by Pasha Malla
Now you’re in the thick of it. Baton in hand, crouching behind a rack of dresses like a jaguar among the reeds, lying in wait for the aspiring shoplifter to make a move. “Just try me,” you think, having pledged to uphold the honour of the mall with your body, mind and soul. It’s true, you’ll do anything to protect whatever shop requires your services—a denim concern, certainly, but even a hairdresser. Shoplifters can be so brazen and, frankly, sick that they’ll even snatch an unattended comb or scissors.
And if they do? You’ll bash their skulls in.
If it comes to that, of course. One prefers a capture. You yourself are the proof of rehabilitation. So when you apprehend a shoplifter—a goofy, drooling fellow with a knick-knack tucked up his sleeve—you do so almost tenderly. You take him out at the knees, sure, but the way you get him to the ground is like an angel laying a sinner to rest. And there, with your baton pressed to his throat, you tell him that the proof’s in the pudding.
But why go rooting around inside a delicious dessert for evidence? All you need to do is strip the guy nude and there it is: a sunflower tchotchke, the sort anyone would love to get their hands on. Yet more decent souls would never dare shoplift an item of such quality and worth. Ten dollars, $19.99, 401(k)—whatever the price—we’d pay it, such is our reverence for the mall, the shops and the goods therein.
“Why yes,” one thinks, “I think at last I’ll purchase this swell item for which I’ve ‘pinched pennies’ for years, the whole while battling with the knave in me who’d just as soon swipe it from the shelf…And so, having thwarted those fiendish impulses, here I am and here’s my money, and no, that’s fine, no need for a bag, I’m wearing it home, proud as a peacock with its regalia fanned in full glory, for I want everyone who sees me to witness the delicious, honourable fruits of transacting money for goods instead of the treachery of shoplifting, which debases us all…But now, Sir and/or Madam Proprietor, let’s both return to our respective lives with the jubilant song of commerce in our hearts, for today everyone’s a winner, aren’t they, from you the vendor and me the customer to anyone else in the world who recognizes that the only worthy ‘shoplifting’ is this: the uplift of one’s spirits aroused by shopping.”
* * *
—
By the end of the week I’d recognized this little essay as a work of recklessness and was feeling a bit despondent as I headed for lunch: What else might I write about? What progress was I making—or might I pretend to be?
I arrived at the food court to discover it teeming with even more Ponytail acolytes than before. The seating area was so crowded that some people ate standing, like barbarians. The air reeked of grease and sweat and sycophancy. Despite having shaved it dutifully that morning, I felt my tongue-hair twitch.
With my jaw locked grimly, I joined a massive line snaking from the chicken stand all the way to the escalators, and spent the next forty-five minutes plodding forward incrementally, suffering a chorus of enthusiasms about my nemesis and all that he had done, all that he was and all that he might yet become.
Finally I reached the counter and placed my order, yet was dispatched to a waiting area for another twenty minutes. By the time I collected my tray, rage had filled my belly so amply that I was no longer hungry, and I wheeled to face the food court with every intention of making a great show, for all to see, of stalking straight to the garbage area and dumping my lunch “straight down the hatch.”
But the mob was dispersing. Everyone was heading upstairs en masse, while a harried K. Sohail was trying her best, solo, to direct foot traffic, maintain decorum, ensure the escalator wasn’t overloaded, and hastily snack through a “two-piece” prepared for her by the chicken teens. Most shockingly, the chicken teens themselves were packing up and joining the throng. The mall’s pre-eminent resident was up to something, clearly, and everyone was rushing to catch his inane matinee.
Everyone except me, of course.
How delicious that my rival provided the distraction I’d been waiting for! With the mall’s first floor as vacant as the dull, glazed expressions of Mr. Ponytail’s opiated devotees, I slipped off to the service elevator, climbed inside and punched the anonymous lozenge. It glowed like a moon, and the erratic contraption juddered into motion. Here goes nothingness, I thought: where would I be taken this time?
