Click. Tap. Click. Snap.
There was no reason for the noise he was once told. They, the engineers, added the clicks and taps into the ride to make it scarier. They, the park creators, wanted people to scream and be afraid. It added the right atmosphere to the park.
Roosevelt gripped the bar.
White-knuckled…
That phrase always irked him when he read it. If a man has white skin, how much whiter could his knuckles get? A black man’s knuckles don’t get white when he grips them, he had his grandfather show him to be certain. Teacher always told him to follow through on his hypothesis. Good advice. It’s what got him into MIT. And neither does an Asian woman’s, because his mama constantly gripped the steering wheel when driving. Connie used to tell him that he took literary references too literally to enjoy a book. He didn’t agree. A writer should write what was true.
Mama. Click. Papaw. Creeeak.
The half empty line of carts slowly came to a halt perch at the very top of the first loop. He’d been here before. Only days before. And then a decade before. She, Mariam, had accompanied him.
Roosevelt bit his lip, then closed his eyes. He thought of her face. With wrinkles and then without. Except he couldn’t remember her face without that one line down her forehead that appeared after he went overseas, Pakistan, to do research for five months.
“Mariam,” he whispered. “Pakistan.”
Willing the words to take a stand against his fading memory and stay there. Like the flag in the moon. He hypothesized that had he been more precise in his language, if he started to be more precise in his language, perhaps his mind wouldn’t revolt as the doctor predicted it would. Perhaps the whole epidemic of dementia was due to too many they, she, them, him words in their thought and vocal diet.
His stomach dropped first, then his head lurched forward, and his neck stiffened against the force of the wind that wished to blow it back. Just as the last time, his ability to breathe was taken away momentarily until he forced air in and out. That he could remember to do: breathe.
As the cart headed into the second loop, Roosevelt braced himself. With all his strength he turned his head to the left and saw the pixels starting to appear. A laughing Mariam faded in and out. The pixels that made up her past hat, pink with a white flower, blew away in glitches as she gasped and giggled. Though he wished to touch the squares of color he knew from last experience that they would disappear in a flash, as though a violation of the contract they had with him.
Mariam pointed as she licked an ice cream cone they had bought at the fair after they were married. Their honeymoon.
The wind whipped at his eyes, but he forced them to stay open. They were nearing the sixth and final loop. The screams in the back merged with Mariam’s screams of pain as the pixels swirled into a picture of her giving birth to their first boy. Her eyes glistening, her cheeks tinged as pink as her skin would allow. Just as she looked up to catch his stare and announce that she loved him, the cart slowed.
Click. Tap. Click. Screeeeech.
The pixels faded into present faces of children and adults waiting for their turn to take the ride on the…
Roosevelt frowned. A young man lifted the metal bar.
“Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody off!”
Off.
The word danced in his head, refusing to form meaning.
“May I help you, sir?”
Strong, young hands gripped Roosevelt’s arm and gently pulled him to standing. The young man in a navy uniform smiled as Roosevelt tried to place him in his memory.
“Do I know you?”
“No, sir,” the young man replied. “Just that my mama taught me right.”
Roosevelt sighed. Off. Yes, get off the ride. The rollercoaster.
“Thank you,” said a young woman, taking Roosevelt’s arm from the sailor and placing into her’s.
Samantha.
“I’m quite alright, Samantha,” Roosevelt said, straightening his spine. But not before it shivered the lie off and left it behind. He wouldn’t be alright in the end, but that was for another day to worry about. Today he had seen his Mariam.