Drew Smith - Arcade

IT WAS A QUIET NIGHT. I WAS DOING MY USUAL ROUNDS,walking from here to there, looking at DVD covers, waiting for something to happen. I wasn’t interested in anyone out there, and no one was interested in me.

I went to the hallway and entered an empty booth. The second I dropped a token in the slot, I recognized a powerful stench. I searched around for its source and spotted on the floor a pile of human excrement. I jumped back, I was so startled. I didn’t think for a second before pushing out of the booth. I felt so revolted, I wanted to leave the arcade right away, but I was afraid that if I did the staff might see me entering the booth and then leaving abruptly on the security footage, and assume I was the culprit. Maybe they’d freeze frame a picture of me and hang a wanted poster on the premises. Maybe they’d wait until the next time I came in to confront me. Surely they’d see what a short time I’d spent in there. But, then, maybe if you really had to go, you could be in and out in no time at all.

I walked around for a few minutes trying to behave normally but not feeling normal. I no longer felt like finding someone to connect with. I thought the arcade must be falling apart and becoming the kind of weird and disgusting underbelly that anyone might imagine when thinking of a place like that.

I left after I felt enough time had passed to clear me as someone who had shat and run. Walking past the clerk on my way out, I debated telling him what I’d seen, but I feared it would make me look like someone trying to avoid suspicion.

Driving home, I didn’t know what to think about the place. I wasn’t sure why I had been going or where it was all leading. I wondered about my best-case scenario at the arcade, and if there had ever been one at all. I wondered what, if anything, would finally make me stop going there. Maybe it would take a big scare or a real crisis. I imagined that the whole place was in decline. I thought about the broken windows theory, and wondered if I had seen the first broken window, or maybe just a broken window. Maybe it wasn’t the first shit on the floor. Maybe it was just the first one I had encountered.

I remembered Holden Caulfield at the end of The Catcher in Rye, when he discovers the words “fuck you” written on the wall at his younger sister Phoebe’s school, how he imagines the way it threatens to destroy the innocence of the children there. “I kept wanting to kill whoever’d written it,” he says.

I WENT OUT TO THE ARCADE ONE NIGHT A FEW WEEKS LATER, and found it closed. The building was dark. There was another man out there. We circled the place in our cars. I got out and tried the door. The guy parked next to my car, and I went to his window after I found the door locked. He was a good-looking, middle-aged Latino.

“It’s locked,” I said.

“That’s strange,” he said. “Was there a note on the door?”

“I didn’t see one.”

I walked back to the door to see if I had missed a note, or if one had fallen on the ground.

“No note,” I said.

I went back to his window, and we appraised one another for a second.

“All the lights are off,” I said. “Maybe they’re closed for a staff meeting or something.”

“Huh,” the guy said. “Well, you wanna sit in my car with me for a minute?”

“Thanks, but I think I’m going to head out. Playing in public makes me nervous. Besides you could be an axe murderer.”

He laughed. “Yeah, you too.”

“Maybe I’ll see you next time.”

“Okay, man.”

Another car was pulling in as I was leaving. We drove past one another very slowly, but I wasn’t able to get a look at the driver.

The day I found the arcade I knew that it couldn’t last forever. It seemed too old fashioned to survive, the buttons on the wall, the porn on disks instead of online. The lit-up coin slots. It was like discovering a pinball arcade.

The next time I went, a week later, the place had been completely emptied out. No note.

However much the arcade seemed like an artifact from some lost era, I had never imagined it would close that way — with no warning, no clearance sale, no heads-up from the clerks, no sign on the front door made in Microsoft Word.

I experienced the same reaction as when the cop ended things with me. Not the hysterical sadness, but the incredulity at not having a vote about something that pertained to me so directly. Like a kid told by his parents that the family is moving across the country, I couldn’t believe other people were permitted to make these decisions about my life unilaterally.

I pictured the other men from the arcade like satellites cut loose in space with nothing to orbit. There was no chance I’d see the Marine again, or the bull, or the hedgehog, or the guy who said I should read The Better Angels of Our Nature. I wished I could phone some of the other men who went there in order to gauge the appropriate response. Maybe they had received news of the arcade’s closing with a shrug.

Even after seeing it all emptied out and vacated, I drove out there one last time a couple of weeks later, just to be sure. In my fantasies, they’d had to close the place down and remove the inventory for some kind of temporary mold or asbestos remediation, after which it would reopen exactly the same as before.

DREW NELLINS SMITHgrew up in a small town in Texas and wrote Arcade while working at a motel in Austin. He has written, reviewed, and interviewed for many of the usual literary places.