for.

That night, Tammy lay on her skinny mattress. She traced the patterns in the wood grain of the panelling above her with her fingertip. This one was a dog. It watched over her in dreams. This shape, a bird.
Oiseau,
she had named him years ago, because she liked the sound of it.
Oiseau
— separated only by an S, its perfect string of vowels was like a hole opening in her mouth she could fly into as she said them. This part of the wall was an island. It stuck out, horizontal, when all of the other knots and ridges ran vertically. Tammy imagined the island as a place she could go as she fell asleep — a place to stand in between sleeping and waking. Tonight, the wall seemed juvenile.

The rumble of the electric fan was amplified. Earlier, she had heard her father in the bathroom running water. Through the walls it had sounded like a deluge, a rushing
shushhhhhh shushhhhhh,
but it had not put her to sleep. Now, no doubt, he was asleep himself. The night seemed both hot and cold.

She had a mental image of Adam Granger sitting in the park. His huge hands and loose, lumbering bear-paw trundle of a walk. His eyebrows that raised after everything he said (Samantha had nothing on him), as if they were just waiting for Tammy to agree and wouldn’t go back down again until she did. The small thistle of hair between them. Adam Granger, with his eyes like cinnamon and his tongue like a twig, snapping in the silence. The tuft of brown that stuck out over the collar of his white T-shirt. His stubby neck, downy as turkey scruff. His wide shoulders and determined stance (especially at the bottom of Laurel Richards’ stairs). His ideas about love. Love.

The plug-in nightlight was a small taupe egg on the wall beside Tammy’s bed.

If they could talk — like real people — what would Adam Granger tell her? Somewhere, Tammy assured herself, there were real people having real conversations, different from the ones she was accustomed to having. This much she had gleaned by observation. As distant as the world could seem, there must be people out there breaking it into bite-sized pieces, filling it up with words.

Would he tell her that? That love could come out of something broken? Take a new shape. Emerge into something else entirely. Like a thing cocooned or a thing born. And if he said that, what would she say? She wouldn’t say anything, she decided. She would ask him questions. Questions like: Couldn’t love also work in reverse, like when Mork and Mindy had their baby, and it aged entirely backward? Couldn’t love begin big and become small? Tammy knew that something in the Lane household had begun to crack. Soon it would lie at their feet, an entirely different thing than it had once been. Small grey figures would emerge from the wreckage. Although Tammy felt someone should warn her parents (just as someone should have warned Mindy before she decided to mate with an alien), it was not going to be Tammy.

She worked her tongue around inside her mouth, felt along the seam of her palate where Jenny’s retainer showed a steeper incline than Tammy could fathom. Tammy tasted the curve of her gums, the angle her molars occupied in her mouth. She found she lacked the proper language. Inside, everything was in code.

PLAYER 1

That morning, Chris walked into the clown’s mouth. Its red lips were square at the joints with its plastic lipsticked grin. Big eyes arched white against its peach forehead. The beady pupils inside were an incomplete ellipsis. Through the low, narrow store space in front of the Joust game, stood the legendary Mickey Newton. His shoulders elbowed from his familiar crablike stance. His head bobbed back and forth in quick jabs. He had a sideways way of going at the machine, as if he were trying to dive into it. The Second-to-the-Master. Returned.

Circus Berzerk suddenly seemed even smaller. The eight machines faced each other like girls with dolls at a tea party. Chris bit the corner of his lip, crept up to stand behind him.

The bird Mickey rode was veering across the screen. It careened downward, landed atop a Bounder. The opposing bird and its rider transformed instantly into an egg. Mickey ate the egg, collected his due in points. He rose up again in pursuit of the Hunter and the Shadow Lord. His wings emitted a constant electronic
whooosh — whooosh.
He banged the Fire button continuously to stay afloat. He collided head-on with the Hunter. Bird-rider ensembles reeled backward, sharp as tires squealing. He tried again. Success. He scooped up the egg. Mickey wasn’t the type to allow the egg to languish and eventually hatch open (whereupon the rider would emerge, miniature and grey, wait for his bird to fly in, pick him up, and resume battle). Mickey grabbed the goods as he saw fit, knocked off the Shadow Lord like he was a sparrow. At the end of the wave, Mickey collected an extra 3000 survival points.

“Watch it, Short Fry,” Mickey said. He whacked the button recklessly, forced his player to rise up, jerkily, then crash down on a buzzard-rider-cum-egg. “Don’t want to take out your teeth with my elbow.” His now-sixteen-year-old chin jerked forward. His eyes didn’t leave the screen for a second.

The ball of the controller was still warm. The bird rose above the platform. Chris felt it ascend from his palm, push against gravity, plunge its two-dimensional head across the top of the screen and exit left, re-enter right.

David kicked the corners of the machines lightly with a sneakered foot. “Fuck this shit,” he said. “Fuck this shit. Let’s go.”

