‘Readers of a certain generation will recall, with mixed feelings, the fad of keychained virtual pets that thrived in that short slice of time between the emergence of the internet and the omnipresence of it. It’s difficult to be nostalgic about a product that so well foreshadowed the trespass of work into one’s home, first via the pager and then, in a flood, via email and the cellphone. It’s difficult, too, to be nostalgic about a creature programmed to run headfirst toward death at every opportunity- gorging itself on vitamins and candy and shitting and falling asleep in its shit and dying because, say, its owner forgot to turn out the tiny digital light.
And yet, nostalgia is a force in and of itself- the gravity equivalent of time- and there is a part of us that’s drawn backward by the serious but not-so-serious stakes offered in little pixel pets. To quash that nostalgia, one might visit ‘The Electric Pound,’ where all exhibits operate on back-up batteries and have the audio toggled ‘on.’’
‘The Electric Pound’ sounds like a screaming dial-up connection- like a server on fire. It has all the atmosphere of the internet as imagined by the eighties and as experienced by an unwitting hacker, thrust into a motherboard by some occult malfunction. Hector is spooked by the place so I leave him in the kennel with the man who sells me the ticket and who is so relieved to experience a living animal that he doesn’t ask about the rabbit’s condition.
I spend an hour, or so, legitimately impressed by the sheer variety of virtual pets on display and by the small, button-pressing levers that have been installed to keep them alive with minimal human effort. My child-mind had not been ready for the responsibility of a virtual pet. In handling death, the off-brand chimpanzee device I’d received for Christmas one year had displayed none of the subtly of the legitimate brands. The chimp had died early and the screen displayed the looping scene of a blurry little ape carcass, framed in digital flies and scored by a melancholy beeping that still plays in my head every time I pass roadkill. I buried the thing in the cemetery near my house, between two kids I didn’t think would mind. I laid there crying and picking black dirt from my nails.
I’ve read that the bootleg chimpanzee goes for upwards of $500 on the collector’s market but, even if I thought it might still function, I’ve never had the heart to dig it up for money. Maybe, if I ever return home, I’ll go out and find the thing and send it here, where it can live long stretches and blissfully reincarnate, subjected to virtual rot only in the second that it takes for ‘The Electric Pound’ to needle in a reset.
In looking for a toilet, I stumble on a backroom where men stand in a ring and make bets on secondhand Graysnail fights. I lose $20 and leave.
-traveler
