FantasticLand

by Mike Bockoven

  I’ve always sort of been like that. I’ve had bullies in middle school, I got pushed around a couple times before I figured out how the gift shops worked, and before this all happened, I had, honest to God, said to myself, “You’re going to have to toughen up or this stuff is never going to stop.” I mean, it wouldn’t have helped me with that psycho woman in the store, but it was something I needed to really work on. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one who needed to toughen up.

  You’ve heard about the crowd that just sort of milled around outside the shelter along the Golden Road, right? People were kind of goofing off, and that one kid climbed on the buildings and fell off? I swear to you, the second that kid’s skull hit the ground, it was like someone flipped the fear switch. Inside the shelter it was kind of scary, but unless you were claustrophobic, you knew it was worse outside, and you just sort of rode it out, right? Once it became clear that the chain of command wasn’t happening and these kids didn’t have anyone to tell them what to do, that was when all the pent-up anxiety and fear, they couldn’t hold it back any longer. Some of these kids had never made a decision without help, ever. Others were freaking out because they couldn’t get on their phones and check in with people. That was a big deal. Long story short, most of the girls on the Golden Road just collapsed. Then that fucker Hockney showed up and did the only merciful thing I ever saw him do, and the fear took on a different flavor. At first it was panic that something bad was going to happen. After that kid’s head was turned into chunks and his blood was pooling in the gutters, it was much more “something like that is going to happen to me,” and then the mind goes from there.

  I didn’t see it happen, Hockney and the stanchion. I wasn’t far away, though. I was actually trailing Mr. Garliek at that point, trying to figure out what in the hell I was supposed to be doing, and he was running around and yelling at anyone he thought he could get away with yelling at. Seriously, he yelled when people tried to leave, he yelled at people standing around, he found some maintenance guys and yelled at them like a maniac, like this was somehow their fault. Any time anyone tried to get a solid answer out of him about what we were supposed to be doing, he would fly off the handle and start yelling things like, “You should know what to do,” and “Didn’t you read the manual?” He was starting to sound like my crazy lady in the shop, so I ducked away from the three or four managers who were following him and walked over toward the shops just in time to hear the clang. The “clang heard round the park,” right? Sam Garliek, he heard it too and he was still puffed up and acting in charge until he saw what happened. The dead body shut him up pretty good, and he began walking pretty fast toward the center of the park. I didn’t see him again for a week, which was just as well. From what I saw of him and how he handled himself, an arrow somewhere above the neckline wouldn’t have been a waste, if you follow me.

  OK, OK, I know I’m not getting to the good stuff, but I need you to know one more thing about me, OK? Sorry. OK. One more thing. I … I kind of hate people. Seriously, I’ve thought about how to phrase this and the best thing I can say isn’t, “I’m not a people person,” or something like that. It’s that I hate people. Some persons, individual persons, I like and love, but when you get eight or more together in a group, I hate that. I mean, hate that. I hate cliques, I hate crowds, and the only reason I got anywhere in retail is that I was always moving around. I had a purpose. My idea of hell is being one of those people in the middle of those crowd shots you see in concerts, you know, where fifteen thousand people are watching some band or something. But it’s not just the number of bodies; it’s that a person gets stupid when they become people. They are easily convinced of things. So I guess if my story had a heading, like, in your book, it might be “How Clara stopped hating people because they started doing what she said.” Or something less wordy that doesn’t make me sound like a controlling bitch.

  So there’s a dead body on one side of the Golden Road, and a big crowd gathered around it, and in that crowd there are at least four girls just sobbing and crying. I chalked it up to the car crash syndrome, where if you see a car crash, you feel bad but are desperate for a good long look. These girls were getting their good long look, and I think they were starting to regret it. Two girls I recognized from one of the stores, they were holding each other, and I don’t know what it was, but that pissed me right off. I went over there and pulled them apart and said, “Why are you looking at that guy? Is he going to get any deader?” and they were taken aback by that. Rightfully, I think. Then I said, “Do you want something useful to do?” and both girls immediately nodded their heads yes. They weren’t speaking yet, and they were sniffling, and one of them had snot running down her top lip, but they both nodded their heads. I said, “You both work in Fantastic Ts & More, right?” and they did, so I told them to go protect the place. Make sure no one made off with any of the merchandise. I said, “Make sure the pop and the snacks and all that are safe too. If anyone tries to take anything, you get in their face. Do you get me?” I wasn’t sure at the time where I got the phrase, “Do you get me?” Later on I remembered it was from military training scene from the movie Starship Troopers.

