by Pasha Malla
Yes. The chicken skewer would do nicely.
Next was armour: food trays wedged up the front and back of my shirt, and an oversized napkin container emptied of its contents and donned as a helmet, with the slot providing a vertical visor. The napkins I stuffed inside my jeans, trusting that the padding wouldn’t compromise their exquisite shape. Still, if anyone tried to bite my shins, they would feast on paper.
Satisfactorily carapaced, I headed to the service elevator and closed myself in.
With the mystery button illuminated, the thing chugged to life. I prepared myself for the lengthy voyage ahead and leaned against the wall with my spear at my side. (My armour didn’t permit me to sit down.) But no sooner had the elevator begun moving than it shuddered to a stop. Busted? Out of operation? Or had I arrived at the pool already?
I cracked the doors and squinted through the gap in my helmet. Instead of the claustrophobic glare of the white-tiled hallway, I was greeted by shadows and a musty smell of mildew and gasoline. I hauled the doors open all the way. This wasn’t the pool level at all. The elevator had brought me to a different place altogether: an underground parking garage. And somewhere, off in the distance, music was playing.
As someone who had (and still has) never driven a car, the space of the parking garage was alien to me. Were they usually soundtracked? I’d never had cause to visit one; they lurked beneath the institutions of our town (the library, the hospital, the “bureau”) like each building’s subconscious—unknowable, unseen, unimaginable. What went on down there? Parking, ostensibly, which one could only trust proceeded under humane conditions. Better to hope that a resurfacing motorist was among the majority—not some lucky survivor.
But who was I to say? Perhaps, being one storey closer to hell, they hosted accordingly depraved activities. Did one gut it out against other drivers for “spots,” with victory arriving from great flaming wrecks, unspeakable injuries to person and property, the odd fatality? Likely not, I’d always reasoned, having faith in the basic protocols of civilization and traffic. Still, I was happy to travel by bicycle, limited only by the objects to which it could be chained.
At any rate. I was in one now, and the parking garage was not what I’d imagined! No one was parking, for example; everyone was already parked, with hundreds of cars lined up precisely in endless rows. The lighting, too, was odd: a green wash, like the mall but swampier. Everything was so still. And, save the far-off music, so silent. Nowhere had I ever experienced such a simultaneous sense of infinitude and claustrophobia.
I’d anticipated something a little more cavernous, down here below the earth’s crust. But this was so close. Regularly spaced pillars propped up the low ceiling—and everything above, I realized with awe. Though this would have been even more extraordinary in the mall’s more prosperous days, what with the mobs of shoppers prowling the stores, I still marvelled at such a feat of engineering. At the hubris of it, really. To think that a space could be hollowed out underneath a building where people might abandon their cars, which they’d then walk atop like angels or kings!
My napkin-dispenser helmet was obstructing my vision, so I removed it—trusting that nothing would come hurtling from the dark and knock me on the noggin. I’d never seen so many cars. Not just hundreds, possibly thousands. Parked side by each with an aisle down the middle, on and on. So eerily motionless—almost dormant. Whose were they? Surely not only Mr. Ponytail’s adoring public; there were too many for that. Who, then, had left their cars here, and where had they gone?
And what of the music? Was a soundtrack common to parking garages? Something to accompany motorists back to their vehicles, a jaunty tune to put a bounce in one’s step and a jangle in one’s keys? But then, I thought, that sort of music would surely be “piped in.” This music seemed to generate from a location far off in the parking garage, played specifically and vibrantly by, I was convinced, a “live” musician.
Someone was out there. Or, I thought, someones: I could make out several instruments twining together. Though, I thought, such a thing could be the work of one of those crafty talents who strap a drum to their back and trumpets to their feet and so on, a human orchestra deploying every physical tool at their disposal, from mouth to fingers to sheer will, thrashing around percussively while blowing and strumming melodies and harmonies and counter-melodies and god knows what else.
The shambolic unity of the music—ragged and wild and almost frantic, yet cohesively so—confirmed it: this was the work of a so-called “one man or woman band.”
