“Maybe in another life, I could find you there.” –The Offspring



A job in Boston at a software design company for Jason is all binary numbers and pie charts at winter Wednesday morning office meetings. He understands the routine so much he doesn’t even notice it. Tall, cramped buildings like the one Jason works in have these tiled white and flaky ceilings. Sometimes, these flakes, they fall into your lap, on your keyboard. Sometimes colleagues will flap them out of your hair. The veterans though, they never say or do anything about the flakes anymore.

But there was a time and place, as Jason vaguely remembered it, when people like him weren’t herded along by the power of the rich and the few. “The South” as he was always affectionately calling it, Jason’s childhood home, was the only topic that stirred up in him any kind of emotion. He regarded it as somewhat of a sentimental mystery, a universally hypnotic phenomenon, cozily wrapped around gently swaying trees and settled most ardently into clear lakes and open pastures. Jason’s always reminding his co-workers that life and youth so casually swing in the breeze and flow in the jet stream of the radio through the glossy curved chrome and open windows of teenagers’ automobiles at drive-in-theatres. The software engineers all synchronically nod their heads in time and agreement of course, and this is all over stale doughnuts and black coffee.

But we should know to be skeptical of this dramatic description only because they say many things, especially adolescence, seem much better in retrospect to middle aged men like Jason, and in that stage of fixed hindsight, we’re aware of that familiar emergence of haunting regret and longing. Jason always trudged through loopholes of past and present. With those bold, dark eyes, underlined with blurred rings of padded purple, his pale face was what we should examine as the essence of a tragic mid-life crisis. If such a phenomenon ever did exist, it thrived on Jason’s cold insides which once burned with all the vigor of the endless cups of grossly black coffee he sipped on hourly to stay awake at work.

Tangled in imagination, Jason doesn’t even realize the sleepy town of his memory has always been evolving just as much as he has over the years. If only he knew that once upon a time, the cracked concrete streets of the south were once smeared with dust and horses tied up outside swinging saloon doors. The football homecoming decorated streets in Jason’s mind were actually named after settlers who founded the small towns in the eighteen hundreds and fought the harsh conditions of an undiscovered West. That’s all dead and a dream now of course, but some still say that their voices hang adamantly in silence. In the residents of rural America, you can always detect a hint of that same die hard desire of the pioneer spirits that the great-great-great grandparents of the West have passed determinedly on to them.

As complacent and innocently detached as Jason may seem, he was not completely inexperienced with life, or risk, or laughter, or girls. In fact, he had held girls’ hands plenty of times. He especially remembers something amazing about this girl, Bethany, her hands, and the way they sort of fell heavy and asleep in his when he was only seventeen. These memories were his humanity, all he had left to combat the droning effect of his career. Twenty-three years later, when he sleeps, he dreams about her. When he falls haphazardly obvious and lazy over company copy machines or blankly stares statue-like into his screensaver, Bethany, and the way she said she would never forget him, is the only thing on his mind.


Jason remembered especially well the last time he ever held Bethany’s hand on a Ferris wheel seat perched on top of the world. He was terrified of heights, but when Bethany grabbed his hand, he exhaled all worry. Jason said it was like a soul exiting a dead body. Your homeostasis, digestion, the growth of you hair-- all of this stops at the moment Bethany puts her head on your shoulder. When the Ferris wheel halts abruptly, and the two of you hover there in the middle of the night sky, you suddenly never have to make a dental appointment again. You don’t think about paying bills, where you will go tomorrow, or what you will do for the rest of your life.

Nestled upon every corner and crack of Jason’s desk were these little bothersome flakes of ceiling. They were in his fingernails, under his shoelaces. Jason had these little white flakes in his nose and they smelled like paint.

In retrospect, it was perfect a thousand miles above the ground, where the sounds of the mingling crowd below, outlined craftily picturesque in the glow of the vender’s lights, fell cozily into a comfortable silence. Way up here, when your metal seat for two hovers in midair at the top of the world, you can’t hear anything but Bethany’s warm chest swell and collapse rhythmically with yours. You know how completely serene and quiet it is on an early snowy morning? Multiply this peaceful silence a hundred times more. That’s what it sounds like at the top of this gigantic Ferris wheel.

