Chapter 1
1
You probably think this is a story filled with roller coasters and carousels. While it’s true that most amusement parks contain such things, this story isn’t about having fun, at least not in the traditional sense. More than anything, I guess, this is really about Derek Garcia.
Now, I wish I could tell you Derek was a great guy. And in some ways, he was kinda OK. Paid his taxes, paid his mortgage, and made sure his family had food—stuff like that, you know. But in many other ways, maybe the most important ones, he was nothing more than a piece of crap.
Listen, don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t a super-villain or anything like that. He didn’t run over an old lady in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. He didn’t burglarize that nice little Craftsman bungalow down the street. He never started a bar fight, lit a forest fire, or even cussed out his mother (excluding that one time when he was drunk, age seventeen, and it was three a.m. on a school night).
You see, Derek was a piece of crap not because he was all-out evil or even just kind-of-mean—in that fleeting way people often are. No, Derek was crappy simply due to the unbelievably vast collection of small, sometimes insignificant, yet entirely shameful acts he’d committed across his twenty-nine years of life. Not the least of these, he subtly realized, was a loveless relationship with a girl named Darlene.
On a Tuesday afternoon in the very middle of August 2007, Derek left work early and drove down Seventh Street in Long Beach, California. He was paying Darlene a visit. But Derek wasn’t thinking lovely thoughts about his girl. No roses, handwritten notes or boxes of chocolates sat on the passenger seat. This wasn’t a cordial kind of visit. In fact, he was trying not to think about her at all. He instead focused on the sights around him. People walked up and down the afternoon sidewalks. A homeless man crossed at Redondo Avenue, a pair of businesswomen in tight black dresses crossed at Atlantic. It was a nice sunny day. Not too much smog and not too many clouds—just sun, air, and a pair of sea gulls circling high overhead. Derek gripped his steering wheel. Everywhere he looked people wore sunglasses, even the homeless. For a moment, Derek pictured Darlene in sunglasses. She was especially attached to the hundred-dollar Paul Franks he’d purchased for her at the Sunglass Hut in South Coast Plaza. He quickly shunned the memory, reminding himself of his mission and the importance of keeping his mind clear.
Derek parked his Civic Coupe in front of an old art deco apartment building just east of downtown. He stepped out of his car and walked into the building. The building didn’t have many windows. Plastic fern plants and black and white pictures from the 1920s lined the walls of the front lobby. The lobby smelled like dog urine.
He walked up two flights of stairs and stood in front of a door. “Darlene,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
“Shut up,” she said slowly, between sobs. “Shut up.”
“Darlene, let’s talk. I want that.”
“I don’t!”
“Listen, open the door. Please.”
The sobbing continued.
“Darlene, let me in.”
“No.”
“You promised,” he said. “You said you were okay.”
“No.”
“Darlene, please.”
The sobbing slowed. Silence. A few seconds later, the door opened.
Something about Darlene’s tiny apartment seemed different. He couldn’t place it. Everything was in its rightfully banal place—the unmade twin bed stuffed against the corner, the particle board computer desk beneath the bay window, and Derek’s favorite—the apartment’s only piece of hanging art—the faded print of Monet’s Water Lilies tacked to the wall. Although everything looked the same, it certainly didn’t feel that way.
Darlene stumbled over to the bed, almost tripping on a messy mountain range of blankets strewn across the wood floor. The single sheet on the mattress had been stained from something red. It was merlot, the kind she bought at the Rite Aid drugstore. Darlene crumpled on the bed and rubbed her arms. She wore a plain white tank top and jeans. His jeans. She liked doing girlfriend stuff like that.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I messed up.”
“Messed up?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you ending this?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you don’t know, then you are.”
Derek peered at the Monet print. Their relationship, if you could call it that, had started three months earlier. Like many things in Derek’s life, it began in a simple series of repeated acts. They had sex in her apartment. They had sex in his Civic and several times in her old burgundy Jeep Cherokee. They even tried having sex on her back stairwell, only to be interrupted by a wizened grey toad of a neighbor who yelled, “Jeez, already!”
