“How can you work here, Melanie?” I’d asked the second time I saw her in the park. The first time I couldn’t say anything at all. “Well, I see it now,” she’d said. “I get it. Zimmer Land could really actually help people see the craziness all around them.”
But that’s not what I meant when I asked. I meant how could she stand to work so near to me and know we would never be the same.
“Hey,” she calls. The sound of her voice makes me wish I were a better person.
“Hey,” I say, and we both walk closer. When we’re only a foot away from each other, we just stand there.
“How was the big meeting?” Melanie asks. At some point, when we were still living together, I’d suggested Melanie try to see if Heland would hire her. I’d been joking, mostly.
Heland had a “talk” with me when he first started seeing Melanie, which was not long after she started working in the park. I don’t know when she’d first interviewed; she’d left me already by then. He’d said, “Melanie. Is that cool?” I’d said, “Don’t worry about it.” Then, two weeks ago, he called me into his office and said that Melanie had suggested me for a spot on the park’s creative development team. When he asked if I wanted it, I snapped out of imagining what strangling him would feel like to say, “I’d love that.”
“It was awesome,” I say to Melanie. She smiles. I stare at her mouth.
“That’s great,” she says. She touches my shoulder, which makes me feel amazing, then pathetic.
“Yeah,” I say, then I walk to my car and she walks to wherever it is she has to go.
Later that day I have ten walk-throughs. Eight times out of ten, I get murdered.
That night I dream about getting killed. Murdered by a bullet. I dream this dream often. But this time, after I’m dead, I feel my soul peeling from my body. My soul looks down at the body, and says, “I’m here.”
People say “sell your soul” like it’s easy. But your soul is yours and it’s not for sale. Even if you try, it’ll still be there, waiting for you to remember it.
The next day, before we open, we have a park-wide meeting with all the players from the different modules gathered in the area just in front of Lot Four. The new module is up. There’s an American flag flapping on the front lawn of the little school, and a sign that says PS 911 up front. Melanie is up on a small platform in front of Lot Four along with Doug and a hologram of Heland’s head. Today Heland’s body is meeting with investors in Cabo.
“You okay?” Saleh pokes my side. Saleh’s half-Indian, half-Irish. She usually plays one of three Muslims who may or may not have something to do with a terror plot that could lead to the death of several passengers on a train from city A to city B in the Terror Train module.
Heland explains first that he’s very happy with all the hard work we’ve been doing and that we should all know the park couldn’t exist without us. “The face of real-time justice-action is changing. We were the first, and it’s only right that we continue to innovate and provide the world with life-changing experiences that foster real growth.” Then Heland announces that Zimmer Land will now be open to children. He explains that the newest module, the school behind him, PS 911, will actually be curated explicitly for youths. Saleh grabs my hand, then lets it go. Some other players look at one another awkwardly. Melanie bites her lip. At least she knows.
“Now, things will be a little different in terms of the patrons we see, but your jobs will be essentially the same. Keep pushing for the visceral,” Doug says in his heavy, comforting voice.
“If you have any questions about the future of Zimmer Land, please see me”—Doug points to himself—“and if you’re new and you have questions about your position and how to fit your role, please see Melanie.”
“Okay, that’s all,” Heland says. The crowd lingers a little, then floats away.
“Jesus,” Saleh says.
“I know,” I say.
“We have to get out of here,” she says. “At least before it was, like, maybe we could have done some kinda good.”
“We still can, maybe,” I say to convince myself as much as her. “We can still change some people.”
“We have to get outta here,” Saleh says.
“I just got put on creative development.”
“So what?”
“So I can’t just quit.”
“You can do whatever you want,” Saleh says.
“Don’t quit,” I say.
“Wow,” she says. We look at each other, then she hugs me. Then she’s gone. And I go to Cassidy Lane.
In the bathroom of house 327, I get ready. I skim the updated protocol that explicitly says not to touch the kids. All children wear green bracelets. I may, however, engage in the usual measured violence with of-age patrons in front of the children.
