Submechanophobia

As we made our way from the employee lockers to the ride basin for Suzy repair duty, Jet asked me if college girls still experimented with each other. 

“You know, like, do they feel each other up in their dorm rooms?” 

I took a squeeze of warm Gatorade, the last trace of lunch, and half-empty by that point. I could’ve bought something to eat before closing—a soft pretzel gravelly with salt, smoked turkey leg the size of my face—but food prices at the park were ridiculous, even with our discount. I swished the juice like a citrusy mouthwash, hoping the electrolytes would fill me up and keep me awake, if that’s what electrolytes did. 

“I guess? Everyone’s queer, though, so I wouldn’t call it experimenting.”

A raised eyebrow. “Everyone? Really…” 

“Not everyone,” I corrected. “But, you know.” 

“So, what would you call it? Hooking up?” 

“Yeah, just hooking up,” I said. 

Another squeeze. I could see Jet’s gears turning. A moment later, he asked, “Is queer gay?” 

I held the Gatorade in my mouth. How do I explain this to a 45-year-old man? 

“Queer is a blanket term for many identities,” I said. “It’s a reclaimed thing.” 

“What does that mean, reclaimed?” 

“Reclaiming is when a charged word, like a slur or something, gets taken back by a group of people and used by them—” 

“You mean like—” 

“Like when a word that was invented to shit on them becomes empowering… to them,” I finished. Then I bent down to tighten my compulsory flippers, signalling that the conversation was over. 

The two of us continued our walk through the sticky night air, waddling Charlie Chaplin style. We’d already been closed to visitors for an hour, all of them safely returned home or tucked under a hotel duvet by then. There were no employees left in Mystery Lake’s dim corner of the park. Nobody around at all. Just Jet and me, fleshy and slick in our wetsuits, like characters from a post-apocalyptic video game. 

Submerged animatronic maintenance was done at night, when the ride wasn’t in operation, and always, always by two people. No one had ever drowned, but a few came close, or maybe that’s what management said to scare us. I think it was a two-person job because it was creepy as fuck. Mystery Lake, being an older attraction, had just one animatronic figure: a sea serpent nicknamed Suzy. When she was running normally, Suzy would rise out of the water each time a boat rode by. But between those glimpses, and all night, every night, her inanimate assemblage settled underwater, waiting.

Jet asked if it was like a certain word for Black people. Reclaiming, he meant. He smirked, having said the whole word with zero hesitation. 

“Yeah, um, same idea.” I crunched the Gatorade bottle, trying to retroactively muffle what he’d just let out at full volume. “But I’m not the one to ask, so…” 

He then launched into a monologue about a friend, his voice lower than I’d ever heard it, carrying the inflections of a cautionary tale. A “harmless” joke that didn’t land, the guy getting written up at his job, followed by “months” of unconscious bias training—“all ‘cause of a joke!” As he went on, I started to wonder if there even was a friend, or if this was something that had happened to Jet before I was hired. Either way, I didn’t want to talk about it.

“Why’d Suzy go down?” I asked during a pause, even though I knew, or had an idea. Submerged animatronics were prone to breaking. Mostly they corroded, the halogen-thick water eating away at bolts until jaws unhinged and limbs unscrewed. On unlucky days, their systems malfunctioned and they became unresponsive. We called this ‘going down,’ when a figure froze, as in Suzy went down on me. When Suzy went down, she remained underwater during her cue to appear, as though in a bout of stage fright she’d forgotten her tricks. 

“Scandinavian freshwater aquatic plants. We import them.” 

“She gets tangled in the plants?” 

“Yeah, they fuck up her motor,” he said. “At least they look nice, right?”

“It’s like seaweed?” 

“No. Seaweed implies saltwater. Seaweed, not lakeweed.” 

“But everyone calls her Suzy Seamonster,” I pointed out. 

“That they do. But it’s not her official name.” 

I took the bait. “What’s her official name?” 