They had met on a little web-thing called MySpace. Derek wasn’t a regular on MySpace. He didn’t add people to his friend list or blog about his life. No one in his real life even knew about his profile. Darlene was just the opposite. Darlene had plenty of MySpace friends, mostly college boys with tribal tattoos. She blogged about Seal Beach keg parties and weekend boating trips to Lake Havasu. She was a communication major at Long Beach State. Derek found her profile while searching for local singles. Her page stated the following: 21 year old. Single. Looking for fun-fun people. Derek had plenty to admire: strawberry blonde hair, green eyes, perfectly aligned teeth (the product of four years of braces, retainer, and headgear). To Derek’s laughing approval, her bio also included a devil-themed emoticon, a computer-generated smiley face replete with crimson skin and a matching glittery pitchfork.
He messaged her a few times. He was upfront about his situation: I’m 28 (look 22), married (wife and kids, no pets), and just looking for friendship. Darlene didn’t fault the arrangement—three months of unbridled sex seemed fine by her. And, of course, Derek didn’t have a problem with it either.
Lucinda, his wife, had begun questioning him about the recurrent late nights and the cologne receipt from Nordstrom Rack (Derek never wore cologne, at least not around her). Of course, she never accused him of anything. Lucinda was too trusting, too meek to attempt something as righteously brazen as that. Ultimately, though, Derek wasn’t ending things because of his wife, or out of some gesture of moral self-restraint. He was ending them because of Darlene. She’d lost her novelty—that newness surrounding her studio apartment, her body, even the merlot. All of it was bland. Familiar. Besides that, Darlene had gotten weird. She was calling twice as much as before. She wanted to “talk” more often than jump under the sheets.
“Give me money,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“If you’re going to just end this…I want something out of it.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Money,” she whispered dryly.
“Are you drunk?”
“Fuck you!”
“Are you?” he asked.
She curled up in bed, wrapping the sheet around her body. “Just go, okay?” she said, sobbing again.
He stood up. For a moment, he wanted to wrap his arms around her, hold her, or at least rest a steady hand on her back. She always liked that, a hand on her back. She claimed it reminded her of being ten years old. He dropped a pair of hundred bills onto her bed. “Don’t call,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” he replied.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
Derek sat at a red traffic light a few minutes later. He rolled down the car window. The outside air smelled of oil, pavement, and salt water—mostly salt water. The light flashed green, but the car in front of him, a pea green El Camino, didn’t move. He punched the horn. “Go,” he said, “go.” The driver turned his head—slow and deliberate. He’d heard the horn. But still, he didn’t move. Derek swerved around the car and locked eyes with the driver, a middle-aged black man wearing a beanie.
Long Beach had a sizable population of blacks, latinos, Cambodians, and whites. The whites mostly congregated along the beach areas and on the east end of town, in neat, little suburban mid-century homes clustered near the university and airport. They were also located in a small neighborhood on the northwest side called Bixby Knolls, which was filled with Craftsman and Spanish bungalows, old mansions, oaks, pines, and a few drive-thru Starbucks. The other races, along with a few hundred homeless people, lived mostly in semi-segregated boroughs surrounding downtown. Downtown was also bordered on one side by the “gay ghetto,” California’s third largest community of gays and lesbians behind San Francisco and West Hollywood.
Darlene lived near the gay ghetto. Her apartment overlooked a street peppered with rainbow-colored flags and brightly colored VW Golfs. She called it the “arts district.” She said it was a wonderful little neighborhood, so “creative and alive.” Although Derek and his wife were technically Mexicans (albeit a lighter, freckle-faced variety), they chose to live near the airport amongst the aforementioned whites. Their home was a modest Spanish-style condo: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a two-car garage. The tinted window above their bed overlooked the cement foundation of a soon-to-be-built drive-thru Starbucks.
Instead of returning home, Derek pulled into the Lakewood Mall parking lot. The parking lot was half empty. A few sea gulls swooped around a discarded McDonald’s bag, and the sound of a car alarm echoed from far away. The air in the parking lot didn’t smell like saltwater. Lakewood was a few too many miles from the beach for that. It was a thick and oily smell, like in a closed garage.
He knew Lucinda was waiting in their living room. So were the girls. He imagined them staring at the digital clock in the kitchen, biting their nails.
He parked outside of a See’s Candy store. Derek wanted to calm down, to process what’d just happened. The money. Darlene. He eyed a pair of families—the kind with daughters who wear orthodontia—standing inside the See’s lobby. His cell phone vibrated. His wife’s name flashed across the screen.
“Hey, Lucinda,” he said.
