Attract Mode

The smell of popcorn lingered in the air as I bagged up the last of it for the dumpster outside. I had sent the rest of my staff - mostly college kids and retirees - home for the evening. I could close up the cinema without them, and the last film of the night was a long epic... they needed the time far more than I did. 

Ever since the divorce and my wife’s abrupt departure, I don’t feel the need to go home to my extremely empty house. So, no: I didn’t mind staying late. Hell, I’ve spent the night once or twice in a reclining seat. There’s a gym just down the sidewalk with showers. I keep a bag of toiletries just in case I don’t feel awake enough to drive home, or the weather’s nasty, or... Well, I’m the manager after all - I can do what I please. 

The Varunkirk cinema is the finest movie theatre in the city... or so I say. There’s two others: one is a dollar theatre, the other part of a corporate chain: both soulless in their own ways, like sharing a town with a ghost and a zombie.

I checked my phone and noted the time and I made my way into the hall. The film would be wrapping up soon. The dim lighting and posters for upcoming films greeted me, and I could hear the muffled sound effects, rumbles, and voices of the film’s climax. 

As a more romantic kid, I called it “cinema thunder.” 

I counted down the minutes and then the ending score boomed within and a river of customers began to flow out of the doors. I gave my usual theatrical smile and wished them all a good night, broom and dustpan in hand. 

I waited till the few that stayed to the end credits exited before I slowly and methodically worked my way down the aisles, sweeping up every bit of popcorn and scattered candies. I'm not a manager that’s afraid to get their hands dirty. I took care of the drinks left in the cupholders, which took me less than an hour. There was not a patron left in the cinema when I exited. An eerie silence filled the building. The poster for an upcoming horror flick with a ghoulish figure leered at me from around a far corner.

After checking the restrooms to make sure there were no remaining patrons, I trudged to the lobby. We keep a decently sized arcade maintained there and the attract screens were running on their loops: engines revved, fighters beat each other up, and masked thugs fired guns at the screen. In the very center a DDR thrummed out beats, the attractive anime girl bouncing along to the music. Humming in the corner was an older arcade cabinet from the ‘80s. “Pareidolia” it was called. The graphics were amazing for how old it was, and the demo playing on the screen never looped - it was always something different. There was a similar cabinet in a cafe near the university, too. 

The characters on the demo were walking around a bizarre castle and fighting strange figures, talking to each other and saying things that video game characters from the ‘80s didn’t say.

...I didn’t like it, but I didn’t dare move it. 

“Dance challenge!” the DDR lady shouted, throwing up two fingers and winking. 

“Right,” I grumbled. “Whatever, time for shutdown.” 

“I’m calling you out Calvin!” the anime girl shouted. 

I paused, hadn’t heard that before. That was my name. Did she always say that? 

“Yeah, I’m talking to you!” 

I looked up to find her pointing a painted nail at me, a grin plastered to her face. I looked around expecting someone to pop out from a hiding place to tell me I was being pranked. 

“Nope, no pranks here. Just dancing challenges... you up for it? Or are you getting too old and depressed?”  

I glared at her. “Hey!” 

Her hands went to her hips with a giggle. “Oooh, did I get personal with you Calvin?” 

“I’m not taking gaff from some computer glitch!” 

“Then bring it on!” 

The pad sat on its rubber mat, four arrows worn slick from a decade of sneakers. I'd swept popcorn out from under it a hundred times. It was just a machine. A gimmick cabinet the previous manager had leased and never bothered to rotate out.

I stepped onto it anyway.

The music cut. The anime girl's bouncing froze mid-beat, her grin holding a frame too long, like a projector hiccuped. Then the screen went dark, and for one long second the only light in the lobby was the stutter of the racing game and the steady hum of the demo from Pareidolia in the corner.

She came back. Not the bouncy loop anymore. She stood still, head tilted, eyes flat on me.

"Song select, Calvin."

Her voice had dropped the cartoon lilt. It came out warm and close, like someone standing just behind my left shoulder. The track list scrolled up the screen — pop songs, EDM, the usual. My name glowed at the top of the player one box. Nobody had typed it.