  The last thing I told those girls was, if you see anyone who works at the stores along the Road, tell them the same thing. Tell them the stores are off-limits. No one is taking anything out of the stores, and I kind of left it at that. A lot of the girls were in pairs or threes. I didn’t have anyone I was really close to at the park. At home I’ve got a few close friends, but in the park I did a lot of things by myself. I mean, I always had someone to eat with and I didn’t go to movies by myself very often, but I spent a lot of weeknights in my dorm room in FresnoVille by myself, which is fine. Like I said, I hate people. I decided to take a stroll through the crowd to see if there was anyone I recognized that I could tell to go to a store. I didn’t have a plan. Not really. I just saw that giving these girls something—anything—to do was better than having them stare at a dead body on the road. I found a girl here and there, but about twenty minutes later, when I came back, I saw the shops were all staffed. Better than that, I saw at least two groups of guys get kicked out of stores on the Golden Road. They would immediately start going another direction and started going from store to store and talking to the girls, and they all asked me some variant of the question, “What do we do next?” After the third or fourth time, I went to one of the shops that sold these cheapo watches and I grabbed, like, forty of them and started handing them out. I said, “Keep your posts until 7:00 p.m., then meet in the center of the Golden Road.” That gave me a couple hours to figure out what the hell I was going to say.

  During those few hours, I thought I’d better figure out just how bad things were, so I walked north through the Circus and saw the road to the dorms was flooded. I didn’t want to circle the entire park, so I started pumping people for information. Anyone I came across, I made it seem like I really needed to know about the condition of the park, and they all pretty much told me the same story—we’re flooded, we’re not going anywhere, hunker down, and did you hear about the dead guy? Yeah, I had heard about the dead guy, and then it kind of hit me, the dead guy was what was freaking everybody out, and in order to rally these girls and stop them from acting all helpless, the best thing to do was to have them face their fears. Then, what I was going to say started to take shape, and I found a shop that had paper and a pen, and I started writing it down. Seven o’clock rolled around, and the girls all came out. It was raining at that point, naturally, and when we all gathered, there were thirty-six of us, all cold and wet and most of all freaked out. I told them if they had keys to lock up and then to follow me, and I led them to the dead body. I told them if they had phones to make a video and five or six of them did. Then I gave them my speech.

  Here’s what I had written down. I made a few changes as I went, but you get the gist.

  “Thank you all for coming and for standing your posts. It might seem like an empty gesture, but believe
me, it’s anything but. I called you all here to take a look at this guy [point toward body]. I know you’ve all seen him, but I want to you to take a real good look at him. What do you notice? His head’s pretty much smashed in. That much is obvious …”

  I remember there were a few girls who kind of snickered at that line. It seemed odd at the time, but I get it now.

  “… but what else do you see? Do you see his clothes? His shoes? If you were to forget, for a split second, that this was a dead body, would he look like anyone you know? Can you relate to what happened to him? Can you see yourself doing something stupid to get a laugh and ending up dead in this park? Can you picture that?”

  At this point I had the girls’ attention, and I vividly remember two sensations. One was a feeling of power. I felt like they were hanging on to my every word. The second was a sense of purpose. They were looking to me for answers, and damn it, I had them. It sounds stupid now, but this was the first time in my life I felt like a leader.

  “I see my older brother, Bo. He’s a goofball. He would climb on a building in the rain for a laugh. I’m different than he is, but how far away am I from doing something like that? Something stupid that could get me hurt? Something stupid that would get me killed?”

  I paused for effect and I remember the only sound was the rain. The rain and my voice.

  “I have an idea. That’s all it is, an idea, but it’s an idea that if we all buy in, might help us from doing something stupid. It gives us someone to be accountable to. It gives us a sense of purpose while we’re here, and in case you haven’t seen for yourself, we’re going to be here a while. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, girls, but we are flooded on all sides, and it is not likely that we are getting out of here in the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.”

  I had no idea if this was true or not, but I wanted to sound authoritative, like I’d done some sort of research they hadn’t done.

  “During that time, or however long we end up being here, I propose that we live by two rules. They’re simple rules. They’re basic rules. But they are rules that just might keep something bad from happening to us. Rule one: This is our space. These stores are our stores. No one takes anything, no one breaks anything. These stores are going to be one thing they don’t need to repair at the end of this thing. This is a good idea, I think, because it gives us something to do. It gives us a purpose. And it gives us everything we need. There are three restaurants and two snack stations here—that’s enough to feed us for a month. And it’s ours. It’s not anyone else’s. The shops belong to the girls who run them.”

  I’ve shown this speech to a few people and they’ve commented that this sounds really harsh at this point in the crisis, and I agree. It was kind of harsh, but I want you to know where my head was at. A lot of these girls were young, they were getting their first taste of freedom a lot like college freshmen, and they reacted in a bunch of different ways. Some of them were party animals, some of them were overly social and always on their phones, some of them were kind of withdrawn, like me, and some of them were homesick. I went to summer camp for years and years and I saw the counselors deal with homesick kids. What you do is, you give them an activity. You give them something to do. So yeah, at this point it sounds like a call to arms, but that’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking, all these girls need a rallying point, and here it is. We were going to defend the shops.

