The Mechanical Anodyne
What once was, no longer is. I walk past the dormant boardwalk on my way home from work every day. It sits as a reminder that everything dies eventually. Its time has passed, and with it left the tourists, the attractions, the cheap amusements. It gives the same dread as looking at an old picture of myself, the kind where my smile reminds me of a time before reality soaked into my skin and blistered into scars of practical fact. Happiness is always fleeting, like it’ll decay along with me if it sticks around too long.
I find myself sticking to the side path with the abandoned arcade instead. It carries less emotional weight, as I was too old for such things by the time it appeared. The undiagnosed ache in my leg causes my foot to drag, and occasionally the sound my shoe makes against the pavement lines up with the flickering lights running along the dusty windows. Those colored bulbs pulse with the stubbornness of diseased organs continuing long after consciousness has fled. There is no one there to tell them they can give up, that there is no one left to entice.
My insistence on focusing on the failure of this boardwalk at least takes my mind off myself. My inward ruminations have become unbearable in their density. Memory, anxiety, anticipation; all the horrid clutter of consciousness has accumulated within me until I can scarcely distinguish one mental torment from another. Even the physical operations of my body revolt me. I have become aware of my lungs as damp bellows endlessly laboring in darkness. My pulse strikes within my neck with a hideous insistence akin to rusty, barely functioning machinery. Sleep offers no relief either; it merely exchanges the crowded theater of waking thought for the more deranged performances of dreams.
One day, when the ruminations were at their peak, I decided to enter the old abandoned arcade. Deep within the building, beyond a collapsed skee-ball lane and several gutted pinball cabinets, I first discovered “The Grand Illusion.”
The machine stood apart from the others, as though excluded from their company. Its cabinet was tall and ornate, though peeling with age. Along the top, beneath a film of dust and nicotine stains, faded gold lettering curled across black paint. Below that, behind a glass enclosure, sat a marionette at a miniature desk, its narrow wooden hands folded with funereal patience. The smile had not been painted onto the puppet so much as engineered into the architecture of its face. Its small black eyes possessed a depthless lacquer shine that seemed not reflective but absorptive, as though light entering them had no intention of returning. I had the disturbing impression, not that it resembled a human being imitated poorly, but that it represented a more simplified and efficient version of one.
A slot beneath the glass accepted old arcade tokens. I searched and found one on the floor nearby, dropping it inside with a child-like curiosity.
The machine groaned awake.
Somewhere within its interior, gears shifted with arthritic reluctance. A faint electrical hum emerged—the exhausted murmur of dead voltage dragged unwillingly through ancient wires. The puppet lifted its head by a fraction.
Then something ceased. Not outside me. Inside. The wet engine of my body fell silent. No itch of skin, no pressure of breath. Only stillness: immaculate and complete.
I sat at the little desk and saw myself staring down at this new me. This better me, which did not ache or ruminate.
Wooden joints in blessed inertia. No blood, no memory. Only clean geometry, simple and frictionless. I understood then that suffering required motion. Consciousness was machinery. Desire, fear, identity—they are merely symptoms of animation. The puppet smiled forever because it had been spared the burden of interiority.
The machine clicked violently.
I returned to myself with such force that I nearly collapsed against the cabinet. Breath rushed into me as the wet pistons inside my ribcage began pumping again. The stale arcade air coated my throat with the taste of dust and salt rot. Every sensation struck with monstrous intensity. For several minutes, I could do nothing except stand trembling before the glass.
Then I inserted another token.
I scoured the old arcade for every token that remained, feeding them into “The Grand Illusion” with unrepentant gluttony. Outside, no one else knew of this beautiful reprieve from a flawed existence, and I intended to keep it that way.
The periods within the puppet grew shorter each time. At first, I inhabited the wooden stillness for several minutes. Later, only seconds. Yet the relief became more precious precisely because of its brevity. All that mattered was the tiny wood-carved room behind the dusty glass and the possibility of escaping the biological prison of selfhood.
The burden of existence felt heavier each time I resumed my own body. I felt worse than before I ever found this sacred machine. The gears screamed louder with each token I dropped. The cabinet exhaled the odor of scorched insulation. Once, I noticed the puppet’s head tilted slightly farther toward the glass than before, as though listening. I became convinced its smile had widened by some imperceptible degree.
When I inserted the final coin, the cabinet lurched awake with the sound of a dog’s jaw breaking. For one ecstatic instant, the world loosened its grip upon me.
Then a gear slipped somewhere deep inside the machine. A hideous screech split the silence. Everything stopped.
The puppet remained seated behind the glass, motionless beneath the hanging paper moon. The machine emitted only a low electrical hum, thin and terminal.
I clawed at the coin return, struck the cabinet hard enough to crack bone in my knuckles, begged aloud for another moment of wooden peace, another interval free from the crowded suffering of thought.
Something emerged from a small opening next to the coin slot. A small rectangular card.
I removed it with trembling fingers.
“NO REFUNDS FOR USED TIME”