by Pasha Malla
Meanwhile I was formulating a plan. With an accomplice to distract K. Sohail I could infiltrate her office and get a look at those tapes, and perhaps even erase any footage that might implicate me in the crime. Back at my quarters that afternoon I put the final touches on a perfunctory Progress Report, one whose insincerity felt palpable but which, at least for now, would suffice to fill the requirements of my residency before Dennis and I set our insurrection in motion. Only a matter of time, I thought, as the lights went down. The chicken teens trotted past, followed by Dennis with a lacklustre wave—and at last K. Sohail, hauling the gate across my quarters and bolting it fast.
I waited, breath held—despite myself, despite everything.
And then: Goodnight.
I clung to the word as she vanished, clutching it to my heart as a shipwrecked victim might some salvaged flotsam or jetsam, with the ocean heaving infinitely all around…
That night I had a terrible dream.
In it I woke up in my quarters to hissing from somewhere out in the mall. Pale blue shreds of light filtered in from the hallway as if illuminating a path toward me. I sat up. Listened intently: the hissing grew louder, brisker. I lay there, unmoving, hoping stillness would render me undetectable from whatever menace approached.
Yet closer still it came.
Now just outside my quarters. Now seeming to spill through the slats of the gate. Now approaching the screen, the sound turned hungry, somehow bristly…
I thought with horror that K. Sohail’s imprisonments might not be to keep me in, but to keep something out. And whatever it was had arrived, ruffling around the screen into my sleeping area.
At first I saw nothing, only sensed a change in the atmosphere—a sort of tightening as the presence closed in. But then in the faint blue light I noticed the floor darkening—what I first took to be a shadow heralding the advance of some huge and hungry creature. But then, as it crept toward me, I realized that the darkness was what had made the sound. An oil slick, I thought. But no. It seethed in a way no liquid could. Ants?
No. Worse. Hair.
A great dark drift hungrily gobbled the tiles, rippling toward me in bed with a malevolent whisper. Not the pelt of some creature but a thing itself, a thing made of hair, a seething, living carpet of the stuff, with a sentience that urged it forward—or perhaps simply with an urge to find me. And I couldn’t move. In the dream I was frozen, unable to flee, to roll away to safety—to scream.
It was all so fast: the hair-thing reached the foot of my bed and up it climbed, claiming the bedframe, capturing my feet and slithering up my legs, over my chest, down my arms, the coarse texture seeming to hook into my skin, each hair finding a pore, pushing inward so that it spread through me, inside me, choking organs and bones as well as skin. It reached my neck, came curling up over my chin and clamped over my mouth like a woolly mittened hand, threading into my nostrils, congesting my sinuses…
Everywhere, everything was consumed with wiry, surging hair.
And all the while that sound: hissing, whispering, rustling. Ravenous.
Finally the thing pried open my lips and began pouring down my throat, streaming inside me, filling my body as hair filled the room, a great tide that spread up the walls and across the ceiling, until at last the terrible finale: the hair closed over my eyes, pinning them shut, and I ceased to see anything at all—just blackness, that scrabbling blackness, as if the hair was its own kind of night.
PROGRESS REPORT #2
Is there any greater joy in life than a haircut?
One day you wake and sense that things are a little shaggy up top and around the ears, and possibly also at the rear end of your head, and that your neck has accumulated an unsightly sprouting of fur—but not to despair, for there exist seasoned professionals who know how to help with such matters. Also beards. Ladies or gents, no matter.
You head for the salon confident that you’ll return a “satisfied customer,” for cutting, by its very nature, assures a reduction in length. Little else in life offers such an inbuilt guarantee. Even a lunch, should it flee your system via propulsive evacuation, might leave you hungrier than you were before you ate.
Immediately upon entering the salon you are greeted by a great cheer from staff and customers alike. They know about you. And the conversations in these places are always lively and ricochet about like a bullet misfired in a rubber room. Local sports teams, the weather and hair are common topics of discussion, with everyone’s opinions carried aloft on the vibrant rhythm of snipping scissors. It’s like a dance. A dance of cutting and words.
