*
Two months had passed since my arrival at the park. In park time, this meant I had eaten every item on the menu at the Laughateria, except for the shrimp scampi （translation: the park needed more toilet paper when they served it）， and attended team morale training twice, which consisted of trust falls and sitting in a circle talking about our feelings— Hi, I’m Skip, and I guess I’m mostly okay now. I’m getting better about dealing with the guilt. But sometimes it’s just hard, you know? The group would nod at comments like these and twinkle their fingers in the air in solidarity. These sessions were followed by an hour of meditation set to a loop of Grieg’s “Morning Mood”—images of wildlife and laughing children projected onto the walls, accompanied by a soft female voice over the PA system telling us that we were waking up to our calling.
“And remember,” the voice said, “what is laughter but a moment of release where pain and memory are washed away? When we laugh, we are stronger. When we laugh, we heal the world.”
But outside of these management-organized events, no one really hung out much. Once, Victoria, the churro kiosk girl who dressed like an elf, came into my trailer in the middle of the night, threw a condom in my face, and told me not to get any ideas. We spent the night together and when I draped my arms over her body the next morning, she immediately got up and got dressed, reminded me this wasn’t the real world.
Sometimes, when I just had to shake up my routine, I’d drive to the Olive Garden in the next town over. The park keeps it open for the guests. A bartender there told me that serving people from the park feels like being surrounded by ghosts—they come in alone, drink quietly, and leave.
“I totally get it,” he said. “Doing what you people do. Nobody wants to linger. People get hurt that way.”
“I don’t know,” I said, sipping on my mango margarita medicine. But I wondered how long it would be before I became like the other staff, one foot in a parallel universe where nothing mattered except laughter and forgetting and sad fucks with whoever lived in the trailer next to yours. Two months at the park meant I had placed nearly one hundred fifty children on Osiris.
It was a regular Saturday when the drug trial patients moved into the cottages next to our trailers. Most of the staff sat on lawn chairs outside as the families arrived, some of the kids in wheelchairs, others walking at a snail’s pace, holding the hands of their parents. We waved if the children waved. Otherwise, we just watched. One of the kids, maybe six or seven years old, arrived on a stretcher topped with a plastic bubble, as if he were some sort of buffet dish. He pressed his hands against the plastic, watching as one of the local coyotes made a snack out of someone’s half-eaten basket of fries. The guards carried him. Behind the boy, a woman I assumed to be his mother struggled to drag two large suitcases. She was dressed in an oversized silk poncho that kept getting caught in the wheels. I looked around at my coworkers—watching, drinking, refilling their pipes with mediocre pot—and finally decided to offer my help.
“I’m Dorrie,” she said, as I approached and took the luggage. “And the troublemaker in the bubble is my son, Fitch.”
I followed them to their cottage, beyond the central playground area, and into a squat two-bedroom affair with a sloped roof punctuated by several skylights. The pharmaceutical company had furnished the place with modernist Swedish furniture prone to straight edges, except for a blue plastic coffee table that was shaped like California. A wicker gift basket sat on top of it. I waited in the living room with their suitcases, watched the guards bring Fitch into his room. Everything the boy could need—his bed, toilet, sink, shelves filled with children’s books, a television with a gaming console, an IV stand, an array of medical machinery—was all separated from the rest of the house by a glass wall with a sliding door. The guards turned on what appeared to be an air filtration system from a panel built into the wall and the room hummed to life. Fitch quickly crawled out of the stretcher and closed the glass door behind him.
After the guards left, Dorrie invited me to stay for dinner. She inspected the fridge, which had been stocked with essentials and precooked frozen meals.
“I’ll give him this,” she said, still inspecting the freezer. “My ex-husband made sure we wouldn’t starve.”
“I didn’t want to ask,” I said. “I’m not sure what’s normal for the study participants.”
“My ex and I have different views on how we should care for Fitch,” she said. “He’s a research doctor. Convinced that any day now he’ll find a way to save our son. I was tired of waiting and these studies are happening now. Some kids seem to be getting better.”