by Pasha Malla
My word, a boot can do anything! Tromp, for example. Or stomp. Much heftier and more menacing than any shoe; one can step free from a boot and shake it aloft to deter an attack. And that’s not all. Simultaneously you might employ the matching boot to shelter a bird that’s been guzzled into a jet engine and regurgitated in a ghastly blizzard of feathers and blood; the boot transforms into a sort of “bird’s house” wherein you nurse the ruined creature back to health, dribbling nectar into its beak and splinting its wings with spent pens. Months later you set Colleen free—out to sea, where, fully healed, she sails right into the waves, never to be seen again.
What of it? You’ve still got your boots.
Boots reduce snow to nothing, every flake mercilessly crushed in their tread. Mud, same: you plow through it like a human tractor, eyes on the prize of wherever you’re heading, whether it’s a boot buyers’ convention or Boot Expo or a support group for the bootless, which you run sensitively, trying to convince a roomful of inferiorly shod lesser lights that one day, with practice and prayer, they might join the booted elite too.
Of course, boots are no monolith, like “fruits” or “the mall.” There are as many styles of boot as there are ways to worry a child. For starters: the deadly cowboy boot. Featuring spurs that jangle and high heels, these are not recommended for novices, pretenders or, for example, waterskiing. Only the most experienced boot wearer should dance with the devil in a pair of cowboy boots, lest you want to meet your maker at “the crossroads,” i.e., some weird demon intent on stringing his banjo with your guts.
(N.B. Rain boots, contrary to their name, are made for avoiding wet weather. As such, wear them only on the sunniest day of the year. With nary a cloud in the sky, you’ll never have to worry about moisture rotting your toenails and peeling them away like dead petals in the wind.)
There are also ski boots and workboots and steel-toed boots and hiking boots and jackboots, to name a few. Also combat boots, desert boots, moon boots, ankle boots and even booties, which are tiny, tiny boots for infants that are in adolescence traded for a saucy pair of go-go boots to be worn until and during the recipient’s “first time.” Then one commits to a set of grown-up boots all the way to the deathbed, when they’re plucked from the bloated corpse, boiled and eaten by one’s progeny. You’ve heard the saying “They died with their boots on”? What’s left out is: “Delicious!” In certain cultures.
Tired of your boots? Just reboot. Done with those? That was quick, but no matter. There’s an endless supply of boots for even the most erratic enthusiast. No judgment here! Once you’re “in,” you’ll never be “outed” again. The booted, like any community, are as dedicated to fostering kinship and harmony among our ranks as we are to barring undesirables from admission. For not just anyone is worthy of boots.
Say you’re the sort to putter about gazing at the heavens and pondering the infinite mysteries of the cosmos—what a waste boots would be, you flighty lunatic. Or say you’re an amputee. With all due respect and thanks for your service—whatever and however you served—what good would even one boot do you, really? By all means stuff a pair onto your hands and clomp about the tabletop, whinnying like a mule. But is that what boots are for? Theatre? No. They’re for leading the finest human specimens, one sure-footed step at a time, a little bit closer to god.
* * *
—
The teen handed over my food, as always, and left. “Same old,” as they say; “same old.” To be honest, my life wasn’t much different from how it had been for the preceding several weeks, excepting that I took my meals at my desk rather than in the food court. I woke, performed my morning toilet, ate, “worked,” ate, “worked,” ate, performed my evening toilet, went to bed, woke, and repeated the previous day’s activities. While my morning routine included a dutiful tongue shave, the hair seemed in hibernation—dying, I hoped, rather than simply biding its time for a full-on bloom.
At any rate, between “making work” and my steadfast routine, I might have been content to serve out the rest of my time without mutinying at all. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that I was being held against my will, and, as an ostensible “freed spirit,” that irked me. This was no longer a residency. To reside suggests leisure, perhaps a hammock. Certainly, at the very least, the capacity to come and go as one pleases. This was a sentence. This was jail time. This was “the big clink,” confirmed again now by the biggish clink of K. Sohail’s keys turning in the lock. I shuffled over to my desk, sat down and began to consume my breakfast.
