by Pasha Malla
Then the itching began.
First it was my neck. Prickling and needling, like being strangled by a cactus. Assuming clippings were trapped in my shirt, I pried open my collar. But as I did so the itch scurried down between my shoulder blades. And no sooner were my fingernails clawing at that spot, an area further down inflamed. It was infuriating: every place I scratched only seemed to chase the feeling elsewhere. There was no recourse but to bathe—for a second time that day, no less. The inefficiency rankled me. But these circumstances were extreme.
I ducked behind the screen, out of view of the cameras, removed my clothing, wrapped my lower half in a towel and entered the bathroom. As water thundered into the tub, I stood at the sink eyeing my new hairstyle in the mirror, clipped so close at the temples that my skin shone palely through. In addition to the cuttings that my shirt had trapped all over my torso, stubble had also collected on my cheeks and in my ears. I brushed as much as I could into the sink, where it collected in a bristly spackle.
But now that itch had found its way into my mouth.
After gargling with water the feeling remained, so I moved close to the mirror and opened wide. There it was, a stout hair perched almost defiantly on the middle of my tongue. Except my attempts to wipe it away did nothing, and when I took it between my thumb and forefinger and pulled, it held fast. The hair, about the thickness and length of an eyelash, was somehow attached.
I got a better grip with my fingernails and tried again: like a follicle, a taste bud lifted with it. But the hair didn’t loosen. In fact it seemed to grip with renewed purpose—not simply affixed to the surface of my tongue but somehow lodged into the deeper tissue. Surely, I thought with horror, it couldn’t be growing there? I shuddered, collected myself, opened my mouth again, pinched the hair at the tip and yanked sharply. Something gave and snapped, like a blade of grass plucked from the earth by its root. But to my horror the hair did not pop free. Instead it began unravelling.
What protruded from my tongue, it seemed, was merely the tip of something much longer. I pulled and pulled, as if reeling in a fishing line, and out it came: an inch turned into another, and then another. Worse still was the tugging sensation of the hair slipping along inside my tongue. Watching myself in the mirror, eyes wide in horror, though my instinct was just to rip the thing free, I proceeded gently so as not to break it off. A foot of the stuff, then two, gathering in the sink in coils. With the bath still running the bathroom was filling with steam; my reflection fogged over. Lost in mist, I groped wildly at my mouth—and still the hair unravelled, thickening from thread to string, braided and bristly and slimy, and slithering still out of a widening hole in my tongue. Relentless. Seemingly without end.
So I closed my lips, pressed my teeth around that cord of hair, and began to chew.
THOUGH THE EPISODE with the really long hair growing from my tongue was easily the most notable occurrence of my residency so far, it felt too grotesque to document in a Progress Report. Besides, it wasn’t an example of “engaging the public” at all, but something private and harrowing. And though I’d been able to bite it off at the root, a little bristle of hair remained, troubling my palate when I closed my mouth. More disturbing was the sense that this was only “the iceberg’s tip,” and that far more hair threaded inside my tongue, down my throat into a nest in my chest, from which tendrils trailed along my arms and legs into my hands and feet—hair like veins through my flesh, coursing under the skin.
Which is to say that the episode wasn’t yet over.
Sitting at my desk that evening, the empty page of my alleged second Progress Report before me, mind wandering, I became fixated on the video camera scanning the room. An eye, watching me. Seeking. But whose eye? K. Sohail’s? No, she was merely a technician, beholden to the same shadow organization that administered my residency; her goodnights suggested the subdued camaraderie of diminished souls. Yet we weren’t quite allies, either. Perhaps because of my limited tenure at the mall, K. Sohail seemed to be keeping her distance. She had bigger fish to fry, as the saying went, than the puny minnow of me.
Watching the camera blink and scan, I thought about how each Progress Report was meant to document my residency—“making work,” that is, as well as “engaging the public.” But how could they compete with actual footage? Considering the ubiquity of surveillance throughout the mall, all that video evidence surely better captured my day-to-day than a few futile paragraphs. If a picture was indeed worth a thousand words, at twenty-four frames per second those cameras were producing an alarming 1,440,000 words every minute. How could writing compete?
