The Park at Valencia

Mr Ferrante took the driver’s microphone at the top of the pass.

The coach had climbed out of the basin between brown hills on eight lanes of freeway, past a great white building on a hilltop that looked like a fortress and was, Señora Ruiz said, a museum. At the top the hills opened, and there in the windscreen, all at once, from one side to the other, was a second city, flat and pale and enormous in the morning haze, ringed by mountains, with the freeway running down into it like a ramp.

“The San Fernando Valley,” said Mr Ferrante, standing in the aisle with one hand on the rail, in the voice he used for 1840. “Population about two million. Part of the city since 1915, when it joined for the water. Ask me about the water some other time. Do not ask me now.”

Somebody at the back groaned.

“In January 1988 an earthquake of magnitude 6.9 struck directly beneath it. Seventy-one people were killed. Two hospitals were destroyed. A section of elevated freeway came down, like that one, there, on your right, and the Commonwealth rebuilt every freeway structure in California to a new design, and the whole Realm copied the code.” The coach had begun to cross a long viaduct over a dry riverbed. “That is why this is still standing. And why in November the hospitals built after 1988 stayed up, and the ones built before did not. That is what a building code is. It is a promise made by people who were frightened to people who have not been born yet.” He handed the microphone back. “There will be a question on it.”

“There will not,” said Theo, under his breath. “It’s a trip.”

“There will be a question on it, Hartigan,” said Mr Ferrante, without turning round.

Frederick looked down at the viaduct going by. Thick grey concrete, the pillars wrapped in steel jackets the whole way along, like bandages. It moved, Marisol had said. It’s supposed to move.

---

The park was in the hills at the far end of the Valley, where the city stopped, and it rose out of them like a city of its own, a tangle of steel and white track and painted towers, with the screaming already coming off it at a quarter to ten in the morning.

It was hot. A dry, white, enormous heat came up off the car park in waves and made the air shake over the tarmac, and by the time they had been counted twice by Mr Abernathy and had their wrists stamped with a purple star by a boy in a striped shirt, his own shirt was stuck to his back and Theo had bought a hat.

It was a terrible hat. A white cotton bucket hat with the park’s name on it in red, too big, down over his ears, which had grown back since October and were, Theo said, his only defence against the sun.

“It’s a good hat,” said Theo.

“It’s a terrible hat.”

“It was eleven pounds,” said Theo, “and I’m going to wear it until I die.”

Nobody looked at Frederick.

The park was full: families, other schools in matching T-shirts, teenagers in groups, grandparents with pushchairs, thousands of them, with ice creams and maps. He walked through it in a grey T-shirt and shorts with a bottle of water and Theo in a terrible hat, in the middle of fifty-seven other sophomores in grey T-shirts and shorts, with Brannigan somewhere behind in a sweatshirt that said UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE, dark now at the armpits, and Kimura somewhere ahead, and Castellanos nowhere he could see. Nobody looked, because nobody in the park was expecting a King to be in it.

Except once.

In the queue for the ice-cream cart, at about eleven, a small girl in front of him, perhaps six, in a pink hat, with a cone the size of her head, turned round to go back to her mother and looked up at him, the whole way up, the way small children look at a tree. She stopped. The ice cream ran down her wrist.

“Are you the King?”

The man behind him was on the telephone. The woman in front was arguing about change. Only Theo heard, and went very still.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

She looked at him for one more second.

“Oh,” she said, and walked back to her mother on a bench in the shade, and sat down beside her, and went on with her ice cream, and said nothing to her mother at all, and did not look back.

Theo let his breath out.

“That’s it? Oh?”

“I think,” said Frederick, “that’s the best review I’ve ever had.”

---

The rollercoasters were Theo’s idea. All of them.

He had made a list on the coach, on the back of the map, in pencil, in order, with the height of each in feet and the speed in miles an hour and a mark beside each, a tick or a star or, in two cases, a skull, and a route through the park that did them all by four o’clock without passing the same ice-cream cart twice.

“You haven’t been on one,” said Theo. It was not a question.

“No.”

“Not once. In your whole life.”

“There wasn’t really,” said Frederick, “an occasion.”

Theo folded the map and put it in his pocket and took him by the arm and walked him across the park, past the log flume and the teacups and a ride that went round very fast in a circle from which Marcus had already emerged a changed man, to the foot of the tallest thing there.

White track went up into the sky in a long steep line, higher than the hotel, higher than anything he had ever seen that was not a building or a mountain, and at the top it turned and fell almost straight down, and cars full of screaming people came down it and went round a loop upside down, and another, and vanished behind a hill, and the screaming went on faintly afterwards.

“It’s got a skull,” said Frederick.

“It’s got two skulls. It’s the best one. You start with the best one. If you start with a small one you get scared of the big one. If you start with the big one, everything else is easy.” Theo looked up at it. “That’s what my dad says about the night shift.”

The queue took forty minutes.

Brannigan was in it, six people behind, looking at the track with something Frederick had never seen on the face of a protection officer, which was fear. Kimura was not. She stood at the exit by the photograph stall with her arms folded and a bottle of water, and when Brannigan looked across at her at the start of the queue, with an appeal in his face, she shook her head very slightly and looked away.

