Kill the Mall

by Pasha Malla

  I noticed that I was boring a hole in the Report before me with the tip of my pen. Such was my rage that I’d destroyed a helpless piece of paper! Shamefully I smoothed the page. Though such a loss of control was understandable. Had I known that “making work” was intended to resurrect the mall (as Mr. Ponytail somehow understood implicitly), I would have gone about my residency with a corresponding strategy.

  Would I, though? How?

  I struggled to think what I might have done differently. Been chattier with K. Sohail? Been more resolute about “making work” that wasn’t simply Progress Reports? Eaten fewer chickens? Eaten more chickens? Been less obsessive about solving Dennis’s murder? Maybe even accepted that, in the course of doing business, any decent mall would suffer a few casualties? And what about Klassanderella? I suspected that I should have thought about her less: surely keeping “one eye on the prize” of our marriage had been detrimental to my performance here.

  That was it: I’d allowed my heart to swell too big, to swell for Dennis, for Klassanderella, for myself—and even in certain nocturnal moments for the mall’s authoritarian proxy, the enigmatic K. Sohail. The secret to a successful residency seemed to be cynicism and megalomania—the stuff of Mr. Ponytail. After all, I’d helmed no legion of lookalikes birthed in a parking garage and which now thronged the mall, never mind some sort of restoration project to resurrect the mall’s former (I assumed) glory.

  All I’d done was made one friend, possibly gotten him killed, eaten a veritable barnyard’s worth of chickens, produced a few lacklustre and essentially devious Progress Reports, humiliated myself before a pony named Gary, humiliated myself before the venerable D. Lee, and now I sported a pair of ridiculous diving boots that, though imperative to prevent me from floating around like a blimp, limited my movements to a laborious slog.

  Sure, if the mall let me leave I’d be returning to Klassanderella with a truly excellent pair of jeans—they hadn’t stripped those from me yet—but the jeans, especially when removed from my legs, were hollow. As was a ring, I thought, stripped from a finger to negate one’s betrothal. How quickly it might be rendered an empty symbol, like a hula hoop with no kid in it, or a crucifix in a Dumpster.

  Klassanderella! Did she fear it too? That love could so summarily turn to farce? Was she down in the islands right now, scraping scales from a slimy fish or slopping fistfuls of fish innards into a bin, gazing at her hand and thinking: This might mean nothing. Had she always felt thus?

  But, I thought, brightening slightly, sitting up in my chair, splaying my fingers to display the ring, weren’t my feelings for her inspired by her very lack of cynicism? Down in the islands, after all, one suffered no pinpricks of the soul such as those of the Lost &/or Found. With no “line” to the outside world, short of the odd crackling telegraphic line burdened with birds, perhaps her ignorance occasioned bliss. The oblivious bliss of love.

  This was encouraging.

  If Klassanderella believed in the ring, and subsequently in “us,” then why shouldn’t I too? Love was a two-way street, after all, and even if one of the lanes was bunged up with a horrifying accident—all flaming metal and limbs strewn about in blood-muck—there was still clear passage in the other direction where a policeman could steer traffic around the carnage. That was us! Klassanderella and I were cop and car, passenger and driver, accommodating pedestrian and local retailer peering through the window of his gun shop. We were everything. Our love was all there was!

  Even the mall couldn’t hold us down. Not a love this strong, which transcended space and perhaps time. A flame so everlasting even the gales of malice couldn’t snuff its fire. So what if the ring was mass-produced? My jeans were too, probably; it made them no less wondrous. I owed it to Klassanderella not to admit defeat, to conclude my residency with dignity, to write the best damn Progress Reports the mall had ever seen, to keep a stiff upper lip and my head held high—a lip so stiff it risked sloughing enamel from the adjacent teeth, and a head so high it might well dislocate from my body and go bouncing off down the hall.

  I jammed the ring triumphantly back onto my finger.

  Hope, then, would be my anchor. Or not my anchor but the ballast I would hurl from the ship of my decrepitude and thusly sail off into the sunset of, also, hope. I’d a cause and a goal—and an enemy to thwart: Ponytail. Ah, Mr. Ponytail. I envisioned him, arrogantly traipsing about his quarters, riveting onlookers with another virtuoso routine. But to what end? Sure, the guy could paint. But each painting was merely a sortie to the next, to the next; he was a pusher, pushing the drug of art. An art that stupefied and subdued, turning patrons into mindless devotees and little else.

