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The Funland is always freezing inside. The air conditioner blasts a crisp 65 even in the winter. Owen stands directly beneath a vent while he carves through the packing tape on a box of brand new plastic balls, and beneath his uniform shirt and ugly yellow vest his skin bunches into painful knots.
There’s only one child in the ball pit. It sits unmoving in the very center, the balls up to its narrow chest. It doesn’t react when he tips the new balls over the edge.
“I did everything right, you know,” he says before he makes the decision to talk. This happens to him, sometimes, at work or in the grocery store or at dinner with his family. Words he doesn’t mean to say dribbling out of his mouth like vomit. The child doesn’t turn.
“I held down a job. I got married. Had a kid,” he says as he spreads out the balls like smoothing sand. Packing them down. “I have the house—paid off—the car, the big TV. A retirement fund. Life insurance.”
He looks up to make sure the child is still there. He stares at the back of its head. He can’t tell what color its hair is in the cycling neon lights. “I send my boy to summer camp. I never went to summer camp.” He isn’t sure why this matters. He remembers hot nights on his best friend’s floor, wide awake in the green glow of her fish tank, wondering if he’d be cooler if he took his shirt off.
“I’m even going to therapy now,” he continues. “To make my wife happy.” He has no idea whether his wife is unhappy or not. It seems like the right thing to say. He pauses, a bright pink ball in one hand. He can’t remember what he was trying to say. This happens in therapy, too. Following the thread of a thought to the end and finding nothing there. The woman he meets with smiles blandly and writes him a prescription.
One, two, three seconds pass in silence. Finally the child turns to look at him. In the overheard blacklight, its eyes flash white-blue. It smiles and flings its arms into the air, scatters balls all over the floor. They roll across the patterned carpet to disappear under arcade cabinets, where Owen tells himself he’ll retrieve them later and never does.
He stands up, clutching the box to his chest. “Sorry,” he says to the child. It watches him as he backs away. “Sorry. Enjoy your stay.”
He flees to the stockroom. Lays down on the concrete under the flickering fluorescent and lets it bleed heat from his body. He wants the cold to make him still and quiet. Instead, he shakes.
The stockroom door bangs open.
“Hey, kid,” Frank shouts. “We got a puker by the air hockey. Get out here!”
He is forty four years old. He stands and grabs a mop.
///
After Maddy disappears, Owen doesn’t have any friends. After his father dies, he has no one, and is ashamed at his relief. There’s an appeal to letting the days slip away from him in silence—work, TV, sleep, work, TV, sleep—a technicolor smear of months and years.
Somewhere in the blurry years, Funland pays for mandatory CPR training after being slammed by a surprise inspection. “In case one of these gremlins chokes on a token,” Frank says, his eyes shining with hunger. Owen dutifully attends. He meets the woman who would become his wife kneeling in a brightly lit classroom trying to force air into the chest of a child-sized dummy.
She is beautiful in a way that makes him ache. He orbits her all afternoon, too afraid to say anything, too transfixed to let it go.
Finally, she turns to him and asks if he wants to get lunch with her afterward. He says yes. Takes a hit from his inhaler in the bathroom before meeting her outside. They have lunch. They date. They kiss. She lets him touch her and it is almost something he wants, like trying to reach her through a sheet of thick plastic. He lets her touch him, sometimes, and shudders and doesn’t tell her why.
They get married. He can’t remember her vows or his own, but he remembers how beautiful her dress is. In his memory, it glows white in the sun and he is almost afraid to be near her, like it might burn him.
He blinks, and they have a son. When he is born, Owen cannot think of a single boy’s name. Brenda. Maddy. Tara. Isa—
He names him after his father.
///
One day, when their son is nearly two, his wife leaves the house to run errands. Owen doesn’t remember the series of decisions that lead him to his wife’s closet. He only remembers the way she finds him—lying on the bedroom floor in one of her sundresses, choking, his inhaler just out of reach. The baby screaming in the other room.
She kicks the inhaler toward him before running to check on their child. He scrambles for it, sucks at the nozzle, praying for just one easy breath when the mist hits his throat.
By the time his wife returns, he’s in the bathroom. He emerges wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt. Slips the dress into their dirty laundry without looking at her.
They never talk about it. His wife brings the baby with her to the grocery store, after.
///
He watches the Pink Opaque every night. He falls asleep on the couch. When he tries to go up to bed, he lays awake next to his wife until the sun pushes through the edges of their curtains and he rises for work, exhausted and gasping.
The show isn’t anything like he remembers. The monsters are one-note villains made out of styrofoam and cardboard. The strange, half-real children are never afraid. At the end of each episode, one of them will look into the camera while a trite moral drips out of their mouth. He can see the adult writer working their jaw like a marionette. In the final episode of season five, the kids cast a spell to travel to the moon. They bring Mr. Melancholy a cheese pizza and a slice of birthday cake, and he transforms into Mr. Cheerful. Turns out he was just lonely, all this time. No one suffocates in the vacuum of space.
He’s afraid to check his tapes, packed carefully away in the basement, in case those too have changed.
