by Pasha Malla
Oh, wow, here was K. Sohail, squeaking and jingling up to my quarters.
Good morning, I said. (Boldly, I thought.)
She offered me a forlorn smile. I was surprised to hear her speak:
You’re nearly finished here, she said.
I told her, Indeed. (Though, I wondered, was she talking about my residency or the collective fate of us all? And by “here” did she mean the mall—or the planet?)
She seemed poised to say something else. Not goodnight—now was hardly the time…I waited. What would it be? A warning? An affectionate send-off? An apology?
Instead she simply stared. I sensed in that lingering look—god, was it longing? Was K. Sohail “after me”? Being desired was unfamiliar; immediately I second-guessed myself. Weren’t the eyes of lust meant to be more hooded, the lips gaping as if for a smooch, the breath heavy and amorous? K. Sohail’s face looked sad.
I tried to contort my own features into a mirror of hers. I softened my gaze. I tilted my head to communicate, I hoped, compassion—reinforced by a slight jut of the chin. My nose underwent a subtle scrunch. The eyebrows peaked.
K. Sohail’s own expression shifted into bafflement.
Immediately I felt foolish, engaged in a bizarre pantomime that likely conveyed only inner chaos. So I gave up, stood, clapped my hands and feigned enthusiasm—for what? The Madness Sale? It would have to be.
She looked at me for a moment longer and then, with a hunch of the shoulders, seemed to collapse—from guilt? From disappointment? From the invariable withering isolation of a failed attempt at camaraderie?
Ashamed now, I gazed past her into the mall. Where the new proprietors were readying their shops. Shutters were being hauled up, lights were turning on. Display racks were being hauled into the hallways. Music began playing over the public address system—the benign, airy music of the void. Yet it also crackled with anticipation.
It was only a matter of time now. The Madness was about to begin.
THIS IS HOW IT WENT: the mall opened and the doors burst like a fraught dam and in gushed a torrent of shoppers. From my desk I watched them stampede past my quarters. Their eyes were rabid with thrift. Their arms were extended as if to race across some imagined finish line, or to snatch a sale item from a rival. A low roar accompanied them as they thundered through the mall. The roar of their thundering footsteps, to be sure, but also something internal—like the growl of an engine, sputtering and threatening to blow.
Oh: every single person—to the man, woman and child—sported a ponytail.
These ponytails fluttered behind the shoppers like windsocks streaming in the breeze—in the winds of change. An ungodly legion of ponytails. A terrible sea of ponytails. Flowing, rustling. A conflagration of ponytails, stoked by the Madness Sale, whipped about with the furor of flames. Ponytails, ponytails. So many ponytails.
I had to fetch my razor, my tongue-hair was whipped into such a frenzy. But no matter how resolutely I scraped it through my mouth, the hair kept sprouting up and flailing—in joy, in celebration. In victory.
The crowd didn’t relent. Even after the initial surge, the halls remained packed. That great mob heaved as one in and out of the shops, arms loaded with purchases: shoes, boots, microscopic heat-wave ovens, you name it. There was something almost tectonic about their movements, uniform and gargantuan and seismic. None of them paid me the slightest heed, even when I rose to perform some light calisthenics (hopping, stooping, “jacks”) in an effort to still the tongue-hair. They were here for deals and I’d nothing to offer them, nothing for sale—nothing to quench their insatiable madness.
What could I do? Hide.
So I hid, contemplating my Final Report. How might I sum up my time in the mall? What had I accomplished, beyond my own dishonour? There had been no culmination of my residency; it had not peaked in some grand display. Nothing like the majesty of Mr. Ponytail’s not-quite-seven—and he’d sketched that on his first day! Who knew what feats he’d conjured since. If my Progress Reports comprised my “work,” they didn’t operate on any kind of trajectory to which now I might append some climax. No—the climax was happening out there in the mall. And it had nothing to do with me.
On the blank page I drew an open circle: a ring.
