by Pasha Malla
But we—the initiated, the wise, the consecrated—know better, don’t we? About bathrooms, and what they can and should be, and how the experience can transform our lives? Yes. Yes, we certainly do.
THE ELEVATOR TRIP TOOK, I think, hours. Eventually I sat on the floor. Wherever I was being taken was not simply a basement level below the mall. No, the destination was burrowed far beneath the surface of the earth. At times the path twisted—not plummeting straight down but angling one way and then rounding a corner, even travelling horizontally for great distances, only to descend again.
At a steady chug the elevator travelled to wherever the mysterious button commanded, its golden glow the only light in the car. At some point I must have dozed off, because I was jolted awake by a great thump and a chattering of metal, and I found myself sprawled face down, drool streaking my cheek.
Up I got and hesitantly opened the doors. In streamed light so ferociously glaring it was as if the sun itself perched at the threshold. I leapt back, retinas scalded. Even closed eyes were no match for this conflagration: the back of each eyelid blazed, each capillary articulated in wormy squiggles against a backdrop the colour of raw meat. Bravely I cracked my eyes and through the slits permitted the light in shreds. Gradually that searing whiteness began to settle into a visual field.
What I saw: the elevator opened to a corridor tiled in white, lit blazingly in a style identical to the food court bathroom. Same tiles, same sterility. But here there were no fixtures, just a tunnel of gleaming ceramic squares that narrowed to a vanishing point some indeterminable distance away.
What else to do? I followed it.
As I had in the bathroom, I felt disembodied, as if I were floating along inside a cloud. Nothing tarnished the corridor’s monochrome. Not even security cameras.
For the first time in weeks, I was not being watched.
At last free from observation, I might, if so inclined, perform any private humiliation I wished. Some sort of nude dance or prance or a series of occult gesticulations, or I might utter a confession so compromising that under normal circumstances it would prompt a fatal leap from a bridge or cliff.
Or I could just scream and scream.
So I screamed.
But no sooner had the word left my lips than those beautiful syllables—Klassanderella! —came caroming so forcefully back down the corridor that a breeze ruffled my exquisite haircut, and the echo produced an echo, which produced another, each reverberation doubling upon itself and folding in and booming out until it all bled together and a roar of white noise engulfed the corridor, the name of my beloved garbled into something so alien and overwhelming that it drove me to my knees, my hands over my ears, and even then the sound continued to refract and replicate through a low drone into a sound I can only describe as the howling of some ghoul or demon, a howling that consumed me—that consumed my soul—crouched in the corridor with my head between my knees, assaulted by a monster into which my own voice had breathed life and which was dragging me down into its infernal lair, a hell of unimaginable horror, of implacable madness and suffering such as no living soul has ever known, and even as this creature opted for mercy and the reverberations began to fade—to a growl, to a murmur, and finally to a hiss—I sensed that an essential part of me had been taken there.
Amid this new silence I unclenched my body and stood. Looked up and down the hall. Nothing remained of that terrible sound: no tremor in the air, no flickering of the lights; the corridor was as still and open as an unblinking eye. From the open elevator to the distant end of the passageway, or what I could make out as the end, far off in the distance, there was nothing but what struck me as a kind of gloating sanctimony: the corridor had shown me its power, lest I try to disturb it.
So with new-found reverence I continued in my pyjamas. Not that my admiration for the corridor’s serenity was without precedent. All the way back to the episode in the food court bathroom, as I hope I’ve conveyed, I’d appreciated the pristine decor and ambience. Though perhaps I hadn’t fully appreciated my fortune, as a flawed and morally derelict human, to be permitted into such pristine conditions, sullying its cleansing atmosphere with my every revolting breath. Never mind staining the white corridor with my ugly human voice! What a fool I’d been to try to assert my putrid existence, even by shouting out the name of the woman I loved.