“Hey, where are you?”
“The mall.”
“Okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The girls.”
“Honey, I told you I was going to be late.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry, am I being pushy again? Tell me, because if I am I’ll stop and….”
“Babe, it’s okay. Just stop.”
“Okay.”
“Listen,” Derek said. “I think I’m going to get the computer.”
“Is that why you’re at the mall? The computer?”
“Yes.”
“Did you check the account?”
“I checked it. We can handle it. I got the bonus coming in anyway.”
“Okay. It’s just, we’re spending money tomorrow night. At the park. We’re still going, right?”
Derek had forgotten that he’d promised to take his family to Orangeville Amusement Park. He had an employee Gold Pass, free park admission for his wife and kids. Even so, he rarely took them to the park. In fact, he’d only taken his family twice in two years—an embarrassing symmetry of procrastination.
“We’ll bring dinner with us,” he said sharply. “That’ll save money. Sandwiches. We still have sandwich meat, right? The baloney and turkey?”
“I thought you said we could eat at the park. You said it was going to be a treat for the girls.”
“Babe, we’ll talk about it later. I’m at the mall. They’re closing soon, and I have to check to see if they have it in. Okay?”
“Okay, we’ll do the meat,” Lucinda said. “I think we have ham, too.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want the turkey or baloney?”
“Either.”
“Okay,” she said. “That’s fine.”
The computer Derek wanted was named nload. It was faster and more visually sleek than his Apple Powerbook. The case was thin and bluish. A shiny glass emblem behind the monitor glowed neon red when powered on. He’d owned his Powerbook for a little over a year. The nload had been released the day before yesterday. But this wasn’t a sudden urge, something he’d decided to buy on a whim. This was an earned reward, he thought, imagining Darlene curled on her bed, crying into her merlot-stained sheets. This was his prize for ending what had been morally wrong from the start.
Two retail stores at the mall carried the computer. Circuit City and Best Buy. Derek first ventured into Circuit City. They didn’t have the computer. A manager in red shirt and khakis explained that he should try Best Buy.
He went to Best Buy. He found the nload floor model on a demo rack. The aluminum alloy casing gleamed softly beneath a pair of fluorescent lights.
A man wearing a blue shirt and khakis strode up to Derek. “Can I help you?”
“I’d like to get an nload.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “We can’t sell the floor one. Have you tried Circuit City?”
Lucinda sat cross-legged on the loveseat. The twin girls sat on the floor. They were watching a Disney movie. Stepping through the doorway, Derek smelled leftover fried chicken.
“Daddy!” the girls yelled in unison.
“Hey, ladies. How are you?”
“Daddy, we’re watching Belle.”
“The movie is called Beauty and the Beast,” Lucinda said.
“No, it’s called Belle,” they repeated.
“Ladies,” Derek said, wrapping his arms around his daughters. “Your mom is right. The girl in the movie is named Belle. The movie is named something else.”
“Belle! Belle!” they screamed. “Are we going to see her tomorrow?”
“Well, girls, we are going to Orangeville, and they don’t have Disney characters, but they have other ones you might like.”
The girls half smiled and smirked.
Derek looked at his wife. Her small, skinny hands were folded too neatly, and her head leaned forward just a little too much. She had the unbalance of a child, one who hasn’t yet learned how to sit straight. Derek knew it was terrible to think such thoughts. This was his wife, the mother of his kids. He wanted to love her. He knew that he did love her, but he wanted to love her even more, in a way that overlooked all fault and flaw. He wanted to take her to Lakewood Mall. Buy her strawberry ice cream. Buy her lingerie. He wanted to take a trip to Portland with her. Make her smile and watch her sagging head sit straight on her shoulders—the simple key to happiness, a level head. He needed the same, of course. He needed it even more than her. No Darlene. No guilt-laden moral side steps. Just sit on a loveseat every night and enjoy a family, a real family.
The girls ran off to their room in a whirlwind of giggles.
Derek turned away from Lucinda and eyed the kitchen. “Is there any food?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I left a plate in the fridge. It’s on the top shelf.” Derek sensed a tightness in her voice, subtle but still perceptible. He wasn’t used to anger from Lucinda. He was used to the tired look, the drooped eyes and pursed lips, at the end of a day. But anger, that was something new.