Again the elevator dropped, and zigged and zagged, and, after a few minutes, finally landed, though this time with less a bracing shudder than almost gently, as if eased to rest by an unseen hand (or horde of ponytails). I cracked the doors and peered out: no sign of any hair; the view was dim, but at least the coast seemed clear.
I’d ended up at neither the swimming pool nor the parking garage, but the corridor of an industrial area that curled out of view. The lighting here was sparse and yellow, from somewhere distant came the roar of a furnace, and a sulphuric odour haunted the air. I was in the bowels of the mall now, for sure. Which made me wonder: were I to continue downward, might I eventually find freedom via its anus?
The truth about the mall was not going to be pretty.
I stepped out of the elevator and stood there for a moment, taking in “the view.” A low ceiling was veined with exposed, dripping pipes and wires pulsing with current, and every twenty feet or so lamps cast splotches of coppery light on the damp cement floor. This felt less like the hallways of the mall than a tunnel spiralling inward to some central hub. The whole place, dim and dank, sent dread shuddering through my soul: something terrible was down here, I was sure of it.
But then I pictured Dennis, and Klassanderella. I had hero’s work to do. I kissed my ring and pushed ahead. For now, my tongue-hair lay dormant and subdued.
A morbid symphony accompanied my infiltration: the rhythmic tinkle of the pipes, the distant breath of the furnace, the hum of the wires, the tap of my footsteps. Between lamplit stations I could see nothing in the shadows, and the tunnel curled interminably, whatever was around the corner always just out of view. I moved on instinct alone.
And this realization gave me pause. Wasn’t instinctual behaviour precisely what the mall wanted? For me to be seduced by what felt like intuition and to believe that said intuition was my own, when in fact the mall had infiltrated my thoughts? Six weeks here had no doubt reprogrammed my brain to the mall’s diabolical caprices. The result of which, I feared, was to end up like Dennis, drowned and partially scalped. And I didn’t even have a ponytail! God knows what part of me would mutiny against my own body.
Walking along, I regarded my legs skeptically. Is that what they’d been up to in the parking garage? Had they willingly trapped themselves with the hope of being severed from my torso so they could head off on their own, either joining Mr. Ponytail’s army or mounting their own leggy insurrection? I pictured them autonomously goose-stepping about the mall. And me dragging myself behind on a pair of stumps.
I shivered. I needed to keep a handle on all my parts—legs, arms, ears, nether regions, whatever. Apparently “everything must go,” or could, in the great clearinghouse extravaganza of the mall’s “final sale.” Poor Dennis, I thought again, following the curling tunnel toward its elusive centre, longing for a weapon—even the chicken skewer I’d abandoned in the parking garage. How I’d brandish it now like a sabre, prepared to flay without mercy whatever enemy might be lurking in the dark!
Weapon or none, stalking the mall’s “corridors of power” was real work. What a revelatory Progress Report I could write about these excursions. The toil and struggle. The progress. And dare I say the engagement too? Admittedly there wasn’t much of a public down here. Even so, I hadn’t felt so engaged in weeks. And wasn’t this the mark of a true worker? Self-engagement? For what is work without fulfillment of the self? Yes, I thought: the world works best when everyone in the world is working, and work makes the world go round.
Though was that right? Sure, it was a dandy of an aphorism, but did it capture some essential �
�colonel of truth”? I was struggling to form clear thoughts as I waded through the mind-muddling darkness, the tunnel curving inward but never reaching its terminus. What if it merely circled back to the elevator?
God, the mall was sick. Yet I continued on, with the bend of the wall endlessly obscuring what might lie around the corner—so far, just more wall. I began to feel that I was teetering toward an abyss. Every twenty yards I’d step into a pale splash of light, like a bucket of yellow paint tipped down from the ceiling. Ceiling? Such a thing wasn’t even visible beyond that snaking network of pipes and wires, humming and ticking, emitting the occasional hiss of steam.
Was it a ceiling of pipes and wires? Was that possible? Could mere pipes and wires uphold the weight of the floor above?
