At the End of Every Day

ISBN-13: 9781668007952

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: 04-23-2024

Pages: 272

Arianna Reiche is a Bay Area-born writer living in east London. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ambit magazine, Joyland, and Popshot, and her features have been published by New Scientist, USA TODAY, VICE, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue. She researches metafiction and lectures in interactive media at City, University of London.

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Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
During those years when I was spending so much time in the shed, I would sleep at night and dream of a theme park. The park, when dreamed, was an island, even a planet all its own. There was nothing else in my dream geography; no bordering territories. There was no gravity or cartography or linearity of time, but night after night, it would in fact be the same place, the park, waiting to be explored.

Forgive me. I’m trying to untangle this all now. How the park first called out, I guess. What it was about my earliest years that made me so fixated on starting a life there. I need to do this because things are starting to feel strange here. Something isn’t right. And it seems important that I keep my feet on the ground, that I remember what’s real and what’s not. The park really tries to confuse all that. It’s sort of the selling point. Come here to fall into a fantasy. I don’t know how much longer I can do that, though. I’m seeing things. People who don’t belong here. Doors that I never noticed before. And something else that I don’t quite have words for.

I could be imagining it. I have been standing here, staring, for a long time.

There’s the turret. Underneath it, behemoth, plaster castle. Beyond it, the faint fingerprint of a daylight moon. My body is strong today. I feel ready for anything. But I’ll stay here a moment longer, trying to pinpoint what isn’t quite right. It’s a little itch, but nothing too bad. An off note in a beloved song. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the park at all. Maybe I should try to keep on truckin’, even though it’s all ending. Maybe I should turn that frown upside down.

What I know: The park has never been the same since the actress crumpled in that boat. They rolled out the new land anyway, despite the crumpling in the boat, but no one could get it out of their heads. That was the beginning of the end.

There’s footage of it everywhere. Each time lawyers manage to get it taken down from one platform, it just pops up elsewhere, re-downloaded and redistributed by people who enjoy—is enjoy the right word?—that kind of thing. I’ve seen it plenty of times. It doesn’t get less sad, the way things can sometimes become less disturbing on repeat. Every time I watch it, I wonder why her boyfriend didn’t take her in his arms, or why the children seated behind her didn’t react like she did, or react to her, or react at all. They looked bored. Of course, the video only caught the last moments of the whole ordeal, just a few seconds before the lights came on. Then it showed about a minute of Callie still bent, but staring up at the electronic version of herself suspended above her, before she—the real flesh-and-blood Callie Petrisko—curled into herself once more, wailed, and heaved over the side of her little lagoon boat. The video stops there, and on the whole, it might not have been so disturbing if we didn’t all know what happened to her, later.

I’m wrong, I suppose. About the boyfriend. It’s no mystery why he didn’t leap into action. He was probably shocked, too. Shocked at her, and at the lights coming on in the middle of a dark ride. No one likes when the lights come on. I know I don’t.

Maybe that’s why the shed was my first real sanctuary. It was a place where I controlled the light. I was a child and a teen in Nebraska, south Omaha, in one of those regions that doesn’t feel like a city or a town at all, but a spill of boxes and roads without connective tissue. Iowa was across the river. I can’t remember when Whit appeared. One day, the crankiest man in the Midwest, with the most Santa Claus beard you’ve ever seen, was coming over for dinner at 10:30p.m., after my mother woke. She hadn’t told me about him coming over. She didn’t tell me anything because she didn’t like to look me in the eye after my short stint in foster care. The next day he was making breakfast for both of us, army rations he’d ordered in bulk online. Chicken chunks in a tomato sauce. Something a little bit like ravioli. Loose oats, no sweetener. Before long Whit was there every morning, and those bag-meals would greet us, fresh from the microwave, steaming, and if Mom was on a shift, it’d be just Whit pouring me orange juice and explaining what the Fed was, the shortcomings of the Cato Institute, how to buy antibiotics online, how his sons weren’t smart in the kind of way that made them right for college but that they’d do all right anyway. And I’d smile into my gruel, surprised, and say “It’s good!” and he’d say “Bitchin’.” He built his studio, the shed, later.

