Must Be This Tall

Threshold Park opened in 2031, the same year the federal government began requiring olfactometric baselines for all citizens over the age of twelve. The baselines were part of the Moral Wellness Initiative, which was part of the Department of Interiority, which had been created by an executive order that nobody remembered signing. The park was a public-private partnership, which meant the government had paid for it and a corporation had named it. The corporation was called Edenvale Solutions. They also made dental chairs.

The sign at the entrance said THRESHOLD PARK: KNOW YOURSELF, THEN PROCEED. Below, in smaller letters, it said: A Department of Interiority Approved Facility. Visitors with pacemakers, pregnancy, or pending litigation should consult their facilitator before riding. There was a height requirement posted, which struck most visitors as strange, since the rides did not involve speed or motion. You had to be forty-eight inches tall. Nobody knew why. Dr. Salk, when asked, said it was a liability issue, which was the answer she gave to most questions.

The Gaskin family arrived on a Tuesday in October. Lorraine Gaskin, seventy-one, had organized the trip. She had read about Threshold Park in a magazine called Flourish, which she subscribed to because the name sounded like what she wanted her family to do. The article had called the park “a spa for the soul” and had included a photograph of a woman emerging from one of the rides looking, according to the caption, “transformed.” The woman in the photograph looked to Lorraine like she’d been crying, but the magazine had used a filter that made tears look like highlights.

Her son Ray drove. His wife Janine sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap, the way she always sat, as if she were waiting for someone to tell her what to do with them. Their children, Britt and Kell, sat in the back with Lorraine. Britt was twelve and had the face of someone calculating whether you were worth her time. Kell was nine and had not stopped talking since Knoxville.

“I heard a kid threw up on one of the rides,” Kell said. “Not because it was scary. Because of what he saw.”

“You don’t see things on rides,” Ray said. “Rides go fast and you scream.”

“These rides show you who you are,” Lorraine said from the back seat, using the voice she had used for thirty-two years in her fourth-grade classroom, the voice that made statements sound like settled law. “They’re therapeutic.”

“They’re forty dollars,” Ray said.

The parking lot was enormous and mostly empty. This was not unusual. Threshold Park had been open for two years and had never once operated at capacity. The brochure said the park could accommodate six hundred visitors per day. The average was eighty-three. The park’s founder, Dr. Petra Salk — no relation to the polio doctor, though she did not correct people who assumed otherwise — had written in the annual report that low attendance was itself diagnostic. “The people who need Threshold most,” she wrote, “are precisely the people who will not come.”

The Gaskins were met at the entrance by a facilitator named Todd. Todd wore a polo shirt the color of a bruise and a lanyard that said GUIDE in letters large enough to read from across the parking lot.

“Welcome to Threshold,” Todd said. “Has anyone been with us before?”

Nobody had.

“Wonderful. First step is calibration. Follow me.”

Calibration took place in a room that smelled like a dentist’s office — the same nothing-smell, the aggressive absence of odor. Five chairs, each with a small mask attached by a flexible arm. Todd explained that the olfactometric baseline would take approximately four minutes per person. The masks would measure scent-response patterns in the limbic system. The results would be used to calibrate each rider’s experience.

“What does calibrate mean,” Britt said. It was not a question. She knew what calibrate meant. She wanted Todd to explain himself.

“It means we adjust the ride to you specifically,” Todd said. “Each person’s experience is unique.”

“Like a fingerprint,” Kell said.

“Like a fingerprint,” Todd agreed.

“What if you don’t have fingerprints,” Kell said. “Some people don’t have fingerprints. I read about it.”

“You have fingerprints,” Lorraine said.

They sat in the chairs. They breathed into the masks. The machine made sounds like a printer running out of something it needed. After four minutes each, a green light appeared on a small screen beside the chair, and that was that.

Ray was the first to refuse.

“I’m good,” he said, standing up from the calibration chair and stretching like a man who had just completed a satisfying nap. “I’ll be in the car.”

“Ray,” Lorraine said.

“Mama, I drove three hours. I sat in the chair. I breathed in the thing. I’m not getting on a ride that’s going to tell me what’s wrong with me. I know what’s wrong with me.” He smiled. It was a good smile. It was the smile of a man who had decided, long ago, that self-knowledge was a finished project. “I drink too much and I don’t listen. There. Saved myself forty dollars.”

“The experience is included with your admission,” Todd said. “There’s no additional charge for the rides.”

“Then I saved myself the experience,” Ray said, as if this were even better.

He walked back to the car. He walked the way he always walked — hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, a man with nothing on his conscience because his conscience had a limited vocabulary. Todd watched him go. There was a form on his clipboard. He checked a box that said VOLUNTARY NON-PARTICIPATION and another that said FAMILY UNIT INCOMPLETE, which Lorraine saw and which seemed to her both clinically accurate and devastatingly personal, though Todd had clearly not meant it that way.

“That happens,” Todd said. “About forty percent of adult males opt out.”

“That happens at home too,” Janine said, quietly, to no one.

There were seven rides. They had names like Prudence and Contrition and Candor. The rides were housed in structures that looked like storage units — long, low, windowless buildings the color of wet cement. There were no roller coasters. There were no visible tracks. You walked in one end and walked out the other. What happened inside was different for everyone, Todd said, because the olfactometric data shaped the experience. Smells triggered memories. Memories triggered recognitions. Recognitions triggered what Dr. Salk called “threshold events.”

“What’s a threshold event,” Britt said. Same flat tone. Same demand.

“A moment where you see something about yourself you didn’t see before,” Todd said.

“What if you already see everything about yourself.”

“Nobody does,” Todd said, gently.

“I do,” Britt said.

Britt went first. She chose Candor, which Todd said was popular with younger visitors. She walked in. She was inside for eleven minutes. She walked out. Her expression had not changed. It was the same expression she’d worn going in — evaluative, unimpressed, the face of a restaurant critic at a gas station.

“Well?” Lorraine said.

Britt shrugged. “It smelled like Grandpa’s truck.”

“And?”

“And what. It smelled like his truck and there were lights and I sat in a room and a voice asked me questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Personal questions.” Britt looked at Todd. “Is that what it does? It asks you stuff?”

“The experience is different for everyone,” Todd said.

“It asked me if I was sorry about Hannah Lovett,” Britt said, to no one in particular. “I’m not sorry about Hannah Lovett. Hannah Lovett is a liar.”

Lorraine did not know who Hannah Lovett was. She filed this away in the part of her mind where she kept evidence of her grandchildren’s social cruelties, a file that was growing thicker every year.

Kell went next. He chose Prudence because he liked the word. He was inside for nine minutes. He came out grinning.

“It wasn’t even scary,” he said. “There was a room with a mirror and the mirror showed you older and I was old and I looked fine. I had a beard.”

“That’s it?” Lorraine said.

“That’s it. And then the floor tilted and I had to choose a door and I chose the wrong one but it didn’t matter because both doors went to the same hallway. And the hallway had pictures of dogs. Dead dogs. Dogs I’m going to have someday who are going to die.” He was still grinning. “But I didn’t have them yet so it wasn’t sad.”

Janine went in third. She chose Contrition, which was the smallest building, barely larger than a garden shed. She was inside for twenty-two minutes. When she came out, her eyes were dry but her jaw was set in a way Lorraine had never seen before — locked, almost, like something behind the teeth had shifted into position.

“Are you all right?” Lorraine asked.

Janine looked at her. “I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“It’s private.”

“Of course it’s private, but —”

“It’s private,” Janine said again, and walked toward the gift shop without looking back.

Lorraine chose Humility. Not because she thought she lacked it. Because she thought, if she were being honest with herself, and she usually was, or believed she was, which she understood were not the same thing but treated as the same thing in practice — she thought humility was the virtue she had earned. Thirty-two years of teaching other people’s children. Three decades of biting her tongue at Thanksgivings while Ray drank and Janine sat there and the grandchildren ate with their hands. She had been humble. She had been patient. She had been, she believed, good.

She walked into the building. It smelled like chalk dust and then it smelled like her mother’s perfume and then it smelled like nothing — that dentist’s-office absence again. The room was dark and then it wasn’t. There was a screen, or a window, or a mirror. She couldn’t tell.

What she saw was a kitchen. Her kitchen. Thanksgiving. The table was set. Ray was pouring bourbon into a coffee mug, thinking nobody could see. Janine was sitting with her hands in her lap. Britt was watching Lorraine with those calculating eyes. Kell was talking to the dog. And Lorraine — the Lorraine in the mirror or window or screen — was standing at the head of the table, and she was smiling, and her smile was the same shape as Britt’s assessment, the same temperature as Janine’s silence. Her smile said: I know what you are. I have always known. And I will never stop knowing. I will know and know and know, and none of them will ever be good enough, and that’s fine, because they aren’t.

She watched herself carve the turkey. She watched herself serve each plate with a precision that was, she saw now, not generosity but control. The dark meat to Ray. The smallest portion to Janine. Extra to the children, because the children still had time. And then the scene shifted, or she shifted, and she was watching herself in the car on the drive down — just three hours ago, though it felt like a documentary about someone she used to know — and she heard herself say “They’re therapeutic” in that settled-law voice, and she understood something about the voice that she could not have put into words, and would not have put into words even if she could, because it was the kind of understanding that only works as long as you don’t look at it.

The room smelled like gravy. Then it smelled like chalk dust. Then it smelled like the parking lot — hot asphalt and exhaust, the smell of leaving. The lights went off and a door opened and she walked through it.

The gift shop was air-conditioned and sold the following items: refrigerator magnets ($7.99), coffee mugs ($14.99), T-shirts ($24.99), and snow globes ($34.99). The snow globes contained tiny houses, and when you shook them, the snow that fell was the color of ash. The magnets said things. They said THRESHOLD: I CROSSED MINE. They said GRACE HAPPENS. They said the park’s mission statement in letters so small you’d need reading glasses to see them, which Lorraine happened to have in her purse, so she read it: Every person contains a version of themselves they have not met. We make introductions.

Janine was standing in front of a rack of postcards, looking at them without picking any up. The postcards showed the park from the air: the cement buildings in their neat rows, the enormous empty parking lot, the highway beyond. From above, Threshold Park looked like a storage facility. It looked like a place where you put things you no longer wanted but couldn’t throw away.

Britt was trying on a T-shirt over her clothes. Kell was shaking a snow globe and watching the ash settle.

Lorraine stood in the center of the gift shop. She could feel something in her chest that she did not like. She walked past the mugs. She walked past the T-shirts. She walked past the snow globe display, where Kell was still shaking the same globe, watching ash settle on the tiny house over and over.

She picked up a magnet. GRACE HAPPENS. She held it in her hand. It weighed almost nothing. It was the cheapest thing in the store. It was the kind of thing she put on her refrigerator at home, where she kept magnets from every vacation, every landmark, every place the family had been.

She bought it.

In the car, Ray had the radio on. He’d been listening to a game. The Braves were losing. He looked rested and sure of himself and completely, permanently, cheerfully beyond reach.

“How was it,” he said.

“Fine,” Lorraine said.

“Fun?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be fun.”

“Everything’s supposed to be fun,” Ray said. “That’s why they charge admission.”

He pulled out of the parking lot. Kell fell asleep before they reached the highway. Britt put in earbuds and disappeared into whatever twelve-year-olds disappear into. Janine looked out the window, which was new. Lorraine sat in the back seat with the magnet in her purse and something in her chest that she would later decide was indigestion, and then decide was nothing, and then not decide anything at all, because by the following Thursday the only thing she remembered about Threshold Park was that the girl at the register had a nose ring and had said “Have a blessed day” without irony, or possibly with irony — in that part of the country, it was impossible to tell.

She put the magnet on the refrigerator. GRACE HAPPENS. She read it every morning. It meant nothing to her. It meant $7.99.