I can’t bear saying goodbye. Not while feeling its weight against my chest, or its synthetic softness against my hand. Its latex face sticking to my cheek.
There isn’t much left to say about grief, each corner of our lives saturated by both its presence and the innumerable ways crafted to describe the concept.
Scribbled on the margins of page one hundred and five of Intro to Computer Sciences by Krasner, Thorne, et al, 1972. The sun-bleached canvas against the gallery window on Main Street, silver-ink artist signature unrecognizable. This week’s number one song on KTY Radio 98.3. A folded, ninety-nine cent Valentine's Day card at the back of a glove compartment. Last month’s indie film on its way to becoming a cult classic—like every other film of its caliber.
It’s all fine and good, the many ways we synthesize and transmute grief. Mom used to say that each head is its own world and that every world has its own set of rules.
While beautiful, these poems and songs and movies only prove to me that we’ve forgotten how to grieve. They prove to me that at the end of all things we are creatures of brittle bone, too proud to express our most primal corners in the most base way.
Standing here, however, I can understand it a little better. Grief is too much. It makes a whole lot of sense but no sense at all, because what stands in front of me is not alive and never was. And yet.
“Howdy there, gang,” I say with a twang, quiet enough to not be heard beyond the shuttered doors. The creature doesn’t respond to my poor attempt at impersonation.
I sit on the carpet that smells of mold and mildew, its pattern of multi-colored neon swirls faded with age hiding any evidence of either. Pieces of rebar protrude through the squares where speckled ceiling tiles once were, concrete dust falling in front of my flashlight like snow.
I try shutting my eyes but it’s no use. The memories from that time are gone, along with most of what accompanied them. The people, the sounds, the taste, the smells. I had hoped with every desperate sob in the back of that Greyhound bus that coming back here would return something to me.
“I was told there would at least be ghosts,” I say, swinging the flashlight from left to right.
Despite the lack of electricity, the plywood covering up the windows and doors don’t reach all the way to the bottom, allowing a slice of light to creep in from the mall’s hallway. The shadows of people walking on the other side stretch out across a decade’s worth of debris, bending over abandoned dinner tables, upturned arcade cabinets, and a shattered jukebox.
This wasn’t the restaurant I grew up going to. Mine was a little different, brought over to my island at the tail end of the 80s when theming around arcade games and anthropomorphic animals were all the rage.
My mascot was the same as the one in front of me, but its colors were inverted. The Spanish that escaped its voicebox sounded wrong when all the TV commercials had been in English, a discrepancy so upsetting that my slew of tantrums robbed me of a seventh birthday party.
I hated that thing. I hate this thing. The way it’s twisted at the hip, whatever internal bits and bobs hadn't been taken to be repurposed sticking out of it like exposed bones. It’s hollow while inhabited, just like this building.
It’s hallowed in ways I should not express.
“I can’t believe it took these people ten years to finally get this squared off.” My exhale makes dust dance. “Wasting all this space.”
I wring my flashlight like a chamois cloth.
“Why did you ask me to come?”
This creature came to me in a dream last night, same as it was on my childhood television. Bathed in light and spilling laughter, emitting a glow that blossomed at the center of my chest and unfurled itself down the rest of my aching body.
It had felt like a little more than a dream. A little less than the waking world.
I haven’t been to this particular location since it closed its doors in the second half of the 90s, when buyouts, mergers, bankruptcy, and the ruthless momentum towards Y2K began typing the location's final chapters. Sure, the nachos were ass and more often than not the ice cream machine was out of service, but it's not like anybody came for the food.
Nobody came for the robotic abominations either, their time in the spotlight winding down. They never left though, and their jingles crafted the soundtrack of a generation stuck in an in-between.
The liminality never ends and I fear it never will. My past is fragmented nonsense and my future is a void. As for my present:
“Do you think whoever made you wanted you to end up like this?" The answer is, obviously, no. No creator in their right mind wants to see something born from them in a state of such tragic disrepair. "Bought and abandoned in a dark room. Kept from doing what you were built to do." I scoff. "You guys must have cost a fortune with all that state-of-the-art tech.”
The mascots are scheduled to be dismantled tomorrow, chips destroyed for reasons of red-taped patents. Their outer skins will be thrown into an incinerator and their internal machinery crushed in a compactor.
I push up my sleeve to feel my own skin with its bumps and bruises, the gnarled strip along the inside of my left forearm that never regained sensation. I slip a hand under my shirt to feel my ribs, my chest, and my belly. I imagine what it would be like to have all of me crushed.
Nothing inside of the room moves, only the outside shapes that cast pictures caught by the corner of my eye. A vine slithers up the wall, but I turn in time to see that it’s just an electric cable. Someone dances in the darkest corner of the venue, and that one I can’t debunk.
The shadow peels itself off a collapsing column to glide across the back wall with graceful movements. Its jagged edges are a projection of pixels that break away from the silhouette, shifting its form until it collapses into a shapeless mound.
For a moment, my brain thinks it sees mountains and the wide expanse of ocean that saw me grow up. I can see the bend in the road, and the cliff that plummets into a hole in the Earth. The aerial view of three dead bodies that should have been four.
The shadow reshapes itself to dance around me, scattered only by the light of my flashlight.
I can hear it moving like gentle vibrations inside my ears. I can feel it drape itself over me in the form of warm static, an uncomfortable blanket from childhood's murky waters. It brushes my mouth and I taste coconut toffee. It slinks past my teeth and I bite down on smoldering glass.