Before the shed, my life was those breakfasts, school, the library. Later, it was school and the shed, staring into molten light for hours on end, alongside Whit. Neon, his neon, his craft, for hours and hours. By that time his medication made him a little less sturdy, prone to stuttering, and therefore, prone to long periods of silence, which was fine by me, because by then he’d run out of things to say about his days waiting out The Bomb in Montana in the seventies with a couple buddies, and we could simply enjoy the harmony of working side by side. I was always sleepy, because it was all so trancelike, the crafting we did, and that constant half-dreaming meant I could never sleep deeply at night.

It was worth it, though, if all that time in the shed left me with skills that the park valued. It was worth it, if all those dreams made me more at ease among the real geography of the place, the curving bow of always-warm concrete footpath that wove between towers and rainforest vines and trolley cars; the secret alleyways; the shadows that might conceal a hidden door, even if it was just a maintenance cupboard. It took some time, but here I am. I have been here, happily, ever since I left home. I’m thriving. Just look at me.

There came a day shortly after training was finished when my feet ached from standing and my nerves were shot from rude guests—the ones who demanded to know why Caves of Chirakan was so scary, or not scary enough, why they couldn’t find the kiosk to buy a photo of their child on the ride, and had anyone even thought to take a photo of their child on the ride? My face hurt from the strain of the smile we’d been carefully trained to deliver, which was not a toothy pageant smile, as some might guess, but an impassive and content one where immobility of the brows was key. Maintaining it was exhausting in its own way; you felt it in the molars.

After I’d been working at the park for a few weeks, I accepted an invitation to a party after work, at these two baristas’ apartment “just north.” I’d never met them before, but they found me in the Tech Crew changing rooms and loaded me into their minivan like we were old friends. Half an hour on the freeway and I came to understand that “just a little bit” could mean any distance, expanse of space, in this part of the world. Already I was imagining how I’d fail to get home again, how I’d have to sleep in this mystery home, but I had faith that I’d be able to stake out a section of carpet. I can fall asleep anywhere.

When we turned off the 5, one of them asked what my training was like, but didn’t let me answer. She told me about her video, which had been straight out of the early nineties, an actual warbly VHS tape, and most of their day had been spent discussing cultural sensitivity, but she heard that now the park had begun calling it cultural neutrality. I didn’t know about either of those terms—we practiced giving directions without pointing, because of how much of the globe finds pointing to be lewd, and how to explain that there are no prayer rooms in the park, but that many locations in Marine Kingdom, especially the spacious and often-empty Orcas-In-Fedoras Millinery n’ More, were suitable. That was the extent of it.

One of them asked if I’d heard any information about The Founders, and what I made of it. The way they explained it, there were two schools of thought. They said the first school was, essentially, that there’s so little information about the brothers, The Founders, because they did some fucked-up stuff during the war, or before the war, or maybe after. World War II, you know—that war. The other barista chimed in to say she thought it was definitely before the war. They’d toured parts of Europe where “all the gnarly Surrealist stuff” was happening, and they stole a bunch of the more dazzling, more cinematic fever-dream designs that things they came across. All that splendor and tricks of the eye, ridiculous costumes, big sets made of wire and satin. And later The Founders got tied up with some artists who sort of went fascist-ish maybe (at this point the barista who was talking and driving reached behind her seat, waggling fingers at a near-empty tub of Pringles, which I nudged toward her hand while I paid sudden, close attention to the road’s meridian), but they made a few animated shorts that became hugely popular. Plans for the park, with all that enchanting, entrancing stolen art, were already set in motion.

The second school of thought was that it was all boring. Just violently boring. And that there never even were any brothers. They were just two anonymous old men whose vision for the park was nothing more than a group venture at an opportune moment with the same type of partnerships you’d need for any type of conglomerate.

This theory seemed most likely. Why else would they have kept The Founders so mysterious? Why else would it be that the world knows them as The Founders, rather than their real names, which were so dull and long that neither barista could recall them, even now? There must be no there there, no real story at all.

