A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online

or twice a month, the absurdity of a bad joke will make him laugh until he forgets to breathe, until the laughter itself becomes a kind of breathing, stretching back through time to fill his life, and he is convinced that it will never stop. The same thing happens with crying sometimes.
    Between gasps Bateman shouts, “Mom, stoplight! Mom! Mom! Speed bump!” and in her cigarette-voice his mom says, “If you take them fast enough, you don’t even notice they’rethere,” and Kevin rocks back and forth with every turn in the road, every pothole, like the spring-headed cat on the dashboard.
    Thad and Kenneth are already waiting inside the gate for them, hands stamped and tickets purchased, fixed to the pavement in their high-tops. “Where have you effers been?” they say, and, “We got here twenty gee dee emms ago.”
    It is a game of first letters.
    “Yeah, dudes, sorry,” Bateman says. “My mom took forever getting ready.”
    “In the bathroom? Taking a pee?”
    “Nah, on the phone.”
    “
On
the pee.”
    “On the pee talking some ess.”
    “Just essing around with some jaying tee dee.”
    “
What
? What the fuck does that mean?”
    “I have absolutely no idea.”
    Everyone but Kevin wants to ride the Zipper straightaway—he would rather stay right side up, thank you very much; he’s declaring this an official no-barfing day—but he doesn’t mind standing in line with the others. They inch along until they reach the rail where the operator is tearing tickets, and then Kevin steps aside to watch the small metal cages slant into the air and spin on their axes. It is an oddly sunless fall afternoon. The sky is the color of oatmeal with lots of milk. For a while he tries to zero in on Thad’s blond hair, on Bateman’s green shirt, but loop-de-looping his eyes around makes him dizzy, and eventually he just lets his gaze drift down the midway, listening for the great swooping arm of the ride to creak to a stop.
    When his friends climb back out, Shane Wesson is with them. It is as if the Zipper has somehow given birth to him. Watching him stride over the asphalt, his cheeks red from the wind, Kevin has the impression that the ride has shaken something loose from him, and from Kenneth and Bateman and Thad and all the others, the thirty or forty people following the rail to the exit, so that whatever it is that usually keeps their minds hidden from view is gone, and every thought they have seems to pop right out of their faces.
Holy hell, that was fast. I should have worn the sweater instead of the windbreaker. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again
. He wants to turn to the person next to him and say, “Look, do you see that?” but he doesn’t. The sensation vanishes as quickly as it arises.
    He supposes he should still be angry with Shane, but the foxtail trick feels like a lifetime ago, and the truth is he has flat stopped caring.
    All at once, Kenneth laughs and says, “I think some kid started
crying
on there,” and Shane says, “Hey, Kev man, where’d you come from?” and Kevin says, “I don’t know about you all, but I’m saving my emm for the gee.”
    “Say huh?”
    “The Gravitron. My money for the Gravitron.”
    “Uh-huh.” Shane drops a look. “So are you like
high
now, or are you like
black
?”
    There is a mechanism inside Kevin that fixes an answer to every question, even the rhetorical ones. It moves forward a notch. “Whatever’s awesomest,” he says.
    Now there are five of them, and they set off through the prize booths and the concession stands, past the barns thatsmell of sweat and hair and grass and corn and leather and milk and manure, past the thrill rides with their waves of colored lightbulbs. Music thumps up through their legs, a new song every thirty yards or so, booming out of the Himalaya and the Fireball, the Twister and the Screamin’ Swing. Some of the rides turn in simple circles. Some rise straight into the air and plummet straight back to the ground, like a