The tongue-hair writhed against my teeth—wispy as a thread, tugging at the root. If I were to escape this place and enjoy a reunification with my beloved Klassanderella, I’d likely try to have it surgically removed. Our first kiss after so long ought not to be tainted by a foreign body.
I tried to still it by biting down, but still the tip wriggled about like a worm trapped under a spade. And then I felt a snap in my mouth. The thing had broken loose.
For a moment, nothing happened. I could feel it testing its new freedom, swaying this way and that. A pause.
And then, in a great surge, my body began to unravel.
Up through my arms and legs, from a pool in my guts, the hair reeled up my throat in a damp tangle. As my cheeks began to balloon with the stuff, I opened my mouth—and out it came. A great, furry vomit went scrawling down my chin to the floor. And still more followed: flowing up from my fingertips and toes, from deep within organ tissue, from the cells themselves. Rivulets of hair came twisting up through my body and poured out of my face, gathering in a massive knot the size of a beachball at my feet.
From somewhere deep within my brain, some cortex or lobe, I felt the end jerk loose, and out it came too, slurped into that infernal tumbleweed. And then, made whole, the thing sat there for a moment—almost as if it were gloating at me—before it went skittering off into the mall to join that mob of bodies and all their madness.
The shock of this had barely subsided when I noticed the ornately hatted woman standing in the doorway of my quarters. My god! She’d returned—just as I’d hoped. Or feared?
I straightened in the chair behind my desk, assuming an air of enterprise and diligence. Please, I beckoned: enter.
But the ornately hatted woman simply stared. The feather in her hat seemed to droop. The spray of violets wilted. The bow trailed loosely at its ends, etc. And she seemed, instead of arriving with an agenda or demand, to be stunned into inertia: frozen, as it were, in place. Clearly she’d witnessed my torrential vomit of hair. I had to do something to distract her—quickly. She was my only patron. This was my moment, I sensed. A chance at redemption for all I’d failed to be.
So I rose, slowly, holding her gaze.
And began to dance.
I opened with a subtle two-step. A tap of the toes of my right foot (still in my weighted boots, so this required considerable strength and effort): once to the left, once to the right and back again. My leg elongated. The rest of my body as rigid as a stick.
Next I added a slight dip from the hips. Everything in rhythm. My face expressionless. The ornately hatted woman was entranced. Or at least watching. Perhaps with awe, perhaps with curiosity: How far would this go? Would there be pirouettes?
Well, by god, next I gave her a pirouette.
And then fell back into the toe-tap w/rhythmic crouch.
Feeling that something else was required, I lifted my arms slowly over my head, forming a kind of proscenium arch—my quarters were my stage, my body my vessel, the ornately hatted woman my adoring public. With my hands clasped above—still tapping, still crouching—I felt as true as light, and very much like the letter Q. Everything was in synch. I was pure form, pure being. The music that I danced to was the music of my soul. Or, rather, our souls—that metaphysical orchestra where the ornately hatted woman’s spirit and my spirit sawed and tootled away together, or pounded some drums.
What next? I was running out of moves. I felt now slightly trapped in the pattern I’d established, tapping and crouching with my arms up and struggling a bit to maintain my balance. But I couldn’t let the ornately hatted woman down. Not after all we’d been through. Our
sacrifices and history. Two months ago she’d been amazed by my work ethic. And now here, at last, was the artistic creation that had emerged from my months of study. A dance to end all dances. How should it end?
The ornately hatted woman held up a hand. Enough, she said.
So I stopped.
Enough dancing, she said. She seemed impatient; her next question rumbled out scratchy and peptic, like a vomit of hair: Do you know what’s going on out there?
The Madness Sale, I replied (with confidence).
Oh, yes—the Madness Sale, she mimicked. Yes, I suppose that’s what they’re calling it. No, no, you beautiful fool. I mean what’s really going on. What’s happening. What’s happening to us all!
I suppose I had some idea, though I wasn’t quite sure how to frame it. At a loss, I tried one of the toe-taps that had so delighted her only seconds before.
The ornately hatted woman waved this away. Save your dancing for a time when there’s a reason to dance, she said. Do you know who I am?