I stopped short: a ceiling was just another floor’s floor!
Wasn’t it?
I tried to gather my thoughts as I continued—but they swirled like frantic searchlights through the gloom of my mind.
If this ceiling, pipes and wires or not, was the floor of the floor above—say, the parking garage, that orgy of demented cars and ponytails—what then comprised the respective ceiling of the floor I now walked upon? If this industrial area, itself a basement, had a sub-basement, how did one account, ceiling-wise, for its floor? How far down could the whole floor/ceiling arrangement go? Sub-sub? Sub-sub-sub? Sub-sub-sub-sub, all the way until it met the curve of the earth and circled back to reconnect with the mall’s second storey, where a ceiling-cum-floor became a kind of roof?
And what then? When did a sub cease to be a sub? To become, say, super?
My confusion extended to other subs—submarines, subtraction, subterfuge, subcontractor. Were there multiple levels of those too? Where did it end?
And what was a subcontractor anyway? Sub: under; con: against; but what about tractor? If traction meant pulling, or something like it, then tractor, generally, had to signify the functional apparatus, mechanized and farmer-piloted or otherwise. So then a sub-con-tractor must undermine the very act of pulling. But such as what?
Such as maybe a wall? Which by its sheer, blithe inertness was certainly anti-pull.
Or would a subcontractor, in order to earn its con, have to actively, if subtly, push? For example, I thought, a door with the word Push on it—a sly suggestion, offering the pedestrian no option. Imagine you are being chased. What else to do but follow the instructions and become a subcontractor in the process. Was I a subcontractor, then, having pushed my way through a lifetime of doors, figurative and literal?
How then did that explain a subcontract? Contract, of course, meaning “to shrink.” How did one get under that? Perhaps I needed once again to break the word down into its component parts. So to be under (sub) and against (con) some alleged tract—as in a manifesto? or a parcel of land? Assuming the former, I imagined infiltrating a meeting of revolutionaries as an agent of the state, operating undercover (subcover?), attending their meetings and nodding agreeably through every speech and missive, albeit while covertly undermining (submining?) the actual manifesto-writing process with defeatist suggestions and counterintuitive edits, such that when it was eventually published the document would be unconvincing and rally no one, and the group would disband in shame. Or was it the latter tract: poisoning a rival’s soil with plague.
Subpoena—under poena, sure. But what in god’s name was a poena? I tried to locate that strange pairing of syllables elsewhere in my vocabulary: peon was close but inverted the vowels; poem might do at a glance but on closer inspection snuck an extra hump into its lettering and dropped the a; Pina was both a woman’s name and the fruity ingredient of a sweet, slushy drink. Under Pina? Surely not!
I stopped walking. Took my head in my hands and physically shook it free of thoughts—too much! Too much!
Was I losing it?
Worse, I thought. Ahead of me the wall curved into gloom; behind me the same. I was nowhere. I was lost. For a long time I’d been lost.
I gazed up at the entropy of pipes and wires above, twining and twisting off into the darkness—so like neurological pathways. Which made the security lights the synaptic explosions of sense and thought! So a brain, then. This wasn’t the mall’s guts, but a kind of cranial holding centre, and here I was, lost in it—not just physically, but mentally too.
Considering how wildly my thoughts had been careering around, was it not possible that these strange, meandering tunnels were in fact passageways through my own brain? Which made me not just lost in thought but lost in my thoughts—and not just lost to myself but lost in myself! My neuroses had literally consumed me. And now there was no way back. Back to what? I struggled to remember where I’d come from, where I was meant to be going…It was as if I’d gotten halfway to something definitive and suffered a stroke, rendering me disoriented and adrift.
I looked around: everything was uniformly dim, the hallway curling identically in both directions and the pipes and wires snaking along above, still with no suggestion that one direction led anywhere more conclusive than its opposite. Were I to turn around and head back, would I be returning home or simply continuing on this same exploratory path? Could it be a loop? An interminable spiral? Or the inwardly vacuuming coils of a black hole that would swallow me into madness?