“Langur Ormur. It’s Icelandic for ‘long worm,’” he said. “You know how y’all who man the boats are called ‘skips’ or ‘skippers’? That comes from another Icelandic word: skipstjóri, meaning ‘ship boss.’”

“Wow.” 

“True story.” 

I didn’t bother replying after that. Our night stretched out before me, long and awkward. 

When I had gotten in that afternoon, my supervisor, Bridget, a vinegary woman who blamed all her ailments—swollen feet, sweaty forehead, knee shocks, online shopping addiction—on menopause, which she felt was just around the corner, asked if I would stay late to check on Suzy, since she’d gone down a couple times earlier in the day. I’d been at Mystery Lake for two months, completed basic training, but had never been asked to dive after hours. The guy who usually went on these rescue missions with Jet was away, on paternity leave. 

“Supposed to be a nice night,” said Bridget. “Plus you’ll get overnight premium pay.” That sold me. My dad was on a trip with his girlfriend’s family that week, so I had the house to myself. My after-work plans consisted of pita chips and hummus, eaten on the couch instead of in bed, which could be postponed. 

It did occur to me that a night dive meant time alone with Jet. We hadn’t shared many shifts, but I knew him from coworkers’ stories. I knew that he said weird things, stood too close, made uncomfortable eye contact. That he was touchy. Shoulders and forearms mostly, a lower back once or twice. But there was one Jet story that everyone seemed to know: a high school senior, a late shift, a ride home. The details of the internal investigation were never shared. Apparently, the park called it a “misunderstanding,” concluding that whatever took place had been between two consenting adults. The girl quit soon after. 

Overnight premium pay. I would keep my keys on me. I would not miss the last bus. 

At the Mystery Lake ride basin, Jet told me I didn’t have to get in the water, that he wouldn’t want the chemicals to dry out my hair. And anyway, he was just going to remove debris from Suzy’s parts for an hour or two. No sweat. 

“Why did you make me get dressed?” The wetsuit alone had taken fifteen minutes to pull on. 

“Oh, I didn’t tell you? I don’t wear all this shit,” he said, laughing. “Weighs me down.” He was referring to his scuba tank, which he shrugged off. It clanked onto the ground like an aluminum water bottle in a quiet classroom. “Just mask and fins for me.” 

Fins. I had been calling them flippers, like a child. 

“How do you breathe?” I asked.

“Snorkel when I’m working near the surface. When I have to go deeper, I just hold my breath. Never smoked a day in my life, so these lungs are powerful.” 

“But management—” 

“Management who? I trained those fools. I’ve maintenanced Suzy for twenty years and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve worn a tank.” 

Maintained, I thought. You’ve maintained Suzy for twenty years. 

“So just relax, you,” he added. 

He called me ‘you,’ even though we wore name tags. He was a serial chest-glancer too, so I was sure he’d seen mine enough to at least guess at a name with the same first letter. I always felt that ‘you’ was payback for the day we met, when he introduced himself Jet, like ‘jet-black’ and I said—feigning shock, even though I’d heard him fine—Your name is Jack Black? 

I don’t know why I did it, maybe to knock him down a peg. Jet was too cool a name for the sebaceous man in front of me—way too cool for his crooked bottom teeth and graying, M-shaped hairline. He asked what grade I was in, I said I was a sophomore in college, and he said, with the same amped-up, insincere disbelief I’d used on him, that these new hires are getting smaller and smaller, and it must be because the younger generations don’t drink real milk. Then he shook my hand like he wanted to break it; crush the weak, calcium-deficient bones in it. 

The crickets made their noises. I stared at Jet. Diving tankless was absolutely against the rules, but I wasn’t about to fight a senior coworker. Twenty years. 

“Go over by the lamp and do the water tests,” he instructed, removing his phone from his breast pocket. Another rule defied: no phones out on the clock. 