  “Rule two: We take care of each other. This one is harder. I don’t know all of you. I know some of you, and I know that some of you don’t particularly like me. I’ve heard some of you say that I’m not an effective manager or that I allow customers to walk all over me.”

  This was less a statement of fact and more me taking my weakness and acknowledging it, diffusing it. I don’t know to this day if what that lady who was screaming at me, if what she said, was true. It didn’t really matter then, and it doesn’t matter now, because I was setting up an idea. I was making it sound like I was an average schmo, just like them, instead of their immediate supervisor, which I was.

  “I can’t make you respect me, and I can’t make you respect whoever is standing next to you, or that girl across from you on the road right now, or anyone else in this circle. I can’t. But what I can do is make a promise that if you fall down, I’m going to help you up, and if you’re thirsty and I have water, I’m going to give you some of mine. If I know first aid and you’re hurt, I’m going to help you, and if you need a shoulder to cry on, mine is here, without judgment. I know this sounds dramatic, but this is a dramatic fucking situation we find ourselves in …”

  A bit of well-placed profanity never goes awry if you pick your spot with care. Stephen King novels taught me that.

  “… and if you are that shoulder or that bottle of water or that first aid to a fellow ShopGirl, then I promise you we are going to get through this no matter how bad it gets. We can’t control what else happens in this park. We can’t control when rescue is going to come. But we can take care of the shops, and we can take care of each other. That’s what we can do. Or … or …”

  I actually wrote that in to make sure I paused.

  “… we could end up like this guy. What do you think?”

  Then I folded up my soggy piece of paper, stuck it in my pocket, and opened the floor. We stayed up all night that night trying to figure out how our little tribe was going to work. That’s the words we kept using, “little tribe,” because of that Nirvana song. Well, the live version of that Nirvana song. Never mind. We stayed up, and we hashed out who would eat when, how we would take care of the shops, and how everything was going to go down. One of the first things we decided, and it was a really hot-button issue, but we came to a consensus, was that the dead body we had gathered around would stay in the street. I know it sounds gross, but the idea was that it was both a symbol that would scare bad guys off and a symbol of what would happen if we didn’t take care of each other. Morbid? Yes, but how did I put it? This was a dramatic fucking situation. The remarkable thing, now that I think back on it, is no one ever questioned my leadership. After that night, we were a group. There were fights and there were hard feelings and there were girls who didn’t like each other, but no one ever said, “This is stupid.” To be honest with you, that’s the reaction I expected. I thought one girl would laugh or break the mood or something, but it never happened. We became a group, and it was like wet cement that set. The day after our all-night “how is this going to work” meeting, I heard one of our tribe talking with a couple of stragglers who weren’t in their section yet, and she said, “I’m with the ShopGirls.”

  OK, now onto what you want, right? The lead-up to the Council. The first week was all about setup. We figured out when we were going to eat, when we were going to sleep, who was manning which stores, and, most importantly, we went around to the rest of the park and figured out what everyone else was doing. We sort of had an informal “come hang out with us” agreement with the Robots … um … the folks in Fantastic Future World. Can I go with the tribe names at this point? I mean, you know where all this is headed, you know the shorthand. Everybody knows this shorthand. My fucking mother knows the shorthand at this point. Hehe, Stephen King.

  The Robots and the Fairies were closest to us, so it was cool until they locked themselves down after Elvis, who was an awesome guy before the hurricane, had something happen to him. I never figured out what exactly happened, so all I got was rumors stacked on rumors wrapped in more rumors. You’d be amazed how quickly rumors can grow and get out of hand when kids don’t have the constant distraction of their phones to check every twelve seconds. There was talk of severed heads and that his girlfriend had her head cut off and that Elvis had been raped by the Deadpools and the Pirates had red glowing eyes and all kinds of garbage, but I was able to figure out a couple of things. One, there was a violent element in the park, and it was west of the Exclamation Point; two, people were scared; and three, the Fairies had no idea what they were doing. We would have tak
en in some of their folks if we had the resources. Most people, they had gone back to the part of the park where they felt comfortable, and some of them had really good leaders like Elvis and, I later found out, Riley. Jesus God Almighty, what that poor woman had to deal with. It was fight from the word “go.” But some leaders weren’t nearly as good, and that was the Fairies. They were just sort of there, and when they got threatened, they hid. And they were found. I … OK, I heard a story of the Pirates crossing over into Fairy territory, three at a time, and dragging girls off as they screamed. I never saw it myself, but that was a pretty standard story. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but given what we ended up going through after the Council, I can say it’s in line with their character.