I’m walking through the lane. Minding my business or up to no good, just like every other person in the world. Door 336 opens. I see a man walk outside. He stretches on his front lawn, then turns to me. I don’t know the man’s name, but he’s come to shoot me so many times it’s almost like we’re family. Then I see his son peeking out of the house. A little kid, as promised. He might be eleven. His father stomps in my direction.
“Hey, you’re not up to any trouble out here, are you?” the patron says. He’s got a little bit of gut that sags out over his pants. Probably in his early forties. His hair is chopped close to the head. He’s wearing a shirt with a knight on it, a local high school team’s mascot. He always wears it. It’s his killing shirt. It’s stained a brownish red already.
“No,” I say flatly.
“Well, I think you’re out here causing trouble.” The kid is out on the lawn now. He has a hat that’s a little too big for him on his head. We’re only a few mailboxes apart.
“Well, if you think that, what am I supposed to do?”
His face reddens. “Listen, this is where I live, and I’m not going to have you causing trouble in my home.”
“Trouble like what?” I ask.
“Listen, either you leave right now or we’re gonna have problems.”
“You know what?” I yell, and then he hits me in the stomach. I fall to my knees and try to take a breath. I feel the mecha-suit begging me to make this easy. I get up slowly. I put the trigger on the ground.
“Come on, get out of here!” he says. He shoves me down again. I jump up, push his arms away.
“Are you happy now? Are you?” I scream.
“Dad!” His kid comes running to his side.
His young, green-bracelet-wearing hand clings to his father’s jeans as the patron pulls the gun from his waist.
“Stay behind me,” he says to his kid.
Friday Black
“Get to your sections!” Angela screams.
Ravenous humans howl. Our gate whines and rattles as they shake and pull, their grubby fingers like worms through the grating. I sit atop a tiny cabin roof made of hard plastic. My legs hang near the windows, and fleeces hang inside of it. I hold my reach, an eight-foot-long metal pole with a small plastic mouth at the end for grabbing hangers off the highest racks. I also use my reach to smack down Friday heads. It’s my fourth Black Friday. On my first, a man from Connecticut bit a hole into my tricep. His slobber hot. I left the sales floor for ten minutes so they could patch me up. Now I have a jagged smile on my left arm. A sickle, half circle, my lucky Friday scar. I hear Richard’s shoes flopping toward me.
“You ready, big guy?” he asks. I open one eye and look at him. I’ve never not been ready, so I don’t say anything and close my eyes again. “I get it; I get it. Eye of the tiger! I like it,” Richard says. I nod slowly. He’s nervous. He’s a district manager, and this is the Prominent Mall. We’re the biggest store in his territory. We’re supposed to do a million over the next thirty days. Most of it’s on me.
The main gate creaks and groans.
“I saw the SuperShell in the back. What’s she wear, medium or large?”
“Large,” I say, openi
ng both eyes.
There’s a contest: whoever has the most sales gets to take home any coat in the store. When Richard asked me what I was going to do if I won, I told him that when I won I was going to give one of the SuperShell parkas to my mother. Richard frowned but said that was honorable. I said that, yeah, it was. The SuperShells are the most expensive coats we have this season: down-filled lofted exterior with a water-repellent finish, zip vents to keep the thing breathable, elastic hem plus faux fur on the hood for a luxurious touch. I know Richard would have me choose literally anything else. That’s half of why I chose it. I set it aside in the back. It’s the only large we’ve got due to a shipment glitch. Nobody will touch it because I’m me.
Most of the Friday heads are here for the PoleFace™ stuff. And whose name is lined up with the PoleFace™ section on the daily breakdown each day this weekend? It’s not Lance or Michel, that’s for sure. It’s not the new kid, Duo, either. I look across to denim where Duo is pacing back and forth making sure his piles are neat and folded. He’s a pretty good kid. Sometimes he’ll actually ask to help with shipments. He wears a T-shirt and skinny jeans like most of our customers his age. Angela tells him to watch me, to learn from me. She says he’s my heir apparent. I like him, but he’s not like me. He can sound honest, he knows how to see what people want, but he can’t do what I can do. Not on Black Friday. But he’ll survive denim.