  That’s not what art was for! I didn’t think so. No, it was likely meant to excite, to inspire, to transform, to challenge, to change—to engage. I’d spent so much time at the mall worrying about my fraudulence, when all along the real fraud was the “pomp and circumstances” of Mr. Ponytail, who didn’t engage so much as dupe the public. The envy that had long squelched around in my soul began to congeal—into hatred, loathing and a thirst to reveal the guy as he really was…

  Not a ponytail at all, I thought, sensing myself on the verge of a “good one”:

  A phonytail.

  Yes, that was it—a big phony! Also a crook, a liar, a hustler, a swindler, a grifter, a fleecer, a scammer, a con, a fake, a sneak, a wretch, a trickster, a cheat, a charlatan, a rascal, a scallywag, a bandit, a rogue, a scamp and a rapscallion.

  And a jerk. A jerk, certainly, but also a fool and a meanie. And a real ding-a-ling and dingbat, wingding, wingnut, nutbar, nutcase and nutjob. A fellow nutty as a fruitcake, mad as a hatter, crazy as a loon, slippery as an eel, blind as a bat, lonely as a cloud, thunderstruck, lightning-tempered, hot-tempered, ill-tempered, intemperate, temperamental, mentally unfit, fit to be tied, tied up in himself, self-righteous, self-important, self-obsessed, self-absorbed, self-possessed, self-concerned, self-indulgent, self-loving, self-interested, self-centred, not worth a cent and senseless as a centaur.

  Simply put, he was not very nice. He was unkind, unbearable, unnatural, unacceptable, uncaring, uncouth, a unique piece, a piece of work, a piece of trash, a trash heap, a garbage pile, a flaming pile, a real pill, a pillager, a philistine, a pig in lipstick, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a whale in a dress, a marmot in galoshes, a kook, a goof, a gimp, an imp and a simpleton.

  He was shady too, and shadowy, but also beyond the pale. And irritating. And annoying. And grating, though not so great, more of a degenerate and a reprobate—and a nitwit, a twit, a tit, a boob, a glans, an anus, an ass, a donkey, a chicken, a dog, a leech, a shrimp, a toad, an ape, a baboon, a monkey, a worm, a maggot, a rat, a snake, a pig, full of bull and bull-headed. Though also a blockhead, a pinhead, a dunderhead, a muttonhead, a bonehead, a meathead, a butthead, a knucklehead, a numbskull, a skuldugger, a scumbag, a dirtbag, a bag of hammers, a bag of nails, nails on a chalkboard—Mr. Ponytail, I mean.

  While we’re at it, he was disgraceful, dishonest, disreputable, disappointing, despicable, a despot, a tyrant, a cutthroat, a murderer, a killer, a bandit, a villain, a felon, a sociopath, a psychopath, certifiable, certified and a stooge, a chump, a sap, a sucker, a patsy, a flunky, a dupe, but also cocky, immodest, arrogant, insipid, bizarre, uppity, snotty, haughty, dotty, pretentious and a pretender.

  And guileless yet full of guile, feckless yet full of feck, shiftless yet shifty, affectless yet affected, baseless yet base, shameless yet shameful, bloodless yet bloody, headless yet heady, footless yet afoot (at something), good for nothing, bad to the bone, best ignored, worst ever, mediocre, mundane, unexceptional, exceptionally awful, awfully terrible, terribly horrible—and just really, really bad.

  But let’s not forget icky, gross, grotesque, gruesome, vile, a live wire, a deadbeat, a birdbrain, a featherbrain, a harebrain, a scatterbrain, cold-hearted, dead-hearted, black-hearted, evil-hearted, heartless, gutless, yellow-b
ellied, liver-lipped—oh, and the mouth on him! Not to mention toothless and fork-tongued, nosey, cockeyed, hard of hearing, hard to like, easy to hate, high and mighty, lowbrow, middling, upside down, stuck-up, up his own, on the take, full of it, running on empty, a brick shy, a card short, a sandwich less, a bit much and a bridge too far.

  Oh, I could go on…

  But I’d riled myself into a real lather, champing at the bit (Gary!), ready to strike.

