She tilted her head. “Are you Asian?”
He caught himself for a moment, absorbed by that open face, releasing her hand.
“No. Ah, it’s actually just…a typo. A nickname. From a typo. On my processing papers.” He winced. “From when I was in the military.” Her face went dark for the beat it took the shirt to switch its message to I AM NOT ALLOWED TO TALK TO CHILDREN.
“Oh, you were in the service! Which branch?”
He felt the need to swallow, glancing around for some third party to hold up a cue card, past the railing, over to the Cutlery Connection window, its bright row of knives.
“The marines.”
“The marines! How exciting! Were you in Santiago?”
He gave one more look of helpless defeat to the knives.
“Um, well…I wasn’t in those marines, ma’am.” He laughed softly as blood pooled in his cheeks. Instead of frowning, she tilted her head upright and offered another curious smile.
“Mango pretzel?”
“Mango, of course.”
He fumbled in the pushcart, the dim light from his shirt illuminating the neat cellophane wrappers of the wares. Looking up, he found a twenty-dollar bill carefully crimped into a delicate triangle, resting on his clipboard like a flag placed on a casket. She took the pretzel, eyes closed.
“I haven’t had one of these in years.”
He carefully unraveled the loose origami of her money.
“This is an interesting fold you have here, Astrid.”
“That’s how I tell,” she said between bites, “which bills are which.”
“But how do you know I’m giving you the correct change?”
She walked off a bit, hand out and receptive for the curve of the rail, chewing, thinking it over.
Finally, over her shoulder, Astrid said, “You have an honest face.”
Chang closed up the cart at five the next afternoon and walked east along the empty mezzanine, toward the map Morton had mentioned. Several city blocks of unoccupied storefronts and empty wooden benches passed before he found the mounted chart standing aloof in public space, like a mighty plastic tombstone. Looking over its convoluted schematics, he understood that a much larger underground shopping mall connected all the old malls within five miles of each other. There must have been several thousand stores listed here.
The decision to engage had already been made for him; it felt less stressful to plunge in than to try to hide. A succession of escalators led him down into the bowels of a vast department store. He skirted the flow of blasé crowds, moving behind displays, always aware of the nearest exit. Promenades led to further unfamiliar sections, overlarge interiors filled with self-illuminated mannequins, perfume stands, wall-sized televisions, a region of lamps and ceiling fans and trellises and giant shoes. In the mirrored perimeter behind a wall of men’s coats, he suddenly saw himself, a droopy nobody. Whatever menace had once lived in this person—this harmless little man with an honest face and a blinking shirt—had long since moved on to heartier hosts.
Down several escalators he found the beginnings of the shopping mall common area. Two levels below he understood why no one stared at his shirt. A group of loud teenagers came barreling out of a Spencer’s Gifts. One gangly boy with a fuzzy mustache wore a shirt that blinked FUCK UP in alternating greens and reds. The girl next to him displayed a full pornographic movie playing on her chest. Farther along, he saw a bored middle-aged mother pushing a baby stroller in her own shirt reading SUCK MY FUCK, this one alternating between words and a short cartoon he didn’t stare at. More whooping teenagers passed, each of their shirts trumpeting something crass, some rude word, or worse. No one cared.
At the edge of level six, a giant macaroni noodle framed the entrance to a descending escalator, the boundary of his terrain. He walked along the railing of this forbidden zone. The food court itself formed another terrace below. He thought of Secret Garden and, with a start, realized he could see the front of the store, just two floors down. He could see families laughing, bright displays of tall paperbacks and magazines. Chang thought of some piece of Greek mythology that began like this, someone gazing over the rim of a world they could never enter. Had they been watching from the heavens, or scowling down into the underworld?
On weekends, he was under house arrest. He wanted to spend both days sleeping, but a strange wakefulness took hold, the same tensing he’d undergone in the first months at Rahway State Prison. All Saturday afternoon and evening he watched TV in the quiet living room. The nameless old lady shuffled past around midnight, saying nothing. He hoped her room upstairs had a door. In the kitchen, preparing spaghetti, he found a stained, handwritten list buried in the utensils drawer, Rules Of Communal Living. He read this anxiously, finding that he had violated nothing, then tucking it carefully back under an oily spatula.
