by Pasha Malla
Mount me, he seemed to be saying.
So I grabbed a handful of mane and hauled myself aboard.
And Gary, like a soldier—or, more so, like a medic rescuing a wounded soldier from a carnage-strewn battlefield—plodded into the elevator to take me somewhere new.
WITH THE RIGIDITY OF THINGS UNSAID, of one who prides himself on maintaining “stiffened lips” in the face of even the most profound disgrace, Gary stood unmoving in the elevator with me atop his back. Gary, I wanted to cry, I’ve failed you! But his silence was my punishment. Or, rather, his silence confronted me with all that I’d done wrong. To break it would be to forgo his forgiveness forever.
So I accepted my punishment and thought. What had I done wrong? I’d swallowed ghosts. I’d breached protocol and compromised Gary. Gary, my saviour, who only wanted the best for me, who clearly had suffered from or at least was at odds with Mr. Ponytail and his legions, and possibly the mall as well. We’d been a team. And what were we now? Literally he carried me. I’d become a burden.
Still, what a towering figure of integrity he was, to hold me aloft, to even lead me further on my quest for justice (if that’s where we were headed; perhaps he was taking me to a cell or sacrificial lair—who was to say?) At any rate, Gary had a job to do and by god he was doing it. Was this job, though, the same as mine? He’d taken me to the site of Dennis’s murder, or at least disposal, but how I was meant to use this information to help us both was still a mystery.
As the elevator continued its voyage through space and, it seemed, time (though isn’t one always travelling through time, even when motionless, such as it is to be alive?), a new feeling darkened the edges of my shame. Not resentment, exactly. More irritation. Sure, I definitely shouldn’t have drunk from the ghostly waters to which the horse/pony had led me (fool! if only I’d heeded the cliché), but with no clear instructions, how was I expected to behave?
And it wasn’t as if I’d scooped the ghosts from the pool and forced them down Gary’s throat. I was the one with the things swimming around my guts.
No, if anything it was I who should be perturbed—not Gary. There was something a little smug about his forbearance. And I wondered, also, if he hadn’t in some way recruited me selfishly. Perhaps retrieving his tail would present tasks that escaped a pony’s capabilities. Forms to fill out, a tree to climb. Or even a single, simple sentence spoken aloud in human language.
That was it: Gary needed me more than I needed him.
And so, rather than begging his forgiveness, I decided to forgive him. Mentally, of course. The pony outweighed me by three hundred pounds. I wasn’t about to start a fight in the confines of the elevator; I’d be trampled to death in seconds. But at least now we were back on equal footing. I’m not sure if Gary could intuit this—horses/ponies having excellent powers of perception—but I did sense a redistribution of his weight, as if something had shifted within him. Yes! I was the human, the master—the boss. I would not be judged. I would ride Gary however I liked.
The elevator slowed. Stopped. The lit button extinguished. Gary seemed to prepare himself for something monumental. And the ghosts readied themselves as well, tensing…
The doors opened.
A hallway led from the elevator to a cage at the far end, in which a woman sat behind a pane of glass that separated—or protected—her from us. Behind her were shelves and cubbies that overflowed with shoes, hats, electronics, various unidentifiable bric-a-brac—and, I noticed, jeans. There was a section of storage dedicated to denim in tidy blue stacks. The woman at the desk nodded cordially. An invitation. But to what?
Where are we? I whispered to Gary. What is this place?
He nodded toward a sign above the woman’s head: LOST &/OR FOUND.
The woman running this operation wore the same beige outfit and peaked cap as K. Sohail, though her nametag claimed her as a certain D. Lee. And unlike K. Sohail, D. Lee seemed grateful to see us. She smiled and straightened and fairly welcomed us with the open arms of a possible embrace, prevented only by the pane of glass.
I drove Gary forward with careful, slow steps so as not to provoke the ghosts into making me float. Upon reaching the cage, I leaned down and spoke to D. Lee through a disc of perforations in the glass.
Hello, I said.
She beamed and asked how we were, how she could help us, if we were looking for something in particular; the Lost &/or Found had it all.
