by Pasha Malla
Then I sensed movement. In the back of the store. An animal, I thought—something furry and dark scurrying around in the shadows. Maybe a rat. I moved closer, threaded my fingers through the grating, pressed my face close and peered inside.
There it was, curled around the base of Dennis’s ladder. A glossy black thing, now nosing out into the light. And creeping across the floor.
I squinted. It was longer than a rat, and sleeker, more tapered. (Were minks native to shopping malls?) And then it was gone again, swallowed by shadow or perhaps crawling underneath one of the shelves. Faintly I could hear it: a scuffling, whisking sort of noise. Not the patter and ticking of a rodent’s clawed feet. No, this was more fluid, as if the creature were slithering along on its belly.
It appeared again by the counter, darting a bit more actively from one patch of shadow to the next. And then it paused, seeming to gather itself—and in a sudden rush it unfurled and came hurtling across the floor, straight toward me. I sprung back as it slipped under the gate, glided over my shoe and went scrabbling off into the mall.
Was it? It couldn’t be.
It was. I’d recognize that magnificent ponytail anywhere.
FOR THE BETTER PART OF THE AFTERNOON I prowled the mall for that orphaned and now sentient, or at least animated, piece of Dennis. No sign of the ponytail upstairs or down, or in the food court, or even in the toilets—a place I had previously avoided. At first I performed only a cursory inspection (cracking the door and hollering Dennis’s name) before acknowledging my own cowardice; for my missing friend’s sake the place required a more thorough survey.
Public restrooms are not places where I’ve ever felt comfortable, what with the invariable puddles of excrement and the salacious, threatening propositions scrawled all over the walls. So I entered with reticence. What struck me first was the light—blinding, consuming, and as shocking as stepping into a icy bath. The door closed behind me, sealing me in. Everything was white: the tiled floor and walls, the stalls, the sinks, even the smell, somehow, and the fluorescents overhead buzzed so intensely that they seemed to produce the very sound of light.
My senses acclimatized. The initial shock passed. Now that I could see it, the bathroom was really quite impressive. It was so clean. After the dimly lit claustrophobia of the mall, this felt…emptying. And though my feet were soundly on the ground, all that whiteness, like some miasmic fog, made me feel I was amid the clouds and floating.
The bathroom seemed somehow detached from the mall—and perhaps the universe. An antechamber. A vestibule of the soul with its atmosphere of purity and sanitation, its soothing antiseptic odour of chlorine. And in it I too detached from the world—and then myself. I lost all sense of time and space. I forgot my purpose. I was airy and unburdened, adrift. I might have been grinning. I gazed into all that light and had no thoughts, none at all, and the trance was broken only when the toilets came alive with a roar and their contents were vacuumed into the bowels of the mall.
Out I reeled into the food court’s drab luminescence, my vision spangled and pyrotechnic. I had to steady myself on the counter of the chicken restaurant, the teens looking on. Something had swept me away in there, behind the door marked with graphics of a man and woman standing side by side. Those silhouettes struck me now as illustrations of myself: an outline, gutted of being, reduced to nothing but form. Who knew a simple bathroom visit could inspire such reveries!
And I’d also confirmed that Dennis’s ponytail wasn’t loose in there. Not only, amid all that whiteness, would it have stood out like a stain, but a shag of dead cells had no business tarnishing such purity. No offence to its former owner.
What a fool I’d been to have never scouted the toilets before, I thought, returning to my quarters. Nearly three weeks into my residency and only now was I discovering their clarifying properties. Who knew what other secrets lay out there in the mall? Back at my workstation I set to writing a Progress Report with vigour—something impressionistic to codify the day’s experience. Something for myself.
But before I could write a word, my gaze snagged on the ring on my hand. Klassanderella! My heart fluttered, overcome with longing. I pictured my beloved down there in the islands, tending to her ailing mother, not to mention all that fishmongering on the side. What commitment. What a woman! I was lucky to have her, even at such a distance. And our wedding would be splendid, a truly wonderful affair—wine and dancing and a goat, traditionally slaughtered in a bloodbath in the sand.