There’s a little girl named Tara in this new version of the show. She wears colorful dresses and braids flowers into her hair and smiles at the cardboard monsters in a way that makes him nauseous.
There is no character named Isabel.
///
On the way to work, a flashing orange sign says ROAD WORK AHEAD. KEEP LEFT. YOU ARE DYING. He puts on his turn signal and merges on the empty road. He see no one at all until he clocks in and Frank passes him with a grunted “You’re late.”
Owen glances at the clock on the cinderblock wall of the break room. Two minutes after nine. Below it is a stained sheet of printer paper with a cartoon clown wagging its finger at him. The bold font reads: WAKE UP. DON’T BE A BOZO. WAKE UP. LATE IS LATE. WAKE UP. YOUR PAY WILL BE DOCKED. WAKE UP. WAKE UP. WAKE UP.
The clown has little X’s for eyes, like it rose from the dead to be disappointed with him. “Sorry, boss,” he mutters. Frank grunts again and disappears into his office with a cup of coffee, where he’ll stay until his lunch break.
Owen methodically turns on all the cabinets and tables and pinball machines. The dark room fills with flashing lights and the compressed theme songs of dozens of different games. It’s soporific. He thinks he could fall asleep standing up, watching the colors on the inside of his eyelids. Wonders if anyone would notice, or if the moment he closed his eyes he would turn into a cardboard standee, his flat, empty grin advertising two for one milkshakes every Monday.
He doesn’t find out. A couple of kids playing hooky sneak through the front door and Owen takes his position behind the prize counter, waiting to hand out badges of childish triumph: sticky hands, finger traps, tiny plastic dinosaurs. He runs his thumb idly over a pink gel bracelet until Lance strolls in at a quarter to twelve and he pockets it, flushing.
That afternoon, there’s a birthday party. The kids make up for the quiet morning by screaming like they’re being burned alive. “Kids, huh?” Lance scoffs. He doesn’t look any older than he was when they met, sixteen years old shoveling popcorn at the movie theater. Still has that same, petulant burnout cast to his eyes. Owen doesn’t think about what he looks like.
A parent walks by with a handful of shiny helium balloons. Each of them, in big angular letters, says DIG.
He’s changed his medication four times. The messages go away for awhile, after, but they always come back. The longest he’s gone without seeing them is three months and the side effects made him so sick he could barely eat. It’s easier to ignore them. If he doesn’t think about them, they fade into the background along with everything else.
“Yeah,” he says with a puff of air pretending to be a laugh. “Kids.”
///
“Owen?” his wife calls downstairs. “Are you coming to bed?”
He stares at the TV, but doesn’t see the picture. He sees Maddy lying on her side, her eyes closed. Hears her say, firmly, that’s not my name.
“In a little while,” he says. “Just finishing this episode.”
His wife doesn’t respond. The bedroom door closes and he relaxes minutely. She hates the old children’s shows he watches, alternately baffling and saccharine. That’s fine. She watches movies that seem to him to be set on an alien planet, the actors all frowning mirrors of his father or his sixth grade math teacher, the stakes utterly incomprehensible.
He watches five more episodes.
In the middle of the night, he hears the soft footfalls of his son on the stairs. Hears him pause halfway down, when he sees the glow of the television against the wall. He imagines the boy’s eyes on him, imagines his face flashing blue in the darkness to a soundtrack of canned laughter. But the boy only hesitates for a moment. He forgets the hour and jumps down the last two stairs, slips into the kitchen. A cabinet door. The sound of the faucet.
When his son comes around the corner again, there are words in Owen’s mouth that would make the boy run away, throw himself into bed with tears in his eyes. They sound in his skull like a parody of his father’s smoke-rough voice. He’s said them before, but not tonight. His son disappears back upstairs like a shadow. Owen clicks “Next Episode.”
///
He doesn’t undress in front of his wife anymore. The open wound like an autopsy scar down his chest doesn’t go away. Its stubborn physicality frustrates him. Neither does it bleed, or heal. He wears thick sweaters to hide the dirty gray light pouring out of him. Keeps his shirts buttoned high. Flinches from her touch.
Sometimes at night he stands in the doorway to their bedroom and whispers, “Help me.” Tries to see how quietly he can say it. Breathes the words, soundless, and is almost proud when she doesn’t stir.
It surprises him, in a dull way, when she tells him she’s leaving. She isn’t supposed to leave. She tells him that he needs help. That her son—hers?—needs to be out of this miserable fucking house. This makes sense to him, distantly. He has never been in this house and not been miserable. Does his son sleep on someone else’s floor every Saturday night?
The house is quiet when they’re gone. The Pink Opaque echoes like thunder through the empty rooms. On the screen, Not-Tara squeezes her eyes shut, saying “Don’t think about Drain Lords, don’t think about Drain Lords,” while a slug thing, some kind of balloon filled with sand, flops down over her forehead, its googly eyes bulging grotesquely.
He goes down into the basement. Takes the stairs slowly, both feet on one step before he takes the next. When he reaches the bottom, he has to stop and wheeze for what feels like another lifetime, minutes trickling away from him.