Here was a true talent, a real artist—not like Mr. Ponytail with all his braggadocio and self-aggrandizing theatrics. How I wished Ponytail’s duped minions might learn from this expression of tremendous personal dignity—of hope and of joy, but of struggle too. Their master was a charlatan, they’d realize after only a few bars; the music of the parking garage was “the real deal.” What integrity this person must have, I thought, performing to no audience, yet still trying to reach something elemental through song. For the simple pleasure of making music. For the soul!
I felt a surge of aspirational kinship: this music expressed something about me too. I had to meet its creator. And so I set aside my revolutionary scheme and skewer-spear for a moment, stepped from the elevator in my ersatz body armour, and trundled into the parking garage, food trays clacking, toward whoever was tootling on whatever horn or wind, twanging strings, “tickling the ivories”—who knew; I was no expert.
To be honest, I had no ear for music at all. In fact, after being diagnosed as a tone-deaf youngster, my role in our school choir had been to stand by our conductor and turn the pages of her sheet music. Ever since, I’d been resistant to songs of any sort, which tended to ignite a pain-memory of paper cuts—my fingertips lacerated by the scores of various operettas, carols, shanties and spirituals, blood streaming down my shirtsleeves while my classmates belted outs their hearts.
Yet this music struck me with a poignancy I’d never known. It didn’t make me feel bad; in fact…dare I say good? (Certainly curious.) That sweet, sad song wafted almost vaporously—like curling tendrils of smoke, like beckoning fingers—through the parking garage. The instrumentation was warm, welcoming. It lulled and summoned. It seemed not just to reach me, I felt, but to be reaching for me. To embrace and pull me in. Whoever played this music really “had my number.” And their song called me, sirenlike, with warmth and grace. At least so I hoped, and not to lure me through the parking garage to my brutal, grisly death.
I pushed into the aisle between cars that, in their almost meditative stillness, seemed to be awaiting reanimation. Like creatures asleep. To avoid waking them I crept along furtively—which, because of my armour, was an awkward, almost sultry manoeuvre between a tiptoe and a lurch—while the music echoed through the parking garage. Like the love song of a ghost, I thought. Or a lullaby hummed dolefully to oneself, if one could sing oneself to sleep. Could one? Unclear; I’d never tried.
What music, I thought, creeping toward it between the cars. So melancholy and sweet. Lilting up, cascading down. Here a trill, there a flutter. The rhythm knocked like a pulse, as if the song itself was a living thing. Yet despite that steady beat, the melody shifted through moods. Whose moods? Mine, somehow. But also its creator’s, as if we shared a consciousness, maybe even a past. If the song had a name it was “Us.” My god, who was responsible for such beauty? Such insight! Such acuity!
On I walked, occasionally adjusting my food-tray breastplate, toward, I felt, some undiscovered part of myself.
But was the music getting any closer? Hard to say. As with my failed escape from the mall, it was impossible to gauge my progress along that uniform channel between cars. With everything washed in that sickly green light, limiting colour to varying shades of darkness, I couldn’t tell a blue car from a red—never mind a maroon from a burgundy. And the gobbledygook of the licence plates was even less helpful than the names of the sho
ps, which were at least identifiably different, not to mention legible, words.
That said, every now and then I did glimpse a “personal” plate, featuring some odd combination of letters and numbers encrypted into a slogan or epithet (BOY 1DER, I DOMN8, 2GUD4U, etc.) These flashes of ego would have provided helpful signposts amid all that anonymity if their arrogance weren’t so generic and uniform. Never mind that such vanity was completely antithetical to the humble, human music of the parking garage, which drifted through the greenish glow like the enticing scent of a lovingly cooked meal—crafted and presented, I was certain, by a genius.
Sure, I was taking a momentary self-involved diversion from avenging Dennis’s murder, and perhaps delaying my takedown of the mall in the process, but meeting the musician responsible for a work of such profound artistic clarity seemed essential to my mission—perhaps I’d even been summoned there by metaphysical means. Knowing that I had a kindred spirit in the mall was already invigorating; maybe when we met my quest would inspire this sir or madam to pack up their kit and join me. An ally, imagine. And a soundtrack for the revolution!
