Bo at the wheel was some kind of orange-hooded Washington fording the Delaware. His orange glove was steady on the throttle as they dove into the valleys, climbed the rising faces, and sailed off the crests, the prop breaking free of the water, the engine whining like an Indy car’s, before burying itself again in the froth when the hull smacked down against the surface. They were heading for the deep water of the Block Island Sound. If there were blues, that’s where they would be. This was as close as Bo Vornado came to nervous, this single-minded focus driving him toward the fish he’d promised his guests would be there. He’d will them into existence if he had to. Nothing was fun unless there was a chase, but he wanted to stay cool around the older men, so he’d gotten up especially early and smoked a sausage of a joint in the garage.
My father lasted about five minutes before he felt it rising up in the back of his throat, that unmistakable tang in the spittle accumulating on his soft palate, the popping in his ears, the den of snakes in his gut. His jaw went slack and the base of his skull throbbed. Nothing but a full stop was going to save him. The wind in his face did nothing to the sweat oozing from his forehead but push it stinging into his eyes. Sweat was flowing down the small of his back. There was sweat between his toes. Sweat on his lips. His flesh felt as if it had shrunk and drawn tight as a cured hide. His organs had disintegrated into undulating liquids. His eyelashes fluttered. No, no, no, no, no.
Retroperistalsis began.
In 1944, my father was admitted to the U.S. Naval Convalescent Hospital in Santa Cruz, California. It was there that, on an afternoon pass, he’d taken a two-minute ride on the Giant Dipper, a wooden coaster at the boardwalk, conveniently located just across Beach Street from the hospital. As roller coasters go, it was about as wild as a Shetland pony, but my father’s ride had been an adrenal Gettysburg, a real eyeball-peeler to the untold horrors his already unfriendly brain had waiting backstage, and he hadn’t been able to shake the eschatological specter that had shadowed him after he’d climbed out of the cramped car, heart racing and palms wet, a sudden hangover crushing his temples. He started babbling about Hobbes and Dostoyevsky to his date, who capitalized on her opportunity to escape when he turned around to leer yet again at the carnival death trap flinging another group of suicidees against the crystal-blue sky. Something had cracked loose within him, hatched and emerged whole into the light of day. It was the thing that had put him in the hospital in the first place, diagnosed as malaise—an aristocrat’s disease, a wilting of the spirit, an inability to sleep, treated with a Benzedrine/veronal dose pattern to reestablish the proper circadian rhythms—but now he saw that the thing had only been incubating, awaiting its monstrous rapture. He’d been insane to risk his life on that contraption. Even back on solid ground he winced as the wheels screamed and thunked behind him, the weathered wooden crosshatching creaking like a rope bridge over a gorge. It was the noise of imminent destruction, the terrible scream of an incoming munition. His eyes saw a changed world. Gulls hovering against the blue sky were agents of disease, the children’s cries oscillating as the coaster whipped around a turn nothing more than civilization’s death rattle. He had put his life in the hands of strangers for the sake of a quick thrill, to get the girl hot. What if some old carnie had half-assed his morning maintenance check, missed a loose assembly in the elbow of one of the oh-so-gentle sweeping banks, and though it had held for the first sixty-three rides of the day, a nut had been incrementally vibrating ever looser down the bolt’s shaft, and finally, at ride number sixty-four, it spiraled free of the last micron of thread as the wheels clattered through the turn, the little hexagon of steel ricocheting down through the superstructure like a pachinko ball, and though good luck and friction had held the beams together, it had been my father’s fate to be on the very next ride, the sixty-fifth, the one under which the crosstie had slipped, the rail distended, leaving the wheels of the leading car free to navigate the open air, and they all went plunging like a speared dragon to the boardwalk fifty feet below?
What if? What if? Of course the maintenance checks were half-assed!
Just because the roller coaster hadn’t collapsed in a splintering, shredding implosion of wood and steel didn’t mean it wasn’t loaded with potential. He understood now. Every man-made structure was a collapsing machine, held in check only by the crews crisscrossing the beams and catwalks looking for cracks, banging on wires and listening for off-key responses. Architecture was nothing more than the art of creating things that fall down very, very slowly, so slowly that we might even forget the inevitability of decay.
The coaster had seven hundred thousand nails in it. Warehouses’ worth of nuts and bolts. Millions of opportunities for the two eyes of the maintenance man to miss something. And how many mechanical elements had to fail at once to guarantee an accident? Two? Three? The potential combinations that led to mechanical failure were infinite. Therefore, infinite possible causes of death. To reverse the tape, an infinite number of non-failures had to occur every second of the day in order for my father to go on living.
He had never been known for his nerve. As a boy, he’d avoided swimming at the quarry, explorations of abandoned houses. He was quick to imagine the aftermath of a slip from atop a stone wall. He served as human ladder and, after boosting the last friend through a broken window, lookout, as they climbed out onto the roof of the Uniroyal warehouse, pretended to lose their balance again and again, tottering on one foot, windmilling their arms, while my father’s breath caught every time he managed to bring his eyes up to see their black shoes and drooping socks, their pale white legs.
Putting himself in harm’s way wasn’t exhilarating, it was terrifying; hiking in the mountains with his father, he kept himself well back from the cliff’s edge, so powerful was the call of the void. His head swam when his father, perched on a splinter of rock jutting over a thousand-foot drop, turned his back to the emptiness and called for his son to come on over and enjoy the view.
No, he’d say. No. He couldn’t go to the edge because he couldn’t trust himself not to jump. He wasn’t suicidal, so why couldn’t he trust himself? He trusted his present self—it was his future self, the one who lived five seconds from now, the one who stood at the edge of the cliff, whom he didn’t trust. That future self had lived through a span, however brief, of unpredictable events. How could my father know what he might experience in those five seconds and how those experiences might shape his behavior? Why offer his future self the opportunity to jump? In every situation, the film raced forward to a dire outcome.
He spent the remainder of the afternoon lying flat on his back on the sand. Only there in the constant sun, the waves breaking predictably at his feet, did he feel calm enough to think.
The world was a slave to pressure and velocity, to the calculus of spinning rods and belts and gearwheels, to the transformation of circular motion into linear motion. All vacuum tubes, pipes, valves, flanges, whether taken individually or in system, as in an internal combustion engine, were potential bombs. Cars were nothing more than harnessed violence: beneath the hood, fan blades spun like saws, pistons fired, belts whipped by at blinding speed. The rotational force of the four Goodyears humming along at highway speed translated to potential destructive energy on par with a case of land mines, each wheel loaded for the moment of puncture when hunks of rubber would shear away, shattering windscreens to the rear, cars to the left and right inscribing twin-black sine curves across the tarmac as their drivers lost control, steel tonnage smashing into steel tonnage into concrete dividers, flying off overpasses, the helpless little meats inside pulverized. And what if an entire wheel disconnected, rim and all? He tried to calculate the stress placed on the shanks of the wheel studs, on the lug nuts holding the rim to the axle. How many thousands of pounds of pressure? And how many hands worked on an automobile production line? A hundred? Two hundred? Each set of hands was a new opportunity for a bolt to be over-torqued, under-torqued, mis-threaded—or, god help us, forgotten entirely.