The backs of my hands had begun to itch. When I was about to weigh in, one of them cut me off.

“You forgot the third theory.”

“There’s no third theory.”

“There is!”

“I’ve never heard of a third theory. You’re literally making this up right now.”

“Jesus Christ, let me explain it first, then you can decide if I made it up”—the barista pulled her passenger side seat down to a luxurious recline—“like damn.”

The third theory was that the park built itself. One day there were simply swollen masses of earth and slim trenches marking out the perimeter, and an inexplicable arrangement of soil dunes where the castle would go, little markings where the main pathways threaded themselves between the park’s many kingdoms, and tunnels running deep into the earth. All of this was tied into the Los Angeles Satanists, of course: Aleister Crowley and the Brit spiritualists who came over, at some point, and maybe a burial ground. Scientologists were tied into all that, right? And stuff in the desert? There was some physicist who was like also a magician and accidentally blew himself up. Forgot his name, but it was like... like you know Oppenheimer—

“It’s not Oppenheimer. He was the atomic bomb. You’re thinking of that one guy. What’s his name. He was making other bombs and got all involved with L. Rod Hubbard.”

“Did you say Rod Hubbard?!”

“Whatever, but it’s not Oppenheimer.”

“Okay fine, but it’s like I said, all that stuff is tied up together, all those things in those early decades last century and LA, right?”

I sat in the silence before I realized I was supposed to respond.

“Right. Sure,” I said. And then, when it seemed like they wanted me to keep talking, “Um, they just gave us a list of names and said these guys designed the first rides. And the castle. I’m not sure if they were, like, The Founders, capital T capital F, I guess. And the rest of it was like, Theory 2.”

“Boring,” said one.

“Of course they’d say that,” said the other. “But what do you believe?”

I wanted to say that I believed that spending my teen years in a dark shed, building little useless totems of glass and fire with a feeble man, made my eyes more sensitive to magic, to spotting things that don’t appear in daylight. I wanted to tell them that that man had helped raise me and I left him to rot, wearing grip socks, medicated within a microgram of his life, in a facility that looked more like a prison than a hospital. I wanted to tell them that I didn’t need to believe anything at all; I could be brain-dead and wheeled into the park, and something about entering its territory would allow an invisible hand to reach within my ribs and pull me across its length. And whether the park was intentionally designed to be like that—a place that fostered devotion, coded into minds subliminally, beautifully, with treasure cove geometries and magic mountain magnitudes—couldn’t matter less. It was all those things, regardless of its architect.

“I like Theory 3,” I said. “Didn’t Aleister Crowley look like a wizard?”

For the rest of the drive they talked about their cousin’s wedding in Tecate, and whether nuts are vegetables. When we got to their house, I found that I was surprised at how nice it was. It was thoughtfully furnished. The things that were meant to look new looked new; the things that were meant to look old looked old. There was something made of real wool on the couch, and a panel of blue and green stained glass leaning against a wall.

People were already there when we arrived. Maybe ten. Someone was bent over a sink, doing something complicated to a pineapple. I felt comfortable offering him help because I recognized him as one of the princes. Very handsome, obviously. Speaking to him made me feel as nervous as speaking to a diorama of colonial Jamestown, or a small airplane. But when he said thanks and admitted, more painfully than I’d expected, that he wasn’t very good at it, at accomplishing with the pineapple whatever he was trying to accomplish, I started to see small flaws in his countenance and in his skin that gave me something to hold on to. I became so light-headed that I almost dropped the bottle of vodka that was, in some way I didn’t quite understand, meant for the pineapples, and he noticed the scars on my hands and I tried to excuse myself, but he touched my elbow and said, “You can’t leave me here like this. Seriously, I’ll fall apart.”

I didn’t stop smiling after that, even when the pineapple concoctions made us wince. Eventually I did leave him, to go through the motions of talking to other people. The living room was so packed it was impossible to tell where the line for the bathroom began. Other people, other girls, spoke to the prince, made bright eye contact and lightly touched his chest when they laughed. But I noticed that he never drifted more than a few feet from me. Once or twice when I looked over my shoulder to check the distance between us, I found him looking at me, and he would look away with genuine embarrassment. One of those times, in a shaky motion, he went to bite the rind of his mangled pineapple and met something sharp, and he jerked the fruit in such a way that he almost smacked a gondola girl in the back of the head.

