The Mall
Kate wants to go to the mall. In the last few weeks, we’ve gone to the Botanical Gardens and to the Waterfront and to a baseball game and on a hike in the mountains and on a tour of the old high school where that one movie was filmed and to the farmers market, and in the coming weeks we have plans to go to the zoo and on a ghost tour and another baseball game, but today she wants to go shopping and specifically she wants to go to the mall and so we go to the mall.
The mall isn’t magic. It isn’t special. It isn’t a fancy mall and we’re about to find out it mostly has all the same stores as our mall back home but we don’t know that yet. We haven’t been yet, so it’s still full of potential and possibility, which I guess means it is special and also kind of magic.
And also we haven’t been yet together. I’ve been plenty, although not recently. Not in twenty, twenty-five, maybe thirty years.
This is the mall of my youth. The mall I hung out at as a teenager, the mall my mom took me to for back-to-school shopping at the end of summer, the mall I think about and picture as the definition and prototypical example of a mall. Which also means it is special and also kind of magic.
The reason we’re near the mall of my youth, which is to say the reason we’re here where I grew up, is because I lost my job. And one of Kate’s childhood friends OD’ed. And my one best friend where we live isn’t talking to me. And Kate has never lived anywhere else and has always been curious and wanted to. And our relationship has been rocky and in trouble and like we need some kind of fresh start. And Kate is also barely talking to me, ever since I had an affair with the wife of my best friend where we live. But we’re working on it.
Which is all to say we needed something new, something different. For a variety of reasons—money, familiarity, lack of other ideas, etc.—our need for something new and different collapsed into the idea of somewhere old and not different.
We walk in and it hits me. Hard to describe what it is. A kind of know-it-when-you-feel-it feeling. And it hit me. Hard.
Almost every store is different, but also everything looks exactly the same. A copy of a copy. The Mall of Theseus.
One part time machine, one part panic attack. Panic attack because shopping always gave me a panic attack; panic attack because teleporting through time gives everyone at least a little bit of a panic attack. I assume. How could it not? Defying the laws of time and space and all that.
That Macy’s used to be Bon Marche, I say. Kate says, OK. And that Nordstrom used to be Frederick & Nelson, I say. Kate says, OK, again.
I look at Kate but she isn’t looking back at me and I wonder if it’s because she didn’t grow up with Bon Marche and Frederick & Nelson and so those stores don’t mean anything to her, or because of all of the same reasons she hasn’t really wanted to look at me, or because she’s just paying attention to which stores she wants to go in and isn’t, like me, currently living inside the body and looking out through the eyes and thinking via the firing synapses of the brain of her childhood self.
Kate keeps walking forward and I follow, though distracted. It’s like living inside a dream inside a memory inside a fog of deja vu.
Or maybe the Nordstrom used to be Mervyn’s? I say.
It’s hard to remember, all a little blurry. Every single memory from my childhood is right there, right in front of me, each just beyond my grasp. Mall as photo album of my youth, only I’ve been instructed I’m forbidden to touch.
Kate points at a store that I’ve never heard of and also I’m sure is the same store that’s always been there and says she’s going to try on some jeans. I tell her I’m just going to wander and feel nostalgic. Kate says, Of course you are.
I get an Orange Julius and it tastes different than I remember but also like I’d give my life for a cute girl to notice me. I get a Cinnabon and it tastes basically the same as I remember and also like my dad telling me I can get whatever I want on his weekend.
I go into the Apple Store that used to be KayBee Toys and I flip through cordless mice and headphones and phone cases thinking about Star Wars and GI Joe and M.A.S.K. action figures until an employee comes over and asks if they can help me find anything, shaking me out of it and I leave.
I go into Spencer Gifts and it looks nothing like it used to when I was little but it makes me feel exactly like it used to when I was little. When the front of the store was all gag gifts but the back was like a softcore version of an adult toy store. I wasn’t allowed back there. I go to the back of the store and it feels risque and exciting and a little dangerous though there’s nothing back there to make it feel like that. I do find a small door back there though. I get down on my hands and knees and open the door and inside it looks like a tunnel though it is too dark to tell for sure. I crawl inside and close the door behind me. I crawl and crawl and crawl and crawl and crawl and finally find another door at the other end. I reach out and grab the doorknob and it opens up into my childhood bedroom. I go to my bed and crawl inside my baseball sheets and curl up and fall asleep. It feels like I sleep for a lifetime. In the morning, my parents wake me up; my dad says he made pancakes and my mom says to hurry up, this week is her turn for carpool.
I wake up and I eat pancakes and I get dressed and grab my backpack and get in the car and my mom picks up three other kids in our neighborhood and drives us all to school. And I keep going through the day, and then the next, and the next, and the next, and the next.
I live through my entire life again, always doing something a tiny bit different than I did the first time through, and on our wedding day I vow to continue making different, better choices this time around, and I tell Kate that it is hard to explain but I think I’m an entirely different person than my previous self but also I’m still me. I’m maybe more me than ever.
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