The sound of whirring metal pulls the dancing figure in its direction, melting its shadow pixels into the broken machinery whose call I needed to answer. No gears are moving that I can see. The leader of the band remains slumped with its fabric skin half sloughed off, its posse faring no better.
There’s an echo in here, and it sounds like the notes of an arcade cabinet whose high score has been broken. I never made it to the point where it would cheer for me. Only the boys with money for countless tokens got good enough to see their initials emblazoned on those brightly colored screens.
That’s kind of what the dancing shadow reminds me of: the play of light and dark across a face too close to a CRT monitor. Human, but distorted.
I get to my feet and follow it, careful of the gaps on the wooden stage. The planks aren’t rotted but they've been removed to expose the intricate wiring underneath, how they knot and weave in an orgy of colors that shine within the dark space.
Those same wires spill out of the robot’s neck like an arterial spray. Fiber optics, transparent and hair-like. I brush my thumb over those jutting out of the black tubing with the coarsely serrated edge, the sensation satisfying enough to trap me in a stroking loop.
I thread my unoccupied fingers between the metallic ones stuck in a permanent waving position, fruitlessly willing them to clasp back. I step closer to rest my chin on a shoulder still clothed in a silken vest that reeks of sweat and motor oil. I let go of the cables to hold the stiffened torso against me.
The machine won’t move—its legs attached to a metal plate on the ground—but I can’t speak for the rest of its structural integrity. I keep myself from depositing the entirety of my weight against it. Though I wish I could, tired as I am.
More than tired, I’m bone-deep fucking exhausted.
It sounds insane, to run from the bed my spouse and I share, the weariness of a grueling twelve-hour shift still heavy in these limbs of mine. To hop on a bus from two states away in nothing but threadbare pajamas and mismatched sneakers. To sneak into the fortified monument that is this dying mall and steal a couple of moments with a character I've never given two shits about.
All because it called out to me. This thing called from within a fog that carried with it the essence of what my past—whatever the hell that may have looked like—actually was. Not even an essence, a diluted whiff that could very well be the desperate wishes of a disillusioned person.
I wanted, and I craved, and all I have ever succeeded in pulling towards me are the rotting scraps of a retro mascot costume.
It’s just it and me here, the unseeing plastic eyes of its band mates turned away from us as if embarrassed by the display and I don’t care.
I don’t care. I can’t care. I shouldn’t. Not here. Not when it’s just the two of us caught in a rigid sway without the help of music or any other sound aside from the tempo of my breathing.
My fingers tighten until graying, fake fur begins to disintegrate. Clumps burrow under my nails and yes, yes, like that. This will remain with me forever. Like lint in a belly button or wax in the ear; no one ever wants to steal the refuse buried in the undesirable parts of the body.
Static weaving through my hair draws a sigh from me. The shadow slips past the edges of frayed costuming, wrapping around the metal frame to return my touch. I can feel it warming up the structure held against me, bringing its temperature up to something human.
If I focus enough, I can feel it: the rush of blood through cables, the pulse of a heart that is not mechanical. Although by now, I don’t care about the kind of heart it is, so long as it is a heart.
To have a heart is inherently human, and maybe that’s why I search for one. I think mine burned alongside those faces I can't remember—Mom's, Dad's, my brother's.
I might have shoved it into the glove compartment between Air Supply and Ruben Blades; got it to leak through the plastic bag that did nothing to protect the Inspector Gadget Happy Meal, its head melting when the engine exploded on impact.
Or maybe I left it in the drink holder, cooled by the condensation of a Big Gulp and propped up by the revolver.
All hearsay, though. The splatter of brain matter across the driver's side window is less concrete than the shadow currently touching me. The ding and ring of arcade machines is equidistant to the gunshot and ceaseless blaring of a horn, but only the former is a memory of my own.
"Are you a ghost?" I ask the thing holding me, despite it not looking like any kind of ghost I've ever heard of. Not that it matters. "Howdy there, gang. Are you ready to have the time of your lives?"
Static on the back of my neck makes me feel more alive than I have in decades. It's a touch that is soft and intimate, a gesture meant to make me feel good. A squeeze, and the tension in my body releases.
The mascot holds and I marvel at its engineering. All these years and it can still hold all this weight, something that can't be said about its modern iterations that are held captive at prestigious theme park attractions.
That will not save it from destruction. Come tomorrow, this comforting abomination too will become nothing but a hazy memory.
"Promise me you won't be scared when the sun rises," I say, pulling away from the thing to rummage through its hanging remains. It feels sacrilegious to speak my spouse's sacred mantra out loud.
I crack open its back, and the pungent odor of neglected fabric and burnt machinery is twice as potent. I scoop out its insides with relative ease, and prick my palm on a rusted metal plate.
The dancing shadow holds out its pixelated hand and I take it, my blood turning into tiny rivers of circuitry as I step inside the defunct machine.
Both of my legs are shoved into one leg hole, and the rest of me is suspended within its broken torso.
There's a hum in here.
It makes sense that the shadow is trying to put back the pieces I removed. It's only fair. The last thing I want to be is rude towards the dream-walking mascot that brought me here for one final taste of a false past sweeter than the present.
I hold out my arms and let the shadow bury me under the weight of metallic body parts.
