Divorce-o-rama: Divorce as a Dark Ride

by Amy Bowers

The sign says “Divorce-o-Rama” in red oxidized letters. Hung off-kilter, the edges glow with an absinthe green light like an accelerating big rig barreling towards you. The phantom driver pulls his chain, and you hear the long-winded horn bellow, threatening to run you over. This ride will destroy you.

You fidget and consider leaving, but the line is congested, and you are pushed forward and can’t get out. The building is low and wide with grayed purple streaks and punched holes across its face, like a bruised mobile home in a park of surreal horrors. “Where is your ticket?” As you search your pockets, the guy in worn-thin jeans with greasy gray hair says, “Go on, you good,” and points a big-knuckled finger towards the entrance. 

A cardboard sign reads: You must ride the attraction alone. No partners allowed.

You step into the open pretzel car, which has a slippery seat.  There is no door or waist strap. You wedge into the corner, pressing a foot hard to the rubber floor for bracing, or maybe you are pushing an imagined gas pedal. As soon as you are seated, the car twirls fast clockwise a dozen times and then stops. Your head is thick and woozy now. 

The car moves along the track and jerks in a stop-and-go dance until you are in position. You are the next to enter the ride, and you are ready. With a whir, you herky-jerky through the wooden doors in front of you. They are huge and covered with wild question marks and spirals. You are meant to be curious about what could be behind those doors, but somehow you already know.  

The doors’ weight slaps against the interior wall as they open and then gently flutter back into position. You roll into a bright room. The walls are white and made up of odd pieces of plywood. The electrical conduit is white, the floor is white, and the tracks are white - although scraped clean at the top, revealing the metal. The fuse box is white. But it is okay because everything is painted and patched to make it seem cohesive like someone cares. The only color is the giant cherry red hearts painted on the walls. In a silver, curly font, they say things like “love” “cherish,” and “4ever.” 

You realize that you are in a tunnel of love. 

The smell of cotton candy and roses and violets is pumped in, and you feel warm and nauseous. The ride moves so slowly that you become bored, take a nap, and wake up to find that you are finally approaching the edge of the room. 

Through another set of doors, this time unadorned, you enter the room of regrets and unrealized versions of yourself. The walls are covered with an accretion of trophies and certificates and pictures of young people with wide smiles in graduation robes. Gold, bronze, and silver emblems of possibility and promise are layered thick into an encrusted tunnel that becomes narrower at the end. A cascade of polyester and silk award ribbons, some with metals, shimmer in the light like a dense waterfall. You duck down, but several fake metallic discs hit you in the head.  

The next three rooms are pleasant. They are domestic scenes of a simple family represented by automatons with blank, padded canvas heads. A sign tells you that although broken, normally, these rooms feature “cutting-edge technology” that projects your family’s faces onto the heads, like a Tony Oursler installation. This is unknowingly synced from your phone when you enter the ride. “Mr. Blue Sky” by ELO is playing. You smile and feel hopeful and don’t mind the empty heads, and you imagine your own children and husband fondly.

The first room shows the family in the backyard. The kids have built a fort from lawn chairs and sheets. The adults sip Stella Artois and look towards the sky; a light breeze, scented with bitter orange and the Florida heat, fills the air. You examine the scene closely, looking for any hint of what is to come. A pulsing neck muscle, a terse word, a squinted glance. You don’t notice anything—just the midday cicadas and a relaxed happiness that feels like mythology now. 

In the next room, the family has moved towards the house for dinner. The male automaton grills on the back porch, chicken kebabs, a family favorite. The sliding glass doors are open, making the inside and outside the same. The female automaton makes a salad, swirling the homemade dressing in a large, dented stainless steel bowl. The scent of lemon and garlic and parsley and grilled meat fills the room. You inhale deeply, and your stomach shuts with hunger. The kids, escaping the dusk mosquitoes, have moved inside to draw on the chalkboard wall or swing on the hallway swing attached to a very strong support beam. Safe, settled, and satisfied are the feelings in this room. For the meal, for the end of the day, and for the future.

