Kill the Mall

by Pasha Malla

  The food court was a cavernous facility with a cathedral ceiling that culminated in a domed skylight, though what sunshine it permitted was subsumed by the mall’s yellow drone of phosphorescence. I occupied a table a dozen or so spaces over from the only other diners, a man and woman who sat side by side (an arrangement I interpreted as marital) to share their box of chicken. I sawed away at the bird’s hindquarters until I’d dispatched a flap of meat onto my plastic fork, but before I could make my first sampling a low gurgling sound interrupted me from the neighbouring table.

  As I watched, the husband fell from his chair, clutching his throat, and hit the floor like a swatted insect. His wife launched atop him and began pummelling his chest with her fists. This continued for some time until he produced a fierce retching noise and rocketed upright. Something sprung from his lips and traced a perfect arc, glinting in the food court’s subdued lighting, before landing beside my foot.

  A ring, slathered with drool and crafted in gold.

  I held it up and asked the couple if it was theirs. The wife, hauling her husband to his feet, shook her head.

  I wiped the ring on my napkin and, with the white paper providing an agreeable backdrop, gave it a better look. The edges were slightly bevelled, and a crease running along the middle sectioned it into two hemispheres. But, wait, no—not a crease. A single black hair, coiled around the ring. This I pulled free and, after some struggles—it clung soggily to my finger—flicked away.

  The ring looked more pleasing now, less complex. I tried it on: a perfect fit. Turning my hand over, back and then front, I admired its appearance on my hand. Elegant. I glanced up and the couple was gone—or, rather, at one of the garbage depositories at the edge of the food court, sliding the ruins of their lunch into the netherworld beyond. Fair enough. Had I vomited a ring, I wouldn’t feel like chicken either.

  But here I wondered, too, if I shouldn’t feel guiltier about profiting from a stranger’s folly. Did this count as “engaging the public”? The ring suddenly felt oppressive and unearned. I slid it free for another, more scrupulous review. Something, I discovered, had been etched inside the band. Perhaps a name or dedication? I brought the ring to the tip of my nose and angled it to the light to pick out the inscription…

  There it was: Now, engraved in a calligraphic script. More words followed. I squinted, turning the ring slowly. What followed was a full phrase, its final period like a door closing upon the sentence—yet somehow also opening to new possibilities.

  Now, said the ring, you are mine.

  MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE MALL was solitary. Well, they were all solitary, but that initial experience of the lights dimming as the halls emptied, and the few open shops shuttering for the day, and the teens at the chicken restaurant clearing out on wafts of grease was one of abandonment. Not that I’d entertained any patrons apart from the ornately hatted woman, or spoken to anyone other than K. Sohail and the chicken-roasting teens. The closest operational enterprise to my quarters was the hairdresser, which existed only as a faintly septic odour of permanent solution drifting down the hall, and I’d seen no evidence of life from it all day.

  Still, as the mall shut down for the night I was overwhelmed by a sudden, desperate solitude deeper than any I’d ever known. Not simply an awareness that I would be spending the night deserted in the mall—but that I was alone in the universe. What a lonely fleck of nothing I was, I thought, amid it all, with only the slight hiss of the air ducts for company. The bluish glow of the mall’s security lighting felt subaquatic, making me little more than some prehistoric plankton fossilized and forgotten in the ocean floor.

  Sitting there at my workstation before a draft of my first Progress Report, which I’d spent most of the afternoon revising and now seemed pathetic and vain, I removed from my pocket the ring I’d found at lunch. At first the inscription had felt invasive. But now, in this total isolation, being told you are mine acknowledged me as a person, albeit proprietarily. So I slid the ring back onto my finger. It really was a splendid fit—remarkable how natural it looked on my hand, as if crafted just for me.

  Wearing it, too, secreted the inscription: now it was mine—and not, as the writing claimed, that I was somehow its. But then this provoked worry: What if the ring passed from my possession? What if, say, K. Sohail claimed it as lost property with ambitions of restoring it to its rightful owner? Would some part of me abscond with it? My soul, say—or my sanity? If the ring and I now belonged to each other, I could never take it off.