"Who did this?" I asked the empty lobby.

"Nobody did anything." The girl's painted nail tapped the glass. "You're the one who walked up. You're the one who's been sleeping in the building because you can't stand your own kitchen at midnight."

My stomach went tight. "That's not something a machine knows."

“It's not a machine, Calvin.” She leaned forward until her face filled the whole cabinet, and her eyes were dark the way a movie screen goes dark between reels. "You've been feeding me all these years. Popcorn crumbs, spilled cola, three-dollar tokens. And you never once sat down to play."

The pad hummed under my feet.

“One song,” she said. “Beat me and I'll tell you where she went.”

The air went out of me. My ex-wife's name sat in my throat like a swallowed key. I hadn't said it out loud in months. I hadn't asked anyone where she went because the only honest answer was that I'd driven her out with my silences and my long nights at a job I didn't need.

“Calvin.” Softer now. Almost gentle. “She didn't leave because of you. She left because of me.”

I should have walked off the pad. I should have unplugged the machine and thrown the breaker and gone home to my empty house and my gym bag and the hum of the Pareidolia cabinet that I never, ever looked at directly.

Instead I said, “Pick the song.”

Her grin split wide, too wide for her face, and the floor beneath the pad flickered with static. 

“I thought you might say that.”

The track slammed in — bass, drums, a tempo my forty-year-old knees had no business attempting. Arrows started climbing the screen. The girl threw up two fingers.

“Dance challenge!”

I moved.

I was never a dancer. High school Calvin was the kid who stood at the wall at dances and watched. But the arrows came at me in a rhythm my body understood before my brain caught up, and I stomped and twisted and somehow kept pace, the pad clicking under my heels, the lobby lights strobing with the beat.

And all the while her voice threaded through the music, low and intimate, in the gap between my breaths.

“You used to stay late even when she was waiting at home. You used to pick this over her. You chose the quiet, Calvin. You chose the empty.”

“Shut up,” I grunted, slamming the left arrow.

“One more night, you told her. One more closing. And she sat in your kitchen with the lights off, listening to you not come home.”

My foot came down wrong. The arrow missed. The screen flashed a red note, and the bass dropped out, leaving only the metronome click of my failure and the sudden, awful silence of the lobby.

She tilted her head at me, sweet and cruel.

“Beat me, Calvin. Then I'll tell you.”

The arrows resumed, faster. My lungs burned. The hum from Pareidolia in the corner rose to meet the beat, and I understood, in the way you understand things in dreams that you forget by morning, that I had never been dancing with the anime girl at all.

I had been dancing with the cabinet that watched everything.

My feet found the rhythm again. I stopped listening to her voice and started listening to the hum, to the click of the pad, to the low bassline under everything. The screen went red with near-misses and I kept moving, kept stomping, kept my eyes on the arrows and not on her face, because her face kept trying to be a face I knew.

The song ended.

The screen flashed a score. Player one: PERFECT. A little pixel crown dropped onto the anime girl's head. She stood in the middle of the cabinet, arms crossed, and for a moment she looked almost disappointed.

Then she smiled, and it was almost kind.

“Alright, Calvin. I'm a woman of my word.”

I stood on the pad, chest heaving, sweat cold down my back, waiting for her to tell me where my wife had gone.

“She's not gone, Calvin.” The screen flickered. "She's been at the cafe by the university. She plays Pareidolia every night at closing. She's waiting for you to come beat that one too.”

The lobby was silent. The racing game looped. The fighters beat each other up. The anime girl's face went still and flat, and then she bounced once, threw up two fingers, and winked.

“Dance challenge!”

The music kicked back in. The loop resumed. Just a machine again.

I stepped off the pad, legs shaking, and stood in the middle of the dark lobby, staring at the hum of the Pareidolia cabinet in the corner. I did not look at it directly. I never did.

But I understood now why I was afraid to move it.

Because if a cabinet could know my name, and a cabinet could know my wife, then whatever was in that one in the corner knew something even I didn't and it had been waiting for me to sit down and play for a very long time.