I have a daily route I take and even if my eyes were put out, I could wind my way through the blind corners and dead end halls of this mall. Like the tragic Shakespearean kings, I would prevail with an uncanny sense of despair and enlightenment. The merchants all know me by smell, and sometimes a wave or a brief nod of a head is offered. There was a time when most of the merchants had convened to try to put an end to my forays. To banish me from my chosen road of human contemplation. But legally there was nothing they could do as long as I bought an item now and again, like Mother’s cigars, or a soup bone from the butcher. They couldn’t evict me for the way I smell, or how I look in my striped trousers. There was a time when I could have been evicted for being coloured, but at this present time in history, and in this geographical location, I am lawfully tolerated.
Alas, no one wants to be merely tolerated, like a whining child or an ugly dog. Such human arrogance. We dare assume that some are meant to be merely tolerated while others are sought out to be idolized, glorified, even to wipe their dainty asses. Have a care! I mustn’t fall into the pit of baseness like my mother before me! The utter unfairness of it all is enough to make one want to bite one’s own tongue off, a mute supplication to the evils of this world, but that’s the other end of the stick. Father’s end of misery and woe. It is my chosen path to seek another. . .
I glide into Holy Smoke to pick out a box of cigars for Mother. If I wait until I have done my daily study of the machinations of mall existence, I may very well forget and Mother would be sorely vexed. In a manner which would be audible for several square kilometres.
“Good afternoon,” Adib nods politely from behind his pastel handkerchief.
“Lovely,” I breezily smile. Step up to the marble counter.
“A box of the usual for you?” He backs up a pace, crinkling his eyes into smiles, to make up for his instinctual retreat.
“Please,” I bob and lean my arm against the cool grey rock slab that runs the length of the entire store. Men on stools on either side of me hop off, stuff burning pipes in trouser pockets in their haste to escape me. Adib sighs, even though he has his back to the mass exodus. He turns around with a box filled with cigars as thick as my thumb, individually wrapped and sealed with a red sticker. He has thrown five extra ones on top, so my return will take a little longer.
“Your generosity is so greatly appreciated,” I bow, clicking my heels like some military personage and pay him with bills sweating wetly from the pocket of my striped pants.
Adib accepts them as graciously as a man extending a pair of tweezers can. No, I am not angered by his reticence to come into direct contact with me. Indeed, I find his manner refreshingly honest and he never hurls abuse like some opt to do.
“My best to your mother,” Adib nods, handing me my change via tweezers. “By the way,” he adds, “you might want to take in the new children’s play area in the western wing of the mall. I hear that it’s quite the development.”
“Why, thank you,” I beam. Then frown. “But how is it that I am not acquainted with this wonder of childish bliss?”
Adib just shrugs, breathing shallowly from behind his scented lavender hanky. I thank him again. Glissande en avant through the door and, toes pointed, leap excitedly to the west wing.
The sign reads: FRIENDZIES!
It’s one of those obscure word conflations that mean almost nothing at all. Like a joke told with a punch line from another, one realizes there is an attempt at humour, but there is nothing to get. It does not bode well.
Grand opening balloons, limp and wrinkled, dangle from pastel walls. Streamers trail limply from golden pillars, curling in the dust on the cold floor. A table with free coffee and donuts and Coke-flavoured pop made out of syrup. I walk up to the gate, disheartened, but must enter for study purposes. One must not let first impressions alter one’s methodology, one’s code of conduct.
“One adult, please,” I smile courteously.
“Where’s your kid?” a girl asks, chewing an unseemly quantity of gum.
I am amazed. She does not curl her nose in disgust from the stench that permeates from my being. Her eyes do not water and she doesn’t gape at my size.
“I have no children,” I say, “I just want to view the newly constructed premises.” How is it that she doesn’t seem to notice? Perhaps her nose has been decimated from smoking or, perhaps, lines of cocaine.
“Ya can’t go in without a kid, because adults go in free, but a kid costs eight bucks.”The girl tips forward on her stool to rest her chin in her hands, elbows sloppily on the countertop before me.
“My goodness! Eight dollars for a child!” I am shocked. Who could afford to entertain their children here?
“What if one were to tell you that the child is inside already, that one has only to come to join her?”
The young woman kicks a button with her foot and the gate swings open. “Don’t forget to take off your shoes and keep valuables on your person,” she intones, rote and bored to insensibility.
She is from a generation where nothing seems to matter. She is so bored of the world and of herself that even my anomalous presence doesn’t measure on her radar. Is there no hope for our next generation? Will the non-starving members of our species perish from ennui even before we’ve polluted our environment to the point of no return?
This turn of thought does nothing to advance my research. It only makes me weary. Ever weary. I adjust my mental clipboard and focus on the task at hand.
