Flat Earther

Ray Sumner is in search of the edge of the world. He walks, and he’s been walking for some time. Footfall after footfall takes him closer to the truth.

He’s seen ugly things, terrible things, and not just on this trip. Life has been full of terrible things for Ray. Born in an ugly town, he sacrificed his youth to an ugly war. Just ask Ray and he’ll tell you: there was nothing uglier than ‘Nam. Except maybe the doe-eyed doves that so vehemently opposed the efforts. Yesterday’s doves are today’s snowflakes, Ray has learned.

Despite the arthritis in his knees and a sore back that won’t quit, Ray remains fit for a man this side of seventy. He’s retained stringy muscles under his permanently tanned and mottled skin. He shifts the weight of his pack over his back, and takes a sip from the tube at his shoulder that connects to a bladder full of water. Droplets stick to his mustache like morning dew. He sings Dylan to himself. Even though Dylan wrote that song, that one that enraged all the boys back in the day and painted Bob as the poster boy for change, Ray still likes his tunes. Sometimes you can’t help what you like.

The sun sits high in the sky like a great orange marble, and the fabric from Ray’s tee-shirt sticks to his back uncomfortably beneath his heavy pack. From the research he did on the Google-machine in preparation, he thought he’d be approaching ice by now. A great wall of ice that NASA and the space boys like to lie and say is the continent of Antarctica. But Ray knows better. And it’s damn hot. A damn desert, in fact. So much for a wall of ice.

Ray trusts his senses above all else. He may be old, but his hearing and eyesight are still sharp and have never led him astray. Not so long ago, he climbed to the top of G. D. Kilimanjaro. And up there, after days and days of hiking, what the world revealed to the big baby blues God gave him was a flat horizon. It was like that song by The Who. He could see for miles and miles. He could see it all—a flat expanse of snow-covered Earth, and in that moment he knew. If he could climb Kilimanjaro and subsist in the sodden jungles of Vietnam, if he could kick skin cancer—not once but twice, thank you very much—and he could outlive every one of his five siblings, he could do this. If there ever was a man to discover the edge of the world, it was Ray Sumner.

He had to. He had to know what happened there. He had to go where no man had been.

Over the orange, cracking earth, Ray finally sees something in the distance. A structure. A tower, perhaps with some smaller scattered structures around the base. Ah, well. He’ll see it soon enough. Ray is nothing if not patient. He takes another sip from the tube at his shoulder.

He keeps a steady rhythm to his pace, left-right, left-right, like a train. One-two, one-two. A habit from his military days ingrained in him like a vestigial organ.

Something is amiss. As he draws closer, the tower appears to be a Ferris wheel. Ray doesn’t usually doubt his eyes, but he just can’t figure out what in Sam Hill a Ferris wheel is doing here. Here in literal no-man’s land.

When he passes under the entrance to the abandoned theme park, the sign overhead reads Everyman’s Land in scrolling broken neon. "Well," he chuckles, "I stand corrected."

The blue and red gondolas of the Ferris wheel sway slightly in the desert breeze, the squeaking of ancient hinges echoing through the park.

The park. It’s framed by the track of a great roller coaster. And beyond that: nothing. Darkness. Emptiness. The sun cuts out and the desert ceases to be. Ray knows. The edge. He’s found the edge.

He makes his way through the refuse of yesterday’s merriment. He passes a carousel dusted in the glass of its broken bulbs. The animals—soaring eagles, pouncing pumas, cantering horses—have been stripped of their paint by the elements.

A steel cart that once peddled hot dogs or cotton candy or funnel cakes blocks the path, pitched over on its side. Its red and white striped umbrella lays at his feet, torn and tattered, a giant stuffed bear impaled upon its pole. The breeze pulls at the bear’s filthy fur in ripples and waves. He steps over it and continues into the heart of the park.

On his left, he passes an aerial attraction called "The Red-Glare Rockets," and on his right, old bumper cars, deep scratches gouged into the red floor. A few cars sit on their side, a few are overturned completely.

Some unknown intuition drives him forward, to the outer rim of the park, where the entrance to the main roller coaster lives. In big, bold lettering, the coaster announces itself. "The Master of Infinity."

He walks up the steps to the stanchions that once divided crowds into neat zig-zagged lines. He opens the gate that leads to the cars, and it emits a god-awful squeak like a banshee on Halloween.

When the girl pops her head up from the track, she nearly gives Ray a heart-attack.

"I’m awfully sorry, sir, but Infinity is down until further notice."

"You scared me something fierce." Ray clutches at his chest to ensure his heart is still inside.