Chris let bird and rider plummet into lava. A gigantic molten hand unfurled, pulled them down into the red, lapping section at the bottom of the screen. Chris deserted the machine.

Kenny’s back was a small cotton sweat stain beneath the rippling strings of light.
If you make a thing happen,
Chris thought,
everyone suddenly wants in on it.
Sometimes, when he was particularly perturbed by something, Chris broke the words into individual sentences in his head.
If. You. Make.
Kenny pushed another quarter into Ms. Pac-Man, as if he could live vicariously through it.
A. Thing. Happen.
Kenny thrust the yellow head back and forth, muttering “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” every time a ghost chased his plushy animated ass across the screen. He couldn’t say the word enough.

Everyone. Suddenly.

Reuben and Dean showed up, wearing scowls.

“We’re not coming. We’re not doing anything,” Dean said. “We’ll be the first blamed. We just don’t wanna —”

“But we want —”

Wants.

Reuben would be lookout, he said.

In.

David kicked the Ms. Pac-Man machine harder, and Kenny lost his man to distraction.

On.

Circus Berzerk spit them out, a regurgitated ragtag army, lightheaded beneath the flashing bulbs.

It.

Ball-capped and snickering, the gang grabbed their BMXs, Chris’s arms rubber-loose, fists roach-clamp-clenched around the bike grips, guts pinned down like laboratory butterflies to his backbone, legs cycling like circular jellyfish away from the rest of him.
In on it.

David and Kenny popped wheelies, a tired experiment resurrected to see who could pull the best one and maintain it, riding a couple of metres at a time on one back tire. Dean wove in and out, wheel wiggly. Reuben statued on back nubs, held onto the plastic seat by his fingernails, his bovine body still for once, unquivering, laughter quelled. Chris brought up the back of the pack, eyes on his running shoes — still too white for the first day of school, no matter how he’d tried to scuff them.

The streets topped, wobbled, spun, the details of them seeming to slow with speed. Chris felt it — felt it inside, felt it as the holding down of a spinning record. The needle sunk to silence, then — letting go again — bobbed back up, all noise. He felt
it,
though
it
didn’t have a name just yet.
It
was the way time came off its wheels. Chris observed the activity in the streets as if he had never travelled them before. He drifted across four lanes of St. Lawrence Street without looking. Pill-capsule cars and vans throbbed in blue-veined lanes, but delayed for him, his eyes on the back of Kenny’s grey T-shirt, its shifting set of wrinkles. The bells in the chicken take-out tinkled under Lego-red roofing as a girl of ten or eleven raced out to an idling car where her mother sat waiting (face pickled behind air-conditioned glass), the paper bag not yet acquired, bills sticking up from the girl’s fist like some unrequired bit of punctuation — a physical question mark. Her other hand split into symbol — V-ed — numbers. A nod. She turned to the car for answer and back again so quickly, her shoulders transformed into the blades of a fan.

Chris cruised on, the sidewalk cracks ushering a soft
thwack
into the motion of his vehicle. This one —
thwack
— where he’d played Break Your Mother’s Back a hundred kindergarten
times. That one —
thwack
— where Kenny had bet him girls could pee standing up. This one —
thwack
— where he’d sat curbside with Tammy for previous Canada Day parades. That one —
thwack
— where he’d sprawled the night they closed Joyland. This one —
thwack
— the last before the gravelled section ahead. The significance of them slowed down too, became more about the bulk of tar or putty, the yellow neck of the hydrant, the black teeth of the gutter, than it was about history. Quietly,
it
ticked, half-sublime, half-sick.

You can feel a thing before it happens,
Chris thought. His mouth filled with warmth, the dry salt of perspiration and fear. Thoughts arrived without words, a series of fast-play pictures made up of visual
perhaps’s
and
possiblys.
Chris yanked on his handlebars, leaned back, left his wheel to lift. When they passed his corner, he ducked his head, as if his mother or father could see him from the living room window. Then, so as not to look like a mama’s boy, he gathered the cracks from his tongue, leaned to one side and spat.

Kenny dropped back. His eyes were insecure, rattish.

“Are you really —” He squelched it when Chris looked at him.

Kenny’s hair was parted on the far right and swooped across his forehead. A salesman’s haircut in miniature. No matter how he’d tried to grow it, its clerkish quality remained, a counterfeit of neatness. He looked like a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old salesman, but a salesman nonetheless. He would jerk his dick under his desk all the way through high school, join the army at eighteen, and in a faraway country, in two vicious minutes and without knowing why, he would rape a fifteen-year-old girl. He would never tell anyone, nor would she, and no one could possibly know. But Chris knew it now. Knew it without knowing how. The incident had its own green tinge, flecking the brown of Kenny’s rattish slitted eyes behind the lenses of his glasses. He was weak, and he would always be weak. If Chris saw the girl lurking in the future, he couldn’t acknowledge it, could only compile it into one word and sticker it across Kenny’s pale stuttering presence:
weak.