So I was playing virtual skeeball at the viral liminal spaces dead mall in Middle Village today, and this little boy no older than three, one of the only four other people in the arcade, dazzled by all the flashing lights, started climbing on the skeeball machine. I was at a loss how to react. In any other time, in any other place, if he was my kid and not a stranger, I probably would have said or done something. But I made children's games for years--a new generation playing happily in the repurposed ruins of my own childhood is, more or less, my whole thing.
This place was near empty, some of the games already broken and probably irreparable; his mother had brought him there alone at 5 PM on a Wednesday to make him happy. In that moment that entire arcade, empty but for us, existed just for him, likely the last generation to carry memories of it in his heart. I saw in his eyes an echo of the happy children who had visited this very mall 20 years ago--my friends and colleagues on whom spaces like this left such an impression they had built their adulthoods around bringing more of that same joy into this cruel world, great designers and critics and builders of worlds who had devoted their lives to crafting the delights of innocence. I thought of all the Street Fighter orphans who said that to them growing up, Chinatown Fair had been the only safe place in the world. Who am I to ask him to move?
His mother showed up shortly, and similarly was at a loss. (I wondered if she had played there herself, as a little girl.) She ended up climbing on the machine herself to retrieve him, and he wailed and cried as she carried him away. I came to realize for the first time that my parents must have suffered from this dilemma too. It is important to teach your child to respect boundaries, but it is awkward in a paradise constructed specifically for children, which you brought them to specifically for their delight.
As I was snapping pictures of the empty signs and hollow alcoves in the mall, partly to answer questions from my friends who had not gone in decades--is the Toys 'R' Us still there, is the pretzel place still there, no, the problem with projecting dystopian visions of capitalism into the future is that it gets eaten by other dystopian visions of capitalism, nothing beside remains--I heard a voice at the top of the stairs shout, "Sir! Sir!" I wondered who the kindly old lady who ran the arcade could have been referring to. It turned out she meant me.
She ran down and intercepted me at the base of the stairs, and handed me the photos I had left behind in the photo booth. There was a deep sympathy in her eyes, which I did not understand until I realized she had just watched a grown man in his late thirties spend two hours on a workday afternoon wandering around taking cell phone photos of the darkened laser tag and tennis ball cannon rooms, playing whack-a-mole and two player lightgun games and skeeball and taking sticker pictures by himself, likely the only customer she had all afternoon except for a handful of single parents and their kids who I clearly had nothing to do with.
I think she might have been trying very hard not to say, "You were here when you were a little boy, weren't you?"
Or, worse: "I'm sorry about your girlfriend who died when you were teenagers."
Neither of which is true. But they felt close enough to true to be sobering.
Instead she asked: "You on vacation?"
"It's my day off," I said.
What a polite but transparent fiction, that an adult would travel this deep into Queens, hours away from any tourist spot, to visit a children's arcade in a dead mall on vacation. I realized I probably wasn't the first--and definitely won't be the last--of the thirtysomething adults to come to this spot alone, from far away, just to pay their childhood selves a visit one last time before they lose the chance forever.
I cannot share the spirit of excitement in which Gen-Z and later Millennials visit places like the Metro Mall, unearthing ruins of things from the nineties their elder siblings had told them stories about that they never got to experience themselves. I have habits from a dead world. For goodness sakes, without thinking, I nearly bought a blender and a ten pound bag of frozen chicken from BJ's before I realized I was in an anachronism, and somehow I walked out of there with an Oreo shake from Burger King. I came there to see weird Backrooms shit, to explore ruins, meet ghosts, indulge in the lore of an almost-forgotten past. Instead it turns out that I am a ghost myself.