by Evan Dara
Happily, other shop-managers don’t find what’s happening incomprehensible, as they’re concentrating on being scared or, in one case, inconsolable, that in the case of the manager of the shop that’s closing down.
Inside, things are not-proceeding swimmingly. Now dozens and dozens, even hundreds of people are responding richly, imperceptibly to the hot calm, the designer quiet, the haute needlessness, the Xtreme easefulness. It is the very pinnacle of luxe nothing. And it shows, because it doesn’t show: as is unwritten in any book, or flowchart, or PowerPoint template, as more people gather the quieter the café gets. Fade up as fade out. More is less. A synergy of stillness.
And the Samby just gives, and gives back, with sitting there, and trips to the john, and descents into sleep. Eats some, too.
And here are muscled men all over the street’s pretty bricks hauling off inventory from failed shops, pulling out pants, and hangared shirts, and motherboards, and tableware, and really awful- and uncomfortable-looking platform sneaks. And here are managers not even bothering to unroll the Everything’s Gotta Go windowsigns, or trying to keep resellable fixtures in resellable condition, or finally trying to get friendly with teen-girl employees, cause the managers are updating their CV’s on backroom computers while they can still use them, and the printers.
And now most unprofessional sloppiness, and dirt, and disarray, including toppled racks, syncopate even more shopfront windows, as the stores give up on snagging even the customers who don’t care about commercial slovenliness, in fact who hunt for it as a marker for price-cut opportunities, and now phone calls from regional supply-centers and national headquarters are going unreturned, and opened, grimed, greasy-fingered merchandise is being secreted off to obscure corners, for unnoticeable nighttime appropriation, occasionally in big bags, underneath paid-for modestly-ticketed items.
And here are realtors scouting and sniffing about the street’s now-available properties, bearing checklists, and here are no more realtors scuttling about the properties, as they decide to wait for the prime locations, even the anchors, to come free, when they see the tumbled drapes and castoff shoeboxes and unconed coffee-filters and cut-label sweaters in more, ever more stores, piled unrulily, flung maniacally, and then think that there are no prime locations any more, or corners or extra-wides or -tails that might serve as anchors, that architectural features and/or details have become irrelevant, and that they might make the break to residential.
But in the stasis-oasis things are unchanging radically, definitively, as the floor- and chair-sitting neo-homesteaders get unbusy with blinking their eyes, and relaxing their limbs, and ignoring lowering blood-pressure, and less. They shift and settle and stretch but it’s as if they don’t shift and settle and stretch, cause all that’s becoming invisible in the emerging dispensation. And the sounds and noises from outside do not come in, they’re masked or blocked by the non-wall of quietness, or made silent in themselves by vigilant indifference.
And now stores up and down the street go down, closing, darkening, flooding into nothingness, leaving heaped debris and blackscuffed floors and posters nodding from tape-unclutched corners. The stores are getting out, racing out, galloping out, leaving pillaged facilities and scant memories for their buildings’ owners, some of them in possession for thirty years or more, and now scanning and jockeying to keep their rents just under their neighbors’ rents, which here means their neighbor’s new rents, newly lowered, for which already, here, there are no takers. And now their neighbors become their nemeses as the neighbors will take anything, anything, just to get a signing, forcing them to go lower still, to anything, almost anything, just let me cover costs, that’s it, or just eke out a few pennies from this, from these awful nothings.
And now here the street, the corporation that is the street, holds meetings, then meetings about meetings, during which the people in the meetings, minds pistoning, start to consider their options, their personal options, and to score private pads with urgent and self-serving calculations, and now they call private meetings with private advisers to review their choices, their personal equity positions, their individual strategies for moring and maximizing and mosting, but quickly, furiously quickly, before everything, before everyone, whatever it is, they must come before it. But before does not happen, all the private pad-scoring and meeting is worthless and mistaken, cause before before the street, the corporation that is the street, is no more, its assets are no more, its board of directors is no more, its secretaries and quarterly projections and teak credenzas and magnetized paperclip-dispensers and social usefulness and automatic greeting smiles at street restaurants are no more, and immediately after before before the boardmembers and governors-general are loath to talk, they do not want to talk, they refuse to mention Pearl Street, even to acknowledge the name of that shoddy misprision and hideous error.