An opening interaction might go something like this: “Do you want your hair cut by Jenny?” No, you prefer Lenny. “Sorry, Lenny’s busy.” Well, fine, you’ll wait, eyeing Jenny suspiciously—is that bloodlust in her eyes in the mirror? Best to never know. Besides, Lenny exudes an artful confidence with his scissors, even twirling them about in exuberant flourishes between snips. And what a moustache. He’s a real pro, in other words, and you trust him not to slice off your ear and scream profanities into the gaping hole.
At this point, a good strategy is to simply settle into one of the comfortable seats in the “waiting sector,” which is often helpfully equipped with a hat/coat rack for your hat, coat or other hangable accoutrements. Best, however, to hold on to your wallet, as few people, especially those swooning in the ecstasy of post-haircut bliss, can ever be trusted.
Best of all are the magazines. These have exciting names like Yes! and What the Stars Did and Yet Another Week of Sport. Apart from tantalizing rumours, these perpetuate useful tidbits applicable to the marginally curious and furiously desperate alike. How white might you bleach your teeth—as white as this thing? What flavours are this year’s “foods”? Who’s disgraced the nation now? And the pictures! Page after riveting page of nothing but cheekbones and divinely sculpted eyebrows, not to mention fascinating products the likes of which you’d never thought possible. Sunscreen for babies! Diapers for men!
Oh, look, the chair is open. Lenny—though obviously everyone has their own “Lenny,” whatever you might call him, whether it’s “Emma” or “Bruce the Impaler” or “Señor Cuts”—is beckoning you with a curling finger. The last customer’s hair-debris has been swept away and disposed of somewhere—gathered in a gigantic garbage bag probably. Anyway, into the chair you go. Lenny flings a cape over you like a tarp over a corpse and buckles it snugly at your throat. It’s all about to begin.
How shall it be? Short on the sides? Long in the back? Spiky up top? Or velvety and useful like the soft down of a baby seal? Lenny can do it all. “The usual,” you say with confidence, as Lenny knows you so painfully well. And here come the scissors: menacing, maybe, if you didn’t trust him so implicitly with your life. In less civilized hands those glinting blades would be instruments of death. Not so with Lenny. Not here. Not now. Likely never.
God, look at all that hair drifting down around you. It’s a type of ballet. A spritz from Lenny’s “bottle of stuff” moistens the scalp for even more refined trimming. He asks non-imposing questions, which you answer normally per your mastery of social decorum. Or else he silently plies his trade on your head. At a nudge you tilt obediently to accommodate Lenny’s favourite angles. In the mirror you watch yourself transformed from a stupid, hairy clown who stumbled in off the street into an elegant swan—or better.
And now for the moment of truth. The scissors calm and settle. Lenny produces a mirror to show you the back. It’s perfect. Everything about it is absolutely perfect. That moustachioed genius has done it again. You wipe away a grateful tear. “Yes,” you whisper, which is all you can manage.
As Lenny brushes some stray clippings from your face and retrieves his cape, applause resounds around the shop. But he’s unfazed. It’s simply what a craftsman of his calibre does.
All in a day of, as they say, making work.
TOWARD THE END OF MY
THIRD WEEK, Dennis failed to show up for lunch. Our noon-hour meals had become regular and, I’d thought, requisite daily check-ins at which we broke bread—or, rather, chicken—and discussed our respective disappointments in the mall (all while I observed him for further signs of existential collapse). So as I sat at “our” table with an entire bird cooling before me, grease congealing in a lardy paste amid the leaves, I was confused and even a bit hurt by his absence.
Had I done something wrong? Driven Dennis away with an untoward comment? Repulsed him somehow (physically, morally…sensually)? Perhaps he had sensed my longing for K. Sohail’s nightly send-off, turned jealous and was now smearing my name around the mall. Or what if he were exclusively a “leg man” and had suffered silently every time I split our chicken? This thought illuminated a broader truth: I’d failed to notice a comrade in trouble. I pictured Dennis, forsaken and ignored, left with no recourse but to hang himself by a fashionable belt from the rafters of the House of Blues.
In which case, I’d killed him. Hardly the work of a best friend!
