by Pasha Malla
So what was my aim? I began pacing, the camera tracking me from above. What did I really want? Sure, it was a little lonely in here, a little incapacitating, but my life outside the mall was no great shakes. I found myself twisting my ring—and recalled again my beloved. Klassanderella! How could I keep forgetting her? I suspected that the mall was using sensory deprivation and emotional isolation to “break my heart.” But love was stronger than psychological warfare. Especially my love.
I strode to the grating. Called forcefully to K. Sohail: not just her first initial, but her surname too this time.
She rose from her stool. Approached with a quizzical look.
Let me out, I demanded. I’ve had enough of this tomfoolery, trapped like a cur in a pen. This is no way to treat a person, I told her. I have an Acceptance Letter. This is unacceptable. Let me out, I say, I said. How can you expect me to engage the public while locked in here? How do you expect me to make work without the thrill of striding about the halls on my own two legs, even in weighted boots? A constrained body is a constrained mind. I’ve only one week left here. In that week my work should culminate, not be drowned like a guttering candle in a bucket of flame retardant froth! (I was really on a roll now.) Sure, I’ve made some mistakes, K. Sohail. But haven’t we all? Has your curiosity never got the better of you? Led you to wander when you should have only wondered? But what happens when you lock someone up, K. Sohail, is that the mind can only wonder, and wonder becomes wanderlust, and someone usually ends up dead. (Here I had to wipe some spittle frothing at the corners of my lips; I was in an actual lather!) Is that what you want, K. Sohail? Another body on your hands? No, just a glimmer of freedom would salve my churning soul. In here all I can think of is murder. Murder, murder. But let me loose, let me breathe, let me share the air with my fellow mall-dwelling men and/or women, and my spirits will ignite with the fires of empathy. I will look the public in the eyes and see straight into their hearts—and I’ll see goodness, K. Sohail. My bloodlust will be quenched by feasting not literally but figuratively upon the hearts of strangers. I will become a person again. I will be fully alive. I will live. (Here came the climax.) I am failing to live, K. Sohail. A person must live! Live while they can, as fully as they can. Live! So let me out, I beg you. Set me free. Let me live. Let me live!
And K. Sohail, bless her, simply shrugged, produced her keys and released me.
The mall was unrecognizable. Everywhere the stores were under renovation, teeming with men and women, some in hard hats, others in neon vests and a few with the officious aura of the tycoon in exquisitely tailored pantsuits. The halls reverberated with whining power saws and pattering hammers. Signs were coming down and new ones were going up. The hair salon had been transformed into a jeweller; diamonds glittered in display cases where the barber chairs had been.
Struggling with the heavy steps of my weighted boots I trudged the halls, feeling like someone awoken from a decades-long slumber to a world of incomprehension. An alien, an intruder. All these people were real, while I was little more than a spectral entity shimmering through their dreams. No one paid me any attention. If the mall’s new proprietors were my public, engaging them would have involved storming up, grasping someone by the lapels and screaming into their face. Less of an engagement than an assault. And I was already treading on thin ice; K. Sohail trailed me at a distance, like a warden whose prisoner has been afforded a final stroll prior to execution.
Also of note were posters pasted everywhere. MADNESS SALE, they proclaimed in a hysterical font, and then there was an illustration of someone losing their mind. Alongside a constellation of dollar signs circling the figure’s head, the impending madness was conveyed with loosening spirals meant to indicate unhinging of the brain. The eyes were crossed too, a classic depiction of derangement, while the feet were pointed inward as with a shameful pigeon or cowardly skier, and the arms flailed maniacally as though batting the dollar signs away—or trying to snatch them.
At the bottom of the poster was a date, one that struck me as familiar. I squinted: the Madness Sale was scheduled for the final day of my residency. Coincidence? Probably not. Though possibly. It wasn’t as if I was the hub around which spun the mall’s wheel of commerce. Yet I still detected a whiff of conspiracy in the air, something nefarious that lurked beyond my purview and threatened me with potential (further) humiliation. Was the Madness Sale simply another scheme to degrade and diminish me?