Such longing I felt then, such anticipation. Love: the rope of the hangman, dangling loosely around our necks! But before that thrilling lurch to the gallows, I would have to soldier through to the end of the residency. In just over six weeks it would be over and my beloved and I could at last reunite, falling into each other’s arms with gratitude and breathless, succulent kisses. I could fairly smell Klassanderella’s hair (a marine bouquet, also coconut) as I imagined our reunion, and smiled wistfully. What a good and graceful thing it was, I thought, not to be alone.
AND WHERE WAS K. SOHAIL amid all this? The only times I saw her were those brief appearances at my quarters to unleash me in the morning and, in the evening, to offer a tender, dare I say affectionate goodnight. How the woman spent her days was a mystery. Did she simply sit at the monitors? Or stalk the halls undetected like a beige-suited spectre? Or might she not caretake the mall at all, and in fact relocate her talents elsewhere?
The last night of the week, waiting for K. Sohail to collect my Progress Report (an idle and vain thing, I felt, that failed to really capture the essence of the Episode of Existential Sanctification in the Toilets), I sat at my desk thinking about her, and Dennis, and Dennis’s runaway ponytail—what a day!—and as my thoughts drifted around the mall they settled on the service elevator: specifically on its undesignated third button. The mall had another floor! A basement or sub-level. What was down there? Or who?
Here she came—the flashlight, the jingle, the squeak. My Progress Report wordlessly accepted, the gate pulled across my quarters and locked fast. The tantalizing silence. And here my usual anticipation was overcome with sudden guilt. Was I “two-timing” Klassanderella? Surely the tenderness between me and the caretaker wouldn’t sit well if exposed at the altar—if, say, K. Sohail stormed our beachfront wedding with a satchel full of video evidence and chastened poor Klassanderella with the truth.
So instead of waiting for K. Sohail to fill the space with her nightly benediction, I pre-empted her.
How was your day, I asked, conventionally enough.
The query seemed to strike K. Sohail like a blow to the gut; her body even buckled a bit. She sighed, closed her eyes. Pressed her forehead to the grating. Stayed like that for a while. What had I done? I waited in terror, expecting some sort of reprimand. But when she at last opened her eyes, she only shuddered, as if whatever she felt were a cloak from which she might shake herself free.
Long, she said.
I’d never heard a word sound so tired.
But before I could probe any further, K. Sohail glanced at the security camera and in a broken voice offered a rushed, garbled goodnight and—there’s no other word—fled.
What conflict I felt, retreating behind the screen. Of course, for the sake of my marriage to Klassanderella it was preferable not to be whispered at lovingly every bedtime, but even so I felt…betrayed. K. Sohail’s goodnight had been dispatched like trash down a garbage chute. And then she’d run! As if making an escape!
First Dennis, and now my only other companion in the mall. What was I doing to people? Had my simple question prompted an emotional meltdown? Were all of K. Sohail’s days so long? Perhaps she was in love with me, and my casual pre-emption of her goodnight had revealed that my heart was in fact sworn to another (i.e., Klassanderella), and the shame of adultery had sent her packing.
But no, that wasn’t it, I thought, replaying the moments before she absconded. What both
ered her most was that our exchange was being caught on tape.
The pieces fell into place. K. Sohail was a consummate professional. She performed her duties in the mall with forbearance and dignity. My thoughtless question had punctured that veneer and everything had collapsed. Her flight suggested dishonour…but also something more troubling. She’d bolted, I was certain, to escape the mall’s all-seeing eye. Who was watching? Who was in control? What were the consequences for K. Sohail being emotionally compromised? Termination? (Of her career—surely not of her life?)
And then a realization struck.