  These thoughts were interrupted by the beam of a flashlight swinging out of the dark. The caretaker herself! I cowered, anticipating a reprimand or gunfire, and hid my ringed finger beneath the table. But K. Sohail, preceded by squeaks and jingles, was simply on her nightly surveillance circuit of the mall. Pausing before my quarters she asked if I required anything—I said no—and then, shockingly, in a sudden, almost violent gesture she unfolded a slatted barricade from one side of my quarters to the other, and locked it up. Caging me within like a beast, or a jailbird!

  Yet here she paused again. Silence, bloated with anticipation, hung between us. Her body a silhouette on the other side of the grating, wavering slightly. Mine at my workstation. That strange blue light glowing all around. And then, as if to temper the insult of my imprisonment, she leaned forward and whispered through the slats: Goodnight.

  Listening to K. Sohail squeak and jingle off into the mall, and presumably onward to her home—jingle-squeaking across town to her front door, to her fridge for a slurp of juice, to the bathroom and finally to bed—I found my thoughts consumed less with the locked grate (basic protocol, I assumed—after all, who was I to freely wander the mall without supervision?) than wonder: had there been something tender, and not just perfunctory or required, in K. Sohail’s parting words? (or word?)

  How sad it is to wish another person goodnight! A gentle nudge into the unknown, so much more forlorn than goodbye. Goodnight implies not just physical but spiritual departure—to sleep, the ultimate solitude. Even for those lucky enough to share beds with a loved one, the nighttime voyages of the mind remain private; we return with no souvenirs, no means to capture where and who we’ve been—and few things are more futile than a retold dream.

  Goodnight, K. Sohail, I thought.

  Is there anything so lonely as it is to fall asleep?

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING I settled into the schedule I kept for most of the residency: wake as K. Sohail arrived to open the mall (and my quarters) around 8:30, perform my morning ablutions and proceed to the food court for a breakfast of eggs and tea. Back at my desk, I would spend the morning honing my Progress Report until noon, when I returned to the food court for lunch (chicken, iced tea), before putting in an afternoon of further “work.” Then, dinner (lunch leftovers, sparing me another visit to the food court), the mall would shut down, and after a period of staring longingly into the dark, waiting for K. Sohail’s goodnight—swiftly deployed, yet dancing at the edge of something profound and thrilling.

  Amid this routine, over those first seven days occurred a few moments of note.

  On the fifth day of my residency, I met K. Sohail on my way back from lunch. She had a garbage bag stuffed to the gills slung over each shoulder, and when I asked her what she was carrying, she told me, without breaking stride: hair. And then she was gone, squeaking and jingling off into the recesses of the mall.

  Hair from the hairdresser, I assumed. But that didn’t add up: not once on my trips to and from the food court had I noticed a single customer having their hair cut. Nor, from my quarters only two shops over, had I ever overheard the telltale snip of scissors or buzz of electric shears. Nor had I witnessed anyone passing through the mall with a freshly coiffed “do” or a salon-slick pomade. The only sign of life in the hairdresser’s was, in fact, the hairdresser herself, sitting in the back of the shop with her face hidden by a magazine—and even then she was motionless; the pages didn’t
turn.

  Sure enough, as I rounded the corner past the defunct clock and parched fountain and stole a quick glance around the twirling barber’s pole, there the hairdresser sat, still as a pillar behind her magazine, with no sign of customers or any evidence of a recent haircut having taken place. As always, the hairdresser was utterly alone, her scissors and combs stolidly at rest in their jars of blue juice. The scene could have been a photograph—no, a painting: not a scene excerpted from life, but an image plucked from the imagination without context or concern for what might precede or follow it.

  So where did all that hair come from?

