“But I’m a comedian.”
“It’s a paying job and it comes with housing,” he said. “It’s entertainment.”
“Manny,” I said, “you know my material. I talk about being a bad stereotypical East Asian—smoking pot outside of SAT prep classes, letting jocks copy my shitty math homework . . . Would I need to wear a costume?”
“I didn’t need to call,” he said. “Just check your email.”
I hung up and stared at myself in the mirror in my hazmat coveralls. But instead of leaving for work, I BitPalPrimed my parents with news of my move, something real for a change, rather than the usual lies about my next big break being right on the horizon.
“Maybe something I can be proud of,” I told my dad. “Not exactly what I imagined, but I’ll be making people laugh.”
In the background of the video chat window, I saw my mother walk in and out of my dead baby brother’s room with a vacuum. He died in a car accident about a year before the outbreak and my mother still saw his face in mine whenever she looked at me.
“Your cousin Shelby died,” my father said. “She may have infected her brothers. We don’t know. Some people say this plague is airborne and others don’t. Hard to know what to believe.”
“How are you and Mom holding up?”
“Surviving, I guess. Might stay with your auntie Kiyo. Help plan your cousin’s memorial. But I know you have work. What’s the job again?”
“It’s a firm,” I began, “that provides comfort services to sick children. I’ll be helping run their programs.” I was already bending the truth to garner some modicum of parental approval. I had always had to fight for their attention when my brother was around.
“Sounds like a good opportunity,” he said, nodding. But I could tell from his tone, the way he squinted his eyes as if he were in pain, that he either didn’t believe me or didn’t have the emotional headspace to really hear what I was saying.
A couple days later, I handed in the keys to my apartment and drove through the lifeless streets, punctuated by a handful of shops and the orange haze of wildfires over the Los Angeles foothills. The newly homeless slept in their cars. Soup kitchens attracted lines snaking through parking lots. Outside of city limits, billboards advertised funeral packages and antique barns that had been cleared for body storage or triage. No rest stops. No open diners. Jacked-up gas prices at the few remaining twenty-four-hour stations dotting the highway. I followed the uncivilized darkness of the road for hours, unable to avoid radio evangelists going on about the second coming, until I saw the park’s angelic lights in the distance.
When I climbed out of the car, I felt like I was arriving at a prison that was pretending to be something else. The barbed-wire fences remained and while the old signage had been removed from the concrete walls, the discolored outline of the words STATE PENITENTIARY was still clearly visible. Inside the park, colorful murals of children in bumper cars, riding merry-go-rounds, and plummeting down log flumes covered the walls of the administrative building beneath the words WELCOME TO THE CITY OF LAUGHTER! A rainbow painted on the linoleum led me through the halls, passing old security checkpoints turned into gift shops and concierge desks. The minimally furnished HR office had been converted from a recreation room, judging from the sofas and old board games piled to one side. Only a table and a few filing cabinets took up the remaining space, along with a floor lamp and a stack of deconstructed cubicle walls. As I approached, leaving the rainbow path, the park manager, a balding man in a silver astronaut suit, leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on his desk.
“Your agent said you’d be here hours ago.” He noticed me staring at the nameplate on the desk: WARDEN STEVEN O’MALLEY . He picked it up and tapped it against his hand. “It’s actually Jamie Williamson, by the way. I kept a lot of the old shit we found around here.”
“Skip,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m sorry. I took a detour to fill up on gas.”
“Skip,” Jamie said, adding extra emphasis on the p. He studied me for a moment and then began searching his desk drawers with a shit-eating grin on his face, pulled out a form. “That short for Skippy?”
“Just Skip,” I said.
Jamie pushed the forms across the desk and explained that I’d have to wear a generic mouse costume while prancing through the park, taking pictures with families, handing out balloons, helping children onto rides.