A Chessington: World of Adventures Recount

2020

The lean-to structures: the Sheriff’s Office 🤠 (a security watchtower🗼📡); the Blacksmith’s Forge 🔨 (a new giftshop); the unconvincing Jailhouse (perfect for novelty photo 📸 opportunities); the Saloon Bar 🍻 (for “Sncks 🍔🌭 nd Rfrshmnts 􀀀” [courtesy of those who stole the vowels]); the Haunted Mineshaft 👻 ⛏ entrance (propped up behind a wooden queuing system) and the Shooting Range 🔫 (where I stand). Most of these elements still hide tumbledown versions 🏚 of their previous selves 🏠 – those which I became familiar with as I arrived here. The whispered plans for expansion had clearly gone to shit 💩 /, or up the creek 🛶. [...] Inside strained dreams: I’m sure they are skimping on the power ⚡ I’m fed 🤤 and paid 💸💸💸 with – or maybe I’m just past my best, with repairs 🔧 becoming noticeably frequent these past few months 📅 (I won’t admit this fact though). ///The static whir of an empty electrical speaker 🔈 system before the needle lifts the twangy guitar 􀀀 and galloping melody 🐎🎼 to life. The absence of sub-sonics 🔊 in the repetitive theme pipe an echoing whine 🎻 that meanders through the breeze 💨, as I return to my body with the power’s ⚡ reengagement./// Today felt cooler ❄, I reckoned. Cooler ❄. I believe it felt cooler ❄ as the tune made its third pass (already). *Motor oil ⛽ (used as) joint lubricant: snaking 🐍 from wooden ass-crack to wooden upper inner thigh – granting potential for an imaginable shiver 􀀀.*

And I have no idea how big the park is 📏, nor how extensive its amusements are 🤡🤹 ♀🎠🎢🎡. Bastardized for generations, I know it houses several generically themed areas. My first experience of these was a ‘Hall of Presidents’ 🇺🇸 - Dutch Angle glimpsed when two beefcake workmen 👷 ♂👷 ♂ dropped my box. Pretend searing pain in my lower back, then, while being welded onto an almost-exoskeleton ☠, followed by a clumsy installation of ancient wires, fettering me into the park’s sickly pulse 🤒 like a primordial life support device, with no degree of change to the power ⚡output feeding into me for the first few months 📅 whatsoever. You imagine the generators vibrating overnight, overfeeding 🤢 and burning great red holes ⭕⭕⭕ around internal joints 💪🦵, while I stand haemorrhaging motor oil ⛽. *Again here, Motor oil ⛽ lingers on wooden inner thigh before proceeding further downwards ⬇*

The main square shares multiple attributes with the far off invention of Potemkin Villages 🇷🇺 – demonstrated one morning when two men in suits 👔 and hard-hats ⛑􀀀 drinking coffee ☕ from disposable cups stopped briskly outside my range and revealed that this square was erected atop the remnants of a far older ‘Prehistoric Island’ 🌋 - a realm that I assumed had belonged to the corporation that was here even before my employers (?). You see the faces of customers in lax disappointment. And shaking heads 🤦 ♀, crossed arms 🙅 ♂. Hunched shoulders. Crawling machines trampling the rockeries 🏗, dislodging this part of prehistoric 🦖🦕 (almost) reality from its physical space, and its slow and ancient time 🕰. The claws then digging deep and hauling the whole zone North 􀀀, like an army of automated tugboats 🚢🚢🚢, leaving behind a blunt, stumpy architecture in a pie-bowl 🥧 crater of dry dirt… The whole act still complying with the customer’s desire for convenient authenticity (of course), an authenticity that is palatable (able to be consumed - swallowed). This land pines to be consumed. It was crafted -

for the gut

- designed with the gut in mind, and custom built to bypass (the mental gag reflex 🤮 between) human pain and pleasure. I meditate on my visitors’ ideas of authenticity, with their secret knowledge that histories can simply be erased and moved in an expensive 💰 and almost mechanical flash 📸, pertaining to a fickle reversal: an excess of authenticity granted by its own hyperreal falsity. ///Thought interrupted by intermittent and jagged audio of some members of the board having heard that the park’s erection on ancient burial grounds could ‘make or break us,’ and at this remark the other Suit stiffens, with both men promising to keep that idea very hush hush./// Still, I struggle to imagine what sort of a person would visit a place themed around the death of Indigenous Peoples. In any event the Wild-West 🤠🐎 sat here now, slowly melting in the wrath 🔥.