The girls went to bed at nine. From where he sat on the couch, he heard them still giggling in their bedroom. They uttered “Belle” five or six times.
Lucinda sat next to him on the couch. She didn’t talk. He didn’t talk. They watched part of the news. After a few minutes, she rubbed his leg with her left palm.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Okay.”
“When are you coming?”
“Soon.”
She nodded.
After she left, a commercial for the nload blared on the screen. Multicolored lights flashed on an aluminum case. Funky bass lines thumped. It was a high-production marketing ploy. Bad music. Bad lighting. And intentionally so. Apple did it all the time. Other computer companies like Dell and HP lagged far behind. They didn’t have the edge, the low-fi roughness that kids and twenty-somethings demanded. That was the brilliance of these marketing techniques. They looked bad but felt good.
Derek strolled into his TOA Orangeville office building the next morning. TOA stood for Team Orangeville Anaheim. The office building sat just behind the Lazy Hills facade at the northern edge of the park.
Derek sat at his desk. He said “good morning” to Bob and Roy. The three of them shared a communal cubicle space. The space was big enough to fit three desks, one printer, and a small fridge that hummed once every thirty seconds. Roy was an obese man who sported a thick brown mustache. He looked like Super Mario from the video game—except fatter. He was nice, a Christian, a sturdy evangelical, as he once explained over lunch at the Green Ticket, the company commissary adjacent the TDA building. Bob was fifty-nine years old. A former atheist turned agnostic turned atheist again, who currently “didn’t know what the hell was going on.” Bob’s wife, Francine, was almost as obese as Roy. He tacked pictures of her up on the cubicle wall. Bob was diabetic. Derek suspected that Bob’s wife was diabetic as well. Derek didn’t know if Roy was diabetic. But if one’s weight were any indicator, he figured Roy had several health problems, diabetes likely being but one of them.
“Hey, Derek,” Roy said.
“Hello.”
“How’s the familia?”
“They’re good.”
“That’s good to hear.”
Bob smiled.
“Did you get the nload? I read it about it on Reuters this morning. Amazing reviews.”
“Not yet.”
“Did you try Best Buy?” Roy asked. “I heard they still have some.”
“They don’t,” Derek replied. “I tried Circuit City too.”
Bob continued smiling. He did this in the morning. Smiled a lot. It was his nervous tick. Whenever a lull appeared in conversation, if something awkward was said, if he misunderstood you or you misunderstood him, he’d smile. Not a small sheepish grin, but a large, over-exuberant smile, the smile of a man whose only daughter has just graduated from junior high.
“It’s good to hear your family is doing well, Derek,” Roy said. “I’m sure they’ll enjoy the park tonight. What time are they coming down?”
“After work.”
“That’ll be fun,” Bob said, furling his brow. “Though, that’s two jobs to me, work then family, back to back.”
Derek stared at his computer screen. He didn’t want to talk about his family anymore. He also didn’t want Bob’s awkward smile or Roy’s kind words. He needed to edit several training guides. He needed them done by 11:00. He’d email them to the project manger by 11:15. By 11:30 he’d leave for lunch. Derek wasn’t going to invite Bob or Roy to lunch today. He wouldn’t pretend to be their friend, their cheery co-worker, as was his daily custom. Today, there was business to be handled.
The nload was available somewhere. He might have to take a double lunch to find one. As long as the training guide was emailed by 11:15, nobody cared if he was a little late. Besides, the family wasn’t meeting him there till five. He had plenty of time.
Derek finally found the nload at a small electronics store called Harrison’s. Just to be sure, he had called the store before he arrived and asked the clerk if the online inventory figure was correct.
He left early for lunch. No one saw him leave. Bob and Roy had vanished into the quicksand of afternoon meetings, and the front desk secretary was affixed to her cell phone. She was talking to her boyfriend, “Chico.” Derek could tell it was Chico by her girly voice and sagging posture, the kind she reserved for her “boy,” as she once referred to him.
Harrison’s was located in downtown Long Beach, not far from Darlene’s apartment. The store inhabited the entire third floor of a twenty-floor high rise. Like many other buildings off Pine Avenue, the main downtown hub, the Harrison building had been built in the late thirties development boom that followed the 1933 Long Beach quake. The building was a mountain of concrete with ornamental archways, polished marble floors, and art deco styling, save for one obviously modern feature. The street level exterior had been recently remodeled, perhaps ten or twenty years earlier, and it now featured tinted glass wrapping around the entire first floor, affording all who walked or drove by a mirror image of themselves.