—But yeah. He got it. He went in and—
—But how—?
—And we didn’t—?
—Oh, man.
—So now we gotta think about putting a watch on the plates.
—Fuck.
—Yeah.
—But that’s like agony, man. Take fucking forever.
—Yeah. Lot of damn paperwork.
—All that stuff’s hard to control inter-state.
—Yeah, Stannie.
—Fucking scumbag. So OK. Let’s, I’ll—
—Good. Thanks.
—Then Lord just let him get into one accident, or one ticket, ’n—
—’N I have another idea. We keep this card active.
—What?
—Yeah. Use it as a trace.
—Thought about that too—
—But what’s, how’s—
—We tell, what’s this one?, Citibank/Visa, we have them put a tight ceiling on advances and expenditures, ’n then use it to follow where—
—Good. Good idea. Fucking smart.
—Yeah. Really.
—Good. So then we’ve got to cover the uncollected outlays—
—Ah.
—But when we collect we just put them in as expenses.
—Ah. Good. So OK. I agree. Stan?
—I’m down. Absolutely.
—Good. Normally the ceiling’s either fifty or a hundred, but in this case—
—No way I’m goin’ any more than fifty with this fucker.
—Sounds about right.
—So OK. My thought too. So I’ll set it up ’n—
—But Phillie, I mean, is it gonna do anything for us? I mean, look at the sheet. The scumbag’s crawling all over the country.
—Yeah.
—Fucking bug.
—I hear ya—
—This human pestilence is obviously trying to dodge us. Runnin’ around ’n thinking we’re gonna—
—Not at all.
—Yeah? So, what.
—The guy’s leaving clues.
—Stop it—
—I’m sure of it. The guy—
—You mean the sick sick fucker.
—The same. The evidence is there. He wants us to know. He wants someone to know.
—Right—
—He wants us to get him—
—You’re effin’ nuts.
—Come—
—Phillie, this guy is a leech and a swindler and a scum, everything about him’s fucked through and through, and if like civilization does not stop this shit-turd subhuman aphid then we’re like no better than—
—I agree—
—OK? And I for one am living for the possibility of ramming the sword of human justice right through the sternum of that gutterswine conjob foulstench fuckup.
—Yeah.
—Like I mean do you really think this ingrate fuckdump is human enough to feel guilty about anything? Do you really believe he’s capable of any human emotion at all? Isn’t that like presupposing some kind of human linkage for which there’s like absolutely no evidence of any kind? Forget it, man. Forget it. He is so far below the radar
of having a human pulse that we should just think of him as another species, OK?, a lowscum subtype of which there is thankfully only fucking one. And the fact that he senses absolutely nothing wrong is proof of his crimes. ’Cause the more one of these swillmeisters are guilty the less he feels it. That’s how he gets away with it. Short-circuit in his gnarling head lets him be evil and feel zilcho. Most offensive fucking defense mechanism there is. ’N—
—’N come on, Arch. We’re doin’ this because it’s our job.
—Yeah. That too. But that ain’t the only—
—’N we get paid for it.
—That too, thank God.
And the cries, the up-pitched and throated cries that appear up and down the street, that wail and peal up and down the street, that appear to echo where there is no echo cause there are so many they seem like echoes, the employees’ and the assistant managers’ heart-flung cries and heaven-held hands of exultation and full rejoicing that this is over, that this is ended, that they do not have to come back, that they never have to return to this any more.