Yet my mind churned wildly, suffocating my appetite. Having behaved outrageously, I feared that I’d be imprisoned here forever. And then what? Would I become a sort of zoological curiosity, with mallgoers and Ponytail acolytes stopping outside my cell to marvel at the would-be dissident in captivity? Or perhaps I’d merely offer a cautionary tale to future residents: obey or suffer. You don’t live in the mall; the mall lives in you.
Well, not on my watch, or listen. I couldn’t die here, I thought, twisting my ring around my finger. I had a wedding to get to. Klassanderella and the dream of our reunion (metaphorical; my actual dreams were mostly of ponytails—ponytails by the millions, suffocating me in my sleep) kept the spark of revolution alive. Oh, and Dennis. Poor guy. Shame about his murder; if in escaping I might also wreak a little justice, so be it.
I looked up sharply from my desk, casting my gaze toward the other “woman in my life,” out there in the hall. K. Sohail was a prisoner now too—imprisoned by the task of imprisoning me. What a waste, squandering her formidable skills as a caretaker. Who, in her absence, was carting off bags of hair or performing “rounds”? K. Sohail wasn’t taking care of anything—not even me. She only dwelt in guilty silence outside my door, permitting the teens to bring me food, then locking me up again. A real caretaker might come in and rub my feet or sing me to sleep. Or, at the very least, wish me goodnight.
K. Sohail hadn’t wished me goodnight in weeks.
Weren’t we both victims of the mall? If only I could tell her. I leaned toward the hallway and called her name—or its first initial, since that was all I knew. Though I might as well have been chanting J! J! J! or D! Certainly if someone were hollering a single letter at me, it likely wouldn’t inspire me to action, like a cur at a whistle or a whale seduced by the ballads of its barnacle-slathered lover. So I quickly gave up repeating K through the bars when, after several minutes, I still hadn’t roused her from her post.
I had to have faith that my note would do the trick. That the teens were assembling nightly after the mall closed, in a back alley or graveyard, poring over it and plotting how best to liberate me and set my revolutionary scheme, such as it was, in motion. That morality—or that breed of morality hastened by a bribe—would prevail. That our hatred of the mall was equal and together we would take it down.
Did the teens hate the mall, though? Or were they just morose? Hard to tell. We ought to have found solidarity in the mall’s rejuvenation: as my singularity had been supplanted by Mr. Ponytail, their food court supremacy was threatened now too. But this assumed that they found their chicken work rewarding. Did they take pride in roasting birds to a golden-brown sheen? Perhaps nourishing hungry patrons sated some instinct of which I was ignorant—ignorant, that is, of such an instinct, as well as of the teens’ capacity to care for anyone other than themselves.
But did they even care about that? Themselves, that is? Certainly one’s self-regard begins with basic hygiene, which they seemed to disdain in even its most lax iterations. I was no paragon of egoism, but at least I washed. The teens…well, suffice it to say that soap was something with which they had at best a casual relationship. And my fate was in the grubby hands of these youngsters!
All this angst and uncertainty made it impossible to eat, so I set my breakfast aside and turned to the week’s Progress Report with a sigh. For the cameras I needed to behave deferentially. The powers-that-be at the mall c
ould never know the fires of insurrection that sparked in my soul. No, all they’d see on their monitors was a defeated has-been, hunched and scribbling away.
But then I noticed something on the napkin folded at the edge of the tray. I picked it up, pretended to wipe my mouth: a message was scrawled on the napkin’s underside—a single word, but one that roared like a battle cry.
Okay, said the napkin.
Okay, said the teens!
To my note, my call to arms, they’d taken their sweet time, no doubt, but ultimately responded in the affirmative: Okay. Okay! That okay struck me as in direct communion with my—and Klassanderella’s—ring. A call-and-response—
Me: Now you are mine.
Teens: Okay.