Michel and Lance cover shoes and graphic tees. Michel and Lance might as well be anybody else. Lance is working the broom.
There’s a grind and a metallic rumble. Angela is in the front. She’s pushed the button and turned the key. The main gate eats itself up as it rolls into the ceiling.
“Get out of here!” I yell to Richard. He runs to the register where he’ll be backup to the backup safe.
Maybe eighty people rush through the gate, clawing and stampeding. Pushing racks and bodies aside. Have you ever seen people run from a fire or gunshots? It’s like that, with less fear and more hunger. From my cabin, I see a child, a girl maybe six years old, disappear as the wave of consumer fervor swallows her up. She is sprawled facedown with dirty shoe prints on her pink coat. Lance walks up to the small pink body. He’s pulling a pallet jack and holding a huge push broom. He thrusts the broom head into her side and tries to sweep her onto the pallet jack so he can roll her to the section we’ve designated for bodies. As he touches her, a woman wearing a gray scarf pushes him away and yanks the girl to her feet. I imagine the mother explaining that her tiny daughter isn’t dead yet. She pulls the little girl toward me. The girl limps and tries to keep up, and then I have to forget about them.
“Blue! Son! SleekPack!” a man with wild eyes and a bubble vest screams as he grabs my left ankle. White foam drips from his mouth. I use my right foot to stomp his hand, and I feel his fingers crush beneath my boots. He howls, “SleekPack. Son!” while licking his injured hand. I look him in his eyes, deep red around his lids, redder at the corners. I understand him perfectly. What he’s saying is this: My son. Loves me most on Christmas. I have him holidays. Me and him. Wants the one thing. Only thing. His mother won’t. On me. Need to feel like Father!
Ever since that first time, since the bite, I can speak Black Friday. Or I can understand it, at least. Not fluently, but well enough. I have some of them in me. I hear the people, the sizes, the model, the make, and the reason. Even if all they’re doing is foaming at the mouth. I use my reach and pull a medium-size blue SleekPack PoleFace™ from a face-out rack way up on the wall. “Thanks,” he growls when I throw the jacket in his face.
I jump down from the cabin and swing the reach around so none of them can get too close. The long rod whistles in the air. Most of the customers can’t speak in real words; the Friday Black has already taken most of their minds. Still, so many of them are the same. I grab two medium fleeces without anyone asking for them because I know somebody wants one. They howl and scream: daughter, son, girlfriend, husband, friend, ME, daughter, son. I throw one of the fleeces toward the registers and one toward the back wall. The crowd splits. Near the registers, a woman in her thirties takes off her heel and smashes a child in the jaw with it just before he can grab the fleece. She inspects the tag, sees it’s a medium, then throws it down on top of the boy with a heel-size hole in his cheek. I toss two large fleeces and two medium fleeces into the crowds. Then I deal with the customers who can still speak, who are nudging and pushing around me.
“C-C-COAL BUBBLE. SMALL, ME! COAL!” a man says while beating his chest. I’m the only one at work who doesn’t have a Coalmeister! How can I be a senior advisor without? The only one!
I press the end of my reach against his neck to keep his hungry mouth from me. Then, without taking my eyes off him, I grab one of the Coalmeister bubble coats from the rack behind me. And then it’s in his hands. He hugs the coat and runs to the register.
“Us? US!” the woman with the gray scarf says. She has large gold earrings hanging off the sides of her head. The pink-coat child is at her shins. The child’s face is bruised, but she isn’t crying at all.
“Can’t. The Stuy!” Gray scarf’s husband says. Family time needs forty-two-inch high-def. The BuyStuy deal is only while supplies last! Can’t afford any other day.