I told her I wasn’t sure. I told her that Gary had brought me here, indicating the pony, and that I was on a quest for truth. I didn’t mention Dennis or his murder; D. Lee was, after all, an employee of the mall and her geniality could well be a ruse to lull me (and Gary) into revealing our true purpose (retribution). I told her instead that I was interested in her selection of denim, stepping back slightly so that D. Lee might appreciate my own sartorial sophistication, at least from the waist down, and might I have a look at a pair or two in my size?
D. Lee informed me—not condescendingly, just firmly—that this wasn’t a store. The Lost &/or Found contained goods either lost, found or both, and while she might help locate something I’d lost or relieve me of something I’d found and with god’s will return it to its rightful owner, she wasn’t about to start hauling jeans off her shelves for casual perusal, even if I was an aficionado.
Return it to its rightful owner…
Instinctively I hid my hand—but then felt the call of destiny. I removed the ring. Placed it on a tray beneath the speaker. And asked, with a quiver of guilt in my voice, where it might have come from.
The tray swivelled around. On the other side of the glass, D. Lee examined the ring. Held it up to the light. Read the inscription—and gasped. Now you are mine, she whispered. Stillness settled over the small room. Even the ghosts quit jostling around my guts. In anticipation, I assumed, or deference—or terror.
D. Lee shook her head sharply, as if to dislodge a thought, placed the ring back in the tray and returned it to me. I can’t help you, she said, her voice trembling.
The ring stared up at me like an unblinking, judgmental eye. Retrieving it would be to accept D. Lee’s obvious lie, to make myself complicit and to bow to the mall’s power. But Gary was watching. I would not forsake him again. (Though, of course, I took the ring—it looked too good on my hand to concede it to the Lost &/or Found, especially as nothing more than a symbol.)
Boldly I told D. Lee the ring’s story of origin: the food court, the couple, the retching, the projectile arc, the outfitting, and the ensuing guilt that I bore wearing it on my finger. I didn’t mention how said guilt had mostly subsided thanks to the ring’s splendid fit, but I wondered if that weren’t obvious by how I brandished it with a certain pride.
Avoiding my gaze—the harsh glare of truth—D. Lee turned to the shelves, straightened a clock radio and claimed again that she couldn’t help.
I don’t accept that, I said, pleased with my perseverance; even the ghosts seemed to swell with a kind of parasitical vanity. But what had I been asking? My thoughts swirled. I checked my hand—right! The ring. I held it up, demanding to know where it came from, what the inscription meant, who was addressed by “you” and “mine,” and, should D. Lee accept the ring as lost property, to whom it would be returned—Dennis’s killer, I privately speculated (but didn’t say because of a lack of proof, causality or logic).
Her back still to me, D. Lee again said only: I can’t help you.
It’s not worth it, she said.
Adding: There are forces at work here that you can’t possibly understand.
I explained that my understanding was irrelevant; I was not particularly gifted with the powers of rational thought, comprehension and action, so what did it matter? I told D. Lee that I was well aware that something spooky and weird was afoot in the mall—and here I felt that a disclosure might help engender trust, so I said simply, Look, and stuck out my tongue, r
evealing the unshorn hair, now some two inches long.
D. Lee glanced over her shoulder. Sighed, nodded. Came up to the glass. And, to my shock, stuck out her own tongue.
By god, she had one too!
Flaxen and wispy, slightly curled, the hair trailed from the end of D. Lee’s tongue like a rope flung over the edge of a cliff. Twice as long as my own. For a moment we stood like that, tongues out on either side of the glass, hairs on full display. I have rarely felt so connected to another human being—in misery, in persecution, in shame. And the hairs, for their part, began to rouse themselves, wobbling upright like plants to the light…
D. Lee closed her mouth first.
For a while I trimmed it, she said, but it grows so fast I gave up.
I asked if it had ceased growing—or would the thing unfurl forever, eventually strangling her or forming some make of single-strand beard?