Later, watching a comedy with subplots and references that escaped him, Chang heard the front door slam. The man he’d seen earlier in his doorway walked past and doubled back.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Chang said, rising from the couch. They shook hands in the middle of the living room, shirts warning both to protect their children from each other. The other man was younger than Chang, dull-eyed, with a grocery bag under one arm.
“You want a beer?”
“Oh. No. Thanks. I thought we weren’t allowed out at night.”
Shrugging, then turning toward the kitchen, the younger man asked, “Who can afford to check up on us these days?” He returned with a beer and sat down. “You must be Sheldon. I’m Hector.”
“Nice to finally meet you.”
“Yeah.”
Hector took the remote and switched to a soccer game.
“How many of us are there?” Chang asked.
Momentarily reading the scores, Hector grimaced, then said, “Who?”
“Us, here in the house. How many residents?”
“This is it, man,” Hector said. “Lewis got hit by that car last month, so…yeah, we’re it.”
The soccer game eventually gave way to a commercial for a product he didn’t recognize. Hector yawned and said, “You’ve got a letter around here somewhere.”
Chang sagged into the arm of the couch, stunned. The younger man leaned over and rummaged through a pile in the corner, turning over phone books and encyclopedias. “Shit man…somewhere…”
“Do you remember,” Chang said, hearing his voice as a dull whine, “who the letter was from?”
“Nah,” said Hector, flipping through the pile on the shelf under the television. Finally standing, saying, “Nah. Nah. It’s gone. Oh well.”
“This is the worst time of year,” Astrid said on Monday. “It’s all seasonal, you know.”
He handed over a papaya-cheesecake pretzel, saying, “Probably not up here it’s not.”
“That’s right,” she laughed. “You’re immune to the tides of commerce.”
She swallowed, then added, “I hear in the winter they have these enormous snowflakes hanging from the top floor. Just gigantic. I guess that would be up here somewhere. Twenty or thirty feet across, I’m told. It’s a wonder they haven’t killed someone.”
“I suppose Christmas must be your big season.”
“Oh no,” Astrid said, turning to face him. “No, no. Next month. When school starts again. I mean, we’re the second largest children’s bookstore in north Jersey. It’s a madhouse.”
His stomach made a low groan. “I didn’t know,” Chang said flatly, “that you only sold children’s books.”
“Of course!” Her eyes sparkled a useless, decorative sea green. “You need to come and visit us!”
He stalked the upper concourse after work, remembering that he was a monster. A pair of elderly men eyed his torso hurriedly as they passed on their power-walks. He wondered what it must be like to grow old into this wo
rld, to have to watch the planet slowly sink into vulgarity, everything swirling down toward a lowest common denominator. When he reached the large mall map, marking his furthest point on this floor, he realized he had no idea where he was going.
A few shops could be seen further along. As he walked closer, his perspective unfurled store names: The Nip Of The Lash, Fudge Factor, Sophisticated Devices. These were the stragglers, businesses that had no place in the high-pressure depths of the mall proper. He stopped in front of Sophisticated Devices. In an old newspaper article he’d had passed to him recapping Freddie Bolson’s death, he’d read that Freddie had erased incriminating photographs from the hard drive of his home computer. The police would only say that they had painstakingly recovered the incriminating material by use of “sophisticated devices.”
Inside the store, folding tables held bins of old cell phones, watches, portable CD players, and dusty disposable cameras. At the back of the store, he found things only peripherally connected to the world of electronics: fish tanks, binoculars, phonograph needles, boxes of old compact discs and batteries. The middle-aged man behind the cash register acknowledged him with a polite nod.
