Amusements

A strange arcade cabinet appeared in a seaside amusement hall in the 90s.
Nobody saw it arrive.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:33

I'll tell you as I remember it, though memory like the tide takes away for its own reasons and leaves you with only vague shapings of greater and lesser amounts of sand. If you wanted a clean account, you won't get it from here. If you wanted the feel of it, the smell of it, the way it sounded in the head after you'd left the place. Filter through about thirty years of other types of living, then I can bring you as close as someone can be brought. It was a summer in the nineties, one of those Irish summers that never quite commits to being summer at all. The light was long, yes, but it was thin, and it was never far from a rain shower as is and was the way. The wind came in off the Atlantic with a salt that stuck to your lips. The town, if you could call it one, lived on the idea of itself as a holiday. Now, I don't mean to cast shade on the place. The only reason I question its status was because it shrunk to a flaccid imitation of itself in the winter, a spectre village of empty expanses and battened down locals, rows of guest houses with names painted in hopeful cursive, a crescent of damp amusements facing the sea like teeth not entirely to be trusted. We were there for two weeks, which is long enough for a child to construct, inhabit, and tear down a world, with its short, intense friendships, the tentative experiments that went on far from adults and anyone who knows you normally, a temporary product of propinquity. And it's notable that nothing propinks like propinquity. There were four of us most days. Myself and the three others who names I won't give. Not out of discretion, but because I'm no longer certain which of them belongs to this same story. We moved as a small gang does, without plan but with conviction, spending our pocket money badly, eating chips and paper that bled grease through in translucent spots to the fingers. Drinking cans of orange that left your tongue coated and your teeth on edge. The amusements were our centre. Surely you'll know the kind of place. Damp carpet with a sweetness that suggested long acquaintance with spilled drinks, a ceiling low enough to press the sound down onto you, rows of machines in varying states of age and indifference, the steady percussion of coins, the chatter of mechanical parts, the thin electronic music that never quite resolves into a melody, and always the sea outside, making its own slower sound and rhythmic tidal changes, indifferent to the machines and to us. The cabinet arrived on a Tuesday. No one saw it come in. It was simply there. Set slightly apart from the others, not by design but by maybe some small unwillingness on the part of the other machines to be near it. That's how it felt, at least. As if the space had been made for it without anyone admitting to the act. It stood taller than the rest, or seemed to. The casing was black, though not a clean plasticky black. It had the look of something that had been handled often and wiped hardly at all. The screen sat deeper than you'd expect, as if the image was not meant to meet the player halfway. There was a name. We agreed there was a name, but none of us ever agreed on what it was. I've heard myself call it Anum, which would make no sense. One of the others insisted it began with a P. Another said it had no vowels. We would stand there, squinting at the marquee and see something that seemed legible until said aloud. The sounds were wrong. That was the first thing we noticed properly. Not loud, not dramatic, just slightly off. Where the other machines had bright, quick tones, this one produced something softer and more layered. A low hum beneath the bleeps, like wind under your neighbour's door, a rhythm that didn't quite repeat, as if it were listening to itself being listened to and making small corrections. The attract mode, if that's what it was, didn't show a clear game. Shapes moved across the screen, lines that suggested streets or paths, impossible colours that bled into one another without respect for the boundaries you'd expect. Sometimes it looked like a map, sometimes a coastline seen from far too far up. Sometimes like nothing that could be named. Coins worked in it. That was important. We tried. You always try. The slot accepted a twentypence piece with a soft, almost wet sound, not the bright metallic click you expect. The screen shifted then, not starting so much as acknowledging. The first time I played, I hadn't a notion what I was doing. There was a figure, I think, or a point, something that moved when I moved the stick. The screen seemed to deepen rather than scroll, as if I was going into it rather than across it. The sounds adjusted with my movements, rising slightly, falling, never quite matching. There were no clear enemies, no score that I could see, only a vague sense of progression or descent. I remember the others standing close, too close, their shoulders touching mine, all of us leaning in as if warmth might come from the screen. Go down there, one of them said. Don't go that way, said another, though I don't remember why. The game responded, not in the immediate way of other machines, but with a slight delay, as if considering. When I lost, if that's what it was, there was no explosion, no bright failure. The screen dimmed, the sound dropped. Jarringly, it never counted down or suggested inserting more coins to play. And then with the fast screen blinking, it returned to that waiting state, as if nothing had happened. As if what had happened was not for us. We took turns. Children are democratic in that way when something new presents itself. Each of us played. Each of us insisted we understood it better than the others, or we got further. We didn't. We felt we did. That was enough. Over the next days we returned to it. Always. We would come into the amusements with pockets of coins and intentions to spend them on the racing game, or the one with the light guns, and somehow we would end up at that cabinet again, feeding it, standing there longer than we meant to. The other machines began to feel childish, too bright, too simple. This one had weight. It held us. The owner of the arcade said nothing about it. When asked, he shrugged. It came in with the job lot, he said. Midlands somewhere. There had been, we knew in that vague way children know things. An electronics place in the Midlands once. Something to do with games. Consoles, assembly. We had heard the name Atari spoken like a spell by older boys who claimed to know about such things. It seemed enough. Machines come from places. Why not that one? But there was another smell to it. Hot, staticky dust. Yeah, the usual. But also something else. A faint peatiness, as if the insides of the cabinet had been exposed to damp ground at some point, and had carried that with it. And a sharpness, like ozo, like air after a storm. We began to dream about it. Not all at once, not in the same way, but enough we spoke of it, half jokingly, half carefully. I saw the town, one of them said. I was in the water, another said, but I could breathe. I said nothing, because I'd seen something that didn't fit into words I had then. There are parts still I don't have words for. A place that was the town, but without people. The building set back slightly, as if they were being reconsidered. The sea too close, the sky too low and pressing, and something moving in it. Not chasing, not hunting, just present. We played longer, we stayed later, the sound began to follow us out. That's not a figure of speech. The sounds began to follow us out. Walking back along the promenade you'd hear faintly, between the wind and the gulls, a pattern of tones that didn't belong. In bed, with the window cracked open to let in the salt air, the same rhythm would sit at the edge of hearing, as if waiting to be recognized. Our parents noticed something, not the machine, not directly. They noticed us. Are you not sleeping? You're very quiet. What have you been at all day? We said nothing, which was true in a way. There was a day when one of us didn't come. We were waiting at the usual place, outside the amusements, kicking at the curbs and the cans, spending coin on nothing while we waited. He didn't appear.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

