#11 Burial
– You know, Anna, I think this is where I first kissed your mother – Shouts Anders Kriek to his daughter, trying to make himself heard over the loud sound of metal being sawed off.
– Aaawww, that’so cute! – Anna replies, averting her eyes from her LARP friends in their patchwork armor swinging sledgehammers against the empty husk of a convenience store and filling sacks with the debris, to look at her father – So that’s why you jumped into this so quickly.
They are sitting together in Ander’s truck, tired and filthy – chiefly cement dust and flakes of rust, some soot – after doing their share of hammer swinging and cart pushing. Elizabeth Kriek died when Anna was very little. Cancer, it was. Anna barely remembers some of her features, but to see that her father’s reasons to treasure this place too are these makes her feel warm and fuzzy and like she will end up crying before this is over.
The spindly lookout tower to their east tilts southward after a loud ringing noise, then starts to fall. They hear Big Jim Sullivan and his son, Anna’s LARP mate William, cheering loudly. Anders can’t hold back a melancholy smile laden with nostalgia. He was thinking about how Anna looks so much like her mom, all big gray eyes and mousy brown hair, when he hears Big Jim laugh like that and feels yanked back to the 80s.
– He always liked to smash stuff, that one. Hasn’t changed a bit – says Anders – Like father, like son. And I guess we are taking the lookout perch too, then.
The sawing sound dies off and they hear more metal hitting the ground. Not as strongly, but closer.
– Hey you two, I got it! The placard! Help me haul this to my van, if you don’t mind, Anders my man?
Anders climbs out of his big truck to help Matt in his cumbersome metal plates and biker gear.
Matt is the oldest of the LARP kids – almost all in their early twenties, but kids to Anders all the same –, and was the last to enter the group, by virtue of being Anna’s boyfriend. But he really went all in, and came to the wake all decked out, with the fake double barrel slung on his back. He, like the rest of the Rogertown Post-Apocalyptic Roleplay Society, loves this place.
Matt and Anders lift the metal sheet off the ground, revealing the words OLD ROGER AMUSEMENT PARK, and put it in the back of Matt’s van. The rest of the people who came to help are done too. They all have their cars filled with whatever bits of park they can fit in, but the most impressive has to be Anders Kriek’s truck. It took some jiggery-pokery, and the Larsen’s boy literally almost died in a mishap, but they managed to put an entire pod from the Ferris wheel up there, as well as a cart from the smaller roller coaster.
Now the Sullivans as well as Luke and Diana Ngo, and their mom Mai, are hauling a fucking lookout tower to Big Jim’s jeep. The whole thing.
– We just gotta tie it real good! – says Big Jim, covered in sweat and rust and soot – Yeah, I’ll be at the back of the line.
That done, the procession of 8 cars and an actual long haul truck drive off to the coast. The oldsters with their nostalgia, some aren’t even parents of LARPers, talking about the good times when the park was up and running. The younger ones with their very present-day grief and hatred of the development company that bought the land their park stands on from the municipality, to build a gated community for rich people.
They arrive by sundown, at a cliff that Mai knew about. They get as close as they can with the cars, before dismounting for a few words.
Anders talks about Elizabeth and their first kiss aboard the Ferris wheel. Anna starts crying. Matt and William huddle closer with her. The three of them talk about that time when they defeated The Iron Jaws in an epic battle that ended with Robert Larsen showing up unexpectedly and saving the day, raining death from his perch atop the carousel.
Young Robbie Larsen, the only 16 year old of the bunch, beams with pride. The events are fake but the memories are very, very real. His older brother Alfie tousles his hair.
Mai got her first job in America at the park, selling trinkets in the very same convenience store Michael, Khaled, Nathalie and Alfie were trashing before.
Allen, the literature teacher that most of the LARPers consider a diamond in the rough of their schooling experience, has a poem at the ready. It is as bittersweet as they feel. Everybody claps.
There’s some crying. There’s some cheer. There’s a very rare inter-generational unity of purpose as they say their goodbyes to Old Roger.
And then they dump him in the sea.