Perhaps, I thought, my Progress Reports should be less dedicated to documentation than to impressions. After all, I needn’t confess every gory detail of my existence, but merely offer something that the videos could not. So why not put pen to paper to recast the Episode of the Haircut and the Subsequent, Possibly Related Episode of the Really Long Hair Growing from My Tongue such that its disturbing reality might—why not?—turn jovial on the page. And perhaps, refashioned as entertainment, the resulting version might even soften the trauma of the real thing.
A fine idea, but, in practice, with the camera rotating back and forth above me, dramatizing the haircut proved hopeless. It wasn’t simply a matter of mysteriously occluded events (I had, of course, had haircuts before that were easy enough to recollect); each word seemed utterly detached from even my imagined reconstruction of the episode. Scissors offered a vague stencil of an object that had nothing to do with the tremulous sensation of blades snicking past one’s earlobe. And not only that, but the Progress Report relied on the blunt stakes of language to pin down the shifting nebulae of sensation and sentiment: hard enough to itinerate, trickier still to concoct.
The problem was the gap: what had transpired during my blackout? There had been no hair growing from my tongue before the haircut; now there was one, indeed. I needed to watch those tapes. Partly to see what I was missing, but also to mitigate what was becoming an existential crisis. And maybe the camera might reveal not just what had happened but, via its detached perspective, some personal truth to which I was ignorant, and which I might harness in my reports—and maybe even in my life.
Yet I couldn’t bring myself to ask K. Sohail for access to the footage. Beyond her goodnights, the one time that I’d encountered her out in the mall, lugging those bags of hair, she’d seemed flustered. The meeting had been out of context, a disruption of her routine—and I of all people appreciate the sanctity of habit. I also sensed that I existed to her as something of a burden, and there was an undeniable element of distrust in the fact that, despite her goodnights, she modified my quarters into a cell every night. (Which, again, I appreciated: the mall was her responsibility, and hers alone, and each night she left it unattended to a stranger whose only credentials were a one-page letter claiming a right to be there.)
Since I was never alone in the mall with free access to roam about, unmonitored, the solution seemed to be taking advantage of K. Sohail’s morning rounds, that brief window during which my quarters were unlocked and she wasn’t yet in her office. Only then might I sneak up to the second floor for a quick look at the tapes. Nothing too nefarious. Were there not in fact cultures that believed the camera performed a sort of thievery of the soul? My plan was to simply reclaim it. In this way, I fancied myself something of a maverick.
I lay in bed the following morning, waiting for K. Sohail to come jingling and squeaking down the hallway. When she at last approached—right on cue—I made sure to lean out from behind the screen, as I did every morning, and wave as she unlocked and folded back the gate.
She nodded in reply, then headed off to the service elevator. Immediately I stole from my bed, grabbing only my credit card (for lock-picking purposes), and, in stockinged feet and nightwear, hightailed it in the opposite direction to the escalator. I bolted up to the second floor, ducked past the sunflowers and, peeking through th
e little window hatched with wire, watched K. Sohail unlock and enter her office and pause before that wall of screens.
I hadn’t considered two things: one, that the cameras might not, in fact, be “live,” but instead relay their footage through some sort of retrospective delay, such that K. Sohail would witness me scampering through the mall, and the gig (jig?) would be, as they say, up. And what then? Arrest? Some sort of psychosexual flogging? Dismissal from my residency, surely, at the least.
But there, on the screen that displayed my quarters, nothing was amiss. I might well have still been in bed behind the screen.
Except! What if each morning K. Sohail stood, just as she did now, watching her monitors and in fact waiting for me to make my way to the food court for breakfast before she commenced her rounds? Meaning that when I didn’t emerge as usual, she’d realize that some malfeasance was afoot. Might she then go down to check on me, and upon finding my bed and bathroom empty realize that I’d snuck off?
My breath caught in my throat. My scheme was ill planned. Who was I to try to outfox the mall?
