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Posted: Sat Sep 25, 2004 4:19 pm by channing
The approaching evening found me sitting next an unpopular bed, smoking to high heaven.
Department store display beds are funny little things; they exist in a kind of perpetual design flux. On the one hand, you want something that suggests an unquestionable bed-ness so that you can extrapolate the look of that comforter into your guest room, but on the other hand, as a department store manager, you're probably really concerned with maximizing your net floorspace profitability ratio or something corporate-y like that. The end result is a weird little midget thing, largely unsuitable for any practical purpose other than giving you a thing to drape your bedroom sets on. It's really too small for anything else.
On the other hand, when you put a gerbil in one, it suddenly looks ridiculously huge.
"Very good," remarked Dana, ineffectually fluffing at the thick fabric with her little paws. "Excellent."
"Glad you approve," I said. I think I was being dry.
"Oh, yes!" she said. "This is quite nice." Dana sighed and snuggled around under the lip of the novelty comforter. "In the wild, you know," she continued, "my gerbil cousins regulate heat by secreting a sticky, dark substance from their Harderian Glands, which, when spread about, reduces the effective albedo of the coat and heightens energy absorption. But this quaint and characteristically human 'blanket' idea has, I must admit, a certain degree of charm."
"Mm hm," I said, scratching at my wig and wiggling around inside the black slinky thing in an attempt to get it to fit right. "Just keep it down, Miss Chatty. We're keeping a low profile here."
"Right," said Dana, nodding brightly.
Sears had been my choice. The idea of shacking up in a "proper" bed had been hers, as had the acquisition of a "proper" nightgown; Mattel's Summer line, prete-Ã-porter, if you must know. Daylight activity was not something that came easy to Dana, and if she was going to sit around in a department store doing, quote, "absolutely nothing to further the Great Cause," she was darn well going to take a nap for a while. Just as well, I suppose. Idle gerbils do the Devil's work.
Still, the bed was a bit much -- especially for a couple of ostensibly inconspicuous characters like us -- but Dana had insisted. And because I didn't want her going off on one of her accusatory rants where I am cast as a puppet infiltrator drawing MJ-12 payroll, I folded, and instead concentrated my efforts on finding the least noticeable bed on the floor.
And, wonder of wonders, I found it. Tucked away in a rather unfashionable corner was a probably-yellow child's bedset featuring the heroine from Disney's ill-conceived Hunchback of Notre Dame remake. Being as its source film was several years out of the public consciousness and never a merchandizing gold mine to begin with, I figured this particular bedroom set was batting in the low zeros as far as consumer interest went, and doing a number on the aforementioned floorspace profitability ratio to boot. That it was still here at all was a minor miracle.
In short, nobody would be looking too closely at this little corner of Sears. And that's just how I liked it.
Dana yawned, hugely. An errant cinder from my smoke scorched a very tiny hole on the face of Frollo, or whatever the hell that goat's name was. Mindful of the possibility of conflagration, I pivoted a bit to the right.
"Yes," said Dana, tucking herself in beneath the hem of the bedspread. "This is marvelous."
She was silent for a moment.
"The Cinnabon will be open, will it? In this mysterious post-closing Mall that you have told me about?"
"Should be," I said, vaguely, still scanning the floor for security. "Among other things."
"Good," she remarked, sounding satisfied. "Long have I dreamed of harnessing the unique quantum properties of their legendary Makara cinnamon to a doom engine of my own devising, and at last, realization is at hand!" She smiled. "Oh, Zeta. Plotting to destroy things with you is such fun!"
"Right," I said. "I could have picked one up while you were off rooting through garbage cans, you know. Then we'd be one down."
"IDIOT!" cried Dana, sitting bolt upright, though notably still dwarfed by the pillow. "DULL THING! It must be hot, fresh cinnamon! Nothing else will do! I refuse to incorporate stale and impotent cinnamon into my state-destroying laser!"
"Mm hm," I said, again.
"Ergo," she said, calming down and settling back under the covers, "we must find our cowbell and the Fingerbone of Saint Mannox first. Then, once our doom-wedge is functioning at its full, matter-smashing charge, we will feed the cinnamon roll into our targeting computer... AND MONTANA WILL DIE! DIE, I TELL YOU, DIE!!!"
"Let's focus on killing Montana later," I said. "You go to sleep now. When you get up, we'll go find the Fingerbone."