  Back in my quarters, pen poised above the page, I turned the episode over in my mind. Was the mystery of the bags of hair entrancing enough to demand documentation? Though the whole thing was curious, it inspired only questions, and a Progress Report was intended for answers, declarations, the supremacy of facts. Besides, it felt wrong to implicate K. Sohail in my reports, since she was the one collecting them. Acknowledging her role felt indecent, like turning the camera around onto the cinematographer, or fleeing the country in a lover’s pants.

  So I left the episode undocumented—for now.

  The next day, on my post-lunch digestive walk—worrying faintly that, save the Episode with the Ornately Hatted Woman, I’d accrued no additional public engagements worth mentioning in my first Progress Report, which was starting to feel a little thin, no matter how many times I revised it—I discovered that the halls of the mall were totally empty. The crowds had been thinning all week and now even the occasional stragglers had vanished: if they had been in transit to locales beyond, perhaps they’d all arrived and were now happily ensconced wherever that was.

  Having completed a circuit of the lower level, I circled back to the food court and the base of the escalators. They seemed so ghostly: one set lifted emptily and endlessly to the second floor, while the other cycled its vacant steps back down.

  Up I went, and shortly found myself before the sunflower display I’d first encountered on K. Sohail’s introductory tour. Remarkably, the store was open. Whether whoever staffed the sunflower store (a sunflorist?) might count as “the public” or not, I was starting to feel a little desperate. All week all I’d done was edit the same Progress Report, and the effect of each subsequent revision was to eradicate the actual Episode. The document wasn’t just thin, it now read like a fabrication, and the person in it, the one who “worked” while the ornately hatted woman observed, had ceased to be me at all, but a character. K. Sohail was due to collect it the following day!

  So I decided to introduce myself to one of the mall’s scant proprietors.

  The sunflower store, it turned out, was actually a wholesaler of household decorations; its name was Kookaburra. A riot of knickknacks and curios and tchotchkes were piled on shelves or stacked in displays around the packed showroom floor. Sunflowers did feature heavily, painted upon the faces of clocks or patterned upon wallpaper or sculpted in copper on the handles of dessert spoons, and a great jungle of the things spilled from the vitrine into the store. Some of these towered over eight feet tall, their monstrous heads lolling up near the ceiling—stooping, it seemed, to inspect me as I crept beneath. I assumed that they were artificial, as none were potted and their stalks appeared to be fixed to the floor, but I didn’t dare touch even the smallest plant to confirm it.

  Despite the ubiquitous bric-a-brac, one thing Kookaburra did not have was an employee. No one worked the counter or prowled the aisles or arranged the displays or pruned the sunflowers, and when I rang the little bell by the cash register, not a soul appeared. So I went over to the doorway marked Kooks Only, poked my head inside and, with uncharacteristic brazenness, announced myself to the shadows.

  Waited. Listened.

  No reply.

  And then, on a faint gust of wind—from the ventilation ducts?—a loose tumbleweed of hair came spinning out of the dark, right up to my foot, and snagged on my shoe. I reached down to remove it. How coarse the thing was, like the bundled wire of a scouring pad. My hand retracted in revulsion. Instead of pulling it free, I wiped my foot on a nearby birdbath, though the hairball took several vigorous scrapings to dislodge, clinging to my loafer like a clot of burrs. Stranger still, that wiry little nest appeared to seethe for a moment before it caught another draft and went scuttling back down the hall.

  PROGRESS REPORT #1

  What is more edifying than the admiration of another human being? To be liked, or even loved, is why we exist. Every morning upon waking we wonder, “Whom shall I persuade to like me today?” Of course affection takes many forms, be it a subtle nod of approval—excellent work, continue—or a juicy smooch on the mouth accompanied by sensual fondling, or a father’s preference for the sturdiest of his sons. Whatever your pleasure, it’s likely the pleasure of other people’s pleasure in you.

  Say for example you are working—diligently, of course, for at least 30% of your waking hours, and perhaps even more—and a stranger comes strolling by. The sheer fervour of your dedication stops her dead in her tracks. “This one is taking his role seriously,” she thinks, reeling in awe. “He is a contributor and not a leech slurping from the open vein of society. I simply must pause to enjoy this moment, hat-fitting appointment be damned!”