The last room of the nostalgia triad recreates the interior of a minivan. With her blank face, the female automaton drives all three kids. The male is missing. As she merges onto the highway, a scene made realistic by a projection on a sheet hung at the end of the room, you feel her tension. Something pops up in the median, and you swerve, gasping. Then you notice it was just a papier-mâché stunt - an empty box that the weight of the ride’s car triggers opens to make a papier-mâché demon head pop out.  It is lightweight but horrifying. Sort of like how a six-pack carried by a finger through the plastic rings or a mere gram of pot can transform a person into something different. Or the weight of family responsibility can trigger a reflex and bring up something that needs to be exorcised.

Still shaken, your car moves to a room of total and true darkness. The walls are painted that black color you read about online, Vantablack. The obliterating color that artist Anish Kapoor collaborated on and retained exclusive rights to, despite an uproar from the art world.  It absorbs 99% of light, and it is prohibitively expensive. How is it being used in a carnival ride, you ask yourself. But divorce is absurdly costly on many fronts, so it checks.  

The room is disturbing but not scary. You remember experiencing true darkness one other time when visiting Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The tour guide turned out the lights, and you stood in the damp coolness, waiting for your eyes to adjust to find one edge of a wall or a shadow lighter than the rest. Your eyes were frantic. And then the guide struck a single match, and the entire cavern was lit. It was a lesson on little impacts and big outcomes. Your eight-year-old mind was blown. Now, your forty-five-year-old mind enjoys the obliteration and would like to disappear into it. 

The ride stalls in this dark room and seems broken. Overhead and announcement blares in a fried and disintegrating voice:   

Please stay seated, the ride has come to a momentary stop due to the fact that you have been bad—that is, not good enough. The ride will resume momentarily. You couldn’t or wouldn’t save this. You ask for too much. Who do you think you are? Please keep your arms inside the vehicle, as it will resume again shortly. In other words. Stay in your lane, bitch.

After an indeterminable amount of time—it could be five minutes or five hours—you have no idea because you have begun dissociating and have folded in on yourself, the ride moves forward. 

The next room is filled with torment: psychedelic colors, flashing lights, and clanging noises overwhelm your senses. It is like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in slow motion. Fragmented memories flash. You are not sure if they are real or, in your mind, induced through some sort of brainwashing trickery. There are fights, slammed doors, angry knocks on locked doors, parking lots and empty yards in the middle of the night, rabbits and little dogs thrown through the air.

Over the soundtrack of grinding metal and screams, a deep voice keeps repeating, You know what you did. Everyone is afraid of you. I know who you are. The words seem menacing and directed at you, but wracking your memory, you can’t remember what you've done. 

In the middle of a panic attack this room has induced, you get a text from a kid—you must complete a flurry of tasks to move beyond this room. It is a rich irony that just as you are losing your mind, people need you the most. You must forget that you are on a ride, fill out an insurance waiver, send a transcript, and give directions on how to get somewhere as if you could navigate anything at all. 

You complete the tasks and sense the ride is coming to an end. 

All the cars conglomerate and turn to prepare for the unloading, and you catch, for the very first time, the other riders, many of whom you know. They are the people you have had dinner parties with, where half of each couple would get drunk and say inappropriate things that would be addressed in a flurry of texts over dark coffee the next morning. They are mostly the married couples who were busy doing all the good things: ambitious house renovations, trips, small vanity businesses, fancy parties. 

You will see none of the friends you used to think had boring lives. They are not on this ride. 

The ride suddenly stops in the middle of the final room. 

The announcement track says: Disembark, it’s over. Have a nice day.

You and the others crawl out of the cars, stumbling over the tracks, and look at the dusty black walls made visible by the leaking light from where you are headed. Struggling to push the doors open, you slip and fall through; the bright sun blinds you, and your eyes water. 

Now you are in the amusement park with throngs of people, the cacophony of tilt-a-whirls and barkers, errant roller coaster screams, and a submerged music track that is meant to be upbeat but is jagged like a hangnail getting caught on a sweater. Sweet popcorn odors. Families with manic smiles and cotton candy tears pass you by. Bells ring as a strong man’s hammer sends a puck to the top of a tower. He crows. This world, overwhelming, is no better, and you turn to go back into the dark ride. But the doors have closed, and there is no handle to hold onto; your hands grope the door and come up empty. 

Amy Bowers is a Florida native. Her writing explores domestic culture, insect and natural worlds, and manufactured s/places. She has work in [PANK], Washington Square Review, West Trade Review, Barzakh, Assay, and LA Review of Books. Her essay "Manual" is anthologized in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays.