J.R. Angelella
Cyclone
1.
The last time Noah saw Joy she was his girlfriend. It was Coney Island, and they rode the Wonder Wheel because she refused to ride the Cyclone.
“I’ve never been good at being scared,” she said. “I can’t commit to that.”
“Fear is only the absence of humor,” he said.
The Cyclone rose behind the park like something old enough to remember time.
“Then you must live an entirely fearful life.”
“Turn your frown upside down.”
“Don’t beat me with child psychology.”
Noah ate a Nathan’s hot dog with sauerkraut and spicy mustard. Joy licked a lemon Italian ice from a paper cup with a little wooden spoon until the ice went soupy and she drank it. They shared watered-down daiquiris out of plastic flutes while walking the cracked planks of the boardwalk, the ocean to their right, all pitch and muscle beneath the dark, and the rides to their left flickering like a cheap heaven.
They stopped to watch two street crews dance-battle to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” This, thought Noah, was either art or tax evasion. Maybe both. All one needed, apparently, was a speaker, some athletic children, and an empty bucket for tips. The crowd cheered in uneven bursts, deciding who won not by anything measurable but by whoever made them yell loudest.
The dance-battle, said a teenage boy nearby, was epic.
One team twisted and dropped and spun, their limbs turning like garlic knots. The other answered with backflips and windmills and a lot of face. It was all very Coney Island’s West Side Story. Noah wasn’t particularly interested, but Joy was, so he feigned enthusiasm. He clapped when cued by the teenage boy. He nodded. He said, “wow,” in the proper places.
When one team clearly won, Noah cheered for them.
Joy, predictably, cheered for the team that lost.
“I guess this means opposites attract,” he said, leaning in for a kiss.
“We’re more alike than you think,” she said, sucking melted daiquiri through a straw.
After the crowd began to disperse, the youngest dancer from the losing team — a kid, probably thirteen or fourteen — walked up to the captain of the winning team, who was older, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, and flashed a knife.
He stabbed her in the thigh.
“Oh no,” Noah said.
Joy laughed, unaware of what had happened.
“How does it feel to have humor?” she said. Then, mocking him: “Oh no.”
Blood pumped hot and immediate through the captain’s tights. She stumbled and dropped to the planks. The crews exploded into a clumsy fight, all elbows and panic and flailing loyalty. Cops on foot and horseback stormed through the chaos, breaking it apart and tackling dancers in batches. The kid who started it all rode away standing on the back pegs of someone else’s bicycle.
“There goes the boy,” Noah said.
“It was a girl,” Joy corrected him. “And it happened because they lost. Nobody likes to lose.”
This was Sunday. Six days ago. They were not asked for a statement, and neither of them offered one. On the walk back to the Stillwell Avenue station, Joy asked, rhetorically, how it was possible she had never heard “Smooth Criminal” before. This disturbed her more than the stabbing.
“Everyone knew the words,” she said.
“Everyone pretends to know the words,” Noah said.
“Everyone knew the music.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Everyone did know the music.”
She did not laugh at his sarcasm.
“Next time,” he said, “the Cyclone.”
“I really don’t think,” she said, “there will be a next time.”
As the F train pulled away from the ocean, he kissed the back of her hand and sang quietly, “It was Sunday. What a black day.”
She let him keep her hand but turned her face toward the window.
That was the part he kept revisiting. Not the knife. Not even the blood. It was the hand. How she let him keep it without squeezing back.
2.
The man checking into the bedroom across the hall from Noah introduced himself as Large Charlie.
He was, according to him, seven-foot-two and four hundred pounds, though Noah had no way of verifying either figure or was too tired to challenge them. Large Charlie smelled like sausage pizza and discount cologne. Sweat shined across his skin without ever fully rolling free. He dragged a large black suitcase behind him and greeted the technicians as if he were a regular at a resort.
“I love this place,” he shouted to Noah across the hall as Tech Crystal fastened a plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist.
“This is his first time,” Tech Crystal said, nodding at Noah.
Large Charlie looked him over with interest.
“I love this place,” he repeated. “Best place in Manhattan, if you can get past the electrodes.”
The hallway of the New York Sleep Institute was carpeted, anonymous, and too brightly lit. Every door looked the same. Every room had two narrow beds, one desk, one chair, and the kind of television mounted high in a corner no one ever watched voluntarily. The whole place felt less medical than disciplinary, as if children with bad habits had once been sent here to be corrected.
“What are your problems?” Large Charlie asked. “Most people have more than one.”
“Sleepwalking,” Noah said.
“That’s a symptom, not a problem.”
“I don’t know then.” Noah pressed through his confusion at the question. “What are yours?”