"Oh, can we?" asked Dana, her voice a picture of childlike bliss, as though this whole crazy idea weren't hers to begin with.
I looked at her for a moment. "Sure, Dana," I said, at last. "But for now, go to sleep. I'll keep an eye out for the fuzz."
A passing child, four or five years of age, trailing behind a harried, older lady who did not spare us a glance. The first to penetrate our hitherto-inviolate barrier of unpopularity.
"Look, mama!" he pointed out, already vanishing from our view. "Esmerelda!"
"That's nice, Brendon," said his mother, her voice trailing off into the distance. "Come along, now. Mummy is late for her cardio-boxing."
I blotted it out. I can handle only one weird thing a day, Mr(s). Brendon/Breanna Flynn. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good, either.
I smoked. The gerbil bustled restlessly under her covers. The day began its long, slow, windup, melting slowly into evening like ice cream on a plate.
For a moment, no noise but the distant shuffle of clerks and the susurrant hum of the air handlers.
Then...
"Sing me to sleep, Dana?"
I glanced crosswise at her. "No."
"Please?"
"No. We're trying not to attract attention."
"When I rule everything, I'll give you a country all for yourself!"
"You gave me one already. Remember?"
"A bigger country!"
"Not interested."
Dana paused for a moment to reconfigure.
"I won't annihilate you?" she said, at last.
"Sorry," I said. Another breath of smoke.
Silence from Dana. An uncomfortably long silence.
I glanced at her again, which was a mistake.
Her lip was quivering. Her little gerbil lip.
She sniffled. Her eyes were large and very, very bright.
We held this position for a moment. My face was a mask.
Then, quietly and tunelessly, I began:
"It's hidden far away / But someday I may tell
The tale of mental tangle / When into your world I fell...
Instantly, she sighed, falling back into the enormous pillow, a smile of bliss alighting on her dark little muzzle.
"Without you now I'll wander soaking / Secretly afraid
'Cause in your grasp the fears don't last / (And some of them have stayed)..."
She was already there; her eyelids were drooping. When it has a clear destination, Dana's mind moves itself quickly from place to place. Her life is small, and ending fast. She doesn't have time to dally.
The chorus. Still quiet. Still tuneless. Still me.
I wheeled around because I / Didn't hear what you had said /
And saw you dancing with Elihu / Up on Leemor's bed
And I was foggy, rather groggy / You helped me to my car
The binding belt enclosing me / A sample in a jar..."
I trailed off. Verse two was unnecessary; Dana was fast asleep.
So it had worked. I expected it would. See -- and I'm spoiling a chapter of my book here -- there was a period in her life, sometime after the Incisor debacle, when Dana turned really inward, and became focused, obsessed, with plotting her own mental decay. Hardly a word about conquering the world. Hardly a word about the world outside at all. Instead of sketching death machines on cocktail napkins, Dana devoted her life to this sober, neat, well-labeled chart detailing her own personal decline. Every day she would run herself (or conscript me to help her run herself, depending) through an exhaustive series of psychological examinations. Then, when it was all finished, she spent hours and hours analyzing and juggling the data, boiling everything down to this one essential figure, which she called the DMSI, or, the "Dana's Mental Solidity Index." And then, with great solemnity, she would proceed to plot this one single point on a big piece of posterboard with an oversized Sharpie marker, connecting it to the dot previous in a grim sort of line graph. Sometimes I would help her when the Sharpie fumes overcame her and she started babbling on about flowers and elves, but for the most part, she insisted on doing this task alone.
The trend was unmistakable.
So day after day this went on. Another battery of tests, another period of furious analysis, another dot on the chart, another gently-sloping line. There was this one time, she got all happy about having gone up a notch, but when she rechecked her scores, she realized that she had made a basic arithmetical error in her tabulation, which sent her into even more of a funk.
"Arithmetic," she said to me, softly. "Arithmetic. I need differential calculus, Zeta. I need irrational math. I need non-Euclidian geometry. And I've just lost arithmetic."
There were no tests for the rest of the day. Or for the day after.
But the tests did continue. And every day it got worse, and worse, and worse. Not dramatically. You couldn't tell, to look at her. But that's what the tests were for.