The armour, it struck me, was a mistake: not the costume of camaraderie but one of suspicion. So I shed the trays and unpacked the napkins from my jeans, leaving them in a neat little pile on the hood of some sedan. On I crept with new agility, lithe as a leopard. I began peering past the windshields—every car was facing out, having been “backed in”—in case a human being sat behind the wheel. But there was no sign of drivers or passengers. The cars began to strike me as awaiting not just reanimation but their maiden voyage, as if the entire fleet was on standby until some command summoned it to life.
No sooner had I formed this thought, the cars came on with a roar.
All of them. Thousands of engines from one end of the parking garage to the other coughed and turned over and revved furiously, and their blazing headlights spotlit the lane from both sides. Like a stage. With me upon it, paralyzed in the glare.
Abandoning my armour suddenly felt foolish. Had the cars been waiting for me to let down my guard? With no protection, I could easily be pulverized. Yet for now they simply idled, their lights cast over me, their engines beastly and ravenous, the odour of burning gasoline choking the air.
I listened amid it all for the music—even a distant tremor of that beautiful song—off somewhere in the parking garage.
Nothing. Only cars.
Looking down the aisle I noticed a distant blurring at the—for lack of a better word—horizon, way down at the end of the parking garage. The blurring seemed to be…getting closer. I squinted. Yes, definitely, something was smudging the illuminated area between the cars.
And as it came ever closer, I realized what was happening. Nothing was approaching. The cars were simply nudging forward so that their noses touched, two by two, in a sort of wave, snuffing out their lights into a faint sliver between fenders. Closer and closer surged this darkness—which, when it reached me, I realized with horror, would sever me in half at the waist.
What else to do? I turned and ran. Away from the dimming light, past my armour on the hood of that grumbling sedan—no time to grab it! I kept running, glancing back over my shoulder at the cars pulling together behind me, one and then the next, closer and closer down the line: a rev of engines, a lurch forward, a screech of brakes, their lights reduced to a faint glow between their fenders.
The safety of the elevator was almost in reach. But the colliding cars, too, were nipping at my heels. I could feel their shadow approaching: a coolness on the back of my neck, a chill in my heart. Another twenty yards—fifteen!—ten!
I was readying myself to dive inside the elevator when I felt something bump against my legs—almost gently. And when I tried to take another step, I could not. I struggled. To no avail.
The cars had caught me.
I’d not been halved—preferable!—but I was still trapped, with two fenders pinching me snugly just below the knee. I watched as the four remaining cars ahead of me pulled together as well. In both directions the cars had now completely closed in, cuddled up nose to nose, headlights kissing. And me pinned, with the elevator only steps away.
Everything returned to stillness.
The cars’ engines died.
Their lights extinguished too.
Silence.
Except, no: from far off in the parking garage once again came that music. Lovely and still seductive, though maybe rueful now too.
Had I been tricked? Or had the cars, working for the mall, merely recognized that I’d found my spiritual other and thwarted my journey?
I squirmed, kicked, flailed. Useless. I stooped, panting. And listened with a heavy heart to that faraway song—as beautiful as ever. But then guilt flooded in alongside the music. Here was someone “making work” while I stood uselessly about like some sort of potted plant. The least I could do with this moment of stasis was use it. So I set to mentally sketching a Progress Report to recast the current situation as one of jubilation and glory. I would show the mall that my spirits wouldn’t be dampened!
A first line struck me—For those blessed with bipedal function, there’s nothing quite like a walk.—and it went from there:
* * *
—
And not just walking: no, the indefinite article is paramount. A walk is an entity, an ontology, an existence. Walking is mere transportation—functional, generic and deficient in mystery, as the vagary of “murdering” lacks the exhilarating specificity and intrigue of “a murder.” And of course “the walk” almost always implies “to the gallows,” the worst walk of all.
