Travels: The Magic Kingdom [Day V]

Disneyland: ITSO the great, sadly late, Ray Bradbury. Old Dead Things.

In the centre of the park, a grove of carefully tended flowers surround a statue. The bronze is sun-warm to the touch.

Far away, under the earth, eyes blink.

Steam drifts through vents in a cold dark room, pulling heat from a tube in the centre. The body inside, empty, twitches in the cold as the throat works. Veins that once pumped blood now ooze acids: gel and nitric and mystery magic. The mouth is motionless. In a nearby chamber, a heart ticks with mechanical precision on a bed of ice. The brain was removed long ago - everybody knows it is the heart that really matters.

He waits.

Beat. A little girl holds the hand of the statue.  Beat. Tourists squint in the sun, flash cruel lights in his eyes. He cannot close them.  Beat. Underground, his breath steams silently inside the tube, trapped. His fingers yearn to shade his face. Above, a pigeon passes over the sun and falls, suddenly, into the shadows of ringed palm trees.

An enormous, deformed animal lumbers past the statue, and the man in the tube feels a pang of kinship: the monsters that roam the park are trapped too, marooned in a prison of felt and sweat - their hands foreign white bodies hanging from rubbery wrists. He imagines tongues lolling in the heat, sunken eyes inside the bobbing heads. They glint out at him with empathy.

His knuckle itches. It has always itched.

The room has no clock in it, but they check on him twice a day. The door creaks open; it is Connors. The man in the tube imagines a smile. Connors is the best of them, the gentlest and the brightest. Most days he brings a thin sketchpad into the room with him and draws lying on the floor, thin legs kicking at the air like a boy.

"Good morning, sir," says Connors with respect. "It's a beautiful day out there."

He sits and draws next to the tube for a few minutes, gentle-eyed women in flowing dresses and dragons and shining castles, and speaks casually of the world. He has been away from the facility for several days: "My baby sister, married. What a doozy of a place this old rock of ours is." He shakes his head and looks up. "But you always knew that, I suppose. One day you'll see it again."

Yes! the man wants to shout. He wants to reach out and flip through Connors' book, make the skirts on the women twirl and the fire flick forth from the dragons' mouths. He wants to claw away the fog of the room, clamber up, up, up to the sun and the light and the hurt and see his world, the perfect world he always knew he could make and he did, he did make it better than anyone could have imagined. Too well, perhaps. In a perfect world, there is no room for decay.

Move, mouth! he commands. Gnash, o Teeth! Bend, knees, bend and break and bleed, bleed blue fire! The tube trembles, earth reaching out to him. He wants to sing.

Obey! Obey! Obey!

Connors looks up from his drawings, startled. Above, the nails of the statue shift and bite into bronze. The tick of the heart falters. It slows. Connors rushes out, his sketchbook open on the floor.

In a perfect world, there is no room for old dead things.

Notes from a tired brain.

Still not super happy with this, but part of this exercise is letting go of writing before I stomp it into the ground, so there you have it. I am pretty sure Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen body is in no way attached to the statue of him in the park, which is actually quite charming, but Bradbury is the best at body horror and I couldn't pass up a real-live I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario.

In actual news, Disneyland is definitely cool in its own way, though I'm sure I come to it very differently than I would have as a child. Now it's more food for thought than mindless amusement. Still definitely a worthwhile experience. Also, a thriller/chase sequence set inside the It's A Small World ride would be amazing. I want to shoot that now. Kind of DIVA meets Charade - it's a scary and surreal artifact of bygone times, much like Disney himself.

Cheers
Julia