Dreamland Social Club(86)

He just kept ripping. “Loki said it’s open to renegotiating a lease for one more season, since it’ll take that long for their whole plan to be final anyway, but my dad says it’s like negotiating with a terrorist.” He threw the paper bits into the trash can behind the bar, then refilled Jane’s Coke, which she hadn’t even realized she’d drunk. “Technically, the bar shouldn’t even be open now, but my father wanted a last hurrah. He’s been talking crazy talk about moving all the stuff that’s in the bar to a different building overnight tonight. Something to do with Hemingway and a urinal. I have no idea.”

He shook his head, then leaned forward conspiratorially and said, “So what’s the deal? How did you figure it out?”

“My mother drew a map of it all. It was under the wallpaper in her room. And it shows that there’s a bathysphere somewhere right under the Cyclone.”

He shook his head. “I would’ve seen it!”

She shrugged. “It has to be.”

He said, “Let’s go have a look.”

“Now?”

And so they walked down the boardwalk and stopped near the Cyclone and looked. Jane didn’t see a bathysphere, but there was a weird little shed that she had certainly never noticed before. “You think it’s in there?” Leo asked.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, and turned to face him fully. “Two a.m.?”

“Two a.m.” Leo nodded. “Bathysphere or bust.”

Then he said, “I should get back to the bar.” Jane went, too, and after they walked in and Leo went to help his dad serve more drinks, Babette appeared on a stool beside her. “All right,” she said. “Spill it.”

Jane turned. “Nothing to spill.”

“You’re still a bad liar,” Babette said.

Jane looked around to make sure no one else would hear. “We go out sometimes, late at night. My mother had this set of keys to all these secret sort of Coney places.”

“Oh. My. God.” Babette said. “He is into you. I never would have thought it possible.”

“Thanks,” Jane said. “Thanks a lot.”

“No, I mean, it’s awesome. I mean, how often does the nice girl win, right?”

“It’s not that simple.” Jane felt like she might cry. “I mean, he’s never said he likes me or anything, but I don’t know. This time it just feels different.” She got up and started pacing around, suddenly felt like an animal in a cage, like an elephant about to make a desperate swim to escape. “I’m freaking out,” she said, still pacing. “I don’t even know why!”

“All right, all right.” Babette patted her on the leg. “Just be cool. All right, just be cool. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. Just calm the ef down.”





Jane followed the smell of paint and found her father in his bedroom with the furniture covered, rolling pale blue paint onto the walls. There was a glass of whiskey on his desk next to a nearly empty bottle. Some of his paint lines were sort of woozy.

“Dad?” she said, because nothing about the scene indicated whether the drinking was a happy drinking, bad drinking, or just drinking. “What’s up?”

“We got word.” He kept rolling. “Big fat veto.”

“Seriously?” she said, and she plopped down on the bed and felt her world start to spin. Were they going to have to leave Coney? She shook her head and said sadly, “I really thought they’d go for it.”

“Well, here’s the thing.” And still rolling. He’d obviously been at it a while; the room was almost done. “Here we were thinking all of this business was being conducted out in the open, but in the meantime there’s been this secret deal being cut.”

“What kind of secret deal?” Jane couldn’t remember what color the room had been before. He was on his second coat.

“The city is going to buy out Loki.”

“What?” She shook her head. “What does that mean?”

“It means that the Loki plans are being scrapped, the city is buying all of Loki’s property on Coney, and then the city is going ahead with its own redevelopment plan, which has yet to be determined.”

“Wow,” Jane said.

“Yeah, wow.” He stood back and admired his work. “I’ve already been approached by someone from the city council. They like my work. Not necessarily the Tsunami, but they want to see something else.”

Jane felt the start of a new seed of hope. “Do you have anything else?”

“On the desk,” he said, and then he set about closing up the paint can and starting to clean up.

Jane walked over to her father’s desk and saw his drawing of a small spiral roller coaster, with just a few cars, that itself spun on its own axis like a dreidel or top. “It’s like the ride from Luna Park,” she said.

Her father came over and pointed things out with painty hands. “Yes, inspired by. But some of the cars go backwards and there are two entwined spiral tracks, not just one. And it can spin both ways on its axis.

“This drawing shows it better,” he said, and he pulled out another rendering, where Jane saw the ride’s name written in pencil and underlined: Lunacy. “Named after you, of course.”