What else is not a walk? Pacing, for one—that’s the anxious fretting about of a madman or -woman, a twitchy mind transmuted into manic action. Back and forth, back and forth. Like a malfunctioning cuckoo plunging from his clock to proclaim some erroneous hour, retreating, then bursting forth again, goggle-eyed with madness—shrieking, thrusting, shrieking.
Stalking suggests the vampiric and predatory. A weird-angled lean of the torso, a daft glaze in the eyes, the jaw slightly ajar, a thread of drool dangling from the chin. Stalkers ply their trade down by the canal, or in a ditch. It’s that shameful and gross. One would never proudly announce, “I’m off for a stalk!” No, stalking is too suspicious, too criminal, too embarrassing, the province of lackeys, organ pirates and the pathologically deranged.
A stroll is too leisurely, almost lackadaisical; invariably you’ll trip. Sauntering is arrogant; promenading pretentious; marching militaristic. One can only amble about the hills and dales—try it in the city, get creamed by a bus. Those who wander are harmless enough but will inevitably—and irritatingly—require rescue. To mosey implies a voyeuristic subterfuge: one “moseys on over to this window to have a look-see,” i.e., to watch a stranger remove his pants. Snoops mosey. Creeps too. It’s one step from slinking! (Which one performs only in the dead of night, slathered in grease.)
No, give me a walk any day of the week. Monday, for example. Or Boxing Day, etc. One dons a comfy pair of walking shoes, selects a robust walking stick from the woodpile, adjusts one’s walking hat to a jaunty tilt and hits the streets. The slap of footfalls on pavement is the sweetest music on earth. You swing your arms, you glance this way and that. With your feet providing the beat, a nearby bird trills a delightful tune: tweedle-dee-dum, diggity-doo-dah, poopity-glee! Life is as sweet as a plum sucked straight from the branch—when you’re on a walk, that is. Rarely otherwise.
Who else is about? An amputee looking on enviously from his haunches. A baby thinking, “Someday…” And maybe a fellow walker passing in the opposite direction who, admiring your gait, offers a collegial nod. Do you return it? Sure. But mostly out of duty. Her walk is kind of strange.
Where does a walk lead you? It doesn’t matter. That’s the point. Though not as mindless as wandering (see above), a walk isn’t the pursuit of some endpoint or goal. Your
destination is the journey, your journey the destination; there is no destination. That said, a circuit is ideal, lest you find yourself stranded atop a hillock or tunnelling into the earth’s molten core.
In times like these—the end times, that is—it’s more important than ever not to get caught racing the human rats of this so-called civilization. You see them zip past at a clip, off to some rendezvous or function in a power suit and/or chaps. Walking, sure—putting one foot forward, then the next, propelling off the back heel, etc. Their technique is flawless. But still, they don’t “get it,” lost as they are to themselves and their own, putrid hearts.
Who does get it? You do, of course. Or anyone, really, with legs and feet and a soul who synchronizes all three in harmony to roam their city’s streets.
Why? Because it’s pure being. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain. Walking’s a zero-sum affair, and what’s better than that?
Why, a walk, that’s what. The thrust of this missive.
Where? Anywhere you please.
When? Same answer.
How? There is no how. Not really. Simply open the door, believe in yourself for once in your godforsaken life, step out into the world and go.
* * *
—
A fine ending.
And, overall, as adequate a Progress Report as any I’d written—crafted entirely in my thoughts! I couldn’t wait to write it up and hand it over to K. Sohail with aplomb. Whether she read it or not, this was undoubtedly the best work I’d made yet.
Though as I began to trace back over certain phrases, that initial satisfaction ceded to melancholy. The pain behind them felt, this time, a little too acute. The whole thing rang with the fragility of overcompensation and trembled with loss. This Progress Report was far too transparently the work of one who could not walk—who was trapped in a “sticky situation” with no way out.
I gazed down at my legs, wedged between the fenders of a station wagon and a coupe. Held fast, I was going nowhere fast.