And then, one day, things were different. On that day, Dana barely managed to drag herself awake, and when she came to me for her morning report, there was a deadness in her eyes. She dismissed me and the tests she had instructed me to prepare the night before, went immediately to her DMSI graph, and began extrapolating. I can't say it was furious extrapolation, because she didn't bear herself with enough energy for that. But it was intense, focused, and very, very efficient.
In the end, she found the point where the prospective line met the zero mark, matter-of-factly labeled "Complete and Total Eradication". And it wasn't so very far off.
We stood there for a moment in silence, looking at that grim point where line met line.
Then, Dana cleared her throat, and promptly widdled all over her graph.
Eyes bright again, she then crossed to her little iPod player (the acquisition of which I'm going to be detailing in Chapter 8 ) and cued up the very song I had just sung to her. Phish, "Sample in a Jar", off of the Hoist album. And she lost herself in the music.
"Dance" would have been too kind, and too careful, a term. What she did was simultaneously, more, and less. What she did was move; move, like a thread, dangling in the air, pushed by the sound, caught forever and bound up between a shake and a handful of twirls. For a moment, there was no her anymore at all. She was the music. There was nothing else.
And then, when the song ended, she started afresh on her plans for her newest laser beam.
And stepwise, and through various happenstances, we made our way to the now. Here. A wicker chair and a phony bed deep within a department store of a very large shopping mall. Me in a wig and a black... thing... from a lingerie store, her in a tiny little Barbie nightgown. Waiting for sunset. Looking for a cowbell and the fingerbone of a saint.
We were in the final stages now, if Dana's predictions were to be believed. And it was starting to show. The plans were getting stranger and stranger, the linguistic brain farts coming more and more frequently. And still I tagged along. It's true I had stayed with her all this time for... reasons of my own. Selfish reasons. But while I would have scoffed at this idea not half a year previous, I was coming to feel that maybe there was more to this than could be explained as me throwing a bone to my personal angst, more to this than me seeing a project through to its completion.
I realized, and this made me blink, that I would miss the little creature when it was gone.
She. When she was gone.
Blink.
Parts of her were already gone.
Blink.
I should already have been saying goodbye.
Blink, and hold.
No more thinking like that. Just sit back, relax. Light another cigarette. Watch out for the smokies on your tail. Get your gerbil all nice and rested.
And wait... for the coming of the AfterMall.
Posted: Mon Sep 27, 2004 11:24 pm by jhrice
For a long time I sat waiting. I would have watched the shadows grow long, but in this corner of Sears, there were no windows. Eventually my mind began to wander the way it probably shouldn't, and I mulled over several imponderables. Then I came back to the problem of Brendon Flynn. The problem was clearly getting bigger. If this trend continued, It wouldn't be long before the entire world was populated by Brendons. It occurred to me that there were only two logical extremes. Either, I would be the solitary nonpareil in the Brendonverse, or worse, I would become a Brendon too. Either outcome was horrifying. I was lost in my thoughts and must have had a worried look on my face, because I was suddenly startled to hear Dana ask “What's wrong?”
Posted: Mon Nov 08, 2004 2:53 am by channing
AfterMall!
The very name conjures up images of...
...not very much, actually. Most people wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about were I to mention it. My current biographee, a crazed hyperintelligent lab animal with aspirations toward world domination, (who, by very fact of her existence, might be expected to have at least a basic grounding in Weird) had never heard of it. Were it not for one night with a girl named Abby in Santa Monica, I might not have heard of it either.
Abby was a full-time surfer and a part-time beach bum, and was studying to become a hydrodynamicist in her spare time. To pay the bills, she was employed at one of those water-massage kiosks they set up in your more fruity malls, you know, the things where you lay in a rubber envelope and they spray the back of the rubber envelope with high-pressure water bursts to reinvigorate you for another couple hours mashing your way through the crowds to finish your regularly-scheduled indentured servitude to the lords of capitalism. Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about. Doesn't matter; I described it. Anyway, we got to talking one day when I dropped by the mall where she worked to pick up a focal-plane shutter for my camera (don't ask), and she impressed me with her lackadaisical, good-natured contempt for her customers and her knowledge of arcane pharmaceuticals. She offered me sixteen milligrams of wicked Polynesian flower distillate and a guided tour through a slice of life that few people had ever seen, and I took her up on both.