Perhaps I could think my way out.
No: thinking was precisely what had gotten me into this mess.
The key, I thought, was to unthink.
Let this be my last thought, I thought. And with that I sat on the concrete floor—its damp touch greeting my buttocks—closed my eyes and did my best to erase consciousness from my brain. To wash my cortex clean, as it were; to gain clarity. I concentrated on my breathing, in and out. I rejected any mental image, any external sensation. I let go of language, of memory, of worry and fear and even—Klassanderella!—love. I ceased to fear the void. I welcomed it. When some perception or idea or quandary came swimming up, I pushed it under (sub). A faint scent of sulphur—suppressed. A leg cramp—ignored. Sudden concern about the plight of an elegant bird species I’d not seen since childhood—not really relevant.
But after five minutes or so of this I became a little too aware of the single piece of stubble growing from my tongue—which, upon any break in the action, became so acutely felt as to drive me bonkers—and rocketed to my feet. Fighting my own mind into stillness was absurd; the abyss would always dwell beyond the scrim of consciousness that separated me and true oblivion. And I wasn’t about to kill myself to get there.
What an idiotic exercise, I thought, and continued on my way.
Who cares to see oneself clearly? To reduce one’s thoughts to a blank slate, and one’s self-perception to something essential and intrinsic, wherein one—or, more specifically, I—emerged pure and unburdened of all the psychological baggage that had obfuscated my sense of self. How the hell would that get me home? And even if it did, then I’d have to deal with whatever terrifying realizations my subconscious had unearthed. No, indeed. Those sorts of insights were best buried in the basement—
And then it struck me: the basement. The mall! It all came back—or at least some of it. I mean, who was to say if what I remembered in that instant was, in fact, everything. Chances are, probably not. Memory being, of course, not only subjective but the moth-eaten net through which not just negligible bycatch but perhaps even momentous fish escape. What is remembering but dredging up the residue of experience—the weakest sea life that couldn’t fight its way to freedom. And this informs who we are?
No, I thought. I’d rather exist as lack, as a sort of negative space—an apparition, a cypher. What made me myself should remain mysterious. Not a fabrication of contrived recollections. That’s not what made me. I was all the stuff swimming loose in the ether of the unremembered, the unconsidered, the unknowable and unknown—what drifted out there beyond me. So what to do but keep walking, I thought—into the darkness, with my mind and body
like a sieve through which life might pass: nothing catching, nothing holding. I would proceed as an ephemeral wisp through existence, never any closer to becoming whoever I might actually be.
On further reflection, this didn’t make much sense either. And this endless walking was getting boring. But which way to go? Back or forward? Either the dank and frankly depressing corridor spiralled interminably toward an ever-elusive centre or it curled back in a circle to the elevator. Considering the size of the mall, I could still be miles from the terminus, while turning back would double my travel time. And there was no way I could take twice as much walking as I’d already done.
Despite the claims of a certain abandoned Progress Report, I’ve never had much patience with ambulation as a leisure activity. One ought to go places, I’d long thought, not simply go; and besides, we’d invented bicycles to save us from the stultifying labour of footwork. Already the past—what? hour? ninety minutes? day?—had been insufferable and pointless. And now, underdressed in nothing but shirtsleeves and stylishly torn albeit drafty jeans, I was also fed up with the damp chill down here, not to mention that, having forgone my midday meal, I was incredibly hungry as well.
This level of the mall, it seemed, was designed only to test my patience. And it was working. My spirits were flagging. What a fool I’d been to discard my skewer-sword and armour! If a foe were to leap now from the shadows they’d do me in lickety-split. And then I’d be nothing but a waste of good denim.
And here again the ghost of Dennis urged me on. Not literally, of course. If only some sort of post-Dennis spectre would come sifting out of the shadows and with a clank of his chains deliver some cryptic yet informative set of directions to lead me to freedom. No, there were no ghosts down here.