In fact, as I examined the poster plastered to the wall by the former hair salon, I began to sense that the figure depicted as the harbinger of madness did in many ways resemble yours truly. To be fair, I did walk with an inward slant of my toes, and while I haven’t confessed such a thing in these pages, I have often found myself swatting at things that aren’t there. Also the spirals had the look of stout and curly hairs—one of which seemed to be springing from the figure’s mouth. (At this realization my own tongue-hair roused itself for the first time in days, piercing up through a taste bud and cilially toying my gums.) Yes, I thought, biting down grimly: the illustration—a man alone, mind unhinged, ineffectual and grovelling—captured something intrinsically my own.
And, examining the poster even more closely, I realized that what I’d at first taken for a splash of ink or an ornamental curlicue in the bottom corner was in fact the artist’s signature. I probably don’t have to clarify who it was—what foul and devious creature had inked and possibly plotted the whole affair—though I will, just for the sake of thoroughness: Mr. Ponytail. (Of course it was! Who else?) His autograph stung like a slap across my cheek.
So. A final showdown. I imagined the Madness Sale as an auction for my soul—me up there “on the block” with Ponytail caterwauling at breakneck speeds in an attempt to entice the highest bidder, pounding a gavel, detailing my various features with a sardonic, mocking tone. Of course, per his irony, there would be no bids, just a dull and vacuous silence that settled over the crowd. I would go once, go twice and not be sold, and as such banished to the Lost &/or Found, locked away by D. Lee in that great trove of forgone and forgotten things.
I realized that someone was standing beside me. A presence looming at my shoulder. A faint mortal odour. A whisk of the wind of human breath.
I turned, slowly, with dread.
And nearly fell to the floor.
Standing there, equipped once again with a luxuriant ponytail and grinning magnificently, was Dennis.
Well, it was Dennis, but it wasn’t Dennis. Something was off. The smile seemed painted on, with none of his characteristic exuberance animating it. The eyes were without light. Even the way he stood struck me as lifeless, like a mannequin manipulated into a human posture. And he said nothing, just stared at me. God, though, that ponytail was still glorious, gleaming with a kind of inner radiance and flowing over his shoulder like a brook or a stream. Even after all I’d suffered at the hands (or tufts?) of ponytails, I found myself admiring this specimen. It was simply that splendid.
I tried to initiate conversation with a casual greeting. A simple hello, no mention of Dennis’s apparent return from the dead. (Or maybe he’d just been swimming?)
But all he did was stare, that weird smile blazing like a signal fire. But signalling what? Or whom? It communicated nothing. It didn’t speak to me. The smile was as mute and inexpressive as the man himself. It struck me as a mask pasted over some private torment. Even my gut-ghosts seemed discomfited by it; they churned and fidgeted, and were it not for my boots they would have launched me to the ceiling.
Another tack, then: I asked Dennis if he was excited about the Madness Sale.
He kept grinning.
Yet a glimmer of panic shone in his eyes, and they flicked sideways as if searching for escape. And he wavered ever so faintly, as if buffeted by some internal wind. And then the disturbance was gone. The waxen grin resumed.
The mall’s certainly transforming, I said.
Grin.
It was nearly suppertime—would he like to join me? Like old times?
Grin.
Our usual or at least previously habitual routine of a whole chicken, that is: shared.
Grin.
He could have as much leg as he liked!
Grin.
I’d even splurge for his iced tea.
Grin.
Great, then. Should we head in that direction, then, or…
Grin.
I took a heavy-footed step toward the food court. And realized that dinner would require a face-to-face encounter with the teens—the teens, mind, who had just encouraged me to O[bliterate] K. [Sohail]. Thank god, I thought, that I would have Dennis at my side for support. For who knew the depths of the teens’ commitment to “the cause”; should they learn that I wasn’t up to the task of murder, perhaps they’d deem me a traitor and as such disposable (literally, like a bag of hair). I wasn’t sure if Dennis would be physically capable of preventing an assault, but I hoped that at least the teens would balk at the presence of a witness.