I’d not heard the telltale click that heralded my nightly imprisonment. Amid all the drama, K. Sohail had forgotten to lock me in.
I slipped out of bed to the gate.
Indeed: unsecured, and flapping as loosely as a broken wing.
Freedom beckoned.
What was out there? All the threads of my mall-bound existence seemed to float amid the blue-tinged gloom. Dennis, K. Sohail, the Now you are mine ring, the hair in my tongue, even the endless chicken…Collectively, they braided into the arterial system of some diabolical creature. Somewhere in the mall pulsed its heart. And here I was now, alone—observed no doubt by some ghostly power, but with a chance to finally do something. To seek the truth. To truly engage. To work. To progress. To do, to know, to make, to be!
The mall at night, bathed in the blue phosphorescence of an aquarium and as still as a crypt, felt even more bewildering than it did during the day. After opening the gate just enough to slip out, like a weirdo in a trance I stalked the empty hallway, with the security cameras and whoever sat at the other end of them watching me go.
The air seemed to pulse with a kind of aura, something thick and almost viscous that churned around me as I passed the dead fountain, searching the shadows for the corridor that led to the service elevator. But the lighting was so dim that I reached the food court without finding the entrance. Figuring that I must have missed it, I turned around and headed back the direction I’d come, eyes “peeled.”
However. Proceeding straight ahead, ostensibly away from the food court in the direction of my quarters, passing shops that now, in the pale aquatic light, seemed even more identically shuttered and abandoned, and failing again to find the corridor, I somehow ended up back at the food court. Via the skylight a lunar pallor washed over everything, and I stood amid it feeling more disoriented than ever. Had I turned around without realizing? Or, like a fool lost in the desert, begun listing to one side and walked an inadvertent circuit?
I turned around again, eyes trained straight ahead. The security lights faded to a vanishing point maybe twenty yards away. Then there was just blackness. But I’d walked that passage dozens of times and knew my way from one end to the other. A straight line. No real trick to it. So off I went. Yet what emerged at the end of that tunnel into the shadows was again the blasted food court! Somehow I was looping around in circles. Never mind the security corridor, at this rate how would I get back to bed? What if K. Sohail were to discover me here in the morning, clad in obvious nightclothes? Might my scantily clad escape, on camera, condemn us both?
The only solution seemed to be heading upstairs to try a different path. The escalator was shut down for the night, so by my own power I ascended to the second floor. Here the lighting was even weaker, without continuity: one trembling blue lamp, a gap of darkness, and then the next. A left turn from the top of the escalator led me through these intermittent puddles of light past Kookaburra, the sunflowers looming monstrously in the vitrine, and on. I paused for a moment at the House of Blues and gazed inside: gloom and stillness and a taut sort of silence, with a stain of feeble light struggling to reach inside. It felt like a view from the water’s edge down through the depths to some netherworld beyond.
On I went.
K. Sohail’s office was, ostensibly at least, amid the next block of stores. But these were lost in darkness; if there were security lights in this stretch of hallway, they were out. So I put my hand to the wall to guide myself and stepped into the nothing of it. The brick was cool against my fingertips as I stepped, one socked foot and then the next, and groped for some break or turn that might indicate the security corridor.
I paused and looked back: the lights sputtered, flashed and snuffed out. The entire upper floor was cast in total pitch. I couldn’t see anything: not the stores around me, not the escalator, not a hand before my face. So I reached out again to touch the wall, to steady myself—but what I touched wasn’t brick.
It was…springy. It was hair.
I lurched away from the wall and into the darkness, my hand still prickling. I could hear something now, a bristly sort of noise.
The hair, I sensed, was crawling.
I began staggering back the way I’d come—and must have made some sort of turn, because my extended hands encountered the wall again—or what was no longer wall but a seething pelt. Even as I recoiled I could feel the curls grasping to snag my flesh. On I stumbled, seeing nothing, all that hair rustling over the walls and chasing me along.