The box is shoved into the darkest corner, behind old Christmas decorations and his son’s baby clothes and a million other things he remembers only as faded photographs. He digs out the tapes, tips them onto the dusty floor, and rakes through them with shaking hands. The labels are faded and peeling. In the light of the single naked bulb, he can just make out “PILOT!!!” in handwriting that is more familiar to him than his own.
There is an old box TV down here with him, glass screen, built in VCR. He’s afraid it won’t work, but when he plugs it in the electricity makes the hair on his arms stand up. He forces the tape into the slot and hits play.
Static.
///
“Hey, Lance.” High scores scroll by on a screen over his coworker’s shoulder. URE. DIE. ING. “Want to make a hundred bucks?”
///
He’s too afraid to buy a coffin. Instead he buys plywood and nails along with a shovel, and knocks a rough box together in his garage. He drives to the high school football field at dusk, the box so big that one end of it rests beside him in the passenger seat of his SUV. A bolt of doubt strikes him at every traffic light and stop sign, telling him he could go home, turn on the TV, forget about all this. He could call his wife, ask to have dinner with her and the boy. He could try to get another job, could go back to therapy, could close his eyes in the shower so he never sees the static hum of emptiness in his chest. He could die there on that couch and no one would find him.
He keeps driving.
The hole takes him longer to dig than he thought. He has to keep stopping to gasp at his inhaler, bent almost double over the hole—still too shallow—and staring at the field where he knocked Maddy down and ran, the last time he touched her, the last time he saw her. Every single day for forty years, he wakes up and falls asleep with an ache behind his ribs that says, what if she was right? what if she was telling the truth?
He is so afraid. The earth yawns open before him, a dark, damp brown, and he imagines what it will feel like, the dirt covering him, the sound of it against the wood, the airless black of the hole. He wonders if it will feel any different than falling asleep in his empty house, the rattle in his chest audible over the murmur of the television. He’s dying either way, he thinks, with a clarity he hasn’t felt in years.
He drags the box into the hole, slowly, breathing hard, and climbs down after it. He lays himself down in the narrow, uncomfortable bed he’s made and pulls the lid over him. That act is strangely simple. The doubt strikes again, that he could make this decision so flippantly, that he’s making a stupid, permanent mistake, that he’s nothing but a spoiled child that refuses to grow up and live in the real world, that he should go to work tomorrow like a real man and stop crying over a world that didn’t exist, a life he can’t even articulate to himself.
Tears well in his eyes. His lungs flatten under the weight of imagined soil. He’d done everything he was supposed to do and none of it worked out right. Why should this be any different? Maybe he’s crazy, just like Maddy, and maybe she’s dead in the ground beside him and he’ll be dead too, and maybe that would be best for everyone, the two crazy, fucked up kids gone for good.
But in the darkness, a thought worms its way through the sharp edges of the condemnations, a thought he would never have admitted above ground. Maddy had never seemed crazy to him. At the bar and that last night at the school, she had seemed perfectly sane, and that was why he had been afraid. She was more solid and real than anything else in his life. More real even than she’d been eight years before, like she had tuned her signal and was finally coming through bright and clear. The voice in his head now is Maddy’s voice, telling him that he’s brave. That he’s been making this decision his whole life. That there is still time.
When the first shovelful of dirt hits the box, he is breathing slowly with his eyes closed, waiting for the answer.
///
It was true.
She jolts to painful, horrified consciousness in the dark and knows that it was true. She wants to cry with relief, but there’s dirt pressing her eyes shut. The heavy earth crushes the sob out of her chest.
She’s too late. She’s underground, somewhere, earth packed so tight that no one will find her. There is dirt in her nose and mouth and throat. She can’t take a breath, and she has no air to scream. Maybe, in this world, someone would hear her if she did, but she can’t.
There’s no more time. She waited too long.
She’s really dying.
But her body knows there’s air above, a few impossible feet away, and she wants it. She wants that one easy breath more than she’s wanted anything else in either life. She thrashes like a fish, needing to breathe, knowing the only way back to the lake is to throw herself against the alien world that’s killing her, again and again and again. She pushes up and feels the strain in her shoulders, her neck, feels her fingers scratch at the dirt, carve half an inch of space, push, scratch, push, again, again.
She did the hard part already, the going into the ground. This is just the final step, the breaking free, the being born. She knew it would hurt. She is trying to be brave.
There’s no light, no way to tell if she’s blacking out. Her lungs scream. Her throat aches with the effort to breath through mud. Strange images come to her, a dream of her oxygen-starved brain: the bottom of a children’s ball pit looking up through the plastic balls, a pale round face in the darkness lit blue like the moon, a glass coffin whirling with slips of paper. She grabs one. The wind tries to snatch it away back into meaningless snow, but she clutches it close to her face. In bold pink letters, it says SEASON SIX, EPISODE ONE.
Her fingers touch cool night air. She reaches up, skin buzzing like TV static, weightless.
A hand catches hers. A strong, warm hand that touched her once, a lifetime ago, a year ago, on a dock by a lake in the setting sun. The hand holds tight and pulls.
And somewhere, in the cold, wet dark, somewhere far from here and closer than it’s been in decades, Isabel feels her heart beat.