At any rate, good to have Dennis along. The problem, however, was that he hadn’t moved. The fellow just stood there with that maddening grin anchored on his face, eyes glazed and distant, ponytail draped over his shoulder. Off we go, I encouraged him, taking another step toward the food court. Nothing: no reply, no sign of motion. Just that grin, less like a fire now than a dying star. Slowly I backed away, announcing that Dennis could take his time, no problem, I’d see him at the food court, maybe go ahead and order for both of us, and how nice it was to have him back in the mall.
Meanwhile Dennis just grinned and grinned, growing smaller as I trod in my boots down the hall with occasional checks over my shoulder. And then, as I reached the turn toward the escalators, I looked back a final time—and he was gone. Only the din of construction filled the empty hall. (Excepting K. Sohail, who skulked about in the shadows, an eye on me as always.) How had Dennis vanished so quickly? Had he been an apparition? It was as if my old friend had evaporated into thin air.
PROGRESS REPORT #8
Living! The thing that gives life meaning. Living is one of the most favourable things about being a person, and a stern head-shake to those misanthropes who believe otherwise. Murderers especially. Though to each his or her own. It’s your life. And if you choose to spend it deathmongering, I suppose that’s between you and whatever “maker” adjudicates your heaven application. Me, though, I believe it’s better to live, not to mention let live, to sniff the flowers of glory, to splash through the brooks of joy, to prance through the meadows of ecstasy with a frisky song in the heart, upon the lips and ringing in the ears like a nice tinnitus.
Life begins at zero. For a while half of you is one place and the other half somewhere else, and the two bits combine during the respective owners’ nude frolics. Basically the fishy thing of your soul punctures the orb of your head—and poof: a brain. And soon enough that brain grows some other stuff and you’re a weird thing swimming around a lady’s guts. Gradually, through a process known as “science,” your fins become hands, your gills turn into feet, and your sweeping, flamboyant tail curls itself into a little beaked triangle, locates itself in the middle of your face, and declares itself a nose.
What do you eat in there? Whatever goes passing by. Your frog-like forked tongue can snag anything within a sixteen-inch radius—ova, platelets, raspberry seeds, DNA soup. You name it. Also milk. From the time we’re no bigger than a drop of the stuff ourselves, milk is the lifeblood of humanity. Without it we are milk toast, as the saying goes. Toast, that is, soaked disgustingly in milk. And then what? Smeared somewhere. Gross.
After a baby “comes out” things proceed until the first-year anniversary, which is celebrated with terrific pomp and a modest—some say almost undetectable—quantity of circumstance. Things then proceed through a sequence of “birth days” (cakes, flames, puppies in a bag) until you turn, say, fifty or ninety and announce, “Enough!” And instead of a party, you hold for yourself a kind of vigil where the candles burn unblown until the wicks shrivel upon themselves and all that remains is a platter of wax.
When you’re living, everything feels good. Even surgery. “No need for an anaesthetic,” you assure the dentist while she sharpens her blades. “I’m just going to grin my way through this one.” It’s that simple. If your soul is boogying and jiving with the power of living, everything else is your dance floor: a delicious celery feast here, a sword through the forearm there. Pleasure and/or pain. It’s all just the stuff of life, the yen and zen of living.
What else makes life worth living, or living worth spending a life doing? Why, love! Love is to life as soil is to death, and there’s no better way to spend your days than buried alive in love’s wormy mud. How many kinds of love are there? At least eight. Spend your life sampling love’s generous buffet, and on your deathbed you’ll know that every moment preceding your organs’ failing and splattering viscera all over the sheets was well spent. Best of all, you’ll be surrounded by loved ones to clean up the mess.
Of course, with life comes death, though rarely simultaneously. Instead think of death as the dessert to life’s splendid luncheon. Do you dare partake? Well, you kind of have to. It’s as if said luncheon were hosted by the devil—it’s great that you’ve gorged yourself sick on all that living, but now it’s time to stuff the cheesecake of mortality down your gullet. Served on a pickaxe. And that’s precisely what does you in.