"Oh boy, I’m sorry, mister. I didn’t mean to scare ya." She scratches her nose and stands upright.

She looks like Rosie the Riveter and talks like Lucille Ball, a polka-dotted bandana knotted at the top of her strawberry blond head.

"No problem, but do you know when that will be?" Ray drums his fingers over the straps of his pack.

"When what will be?"

"When the coaster will be up and running?"

"Oh gee, as soon as I can fix it," she proclaims and holds up a rusty wrench.

"You?" Ray is a dubious man by nature, and he has quite a bit of trouble believing this freckled young thing knows her way around anything mechanical.

She slips the wrench into the pocket of her grease-stained coveralls and hops onto the platform beside him.

"Yup, just me. I’m trying my best to keep up with all the demand, but it’s a lot of work for just one person. Might I suggest you check out the bumper cars? Or the Monster House, if you’re in the mood for something spook-tastic."

Ray squints at her.

"I don’t think so, honey. I just passed the bumper cars and they’re in no shape to be ridden."

"Aw, nuts. I guess I’ll just have to add that to my to-do list. A woman’s work is never done!" She rubs her grease coated hands together. "Welp, if you’d like, you can ride the coaster, but you’d be doing so at your own risk. The park can’t be held liable for Infinity, at the moment."

"Why’s that?"

"Well," she drops her voice and leans into him, "the people load into the cars just fine, see. But when the ride is done, they’re not there anymore."

"The cars?"

"The people."

Ray thinks for a moment. He presses a finger into his big, gray mustache. He looks to the track. Beyond the metal and the mechanisms, he can just make out the edge. The beginning of the end. The truth.

"I think I may just risk it."

"Suit yourself!" Her chipper tone should be annoying but isn’t, somehow. "It’s probably for the best. Darn teenagers always treat the Monster House like a passion pit, anyway… Let me just find the liability waiver." She pops behind the ride’s control panel and shuffles through some papers. "Here it is."

She brings him a single sheet of paper, upon which is written an infinite amount of impossibly tiny writing. Ray knows his eyes aren’t what they once were, but he’s fairly confident he couldn’t have made out the print even if he were fifty years younger.

It doesn’t matter anyhow. He’s not going to sue. He’s about to ride Infinity at the edge of the world. Nothing else matters.

"Just need your John Hancock here, if you’d be so kind."

He takes her proffered pen, and she turns around and bends slightly, allowing him to sign his name by the great big X at the bottom against her back.

"Alright, in you go! Oh, but you’ll have to lose your pack."

He sets it down near the entrance to the ride and takes an excited breath. He climbs into the first car in the line of many. It’s black with yellow shooting stars along its front, as if illustrating the coming speed. The coming infinity.

The girl pushes the safety bar down over his lap.

"Please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle, and remain seated at all times. Now, prepare to master Infinity!" She winks at him and hops behind the control panel, where she pushes a lever. The track squeals beneath him. He’s thrust through a black tunnel with shooting stars painted along the inside. There’s a rolling clack-clack-clack beneath his feet.

Up Ray goes, cresting the top of the first hill, where he can see the entirety of the abandoned park beneath him. The Ferris wheel spins slightly in the breeze, the same wind that’s blowing over his ears and deafening him to everything.

Down Ray goes, sliding into weightlessness.

And then, nothing.

The wind in his ears, the gravity at his body. The car on the coaster track. Space before him. All gone, all gone entirely.

He blinks at the sudden vacuum he finds himself within, and he winds backward. Not backward physically, but entirely. Wholly. Ray is backward.

He knows nothing. Time and cruelty erase themselves from him, winding in reverse like a fast-motion film of a flower un-blooming or a pregnant woman’s fetus shrinking within her.

The vacuum erases everything from him. Everything but bliss in its truest form. No war. No cancer. No GD Kilimanjaro. No pain in his back or knees or head. No thirst or desire. He has only his ignorance; he’s oblivious to everything and anything. And it’s such a comfort.

Ray’s ignorance wraps around him like a favorite blanket. So cozy and wonderful, and not at all capable of smothering him. Except it’s smothering him. It’s forcing itself down his throat and up his nostrils and stealing his mind. But Ray is too ignorant to stop it.

A bible verse pops into Ray’s suffocating mind. "… for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens." Except it’s not true. Ray sees nothing.

And in the darkness, the vacuum snuffs out Ray Sumner like a candle.

The line of coaster cars pulls back into the station.

The girl pushes at the lever behind the control panel, and the cars come to a stop.

Her dimpled cheeks are plump as she smiles and says to herself, "The price of admission just keeps going up."