It didn’t matter where the corridor was taking me, or if it led nowhere at all. Simply existing in it was a gift. If the purgatory of the mall had been a test, its trials had brought me here, to a state of pure being. The food court bathroom had been a glimpse into this glorious annihilation of selfhood. And here I could journey fully through or into an infinitude in which I might become, at last, nothing: not a person, not a jeans enthusiast, not a fiancé, not a resident, not a subject or object or anything. Now I might at last walk—or, more so, drift—into obliteration, into irrelevance, until I was little more than a vagueness of form, an outline of a person, without aim or destination. And perhaps eventually, not even that, in this corridor to nowhere, to oblivion and beyond…
Oh, actually it led to a swimming pool.
The corridor dead-ended at an eye-level window about six inches around, and the view through it was underwater. Glowing bulbs in the swimming pool’s walls cast quavering beams that rippled up to the surface maybe fifteen feet above. Though the tiles were also white, the pool had a bluish tinge that felt, even on the far side of the glass, satisfying in the way of anything that fulfills its destiny: the quintessence of a peach being peachy, a strongman twirling an extravagant moustache, a dog defecating on a manicured lawn with a glimmer of triumph in its otherwise soulless eyes.
I am not a swimmer. Never have been. Oh, certainly there was a time in my youth when I was the requisite “man overboard” on any boat trip from one port to another, and I held my own amid the sharks until a buoyant ring was flung from the decks and I was dragged for miles—punitively, I assume. But I’d never dive in willingly, and I have always admired those with an inclination or knack for steering their bodies deliberately through the waves: there, these people aspire from the shoreline and, through some miraculous thrashing of limbs, attain the horizon, and beyond.
So it was with great longing that I gazed through the porthole (portal?) into the swimming pool. The longing of dreams unfulfilled, or even dreams undreamt. And of course Klassanderella. Having grown up in the islands, she was an expert swimmer: from great clifftop heights she’d blithely plunge into the depths and frolic through fields of coral and great billowing throngs of sea life with her breath bubbling in wild percolations, and then she’d surface to croon a mournful siren song that coaxed kind sailors around an unexpected sandbar or promontory, or else seduced dastards to their rocky deaths.
We were different, sure, but isn’t it precisely those gaps in which love, like a weed between paving stones, blooms and thrives? Yes, it was Klassanderella’s nautical proficiency that made us such perfect partners. Imagine if I were drowning. She could save me. And would! Gazing through that porthole or portal into the swimming pool, I humoured the tantalizing thought that, were I to picture my beloved persistently and precisely enough, I might conjure her—fluttering up to the portal or porthole, our hands touching but for a pane of glass between them, until at last the longing in her eyes turned wild with panic and she was forced to surface for air. For even love has its limits. Among them, suffocation and death.
But of course no one appeared. My mind was too weak to summon much of anything. The pool remained empty, the surface shivering slightly as if it were a living thing, its movements as tremulous as human breath—as the breath of a loved one (i.e., Klassanderella) on your cheek as they sleep.
I looked around for a door or hatch that might allow me to pass into the room with the swimming pool—god forbid into the swimming pool itself! I ran my hands all over the wall, feeling for a catch. Nothing! No handle or knob in sight. No catch, no hatc
h, no latch, no keyhole or keypad, and nothing to suggest a secret passage tripped with a canny nudge or caress. Just tiles from floor to ceiling.
Surely this couldn’t be it—a dead end. I looked back at the elevator down the other end of the corridor with its doors hanging open. Why did it bring me here? As spectacles go, the portal/porthole’s view of the swimming pool was briefly enchanting but ultimately limited. There wasn’t even anyone swimming! Or boat traffic, or fish.
But then I felt the sprout on my tongue and remembered what had chased me here: the waves of hair that had consumed the second floor of the mall. I shuddered. An escape from that ravenous carpet to the relative sanctity of this corridor, however boring, wasn’t so bad. Back up in the mall, my hirsute predator might be lying in wait. But I couldn’t hide out down here forever, especially if K. Sohail were to discover me missing. She might already have done so—it was impossible to know how long I’d slept.
Movement in the portal/porthole caught my eye.