And here, when I go back into the kitchen, after leaving a short stack of blueberry-buttermilks with a chair-sitter all but beatific in the rear room, I see on the Vidal Board that someone has put up A Viler Dog. And so I understand, and turn to see that Mayuck is threading his way through the crowd, the placid crowd, delicate step by delicate though sometimes stumbling step, and that when he looks up he’s smiling, and that he’s bearing documents, venerable contracts filled with reciprocities and considerations and clauses. And Agnes and I say we can’t be sure we can accept a continuation of our existing rent, or even a, thank you, ten-percent reduction on our existing rent, who could want that, and we tell him, quietly, with perfect speech, that we’ll get back to him, and after he smiles and I turn away I know he’s gone when I see that the Vidal now says Id Love-Rag. But maybe that’s just a request for a Eubie Blake tune.
And here now we get to initiate a concept, with the pedestrians gone and the stores closed and the wastebaskets untended and the buskers off to B school and the thing-drifts beginning, the scudding and tumble-down drifting of tester bottles and coffeecup sleeves and try-on-room numbers, and vacuum-outsmarting scuzz and bag handles and rebate register-slips and torn giftbox-lining paper, all now dirty and ugly, all fallen from pockets or cuffs or fingercurves or breast-pressing arms or countertops or racks, and now ignored, and unnoticed, and grubby, the concept Ghost Mall.
Are there looters? We don’t know. Time is a vandal. Hangars, then wrap-twine, then chargecard readers begin to disappear, then separable drawers then shoe mirrors then more. And tapemeasures are gone and backup bulbs are gone, and watercooler bases and spare little jutting display-shelves for single sneakers.
And CD slots and handsoap and slide-on sawblade display-case locks and drop ceilings. And excelsior, and dime-sleeves, and carpet flakes, and nametag sheaths. Gone. All gone.
And now more substantial features and fixtures are disappearing, many-leveled presentation hutches and thick-leg tables and entire checkout areas, the registers and receipt spikes and partitioned desks, the bag-stacks and bookmarks and pen- and tape- and stapler-filled enclaves, the whole lot. They are leaving, they are departing, the hidden sound-systems, the silent-alarm relays, the staff-only doors, the dowels. And now columns, weight-bearing and ornamental, and pilasters, same, and track lighting and spots and ambients. Gone, they are gone. They are gone.
And the racks, the racks, all of the racks, and the standees and the lowboys and the settees and the swivel chairs, vanishing, leaving us, finally leaving. And the mantels and the lintels and the all-weather carpeting, disappearing, leaving, absenting. And they are taking the signs with them, too, all of them, every one, the printed and the handdrawn and the laminated and the matte, bold and block and cursive and sans-serif, outlined and italicized, color-fielded and benday’d, S and M and L and XL and onward, posted or suspended or crossbar-gripping or leaned or placed, ! and + and $ and !!!! and &, departmental and directional, informing and suggesting and alerting, notifying, identifying, clarifying, amusing, asking, assuring, benefiting, specifying and now finally vanishing, leaving, leaving us, leaving us be.
Escalator tread, escalator pulleys, escalator handgrips, escalator rotors, escalator cams, all of it, out, finally out, forever out, accompanied by neon tracery and honeycombed a/c filters and SKU print-outs and thick wands of orange highlighter. Dispersing, forever, and disappearing, forever, the overhangs and underlays and backings, the inventory lists and inventory order-forms and inventory guidelines, the linoleum and plasticene and sour-reeking naugahyde and particle board, the Formica and aluminium, in tiles and planks and sheaths and slats, and rolls and segments, and bars and packs and tubes, and blocks and squares and tips and edging and ends, in gross, in tens, in dozens, in units, in hundreds and in hundreds of hundreds, in ounces and in pounds, in kilos and tons, long tons, too, getting out, going away, letting us be without them.
And the wall mirrors, and the compact mirrors, and the small ovoid mirrors suspended in shape-echoing frames, and the unfoldable full-body mirrors, and the less-lit backroom mirrors preparing staffers for the other mirrors, and the drawer handles, and the door handles, and the sliding-door finger slots, and the a/c compressors, and the a/c ducts, and the condensation discharge trays, and the freon stocks, and the radiators, and the gas-fired heaters, and the hot-air convectors, and the pilot lights, and the ankle-level grilles, and the ceiling-inset grilles, and the self-regulating thermostats, they are gone, get them gone, they are finally gotten out of here.