By midnight I found that being near him made my chest hurt, and that it felt better than the morphine they gave me in the hospital, after what happened in the shed.

“Who are you friends with here?” he asked, later, and I struggled to give an answer, because I convinced myself that this was him asking about other people, other people he might want to be talking with more than me. So I slipped away from him, and spent some time in the bathroom alone staring into a mixture of vodka and sparkling wine that someone handed me, and the line had grown longer when I returned to the living room. I found it hard to see a line of people and not ask questions about group size, and to start guiding them to loading sections for their ride vehicle.

It’s foggy, what happened between those hours and the moment on the couch when my lids became heavy, but when I woke, he was at my feet. The prince. Brendan. His hand was on my bare ankle. His head was lolled back, but when I looked closely I saw that he was awake. He seemed to be watching the weak, watery sunrise leaking through a skylight I hadn’t noticed over the course of the night. A section of dawn grew on the floor by a radiator, and it made everything behind him start to glow.

“Have you been up this whole time?” I croaked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just making sure you’re good.”

Is there a name for the thing where time distends? When a week or a year becomes longer than another week or another year. Everyone experiences it, but it doesn’t have a name. It doesn’t matter. After that party, time changed. It took two years after my arrival at the park, just a bit more, for everything in my life to become symphonic. My feet no longer ached inside my shoes, and I learned to soothe fussy families before they could voice their complaints. Managers learned about my mechanical skills, skills absorbed from Whit, and I officially became Load-Mat—managing the loading of guests into the cars of the ride and able to oversee basic maintenance tasks. I decided to move out of my shared room in a halfway house that had called itself an intern dorm online, and I found Brooke, who knew how to work an air fryer and how to keep someone company without demanding chitchat. She came to after-work drinks, sometimes, after I’d made a handful of solid friends at the park, and occasionally I went to drink with her teacher friends. They, like Brooke, did their self-tapes in the teachers’ lounge or an empty locker room, and took pride in the fact that they weren’t waiting tables while they auditioned and tried to attract agents. But only Brooke seemed to care about both—being a good teacher, being a good actor, even when that acting was, by and large, looking delighted by a CGI reflux pill that had come to life and begun listing its own side effects.

After that party, I could count the nights that Brendan and I spent apart on one hand. If he stayed at my place, he’d hide upstairs to let me and Brooke watch TV and share stories about shitty children. If I stayed at his, he’d show me his little projects: A terrarium he’d found intact next to a dumpster in Sunset Park. Two squares of timber that he was sanding down to assemble into a lazy Susan. Nondescript putty that he’d molded for the inside of his running shoes to improve his gait. He bought a book on palm-reading from a flea market, and the fact that it was clearly geared toward preteen girls didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.

I became awkward when I saw that last one; he hadn’t asked about my hands by that point. By then I had my gloves. I wore them almost constantly. Sometimes I slept with them on. Someone else might read this as an aversion to touch, to physicality. But Brendan never stopped picking me up, not as a flirty stunt, but almost as a nervous tic, gazing off into the distance, trying to work out some problem while bending at the waist, wrapping an arm around the front of my torso, gripping me with his elbow, and quietly trying to flip me upside down. If I leaned on him, he would demand that I do it harder, with more weight than I was able to give, so he could push back against something and create an equilibrium. He would mash the tip of his nose on my scalp until I could hear cartilage click.

“This seems like a dog thing,” I’d say.

“Mmh...” He’d think. “Pig thing.”

I rarely saw him at work. His was a moving circuit among the guests. The guests came to me, where I was stationed. But it worked, perfectly. All of it did.

But time flies. For so long, the park had seemed invincible. It was some vital spinal fluid of America. Then came the video of that actress, Callie Petrisko, crumpling in the boat. It had seemed bad when it happened, when the video leaked, but after what she did a few days later, there was no going back. The damage was irreversible. Now the park doesn’t have long to live.