I admitted I did not.
Leaning against the doorway to my quarters, she looked over her shoulder at the teeming masses. Turned back to me. Shook her head. Sighed.
I waited.
This mall is mine, she said sadly. I’m its owner. And it used to be a glorious place. A place for a kind of worship. A place to discover what you most wanted and adored.
Yes, I said. (The ghosts were stirred by this too, and they began a dance of their own around my innards.)
I’ve been watching you, said the ornately hatted woman, indicating the camera above my head. Hoping.
I eyed the camera. And thought but didn’t say: Hoping for what?
I know you’ve tried your best, she continued. Considering the circumstances. And certainly, perhaps regrettably, though I suppose it was to be expected, you let your curiosity get the better of you. You saw some things I wish you hadn’t. The mall’s inner workings can be…bewildering, let’s say, to the uninitiated. But your discoveries aren’t what I regret most.
Here she was interrupted by a roar from the halls—some especially spectacular deal or giveaway had been announced and the crowds were surging with renewed purpose. Toward the escalator, I was certain. And upstairs, toward Mr. Ponytail.
The ornately hatted woman regarded me now with an expression of desolation. You were our last hope, she said, shaking her head.
I?
Yes, you.
But…
It’s too late now, she said. But thank you for trying.
And with that she released herself from the doorway, wavered for a moment and then fell backward, into the hall, where she was swept up into that tide of bodies and carried away like a bit of flotsam upon a current—one that hurtled headlong to some precipice or chasm where she would be carried over, smashed and ruined on the rocks below.
Except above, i.e., to the second floor, where everyone was going.
I sat down at my desk to take stock.
I’d never been anyone’s hope before. Not even my own. (I wondered briefly if I’d ever been anyone’s anything—short of Klassanderella’s beloved, of course, though there was a kind of duty to that.) At first I felt cowed, but gradually I allowed the ornately hatted woman’s revelation to embolden me. A stranger’s hope was like being garlanded with love, or celebrated as a time traveller to (or from?) a happier future. I gazed out into the mall, into all the bodies into which she might have suicided, and thought:
Perhaps I’ve not failed the mall just yet.
And thought:
This isn’t over.
And:
Vengeance is mine…maybe.
I moved to the edge of my quarters and stood watching the mallgoers heave past. I searched for an opening, but they were shoulder to shoulder, packed in as tightly as sailors at a dance, their eyes glittering with covetous hunger. Entering that great thronging mass would be like diving into a lake of hardening concrete: Would I make it? Would it suck me in and ossify me and I’d be forced to live there, among all those bodies, forever?
But then the crowd began to thin—to a gurgle, then a trickle, then a few scant drops, i.e., a man and a woman rushing by in socked feet, a child spinning past in a tutu, and three elderly characters bringing up the rear, lugging walkers with a kind of besieged desperation, haranguing one another to Hurry up, though the lot of them were labouring equally.
I slipped in behind them, overtook them, left them “eating my dirt.” And tromped in my boots toward the food court, where the crowd was gathering. On the way, I ducked into a brand-new Knife & Blade concern and procured from a counter display—scissors. This was more instinct than scheme, though the moment I held those cold steel blades in my hand I felt their power coursing through me, and I moved back into the mall with weaponized nerves and a new sense of purpose—of, dare I say, wrath.
The crowd filled the food court, assembling at the base of the escalator and spilling into the mall. There were hundreds of people—possibly thousands. (One of my skills is not crowd-size estimation; I am not sure what my skills are.) At any rate, with my stolen scissors secreted “up my sleeve,” I pushed through that stinking, seething mass of humanity, many of them clutching shopping bags full of recent purchases and/or coupons for future attempts, and squirmed between elbows and ducked under hats (none so ornate as the ornately hatted woman’s, of whom there was no sign) and did my best to avoid all those disgusting ponytails drooping down backs and curling over shoulders like stoles or scarves, until I was at what I perceived to be the “front,” with a view straight up the escalator to the upper-floor mezzanine, where Mr. Ponytail would no doubt make his appearance.