*The stream of motor oil ⛽ splits in two before the bulge of wooden patella, opting to follow the contours of the back and side of wooden calf*

The isle of dirt standing between my range and the giftshop is almost black, having been overexposed to the yellow that also bleaches me for around a third of each day. A small stone wall and a mottled metal bar protect it from the rest of reality. It is totally infecund, bar two PVC cacti cacti 🌵🌵 and a horse 🐎 melded with a saddle that is “NOT TO BE CLIMBED!”. The parched waterworks 💦 💦💦 that once cascaded ⛲ from the pistols 🔫 🔫 of a dulled but grinning Cowboy 🤠 have been switched off, rife with an emerald patina. Expensive maintenance 💰, I supposed - once again acknowledging how the cowboy’s freckled cheeks ☺ have slowly been windburned 💨🔥 to a leaden gurn 🤪. Perhaps the identity crisis of the park the Suits 👔 sometimes mentioned had an invisible hand 🤚 in the clear lack of repairs to exterior features.

*Motor oil ⛽ on wooden shin – the stream now slowing*

I imagine this gloved and invisible hand 🤚 as I imagine greeting my co-stars each morning 🌄, who’s names I conjured up based on their looks alone. There’s Mike - a handsome and muscular Cowboy 💪🤠, stirrups coolly resting on a wooden table decorated with poker chips 🎲🎰 and empty metallic tankards 🍻 (each prop in the scene held in place by a clumsily glued seam: an excessive prevention of potential theft, here). And Mike has lovely eyes 👀, and soft, buttery looking hands 🙌. And I assume his waxen face is ruggedly handsome beneath the red bandanna covering his mouth 👄 (or, as handsome as something resembling a disfigured can encased in a fleshy layer of industrial paint 🎨 can be). Here, the thickset paint 🎨 seems to exaggerate his virility somehow, buffering the vague scraping of his painted features 🎨👃👄; all adding up to this image of a metal object brutally molded by stone or cinderblocks or bricks 􀀀. By hands 🤚 and harsh force – a macho man in his essence 💪👨. If a visitor inserts change into the slot in order to ‘activate’ the range, and choses to shoot 🔫 their laser at Mike’s sensor, he falls backwards slightly on his chair 􀀀, balancing in limbo – an action quite impossible beyond the mechanically enhanced physics of the range. His leg􀀀raises from the table, his arm casting his tankard 🍺 skyward, while a dusty khaki StetsonTM jolts upwards ⬆, revealing wily and matted brown hair peeling from an oily scalp; and then back down ⬇.

There was Paul - a man of few words - by far the oldest thing in the range. He really looked it too (cracks really starting to show in the varnish especially). A sour face 🍋 puckered impossibly inwards, as if he had been sculpted with expanding foam instead of paint 🎨 and rubber - dribbling in the dry haze, sheened in a lurid glisten. His mechanical animation is far simpler than Mike’s, permitted by his ripe age and assuredly ancient mechanisms 🔩⚙. If a visitor inserts a coin into the slot in order to ‘activate’ the range, and choses to shoot 🔫 their laser at Paul’s sensor, he simply leans backwards into the shelves behind him, crusty lids grazing eyes 👀 - blue and empty, while his mouth 👅 clunks open revealing an abyss - bottomless and dry. No real feat of physics is defied here, as is the case if a visitor chooses to shoot 🔫 their laser at my sensor. My arms 💪💪 flail upwards, raising my faux Smith and WessonTM 🔫 (stripped to its skeleton ☠ by teens while I dreamt, some years ago now) at my audience. My head spins painfully, while my body leans backwards (just beyond comfort), still anchored ⚓ by my harsh frame.

