all of the orlandos
John Haggerty
There were two Orlandos, she said. It was important that she make that clear right off the bat. Her name was Shelley, she liked eye makeup, and there were two Orlandos. She was the only person in the Ramada Inn SuperExpress bar when Carl walked in, stunned by the humidity outside, and it seemed to him, in the strange twilight of that transient space, that it would be rude not to say hello.
“This bar,” she said, “it’s halfway between the two of them. The Orlandos. That’s why I’m here.” She was in her mid-forties, he estimated, long-faced, thin and dressed in a peach polyester pantsuit. Her eyeshadow matched the suit, and her eyeliner extended in delicate triangles past the outer corners of her eyes, as if pulled there by a strong headwind.
“It’s my first time in town,” Carl said. He wasn’t good at talking to women. He sold plumbing wholesale, which was why he was there. Big hardware show. Get a foothold in the Southeast. That’s what his boss, the VP of AeroPlumbing, had told him. Basically, it was his job to talk to plumbers. A lot of plumbers. And not to be politically incorrect, but most of the movers in the plumbing business were men.
Dale’s left hand was nearly lost to a CookieMatic SJV-3300 Cookie Press at the plant, about 45 minutes before the end of his
shift. It was a sad defeat for the encouraging “This workplace has gone 83 days without an accident!” sign, which, at any rate, hadn’t been updated since the last accident thirty-nine days previously.
Since the incident, Dale has had a lot of time on his, well, hands, to review what all of the things that had gone wrong. Like gravitational waves, aftermaths of some cosmic collision, there are echoes of the event everywhere he looks. There is, for example, the wall opposite him, approximately eleven feet away, eleven feet and ten inches being the precise, standardized width of a singlewide manufactured home.
Also, constantly audible, a low, unrelenting whir—disturbingly reminiscent of the sound of the factory floor—announces the presence of the Interstate, just a quarter of a mile away. This was used as a selling point when Dale first rented the trailer, though the noise now is one of the primary factors fueling his insomnia.
“Convenient,” the manager had said in a way that made convenience sound slightly unpleasant, like a surprising sip of room-temperature coffee. “You just get in your car and you’re gone.”
They found him—the man they later learned was named Howard something-or-other—floating face down in the Yo-ho-ho Grotto, clearly dead, though it was uncertain for how long. The Grotto itself was in one of the inauspicious corners of the already inauspicious Surfganza Adventure Hydro Thrill Park, a 1,500-acre slab of blistering cement, fiberglass slides and a network of pools filled with water adulterated to an unknown extent by chlorine and toddler urine.
Situated in the vast, flat desert of the suburban fringes of town, it was a mixed-metaphor water park and video game fun-plex, the Yo-ho-ho Grotto being the terminus of a variety of chutes,
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such as the Tyranosaurus, the Wild Bill and the Death Stab, the latter having had to be renamed and its sign hastily repainted after receiving a cease-and-desist order from a litigious children’s entertainment company that claimed to own the words “death” and “star” in a wide spectrum of combinations.
Oddly, the discovery of the corpse, after the initial shrieking and pointing died down, seemed to enhance the atmosphere of the day, which had previously been unpromising. Something new had come to the water park, or something very old, depending on how often one thought of death. People stood in small groups, whispering and giggling nervously as two of the now ironically titled lifeguards dragged the body to the edge of the pool and heaved it onto the cement.
***
“There’s Airport Orlando and there’s Attraction Orlando,” Shelley said. Carl wondered if he was supposed to offer to buy her a drink. She was running a fingertip along the rim of a highball glass with two emaciated pieces of ice in it. “Well, I guess maybe you could say there’s three Orlandos, if you want to talk about Interstate Orlando. But Interstate Orlando is strictly for the doomed. Nobody—nobody—wants to be Interstate Orlando.”
He nodded. He found her unsettling.
“Buy me a drink,” she said. The bartender was nowhere to be seen, but Shelley didn’t seem to notice.
***
Beneath Dale is the cracked brown vinyl of a La-Z-Boy recliner knock-off, site of numerous fitful and largely fruitless attempts at sleep.
The opposite wall holds a window thirty inches by fifty-eight, also standard mobile home dimensions, currently obscured by dusty ivory venetian blinds. Manipulating the blinds in a way that would allow light to pass through them would reveal a dirt patch, a broken asphalt driveway containing his 2001 Oldsmobile Intrigue GLS, and the home of his neighbor, who he has never met, or even seen, except as an indistinct form that arrives at unpredictable intervals, but always in darkness. His neighbor’s windows blaze with light at all times of the day and night. There is a surveillance camera above the door, trained, at least partially, on Dale’s trailer. All of these things raise the possibility in Dale’s mind that his neighbor’s mobile home is actually a small-scale marijuana plantation. That it is probably not a meth lab provides Dale with some level of consolation, if not a sense of restfulness.