Plastic tubing runs crazily throughout the room, like a diseased mind twisting, turning back on itself with no end, no beginning. Plastic balls fill a pit of doom, three toddlers drowning to the chorus of their parents’ snap-shotting delight. Primary reds, blues, and yellows clash horribly with khaki, lavender, and peach. Children, fat children, skinny children, coloured children pale from too much TV, run half-heartedly through the plastic pipes, their stocking feet pad-padding in the tubes above my head. They squeal listlessly from expectation rather than delight. A playground for children constructed from a culture of decay. There is enough plastic here to make Tupperware for an entire continent and I am too stunned to gape in horrified dismay.
Mother would think this a grandiose joke. Would laugh in her cigar-breath way, her ever-present stogie clenched between her molars in a manner that would make Clint Eastwood envious. Mother would enjoy this place to no end, but I am stricken. I am an urban rat, but I still recognise the forces of the sun, the moon, the patterns of wind that guide me. Albeit, through a film of pollution. These tragic children who are taught to play in an artificial world can only follow the route to an artificial death. Their spirits will be trapped forever with a shelf-life of an eternity.
I wander, dazed, dismayed, my dancer’s feet dragging heavily on the Astroturf. Some of the older, anemic children stop and stare, whisper to each other from behind covered mouths. I take no heed. I continue through the cultural maze of hyper-artificiality.
There is no hope, my mind mutters incessantly. My steps slow, motion stilled, all joie de vivre leached through the bottom of my feet.
Stone.
A toddler topples backward out of a chute. A millisecond of silence. Then she bawls like the world has ended. Red, yellow, and blue balls fly fitfully through the air. Children gulp from tubs of simulated Coke while waiting for their microwave-heated pizzas. A boy bends over and plat! Vomits a soft pink mound of hotdogs.
Horrible humanity. How can I bear this?
How can anyone bear it?
No! I must not waver from my calling. I will not follow the path of my father into woe and I won’t encrust my airy spirit within a coarse mantle like my mother. It is not enough to simply stand on the outside and gape, albeit with a closed mouth. It is not enough that only I fully understand the human mall condition. What if I am to overcome the shackles of social norms and thus, reach the outer limits of time and space? Do I want to survey the vista, alone? I must join the epicentre of humanity.
I mus
t enter the maze.
“Watch your fat can,” I can hear my mother’s raspy voice all around me. “Don’t come crying to me. I’ll only say ‘I told you so,’ and kick you in the butt.”
Mother, oh Mother.
I circle the strange man-made maze, thinking to myself that a woman never would. Circle thrice before I spot a young child scurrying up a hot pink pipe, like a rabbit with a watch. I adjust my mental clipboard and squelch my body into the mouth of the tube, wishing for a ball of thread.
Fat rat in a sewer pipe. The thought bubbles hysterically to the surface of my mind, but I kick it in the can in the manner of my mother.
What is interesting is that instead of getting stuck like an egg in the throat of an over-greedy snake, my body elongates. Spreads towards the ends so that all I need to do is flutter my toes to initiate a forward motion.
I slide, glide smoothly through the twisting tubing. The only impediments are the large metal heads of bolts that are used to fasten the portions of pipe together. The friction of clothing against the plastic raises such electricity that I am periodically zapped with great sparks and frazzle. Definitely a design flaw. Children in neighbouring tubes pad, pad, twirl down spiral slides. Their small muffled noises are only broken with intermittent zaps and small exclamations of pain.
I have never cared for children although I’ve cared about them in theory. . .
Something pokes the bottom of my foot. Of course, I cannot turn around to look. A barely discernible voice squeaks in protest and the single voice is joined with another, another. For in my contemplation I’ve ceased my inching progress and I’ve blocked the tube like a clot of fat in an artery. Their small mouse-like rustlings unsettle my philosophical and scientific musings. I would wave them away if I could face them, but all I do is flap my foot in a discouraging manner.
Then I notice. A certain something. For the first time in my life, that which has always been with me yet never perceived seeps into my consciousness. I am so completely encased in plastic that it cannot be diluted by outer forces.
I can smell myself.
But the wonder!
Because my odour is not smell, but sound. . . .
The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds that emanate from my skin are so intense that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. Unable to bear hearing such unearthly sounds they transmute it into stench.
And my joy! Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and my smell/sound mix such dizzying intensity the plastic surrounding me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon.
I hover, twenty feet in the air.
The children who were stuck behind me tumble to the ground. They fall silently, too shocked to scream, but the pitch of sound that seeps from my skin intensifies, like beams of coloured light. The sound catches the children from their downward plummet and they bob, rise slowly up to where I float. I extend my hands and the children grab hold, hold each others’ hands, smile with wonder.
“Oh my god!” someone finally gasps, from far beneath us. Another person screams. Fathers faint and an enterprising teenager grabs a camera from a supine parent and begins to snap pictures. None of it matters. This moment. Tears drip from my eyes and the liquid jewels float alongside us like diamonds in outer space. I burst out laughing and the children laugh too. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow or the day that follows but the possibilities are immeasurable.
We float, the remaining plastic pipes shimmer, buckle beneath our voices, then burst into soft confetti.