D. Lee smiled sadly. No, no, she said. It stops after a while.
We exchanged a long and knowing look. Broken only when, with a sigh, she spun the tray around again, picked up the ring and held it to the glass.
Do you really want to know about this? she asked.
I told her yes.
Okay, said D. Lee, told me to hold on, and shuffled off into the back alleys of the Lost &/or Found.
To fetch what? I wondered. Or whom? Klassanderella? Perhaps my beloved had travelled from the islands to find me, gotten bewildered in the mall, boarded the elevator and pushed the wrong button, ended up in the basement, and stashed herself amid the forgone stock with distant hopes of rescue (by me)? Was she lost?
Or perhaps this was a delightful ceremonial game played in Klassanderella’s homeland, a premarital turn of “hidden and sought” wherein one’s lover secrets him- or herself in a Lost &/or Found, only to be “returned” upon the other’s arrival therein?
My heart juddered with anticipation. Surely that was it. I’d nearly forgotten that Klassanderella had a ring just like mine! This seemingly pointless voyage down through the various basements of the mall would culminate now, at last, with a reunion. Yes, I was living a love story that had at last reached its giddily happy ending. I pressed my face to the glass and peered into that dim warren of shelves. I wanted to see Klassanderella the moment she emerged, not Lost but Found, with her own ringed finger held aloft in a salute of imminent matrimony. And then we would perform our vows (officiated by D. Lee), trade rings, and in wedded bliss escape the mall forever.
Even the ghosts seemed excited. They tossed and turned in my guts with such fervour that I had to cling to the counter in order not to go sailing up to the rafters. Meanwhile Gary remained as inscrutable as ever, a picture of stolid dignity between my legs. The faithful steed that Klassanderella and I would ride to freedom.
I laughed aloud. The mall couldn’t stop us now!
Well, not so fast. Here was D. Lee—not with Klassanderella in tow, but shuffling out of the shadows with what looked like a shoebox in her arms. Same size, same shape. Brown scuffed cardboard, lid slightly askew. No lover could fit in there. Not a human one, at any rate.
D. Lee settled before me on the other side of the glass. She eyed me, then the box, which she held at chest height, then me again. Are you sure? she asked.
I was indeed, I told her, without conviction. A shoebox portended no joy. Even the shiniest loafers could hardly compare to undying love and happiness.
The lid came off. D. Lee shook out the box on the tray and swivelled it around.
Rings.
Dozens of them, in a heap, identical to my own.
I picked one up, read the inscription: Now you are mine.
Another: Now you are mine (too).
Another, the very same.
So my ring—my special ring, that icon of affection and adoration and the commingling of souls and the most precious personal intimate extraordinary irreplicable bounteous union that two people could manufacture together, i.e., love, even from a distance of several thousand miles—had been mass-produced. At least forty of the things sat on the tray before me. How many were out there in the world? Another forty? More?
I glanced up. D. Lee met my eyes. So now you see, she said.
My response was only to drop my gaze to my hand. What a pathetic thing the ring seemed now. And what sense did it make to keep it, this meaningless trinket machinated in a factory? In disgrace I removed the ring from my finger and dangled it over the pile—but found that I couldn’t let go. Why?
The ring was mine.
And here something focused. Like the rack of the camera drawing a scene into crystallized view. I returned the ring to my finger and looked D. Lee dead in the eye.
Sure, I said, out there beyond the confines of the mall perhaps dozens or even hundreds (god forbid, thousands?) of people were strolling about with rings just like this one, deluded in the belief that they and their spouse or partner or paramour were “two in a million” (though even that would mean four in two million, and eight in three million, or 15,200 citizens globally—though more likely at least forty in a million, or 304,000 people total, and perhaps even twice that many, or more).
At any rate, I continued, maybe it was naive to suggest anything special about a relationship based on an illusion, but now that I’d been disabused of said illusion, wasn’t I gifted the opportunity to consider my love for Klassanderella, and hers for me, beyond symbols, and how our love was unique in less material ways.
Consider the fact that I was living in a mall and she was nursing her ailing mother in the islands, I told D. Lee.