The head lifeguard, Chad, got out of the pool and stood gazing down at the corpse for a few moments. “Well, shit,” he said. “This sucks. You think he’s been here long?”
“Jesus, I don’t know,” said Steve. “Weren’t you around?”
Chad had, for the previous twenty minutes, been behind the Hot Dawwwg! Snak Shak making out in an enervating way with a girl named Mandy. The Snak Shak had proven a poor venue for making out because the smell of rancid fryer oil never left the area and it was clearly putting the two of them off their games. They were persevering just on principle, but it was becoming clear that their hearts weren’t really in the venture. Luckily, he now noted, the fact that there was a dead guy in the Yo-ho-ho Grotto had completely killed his half-hearted Mandy-based erection, because it would have been really embarrassing and weird to have been walking around with that, given that there was, in fact, a dead guy in one of the pools.
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“It’s like I looked away for just a second,” Chad said. “You?”
“Airport Orlando, that’s people like you,” Shelley said. “Trade show, right? In and out. Big cold convention center display floors. Sleeping off a hangover in some bullshit presentation. You’re thinking about getting a hooker but you’re not sure how the whole thing works.”
“I wasn’t—”
She snorted and raised her eyebrows at him before continuing. “Attraction Orlando, that’s families. Usually right on the edge of divorce. The kids are fighting all the time. Maybe one of them looks like they might turn out weird in a scary way. Dad gets a big idea. Drop a bunch of money. Magical memories. Buy yourself some happiness.”
Carl thought for a second. “OK, but if a family takes a plane here and then goes to a theme park, are they Airport Orlando or Attraction Orlando?”
Shelley waved her hand rapidly in front of her face as if trying to ward off a persistent but stupid insect. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said.
If Dale were to lean slightly forward in his recliner, he could look down the hall of his mobile home, past the kitchen, and into the bedroom, a room that his estranged wife Hazel has never visited but which reminds him of the master bedroom in his former home, in which, upon his unexpected entry, he discovered her in enthusiastic sexual congress with a sweaty, red-faced man that he recognized, after some thought, as their car mechanic. As
a result of this, Dale finds it difficult to sleep in the mobile home bedroom. Or to get his car repaired, for that matter. If his gaze were to fall slightly to the right, it would alight upon a faux wood-grained vinyl laminate side table that holds a number of printed documents. Among these is an accident report issued by SugarDaddy Incorporated, a subsidiary of ActiveGen Foods. Employee, it reads in part, in contravention of training and established best practices, attempted to clear the 3FLE4 extrusion nozzle while the CookieMatic SJV-3300 was in full operation. When the pressure cycle of the machine commenced . . . Dale finds that he prefers not to look in this direction.
Steve, the second of the two lifeguards ostensibly on duty, had been in the parking lot hotboxing his car with marijuana smoke, something that he was doing with increasing frequency in the weeks since Mandy had told him that she couldn’t see herself with someone who was still wearing his hair in a drop fade. Which, he thought, again, was unfair and shallow of her, especially since, two months earlier, he had made a radical transition from the drop fade to a top-textured fade, something that she had failed to remark on at the time and which, now that he gave it some thought, was completely typical of her. That was Mandy in a nutshell, really, and he began to wonder if, in fact, he loved Mandy—which he had previously been convinced that he did—or if, instead, he loved the idea of Mandy, an abstract, perfected version of Mandy, a Mandy who wouldn’t have giggled inappropriately at his poetry and who definitely wouldn’t have started hooking up with Chad, like, five fucking minutes after breaking up with him, a Mandy who—he could see it now—would gaze lovingly into his eyes, who would walk hand in hand down the beach with him—this scenario requiring that the two of them lived a reasonable driving
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distance from a beach, which theoretically they actually did, had both traffic and his car not been so reliably aggravating to preclude attempting the journey very often, making him think that in the beach-walking perfection-Mandy world he would have a much better car, one without that big primer spot on the left fender and which wouldn’t give off that embarrassing alternator-belt squeal every time he tried to goose it at a green light and Brent, his stepfather, wouldn’t be such a dick and they would have a back yard pool—the kind that was actually a hole in the ground instead of the cheesy above-ground ones that were basically just a big plastic bag full of water like everybody around here had, and which were really embarrassing when you gave it even a little bit of thought.
“I’m sensitive,” he blurted out, and then immediately thought that he might have overshot his weed dosage by just a little bit.
Also on Dale’s side table, underneath the accident report, is bit of corporate communication, stating, in part, Team!!! It has come to management’s attention that production levels of SugarDaddy ChocoHaulick Flavor Bombs are 8% below quota. Downtime should be restricted to emergency situations only!! Line idle times are monitored and logged! Come on, ChocoHaulicians, let’s get rad!!! The radness level of Dale’s current situation is unknown but would seem, upon reflection, to be rather high, if not entirely in the way that SugarDaddy management chooses to employ the term.