LOGUES
Eric Basso
Eric Basso is an American poet, novelist, playwright, and critic, born in Baltimore, Maryland whose work has appeared in many literary journals. He is perhaps most famous for his experimental Gothic fictions, including the story reprinted herein. His “The Beak Doctor,” considered a cult classic, was published by the Chicago Review in 1977 and has recently been reprinted in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, covering one hundred years of weird fiction.
The Tower
Once again the unnamed man or woman has entered into our conversation. Fenton believes he or she no longer exists, though he wouldn’t admit this until we pressed him for an explanation of why the letters had suddenly stopped, for no apparent reason, while the certified checks continued to come in on their usual monthly basis.
At the beginning we looked on the letters as a kind of meaningless practical joke. The unnamed man or woman seemed to like nothing better than to harass us with lunatic accusations. We burned those early letters in the kiln by the side of the Tower. The smoke billowed out of the chimney and formed a white plume against the cloudless afternoon sky. It hung there, above the Tower, undisturbed by even so much as a breath of the cold autumn air for several days. One morning it vanished.
1
The parking lot is virtually deserted on Sundays. The shack at its far end looks away from the street to where the grassy hills begin—you can just see the upper part of the Tower dome gleaming behind them in the distance. There are no other buildings.
We’ve come to this shack by way of the letters to ferret out the unnamed man or woman. Fenton knocks at the door; when there is no answer, he enters through a broken window. But no one is there.
2
Some of us believed that the man or woman in question was one of our parents, but the more recent letters seem to indicate the workings of a younger mind. The handwriting has gradually changed from spidery hesitance to a few broad strokes, barely legible. In the final letters, words have been pasted in from newspapers and magazines with illustrations that appear, on the face of it, to have nothing in common with the text: a gloved hand, a burning candle lying on its side, a mathematical graph.
Fenton has not moved from his bed since that day in the shack. He turns his face to the wall and calmly waits for death. He shows no interest in the progress we have made with the letters.
3
There is a sealed room in the old theatre, quite high up near the rafters. You get to it by scaling one of the outer walls of the building (the stairway goes only as far as the balcony). From a certain part of the roof the view of the Tower is unobscured by trees and what few buildings remain.
The famous room lies directly below. We had to chop through slate, then pry loose the wooden slats. It is as we left it several years ago but for one detail: the skeleton of the rapist has been taken away. A good place to bury Fenton when he dies.
4
On the eve of Fenton’s death a visitor came to the Tower. A tall brown woman from another part of town claimed the letters and took them away.
We have emptied the kiln to read the ashes.
December 4, 1974
A Strange Juggler
There is a dying face in my dream, a face of mystery floating across the sky. Let him roll the dice again. His face and the face in the portrait are one. Begin with middle gray: swarming pitch-black specks. The dice cup rattles. I can just make out his eyes askew in the half-light. The rest of his face is lost in the shoulder of a headless man or the stump of a frock-coated tree. Whatever it is, he embraces it without emotion. Perhaps he, too, walked in his sleep. The artist was there and drew what we have of him. He also drew the black sun that hangs in the upper left like a second, extinguished face.
Since the day he lost the wager, I have been troubled by faces. It’s not so much where they appear—they are apt to turn up anywhere, I’ve often seen them riding the bus or sitting a few rows away at the opera—it’s who they might be. These silent disembodied faces, without expression, in the dust on the mirrors or rolling down the stairs. In bubbles that rise up the side of a glass.
1
He led me up the back stairs to his dingy room. Said he wanted to talk. These days he’s bee
n sleeping on the floor. The bed is unmade. He says they come begging at night, bouncing up and down on the mattress. Sometimes weeks go by without even the trace of a nostril hair. Then, without warning, a stray lip or an eyelid will turn up stuck to the wall. The faces are often in need of sleep.
But when they come it’s always with the same heartrending plea for him to roll the dice again, to win back the wager.
2
He keeps a small snuffbox, and when he isn’t downstairs shooting dice, he practices his art with what lies inside. That mysterious box.
Returning drunk one morning a few hours before dawn, I mistook his door for mine. My key wouldn’t fit the lock. I kicked the door in and found him standing in the center of the room. The table and chairs had been pushed up against the wall. The snuffbox lay open at his feet. His arms and hands were a blur, as though he were trying to keep no less than four invisible objects in the air at any one time. His eyes, shifting rapidly from one imaginary ball, cube or ninepin to the other, had no time to acknowledge my unexpected presence. I don’t think he knew I was there. Before long, I passed out. When I awoke, I was alone.
3
A face returned tonight, one I could recognize—it was the toothless old man: “Why have you switched the dice? You’ve made it impossible for him to win back the wager!” I said nothing. The head faded. I hadn’t touched the dice. He had no reason to torment me with his senseless accusations.
4
It’s true. Some of the dots were painted white. Did he notice? The door to his room was locked from the inside. I knocked. An old man opened.
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