It’s been a long process, the ending. From the official internal announcement of the park’s “transition” to an overseas presence, we were given a year, and each team received a specific Action Plan for mindful disassembly and ongoing reduced capacity maintenance. And once each team had an Action Plan, individual team members got a directive. One day, I opened my locker, with its digital display built in, to show a message sent to me and me alone. Baxter, Delphi—c3230912—Private and Confidential. It was my own Action Plan, with separate points laid out for day-to-day disaggregation and closure tasks that were to be done alongside my normal work. There were also milestone closure projects within the land containing Caves of Chirakan, group tasks that would be completed either after hours or remotely, in the mechanical bays, the ones just beside the main tunnel where we arrived and changed and had lunch.

It took a long time for us to understand what “transition” meant, although it was all anyone talked about for a long stretch of time. This park was closing. This, the first, the only one on this coast, the only one of this size and scope. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t really understand. It would have been too much to bear.

There were problems even before Callie: an outstanding lawsuit involving a cheese by-product found in one of the dining locations; something to do with the passholders, the adult park die-hards, antagonizing “casual” guests; harassment mishandled by park security. Settlements over whiplash were made almost every year. I suppose all those, plus Callie, might have made management rethink how the park operated, but I know in my bones that they wouldn’t have forced the gates to shut permanently. No, there was something else. The big dream of the future. There was something big planned for Hong Kong. A new park. We didn’t know much more than that, much more than the rest of the world knew in little press releases—breathtaking sketches that might get “leaked” from the studio, depicting palaces (plural) overlooking a vast stretch of lush terrain, coasters, hang gliders and hot-air balloons, all on the backdrop of a prismatic star system that certainly was not our own. It seemed this park wouldn’t have themed lands but would be a staggeringly complex harmony of every fantasy that the park, the studio, the guests, could muster.

Of course management confirmed nothing, and we were left with our Action Plans.

Over those first months countless friends were let go, the little notes slipped into their lockers in the underground corridors, and some unnamed, omniscient manager asking them to pop into the corporate campus just a “hop, skip, and a jump” across the freeway. At consolation drinks in February, Amber, who operated the steamboat, and Kenji, who worked in makeup, realized they’d experienced something identical when they got to the offices beyond the park. The first HR rep opened with “Let’s start at the very beginning” and the second one chimed in with “A very good place to start!” and both reps laughed and laughed.

We continued to watch individual C&C—cast and crew—get their letters. Mascara dripped onto the itchy lace collars of Arthurian princesses, and a man in lederhosen punched a wall.

Then people disappeared in small groups. First, the entire team at the Beignet Grotto, then all the ladies from the unnamed Edwardian section, and Springtime Canyon, and the Colonial Outpost. They even got rid of Beth, who was famous among C&C for her ability to remember details about the hundreds of children who took photos with her every day. She could recall the story of how a boy got the scar on his knee if he approached her a year after his first visit. It baffled parents. They always tried to have a quick whisper with her, to guess how she managed it (“Is it cameras? Face recognition software or something?”), and Beth, in her lilting soprano, would answer, “Oh no, Madame Lily could simply never forget such a special child!”

They fired the live actors embedded within the mummy thrill ride, even Eric, who’d paid for facial filler and laser hair removal to achieve the Pharaoh’s famous straight brows. The guests’ favorite thing about that ride was the fake-out breakdown, where the wooden carts in which riders were seated jerked to a halt that felt, convincingly, like a mechanical problem. Then, after ten full seconds, Eric would appear at a rocky ledge toward the ceiling, slide down a greased pole made to look like a dangling rope, land, howl, and charge toward the cars, only to have them sputter to life and shoot away right in the nick of time.

Thinking about it now, after the footage of Callie Petrisko was released, it might have been in poor taste. The ride pretending to be broken like that.