“Sleep apnea and night terrors,” Large Charlie said, opening his suitcase. “Which is a nice way of saying my body tries to murder me in my sleep.” He unpacked with reverence: slippers, a folded robe, three over-sized Henleys, sweatpants, a travel pillow of unusual girth, earplugs, his own soap. “Did you know,” Large Charlie said, “the average person swallows six spiders a year in their sleep?”
“That can’t be true.”
“Afraid so.”
“Not possible.”
“Ten might be pushing it,” Large Charlie said. “But six…six is totally doable.” He stopped unpacking and wiped his giant hand across his forehead, clearing away sweat. “Six is a fucking lot of spiders.”
Noah decided immediately he did not want to be part of that statistic.
“Who’s counting these spiders?” Noah asked.
“No idea.”
“Based on how many people?”
Large Charlie looked up. “The question isn’t how many people. The question is how would they know?”
Noah thought about it and nodded in agreement. He wished they would stop talking about eating spiders now.
“What do you do for a living, neighbor?” Large Charlie asked, pulling off a sweat-staining t-shirt. His upper body didn’t look fat. He looked like the mythical creature.
“I’m a bankruptcy analyst,” Noah said. It was lie. He was not. He always lied when asked questions. “What about you?”
“I’m an exterminator,” Large Charlei said, rubbing his belly.
Noah didn’t even smile.
“What is it?” Large Charlie asked.
“You like to tell stories,” Noah said.
Large Charlie nodded and turned to Tech Crystal, setting electrodes on Large Charlie’s chest now. “Skeptic,” he shouted. “Tech Crystal, add that to your chart. This man right here doesn’t believe in truth.”
3.
Earlier in the week, a doctor diagnosed Noah with acute somnambulism.
“Put simply,” the doctor said, “severe sleepwalking.”
“Impossible,” Noah said. “I don’t sleepwalk.”
“That is often the opinion of sleepwalkers.”
“I think I would know if I got up and roamed around.”
“Would you?”
There were, in fairness, some recent incidents.
One night he woke standing barefoot at the kitchen sink, eating a square of feta cheese with chopsticks. Another night he woke on the couch with one leg crossed over the other, a men’s magazine in his lap opened to an article ranking the best hot dog stands in America. And yet another night he woke in the hallway of his apartment building urinating on his neighbor’s welcome mat. The mat said, in cheerful script: Good Guests Shed Their Shoes. He was aiming for all of the G’s.
After this incident, he called his therapist and begged for an emergency appointment. She sat with him through the details. The feta. The magazine. The hallway. The mat. The G’s.
“This has never happened before?” she asked.
“Not unless I’ve been incredibly efficient about forgetting it.”
And so, she referred him to the sleep specialist. And the sleep specialist referred him to the Institute.
“Likely causes include stress,” the doctor said. “A sudden lifestyle change. Anxiety. Substance use. Sleep deprivation. Any of these ring a bell?”
“I don’t even need a daily vitamin,” Noah said.
“That’s not really the defense you think it is.”
When the session ended, his therapist stood and walked him to the door. Before he left, she said, “I have never seen you be this honest before.”
He almost turned back to ask what she meant by that. Instead, he thanked her and went downstairs and called Joy.
She didn’t answer.
He hadn’t seen her since Coney Island.
Three days after that, she texted: I think you want me around because I make you feel like a person who has a life. That’s not the same thing as love.
He read the text six times before not responding.
She didn’t text again.
That had been enough, apparently, to teach his body the ancient art of sleep escape.
4.
The New York Sleep Institute sat between Ninth and Tenth Avenue on Fifty-Fifth Street in a building that looked like accountants might work there. By ten-thirty Noah had been wired with electrodes. Tech Crystal, a dental hygienist during the day, attached leads to his scalp and chest while Tech Dawn, a kindergarten teacher during the day, explained the bathroom protocol in a voice so calm it could have narrated executions.
“Try to sleep normally,” Tech Dawn said.
As if that were an option.
Through the thin wall he could hear Large Charlie speaking to himself in full conversational cadence. “I am relaxed,” Large Charlie said. Then, after a pause: “I am extremely relaxed.” Then: “Spiders aren’t real.”
Noah lay on the narrow bed in socks and an institutional T-shirt, staring at the ceiling. The monitors beside him glowed and clicked. There was no television. He had no book. He only had himself, which was clearly part of the problem.
It was sometime after midnight when he finally slept.
Suddenly, he was back at Coney Island. The boardwalk was empty. Not the normal bustle of things. No dancers. No tourists. No laughter. The newer rides glowed neon in the distance. And the Cyclone stood above it all. A giant in the night. Rising up against it all.