Okay, said D. Lee.
Or the specific ways in which she was mine, and I hers, I expounded, gaining momentum now. How we connected despite Klassanderella’s “fun in the sun” childhood and mine of indoor shame. Or the ways in which we made each other laugh—shrill and cackling, with undertones of roar, like a witch hurled over a waterfall. Did any of those other couples with the same rings include one member who was a terrific fishmonger, and another who had, despite suffering a tongue-hair and a rivalry with a sociopathic albeit undeniably talented ponytail, befriended a subterranean pony?
Seems unlikely, said D. Lee.
Precisely! I replied. And, I fairly screamed, never mind that our love thrives despite the literal (watery) gulf between us, traversable only by ferry or flight! A love that one might assume was doomed from the start! And yet we would show them, I told D. Lee; we would show them all!
Here I paused, as my passion had whipped the ghosts into a real lather, and by the time I’d realized what was happening I’d already floated halfway to the ceiling.
Who else would come to my aid but Gary? Gary, that indomitable paragon of loyalty and companionship, as noble a creature as I’d ever met, let alone ridden. Forward he cantered and presented himself to be mounted. The ghosts stilled as I nestled atop his back. And clung there to his mane with both hands.
I felt D. Lee’s eyes on me with fresh inquiry. Had she noticed?
Indeed.
So, she began, you’re a floater.
Had I a name? A name for this pain? I’d never been anything before, let alone afforded a title that also conferred an identity. (My childhood epithets, “Fecal Face” and “The Broken One,” were little more than taunts hurled across my sickbed.) Being a floater, I assumed, occasioned a set of codes and normalcies. What were they, I wondered from atop Gary’s stalwart frame. I smiled at D. Lee, hoping to provoke more information.
But all she said was, You’ll need boots, and vanished again into the stacks.
Boots! Of course. I eyed my loafers with disdain. These weren’t the footwear of a floater—or was it…Floater (capitalized)? The syntax of my new nomenclature notwithstanding, yes, boots. I kicked my loafers away (if only I could burn them!) and sat atop Gary with my stockinged feet dangling. But a socked foot is a sad and childish thing. Vulnerable. Even pathet
ic. So I took those off too—barefoot now, and brazen, I awaited my boots. (And worried faintly about blisters, and eyed my discarded socks with regret.)
Here was D. Lee, a huge black boot in each hand. With effort she hefted one, then the other, up onto the counter and beckoned me closer.
Gary seemed to understand, and knelt. I eyed the boots from my side of the glass. Rubber, huge, with a single buckle flapping undone.
Diver’s boots, D. Lee explained. They’ll hold you down.
She spun the grate around. There they were.
Retrieving them from Gary’s back required some athletic manoeuvres—sliding, clinging, stretching, grasping, grunting, a frantic sort of scuttle, two more grunts. And the boots were very heavy. Each one weighed roughly, I’d estimate, about ten pounds of Gary’s meat. Or, by cut, one full pony leg plus a couple of fair-sized steaks hacked from his midsection. And they were meant to go on my feet!
I asked Gary to fetch my socks—and by god, he did. What a mind! He bent his head and snatched them with his teeth from the floor, and then he “handed” (mouthed) them to me as a neatly arranged pair.
So: first socks, then boots (a struggle I won’t get into), and then I slid from Gary’s back to the floor. The ghosts were losing it. But, remarkably, all that came of their mania was a slight jounce in my step—a jauntiness that might have passed for a buoyancy of spirit. Walking was laborious—my feet felt encased in concrete—but at least now I wasn’t floating up to the rafters every time I moved.
I told D. Lee thanks.
She told me not to sweat.
I did my best to obey.
But what now? I felt myself at a crossroads.
On one side was D. Lee, with whom I had established an irrevocable connection: she’d revealed great secrets and found me great boots. And then there was Gary, my ever-faithful companion—yet now, did I really need him? I sensed that he at last accepted responsibility for leading me to water and forcing me to drink (ghosts), and that having helped rectify that situation, he would now be content to trot on his merry way.