Sentence by sentence I replayed our last conversation for an ill-considered word or phrase that Dennis might have construed as offensive or alienating. It could have been anything. As I’ve made clear, my interpersonal fluency is a “work in progress,” and I worry that my limitations manifest sociopathically. So some inadvertently botched basic exchange (e.g., Dennis: Good morning. Me: Die a slow death.) could well have provoked a vengeful campaign against yours truly—or worse.
Yet perhaps it was nothing I said, or even did, but instead a revelation about me that had driven him away. Some gesture or tic could have cracked the carapace that concealed my true self, one unknown even to me, and afforded Dennis a glimpse into my soul. And maybe what he saw there looked deviant—or devious.
Well, there was this: during our last meeting, Dennis had noticed my ring. Since I’d donned it for good the week prior, the ring had become such a habitual part of my get-up that I’d more or less forgotten its existence, so when Dennis asked about it, my first instinct was to conceal it beneath the table as if apprehended amid some terrible deceit. Realizing how suspicious this seemed, I coolly returned my hand to the tabletop. Oh, I said, turning it this way and that, this old thing?
It’s pretty, said Dennis; I told him thanks. But the way he was peering at the ring struck me as more than sartorial curiosity. He seemed…covetous. But also as if he were trying to see beyond the ring to discover its—and my—secrets. So I remarked that the chicken was getting cold, brandished my cutlery like a warrior and set to it with focused, and I hoped contagious, fury.
But Dennis wouldn’t let the subject drop. How had I acquired a ring so lavish, he wanted to know, and under what circumstances, and was it expensive, and had I paid for it on something he, ever the professional, called “layaway,” and if so were the payments weekly or monthly, and so on. I shrugged and deflected his inquiries with beleaguered laughter, a sound meant to suggest humility—sure, the ring was indeed exquisite, Dennis, but was it really appropriate to dwell on such luxuries here in the mall’s skylit food court over this humble meal of teen-roasted chicken?
Yet all the while the phrase rightful owner looped through my thoughts. The ring wasn’t mine, really. Nor was I its. And from his unrelenting inquisition, it seemed that Dennis sensed my unworthiness and was attempting to tease out the truth. But why should a chance discovery be party to some moral compact? Shouldn’t an owner’s carelessness cede their rights to property? A statement like you are mine, per the standard caprices of human love, could be directed at anyone in its path: here it goes for a while, and fades, and one retreats to the basement with a blanket, emerging finally like some amorous mole seeking a new and better target. You are mine, and now you are mine, and now you—on it goes. Why not the same for rings?
Dennis had turned even more intent. He leaned across the table and, with a look that suggested re-evaluation of my ethical stature in the mall, eyed me steadily. He seemed to require an answer. So I gave him one.
It’s an engagement ring, I said simply. I’m engaged to be married.
Dennis pushed back from the table as if the words were a bomb and he’d been repelled by the shockwave. But then he turned curious again: Who was the lucky gal or fella? He was after a name. In a panic I provided one, beginning with a syllable that floated to the surface of my mind and then scrambling from it to another, and another, until I’d reached the end of some plausible human nomenclature: Klass-an-der-ell-a.
Klassanderella? That was my fiancée’s name? Dennis had never heard it before; where was she from?
The islands, I told him cryptically, gesturing southeast.
Dennis made a noise like ah and returned to his chicken with a faint smile.
And that had, more or less, been the end of the conversation.