Joy stood by the Cyclone this time.
“You ready?” he asked.
She looked at the Cyclone rising and dropping. “I told you,” she said. “I’m bad at being scared. I really wasn’t kidding about it.”
“Fear is the absence of humor.”
“You keep saying that like it means something to me. I assure that it doesn’t.”
“It should mean everything to you,” he said.
“No,” she said. “It’s just something you say when you don’t want to admit you’re frightened.”
He tried to laugh but couldn’t.
The train rolled into the station. Empty. They climbed aboard. The bar dropped across their laps. The wooden car lurched forward and began to climb. Below them, the boardwalk shrank. The ocean widened. The whole city became a carbon copy of itself.
At the top, the train paused. The air changed. Joy turned and looked at him. “Why didn’t we ride this before?” she asked.
“Because you were afraid.”
She smiled, but not kindly. “No,” she said. “Because you were.”
Then the tracks vanished. The front of the train tipped into blackness.
Noah woke standing in the hallway of the sleep clinic with electrode wires dragging from his chest like seaweed.
Large Charlie stood in his doorway watching. “Sleepwalker,” Large Charlie shouted.
Noah looked down the long hall. Covered in fluorescent light.
“What was I doing?” he asked.
Large Charlie shrugged. “Heading for the stairs. Said something about going to the Cyclone.”
The technicians descended fast, ushering him gently but firmly back into bed. No one seemed alarmed. To them, this was simply a Tuesday.
“We got enough data,” Tech Crystal said.
“Enough for what?”
“To tell you what’s wrong.”
“I already know what’s wrong.”
“Do you?”
“I think I lost my sense of humor.”
In the morning, after bad coffee and a stale blueberry muffin in a waiting room full of people, the doctor reviewed the findings.
“Your body is mobilizing during sleep.”
“Mobilizing toward what?”
The doctor folded his hands. “Something unresolved. You don’t need a prescription,” the doctor said. “You need sleep.” Then: “you can pay your bill at reception.”
Outside, the city looked fake and impossible. Too much light. Too many buildings. Too much glass. He stood on the sidewalk for a while, then pulled out his phone. He called Joy. To his surprise, she answered. He heard traffic on her end. A siren far off. Her voice was careful.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“You okay?” she asked.
There it was. The question.
When he was in second grade, he watched his dad fight a man at a gas station. His dad knocked the man to the ground with two punches to the head and then stomped him repeatedly. When he was exhausted and panting for air, his dad looked at Noah in the passenger seat of the truck and laughed. He said, “you gotta find the humor in it all, son.” The ambulance came and took the man to the hospital. Later, he heard his parents talking and that the man had lost one of his eyes. Noah remembered the blood. It was everywhere. Later, when Noah was in his late teens, he remembered the incident again and asked his dad about it.
“Why did you fight that man?” Noah asked.
“Because he fucked your mom.” Then his dad laughed and said, “you gotta find the humor in it all.”
Joy asked him again. “Hey…you okay?”
He should have said yes. I am okay. That was the adult answer. Instead, he said, “Not really.”
“That’s more honest than usual for you,” Joy said.
“I went to a sleep clinic.”
“That sounds glamorous. Proud of you.”
“I tried to leave in my sleep.”
“Where to?”
“Coney Island, I think.”
“What a terrible destination for your subconscious to want to go. Were you trying to get to The Cyclone?”
“Of course I was.” He looked west, although there was nothing to see. Only traffic. And windows. And sky. “I think,” he said, “I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of being by myself.”
“Of being alone?” she asked.
“No, I said what I was scared of.”
She was quiet for a moment, before she said: “You know, I’m not getting back together with you just because of this strange, dramatic medical journey.”
“I wouldn’t get back together with you if you had one either.”
“But,” she said, “if you want to go ride the Cyclone this weekend, I might be willing to watch you throw up.”
“Will you hold my hand after?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But I’ll let you try and make me laugh.”
The line clicked dead.
Noah stood there. For the first time in weeks, he felt tired in what he could only think was an ordinary, regular way. Human tired. The kind that suggests the possibility of sleep rather than escape.
5.
Noah woke up already standing.
He was in his kitchen. The overhead light was on. The refrigerator door stood open, humming. Noah held a glass of water he did not remember pouring. He drank it because it was there. His body felt heavy and delayed. He set the glass in the sink.
The apartment door was open. Not wide open. Just enough for the hallway light to slip inside. Noah stared at it.
For a long moment he stood there. Existing. Then stepped into the hallway. Down the stairs and out onto Seventh Avenue. Brooklyn at three in the morning was less empty than paused. Streetlights buzzed overhead. A delivery truck idled at the corner. Somewhere someone’s television played something.