Black Friday takes everybody differently. It’s rough on families. They can’t always hear what I hear.
“Asshole!” the wife seethes. Then she stares back at me.
“PoleFace™. Pink,” she says, pointing to her child. “Coal SleekPack,” she continues, pointing to her own face. A new kiddie PoleFace™, a new coal SleekPack, a Coalmeister. A family set.
The woman has both the coats she needs in a second, then storms off, dragging her child behind her.
It isn’t always like this. This is the Black Weekend. Other times, if somebody dies, at least a clean-up crew comes with a tarp. Last year, the Friday Black took 129 people. “Black Friday is a special case; we are still a hub of customer care and interpersonal cohesiveness,” mall management said in a mall-wide memo. As if caring about people is something you can turn on and off.
In the first five hours, I do seven thousand plus. No one has ever sold like that before. Soon I’ll have a five-hundred-dollar jacket as proof to my mother that I’ll love her forever. When I imagine how her face will look as I give it to her, my heart beats faster.
At five in the morning, the lull comes. The first wave of shoppers is home, or sleeping, or dead in various corners of the mall.
Our store has three bodies in the bodies section. The first came an hour in. A woman climbed the denim wall looking for a second pair her size. She was screaming and rocking the wooden cubby wall so hard that the whole thing almost fell on Duo and everybody in his section. Duo poked her off the wall with his reach. She fell on her neck. Another woman snatched the SkinnyStretches from her dead hands. Lance came with the pallet jack, his broom, and some paper towels.
My first break is at 5:30 a.m. On my way to clock out, I walk through denim.
“Looks like you’ve had it pretty crazy,” I say to Duo. There are jeans everywhere. None of them folded. Bloodstains all over the floor.
“Yeah,” he says. A young man in a white T-shirt staggers toward us. “Grrrrr,” he says. He’s gnawing on something. I move to sling him one of the SlimStraights in his size—he thinks it’ll make him popular at school—but stop because of how quickly Duo tosses the right kind of jeans to the customer, who takes them and limps to the register.
“You understand them?” I ask.
“Now I do,” Duo says. He kicks at a tooth that’s lying on the ground. Then he shows me a small bloody mark in the space between his thumb and forefinger.
“That’s Black Friday.”
“This is my first.”
“Well, the worst part is done,” I say, kind of smiling, trying to see where he’s at.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, and continue on toward the register.
“My break is after yo
urs,” Duo says. That’s retail for Hurry up, I’m hungry.
I punch my username and password into the computer, and Richard bows down to me like I’m to be worshipped. Angela nods at me like a proud mama. While I’m gone, Angela will take my spot in the PoleFace™ section. It’s the lull, so she can handle it.
Outside the store, the Prominent is bloody and broken, so I can tell it’s been a great Black Friday. There are people strung out over benches and feet poking out of trash bins. Christmas music you can’t escape plays from speakers you cannot see. Christmas is God here.
I’m hungry. My family didn’t really do the Thanksgiving thing this year—which felt like a relief except I missed my chance for stuffing. I’d offered to help with some of the shopping. My mom had lost her job. I make $8.50 an hour, but I saved. Mom, Dad, sister, me. But then we skipped the whole thing because we don’t really like one another anymore. That was one of the side effects of lean living. We used to play games together. Now my parents yell about money, and when they aren’t doing that, we are quiet. I walk, wondering if there’s stuffing anywhere in the mall.
My second Black Friday, our store was doing pretty well, so there was a commission. You got something like 2.5 percent of all of your sales. It was a big deal for us on the floor. That was when Wendy was sales lead. Which meant she had the highest sales goals. That year she’d brought in a pie for everybody. I made sure not to eat any of it because I don’t eat anything anybody tries to shove down my throat, and she couldn’t stop talking about the pie. “We can have Thanksgiving in the store! It’s homemade.” Everybody was saying how nice she was, how thoughtful. Then Wendy and I were the only ones who didn’t have the shits all day.
Friday Black Page 10