  First, of course, I’d need to scheme a way out of my quarters.

  SOMETHING PHYSICAL WAS CERTAINLY OUT. I wasn’t much for exertion anyway, though my mental faculties were admittedly limited as well. It’s not like I could telepathically bend the steel bars of my cage or liquefy myself and pour juicily down the halls. I’d no knack for witchcraft. What I did possess, I felt, was the skill of coercion—particularly that manipulative brand rooted in pity. I was quite adept at exploiting my inadequacies to trigger the mercy of others, to get what I wanted by showcasing all that I lacked—because I was weak, because I was ineffectual, because I couldn’t achieve anything on my own.

  If I’d a war cry, surely it was: A little help, please?

  Whether people were moved to empathy or sickened into action by this sort of thing was beyond me. All I knew was that an obsequious, cloying, faintly tragic approach was often “the ticket”—or at least my ticket, viz. my ticket to ride, viz. my ticket to ride the wave of someone else’s competence to triumph. Or if not triumph, then at least adequacy. Yes, that was it: the safe harbour of adequacy. And in this case, adequacy meant the basic freedoms accorded to human beings under various charters and declarations, such that they weren’t caged like some primal beast or quarantined sicko.

  What would be my ploy? It needed to be really pathetic. Something feeble and helpless—the emotional equivalent of a weeping baby dangled over a chasm. (If not the imminent peril, it’s the discordant shrieking that causes the would-be hero to act.) Something equally annoying, yet something that also compromised my adult dignity. It wasn’t exactly compassion I was after, but more that human distaste for humiliation—the way when one sees a dead dog in the street, one doesn’t just leave it there, but kicks it under a bush so no one else has to witness the ignominy. My scheme needed to be irritating, ingratiating and embarrassing, yet relatable—and something primal that spoke to the basic functions of human existence…

  By Jove’s eureka! I had it!

  Hunger.

  I’d not eaten in—now that I was taking stock—days. Who wouldn’t share my pain?

  Yes, that was “the ticket.” A successful scheme had to be rooted in truth. I was an even less proficient actor than I was a hero, so the marrow of my ruse had to be slurped from lived experience. And I was very hungry. I thought I’d long ago exhausted my appetite for chicken, but now the prospect of nibbling a wing had me fairly clucking. While K. Sohail’s professional decorum likely inured her to my tricks, there was a group of mall workers who performed their duties with much less vigour—in fact, with a kind of beleaguered suffering—and who might well, if not fall victim to a scheme, at least abet one through their apathy.

  Who? Why, the chicken-roasting teens!

  But how to contact them? They were way down the hall in the food court. Roasting away. Spearing, hacking, serving. Gamely intercoursing with the public, trading cash for bird, providing nutrition to the hard-working hordes who were remaking the mall. Oh, those teens. I loved them a little, suddenly. Not as I loved Klassanderella. Certainly not! No, this was more a fraternal or sisterly love. As one might love one’s lifetime bus driver or a friendly, slinking kitty. I would pet a teen on the head and say, There. In the smile I lavished upon them would be affection, admiration—and little to no desire.

  Would this help, this new-found warmth? This sudden humanization of a group whom I’d long regarded as little more than automata, and as divorced from sentience as the chickens themselves? I closed my eyes and tried to summon one through clairvoyance. Teen, I thought. Teen! I opened my eyes. Nothing. The hallway was as empty as ever, aside from K. Sohail’s sneakered foot sneaking into view. Tapping twice. (A code?!) And sneakily retracting.

  And then, by some divine miracle, it happened: a teen appeared before my quarters with a takeout tray. I rocketed to my feet—though the boots held me fast as concrete blocks. K. Sohail rose, keys out. The grating was unlocked. The kid approached with my lunch, piping hot. Quickly I scrawled a note on the corner of my most recent Progress Report, tore it loose and snuck the note into the teen’s fat-spattered shirt pocket.

  Amid this exchange, I was enveloped in a bouquet of grease and adolescent hormones: like deep-fried laundry, or a damp sausage. As hormonal and moist a smell as any I’d encountered. My god, these creatures were alive in a way I’d never be! And yet so constrained by the strictures of their profession: arrive, spear, roast, hack, serve, bill, repeat. If someone set them free, who knew the feral heights to which they’d scuttle. What an army they’d make with me as their leader—with them as my ponytails, scrabbling along behind. An army of me and some teens!

