I had the balls to ask my dad what happened to my mother. An awkward silence sat between us. The lights in his room were turned off, while we watched the Buckeyes play in the Rose Bowl. The TV glowed across his scraggly beard, and his empty pack of Newports lay next to his bowl of chicken soup.
Amusement parks were the only places where I got along with Mom and Dad. They kept their distance otherwise. We would wait in line for a rollercoaster named the Beast. That line would take forever. I used to close my eyes and wish the crowd would disappear, Mom and Dad included, so the whole park I could have to myself.
My parents I really didn’t know. Dad was a burglar who one night had broken into my house and decided to raise me. Once we sort of got to know each other, we would talk about the Buckeyes, but nothing else. And Mom was barely around, period. She used to wake me up for the bus every morning until one morning, in my freshman year of high school, she didn’t. Not an email, not a text, nothing ever came. A phone call would’ve been too intimate, a handwritten letter, too. I wonder, now at forty-eight, if she’s still alive. Never again would my dad ever marry or even date anyone. His emotional distance became more infectious. No wonder a friend or a stranger would ask if I was OK. And it wouldn’t take too long before a woman realized she was dating a tinman.
“I think she moved to Reno,” he said. The conversation ended there. We talked some more about the Buckeyes. That was the last time I saw him.
After burying my father in 2058, I left Ohio for Periscope City, where I lived inside a cave called the Troglodyte Hotel. It was a typical hotel, with housekeeping, room service, fine dining, et cetera. Except automatons ran the place, and it had stalactites for chandeliers.
One day, when the power went out, everyone had to evacuate the hotel to a lake inside the cave. There at the lake, I met an older lady, a widow in a bathing suit and a swimmer’s cap, with her service poodle by her side. She said she knew everything there was to know about Periscope City—the city of loners.
“Have you been to Waldenland?” she asked.
“No. What’s that?”
“You mean to say you live here and you’ve never heard of Waldenland? Have you been living under a rock, mister?”
I lived inside a cave.
“Tell me more,” I said.
“You must go. Just take the sky-tram up the mesa. And if you do go, you gotta try the huckleberry pie.” She kissed her fingers. “It’s to die for.”
I asked the automaton at the concierge desk, “What’s Waldenland?”
It handed me a brochure. Waldenland looked like a normal theme park at first, with a rollercoaster and all that other stuff. But it was themed after a nineteenth-century book about a pond, with transcendentalism sprinkled in between. Although it sounded too bizarre, I would get the whole park to myself. My dream, after forty years, finally had come true.
“What do I do?” I asked.
The automaton pulled out a waiting list.
The wait would take a month. I spent April hibernating. My day, ironically enough, arrived on May Twelfth, the date of my father’s burial. Instead of mourning his death all day, I decided to go to the park.
The wind in Waldenland didn’t feel like the wind on a spring afternoon but rather the wind in a cemetery. I was the only human being there. Automatons controlled the rides. They cooked the food in the food court. I ate fried raccoon, an elk sausage, and a tub of chestnuts. They ran the midway games, where an automaton at a shooting gallery awarded me with a teddy bear. The teddy bear reminded me of the one I had when I was six. I don’t remember anything else from that age.
The dolls took every seat on every ride except for one reserved for me. I sat in the back of the rollercoaster, with the dolls at the front. The track curved and twisted through a farm with barns and plastic crops and animatronic livestock.
The dolls on the carousel grinned at me. I tried to look away. A horror movie from my childhood came to mind, about a carousel that whirled a man to death, so I hopped off that thing.
I brought my teddy bear with me to a funhouse called Henry’s Cabin of Mirrors. The animatronic doll of Henry David Thoreau slept in its bed. I took a hesitant step into a maze of mirrors called The Maze of Transcendentalism.Each mirror showed me at a different age. The older I looked, the more lost I was. I had to find the exit to reach transcendence. And when I did, I felt sanctified.
I took a bite of huckleberry pie, following the woman’s advice. Thoreau had written about huckleberries in Walden, I believe, but I didn’t know what it was. The pie, nevertheless, was disgusting.
The Ferris wheel, the Isolationist, left me at the very top. Alone in the sky compared to alone in the cave, besides the obvious, was not the same. The cave would trap me in my mind, where intrusive thoughts, sometimes but not always, attacked me like vampire bats. Whereas alone in the sky, my mind flew away like Icarus to the sun. I watched it, within seconds, shrink into a speck. The sky turned into peanut butter and strawberry jelly with melted marshmallows for clouds. I needed to gather my senses. So I switched my focus to downtown Periscope City, where the loners hung their heads at their feet. I could feel what they felt. I craved loneliness, yet I hated loneliness.
The Ferris wheel and the station finally met, and my mind came down with it. The automaton that worked the ride resembled my father from forty years ago. Its eyes, like on all automatons, were as white and stony as the eyes on a Greek statue. The difference was my parents had pupils.
I rested, near the day’s end, in a shady grove at Walden Pond, and listened to a soundtrack of songbirds and cicadas. All the animals were animatronic. A rabbit dashed from plastic cattails to a plastic lawn. Robins and partridges and woodpeckers perched on the branches of an oak tree made of Silly Putty. When I approached it, to carve my initials in the trunk, they flapped away. I watched schools of fish in the sky-blue pond and thought, wow, I was sitting in a nursery rhyme. If only my parents could see it, but they probably would’ve been unimpressed.
The seasons changed at Walden Pond every thirty minutes. It was like the fireworks display at Disneyland. Everything, every season, occurred in a blink. The oak trees in fall shed their leaves. The pond froze in winter. The plants in springtime grew from gray and dead to green and full. All sorts of woodsy creatures frolicked out of dormancy. A turtle dipped its silver limbs in the water, as white geese landed on the lawn. And Henry’s doll nodded at me, holding a fishing pole on a wooden raft. I nodded back—at something without a brain.
After the sun had slipped beneath the canyons, an automaton tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to leave. My two hours were up. Tomorrow, someone else would take my place. I must admit, after what I’d experienced that day, a smidgen of my inner child had emerged.
INSTANT NOODLES 