“Hey Quinn, how are you doing on this fine chipper day?” Asked Michael in a sarcastic tone.
“Hey yourself. I didn’t think that you’d be coming in today.
“Oh I’m here at the top of my game. I’m ready for anything; broken signs, puking kids overflowing toilets… you name it and I’m ready to assist.”
“I’m glad to see your attitude is align with the path that you’re on.”
“You know Quinn, you’re going to spend the rest of your life doing this shitty job leading your casual life, having your casual conversations and then you will die and you will be casually missed.
“Just keep to yourself and we’ll be fine. I don’t need to hear anything else out of you. You’ll be gone soon enough you crazy fuck! I’m tired of listening to your moping and sad attitude. I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t felt that you had an unfair childhood and that the world owes you something special.”
“You’re right, I will be gone and someone will just come in and fill my spot. It’ll be just like I was never here. We’re interchangeable.”
Quinn asserted his dominance. “You’re not even listening to me. If there’s a clogged up toilet, you’re cleaning it you crazy asshole. I’m done with you, I’ve had enough.”
Days washed into each other in the routine of work. One day it was a shit clogged toilet and overflowing trash cans, the other vomit patrol and broken water fountains. It was two or three days that went by indistinguishable from one another with the help of alcohol and insomnia. All of the days had one thing on common; there was no Sarah. A person in a normal state of mind would have put some type of effort into inquiring about it. Michael was drifting into the abstract and was only happy to have the time alone with his thoughts of fat chickens getting coupons for cheese in a can. It was getting more and more difficult to distinguish the waking life from his strange dreams. He wondered if Darline was his friend. He wondered if he was alone. No matter what he thought, he awoke on the couch with only his reflection in the unplugged television.
“Wake up Michael.” Michael opened his eyes to a blurry vision of his chubby girlfriend. Get used to the couch, because I’m not letting you back into my bed anytime soon.” “Where have you been, I’ve been worried sick,” said Michael.
“You lying shit. If you were worried, then you would have at least called.”
“You might have me there.”
“I don’t think you’re funny and I don’t know what happened to you but I’m not going to let you ruin my life. I called your brother and I know you weren’t there. Why are you cheating on me you liar?”
“The honest truth is that I’m not. I wasn’t at my brothers, you’re right about that.” Michael in his drunken state could only speak the honest truth on his mind. He no longer had the ability to mask his true feelings behind casual conversation or social niceties. “You’re right about the other thing to. I don’t really care. If I did, I would have went looking or you. I’m only looking for me bitch.”
“You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re lucky that you haven’t been caught doing anything stupid at work. If you get fired, you’re on your own. I’m not taking care of a loser who can’t take care of himself.”
“That’s all you care about. You just need me to earn enough so you can get a big screen TV… or some sunglasses. You and your fucking sunglasses! You just can’t get enough of those fucking sunglasses. You love all this stupid shit.”
As he said that, Michael kicked a small statue off of the coffee table. It was a statue of Braden Pinn that he got her for her birthday.
“I need you to take care of yourself like a man. I’m not going to mother you through your life because you’re going to have one of your sad times. Be a man!” said Sarah. “Gee, you make it sound like I don’t deserve you.” Michael slurred out sarcastically. “You don’t deserve me. My father’s been telling me that for years. They hate you. You’re either a winner or a loser in this world and you’re a loser Michael Christianson.”
“You know what you are… and you’re right I don’t deserve you. I deserve much better. Everyone does. You’re just an ignorant trained fat chicken.”
Sarah began to stop paying attention to him and locked herself in the bedroom. Michael didn’t seem to notice. “You don’t even know it. You’ve been bred to just eat and get fat and shop and wallow in your own shit. I don’t deserve you! I deserve to be alive. You wouldn’t even know the difference. You big fat chicken fuck!”
Michael looked at his reflection in the unplugged TV. He hardly recognized himself. Sarah made some noise getting ready for bed, but soon enough it was quiet again in the apartment. Michael walked to the kitchen and cracked a beer. He could hardly walk straight and barely made it back to the couch. He was drifting in and out of consciousness looking at the blank screen. He thought he heard muzak as the line between consciousness and unconsciousness became indistinguishable.
“Am I thinking my own thoughts or are these someone else’s?” “Did I say that or think it?” Michael was watching himself walk through the apartment. He was akin to a spectator watching a movie on the screen. His body walked the perimeter of the apartment touching the walls like an animal trying to understand its cage. He turned and looked at the television blinking it’s blue light on the couch. He sat down on the couch and watched as the screen showed familiar scenes from his life. It was his drive to work stuck in the endless rows of commuter traffic. He watched the population nudge forward in well-formed lines to someplace that they didn’t want to go. Then the image on the screen changed to the familiar hallways behind the stores in the Mall. He saw himself walking aimlessly lost in the maze. He was not alone. One Mall worker after another began to fill the hall. Soon he could hardly move. He had the distinct feeling of an animal being led to slaughter. None of the other people packing the hall to capacity seemed to notice. He was being crushed by all the people in the hall. He couldn’t move. He was trying to shout but he couldn’t breath. He had no voice.