  I could only hope that I’d worded my note rousingly enough.

  The teen headed off, I dug into my lunch, and K. Sohail locked me up wordlessly once again. As I ate, I fancied myself a sort of dissident unjustly imprisoned. But I’d flung a lifeline into the ether—and who knew, perhaps a teen would snatch it up, haul me to freedom, and the revolution would be at hand. A revolution sustained by chicken, hope and tea (iced or regular).

  What was in my note? you ask. A bribe?

  Perhaps a bribe; perhaps the promise of a bribe. But in times of desperation one must act accordingly. (Desperately, that is.) So that night, after finishing the lunch leftovers that constituted my dinner, I bedded down and listened as the bustle and clamour through the mall calmed and stilled and people made their way home. Since I was already locked in, at some point K. Sohail simply headed off on her own merry way—though “merry” isn’t the right word to describe K. Sohail’s movements. Officious, yes. Efficient. Certainly capable. But, no, she wasn’t “merry.”

  If anyone in the mall was merry, it was the mercilessly merry Mr. Ponytail. Though there was a malevolence and arrogance to his merriness, like a cocky, drunk Santa Claus performing sleight-of-hand tricks with a switchblade. He moved with a buoyancy one might mistake for joy, buffeted by hubris rather than a lightness of spirit. In fact, in terms of sheer buoyancy, I certainly had anyone beat: take off my boots and I’d float to the moon. Though there was no joy in that, either. Only ghosts.

  By the by, by this point, as with the hair in my mouth, I’d grown accustomed to the ghosts in my guts, and only in passing—actually, while visiting the toilet between lunch and dinner—did I feel them stirring and wondered if a bowel movement might hasten their expulsion. Alas. No luck. Apparently the things were housed in my soul rather than, say, my duodenum. Which meant that I couldn’t even abort them by Caesarean section.

  My point here is that I’d come to tolerate the ghosts. Sure, every now and then I’d feel them sloshing around between my liver and kidneys. But consider those who live with the pains of dysentery, or the sorrow of a broken heart! I suffered neither—especially not the latter. I was soon to be wed to the love of my life, the woman of my dreams, the ringmate of my ring: Klassanderella.

  First, of course, I had to escape.

  WELL, THE DAYS PASSED, the renovations continued apace, and I remained locked in.

  A teen came in the late morning with my rations of chicken products and tea, refusing to meet my eyes. If there was some sort of clandestine signal coded into how the tray was placed before me, or how the chicken was arrayed atop its leaf mattress, I couldn’t say. It didn’t help that I couldn’t tell one teen from the next—the same shifty gaze, the same disillusioned slouch, a uniform oily, glandular reek. Was this the one to whom I’d given the note? Or was that the one from yesterday? Or were those two i
n fact the same one? How many teens worked in the food court anyway? Four? Forty?

  Of course the security cameras were lording over our every exchange, so I could appreciate the teen’s/teens’ hesitancy to “make a move.” It’s not as if I were the picture of courage, whittling chicken bones into spears and plotting my escape with tea leaves. No, I’d compliantly been making the week’s work as always. And while I ended up ditching that Progress Report, I will include it below—again, as a record. Ultimately, for reasons to be revealed, it became frivolous and self-involved. Yet there is truth in it. Here:

  * * *

  —

  If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the feet are certainly the gateway to a path that slithers up the legs, plunges into the anus and winnows its way through the intestines before joining up with whatever entered ocularly in some central soul-housing locale. (The spleen? Probably the spleen.)

  Like the eyes, feet need lids. You can’t just tramp about barefoot, not through all that glass and syringe! In advanced cultures, podiatric lids are known as footwear—from the barbaric sandal to the devious athleticism of sneakers. Elegant ladies and bold gents totter about on stilettos. Some folks opt for clogs, others slippers, still others ruthlessly bind their feet until the metatarsals crumple like wet paper—and it’s beautiful. Detectives wear shoes of gum; a “soft-shoe” is sported by lords of the dance. Children are shod by their parents’ decree, be it with roller skates or, hilariously, a single mitten. And while many, if not most, would consider the mighty loafer the height of footwear supremacy, the finest shoes of all are in fact: boots.