Lost.
Beautifully lost, that is, in something like the alleys of Paris, the vast spiderweb risings and fallings of ways and byways in the Casbah…
A touch of London waterfront, with fog here…
A remembrance of Shanghai or Hong Kong there…
The Tivoli just beyond…
And beyond that, a twist to find Dublin, a turn to discover Venice, a roundabout to Rome, upstairs to Vienna, downstairs to Flamenco Madrid caverns…
What we have here, of course, is a multiplicity, a plethora, a maze of restaurants, large and small, foreign and domestic, where the hot dog blends with the pizza, which blends with the falafel, which wanders over into the strudel and the cream bun, the coffee and aperitif outdoor cafe. All the textures, colors, smells we can borrow from every street, cornucopia alleyway, every burrow and lost corner of Piccadilly or Montmartre, Florence or downtown Barcelona, let us borrow, let us build, let us light. The overall flavor in the air might well be the smell of coffee being roasted somewhere in the deeps of New Orleans—but the scent reaches us here. Our noses should lead us even before our eyes see the Maze and can hardly wait to be lost.
Because the maze of restaurants, twining in and out of history, should circle and re-circle itself so that it might take three or four visits before you figure out where everything is. In the meantime you are delightfully blundering into sitdown cafes, stand-up hot dog stands, lounge-around beer halls, take-your-time-forever French restaurants, instant-ice billets. The overall smell may be coffee, but the overall sound is tasting, chewing, swallowing. It is a Sea of Eats.
It follows that your uncommon tourist, wandering these territories will stumble upon not only uncommon times but uncommon foods, moving down through history or across continents.
At dinnertime, why not climb aboard the largest locomotive in the world to find that its interior is really a kitchen with stoves, ovens, and preparation tables. The steam from its kitchen would plume from the locomotive stack, of course, to be ventilated off. Behind the locomotive with its hidden bakery would be a procession of flatcars sporting, as it were, tables positioned in the open. An illusion of travel would run past them on surrounding film-projection walls as they felt themselves ride through an endless tunnel of images. As the dining flatcars rocked gently on their gimbals, and the silverware chimed sweetly, the diners would gaze out at Irish meadows, French vineyards, or the Indian buttes or mesas of Cheyenne or Taos. A different travel view every hour, a different journey, considered and ticketed in advance, every day. And the menu, prepared to fit the scenery: gazpacho nearing Catalonia, foie gras leaving Paris. Or, hell, why not an art history tour? The gourmet locomotive steaming through Provence and the multimillion sunflower fields to track-measure Van Gogh. Or an endless excursion sideswiping Monet’s oil or watercolored Giverny flower gardens and lily ponds? Or El Greco’s electric-fire-green-blue mountains, capable of birthing taffy-pull-elongated Christian saints? What a train, what far-travelings, what real and unreal remembrances!
Those who shun that special dining-seeing train (what a loss!), can board the Tea Trolley just beyond. It would resemble a San Francisco cable car or one of those smaller red bread-box-sized trolleys that used to sail the streets of Los Angeles. At four in the afternoon, how fine to see the Tea Trolley nested with three dozen ladies, or gents, sluicing the Indian brew over their teeth and devouring crumb cakes, yes?
Along the way, in the heavens above the Maze, a Zeppelin or Blimp shape, suspended, into which, if you wish, you can be hauled straight up by a harnessed-seat-rescue-device into a floating, soaring—or so it cinematically projected seems—restaurant where you can eat as you fly over New York, London, Paris, or Rio.
On through the maze, we have, finally, four to five dozen cafes, restaurants, soda founts, which we can add or subtract to infinity… including… yes?…
The Longest Soda Fountain in the World… a grand long parade of stools, one hundred in all, count ’em, all the way down the line, duplicating sweetly, succulently, the Longest Bar in the World in Tijuana. Faced with mirrors, of course, so you can fatten your eyes with the grand sight of yourself or your chum in the reflecting glass while you fatten your stomach. Then up and out and around, to the end of the Energy-Restoring-Restaurant Maze, to the entrance of: The Experiences!
Are you ready for this? Still with me?
The Second Time Maze is across an Abyss of Stars, separated from the First Maze, straight down, and, seemingly straight up, by a billion light years of stars in all directions. In order to cross over the abyss, there are a number of game stations where the head of any party of two, three, or four or more would play a laser beam game which, if won, totalling up to some particular sum, would cause a bridge to jut across from one side of the First Maze to the Second’s side.
The Second Maze, as seen from a distance, would be like a small City, seemingly suspended in space, turning slowly. An illusion, of course, the outer wall might circle about, with light patterns on the other walls giving a semblance of motion. The entire structure, perhaps like a double pyramid, one upright, one upside down, would have a series of doors in the various faces, and every few minutes, or every thirty seconds, a new door would be presented, with a different date on the facing, representing a different age, Past or Future, or, for that matter Far Away and Mysterious Present! What we are playing here, for the moment, is a variety of Time Roulette.
The facade of the Fantoccini Great Electric Time Maze Two gives one an immediate idea of the wonders that lie waiting, and humming inside.
Across the front, in giant metaphorical symbols, some electric robots, others in mural form, are representations of all the Times that wait within the portals. Here a great dinosaur lurks, there Jupiter rises as Saturn sets, up here an Egyptian pyramid looms, while below is a thermonuclear lab, an AC-DC electromagnetic Mechanical Hound spiders its eight legs until, like the wings of a hummingbird, they almost vanish!
Each Adventurer (customer) is given a computerized card or a small computer with which to give options for action within the Maze.
The Adventurers are led, 20 or 30 at a time, into a chemical-nuclear-electronic laboratory of immense size and incredible flexibility; it is all storms of electric power, and great screens on which Past, Present, Future thrive in images. At the center of the Lab is the Time Centrifuge. One of the Adventurers is asked to Volunteer to get into the Spinner to be Spun off into Time.
Someone volunteers… a boy or a girl preferably, though it could be an older person. The Volunteer (a real customer or an actor who is a permanent employee of the Maze) enters the Yestermorrow Centrifuge and the Physicist-in-Charge then asks the crowd to vote via magnetic card or computer device, on where the Volunteer Voyager shall be sent.
The vote is taken! It totals up on the screen—dinosaurs perhaps, hound Maze maybe, Alpha Centauri, could be! Lost in the pyramids, why not?!
Bang! A switch is thrown. The Yestermorrow Centrifuge whirls, groans, explodes with energy and breaks down! “My God!” cries the Physicist. “Our machine has miscalculated! Our Volunteer has vanished! See! But to what planet, what place, what time, where, how, why?”
And, indeed, the Machine has slowed and is empty. The Volunteers are now asked to vote, where to go, how to find, in what place and time to search for the lost Time Traveler!
They vote! They choose—perhaps—the Future! The Cosmic Reaches, the Star Deeps!
“Enter!” cries the Physicist. “Off you go to find our lost child!”