There was a single work lamp brought out for nighttime tasks, but all it provided was a faint, alien glow to an otherwise dark area. The flashlight nub on Jet’s phone would’ve been a more effective light source, our range of vision just 20-ish feet around us. The pool looked like an oil spill; I could barely make out Jet’s body when he lowered himself in. I couldn’t see Suzy at all. 

“What happens if you don’t come up?” I asked, a surge of real fear in my voice. An awful image came to me then: Jet caught on a cable, his body straining, arms tugging for the surface, while I, oblivious, sat criss-cross applesauce next to that lamp. Or what if Suzy came to life and held him under with her steel talons?

“If I don’t come up for five minutes straight, feel free to jump in.” 

Then he was gone. I watched the LED strip affixed to his mask travel for a few seconds before disappearing in the black. I imagined it was a cluster of bioluminescent plankton; an unsuspecting, late-night snack for Suzy. 

All the tests came back in the normal range, assuming I’d done them right. My one job over with, I plopped onto the grass and stretched out my legs. It was my first time in the park, alone, after hours. In the dark, with no visitors milling around—no bleating toddlers, idiotic questions, Crocs slapping the pavement—Mystery Lake could’ve passed for a real fjord. In the daytime, this was not the case at all; heavy oak branches grazed the water and it was swelteringly hot. 

The ride had a circuit layout, like a lazy river. What came next was always hidden. This allowed for a buildup to Suzy’s reveal: models of her devoured prey lined the bank, the most disgusting of which was a steaming whale carcass that once made a kid in my boat throw up into his mother’s cupped hands; then an underwater ripple effect that looked like something swimming alongside your boat; next came the hint of a tail, flicking just enough to make your eyes widen. At the end, Suzy herself, that long, primordial neck, scales metallic green when they caught the sun, rose out of the water as she exhaled a hiss of smoke. 

“So many fucking plants,” Jet grunted, tossing a handful to shore. The wavy mess of weeds landed at my feet; it looked like he’d scalped a mermaid. I felt sorry for the plants. The fact that they were imported, brought over to do a job—decorate the set, provide a sense of realism to a very un-real place—then plucked and discarded when they threatened the leading lady. 

“Hey, you, what are you majoring in?” He asked, tossing his mask between his hands. 

Here we go. “Musical theater.” 

“What now?” 

We’d had this conversation before. I knew he just wanted to hear me say it again, to relish in the absurdity of it, the poor investment. “Musical theater,” I repeated. 

“Muuusical theater.” He drew out the oo like an articulate, silver-tongued cow. A cow with a BFA in musical theater. 

I had originally applied to work at the park as a performer in their repertoire of fairytale plays. I wanted to be a princess, wanted the sheen of it: the pop star mic, poofy tulle gown, wig with roller-set ringlets—all of it. A kid in the year below me at school was the park’s Pied Piper the summer earlier, a gig that earned him his Equity card. Overnight, he went from amateur to full-fledged member of Actors’ Equity. My classmates and I tried to sublimate our fuming jealousy into praise (Yas, Jake! Booked ‘n busy! We love to see it!), but, really, Jake could choke. All the straight guys in theater could choke—all three of them. The rest of us were scrounging for union contracts like raccoons in jazz shoes. 

The production team had me audition for a track that would have allowed me to understudy the princess roles. I never heard back, but they must’ve passed my number along, because shortly after I got a call from Bridget about being a skipper at Mystery Lake. 

“It’s a performance-based job,” she told me over the phone, “without the glamor of an air-conditioned theater.” 

Jet told me he did a year of college, took a janitor job at the park for the summer—“To keep a little change in my pocket, you know, take my girlfriend out on weekends”—and didn’t return to school in the fall. The park had offered him a raise: twenty-five extra dollars a week as an incentive to stay. He’d been there ever since. 

“Isn’t that kind of shady?” I asked. “Bribing young people to ditch their education and work at a theme park?” 

He blew air from his nose. Then he put his mask back on, adjusted the seal.