A cemetery is one place where the dead are deposited. Another is the sea—what’s known as a “watery grave,” because of the attendant wetness. Some people get lit on fire; others are wrapped in tissues, stood upright in a box and left for intrepid archaeologists to peel, but never lick. However you decide to discard your remains, what’s lost forever is your soul—no matter how thoroughly someone exhumes the body, whether with saws or dynamite.
Is there life after death? By its specific parameters, no. Although there have been reports of the dead “giving themselves a raise” to spook the living or reclaim unpaid debts, whether as ghosts, vampires, zombies or a vaporous, drifting substance akin to the damp stuff of a sneeze.
The point though is: live! Live, damn you. Stop standing around with your head in the shrubs—get out and turn your face to the winds of vivacity. Let it ruffle your hair, flutter your eyelids, winnow inside your orifices and tickle your soul. And then go bounding off to drink life’s sweet nectar—from a flower, from the lips of a lover, from a trough being hogged by some hogs. Guzzle away, friend. For soon enough every drop will be all gone.
THE RENOVATIONS WERE COMPLETE. The mall was revitalized. The Madness Sale was imminent. Every store was open for business—or would be. In fact the only shuttered enterprise was the chicken stall. The rotisseries were gone. The cash register had been packed away under a vinyl cover. There was nary a teen in sight. Even the unctuous reek of the place had been scrubbed clean, replaced with ammonia and citrus.
Had the teens’ homicidal scheme been thwarted? Had they been punished? Was I, in some way, to blame? Might I be next? Though this swell of fear quickly deflated: if the mall wished it, my time (on earth) would have expired long ago. Now that K. Sohail had set me free from my quarters, as if I’d served some punitive sentence and could now emerge having learned my lesson, my presence in the mall seemed to have been judged so ineffectual that I didn’t even require observation. I was beginning to feel toyed with, as if my fumblings at life were mere entertainment…
Confronted with a bounty of choice at the food court, from noodles of various girths and ethnicities to “wraps,” I merely approached the nearest kiosk and, as a sort of testament or memorial, asked for chicken—broiled, boiled, fried, chopped to bits and dispersed through rice, chicken on a stick, on a prong, à la mode, you name it. Just give me chicken, I told the uniformed woman in a hairnet. Well, they didn’t have chicken. Would squab do? Yes. It would
have to.
I took my squab, tenderly poached and accompanied by a small cup of nectar, to my old table. For now, the food court was empty. I could sense the mall readying itself for something grand—like a drunk uncle waddling out at a family function and commanding everyone’s attention before flopping to the ground in the pulsations of an interpretive dance. Soon they would arrive, the mall’s proprietors, flooding this place by the hundreds. And right behind them would be the massing, maddened public, here for the Sale. It was going to be bonkers. Units would move. Nothing would be off limits. Everything must go.
The squab was fine. I returned to my quarters against a tide of shopkeepers (eyes wild, registering my presence only as something to swerve around) arriving for the day’s trade, and sat at my desk before the blank page of my final Progress Report—my Final Report, in fact. Minutes turned into an hour and still the thing gaped at me from my desk, vacuous as a yawn. Fatigued with me, fatigued with my existence. What was the point?
Though maybe this was precisely it. Having had the flicker of revolution snuffed so summarily, perhaps the only resistance left was apathy. Taking any sort of action was just playing my prescriptive role at the mall, creating an illusory purpose to chase like a rat in a maze while my keepers jiggered the walls to keep me running in circles. And they laughed. Oh, how I’m sure they laughed.
So who was in charge? If all this wasn’t helmed by Mr. Ponytail, he was at least an agent of the mall’s deep state. I hadn’t seen him in ages yet still sensed his presence, ubiquitous and omnipotent and “pulling the strings,” as if each hair in that magnificent bunch tugged about his army of puppets—K. Sohail, D. Lee, perhaps even Gary, and certainly me. Our every action, every gesture and perhaps even every thought were of Ponytail’s grand design. But a design for what? Mastery and manipulation? To what end?
Certainly the Madness Sale represented the culmination of some infernal and insidious scheme that had been conceived long before I’d begun my residency. At its finale loomed something terrible—not just a storm but whatever lay beyond the horizon, that horrifying infinitude of nothingness and oblivion. What would be left? Anything?