Derek pulled into the parking structure across from the Harrison building. His phone rang as he parked. His home number flashed across the screen. “Hello,” he said.
“Dad?”
“Sarah,” Derek said. “What’s going on?”
“Mom is sick.”
“What do you mean sick, honey?”
“She’s in the bathroom. She won’t come out.”
Derek could tell that his daughter had just been crying. Her breathing sounded shallow and uneven. “Let me talk to Mom, honey.”
“Mom won’t open the door.”
“Honey, go to the door and knock on it. Tell Mom that Dad wants to talk to her.”
Sarah sobbed. “Why is Mom sick, Dad?”
“Honey, is your sister there? Let me talk to Emily.”
“Yes.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“Yes.”
Derek heard another voice. The other voice whispered something.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Honey, Emily, listen to me. Take the phone to the bathroom. I need to talk to Mom right now.”
“Okay, Dad. I’m at the bathroom.”
“Knock, baby. Tell Mom I want to talk to her.”
Derek heard knocking.
“Mom won’t open the door.”
He raised his voice. “Knock on the door again, okay? I need to talk her.”
It was very quiet. Derek thought he’d been disconnected. He looked at the phone. The call was still active. Then breathing filled the phone. Heavy breathing.
“She called,” Lucinda said.
Derek rubbed his chin. “What are you talking about?”
“She called.”
“Listen, baby. I’m out of work. I’m in downtown Long Beach. I’m getting the computer. I’ll be home in a few…”
“She said you fucked her once a week. She said you paid her not to talk to me.”
Derek stared at himself in his driver’s side window. He saw his receding hairline, the gray hairs around his ears. He gripped the phone. “When did she call?”
“Two hours ago.”
“Baby,” he said.
The phone went silent.
As you might imagine, Derek should’ve gone straight home. He should have talked to his wife, cried, asked for forgiveness, bought her flowers, chocolates, jewels, a month-long trip to Europe. He should have done all these things—or at least two or three of them. Instead, Derek chose something else.
The building lobby loomed large and silent, like a museum minus the art. Derek strode past an old man security guard and took the elevator up to the third floor. Turning the corner, he walked into Harrison’s.
A few customers wandered past the front aisles. Aside from its unusual position above the street level (most Long Beach retail stores were first or second floor), Harrison’s was typical of modern retail outlets: too much signage, too many fluorescent lights, and rows and rows of barcode-clad boxes. It almost felt as if everything in the store, including Derek himself, were up for sale.
He passed the front aisle and turned down a long row of DSLR cameras. He piled forward with his head tilted down. Derek checked his digital watch. Two hours had passed since leaving his office at Orangeville Park. He rubbed his chin and continued walking until he was surrounded by row upon row of stacked boxes. Hard drives, cameras, webcams, graphics cards—everything a computer junkie might possibly want surrounded him.
At the end of the aisle, he finally found the mobile computer hardware section. On the far end of the counter, he saw it: the nload. Directly beneath the floor model, locked within a merchandise cage, he eyed a pair of sealed nload boxes. No customers or employees were around. He was alone.
Derek smiled as he strode up the aisle. You see, he felt okay again. Not completely okay, of course, but better. All that’d happened yesterday and today could be managed. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t even imagine how, but he could now at least hope for the best, and just that hope, or at least the idea of it, was more than he was used to in life.
As he reached the merchandise cage, he felt something strange. His feet moved backwards. Only it wasn’t his feet, it was the floor. Looking down, he saw that he’d stepped onto what looked like a circle cut neatly into the floor. Like the iris of an eye, the circle suddenly expanded, revealing beneath it the inside of a hollowed, metallic tube—three or four feet wide. What the hell, he thought in that instant, what the... Of course, it’s not every day that one slips into a hole in the ground, something out of an old Road Runner cartoon or a bad re-imagining of Alice in Wonderland. Derek wanted to purchase a computer. He wanted to get home. Talk to his wife. And his job. Yes, Orangeville Park, hell, he was over two hours late now. A hole in the ground, especially one that resembled an eye, of all things, didn’t fit the picture.
As Derek slipped through the opening, no one heard him yell. Not the customers, not the employees, not even himself. His lips never parted.