“I don’t wanna bum you out,” he said, “but trust me: you’ll still be here after you graduate.” 

He was underwater before I could respond. 

With nothing else to do, I scanned the grass for toads. But toads were tricky; I’d spot one and get excited, only for it to leap out of my grasp when I’d lunge at it.

“What are you doing?” Jet asked another time he came up for air.

“Nothing. Catching toads,” I said. “Well, trying.” 

“You gotta find a worm first and dangle it as bait. The toad’s not just gonna crawl into your lap. He’s not stupid.” 

With that bit of Jet wisdom, he slipped back into the water. I wasn’t about to do all of that—touch a worm with my bare hands—so I gave up on the toads. 

I kicked off my fins and plunged both feet into the murky water. The pool was scummy, clogged with leaves and old machinery. Suzy was inert, I knew that, but there could have been real animals down there—alligators maybe. Who knows what else. I stared at my legs, cut off at the ankles, a queasy thrill rising in my chest.

Jet never hit the five-minute mark, but he did get close. At one point, he was under for four whole minutes. 

In the nighttime quiet, I could hear the area music looping. They kept the speakers on at night, to give the illusion of activity and make the place feel less eerie. It had the opposite effect: vague medieval music wafting in from the empty village just beyond Mystery Lake was worse than silence. 

I thought about who I’d be cast as in Measure for Measure, our play that semester. I wanted Isabella, obviously—everyone wanted Isabella—but I knew the role would go to Esme or Arizona, two overeager girls in my class. Esme was doing a summer Shakespeare workshop with a professional theater company, while Arizona was in a rural part of the state teaching method acting to kids with learning disabilities. And where was Jake? On an Equity tour of The Music Man? 

I was acting, too; my summer wasn’t a total waste. I was playing a skipper, steering my crew of visitors to hunt the great sea serpent. In my mind, all of us skippers were actors. We told cheesy, scripted jokes, our voices modified for the public, a few notches giddier. 

I memorized those jokes until I could riff on them without stumbling, even though improv wasn’t my strong suit. It was the class I consistently got the lowest grades in. My first-year improv teacher, a smug, skinny former clown named Joel, labelled me “creatively blocked” and wrote that I was hard to work with on my final exam scorecard. He was swiftly fired after he demonstrated a lay-down kiss with a student during rehearsal. 

If Joel could see me now.

What if I left school? My degree in breath control and body dysmorphia had reached a state of diminishing returns. I’d endured two years of a four year program with nothing to look forward to but a fruitless acting career when I got out. I’d rather live out my days circling Suzy’s lake. When my time came, my fellow skippers would wrap me in cloth and toss me overboard like a slain pirate. My shrouded body would sink the eight feet it took to reach the basin’s lowest point, and there I’d rest, finally at peace. In a hundred years they’d drain the pool and fish me out. My identity would be meaningless then, let alone my union status. And yet… what did it mean now, besides the regular labor union stuff? Access? A leg up? The privilege of being taken seriously? 

The hours snagged on like this: Jet removing weeds from Suzy’s parts, me getting a headache from the steady spiral of lutes and my own ruminations. 

A long stretch had gone by with no movement in the water, so I tapped Jet’s phone to check the time. His lock screen was a female wrestler—I didn’t know which. At first I thought it was his girlfriend, then I noticed the glaring WWE logo he hadn’t taken the time to crop. While I was distracted by the wrestling lady, trying to decide if I should yank my mask on and save him, Jet burst through the surface and grabbed my ankles. I screamed with my mouth closed, so hard I felt a splash of vomit at the back of my throat. 

He laughed in my face, said something like, Gotta stay alert! You never know! I showed him his phone screen, my hand shaking. 

“Four minutes. That’s how long you were under. Do you want to fucking die?” 

He just winked and slowly lowered himself back into the water. I flung his phone away. Then I wet my hand and wiped it on the grass, because I didn’t want Jet residue on me. 