You can see us here now: we are each a palimpsest, erased ✏ and regenerated when the sun ☀ bleaches us too harshly or when we are outmoded by a newer, more convincing version of ourselves. I feel nothing but sympathy towards the haggard, moth-eaten lump curled on the floor named Toby, who from this angle doesn’t look very much like a dog 🐶. Toby gets shot 🔫 at the most, letting out tired whimpers from a knackered speaker 🔉 somewhere inside his lumpen body. Visitors often call me ‘the bad’: a redux of a silver-screen outlaw, a re-release from the background of some long lost Western B-side. I’ve caught scattered glimpses of myself in the reflections of visitor’s sunglasses 🕶; brown chaps, red tasseled shirt (possibly) with silver brogueing, a barren bandolier completing the look. I have gathered the parts of my identity, composed myself years apart: a black moustache (rendered in plastic), grey handsy smears on a contorted toony face plastered with grin 😁 (from which several oversized teeth 􀀀􀀀􀀀 are painted missing). I feel I am seen as a man 👨, or perhaps a phenomenally ugly woman 👩 based on the sheer amount I get shot at 🔫. The only other figure in my line of sight is the back half of a female figure’s outline - across the tiny desert island 🏝 in the Forge’s bay window. A head of glistening hair, followed by a long burgundy dress 👗 hanging from cream shoulders. Mary is a fantasy forbidden to me by my stationary condition. Besides, I could not abandon my post even if my limbs permitted me, for fear of disappointing my audience and failing my employers in some way.

Our sedentrary management of the Range fortunately requires no real housekeeping - other than to keep ourselves working by keeping our minds ticking over 🧠⏰ with listless recounts such as this. Each of our idiosyncrasies adds to the authenticity of our display - to my range - which is something I take great pride in. Our brilliant trifecta (because who really cares about Toby?), manages to balance the seriousness of our narrative (whatever it is) with the fun associated with shooting firearms 🔫 from a young age.

*stream of motor oil ⛽ passes rim of boot 􀀀, slowly filling around the swollen wooden foot shape 􀀀 inside*

***

Sunlight ☀ glances off the various facades 👺🏘 of the square’s buildings. And I wonder if my legs 􀀀􀀀 will suddenly ache from all the standing I’ve done in this unchanging saloon. I gaze from the left hand side (visitor’s right) of the range, and out past the weathered poles maintaining the sagging porch, all the way across hazy cobblestone walkways and towards the Blacksmith’s Forge 🔨 . Exploring any pixel of my view in detail, rambunctious joints arch wrongly here and there - wilfully structural but bulging in the sweaty fug, as if they are freshly pruned branches leaking thick sap in the swelter. My immediate view appears to be held together by generous caulking along all visible seams, finished with an approximate pass of spray-paint – a hint that the less exposed parts of the scene were designed to be submerged in the ocean 🌊 someday, and for the park to still be able to function. ///Interruption of seeing: a blizzard-white shimmer on black waves./// - Not a bad view of things, I often admitted: just enough to keep my mind ticking over, with thoughts running themselves ragged with speculations on whether I had a higher purpose to serve than standing here, occasionally getting shot 🔫 at and sometimes reacting.

Visitors could enter my range and stand comfortably shaded by the long mandapam. On scorchers the air-conditioners inside would be turned up to full blast, and if enough people stood beneath the porch I pretended I could feel my body cooling ❄, starting with the puckered fingers on my left hand 🖐 - the part of me that was nearest my audience. My agonising reaction often proves enough of a reward for the children, who these days seem far less inclined towards the arcade tickets 🕹🎟 that come spilling out of a hole in the top of the counter as reward for their accuracy in the allotted thirty second shooting window ⏱🔫. I feel a rising sense of joy ⬆😊 as I watch them take aim with their oversized rifles, and then again as they giggle 😂 with satisfaction as the laser hits one of my sensors, forcing a painful (but clearly hilarious) reaction.

When they laugh 🤣 at me, I feel no shame as I used to: I would often retreat inside myself, quivering on the wooden floor of my head 🧠 – a feeling now replaced and buffered by years of consideration, with a sense of pride in facilitating their strange enjoyment. I see momentary hatred 😡 on scrunched faces - while they indulge in the (almost) violence, which is followed by unfathomable joy 🤩 at the mechanical rewarding of their immorality. Some don’t pay, simply simulating the public execution with an empty magazine instead. This hysterical play-act cycles in endless repetition, with the strange but pleasurable agony I feel when I’m shot, in my opinion, being the most realistic projection available in this town, if not the whole park. I know this because I feel the cold wrench ❄🔧 – a strange comfort knowing that I have something tangible to cling to with all digits 🙏.

*Motor oil ⛽ spilling over the rim of a rough, Naugahyde[TM] boot 􀀀, pooling harsh and dark on wooden floorboards*

[Notice the motor oil ⛽ here: see it as a writhing semiotic liquid, imbued with strange power.]

The underpaid 💵📉 actors, the cuddly lovers 􀀀👫, the overfed kids who laze through here each share a meniscus of hyperactive falsity that bobs above the pool of their character, glazing their eyes 👀 as if they’ve undergone some wild hypnosis 🧙 ♂😴. I guess it’s how the town 🏫 plays with their heads 🧠.