That night passed in a dizzying flash. For eleven hours I was euphoric, tremulous and horny as a tree frog, and every third object I saw was bathed in violet light. This I attribute to the drugs I was on. The rest...?
...I dunno. You aren't going to believe me when I tell you this, but I will swear to you up, down, and six different kinds of sideways that the shopping mall you see by the light of day is only half the story. If that. After the movie theaters close, after the last guards depart, after everything is locked up good and tight and ready for a night of darkened slumber, that's when the freaks come from the woodwork, doing their freak things, running their freak stores in a mad carnival of spastic joy. They set up booths in the open spaces, establish shops in the darkened storefronts where stores once were, and sometimes found entire businesses in places that shouldn't technically exist at all. I don't know how they get there. Abby mentioned something about "secret underground parking garages" but I was too high to get caught up in the particulars, and later experimentations with the phenomenon of AfterMall had yielded inconclusive answers. We twirled flaming batons, roasted a wildebeest and danced to the bizarre but inescapably catchy stylings of an Electric Hurdy-Gurdy man. Saracen warriors gave us the time of day and when they released the flamingos, that's when the real fun began.
Afterwards, the next morning, we sat on the beach, watching the sun rise and drinking massive quantities of Gatorade to stave off sudden death from electrolyte shock, an unfortunate and common side-effect of the herbal concoction I had imbibed the previous night. For a long time we didn't speak. We just sat there, listening to the tide roll in.
Eventually I said, "Was that even real?"
"Oh, yeah," said Abby, dreamily. "And, you know what?"
She touched me on the chin.
"No," I said.
"Girl," she said, "it's not just Santa Monica. It's everywhere."
And she was right. I had spent a long time looking, and had found that the phenomenon wasn't confined to Santa Monica. Nor even the coasts. Cross the country, nationwide, sea to shining sea. From F.A.O. Schwartz to Poplar &#@!$ Bluff in Rat's Ass, Nebraska. Everywhere you go. There's the AfterMall. You just have to know what you're looking for, and the way becomes clear.
But for all my travels, I had never seen the AfterMall of America.
It didn't let me down.
AfterMall! Ten times the weirdness of Burning Man with half of the pretention. Dana and I emerged from Sears into a three-level world of riotous color and deepest night. Stiltwalkers clothed in iridescent fabric the hue of a starling's wing, their faces masked with executioner's hoods, chanting in the Ionic mode. A man with sequined jacket and a flamethrower who would roast marshmallows and artichokes for you from thirty feet away provided you (a) held the skewer yourself and (b) gave him two bits for his trouble. Wandering groups of men and women beneath those Chinese dragon floats who called themselves "The Collective" and insisted on asking everyone they met whether they were in possession of any cubic zirconium and if so, could they purchase it? An entire platoon of the Soviet Army Band Horn and Drum Corps, looking lost, disoriented, and about twenty years out of fashion. COMPLETELY NUDE MEN.
And the shops! Egg Foo Jung, an Oriental eatery decorated with portraits of the great Western philosophers. Eau Contraire, a popular counter-culture hangout that served water, water, and nothing but water. Used Concrete Rebar Unlimited, which was actually pretty limited, when you thought about it. French Things 'R' Nous, which sold anything, absolutely anything, so long as it was both portable and French. Bad Ground, a coffeehouse staffed by unsmiling Native Americans in full tribal dress, whose counters bore notes to the effect that 10% of all proceeds would go to the Second Ghost Dance Fund for Reversing the Colonization of the West. The SaTUNEic Verses, which dealt in illegally-burned J-pop CDs based on the works of Salman Rushdie. I could go on, but you get the point. But for its grander scale, it was much like other AfterMalls I had experienced, although the elaborate infrastructure of the Mall of America allowed for certain excesses not possible in other, smaller AfterMalls. I will say three words and leave the rest to your collective imaginations: Roller Coaster Sacrifices.
And, as I suspected, the Cinnabon was open as well. Because even if you are a freak of society and nature, damn, those things are good.
We were quickly lost in the crowd, which was refreshingly free of Brendon Flynns.
"This is amazing," said Dana, from her position on my shoulder. No-one much paid attention. In the normal world, whenever Dana acts weird, people just get this glazed look on their faces and walk away. Here in the AfterMall, though, Dana just wasn't all that special. It seems the truly Weird can never really come into their own. "Just amazing! You're saying this goes on all the time?"