“I know you’re not happy here.” It was the end of the night and he was coming up to dump the last of the mermaid hair. “Bridget knows, too.” 

I froze. “What do you mean?” 

“Mystery Lake. I get it. It’s a classic, yes, but it’s not for everyone.” I didn’t want to tell Jet about my crushed ambitions, but couldn’t risk him reporting me for being uncooperative. 

“No, it’s not that,” I said. 

The park used that word all the time, ‘uncooperative’. If someone threw themselves on a ride track and got run over, their mangled body would be called uncooperative during the investigation. 

“I wanted a stage performer contract but I was offered this instead.”

I wasn’t uncooperative. I just wanted to act. 

“I’m still a bit disappointed about that, but it’s fine. This is a good job, performance-based and all that. And it’s a classic, like you said, good experience for my resume…” 

I was rambling, but it didn’t take Jet long to interrupt me. 

“Who did you audition for?” 

I told him which members of the production team were in the room, at least the names I could remember. Told him how it went, the fact that I never got a callback. Then, feeling more comfortable, or just wanting to rid myself of it—the shame gunking up my motor—I told him about my classmates and their summers, Jake the Pied Piper, how you need to be offered a professional contract to join the stage actors’ union. Even the princess stuff. 

“Why would you want to go union straight out of school?” he asked when I was done. “Why restrict yourself, you know? A union dictates what you can and can’t do, which projects you can accept and which you have to turn down. They hold you back. If I was young and just starting out, I’d want the freedom to do whatever the hell I want.” 

He didn’t get it. I gave a polite nod, then turned away. 

“No offense, I mean, I’m sure you’re capable,” he said, correcting himself. “You’re already an A1 skipper. You’ve got a clear voice and you’re funny with the kids. You could be onstage tomorrow. You need to sing for me sometime, though!” 

I felt pathetic then—more than usual—barefoot in a squelchy wetsuit, staring at a crooked oak tree and the endless night behind it. I knew there would be other gigs, but this was the park. Broadway stars had gotten their start here. Still, this wasn’t the end of the world, and I knew that, of course it wasn’t, so why was I being such a pissbaby?

There’s always next summer, my dad had said.

“You know I know Courtney,” said Jet. He didn’t even phrase it like a question. I snapped back to our conversation. The tree thrummed with light. 

“Courtney?” 

“She’s the, uh, what do you call it… the stage manager? She runs those shows. Me and her started out together in custodial services. We cleaned so many fucking toilets!” He gave a scratchy laugh. “I can put in a good word for you, if you want.” 

Courtney. Yes. I knew Courtney. I auditioned for Courtney. 

My breath caught in my throat. Ensemble track. Full union member. Classmates, scrounging, clawing, racoons. Access, entry, foot in the door. Princess. Princess. Princess. 

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah, I’ll go down to the theater tomorrow and give her your name.”

Do you even know my name? I wanted to ask. What’s my name, Jet? I imagined the name line on my Equity card: ‘You,’ capitalized like a proper noun. Who cares what it said? I’d be a real actor—a union member with a plastic rectangle of legitimacy. 

“All done, beautiful,” said Jet. Suzy was still fully submerged, so he spoke in her general direction. “Next time stay away from those plants,” he warned, wagging a finger at no one. 

For the first time that night, I felt Suzy’s presence. She was listening.

“Do you ever get freaked out being in the water with an animatronic?” I finally asked. I imagined myself face to face with Suzy, those tranquilized animal eyes staring back at me. 

“Not at all. I love this girl. I love this ride, man.” He slapped the water for emphasis. “How old were you your first time?” 

“On Mystery Lake? I don’t know, six?” 

“I was two,” he flashed a peace sign, “and I remember every minute.”

I snorted, “You do not.” 

“I swear! My family would drive up here on weekends and I’d get on this thing ten, fifteen times in a row. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away. Also, don’t laugh, but… I’ve brought every girlfriend I’ve ever had on this ride. Every single one!” 