My goal through all of this is

therefore to

blend in completely,

to become

an unthinking component

of my olden surroundings. In terms of my sensorial experience (if I can call it that) I ponder my innate confusion between corporeal pleasure and pain. I ponder my experiential importance compared to the unprecedented importance of my audience’s experience. I have been designed as subservient: I wonder whether to feign my reactions, and if they can even see 👀 my exertions making a difference physically. All I know for a fact is that I do not want to come across as a phoney. In any event, the vague approbation of my audience seems to keep me moving forwards 🛣, so to speak, and keeps me from the clutches of mindlessness 🧠😵 that I so often feel looming behind me, unable to turn my head and gaze its gloved and invisible hand 🤚 silently advancing - an ailment that seems to have befallen my counterparts, rendering them silent 🤫 and unknowing.

***

///Noticing: All mornings drag.///

Today was especially sweltering 􀀀. No visitors yet. If I could sweat 😓 I’m sure I would be (etc.). A few meandering past: fathers and daughters 👨 👧 together for the day – all fathers clearly eager to leave the park soon in order to beat the pre-empted but totally fictitious ‘mob’ of others.

Kids running off in every direction - sugar-infused energy 🍬🍭 thwarted by firm grasps 👊 on wrists. My thoughts drift through the unconvincing middle American daydream 🇺🇸😴: ‘Mobs’ hadn’t entered this place for years, although one occurrence always surfaced in my memory: the first time I had ever been shot 🔫 to figurative smithereens by a kid using a laser pointer he must’ve smuggled past security. A memory manacled away in a dark corner of my wooden head 🧠, which on that day must’ve spun into triple figures, my arms 💪💪 flailing animatedly, snagging in their ancient sockets. The relentless hammering energy 🔨⚡ I received from the generators I imagine to be hidden behind the set somewhere, forming a dark heat 🔥 in my wooden thighs, rising to linger in my wooden groin, with all the energy from my wooden being drawn there. My wooden arms 💪💪 hanging numbly, wooden elbows feeling nothing while wooden legs 􀀀􀀀 shook violently, the stand creaking and spitting out swift plumes of dust. A real lump in my hollowed-out chest, then. My body pulsating its way into blunt contortions. The energy ⚡ in my wires throbbing to the beat 🥁 of my rocking, while saccharin sweet laughter 🍬🤣 burst from the lips of my tormentors; regrouping, reforming and resounding again and again - a ricochet between wooden ears 👂👂. To become relieved through the basest of feelings, animalised in full discomfort of my visitors, all taking photos 🤳📸 (photography sadly being actively permitted in the park) of my combustion 💥. Wooden eye 👁sockets aching - a mental pipeline 🧠 had ruptured throughout me. The maintenance men 🛠 even had to come and stop the ticket machine from spewing so violently, making a rare and hazy daylight ☀ appearance (although they just looked like the regular park safety officers 􀀀, still all specky but now wearing Indiginous headdresses with their sweaty beige shirts, and carrying tomahawks alongside their toolkits 􀀀). The image of customers watching the borderline voyeuristic spectacle - the leakage of oil ⛽ from the back of my drainpipe chaps (just as it leaks from my body now - the damage undergone seemingly irreparable). All was enough to make me want to fade out, to exit the stage-set. The audience waned slowly throughout that fateful afternoon I remember, while the repairmen 🛠 welded me back onto my stand once more.

*Streaming motor oil ⛽ seems to falter, the puddle filling it’s usual and deeply soaked parameter on the wooden floor; the parameter of a mindless number of identical daily motor oil ⛽ leakages.*

///At noon the heat deadens.///

I think of eager birds 🦅 circling above. I can’t look 👀 to see if there are any. The sky in the jailhouse windows reflects a luminous FantaTM orange, the cracked plastic framing the windows having leaked in years of sunlight ☀ causing an unworldly tint (but I know the sky has to be a pale aegean blue [and completely cloudless] for the air conditioners ❄ to be whirring so loudly).

While my thoughts flatline under our ancient wooden framing,

I imagine my job’s specification (which I imagine to be filed neatly in an imaginary

and more abandoned part of the park) saying to

remain completely apathetic to the public’s reactions,

the wrenching levels of pain experienced when shot 🔫 at.