What could he say to Astrid? Gathering a pile of dirty, blinking laundry in the center of his room later that night, he thought over polite phrasings, clarifications, excuses for why he could no longer be her pretzel vendor. The hallway outside his door crooked a menacing left into darkness past the stairs. He found the light switch and tottered past several desolate, doorless bedrooms with his arms full. Near the back of the house, he found a cramped, damp alcove with a stackable washer/dryer combo growing a skin of rust. Rahway had sent him into the world with fifty dollars, two trousers, four boxer briefs, eight socks, a thin windbreaker, and a cheap duffel bag printed with the blobby logo of the NJ Department of Corrections.
On the tag of a shirt, he read THIS GARMENT BELONGS TO THE TAXPAYERS OF UNION COUNTY DO NOT WASH. He stuffed the shirt into the drum of the washer anyway, remembered Morton’s iron handshake, and dug it out in a dull rage. Rummaging on a plastic shelf for detergent, he found an envelope from the NJ DOC bearing his name.
He retrieved a check for $2,241 and a slip listing a few deductions he didn’t understand. Chang leaned against the dryer and exhaled. He vaguely remembered, long ago, someone complaining from a neighboring cell about earning only eight cents an hour. They had been paid. He had pondered this occasionally at the end of an eight-hour shift in the clean, expansive U ward laundry hall, thinking of the day’s sixty-four cents accruing in a distant bank account. He remembered nights when he’d floated off to sleep trying to work out the math.
“I’m becoming a regular here.”
He handed her the banana-chutney pretzel. “There are still a few flavors you haven’t tried.”
“Don’t try to sell me on that nasty shrimp thing. I won’t do it. What sort of drinks do you have?”
He listed off the sodas, wondering if she could see perfectly well, if she was some sort of spy send sent to monitor him.
“Are your other regulars as methodical as I am?”
“Ah…” He paused. “You should probably know something.”
She seemed to scan the space between them, meeting his eyes and then drifting off. “Yes?”
“I’m not.”
“You’re not?”
He cleared his throat. “I, ah.” He looked up to a louvered metal duct, far overhead, all that displaced air.
“I don’t have any other regulars.”
She laughed, eyes drifting again. “Good. They’re a pain in the ass.” He laughed, too, catching the slight waver in his own voice.
She finished a bite and said, “They are. All of ’em. The same mothers always whining about the fourth Hubert Hedgehog book when there’s a great big poster near the cash register as big as can be—Denise told me—saying that we won’t even be taking preorders until Labor Day. As if we had a secret stash in the back, you know? And creepy regulars, too. This one woman who keeps buying a copy of Harry The Dirty Dog every week. Isn’t that strange?”
He nodded, then grunted to indicate the nod.
“And I hear things, too, you know. I mean…I pay attention to sounds more than most people.” This was the first time she’d acknowledged her blindness. “You know, small things. Like this guy who comes in every day for story hour. I can tell by his sniffles. But he never says anything, no “hello.” People shouldn’t be ashamed to admit they like to hear children’s tales, you know? It’s so silly.”
“Yeah.”
Chang stared down at one tile.
“Maybe I’ll come down for story hour one of these days. When is it?”
That night he woke to the usual pinprick on his leg. Later, he dreamed he was back at his parents’ house. He was in the kitchen, hauling clothes out of the refrigerator, trying to force the wet laundry into the freezer. “Hey, Dad,” he yelled into the next room. “How do I work this?” But there was no answer. He found the living room empty. His parents had fled. On the hall table he saw an envelope with his name on it, something they’d left behind, some sort of warning he was terrified to open.
The next day, Chang opened a checking account on his lunch break and bought a pair of binoculars at Sophisticated Devices. When his shift ended at six he made his way down to the balcony by the giant macaroni noodle. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for in Astrid’s store, and he didn’t see anything unusual. From his angle, one could only view the store’s marquee and about a dozen feet into the space. But he knew this was the dozen feet he’d need to watch.
