Dreamland Social Club(12)

She started to read, finally, about Luna Park, which had boasted a million lights. Electric Eden, they’d called it. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine never having seen a lightbulb—like a lot of poor people of the time—and then seeing Luna, a glistening city of minarets and spires and promenades and fountains with slices of the moon glowing white by its entrance and a glittering heart-shaped sign out front that dubbed it “The Heart of Coney Island.”

A million lights.

She couldn’t imagine. She wondered whether people fainted, or cried, or swooned. Luna, Steeplechase, Dreamland. They sounded like the most amazing places to ever have existed and they were all . . . gone. Was this the Coney her mother had been talking about?

When she came to a drawing depicting an attraction at Luna called Trip to the Moon, she felt a sort of spark of recognition. The ride simulated a lunar voyage and, upon arrival, riders were greeted by moon people with spiky points on their backs who sang a song for them. Jane realized it all sounded eerily familiar, eerily sad. . . .





My brother and I are sitting in a cardboard box, and my mom is shaking it and making vroom-vroom sounds from where she’s kneeling beside us. She takes a sheet she’s pulled from the bed in my brother’s room—it has stars and planets and rocket ships on it—and she’s waving it around, over our heads. Shaking the box again, she puts on a deep voice and says, “This is your captain. We are passing through a storm. We are quite safe.”

I grip the sides of the box tight and laugh, even though I’m a little bit scared. Then in her deep voice she announces that we’re landing, and she puts on a headband with a few antenna-type things attached to it; she made them out of straws and cotton balls. “Welcome to the moon,” she says, sort of like a robot, and I laugh. “I am a Selenite, and I would like to sing a song for you.

“My sweetheart’s the man in the moon,” she sings. “I’m going to marry him soon./’Twould fill me with bliss just to give him one kiss./But I know that a dozen I never would miss. . . .”

She kisses my brother all over his face and he says, “Yuck! Get away!” and then she kisses me, her lips warm and wet and full, and I start giggling and can’t stop.





Jane—officially Luna Jane—had been named after Luna Park. She knew that in some faraway part of her mind, just as she knew that it had been her own deep desire to start going by her middle name a few years after her mother died, when they’d moved to places where “Luna” was just too weird, too hard to translate or explain. Her father and Marcus had happily made the switch, as if they’d both felt that the name had only ever felt right on Jane’s mother’s tongue anyway. But Jane hadn’t ever known what Luna Park was, exactly—beyond being an amusement park—or that the games of her childhood had been inspired by it.

Games.

Plural.

There had been more.

She sat down with her journal and tried to write down the details of the memories as best she could, and then she suddenly remembered there’d been a game about a submarine that went to the polar ice caps, clearly inspired by Luna Park’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea attraction, and a battleship game that she’d never liked quite as much as her brother, something her mother called War of the Worlds. There had been toy ships made of Tupperware involved; the bathtub, too. Her heart suddenly ached for the mother she’d almost forgotten and was only now—ten years later—starting to remember. The very synapses in her brain seemed to be responding to her new surroundings.

Setting her journal aside and returning to a Coney book, she found a picture of a building shaped like an elephant—a hotel, the caption said—that used to stand on the land that eventually became Luna Park, and she realized that had been a game, too. Involving peanuts and trunks made of . . . what had it been, exactly? She couldn’t recall, and she felt a sort of irrational anger at her own brain, for failing her, for not remembering more . . . or everything.





When she discovered a box of old film reels, she pulled out one labeled Orphans in the Surf and approached the projector. With a few adjustments it whirred to life and projected an image on the attic’s far white wall. A group of little kids—they couldn’t have been more than two or three years old, mostly boys—frolicked in the surf. Some were fully clothed, even wearing hats, but some wore only diapers.

For the minute the film played—and despite the gentle whir of the projector—the attic seemed quieter than was possible, a black hole of sound. And in that painful silence, the grainy black-and-white images, herky-jerky on the wall, seemed to call out for some kind of mournful sound track. Jane could almost feel the sounds of strings hitting melancholy notes in her heart as a few kids pushed farther out into the water and then rejoined the group. They clasped hands and skipped in a circle, playing a silent game of Ring Around the Rosie.

Ashes, ashes. We all fall down.

It was only a minute or two and then it was over, and Jane sat back down in the old armchair and wondered where those orphans had ended up in life, if they were orphans at all, and whether or not they’d ever found a place to call home. In that same instant, she decided that Preemie couldn’t have been as bad as the geek said.





A line of light escaped from under her brother’s door. She knocked lightly and heard him say, “Come in.”