In Dale’s kitchen is a coffee machine, non-operational. It is certainly true that Dale’s current lifestyle is not conducive to alertness and clear thinking. Whether additional caffeine could have changed the outcome of recent events is unknown.
In the far corner of the room, lying where he flung it, is a threecolor glossy pamphlet entitled Changes . . . And Opportunities!!,
subtitled, It is what it is!! It is an official publication of the SugarDaddy human resources department. It describes, in cheery terms, some of the things that Dale might expect in the coming days. It appears to be aimed at new amputees, though Dale’s hand was not severed, merely broken in many, many places. The pamphlet touches on such topics as stump maturation, edema and the phantom limb phenomenon. It makes it clear that the cost of prosthetics and physical therapy will be borne solely by the employee. ***
“Oh my God,” Mandy said, having walked up behind Chad and Steve. “It’s . . . wow. He’s really dead.”
Mandy’s eyes roamed over the gathered crowd, the pot-bellied dads and the Zoloft and Valium-stunned moms, the shocked and titillated children, everyone composing their faces into whatever expression they thought was appropriate for the admittedly strange circumstance of a guy showing up dead in the Yo-ho-ho Grotto, and then she stepped forward, shouldering Steve and Chad aside and stood above the corpse.
She wasn’t sure what she thought a corpse should look like, she realized, but it probably wasn’t this. ***
“So you’re Attraction Orlando?” Carl asked.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Shelley said. “I’m neither. Or both. I’ve measured it. Or asked the internet or whatever. This bar is exactly halfway between the airport and Disney World. Throw in the Interstate if you want to. I’m still in the middle of it all.”
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He thought about the convention, his tiny booth all the way in the back next to the bathrooms, a folding table with a spread of brochures. A few aisles over one of the big companies had a thunderous DJ and swim-suited booth girls—PEX oh yes, copper, that’s proper, shark bite bitch. When his boss told him about the trip, he had considered asking Mary if she wanted to go with him, but in the end had been afraid of what she would say.
Also on the side table is Dale’s phone. On it are a number of awkward consolatory messages. In one of them, an acquaintance from the plant tells him that they only shut the line down for twenty minutes after the accident, and that blood was still visible on the press when it started up again. He thinks about this sometimes, Dale, or at least a portion of him, subsumed into the dough, pressed, molded and baked into Flavor Bombs, enclosed in individualized cellophane wraps, loaded onto pallets and then trucks, sent with diesel bellows throughout our great nation, Dale, his essence, his bones, his body, his blood, consecrated, sacred, sublime, touching, for just a moment, the lips of the world.
“Howard!” a woman’s voice shrieked behind her—the man’s wife, Mandy assumed—and she imagined him, Howard, the dead man, making plans, arranging his week to come to the Surfganza Adventure Hydro Thrill Park, packing up the family, making a whole day of it even though he must have known, in his heart of hearts, that it would end up in disappointment, barely past lunch and the kids already sunburned and exhausted, bickering and slapping each other, his wife in her sagging blue one-piece
watching him with narrowed eyes, filing the day away in the constantly growing catalog she kept of his failures as a man, the whole thing unraveling in completely predictable ways, and Howard, then, at the top of one of the slides, probably the Death Stab, since it was the tallest and most conducive, post mortem, to the generation of crass internet memes, Howard looking out over the water park, the parking lot, and the suburban metastasization of strip malls and planned housing complexes, the whoosh of the water jets at his feet sounding, for just a moment like something else, a waterfall, perhaps, or the whisper of a song, and he feels the quickening of something, a feeling growing in his chest, a hint of another world, something more perfect just beyond this vale of illusion, nearly within reach.
“My mom used to tell me I have small eyes,” Shelley said. “Like a little piglet she used to say. Those piggy little eyes don’t miss a thing. Always watching things. Always seeing. I don’t think she meant it as a compliment.”
The air conditioner sputtered to a halt. A moment of silence grew between them.
“One Orlando, two Orlandos,” Shelley said. “All of the Orlandos. They come together right here.” She leaned forward, gazing into his face. “I see them all,” she said, a strange new note entering her voice. “You can feel it, can’t you? You get up in the morning, you think maybe today is your day, that everything is going to be different. But it’s always just Orlando. Nothing but Orlando. So much of it. It’s all there is.”
He glanced around the room, conscious again that they were the only two people in it. The walls were painted a dark gray, a few faux suede chairs huddled around the scattered tables as if
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for warmth. Stepping behind the bar, he took out a clean highball glass and set it carefully in front of her. “What are you having?” he asked.
“Surprise me,” she said.
He picked up a bottle at random—some sort of vodka, heavy and cool in his hand. He imagined looking at her, looking into those eyes, and he wondered how many Orlandos he would see.