He's probably grounded, someone said. Or gone home, said another.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

We accepted that. Sometimes people preferred to go without saying. Although one of the other lads heard him saying they'd another week booked. Children accept absences more easily than adults. We're used to things simply stopping. But later, one of us said his house was empty. Gone early. No explanation. Fair enough. We didn't go to the cabinet that day, not out of any kind of concerted decision. Nothing was discussed. Tacit consensus. It simply didn't occur to us. The next day it was as if nothing had been lost. We returned, subtly, impelled. We played. The machine seemed fuller. That's the only word I have. The sounds were richer. The screen was deeper. And when I stood there, hands on the controls, I had the sense, not of being watched, but of being known in a way that made watching forever unnecessary. I stopped then. Not dramatically, I simply stepped back and said I was done. The others laughed. Your turn's over anyway, one said. I couldn't argue. I went outside. The sea was loud that day, louder than before. Or perhaps it was heard differently. We left the town at the end of two weeks, as planned, as expected. The car was packed, and goodbye to a place that had never fully admitted us. I didn't look for the cabinet. I never said anything about it to my parents in their parallel worlds of parents and their teenagers. It seemed, even then, like something that couldn't survive being described, or maybe shouldn't be. Years pass, as they do. The town became one of many in my memory. The amusements blurred with others. The gang dissolved after a few furtive attempts at keeping up with letters. This was before we gave mobile phones to teens, or even instant messages. We'd meet again if fate decided. Or we wouldn't. The cabinet for a long time didn't return to my mind. Not in any way I could point to. Only occasionally, in certain lights or in certain arrangements of sound, I would feel the same slight delay in the world, as if things were considering themselves and me before they continued. Then, some months ago, I was on one of those online auction sites. It was late at night. The sort of browsing that's less about buying and more about drifting through the accumulated debris of other lives. Old consoles, cartridges, arcade boards, things described as rare, untested, sight unseen. And there it was or something like it. A cabinet listed without ceremony, no proper title, the description brief. Arcade machine working. Collection only. The photographs were poor, taken in a shed or a garage, the casing black, in that special kind of black. I fantasize I could make out my own juvenile handprint, maybe. The screen dark in the image, reflecting only the vague shape of the person taking the picture. I zoomed in on the marquee. The name was there, or something was. I couldn't read it, not clearly. It seemed to shift slightly as I looked, as if resolution was a kind of mercy the image didn't grant. There was one more photograph, the screen powered on, dim, colours bleeding, lines suggesting a shape, a map, a coastline, something moving within it. In the corner of the image, faint but present, were three letters, initials.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

They might have been mine, they might not. The listing is gone now, ended. No record of sale, no buyer, no further images.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

But sometimes late, when the house is quiet and the modern devices hum with their own small electricity, I hear it again, not loudly, just enough to accuse. Just enough. A tone beneath the tone, a pattern that nearly but never quite repeats.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

And I find myself without meaning to, leaning forward slightly