After a few lurching steps my shoulder struck the wall again, and a few dozen hairs clung to my shirt. I had to tear myself away, careering off in some new direction. I began to run through the dark, hands out. It felt like falling, like some terrible tumble down a chasm into the earth, chased by that scuffling hiss, a thousand infernal secrets whispered in the dark. Closer it came, and closer—and then I smacked face-first into something hard and cold.
The elevator door!
My hand found the call button. Slammed it as hard as I could. Amid the hiss of the hair came a grinding sound, a clang. I grasped for the leather thong and tugged open the doors. Dove inside and pulled them closed. Darkness in here too; all the lights were out. The hissing on the other side reached the doors and turned furious. Soon it would find the cracks and begin spilling in. I swept my hands over the steel panel beside the door and thumbed the first button I found. A glowing coin of light appeared in the dark: the unnamed floor.
And with a growl and a cranking of chains I was off.
Down to the first floor—and past it.
Down and down I dropped, toward the basement, wherever it was, and whatever or whoever awaited me there.
PROGRESS REPORT #3
Ah! Is there anything so clean and rejuvenating as milk? As pure and white as fresh-fallen snow before a heedless farmer tramps across it in dung-splattered boots. From the moment each delectable drop is yanked free from the unsuspecting cow to the glorious occasion when the first splash kisses your lips, there’s nothing quite like it. Cold, smooth and perfectly wet: milk. Verb and noun: milk the milk! Sir or madam, whomsoever you please, milk it until the cows come home and cannibalistically demand a sip of their own delicious juices. It’s definitely something to think about, milk.
Or, say, clouds. And not the derelict, rain-stained ones that glub morosely across the sky or else hang, heavy and guileless, like a half-assed taunt from a cowardly god. No, I’m talking about the fluffy white type. Clouds, that is. Darling steamy puffs. Each one as joy-filled as a child’s laugh—and not the evil kind brayed across the classroom at a moronic peer. No, the clouds I’m talking about are like a noiseless song that no one can hear—not even you. Light as air and illusively solid: tempting as it may seem, walk upon clouds at your peril. Something else to consider is clouds.
Also snow, actual snow. Whether floating down blissfully from the heavens or spilled all over the ground like a thick, frosty layer of petrified milk. But why cry over fallen snow? No, you should laugh. Or preferably be quiet. You should just stare out your window in reverential silence and admire all that virginal beauty, like a pair of jeans fresh from the shop: creased in all the right places, untarnished by grubby human skin. So clean and great. Snow.
What I’m getting at here is that bathroom decor isn’t some slapdash endeavour. Attention to detail makes all
the difference. A bathroom should be a sanctuary. An escape of sorts. A chance to make oneself anew. The effect you’re going for is serenity, per the milk/cloud/snow “metaphors” above.
White isn’t a colour, technically, but rather an absence of colour (or else all the colours prismed together—unclear), so that’s the colour to keep in mind. Also the whole idea of absence: you want the bathroom to be about what’s not in it. For example, how your overweight, pork-chop-crazed uncle had his way in there for a good forty-five minutes, his struggles and triumphs expressed so grotesquely that you had to turn up the radio in the other room. That should never be on anyone’s mind again, and no evidence of his visit should remain.
You want a bathroom to convey purity, no matter how foul the visits of previous barbarians. Details aside, what actually happens in a bathroom? We are cleansed. Inside and out. The bowels or bladder are discreetly voided, but also the teeth are scrubbed clean and so is the body. Some people prettify themselves in the mirror with combs, “product,” tiny scissors and rouge. To each their own!
Think of the various terms deployed for that special place: restroom, as in a place of rest; bathroom, as in a place with a bath in it; washroom, connoting somewhere to wash yourself of filths both literal and figurative. All are true. No one would dare tarnish that hallowed space by calling it a “pooping house” or “shame chamber,” except maybe a child who specializes in insolence. And they should be corrected—gently, of course, for they know no better.