  Work is the lifeblood of humanity. But love is the lifebones (equally essential). For blood without a form is just a red mess on the floor. Also important are skin and musculature—food and water, in this analogy—and a nervous system/brain, which we might equate to, for example, engaging the public. For what is society without socializing? Nothing. Or maybe something else with another, lonelier name. It’s simply that powerful.

  And what better way to engage the public than with one’s work? It comes full circle, like a snake eating itself to death. You make work, you engage the public, and love erupts like a volcano or a boil. Work, engage, love…work, engage, love…and so on, the basic recipe by which the greatest civilizations have thrived throughout history. The worst civilizations having employed a different, useless recipe, so theirs are now the ruins we plunder for gold.

  In conclusion, 60% of the day spent making work and engaging the public almost isn’t enough! Because every wave of adoration that crashes over you is like a drug that whips you into a frenzy for more. I’ll say it again: love is a drug, and so is work. And what an inspiration that each member of the public, or a colleague, might love you for your zeal for work and catch the addiction, and return to her own work with renewed passion, burning with the fervent hope that someone will end up loving her, too.

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE SECOND WEEK of my residency I decided to get a haircut. Or, more honestly, the conditions of my hair forced me to act. I am not usually one to trust any part of my body, even its dead cells, to a stranger. However, the tufts around my ears had gotten so wild and feathery that at night they tickled and kept me awake. So off to the salon I went, hoping, at the very least, for access to a scissors—even if I had to deploy the device myself.

  Again I encountered an empty room save the woman at the back with her face buried in a magazine. Tentatively I made my approach, halting a few paces away in the middle of the shop. Cleared my throat. Introduced myself as the person residing a few doors over, outlined the 50-50 work/public engagement balance, offered a quick equivocation about the actual arithmetic per sleep/ablutions/etc., and made my request: Just a quick trim, if you please.

  No reply.

  The magazine didn’t budge; no grateful or curious or livid face emerged.

  I tried again. A simple enough thing to ask. And while I would never describe myself as a master of social decorum, I was certain that asking for a haircut in an establishment that specialized in said enterprise wasn’t outlandish or vulgar. In fact, I felt like I was acting conventionally—even reasonably.

  Still nothing. The woman didn’t even flinch.

  But then I wondered if perhaps I was o
verstating the obvious. If asking for a haircut in a salon was, in fact, egregious. Of course that’s why I was here! What a fool I was to explain myself. So, amid burning shame, I assumed one of the expressly designed chairs and waited to be tended, avoiding my own eyes in the mirror and instead gazing down at the tiles. The pattern, the pale colour, their stark sterility—the things seemed to swim up off the floor, the lines between them deepening, turning cavernous, plummeting down as each tile seemed to float up and lift…

  I felt myself in a sort of swoon, unable to look away…

  Lines blurred…The air turned liquid…I felt myself swimming in it…Or drowning…

  And everything faded.

  Some time passed. I’m not sure how much. Apparently I slept, or passed out. Because the floor—previously spotless—was now covered with what was unmistakably my hair. Same colour, same consistency, yet now disengaged from my scalp and orphaned upon the tiles. I had no memory of a cut. But a glimpse in the mirror confirmed it: I’d been treated to a neat and tidy trim. Perhaps a little shorter than I would have preferred, but a decent haircut all the same.

  Bewildered, I looked to the back of the shop. There the alleged hairdresser sat, motionless, with the magazine blocking her face. I offered thanks. Again she didn’t budge or acknowledge me. Had I enraged her? Perhaps falling asleep during a haircut was another breach of etiquette. Fearing that I’d humiliated myself yet again, from a wall-chart of prices I situated myself accordingly, swiped my credit card through the device beside the cash register, and without another word slunk back to my quarters—where, I discovered, nearly three hours had passed.