It says to

remain living in fear of this pain,

and

the constant dull sting of the sun ☀ cooking the painted skin off my head, burning my varnished scalp.

I feel my purpose is undermined by even the smallest distractions my visitors encounter: I am secondary to say, a fly 􀀀 buzzing around them, or a more appealing, newer structure with more attractive and shiny versions of myself inside. The basest level of my consciousness – how I feel waking from those dreams - seems to have been engrained with the idea that I am here to serve the higher purpose of their enjoyment until I am outmoded, and that is all.

///Audio interruption maddening theme-tune revisiting in the air – striking off-chords and pitchy harmonics – it seems heavier now, like a winding funeral dirge.///

I have higher hopes for the future, and feel as if my fate is not sealed in this sticky, mock-up saloon. Totally destitute, my main source of humiliation comes from the mechanics 🛠 when they strip me down to my waxen flesh in front of my audience in order to fix me, peeling me apart to re-oil ⛽ or re-solder my innards 🔩⚙. It doesn’t matter if the Suits 👔 who want to ‘keep things neat’ dislike my forced nudity 😣 in front of my audience or not, because they never seem to find out, and even if they did the excuses of the grunting mechanics 🛠 - after patting my wooden buttocks - would be enough to shut them up anyway. I am unable to thwart their movements in any way: my body stands rigid with catalepsy. I can merely watch 👀 what they do to me, figuratively biting a metaphorical lip 👄, silently willing that they don’t pry me apart too harshly, or scratch the inside of my rib-plate with their tools ☠🛠. To them I am a punchbag-cum-man 🥊👨, preternaturally resistant through my inanimate being, and this grants me another morsel of joy – in knowing that their purpose lies in my maintenance.

///The cool end of each day brings physical solace, at least///

The horizon 🌅 dusking beneath the long, ragged veranda. When the enclosure is switched off and the pretend gas-lamps mute, I am free to wander within dreams 🏃 ♂💭, or, rather exist through lucid hypnogogic hallucinations. (The stupor I enter each night may be partly due to the fact that the wires running into my lower back remain half on; the generators churning noisily somewhere.) I step away from my metal struts, leaping the gun counter 🔫. I am able to glide 🦅 - no - walk over to the barren island 🏝, looking the cheesy Cowboy 🤠 dead in the eye. I feel - no - touch the bins, inspect their flecked paintwork, experience their rust. I watch the faux lamps more clearly, the warm orange glow, ///their low hum/// strangely comforting. I feel the cobbles - still warm from the sun ☀ - through my boots 􀀀􀀀. I drift towards Mary’s window, passing straight through the discoloured panes without shattering them, until I stand next to her, regarding her slender profile, my hand almost brushing her pale shoulder, hovering there, moments away, as if any movement could shatter the perfect illusion, the moment trapped in my mind’s eye 🧠👁, engrained onto waxen eyelids I cannot close.

This, followed by a breakneck realisation: as I approach her front, my sheer anxiety is replaced by horror at the realisation that the limp mannequin is all but featureless: blindly painted 🎨 gestures on fabric (just hinting at an identity - a look), while all parts are peeling, reduced to a skeletal ☠ carapace. Staggering backwards reveals the flies’ feast in full - the whole body an immobile nest of woodworms, of termites, of flying things gorging themselves 􀀀􀀀􀀀. In an instant the reality of bare flesh is at once understood and infinitely mystified by the mannequin’s false materiality, by it’s false humanity.

The creatures flutter through the darkness, becoming mobile through my shock: bumping into the glass, travelling towards the gas lamps outside (while I regard their meal, their process). The mundanity of a daily oil leakage ⛽ seems just fine now, my disappointment in my own defects made infinitesimally small and distant. The horror of realisation setting my chest into tightening spasms; my legs 􀀀􀀀 no longer working (or wanting to work). I pulse as I stare 👀, furled energy behind glassy eyes 👁👁: aghast the rotting thing, at all the misconceptions. I am elevated, and cannot escape the hold of my physical body, being dragged backwards past the rusty bins, the gaslamps, the cheesy Cowboy’s rigid smile 🤠 and the long porch of the Range, grasping; wooden nails scraping along the cobbles before I’m back upright, rigid, re-soldered onto my stand in the dark. My mind races for countless moments, wishing for the prelapsarian bliss of mundanity, the endless motor oil leakage ⛽ and the looping theme tune 􀀀🔊 from before my nightmare,

///as I come back to my body with the power’s reengagement.///