—in which “mine” implied the collectivity of guerrilla-style warfare rather than the proprietary sentiments of love, and “okay” signified not only an agreement but a commitment to “the cause,” viz. our collective freedom from the subjugation and internment of the mall, which we would achieve through militant means and/or trickery and/or simply running away.
Every burgeoning insurrection has no doubt been instigated with a similar exchange—the recalcitrant proletariat trading clandestine communiqués like flirtatious schoolmates in the back of class. But instead of At recess I shall chase you / Okay, we were plotting the overthrow of an empire. Or at least committing to said enterprise. A specific scheme had yet to be hatched. Any scheme was, to be fair, still merely an unfertilized egg of agreement bobbing expectantly around our proverbial loins.
(Before I continue, I want to confirm that no impropriety is intended in the above analogy. Perhaps my words got away from me a little. I repeat: my interest in the teens was limited entirely and exclusively to our collective resistance, and not at all romantic, seductive or reproductive. Besides, the teens were repulsive. The thought of even faint proximity to one, let alone bedding down with several of them and their oozing, redolent flesh made the ghosts in my bowels churn queasily.)
So here we were, at any rate. An unlikely army. Me and the teens. In platonic cahoots. I rendered their reply illegible by soaking the napkin with schmaltz and crumpled it into the trash. Nonchalant enough, nothing untoward; it wasn’t like the security camera could read my thoughts. Though if it could, I thought, I wondered how many recursions down—how many sub-levels of consciousness—I’d have to descend to escape its psychic purview. Even now, as I was thinking about thinking about what I’d thought, was that far enough? Or did I need to retreat further to dull the seismic echoes of my consciousness from being sensed and read by the camera, or whoever was on the other end?
I could only hope that the mall’s mind-reading capacities were compromised by the number of brains suddenly filling its shops and walkways. Surely with the halls teeming with all those enterprising souls, the mall’s cognitive receptors would be jammed; it seemed improbable that my feeble notions could rise above the clatter. No, the teens and I were safe—for now. Though tantalizingly it was this very safety that we wished to compromise, to throw great handfuls of caution in the face of the wind, whipping the wind into raging, retributive gales that made our hair dance like snakes and our eyes weep and noses run and ears spout torrents of blood.
But this was no time to worry about windstorms, figurative or otherwise.
It was time to scheme.
Yes, I know I’d “travelled this road before,” and my schemes had been mostly ill-fated and ineffectual. But this scheme would be a counter-scheme, an un-scheme and a de-scheme—the ur-scheme to beat all schemes. A scheme by me, executed by teens.
It would begin with a map. A mental map, necessarily, what with the camera peering over my shoulder. Yet as the afternoon progressed my thoughts only spun emptily, like a reel-to-reel recorder that, having reached its end, is reduced to a little strip of flapping tape. I needed to snatch it up, stretch it over the magnets (or what have you) and play the anthem of my freedom, forever. (If only I could charter the parking garage musician—what wasted talent, playing away down there for the cars.)
By the time dinner arrived I’d yet to map or scheme anything, and when the grating clattered open, revealing a teen standing there with a meal tray, I looked away in shame and futility. K. Sohail lingered. The teen approached. We met eyes. I cringed. The teen stared. What a pro! The teens were definitely more practised in the art of subterfuge than I—who knew what they were up to behind the chicken stand. Building a bomb from bones? Maybe they were planning to break me out explosively, the door blown off its hinges and all of us scurrying away under the cover of smoke.
I accepted my dinner. Offered thanks.
Okay, the teen said, shrugged, and withdrew.
Okay! Our code. As K. Sohail locked me in I tried to decipher what the word meant this time, if some particular inflection conveyed that our scheme was moving ahead, whatever said scheme might entail, or even some specific instruction.
But, I thought, picking at my chicken, what could “Okay” possibly mean? Spelled backward it offered no compelling options. My thoughts spun again—that same tape, its loose end snapping and clicking! How to make it play?