Now, with Dennis “missing in action,” I wiped my grease-splattered fingers on a napkin and considered that smile. In the moment I’d thought he’d seemed impressed—cowed, even—and, should he pursue the story, I quickly readied an entire life for this alleged Klassanderella, back in the islands with her family: her mother was sick, which was why despite our betrothal Klassanderella was there, and I here. Every day she tended the poor bedridden woman, fanning her with a massive palm leaf and dribbling coconut milk between her parched lips, and Klassanderella’s father was a fisherman who in the evenings would haul his skiff up onto the beach and trundle ashore with a pole yoked over his shoulders draped with fat, glistening sea bass, and Klassanderella would get a fire going where she’d roast one of those bass in another palm leaf, with coconut, while the rest went on ice for the following day at market, to which Klassanderella would hike through a jungle teeming with leopards and the fish in a basket balanced expertly on her head, and for the rest of the day she’d slave away at her fishmonger’s stall, hawking her wares in a hoarsening voice—wait, was “hoarsening” a word? As in to become hoarse? I worried that it might imply that Klassanderella suffered an equine aspect, which couldn’t be further from the truth! No, she was beautiful and humane, and fiercely intelligent, and an excellent salesperson too, and careful, and every night before bed she took a moment to admire the majestic, perfectly crafted ring on her finger, an exact replica of the one her husband-to-be wore on his own hand in a mall so many thousand miles away to the distant northwest, and she was his and he was hers, and the rings were theirs together.
The ring really was splendid. It shone in the lights of the food court like a beacon (to a faraway lover) and looked as natural on my hand as the nails at the ends of each finger. And in partnership with my new jeans the ring vaulted my “look” into the heights of haute couture. But was it absurd to be dressing like some sort of baron or playboy in the plebeian confines of the mall? Klassanderella aside, might the ring and the jeans seem, to Dennis, for example, like an excessive costume designed to elevate me above my surroundings and/or disguise my actually deficient soul?
Perhaps that was what Dennis sensed—my disingenuousness, my ostentation—and, as a good and honest fellow struggling to make a go of it in the high-stakes world of commerce, denim division, he felt that my pretensions were compromising him. He could even, quite reasonably, extrapolate that the downfall of the House of Blues might be due to an association with me, its first and heretofore only customer, a poseur who had sullied the store’s reputation by not only dominating “opening day” but making off with the finest jeans in Dennis’s entire stock.
Suddenly the chicken had a charred and bitter taste. I could eat no more. I ditched more than half my lunch (plus Dennis’s untouched portion, even his precious leg) into the garbage and returned to my quarters, hoping that “making work” might bolster my spirits. My third Progress Report was due soon. But what would it survey? Surely not this.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, when again Dennis failed to meet me for lunch, I forwent the gloom of another solo meal and headed up to the second
floor, emboldened now by resentment.
Who did this Dennis think he was, when I’d been so hospitable and “shown him the ropes” at the mall, frequented his business, extended the hand of friendship, shared a coop’s-worth of chickens, and let him in on my imminent marriage to Klassanderella? I would march up to his House of Blues and give that ungrateful hotshot a piece of my mind. Though once I reached the top of the escalator my gait dwindled from retributive stride to shameful slink, and in a sort of gnarled scuttle I made my way past Kookaburra (shuttered) and sundry other ruined businesses until I arrived at the House of Blues, into which I peeked sneakily, concealed behind a pillar.
The lights were off. The gates were closed. And inside the store: nothing. No Dennis, no jeans. The place had been cleared out. The shelves were barren. The cash register hung open like the gaping jaw of a recently guillotined head. Had Dennis enjoyed some sort of sales bonanza and “sold out”?
Despite everything—the desertion, the pain—my heart leapt. Dennis! His absence might have nothing to do with me at all. Perhaps he was simply off on a business trip replenishing his stock, visiting the finest denim wholesalers across the land, or heading right to the source at the factory, fingering still-warm jean jackets as they came tumbling off the line, or even to the fields to kneel in the dirt and sniff the budding cotton, selecting only the finest crops per his refined and exacting taste.
But my heart’s leap was feeble and vain; the next beat plunged to my guts. What sales bonanza? To whom? Some spectral public that I’d somehow missed, let alone failed to engage? Absurd. The mall was no place for glory. It was a great, windowless garburator that made a mulch of dreams. Had it crushed Dennis’s too? Was he at home, now, fetally curled on the floor, sobbing at his folly and cursing me for failing to warn him? But was I really the one to blame, Dennis? A modest temporary resident of the mall, assigned a pitiable existence engaging a public that barely existed, documenting those few and same instances in wildly dishonest reports? Still, gazing into the evacuated shop, I felt a pang of melancholy. Poor, tragic Dennis, I thought. The boy had believed!