But they didn’t fire me, and they didn’t fire Brendan. Somehow I knew they wouldn’t, even though there are more popular rides than mine, and there aren’t enough guests to require a full-time prince. We felt guilty, in a way, especially when the lederhosen guy got escorted out by security. But we can’t help it if management has a soft spot for us. Most people do. The unlikely love story: the prince and the cave dweller.

In the moments when I’m not panicked about the future, I try to fill myself with a kind of wisdom, like when I read the contents of a self-help book from the library back home, or the sage-like yak from Himalaya Hootenanny 2 who greets guests in Springtime Canyon at 11:20 a.m. and 4:15 p.m., and I think: It’s all right that things end.

But how do you end a place like this? A park the size and scope of a small city? Not too long ago I asked Brendan that question, while he tinkered with tweezers inside that terrarium he found. We were about to go to this market where he’d heard you could get hermit crabs. (This did not turn out to be true.) He asked what I was looking at, and only then did I realize I’d been staring out the window above his kitchen sink, which smelled like moss. “I guess I’m trying to figure out which section of sky belongs to the park.”

“No section of sky belongs to anywhere. It’s sky.”

I didn’t tell him that I thought he was very wrong. “The park is bigger than some incorporated towns. Did you know that?”

“No,” he said. “You’re the tiny town authority.”

“My town wasn’t that tiny. It was bigger than the park. But the park is bigger than some towns, is what I’m saying.” I heard little pebbles clinking on glass.

“How do you know that?”

I shrugged, even though he wasn’t looking. I let my hipbone push into the sink and wrapped my gloved hands around my waist. I leaned forward until my forehead was touching the glass. It felt nice.

“We got a CD-ROM in the mail once, when I was like twelve. You could click through different areas of the park and play grainy videos about each ride. There were all these facts you could uncover, if you clicked on enough of them. And one was about the size of the park. But that’s even before Nebuland.”

“How much time did you spend on that CD-ROM?”

“Two years, I think.”

He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t turn around.

“I mean,” I continued, “I knew most of the audio by heart.”

Later, before we went out, I pressed Brendan into the couch, where he’d taken a break from his miniature arrangement, and rested on top of him, like his gently expanding torso was a raft, and he pressed his fingers into the back of my skull. I almost fell asleep, but he whispered, “Hermit crabs,” and we knew that if we stayed there any longer we’d get naked, or fall asleep, or both.

I felt a little unsatisfied that he didn’t understand what I was saying about the sky. If you found yourself somewhere like, I don’t know, the Scottish Highlands, or the Louisiana bayou, and the sky was doing something particularly beautiful, you’d say to yourself, This Highland sky is sure somethin’. Only on the bayou would you get this kind of sunset. The park, too, has its own sky, and that makes the disassembly seem impossible. It kept me in disbelief about the closure, even though my workload became heavier than most.

There are tasks in my personalized Action Plan that the others don’t have. From the shed, with Whit, I know a little bit about engineering. Only the basics. I qualified to pass an online safety test that was designed for work-experience machinists, day laborers, that kind of thing. And so I can do some mechanical work inside the rides. They don’t have to pay me any different, unless I go into overtime. I’m happy to help. I want them to remember me, if I ever find myself in Hong Kong, or if something in management comes up here, remote. I’m resourceful, I think. I’m up for any task. Except for one.

I made the Nebuland lagoon ride, Callie’s ride, part of my deal with management. That I would never, under any circumstances, set foot in there. I’d rather be fired.

I’m standing, still, feeling strong, underneath that faint lunar stamp above the clouds. Staring.

“Delphi, right?”

I jump a little at the sound, and my eyes water. I must have also been staring into the sun.

“Yes?” I offer.

I can’t see who it is. No, it wasn’t the sun I was staring at. It was the turret, so high, and so huge. I can’t stop blinking.

The voice again: “I recognize you from those... all those...” It’s gravelly and familiar. Black spots wiggle across my line of sight. I rub my eyes.

“... those all-hands meetings. You always ask good questions.”

“Oh!” I try to laugh in the direction of the voice, but now the black is morphing to yellow, then red, bruising across my vision.

“What you looking at there?” he asks.

I finally make him out: thick brows. He’s carrying a mop and bucket on wheels, but