"Yeah," I said, weaving my way past a group of people engaged in the act of shoving lit sparklers into their various bodily orifices.
"Even in the little malls?"
"Yeah," I said, again. "To a greater or lesser extent. The small city all-but-abandoned ones are some of the most popular, actually. All the empty storefronts give AfterMallers plenty of room to work."
"Wow," said Dana, looking around in childlike wonderment. "In both my years, I have never seen anything to compare to this."
"Mm hm," I said.
"Look!" she cried out, tugging annoyingly at the shoulder of my black thing. "A Paladin supply shop!"
And indeed it was, staffed by a bored-looking red-haired woman in field plate armor. A nametag bolted to her breastplate read "Hi! I'm PureHeart".
"Hello, PureHeart!" said Dana, leaping all the way to the counter from my shoulder. "Tell me what you sell here!"
PureHeart sighed and cracked her gum. "We got it all," she said. "Greaves, vambraces, codpieces, breastplates, helmets, gauntlets, boots, religious icons, spurs, plumes, tabards and Swords Holy Avenger."
"Fascinating!" said Dana. "What about warhorses?"
"Yup," said PureHeart. "We got those too."
I raised one eyebrow. "You keep live horses for purchase here in the mall?"
"Nah," said PureHeart. "You see, you pick out one of these little tickets..." (she did so,) "...and then I scan it with the gun here," (again, she did so, and it made a little 'bleep' noise,) "and then, when you've paid for it, I give you the ticket, and you go down to the stables and you claim your warhorse."
"Wow," said Dana. "I'd like a warhorse, please!"
"Dana!" I said, warningly.
"Sure," said PureHeart, ignoring me. She scanned the little ticket again, and again, it made the 'bleep' noise. "Cash or major credit card accepted," she said. "If you'd like, I can--"
"One thing, though," said Dana, wringing her paws. "I'm evil. Is that going to be a problem?"
PureHeart looked at us for a second, then quirked her mouth. "Yeah, actually," she said, drawing a Lucerne Hammer from beneath the counter. "And, in addition to not selling you anything, per store policy, I'm supposed to smite you both with holy power if you don't leave the store, like, instantly. Boss gets real mad if we don't get at least a 90% smite rate," she explained, apologetically.
"She's new," I said, grabbing Dana off the counter and backing away. "And we're going."
"Hokay," said PureHeart. "Thanks for shopping PaladiNation!"
And we left, and lost ourselves again in the crowd.
We wandered for some time, in a directed fashion, away from PaladiNation, just in case PureHeart got it into her head that she wanted to up her smite quota by hunting us down and destroying us. I didn't know how any of this was legal, or even possible, but extended exposure to the AfterMall teaches you to turn what few rational parts of your brain you have left to "off".
Eventually we found a bench in an out-of-the way wing of the mall that was comfortable, clean and unoccupied by persons in various states of sexual congress. I sprawled in an exhausted fashion. Some of us didn't get a nap this evening.
"I am disheartened," said Dana, poring over her notes.
"Whyzat?" I slurred.
"The relic!" she stated, firmly. "While I most certainly agree that the resting place of the Fingerbone of Saint Mannox is more likely to be accessible from this second and far more interesting mall you have introduced me to, the fact remains that we still have no idea of its location. And the AfterMall, for all its curious charm, does not seem to have a map associated with it."
"I'm not sure you can map the AfterMall," I said. "Something about it defies codification."
"Nevertheless," said Dana, her muzzle buried in clutched paper. "We are still no closer to finding it than we were before! All we know is what I have obtained from the writings of sixteenth-century French mystic Guy de Mont Ange -- that the Fingerbone of Saint Mannox will be unearthed in a place guarded by and I quote, 'Three Deadly Challenges'. That could be anywhere!"
I looked up, across the mallway, my eyes bleary. Then I raised a finger to point.
"How 'bout there?" I said.
Dana followed my point with her gaze, to an old and cobwebby store-front whose entrance was flanked by two great stone lions. The sign above, in blazing neon, read:
"THREE DEADLY CHALLENGES (-o-rama)."
Dana blinked.
And then, a sinister look spread across her face. She rubbed her paws together deviously.
"Yes," said Dana. "Yes. That will be it."
[Ed. Note. Channing - an entire post with no italics? You were slipping, my friend...]
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