Well, I fled—down the hall, searching desperately for an open store in which to hide.
While Kookaburra was, today, closed, a few shops down I discovered the House of Blues, a new operation specializing in denim products, open for business. As I entered, a young man came bounding at me from behind the cash register, eyes aflame with, I assumed, the prospect of a potential commission.
The salesman told me his name (Dennis), that it was “opening day,” and—sincerely, I think—that he would be happy to assist me however he was able. (From his lingering glance at my pyjamas, I sensed he already had ideas.)
Dennis was twentyish, luxuriantly ponytailed and dressed in an entire outfit crafted from the finest marbled denim: an open jean jacket revealed a matching shirt beneath, which in turn bled into a pair of identical trousers; even his shoes, which boasted little denim tassels that flickered insouciantly with his every step, synchronized with the rest of his ensemble. He was, without question, a remarkable specimen, right on the cutting edge of the latest fashions and full of that guileless abandon particular to youth.
Concerned that my naturally dour and somewhat furtive demeanour might ruin “opening day,” I looked away in shame and propriety—right into the glaring eye of a security camera.
I wheeled back to him with renewed vigour: Wonderful, Dennis, I am here to buy some new pants!
Well, Dennis set to it like a creature possessed. In a delirium he tore jeans from displays and unclipped jeans from racks and even removed jeans from mannequins, knocking them to the floor and wrenching the pants from their lower halves.
Though my request had been merely a tactic of subterfuge, I was quickly swept away upon the tide of Dennis’s passion. As he collected armloads of jeans, I found myself actually wanting pants now. Would he prove a genius of intuition, and find me “just the thing”? Would we metaphysically commune, via jeans?
More honestly, I wanted to impress Dennis. Don’t we all long to inspire a shopkeeper’s awe at our fluency with their wares? Wow, yes, we want the salesperson to marvel. From all these selections—you’ve done even better than I’d imagined. In a way, you’ve set them free.
We were both really in the thick of it now!
What an “opening day” this was going to be for Dennis, who now, ponytail swaying, climbed a ladder to fetch his most rarefied merchandise from the highest shelves. Denim in all the colours of the oceans—blues, of course, but also greys and greens and blacks as profound as the bowels of the earth—came cascading down from the ceiling and settled on the floor of the House of Blues. And the styles! Shredded to rags, tight as suction, baggy enough to permit room for two. Just as it was all beginning to feel hopeless—how to choose from all this choice?—my heart leapt to my throat. In a strangled voice I cried out: Wait!
Dennis paused. Teetering slightly on the ladder, he turned to spread his most recent selection like a set of denim angel’s wings. These?
I held my breath, examining the jeans in their full glory. A strategic distress of the fabric, a gentle taper, a set of pleats as subtle as the windswept sands, and a single, tantalizing “rock and roll” slash across the left knee. Extraordinary. But were they the ones for me? I met Dennis’s eyes. There was something in them, something imploring: like a true master, he wouldn’t guide me patronizingly through to the other side, only lead me to the edge of revelation. And here was my moment…
I nodded. Those, I told him, please.
To my relief, Dennis nodded back. Scrambled down from his perch, grinning the whole way. Once he was back on solid ground, in a gesture of surprising paternity he clasped my shoulder with one hand and pressed the jeans into my arms with the other.
I took them. They were so soft—yet durable, too. A jean one could trust.
Dennis grinned, patted me on the upper arm, and retreated behind the till to ring up my purchase.
I produced my credit card from the pocket of my pyjamas.
I awaited more than the imminent swipe.
And here it was, delivered with a cockeyed glance and an awestruck shake of the head: Excellent choice.
Excellent choice!
By god, I’d done it. The jeans, and Dennis’s veneration, were mine.
A COMRADE IN THE MALL presented thrilling possibilities.
In a hospitable turn of seniority, I invited Dennis to join me for lunch, at which I suggested we split a chicken—“on me”—though our iced teas would remain independent ventures. New to the mall, Dennis was undeniably impressed at my expertise in navigating the food court. Assuming my regular table, I explained to him that this location was ideal since it was out of smell range of both the washrooms and the garbage area, concealed by the escalator from the purview of the chicken teens, and also positioned with a scenic view of the skylight and the sunshine beyond.