“He’s actually coming on it,” said Theo.

“If I’m on it, one of them has to be. That’s always the rule.”

“Even on a rollercoaster?”

“Especially,” said Frederick, who had asked Castellanos in the car on Monday and been told that Brannigan had been given the rollercoasters, and that Brannigan did not yet know.

The boy in the striped shirt waved the two of them forward into the very front seat of the very front car, with nothing in front of them but track. A bar came down over their shoulders and locked with a clunk. Frederick held it underneath with both hands, where nobody could see, and three cars back Brannigan said something under his breath that was not in any manual.

The car went up.

Slowly, tipped back, with a noise like a chain being dragged, clack, clack, clack, so that he was looking at the sky. The sky got bigger. The park got smaller and its noise fell away beneath them, the music and the shouting, until there was only the chain and the wind and Theo beside him saying, quite calmly, “Don’t look down. Look out. Look at the hills.”

He looked at the hills.

At the top, for about two seconds, the chain went quiet and the car hung there, and the whole world was spread out underneath, and he saw them. Not the hills round the park. Further. North and east, beyond the end of the Valley, a long dark line of mountains along the edge of the sky, high and blue in the haze, with the morning sun on their faces. He had seen them on the map on Theo’s phone in history, seven months ago, with a red line drawn along their foot through places he knew only as stations. Palmdale. Somewhere over there, fifty miles away, on the morning of the second of November, the ground had opened like a door and closed again.

It looked like nothing. It looked like mountains.

Then the car tipped over the edge.

---

He screamed.

He had not made a loud noise in public that nobody had written down in sixteen years. The car fell straight down, faster than anything in his life, the track coming up at them and the wind tearing the breath out of his mouth and his stomach left at the top, and he screamed all the way down, and the loop came and the world went upside down and he was still screaming, and Theo was screaming and laughing at once, and three cars back Brannigan was making a sound like a ship’s horn, and the second loop, and the hill, and the long fast curve round the back of the park with the brown hills going by in a blur, and then it was gliding into the shade of the station and stopping with a hiss.

The bar came up.

He sat in the front seat and did not move. His hands were still on the bar. His face was doing something he did not recognise.

“Well?” said Theo, with the hat in his hand, because it had come off on the first loop and he had caught it, somehow, upside down.

Frederick turned and looked at him.

“Again,” he said.

Theo stared. Then he began to laugh, helplessly, sitting in the car with the hat in his hand while the boy in the striped shirt said please exit to your left, please exit to your left, and Frederick laughed too, and could not stop. Three cars back Brannigan got out very slowly, holding the side of the car, and stood on the platform with his eyes shut, very pink, and said to nobody, distinctly, “Once more, sir. Then the log flume. Sergeant Castellanos can see the log flume from where he is.”

---

They went on it three more times.

They did all of Theo’s list by ten to four, every tick and every star and both skulls, with Brannigan in the car behind on every one, speaking to nobody between rides and drinking a great deal of water. Marcus did not go on anything after the first ride and spent the afternoon on a bench in the shade with Priya, who had won a large purple stuffed animal of no identifiable species by throwing a ball at some bottles, and would not give it to him.

Lucía did not go on anything.

At three he found her sitting on the edge of the fountain by herself with her feet in the shade, looking at her phone, and went over with Theo and the water.

“They’re coming at seven,” she said, before he asked. “Grandma’s worried about the parking. Grandpa says he’s taking the interurban, the whole way, Pomona to the beach, because he’s never done it, and Grandma says he’s crazy, it’s two hours, and he says he’s seventy-three and he’s going to see the sea from a train if it kills him.” She turned the phone face down on her knee. “She’s going to make him wear a tie.”

“Is that bad?”

“He hates ties. He wore one in November. For the funerals.” She looked at the water in the fountain. “There were a lot of them, on their street. They went to all of them. He says he’s not wearing a tie again till somebody gets married.” She picked the phone up again. “But she’s going to make him. Because of you.”

“Tell him he doesn’t have to. Tell him I said.”

“I’m not going to tell him that,” said Lucía. “He’d be so offended.” And for the first time all day she almost laughed. “If the King said he didn’t have to wear a tie, he’d wear two.”

---

The coach went back over the pass at six with the windows open and the warm air coming in, and nearly everybody asleep.

He was not. He sat with his face against the warm glass and watched the Valley go pink and then purple behind them, the lights coming on in it one by one, and the viaduct with the steel bandages on its pillars, and the white museum on its hill. Then they came over the top and there was the basin, the whole of it, laid out in the dusk from the mountains to the sea, millions of lights, orange and white and gold, like something spilled, all the way out to a black edge where the land stopped, and beyond it the Pacific, dark, with a last line of silver where the sun had gone.

Beside him Theo was asleep with the terrible hat over his face and one hand still holding the folded map, on which every name had a tick beside it in pencil now, in order. At the bottom, in different writing, very small, where Theo had held it out to him in the queue for the last ride and told him to write something, Frederick had written again.