These chips of paint in the corporate office building, they sort of reminded Jason of snow. And generally, the office was deceivingly quiet, full of relentless click-click-clicking of keyboards and the electronic beeping of fax machines.

Jason’s insanity was probably more eventual than it seemed to be. But it goes without saying that anyone who saw him, slouched plainly over his desk while staring off into nowhere when little flakes of imaginary snow polluted his figure and ill concentrated ghost-white face, might have immediately called the hospital. When Jason’s head dropped sideways, everything was happening in a blurred slow motion: zeros and ones, and zero zero ones and long wailing beeps.

Fifteen minutes later, Jason was chasing his humanity at approximately eighty miles an hour in a 2002 silver Honda Accord. That is to say, he was driving to the Kingfisher, Oklahoma County fair of 1980. It was like charging down the Transatlantic Railroad into the past.

That usually small burning feeling that’s ever told you to do something crazy, that tells teenagers to drop out of school and become a rock stars, that tells eight year olds to jump off of high dives for the first time, that notion that caused pioneers to pick up everything and move a million miles west in wooden carts in search of gold -- well that mad desire is Jason, and Jason is now well over 85 miles an hour on a four lane stretch of highway.

Jason’s polished black glove box somehow accumulated little encrusted white flakes.

Like I said, these towns, they sort of fall asleep on you, sometimes quite unexpectedly. One moment they’re thriving with saloons and the next few centuries later they’re full of ghosts that sort of move awkwardly in the back of your mind like grainy black and white silent films. In the South, reckless desire sparks and rumbles amid the heat like metal wheels on a track to nowhere.

When Jason veered off onto that dirt and grass patched road that once led to the County Fair of 1980, he still wouldn’t turn back. What’s more amazing however, is that even though the open pasture was now just a graveyard for old worn out shacks, that determined Ferris wheel, though now rusted and tattered, still loomed there as firmly rooted as it was twenty-two years ago.

They say when you look deep into these towns peoples’ daughters’ eyes, you can imagine in your mind their ancestors cultivating American soil for the first time.

If you recall, Jason was afraid of heights, and it was far from him to climb a rusted Ferris wheel gone unattended for decades. Jason wasn’t himself by this time though, and he was, for lack of a more suitable word: insane.

Staring down onto that unforgiving land below, you can’t help but think about that faint but distinct, sweet scent of a girl on a summer night. Even without a jacket, you’re not cold when it starts to snow a light blanket. You think about her body and how it fell asleep all warm and light and cozy, like liquid, or home, all over you. Softly, her memory hums in your ears like the sound of your own heartbeat underwater.

Back when Oklahoma was called “The Great American Dessert,” a man named Jesse Lawrence rode a horse while jockeying another along with one arm in the Oklahoma Land Run to claim land for his family. Hundreds of years later, his first prairie home has become the tiny grits of dirt that get stuck in the cracks on the underside of Italian leather shoes. His current descendants, they’re all trapped inside big grey cubicles, office meetings, company SUVs.

That utter silence of snow at night-- it makes you stop and think about what you really want-- everything you wish your life could have revolved around. It can pull you inside out, as a Ferris wheel might, with the tragic power of its careless centripetal force. The way these tiny little freezing flakes of white dribble and melt on the back of your neck – they can twist and massage your heart to mush.

Somewhere in an office building hundreds of miles away, there’s a beeping and a click-click-clicking, and no one even knows that their associate is wrapped up inside himself on a snowy Ferris wheel.

Bethany is still alive and doing well. By now over breakfast, her husband’s reading an amusing, little newspaper story about the recently discovered body of a man named Jason who apparently leapt to his death from an old, local Ferris wheel. She raises an eyebrow as she fills out her list of things not to forget at the grocery store. “That’s ironic,” he says, “a crumpled note addressed to a seventeen year old girl named Bethany was found in his pocket.”

For a moment she almost drops her coffee. Her head tilts cute and confused.

“What a sad thing for someone to do over some stupid girl,” she says.

Three hundred, twenty-four miles away, minuscule white flakes drizzle on white collars and colored ties. Most people, they don’t even feel them anymore.