I and my scissors were ready.
THE LAST FEW STRAGGLERS ARRIVED into that cone of sunshine beaming in celestially through the food court skylight, and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Everything went still for a moment—even me. Even the ghosts in my belly. All eyes were on the top of the escalator (inoperative now; simply stairs) where Mr. Ponytail would appear in full glory, as luxuriantly splayed and displayed as anyone had ever seen him. Grandstanding. Showcasing himself like a prize pony trotting out to the fawning cries of would-be riders.
That wasn’t right. Mr. Ponytail was no pony; how insulting to Gary. Something else. An ass, maybe, that fancied itself some make of prince. But more monstrous: a twelve-legged zebra. A scaly dog with wings.
The air prickled with anticipation. Every man, woman, child and whoever else stood there side by each and frozen-footed (and -jawed, and -eyed); even their ponytails seemed rapt. I thought I saw my former tongue-hair, now looking like a rolled-up muskrat, go wheeling past. The moment of revelation was at hand, or close to it—the culmination of the Madness Sale, the climax of Ponytail’s tenure and the anticlimax of my own. He would emerge and do something spectacular, and my disgrace would be complete.
But first: something else happened.
Out of the corner of my eye I detected movement. Something brown, shimmying glossily in the refracted sunlight. Before I could make a diagnosis (a wendigo? a bat?), I sensed a similar agitation before and beside me, and also behind, and then everywhere all around.
The ponytails were stirring. (Think ferrets nosing up from their lairs.) Twitching—left, right. This way, that. Swaying. In synch. In rhythm.
My god.
The loathsome things were dancing.
I looked into the face of the woman next to me, to the man beyond, past him to a child, and so on. Nary a one seemed to notice the ponytails squirming upon their backs. Had they gone blind? And also senseless? While the ponytails twitched and writhed and crawled, each pair of eyes—save one cycloptic character in a pirate’s patch—remained fixed on the escalator for their overlord.
I did not care for this turn of events one bit. There was something a little too gleeful about the ponytails’ dancing. (And a bit too uncomfort
ably reminiscent of my own tantalizing moves before the ornately hatted woman only minutes prior.) I had to resist the urge to grab one of those hair tubes and choke the life from the thing. To wring its neck. Or, I thought, as I tightened my grip on the pilfered scissors, I could just go on a glorious cutting spree…
No! Even if I were to take down a few dozen, it would be no good if I were subdued before getting to their leader. Patience, I told myself. So I pocketed the scissors, clutched my hands under my armpits and stared sullenly at my feet. If I didn’t look up, nothing would tempt me into violence. And surely some insipid roar of adulation would alert me when my rival appeared on the scene: then I could act. Until that moment, I ought to keep my thoughts and actions to myself, I thought, and perhaps simply admire the remarkable girth of the diving boots with which D. Lee had outfitted me—like a smallish submarine on each foot—and ready myself for the real drama.
Besides, for now at least, what did it matter if some ponytails were dancing? A vague irritation, certainly, but it wasn’t a threat to me, or a direct insult—perhaps a taunt, but I could handle such things. I always had. Was it really so bad?
It was not.
However, then their human hosts started hissing.
A food court full of hissing. What a horrible sound! All those people reducing themselves to the ghoulish sibilance of snakes. A thousand (odd?) tongues pressed to 32,000-odd teeth with however many hundred gallons of air kissed through, the lot of it commingling into a demonic whisper that drifted up into the rafters of the food court and hung there with the eerie quality of a witch-conjured mist. Hissing, hissing, hissing, without cease—without, somehow, breath! Their faces expressionless. Why?
And the ponytails responded to this hissing by whipping themselves into a real frenzy. I couldn’t look away now! It was riveting. A crowd so stiff and unmoving and hissing while their ponytails danced about like charmed cobras. And me amid it all: no ponytail, and instead of hissing reverence, my silence pulsed with intimations of murder. The scissors cold against my leg in my pocket.