The scene changed again. He was in the Mall and he was alone. He walked the ghostlike empty Mall corridors expecting some sinister force to make itself known. Every light in the Mall seemed to be on. It was illuminated to a pain-full degree and nothing came but the emptiness. There were no people and there was no ominous voice declaring the sales. There was only muzak. He passed all the familiar stores and took little note of the items in them. Then he came on a store that held a special resonance for him but he couldn’t place it at first. Then he saw the bronze figurine of Braden Pinn that he purchased for Sarah for her birthday. The statue was a foot long and the exalted image of what most men wished they could be, including Michael. The figure was taken from a promotional poster for one of his movies. He was turned to his side flexing all his muscles as he reached out to a girl. Every girl in the country wanted to be that girl. To Michael, the statue was a symbol of everything that was wrong with the world.
The scene changed again and he was back in his apartment. He didn’t know if it was really him or if he was still watching from the safety of his favorite television spot on the couch. He felt, as though me might as well have a bowl of popcorn for all that he was involved in the action. It was all just a show being played out on a screen. He felt that he was watching as he walked over to the coffee table and picked up the statue of Braden Pinn. “I hate that fucking bitch, keeping me chained down to this fucking life.” He watched in his separated state as he kicked in the door to the bedroom. He was still watching in his detached state as he pinned her to the bed. “This isn’t real. None of this is real. None of anything is real.” He heard himself say it like a distant narrating voice as he hit her repeatedly over the head with the statue. He pulled the sheet around her face and was strangling her as he did it. She tried to scream but had no voice. She tried franticly to break free but he just kept hitting harder. She pulled the picture of flowers off the wall and it smashed to pieces on the floor. He kept hitting. Blood covered the stat
ue as he kept pounding away. He continued frantically as if every cell in his body were programmed to. The body lay there lifeless. The picture was ruined. “I’ve never eaten anything real. I’m not real.” He heard himself saying this as he licked the statue cover in blood and parts of her innards. “You will make me real. Now, I’m real and whole in the world.”
Family is important. That’s the ending message of so many of those run of the mill movies that they churn out endlessly. Every family that I knew had almost the same collection of movies. No matter what happened in the movie, the message was the same. Family is important. I could never explain to my family the things I’ve done. I couldn’t explain to them the thoughts I have. Sometimes you have to bury something and leave it as the past. It’s the only way to move on. Sometimes out here, I think about all those people out there who have lives just like the one I used to lead. None of them get the same restlessness that I do. We buried my father in a graveyard when I was a small child. He was just another stone in a big long line. There was nothing significant about his stone. There was nothing significant about his life. There was no restlessness there. Family is important and sometimes it’s better to leave things buried.
I just stopped for gas and the station, the attendant; everything was exactly as it was when I left. It was a different place, a different person but the sameness… it never ends. I can’t believe that I went along with it all as long as I did. I can’t seem to understand the people around me but I used to be one of them. I know what keeps them in line because it kept me in line for so long. It was the fear of what was there if you stepped out of line. No one really thinks about it. That’s how it works. It’s a deep seeded fear in the back of the mind. They see it on television; they know what happens to dissidents of the state. They know deep down that men like the man who is chasing me are out there. The man on my trail will never question. He will always do as he is told no matter how horrific. That kind of unquestioning loyalty was looked at as an attribute by most of the population. Not by me, not anymore. I may be a monster for things that I’ve done but I’ll never be an unquestioning drone again. I’m a fat chicken no longer. I feel things even if the rest of them don’t. The man after me feels nothing. There is no empathy, no understanding in him. There is only following a direction even if the direction is towards horror. It’s been hard for me to put a name to the plague of my people but I think its indifference.
Chapter 6
Michael awoke on the couch in front of the TV as he had done countless times in the past. This time was different. He felt no sensation of having been asleep. There was no feeling of being rested. He was convinced that it was all a dream. It had to have been. Things like that just don’t happen. The thought of it all filled with such dread that he was actually longing to see his chubby unappealing girlfriend and go back to his life of quiet desperation. He went over to the bedroom apprehensively but fully expecting to get chewed out by an upset girlfriend. She wasn’t there. He was alone in the apartment. The room was not filled with a corpse but it was a mess and it seemed that someone cleaned it up in a hurry. The contents of the rooms were still disheveled. Lamps were broken but on their nightstands. The picture was broken but put back on the wall. The sheets were gone. “Where the fuck are the sheets?” Thought Michael. He had to get out of the room. He left and closed the door behind him. When he looked at the kitchen clock he realized that if he left right now he would still be late for work. It should have been the furthest thing from his mind but at that moment the certainty of routine would be a comfort for his anxiety. He hastily left the apartment, barely getting into his clothes. He was still drunk but that didn’t stop him from grabbing his last bottle of hard liquor for the trip to work. Sometimes, life was too much to face without some help.