A glimmer, a flash. A shadow, maybe, of some fleeting creature—a man, a woman, a fish, a thing. Pressing my face to the glass, I craned my neck back and forth but could make out nothing, just the shimmering blue water speared and spangled with bands of light. A stillness that moved. The natural tremor of the waves, or a wake left by something that had disturbed the water?
Then I saw it, up on the surface in silhouette: a human, floating into view. Just a shape with no defining features, such that it was impossible to tell if the person was swimming face down or on their back. I tapped the glass, hollered. No response: whoever it was only rotated slightly in the current, arms and legs splayed.
My god, might it be K. Sohail, out for a morning dip? So this is what she got up to all day! I’d taken her for such a hard worker, a dedicated servant of the mall, and here she was—as she might well be every morning—leisurely “taking the waters.” Who knew how else she wasted her days? Foot massages, bouts of vigorous perspiration in a steam room, a tea service replete with cakes, maybe even a nap. I eyed her up there—floating, hanging—with feelings of betrayal. Oh, K. Sohail, you scoundrel. You rogue! While I’d never claim perspicacity as one of my finer qualities, I’d been duped—the keys, the uniform, the focus, the guise of diligence. All a ruse! A fiendish ruse!
Oh, but wait: the swimmer was in fact a man. A naked man, I discovered, as certain anatomical features drooped into a band of light. And not swimming so much as simply drifting face down, propelled by the jet stream vomited from nozzles around the pool.
And…no. My god. No, it couldn’t be.
It was.
Dennis.
Floating there, lifeless.
And, very clearly, very dead.
I hammered on the portal/porthole, the walls, my own chest, and hollered for all I was worth. Of course it all amounted to nothing—not even another cascade of soul-destroying reverberations from the corridor. Perhaps whatever forces ruled this place had decreed that witnessing my best friend’s fate was punishment enough. So with sinking spirits I watched Dennis—or what had once been Dennis, robbed of his ponytail and life and jeans—bob along the surface of the water while the pool lights glimmered like macabre death-lamps below.
Had he drowned? For a moment I felt a little pang of envy—how had some twenty-something ingenue denim-dealer been afforded access to the pool while I, the sole and expressly anointed resident of the mall, had not?—before realizing that Dennis would surely be the jealous one now, were he alive, since I was alive and he wasn’t. This thought made my brain twirl in vertiginous ways and I had to sit on the floor to gather myself.
Certainly the body needed to be collected, and unless K. Sohail was Dennis’s murderer she’d likely need to know, as caretaker of the mall, about a corpse floating around the pool. (She likely had access to a specialized net or prong for such tasks.) And, even if she had “done him in,” disposing properly of Dennis’s remains would still be her responsibility. It seemed odd, at any rate, that he’d just been left there, in full view of anyone who happened upon the portal/porthole—or the pool itself, however one got on deck.
I toyed my tongue-hair over a back molar; it needed a trim. But first I would return to ground level and confront K. Sohail about Dennis. If she was a killer, fine. She’d certainly had her chances to kill me, if that was her thing, and so far had made no moves. And would someone with designs of cold-blooded murder really offer such tender goodnights? Unless she was “playing the long game,” fattening me up on chicken and her affections in order to feast on my delicious meat at the end of my residency…But this was absurd: K. Sohail didn’t have the look of a cannibal. Not in those sneakers.
I made my way back to the elevator, pulled the door closed and hit G. Improbably enough, less than thirty seconds later the thing stopped short and that little lozenge dimmed. (Had my trip down taken some unnecessarily roundabout route?) Opening the doors, I discovered myself indeed returned to the mall’s first floor. The lights were on, indicating that it was daytime—but which day? How much time had passed? I ventured down the service corridor and into the mall proper: no one, of course. Just the empty hallways, which had the same look as always—complacent, vacant, anaesthetic.
And then I heard that telltale squeak and jingle down the hall, and raced after it.
