[Original Novel] Persistence of Vision, Part 2
They don’t bother to chain the front gates anymore, it never kept anyone out. I brought my bolt cutters anyway, as now and again I find some locked door, overlooked until then. The handles terminate in bent wedges such that it doubles as a crowbar, making it supremely useful for these kinds of excursions. Naturally, it also makes a serviceable club.
The other thing I’m never caught without is an LED head lamp. Before, I used the light on my phone in dark service tunnels until a disoriented junkie startled me into dropping it. The light’s now busted and the screen’s got a mess of cracks in one corner. Live and learn.
Once past the gate, I head for the fun center. “Fun” being subjective of course, having rather a different meaning in this country now that it’s under new management. The narrow selection of arcade machines languishing along the far wall of the stout little structure give no indication that they were ever sincerely meant to be enjoyed.
“Sea Battle”. “Magistral”. “Winter Hunt”. “Autorally-M”. “Radish”. “Safari”. All of them just barely sufficient imitations of some Western game. Usually Atari or Williams games provided the general design concept. Then the programmers, working for peanuts with government guns at their necks, phoned it all in.
The result is something comically rudimentary even for the time, and just barely playable. Their reason to exist was only ever to prove a point; that we Russians had every luxury under Communism that any American had under Capitalism, wanting for nothing.
The two soda machines in the room were similarly austere. One simply a grey steel box which dispensed carbonated water, and the other a Cil-Cola machine which was broken into and looted years ago. The first time I found it, out of morbid curiosity I cracked open the last remaining can and took a sip.
Flat of course. Otherwise surprisingly inoffensive given the age. Tasted vaguely like Kvass. I used to power up the arcade machines now and again just for laughs, but there’s little point as you can’t save your high scores. That would constitute blatant competition, you see.
On my way from the fun center towards Fairyland castle, I paused to take a picture of the clown train. I often wonder who designed this and why they thought it would appeal to children, rather than traumatize them.
It’s a small electric train resembling a centipede, each section of the body its own wheeled car with a pair of cushioned seats, now thoroughly beaten up by years of exposure. The front is, for some reason, the rusted head of a clown. I’ve often seen kiddie rides of the same make and model show up on urban exploration forums, they make an irresistible photo op.
The park is divided into Cosmoland, Fairyland, Futureland, and Cartoonland. As the names suggest, the first is space themed, all of the rides named after and meant to represent historically important orbital missions.
Futureland is even heavier on the propaganda, as it is specifically the “global socialist future” being represented. The “housing of tomorrow” near the entrance always catches my eye. Disc shaped fiberglass pods, four to a cluster, stacked two clusters tall for a total of eight small apartments in each tower.
Each tower’s a different color, all of them now faded to pastels...in the spots where the paint hasn’t flaked off yet. Increasingly communal living in the future was simply assumed for obvious, ideologically driven reasons. That said, while they don’t look like much now, I’d take one of these pods over panelak any day.
As I continued towards Fairyland castle, something new caught my eye. Same old building I’ve passed a dozen times before, but somebody must’ve been through here since the last time, as a mess of vines were cut away to reveal lettering just over a row of second story windows.
“Animation Center”. Presumably someplace children could learn how cartoons are made. Parts of the old facade still survived, yet more fiberglass. At one time making the building resemble something from a cartoon.
The majority of it must’ve been torn down since then, revealing the ugly, rectilinear concrete truth hiding behind it. It reminds me of a story I once heard in which a visiting American diplomat was taken to the Kremlin aboard a train which passed by fields filled with false wooden tanks and airplanes.
The intent, presumably, was to fool the diplomat into returning to the US with a grossly inflated impression of Soviet military might. That the train “just happened” to pass all of that hardware was something I suppose they hoped would not seem suspicious.
So much of how this country was run back then relied on carefully cultivated illusions. To fool the outside world, but also its own citizens. Not so different from this park. To the eyes of a child, Fairyland, Cartoonland and the rest would have an airtight appearance of reality to them.
Small but fully functional civilizations, populated by spacemen or costumed elves who, so far as the child knows, actually live there. All of it an elaborate farce, no deeper than the thickness of the facades masking the buildings. All to preserve the happiness of children who are none the wiser.
Natasha must’ve come here sincerely believing that she’d meet Peter the Possum. That his fantasy world she saw on television was a real place she could run away to. How it pains me now, that I was ever the sort of person she’d want to escape from.
What I wouldn’t give now to hear her repeating after Peter, word for word, sprawled out before the little black and white television set in our room. How vivid it still seems. Like something still happening now, a place I might physically return to if I focus hard enough.
That feeling is also an illusion. Perhaps the cruelest of all. That the past still exists, that the immediacy of these visions connotes reality. As if we should be able to travel as freely through time as we do through space. What it must be like for a bird with broken wings.
So often I find myself lost in thought. Reliving memories of Natasha so completely that it startles me to resurface from them. But during those precious periods of somber reflection, the vast gulf in time between where I am and where I want to be shrinks to almost nothing. It’s as if I’m right there with her.
So near, yet so far. No matter how convincing, I cannot reach out and caress her face. I cannot braid her hair. I can visit, but never stay. Observe, but never change anything. The natural order of things, surely? But then, why does this restriction feel so wrong? So artificial.
That was me, wasn’t it? And here I am. I was there once. Why, then, can I not return? The only direction I cannot move in is the one I most desperately wish to. Seconds ticking mercilessly by, each one carrying me further away from her.
There’s nothing like losing a loved one to make you contemplate the nature of time. It becomes a nemesis. A tormentor. The only barrier preventing your escape from Hell, back to the paradise you were swept from by the relentless passage of minutes, hours, days and years.
What do any of those words really mean? Does the universe know what a minute is? If there’s a smallest indivisible unit of matter, and a smallest measurable distance, could there also be an objectively smallest unit of time?
If so, time does not pass fluidly, but as a sequence of still frames. One after the next, after the next, quickly enough to create the illusion of movement. And if it’s true that events could have unfolded no other way than they have, the predictable chain reaction of so many atoms interacting with one another, then all of this was predetermined.
Something like a movie. So many still images strung together like film, all of us simply actors playing the only parts we’re able to. No small number of people find that perspective unsettling. Personally, I find it comforting. It would mean that there was nothing I could’ve done differently. That it wasn’t my fault.
The alternative is that time doesn’t exist. That what looks to us like the passage of time is just the accumulation of changes, more and more atoms out of place compared to how we remember it. If so, then time is truly irreversible. You’d have to manually move every atom in the universe back to where it used to be.
Stay Tuned for Part 3!