“I used to have rollercoaster dreams except they had miles of track and impossible leaps where the track ended and the cars had to jump across empty space where the track resumed. And I do these crazy moves where I move across the country with no money to a city I’ve never been to, for school, or a job, or a girl. And sometimes I become homeless. And sometimes I end up like now, with a job that pays and money to drink and rent cars and shit.”
“Impossible leaps,” Clarity says.
“That’s exactly how my mom describes them. Impossible leaps, impossible moves. She says, ‘You can’t keep doing these flying leaps.’ And I’m like, ‘Mom, what else am I supposed to do? These people I work for are corrupt, they collude with their friends to defraud the US government, they cheat their friends behind their backs by overbilling on a project. I mean, I can’t work for people like that. I have one iota of conscience.”
“Yeah, you lose the other 99 every time you do a line of meth.”
We take a step forward, inevitably moving toward the train house of Goliath.
“I’ll tell you something, if I ever got to design an amusement park it would be scary as hell.”
“Oh yeah,” Clarity says. “How so?”
“Well, it would be a super-fun insane deadly amusement park that only a crazy schizo bipolar person could come up with. On my first day, I would start by going around taking Polaroids of every ride and showing them to people and asking how that could be more scary and more fun. And I’d take like thousands of pages of notes from people who came to these parks and I’d ask them about their dreams and any theme park elements that appeared in them. Actually I have dreams of that—that I work at an amusement park and my job is to make all the rides better.”
“You are an encyclopedia of information useful in only one context: keeping me vaguely entertained while we wait in line two hours for a two-minute ride.”
We take another step of inevitability toward Goliath’s train house. And I keep talking, like an idiot, because this is the part where you’re supposed to let the girl speak, or maybe it’s the part where you’re you’re supposed to entertain her. But I’m doing neither. I’m rambling on about what my true heart speaks, which is definitely not entertaining, but I’m the kind of guy who ends up homeless and smokes meth, so I don’t really do smalltalk.
I say, “People say they’re afraid of death, but I think what we’re really afraid of is being alone. Because imagine the ideal death scenario: if you were with the one you loved, if you were surrounded by your family or just your mother’s or your father’s arms, would death be so bad? And I’m not saying we’re afraid to die alone—I’m saying we’re afraid to be alone, in life.”
“We’re not alone, now,” Clarity says.
She touches my hand but makes it look like an accident.
“No,” I say. “We’re not.”
And again, we step forward, toward the Goliath train house. We were in that line for two hours, and that two hours broke down any walls we had remaining between us—through boredom, endurance, and more boredom and endurance. Step. Step. It was like a cross between a wedding processional and a funeral pageant. Like Vegas, mass couples lined up to christen their relationships but instead of by a ceremony it was by Goliath, the second-tallest rollercoaster in the world. It was so tall that it didn’t even have any loops—it didn’t need loops to impress you, since it was already impressive as the second-tallest in the world. Like cool people, you know, they don’t have to impress you because—well—they’re already cool.
“I think closeness—true closeness—is rare. Even though there are so many relationships, most of them aren’t intimate. Like my relationship with my dad: I mourned the loss of it for a long time when he left not just his wife but his kids, too, when he found a new wife. I was sad I lost him—sad for a long time. Then I started to realize that he and I had never been close—from the time I was a kid, we never had a real relationship! So I hadn’t lost a thing. I’m just saying, maybe it’s one, maybe it’s three, maybe it’s seven—maybe for most people in our culture it’s zero—but there aren’t that many truly intimate relationships in a person’s life.”
Clarity says, “Yeah. I lived with my aunt for three years and she never came out of her room.”
“Was she sick?”
“No, I mean she had some pain but she wasn’t sick. She just sat back there and watched TV. I was grateful for the place to stay but I thought when I went there it was going to be like: Yay, I get to be with fun aunt Susan! I mean I know you can’t take things like that personally, but she obviously had no interest in getting to know me better..or..getting to know me as an adult, even.”
“That’s fucked up—or—I’m sorry—”
“No,” Clarity says, and this time she really does take my hand. “You’re right. It is fucked up.”