Noah turned left. He saw himself move that way. He did not protest. He followed. As it felt a necessity.
At the subway entrance the metal gate was halfway down. The wind descended the station and wrapped around him. The F train platform was nearly empty. A man slept sitting upright with his arms folded across his chest. A woman in scrubs stared into space while eating potato chips from a plastic bag. Noah sat and waited. That was something that felt important somehow. The waiting.
When the train finally arrived, he boarded. His body automated. The doors closed. The car lurched forward. For several stops he sat without moving. He watched his reflection bend and distort in the cloudy windows as they passed through tunnels. It looked like someone else sitting there. Someone calm. Someone with intentions.
At the end of the line, the doors opened and his body stood. The air smelled of salt. The boardwalk was mostly empty. A few fishermen stood along the railing, their lines cast into the black water. The amusement park behind them was dark except for a few security lights that turned the rides into enormous skeletal shapes.
The Cyclone rose above everything. Even in darkness it was unmistakable. All those wooden ribs. They ached in the wind. Noah walked toward it. The chain-link fence surrounding the ride was eight feet tall. He stopped in front of it. Not a deterrent, he felt like he thought. Then grabbed it. Climbed it. Not elegantly. Like a n early human discovering it. At the top he swung a leg over and dropped into the gravel on the other side.
Noah walked toward the loading platform. The ride sat in the station. Empty rows of seats waited beneath the yellow glow of a security light. He climbed into the front car. The lap bar rested tight across his thighs.
Nothing happened.
Then Noah woke up. Not gradually. But all at once.
He was sitting in a roller coaster car inside a closed amusement park.
A flashlight exploded across his face. A voice shouted. “Sir.” A police officer stood on the platform below him. Hands on hips. “Would you care to explain yourself?”
Noah looked around. The Cyclone. The ocean. The fence he had apparently climbed. He nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I would care to explain that.”
The officer waited.
Noah considered how to explain. “I believe,” he said finally, “I may have been confronting my fears.”
“You being funny?”
“Unfortunately, that’s the problem.”
“You climbed an eight-foot fence.”
“Yes.”
“You boarded a roller coaster.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I think I was hoping it would start.”
The officer lowered the flashlight slightly. “Sir,” the officer said carefully, “are you intoxicated?”
“No.”
“On drugs?”
“No.” Noah thought. Then said: “I’m beginning to suspect that I may be escaping from myself.” Noah looked down the long wooden drop of the first hill. “Do you ever ride it?” he asked.
“The Cyclone?” the officer asked.
“Yes.”
“When I was a kid.”
“Was it scary?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But that’s kind of the point.”
Noah nodded. “That’s what I’m starting to realize.”
He looked past the officer’s shoulder and noticed something delicate trembling in the security light. A spider web stretched across a nearby wooden railing. The web swayed in the wind. At the center…a spider. Small enough not to worry about being blown away. And yet large enough to eat.
The officer tapped the flashlight against the rollercoaster’s frame. “Let’s get you off the ride before you confront anything else tonight.”
Noah stood slowly. His legs trembled.
“You okay?” the officer asked.
There it was again. That question.
“I am,” Noah said. Then he shook his head. “Actually, no.” Noah looked out toward the black water of ocean. “I am categorically not okay.”
Noah thought about his parents when he was a kid. The frozen dinners. The bottles of wine with handles. The thin walls. The long silences between arguments. The way the television stayed on all night like a third person in the room. The way his father once said everything’s fine in a voice that meant the opposite.
The spider scampered across the web.
“You know,” Noah said, “someone told me something interesting recently. He said the average person swallows six spiders a year in their sleep.”
“That can’t be true,” the officer said.
The spider sat motionless in the web now.
“That’s what I said,” Noah said, and then reached out and pinched the web between two fingers. The spider skillfully clung to the silk. He brought it closer to his face. Noah opened his mouth and placed the spider on his tongue. He chewed thoughtfully once. Then swallowed.
The officer’s flashlight lowered toward the ground with sadness.
Noah wiped his fingers on his jeans.
The officer sighed. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not even writing this part down in my report.”
Noah could still feel the faint grit of legs and silk at the back of his throat. Large Charlie’s voice floated back to him from the sleep clinic hallway: Six spiders a year is a fucking lot of spiders.
“Well,” Noah said, “that’s one.”
J.R. Angelella is the author of the irreverent, darkly comic coming-of-age novel Zombie (Soho Press, 2012). His short fiction has appeared in various journals and most recently in the crime anthology Eight Very Bad Nights (Soho Crime, 2024). He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House, a literary center dedicated to creative writing across cultures and languages. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Bennington College. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.
