Ride the Titanic! Read Online Free Page A

unexpected, disastrous destiny.
    We stand there in the dark, relieved only by the haunting image of the Titanic floating in space like some sort of dream. No longer are we in a basement in Orlando, Florida; we’re off the coast of Newfoundland, racing through the night, while music plays and death waits.
    Joe says softly, ‘Hell of a thing to happen. All those people.’
    ‘What if you had a chance to be one of them?’
    ‘You mean the ride? Blue-sky is all it ever was. Like Mickey’s Moonwalk .’
    ‘It’s so much better than that crappy ride and you know it. Besides, mine would have worked.’
    I flick on the basement lights and the illusion vanishes, just like all ‘dark’ rides do when you turn on the lights. Take a trip on Universal Studio’s Amazing Adventures of Spiderman in ‘maintenance mode,’ with the 4D screens and nitrogen gas jets turned off and the fluorescents on, and if you’re an average rider, it’s about as thrilling as walking through a warehouse filled with junk. As a Disney brat I hated it, but as a ride designer, that’s when it’s at its best. You get to see how they pull the rabbit out of the hat, and what’s more, you start thinking how you can pull it out even better.
    ‘Remember my Ride Rooms ?’ I say, as I fold down the side of the hull to reveal a series of pressurized chambers arranged sausage-link-style, with their interiors done up as First Class Staterooms, Steerage, the Men’s smoker, the Gymnasium and other familiar Titanic locales that, when filled with high-paying ‘Platinum-Riders,’ would have filled up with water and simulated the sinking ship, even as my real ship actually sank in the waters off the Florida coast. It was beyond 4-D, beyond virtual reality, it was reality-reality.
    ‘Such a cockamamie idea,’ Joe says. ‘You couldn’t pay me to get in one of those rooms and go down with the ship.’
    ‘Market research proved otherwise, remember? We would have turned a profit in less than two years.’
    ‘Maybe so, but how were you going to feed your family until then?’
    I finger the delicate brass railings on the Promenade Deck and for some reason almost weep. This is worse than remembering my first love. Tempestuous, demanding, I was Icarus and she the sun, and nothing could stop me from flapping my wings too close to her destructive heat.
    This feels just as painful. I smooth my hand over one of the Titanic’s buff colored smokestacks. Lost loves and lost dreams are terrible things. Even though they’re gone, you keep looking for them, hoping they’ll miraculously turn up again someday. But they never do.
    Joe says, ‘Maybe you can sell this thing. It’s still a nice model.’
    My hand freezes. ‘The hell with that. We’re going to re-invent it.’
    ‘We?’
    I yank hard on the ride room chamber labeled Men’s Smoker . It comes loose in an explosion of broken plastic and wooden bits.
    ‘Want to help me feed my family the right way, or do you want to clean my pool and paint rocks until you drop dead, while I fiddle around with sheet metal and Freon compressors and die of boredom?’
    One by one I rip out the ride rooms until there’s nothing left but a yawning cavity of dangling wires and broken stairways. The guts of my long-ago ride lays at my feet like a crumpled Icarus. I kick at the junk, skittering it across the floor.
    Joe says, ‘You’re nuts, you know that?’
    ‘No more than you, paisan .’
    ‘Drop anchor, kid, and shut up. Take a deep breath, put your dreams on the shelf and make that phone call. I’ll clean up the mess. I’m good at shit like this.’
    ‘Later.’
    In an odd way, what remains of the miniature interior lights of the gutted model reminds me of the maintenance lights on a dark ride, and the vision comes to me. Yes, I said vision. Saints aren’t the only ones who have them. Sinners do too.
    ‘First of all, this thing’s never going to sea, so we don’t need any of this crap.’
    I rip out the diesel