I feared the teens were too clever for their own good. Or, more specifically, my good. They seemed to have overestimated me. Perhaps because of my prestigious position at the mall, they’d taken me as some sort of genius versed in everything from boot shopping to cryptology. I could barely crack the codes of basic human speech! Even the most banal social interaction required of me intense concentration for instructive cues: Did someone saying Hi with a particular tilt of their head in fact signify a death wish? Might a stranger’s asking for the time really be a desperate confession of soul-wrenching lust? How was one to know, ever, what another person really meant?
Okay, I thought, turning the word around like an artifact, attempting to see it from all sides. Okay…okay…okay…
I had a start—a jolt of inspiration.
What if I were spelling it wrong? What if the teens were actually saying O.K.? An anagram or initialism, that is, and not a word at all.
So what then might the letters stand for?
Perhaps the K signified the K of K. Sohail. The only K I could think of. The only K almost literally at hand. But what about her? Was she the key to our freedom? I needed to figure out what the O meant…
I rummaged through my vocabulary for O verbs.
Occupy? That made no sense. How could one occupy a person? I mean, I could distract her, but was that the teens’ big plan? Me creating some diversion while they—what? torched the place? No, their message had to signify something more grandiose than, say, me dancing a saucy jive or feigning anaphylaxis on the floor of my cell.
I thought of other O verbs: order, obviate (not that I knew what that meant), ogle, ordain, occlude (again, no idea), own, oxygenize, oblige, oil (surely not!), outline, open, offer—none of those made sense.
Observe, maybe? But then what?
Surely not obey…
And then it struck me: What if the O meant…obliterate?
My god, were those homicidal teens plotting the caretaker’s assassination? I sat up, my ghost-clogged stomach lurching. Surely they realized that K. Sohail was only a peon, a pawn, as beholden to the mall as the rest of us. If anything we should be attempting to fold her into our scheme as an ally, not posting her decapitated head on a chicken skewer to portend the revolution. What would we be then? No better than Mr. Ponytail, surely. And our freedom would be forever stained by an innocent’s blood.
I needed to warn her!
But then a second, even more sickening realization came over me. That O.K.—Obliterate K. [Sohail]—wasn’t simply the teens suggesting a scheme.
They were giving me instructions.
COULD I KILL K. SOHAIL? Probably not. At best in some cowardly, distant way. With poison, for example—though a swift-acting brand, nothing that would prolong a pain
ful death or send humours gurgling from her orifices. Even if I could manage something discreet, I thought, I still didn’t like the idea of taking a life. Hers especially. She’d been kind to me. Sure, I hadn’t enjoyed a goodnight in a long time, but to be fair I’d been caught sticking my nose, eyes and appendages where they didn’t belong. She was only doing her job. We all have our purposes; that’s what makes the world go round. Imagine if I failed to file a Progress Report, the chaos that would descend upon us all…
A merciless killing couldn’t be the answer. And, really, was a revolution so necessary in the first place? I sat back and surveyed my quarters. They weren’t so bad. Where else might one be provided three (counting leftovers) square meals a day and shelter free of charge? The bed was comfy enough, the shower hot, and I’d even been assigned my own private security detail. With a slight shift in thinking, the video camera seemed less of an intrusion than a watchful, caring eye. That’s it: I wasn’t being surveilled but tended to—maybe even lovingly observed, like a parent looming over the crib of a newborn, except also recording hundreds of hours of uninterrupted footage.
The death of K. Sohail would solve nothing. Consider the guilt I’d experienced over Dennis’s demise—and that hadn’t even been my fault! Let alone my doing. Let alone something I’d schemed with a bunch of upstart teens via coded message and executed ruthlessly under cover of night. Were I to start offing folks how could I live with myself? I couldn’t. And I’d be too wracked with shame to do myself in. The only way that I could stand to kill K. Sohail would be if I killed myself first—a paradox. And simultaneously taking us both out—some sort of kamikaze mission where I went careering into K. Sohail in a shopping cart full of dynamite—seemed out of the question. I’d not the courage for that. Nor the aim.