Only when I caught up to K. Sohail, riding the escalator up to her office, did I realize that I was implicating myself in my own escape. But had it really been an escape? There were no stipulations in my Acceptance Letter about venturing into the mall after hours. And we’d never broached the somewhat awkward subject of K. Sohail locking me inside my quarters every night. Perhaps she did it merely out of habit, accustomed as she was to ensuring security and order. If I brought it up, she might well respond with incredulity—I’m sorry, no, of course, please feel free to roam however you wish.
So I called out to her with confidence from the bottom of the escalator, certain that I’d not compromised either of us.
Yet upon noticing me at the base of the escalator—still in my pyjamas—a strange look passed over K. Sohail’s face: the eyes went wide, the mouth slackened. Was it fear? astonishment? wanton desire? Whatever that look intended, she fixed me with it, unblinking, as she was lifted to the second floor—as one might gaze in the mirror at, say, a hair growing from one’s mouth: with paralyzed stupefaction.
And then the escalator’s steps flattened out and swept the caretaker from view.
Well, I followed her, on the offensive now that K. Sohail seemed to be avoiding me. As the escalator dragged me upstairs, I sensed more and more that the “look” had been of guilt and its attendant getaway. (So she had killed Dennis, I thought—and perhaps now deserved a taste of her own medicine!)
By the time I reached the second floor, K. Sohail was nowhere in sight. Hiding in her office, no doubt. So I headed that way, remembering faintly my last trip here: the darkness, the bristling carpet. Now all the lights were on and the hallways were empty. And I, the once-hunted, had turned hunter—or at least a vessel of retribution and revenge.
With the pulse of justice thrumming in my chest, I pushed through the doors to the service corridor, only to discover the caretaker’s office locked and empty. I peered through the window at all those monitors: dozens of shots listlessly tracked across the lifeless spaces of the mall—the food court, the fountain, my quarters, etc.—with no sign of K. Sohail in any of them. Yet one monitor in the corner of the room had a suspiciously blank screen.
She was up here somewhere. I returned to the mall proper and stood for a moment listening. There! A faint sound of voices down the hall—possibly from the House of Blues. And whom should I discover in Dennis’s old shop but the murderess herself, returned to the scene of the crime. Her back to me, oblivious to my presence. So I readied my hands in a classic strangler’s pose and stealthily made my approach.
And pulled up short.
She was
talking to someone. My god! Was it…Dennis?
Perhaps he really had been only taking a dip this morning, and wasn’t a drowned and bloated corpse at all. I lowered my hands. What a fool I’d been to panic, never mind nearly offing K. Sohail in misguided vengeance. So I pushed closer, eager to see over K. Sohail’s shoulder—to glimpse my old comrade-in-arms, to rekindle our friendship and to apologize for forsaking him by consuming so many chickens alone.
My tongue-hair bristled. Dennis it was not.
Instead, behind a desk just like mine, perched his ponytail. Though of course now it was no longer his. It was simply an autonomous being: a hairstyle without a master. So no longer a ponytail at all. This was something else, something etymologically unique. Something eponymous. This was Mr. Ponytail.
K. Sohail stiffened a little as I loomed into her periphery, but continued talking. The words were a formless churn of sounds until I heard her mention the requirements of the residency. And at this my hearing sharpened, and the hair began to dance upon my tongue as if wakened, or aroused. Two meals per day would be included, K. Sohail was telling Mr. Ponytail, precisely in the terms of my Acceptance Letter.
So the dastard had killed Dennis and in lieu of punishment had been rewarded with a residency at the mall—presumably without even applying!—and his quarters would be his victim’s old digs. The whole thing would have been perversely comical if it weren’t so chilling.
I reeled out of the shop, tongue-hair wilting. A conspiracy was afoot. Had Dennis’s former ponytail acted as a “lone wolf”? Or were he and K. Sohail—and possibly the honchos at the mall—somehow in cahoots? What did this mean for my own residency? I’d been “top dog” for weeks, and this new development risked relegating me to a lowly “second fiddle.” What sort of work was Mr. Ponytail going to make? What were his plans for engaging the public?