He came back the next day on his lunch break, spotting nothing unusual. On day three of the stakeout, he carefully read his employee handbook, discovering that his forty-five-minute lunch break could fall anywhere in the shift. He arrived at his balcony perch an hour early and spotted his quarry. A thin man in a red cardigan arrived at Secret Garden, took a magazine from a front rack, and opened it without reading. This would be story hour. Chang watched the man’s face, recognizing an expression, an alertness. The man let his eyes stray off the printed page, scanning his vicinity without turning his head. Children drifted around this man, this stranger who moved about the width of the space, never venturing deep enough inside to be out of binocular range. It was one of the few riddles of life Chang knew the answer to. You need to stay toward the front of the store, he thought, so you can make a quick exit. He knew this routine.
The next day was Friday. He surveyed the lower levels for an hour after work, searching in vain, mindful not to miss the 7:20 bus. Riding the escalators up to the surface, he wondered what his options were. Would mall security believe him? Would Astrid?
He boarded the bus and found a space halfway in. With one fluid motion, Mr. Morton eased his huge body into the seat next to Chang and placed a giant steel hand on his thigh, pinning him in moving space.
“Mister Chanfield. I understand you’ve been watching children with a pair of binoculars.”
He sat limp under this grip, helpless.
“Well?” Morton asked, inching his face closer to Chang’s.
“They’re in my duffel bag,” he said quickly and quietly. “Take them.”
Morton relaxed his grip and leaned back, sighing.
“Sheldon, Sheldon. I’m morose. Do you know why?”
He shook his head, miserable.
“Sheldon, I’m morose because it looks like you are a nice guy, you don’t disrespect me, you always call in. But what it sounds like is that I will eventually have to tear your ass in half. Now, doesn’t that make you sad?”
“Yes,” Chang whispered.
In the bathroom with no door, he jerked a brush across his teeth, the only exposed part of his skull. Inflation had warped the value of everything in this world, but not so badly he couldn’t plot a course. The $2,200 could get him somewhere—get to New York, buy some new shirts, and
catch a flight to Mexico, maybe.
He rinsed and spit into the stained sink. Sitting on the toilet, Chang pondered what he would do in Mexico, penniless, unskilled, knowing no Spanish. Maybe not Mexico then. The USA was big enough to lose himself in. Figure out some way he could get access to Depo-Lupron. Find a corner of the world where people were still civil, where he didn’t have to see reflections of himself. Figure out how the world runs. Learn how to avoid detection for the rest of his life.
“Yo.” He looked up to see Hector leaning in the doorway, eyes at half mast.
“You want a cream-cheese sandwich?”
Chang shook his head, wondering if he was supposed to acknowledge the invasion of privacy.
“Listen. Sheldon. I need to ask you something, and I need a straight answer. If I start up a neighborhood watch, are you in or out?”
In front of his stand, Astrid chewed her lip gently.
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Your call,” he said. “Yes or no?”
“Oooohhh. Hmm. What do you think?”
“Personally, I’ve never had the spicy strawberry shrimp.” He rubbed his eyes, sleep deprived. “But then again, I’m not as adventurous as you, Astrid.”
“You’re not,” she said, face brightening. “Good point. Hand it over.”
“I would like to now formally apologize, on behalf of the Pretzel Connection company of Rochester, New York,” he announced, “that there is no plaque to award you upon completion of all twelve flavors.”
“I’ll keep your name out of my angry letters.”
The day before, he’d gone to Sophisticated Devices and bought a dusty laser pointer. The man behind the counter had rung him up while chuckling, saying only, “Trick or treat!” Even with Chang’s bad eyes, the tall stranger had been easily visible in front of the Secret Garden. Chang had waited for a moment to present itself. Next to the magazine rack, the man had crouched by a tiny boy.
All the rituals came back to Chang instantaneously, the astonishing ease of transferring trust. He aimed the laser pointer and fired. Two floors below, a small red dot appeared on the back of the man’s head. Chang joggled the light, and it caught the attention of the little boy. His tiny hands went up, shielding his eyes. The tall stranger pivoted, looking around, and the boy stepped away, back into the gravity of a parent. The tall man had stood, also squinting, the dot playing off his face.
Sophisticated Devices/Make No Mistake Page 2