Picking up, pulling away, letting us return to other concerns, round objects, rectilinear objects, oblong objects, Baroque-alluding objects, orthogonal objects, sleek and hard and furry and boxed and soft to the touch, pliable and crisp, value-packed and now-enhanced, scented and monochrome, tearable and chemicalled, varicolored and plastic-ensheathed, but over, through, part of the past. Stacked things, hanging things, sorted things, dross, heaped things, shelved things, things arrayed to best catch the light, at last no more, no, no more, at last they are no more.
8/03: try UC again. S’s profs? mayb a neighb. is it poss tht the collective psychic damage of his disapp so great tht people are still procssing? encircling wout touching? like jp, ger aftr the war?
And now the roof trusses are invisible, and the catnic lintels are invisible, and the I-beams and the galvanized girts and the endwall sheeting are same, and the breather membranes are same, and the aluminum louvers are same, and the grouts and the monoglass insulation and the draft seals and the heater casings and the purlins and the weather-stripping and the self-smoothing screeds, they are invisible, forever gone and thus invisible, because they are useless, and unneeded, and unwanted, and purposeless, we don’t need them any more, there is no possible, conceivable, justifiable need.
So take them, take them all, the resin-stained fanlights, the A-307 high-tensile bolts, the self-drilling screws, the gypsum-based plasterboard, the amenity lighting, the trace heating vesicles, the encaustic floor tiles, the overdoor canopies, the PVC wall claddings, the air bricks, take them, take them all, they are yours, take them, just take them, just take.
And now we hail the wood joists and the laminates and the flitches and the decking, and the casework and the trim, and the fiberboard and the veneers, we hail them because they do not exist among us any more, because they have disappeared, because they have left us and have left us be, and so we hail them, we hail them, hail.
And with them go the flue liners and the cast stone and the dimension stone and the refractories, and the greenstone and the masonry anchors and the calcium silicate units and the granite, all of them, all, disrobing and disappearing and cutting us free, unhandling us and releasing us and letting us go, finally, finally, we have been let go.
And here, finally, is the liberation, from castings and from form liners and from cementitious underlayment, from trench covers and from ornamental extrusions and from post-tensioning
systems, and from cold-formed metal framing, and from treads and nosings, yea the liberation has come, it has come because all of it, all of them, has, have, and will forever be gone.
Air-infiltration barriers, cast-in-place anchors, concrete formwork, they have moved on, moved out, moved, thank the heavens, away from us, all the shingles and the skylights and the waterstops, all the vapor retarders, all the tool-driven fasteners, and all lead to rejoicing in their absence, in their brute termination, they have gone to where no one can find them, and to where no one, no one ever, will look.
And here is the end of built-in bituminous roofing, and of concrete curing, and of clinker brick, their reign is over, their damage undone, there is light and air and sky and not soffit panels, and not fluid-applied roofing, and not stranglehold banding, and not fascias, and not flexible flashing, and in place of those things there is much, so very much that is giving us so very much.
And the tackboards are knocked out and the filter underdrains are wiped out, and the metal furring and the display casework and the quarry tile and the checkrooms, all of them removed, all of them obliterated, all of them as well as the finish fasteners and the ice machines and the concealment assemblies and the telescoping stands, they are purged, gone, they are gone, gloriously, gloriously they are forever gone.
So applaud us, hail us, worship us for this, that the awnings are gone and the carpet cushions are gone, and the Portland cement and photovoltaic collectors and interdendritic spaces in the steel-substrate coatings, and the sheet carpet and the bintley lintels and the roller shutter frontages and the lead paint encapsulants and the piling, gone, they are gone, we are to be worshipped for this.
And vanquished now, conquered, entirely bested, the steel balustrading, and the dismountable partitions, and the blast-resistant modules and the doorframes, the window films and the electric fly-killers and the precast Terrazzo, they are slaughtered, they are vanished, they are away, so far away, and far away forever.