I sawed the chicken in half, placed Dennis’s portion on a mat of napkins and mentored him briefly on strategies to liberate meat from bone. The conversation that accompanied our meal was scant—check-ins as to each other’s satisfaction with the food; admiration of my new jeans, which I’d donned overtop of my pyjamas; a fleeting, mostly benign argument over who would dispose of the skeleton once we’d picked the bird clean—yet felt tinged with melancholy. Surely Dennis noted the dearth of patrons in the mall, and what this entailed for the viability of his House of Blues. Since I didn’t dare broach his shop’s imminent failure and the dashing of his dreams upon the rocks of bankruptcy, instead I offered to refill his iced tea; he declined.
Those simple words—No, thank you—seemed to echo out from our table and to swell up to the heights of the food court’s ceiling, pressing against the skylight as though trapped and trying to escape; then, defeated, withering back down and dispersing like some noxious gas, rolling out from the food court and down the empty hallways of the mall, all the way to my quarters, where my desk and bed were finally swallowed in a fog of annihilation…I shook the image free from my thoughts and returned my attention to Dennis, who, ponytail lolling over his shoulder, was pensively chewing his chicken. Had he been picturing the same scenario?
What I’d hoped from this new-found companionship, initiated in the House of Blues and now sanctified with our first lunch together, was that, as it had during our earlier transaction, Dennis’s youthful exuberance might jubilate my own depleted spirits. Instead, watching Dennis dislocate the chicken’s leg to gnaw some purple meat from the gleaming joint, I sensed the sorrow of the mall infecting him. I ought to say something encouraging, I thought, something to convey hope and possibility—alhough perhaps solidarity awaited us at the nadir of Dennis’s plummeting spirits, rather than through me, falsely buoying him aloft from below.
Yes, Dennis and I had shared the bliss of commerce, the sure inauguration of a lifelong fraternity. Yet there were truths about the mall that he would have
to glean on his own. It was still too early, for example, to announce that a hair growing out of my tongue might be colonizing the rest of my body. Nor could I trouble him with my worries about the ubiquitous surveillance in the mall, what the footage might be used for, who was monitoring it—and why. And certainly I couldn’t detail the complexities of my relationship with K. Sohail, viz. the tantalizing tension between the officious way she imprisoned me and her gentle and, dare I say, almost fond goodnights.
No, this was only our first chicken. Soon enough the mall would deflate Dennis’s spirits until we were equally bereft. Only then could we freely commune—about the mall, about our potentially shared purpose in it, about what we might accomplish together amid such overwhelming desolation. For now, after I’d pitched the ruins of our lunch into the garbage, all we could do was shake hands, thank each other for a swell morning, and head our separate ways “back to work,” such as it was: Dennis up the escalator to the House of Blues, and I to my quarters, where the week’s Progress Report still remained a blank page on my desk—and in my mind.
THE HAIR WAS GROWING.
Fortunately I’d brought a razor, and one morning toward the end of my second week, driven to distraction all night by that horrible tickle against the roof of my mouth, I rocketed from bed straight to the mirror, lathered my tongue with cream, and set to carefully shaving. This task I performed not without shame, and although I’d successfully hacked the protuberance to a speck amid the pink flesh, at lunch I ate my chicken with a hand over my mouth, lest Dennis glimpse the freakish horror therein.
Our relationship was progressing nicely; two days in I already sensed in my new friend a growing despair. He wondered aloud where all the people were, and I consoled him that they seemed to come in waves, recalling my first day in the mall, when a relative mob descended from the main entrance—though I refrained from mentioning that they had merely streamed through and out the other side. Dennis’s misery was not for me to hasten; and certainly, by the hangdog way in which he slumped back upstairs to the House of Blues, I could tell the mall was taking its toll. He seemed to be aging. Even his ponytail had begun to droop.