The traffic was like his nightmare. The world was slowly limping along and the heavy flow of rain didn’t help things at all. The slow commute gave Michael plenty of time to continue to dull away the moments of his life with alcohol. By the time he got to his usual parking area at the Mall it was full. He had to run in the rain from a far off lot. He was wet, late and felt that all security in his life was evaporating. His coworkers were off to their posts by the time he got where they had the shift meetings. “It was all a dream. This is the real world,” he whispered thankful no one was there to hear it. Were he in a better state of mind, he would have considered himself lucky to have at lest missed the meeting.
“M.C., I don’t like starting my workdays off by having to reprimand my staff.” said Thom.
“I can certainly understand that. I recommend that you don’t do it,” Michael barely slurred out. Thom didn’t have the demeanor of someone who was angry. He seemed more sad than anything. He looked like a boss that had no other choice but to fire an employee. Michael picked up on the mood and decided to make his way to the floor sooner than later. Even in his drunken state, he knew it would be better deal with any of what was waiting for him with a clear head. He had to keep a low profile.
He walked with the masses of consumers going past all the familiar stores. He took little note of the goods or the people in the stores. Then he came to the video game store and was compelled to stop. He saw a mother come out of the store with her two small children. There was something unnerving to Michael in seeing this mother usher her children out of this store with an entire virtual life in their shopping bag. He felt that he should warn them. He felt that he should reprimand the mother for letting her children be parented by video game programmers. He didn’t though; he didn’t want his workday to start off like that. He knew that he had to keep his mind focused and his presence to a backdrop. He had to keep the machine working.
If the situation were different, he would have told the mother to run away from the Mall. If the situation were different, he would have told the kids not to live through the television screen and to live their own lives. He would tell them not to end up like him. He knew they wouldn’t listen to him anyways, so he what people of conscious must be doing all over the land and he didn’t say anything. He watched the mother and children blend back into the crowd of consumers and he heard a call to clean up a large vomit sighting near the food court. That was the situation.
He stood awestruck at the enormous puddle. Michael considered himself an expert on vomit. He’d grown to be a sort on connoisseur over the years and had seen some impressive displays of humanities exploits. Nothing matched what was in front him here. He couldn’t look away. He was slowly pouring sawdust into the massive puddle, lost in thought over the impressive display. How could this much liquid come out of one person? Michael thought that it must have been a vomit domino effect. That was when one Mall patron looked at the vomit and they themselves became sick, adding to the puddle. That was the conclusion that he came to working in front of a small crowd of onlookers circled around the big display. Sure enough, when he was finished putting sawdust on the puddle, he heard the all to familiar splat sound of one of the onlookers getting sick. “You fucking people. There’s no end to it!” Exclaimed Michael to no one in particular.
“Mr. Christianson, come with me please.” Michael of course recognized the authority voice that he hated most in the world. He carried him mop and a primal sense of fear as he followed the security officer.
“How is your girlfriend doing these days?” Asked the officer as they walked to the back security office.
“Why do you ask?” Michael could barely reply through the fear of going to jail for the rest of his life. No reply came from the officer. The back office was a hive of activity. It was disheartening for Michael to see so many officers in one place. His distant hope of making a run for it seemed an impossibility now. They walked down the hall past the room where the security officers monitored all of the activity in the Mall. Michael had no idea how many cameras’ there were throughout the Mall, but it seemed that every square inch was monitored. The shoppers may not notice but someone was watching every detail. They went to a back office away from
the other officers.
“Do you know why I brought you here?” Michael could do little more than stare helplessly as he did when he was in trouble as a child in school. He was sure that he was found out. He clutched his mop and waited for it to happen, for the world to catch up to him and crush him down. He was being teased.
“I don’t like you. You… are a drunk, ungrateful shit. I’ve seen bums like you come and go throughout the years. I know the type.”
“I have a type?” Asked Michael who actually thought he hadn’t met anyone like himself. “You’re type is loser. Losers like you all act the same way. You think you’re better than the world. You take what you have for granted. Let me tell you something… I’ve seen shit’s like you leave because they think they’re too good for this and they come right back. Most losers get fired because they’re incompetent but they all come back and start again at the bottom.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” Michael always reverted to his sarcasm defense mechanism when he had nowhere else to turn.
“Loser’s don’t know that they’re losers. That’s what most of the officers say, but I have a theory. I think you act out because you know it. Deep down you know that you’re lucky to have what you’ve got. You don’t deserve any better and you know it.”
Michael was feeling sick to his stomach and could barely focus on anything but the muzak.
“You’re beyond lucky, you ungrateful shit. Do you have any idea how many people would kill to have your life? Do you know how many have? I don’t know how you were able to get any girl to put up with your shit for as long as you have. She might put up with your bullshit but I can’t have you disrupting commerce.”
“Heaven forbid,” said Michael.
“Has anyone told you about those that sacrificed so that we can have this peaceful time we live in. So people can shop in peace. It’s like talking to a petulant child… you don’t know anything about heroes. You don’t know anything about the sacrifices they made for you. It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to make a choice here Mr. Christianson. Understand, you either change the direction your going in or… well you know what and who is waiting for you.”
Mall Land Page 6