Libertyland
Gardner Mounce

WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, the operators of a steel roller coaster forgot to lock my and my step dad’s shoulder harnesses in place. This happened in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, at an amusement park called Libertyland that has since gone defunct from poor management. The ride, which was called The Revolution, was themed around America’s war of independence. In the spirit of insurrection with which that war was won, the ride rebelled against the principles of safe roller coaster design. It went too fast, did too many loops, and ended in a series of corkscrews over a stretch of ground strewn with vomit. For teenagers like myself, the ride was a dare, a rite of passage, the scariest ride at a park that’s scares were mainly derived from how unsafe everything was. For example, the park’s other roller coaster, The Zippin’ Pippin, famous for being Elvis’ favorite ride, was known for dropping loose bolts onto its riders’ heads. 
As The Revolution embarked from the station, and my stepdad and I realized that our shoulder harnesses had not been locked in place, the whole situation made a perfect sort of logic. Yes, this was the sort of place where two riders would be sent to their deaths by the forces of neglect.
The upshot was that I was with my stepdad, Hank, who is muscular and takes charge. To date, he has competed in two Iron Man triathlons and something called a tetrathlon, which involves all the normal triathlon things plus the shooting of pistols. We were seated in the front row. As the cart embarked from the station, Hank half-stood from his seat to demonstrate that he could half-stand from his seat.
“Hello,” he called. “Yeah.” 
The teenage operators looked at him with the baffled, nearly amused expressions of Mid-southerners who are looking at surreal art. For a moment, they couldn’t understand what they were seeing or maybe even why they should care. 
“Well,” Hank said. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” 
The operators roused themselves. They dove for walkie-talkies, looking professionally horrified.
Hank sat down. “Don’t panic,” he said. “Shit.” 
He laid out our options. We could jump—the ascent was flanked on one side, my side, by a set of stairs—or we could press up with our knees on the inner front curved shell of the cart and rely on centrifugal force to keep us inside. I could feel that he wasn’t confident in the second plan because he looked at my scrawny thighs. I could feel that he wanted me to go with the first plan, but when I looked over to the stairs I saw that they were moving at a rate of speed that I could totally imagine breaking my ankles if I were to jump onto them. (The Revolution even ascended too quickly.) What I couldn’t imagine was the more abstract pain of falling to my death. This is a stupid line of reasoning, but panic was causing me to suffer a failure of imagination.
“It’s your call,” Hank said, but what he was really saying was, My life is in your hands. 
Hank wasn’t about to jump over me to the stairs to save his own skin. He had only been married to my mom for a year but we all pretty much liked him and things were going smoothly. I had come to find out that he was a good person. I wanted nothing more, as a thirteen-year-old with a dead biological father and a new stepfather, to have a reason to hate Hank, but he remained doggedly likable. Not even the fear of death could compromise him. 
He took my hesitation for an answer. 
“Press your knees here,” he said. He sat back in his seat, pulled the shoulder harness tightly to him, and braced himself. I did the same.
As the coaster continued climbing, another interpretation of the events presented itself to me. Maybe Hank was going with my choice to stay in the cart for the simple reason that only he was strong enough to survive the ride. He would survive and I would die. Unlike my thighs, his thighs, which he kept shaved for reasons having to do with cycling, were heroic. He could do the ride unharnessed and probably not even feel sore the next day. 
I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I had always imagined that my biological father and then Hank, both very nice men, secretly wanted to kill me by strangulation. I don’t know where this fantasy came from. I also knew that, if either of them were to try such a thing, I wouldn’t fight back. Ever since the sudden death of my biological father a few years before, I believed that I too would die young, as my dad’s father, who was shot to death in a mugging. Death wasn’t something to be fought against, I had learned, but accepted. And if our shoulder harnesses weren’t secured, if during the first loop we would spill out of our seats like eggs from a carton, then that was just the way things went.
Once, I had a strange moment with an azalea bush. At one point during my Dad’s burial, this azalea bush, which towered next to his grave, went gray, as if the color had gone out of it. In a panic, I looked around and realized that the sky had also gone gray, and the grass, and my siblings’ faces. I wondered if the color had gone out of things because it was me who had died, and not my dad. Was it possible that my dad had smuggled the living world into his coffin, which was not a coffin but a portal to somewhere else? Was it possible that my siblings and I and everyone else in attendance were the dead ones? The thought was oddly comforting. Ever since my Dad had died, I had lost all conviction that the things happening to me were really happening. I no longer had a good grasp on what was real except the loss of him, which was a single moment happening again and again, like a reflection reflecting itself. If I was dead, I could at least rely on the fact of my death. Like solid ground, it would be a fact that could give me my bearings, a fact that my new life as a dead person could be staked upon. The color of the azalea bush and my siblings’ faces returned quickly. But that uncanny feeling of being dead lasted up to the time that I was on the roller coaster. 
On the roller coaster, at the top of the ascent, at the moment when I was bracing myself to find out what lie on the other side, the ride stopped. 
We were maybe two feet from the crest. Hank laughed, a choked-off sounding gasp. Someone behind us applauded. This started a chain reaction of applause that became confused when a teenage operator came loping up the steps, tripped, and fell on his face. 
We got off the ride and went to see the manager. She explained that the roller coaster was equipped with a failsafe that triggered at the top of the ride. I didn’t believe her. Neither did Hank. 
“Why wouldn’t it trip at the bottom of the ride?” Hank said. 
In response, she offered him free park passes and the assurance that she would fire whomever was responsible. 
Unlike me, Hank was not one to believe that you should lie down and take what’s coming to you. He did not believe that the universe operated by some entropic algorithm. He believed that many of the unfortunate things that happen to us are caused by other people, not fate, and people can be changed, or at least reprimanded. 
“I want you to look at my step-son,” he said. His voice was shaking. “He almost died because of you.”
The manager looked at me. Her eyes were blue.

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Gardner Mounce attended Clarion West in 2019 and graduated with an MFA from the University of Florida in 2020. He can be found at gardnermounce.com and on Twitter @GardnerMounce.

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