Journey had been trapped by a giant glass bowl. The glass bowl was full of fifty-pound chocolate bars, of which Journey had eaten at least one. The bowl was in a candy store in the Dasney Amusement Park Mall, a shopping center modeled on Disneyland that featured all the standard Dasney characters attached to various Dasney stores: the Mudhutter’s Amazing Mobile Homes, Dallas in Wunderland’s Drinking Glasses, Yellow Snow’s Lemonade Concoctions, the Wacked Witch’s Flying Cleaning Appliances.
The bowl was narrower at the top than at the sides and difficult to escape, especially when the supply of chocolate bars was low, as it was now. Patrons pointed at Journey within it. One overhaul-clad boy put his nose to the glass and snorted like a pig. Another licked the glass as if the chocolate could be consumed by osmosis. A girl in a polka-dot dress jumped in place as if she might at any moment launch into the bowl herself. A man in a plaid jacket averted his eyes, embarrassed, remembering his own past childhood transgressions involving Fruit Polygon Cereal.
Neither Journey nor everyone noticed any of this. Everyone was in love with the Internet, so computers of any sort sent her or him into a swoon, and a computer made of popsicles sent everyone into a double-swoon, since everyone was on a diet.
For Journey, the chocolate bowl was a world not unlike the animatronic John Quincy Adams Hawaiian exhibit on the other side of the mall. There, patrons were asked to forget what had been and what was possible and instead live in the moment, as if it were the real. Jump out a window and fly, the Dasney Amusement Park Mall executives in charge of bad decisions might as well have proposed. Don’t worry about what’s below.
What’s below came for Journey as a person dressed as a red-mustachioed copper put clinks on her or him. Beside Journey, a person dressed as a woman with a matronly physique read the child her or his rights in an enthusiastic sing-song voice appropriate for a picture book reader. Around Journey, Pop Rawk grenades went off as people shifted their feet trying to get a look.
Everyone was one of them.
Five thousand ninety-two dollars was a lot of money everyone did not have and a lot of lesson Journey had failed to learn. Still, this was everyone’s darling, her or his offspring, and it was difficult to watch her or him disappear into the darkness of a vehicle decorated like a paddy wagon.
Everyone thought of the Internet that she or he loved so much. It was always telling everyone to let go, that attachments were keeping everyone from what she or he wanted, which was to find the end to the novel she or he was writing, the end that was also the beginning.
Everyone thought of John Quincy Adams on the other side of the mall, of the transcendence offered in robotics.
Everyone saw Journey melt before her or him as if everyone’s darling were merely an idea conveyed through an assemblage of metal and plastic. Everyone let go.
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