I let what Jet said hang in the air. Had Suzy heard? I couldn’t imagine Jet bringing girls on the ride. Or dating. Or living out in the world. He never mentioned a family. Did he have anyone to go home to? Did he have a home, or did he just sleep in the bed of his pickup? I can’t separate the man from the park, from the place he worked most of his life. I wonder if he had trouble separating himself from it, too. 

“How are you getting home, by the way?” he asked. “Do you have a car?” 

“My bus is at one-fifteen.” The transit system around the park was surprisingly good for the area, though it was mostly used by park employees, which gave the impression of a company town. 

“They pass that late on the weekend?” 

“It’s Monday. Well, Tuesday morning, technically, so they run ’til two AM.” 

“Check my phone,” he said. “It’s Monday now. It was Sunday night when we came out here. I’m pretty sure that’s still weekend hours.”

There was no way. I picked up his phone from where it lay on the grass and tapped it awake. The shredded woman and her silver sports bra lit up the screen. Monday, 12:51 AM. 

“Oh, God,” I whispered. There were no buses past midnight on weekends, and they only started up again around six, when openers began their commute. How—how could I have screwed up that badly? The week had flown by with my dad not home, sure; the days blurred, my schedule was erratic, but still, I couldn’t believe it. 

“What does it say?” Jet was floating on his back in the ride basin, arms outstretched, doing the star. Not a care in the world. 

“Monday.” Dip hand, wipe on grass. Fuck! I’d heard horror stories of coworkers sleeping outside the station when they missed the last bus working a late shift. The park is in the middle of nowhere; a taxi would’ve cost more than I made that day, even with the nighttime bump. There was also that fear, there’s always that fear, of the driver being a man, of a deserted country road… 

“What are you gonna do?” 

I didn’t respond—I was going over options in my head. Hide until park open? Staying overnight for fun was forbidden; we were warned that anyone who tried it would be fired on the spot, then issued a lifetime ban. Plus: motion sensors, cameras planted everywhere. 

Get in the water? I thought about swimming the perimeter of the lake until the buses started up again. Staying close to the surface but never revealing myself, like I was at war or something. But I was hungry—had been for hours. 

“Where do you live?” Jet had gotten closer. He was standing now, the water hitting him at waist-level. I looked down at him while he talked up to me, like a sopping wet version of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. What was Esme doing right now? 

I told him where I lived. I barely heard myself say it—my heartbeat thrashed in my ears, loud as a propeller. 

A pause as he considered this. A big, fat, heavy-handed theatrical beat. “That’s a bit out of my way, but I don’t mind,” he said casually, tugging an earlobe to shake out the water. “Up to you.”

I would replay this moment in my head for years—long after I’d quit the park and dropped out of school. How easy it would have been to leave. To walk along the main pathway until I found help. Follow security to some back room, sip papery water while they figured out how to get me home. Someone had to be there at that hour; some person patrolling, another monitoring the cameras. We couldn’t have been alone. 

Or what if I’d broken character for once, did something bold? Made a break for it, taken off running toward the parking lot? Cold pavement, bare feet curved inward to brace against tiny rocks and debris, my oxygen tank swinging behind me. Jet’s janky pickup in a flood of white light, alone and unguarded. My heavy, unused tank coming down on the windshield. Over and over and over. Smashing the shit out of it. Followed by my pruny fingers forming a fist and denting, bloodying the driver side door. When the damage was done, I could’ve hid in a tree until morning. That would’ve been an ending. A real catharsis. 

My stomach twisted. I wished five hours would pass in a single second, so I could tell Jet Thanks, but no thanks, get on the early bus back to my empty house, and make myself a huge breakfast. 

He was pulling himself out of the ride basin, over its curved, white wall. A firefly’s wink of yellow. An Equity card with ‘You’ printed on it. 

“It’s up to you.” 

I thought of the high school senior. I wish I’d known her name.