Smokescreen

 

The air quality index has got pictures of cartoon faces next to the ratings, I guess so you don’t have to try to parse out the numbers or figure out what ‘very dangerous’ means. You can see it.

The last few days, the face has been brick red with an expression somewhere between morose and angry, but today, it was purple and looked like it was suffocating or choking. I looked outside and couldn’t tell if the washed-out look of distant buildings and trees was due to smoke or fog—the weather called for both—but I decided not to risk taking my daughter to the park, but to the mall. Thinking, I suppose, that she’d be able to run around a little in there.

The car was still filmed with the ash that had fallen yesterday which has more of a dandruffy quality than the weightless snowy fluff that issues from a campfire. Must be all the houses, cars and bitumen roads the fire has melted that’s given its ash this ponderous quality. It must take a substantial heat even to be able to keep that greasy stuff floating through the air. I swiped my fingers across the car, the ash smeared like lotion.

From the car windows, the outside world looked flattened, toneless, like it had lost its affect and was now just a movie set or a photo in a newspaper. I drove through the ghost town haze with headlights that barely projected to the next car. The other cars were the same, all the lights had a dull brassy quality, like gold icons in a church. Perversely, it turns out, fire makes light look distant and cold. It gave me a headache to even be out in such a still, drained landscape. Even the tallest and most isolated weeds refused to sway and even that brightest star—the sun—refused to glow.  

I listlessly drove toward the mall, trying to imagine what it was we would do when we got there, trying to remember if I needed anything at home. I couldn’t think of anything. The news on the radio refused to mention the fires and kept intoning the successes in Taliban negotiations.

…

I’d gone to a mall earlier in the summer and seeing the lost-looking masked shoppers and the vacant storefronts, I realized didn’t feel sorry for the malls. After all, they’d killed the downtown shopping districts. It was only right that they should eventually suffer the same capitalistic fate they forced on their competitors.

I’d thought seeing this great institution come down would look depressing. But it didn’t. At least no more than it had watching the main streets of the 1980s shrivel up into seedy alleys of chipped sidewalks and unused parking meters. The demise of the malls was part of a cycle, and I’d already seen from my parents and their parents how little good it would do to lament the passing of the familiar; it certainly wouldn’t bring it back. And really, why should it matter to me that my daughter won’t have a mall to flit her pre-teenage years away in?

Despite the failings of the malls, many of them endure, nearly empty, coughing Muzak and Bath and Body Works odors on anyone who treads their airplane hanger environs. They are still serving as  meeting places in a world that hasn’t quite agreed on what should replace them.

…

The parking lot was ashen and still. Cars trolled through it like boats in a fog and shoppers slogged into the entrance like they knew they weren’t going to find what they were looking for inside but went anyway. I struggled to get my daughter out of the car and kept thinking of that purple-faced warning. What did it mean for such little lungs?

The Halloween Store, or whatever name if goes by these days was open and here, I thought, could have been what we came for, a little cheering up, a hint at the celebration that will probably be cancelled this year but would normally take place. Only at the door, an animatronic skeleton, red-eyed and screeching surprised us and I felt an unexpected indignity well up when my daughter stretched her lower lip out and her eyes started to water. Ah, what was I thinking coming in here? She understands how this is supposed to be threatening now. She is not the doe-eyed baby we carried in last year ambivalent to both horrific shrieks and loving coos.

We were nearly chased out of the store by a caterwauling of the electric undead which I normally would’ve enjoyed, but, now only seemed indicative of my own parental incompetence and rather than warn or scare, each cloaked and phantasmagorical figure seemed only there to chastise me. “Bad dad!” they all seemed to moan. “Bad dad!”

Out in the main corridor, other shoppers slunk past, masked, sullen and oddly diminutive. I encouraged my daughter to run, hoping she’d be able to get some energy out in the wide halls and put the Halloween decorations behind her, but the spectacle of the wide open area was too much for her and she stared and began to move through it with the hyperconsciousness of someone walking though a museum they’re going to have to write about for an upper-division class. She took in each empty storefront, rattled each chained door, scrutinized her dusty reflection in each empty display window and stopped to bemoan the fence wrapped around the little rocking rides for kids: a helicopter with a dog for a co-pilot, an ice cream truck and a Stewart Little car.

We walked all the way to the other end. My daughter’s excited footsteps reverberating from the shuttered storefronts. A shoe store was open. A hat store. One customer each. Everyone else, just trundled past, thinking their own thoughts. I noticed the light in the mall had the same gray and still quality it had outside and all the new rubber and polyester and floor cleaner made it perhaps even more nauseating than it had been outside with ash.

The end of the mall opposite that of the Halloween Store, was completely empty. All the store fronts were dim and vacant, save for a gym that looked to be doing alright. A woman was doing rapid leg-lifts in front of a window and a few stationary bikes whirred and wheeled behind the glass.

We played in the empty end of the mall, but I think my daughter could feel the emotional resonance of the place, or maybe it was just strange for her to be an institution that probably won’t even last into her adolescence. I remember this feeling as a kid running errands with my mom and stopping into small, flyblown TV and VCR repair shops with dusty spools of cable on the wall and, usually, a staticky radio broadcasting a sports game or the local weather. Walking into such places, I moved like one out of place in a world already gone and unfamiliar. If my daughter remembers malls at all, it will be in this way.

We got a cookie and a cup of coffee and found a table by the window in the food court. My daughter toying with her chocolate chips and me watching the haze through the floor-to-ceiling windows and feeling suddenly like I needed to cry, almost physically the way one feels they need to sneeze or cough.

Shoppers cleaved the gloom of the parking lot with the brightly-colored and loosely fitting clothes of sports teams. I sipped my coffee and watched them go by like I was watching birds in a park, feeling completely removed from the rhythms of their lives, whatever they were.

The whole time, this upbeat music had been playing over the loud speakers, as it usually does in such places, but I hadn’t paid it much attention. With the mask over my face and the smoky fog clouding up the windows, everything felt muffled but in the cavernous environment of the food court—you ever notice how echoey those places always are?—I could hear Pink crooning about how she was a tiger and we were going to hear her roar-or-or-or-or.

At first her protest seemed so stupid and meaningless as did the fact that everyone in the food court was being subjected to it, but gradually, as the song went on, this meaningless became absurdity and, in this way, it was like all the pieces suddenly fit: the suffocating air-quality face, the brassy headlights on the frozen world, the fallout shelter mall and its anonymous patrons/shelterers, the cackling animatronic skeletons, it was all held together by an absurdity so great that it was a force like gravity or stench. In that lonely fireside food court, the absurdity was palpable, just what it was we had all come here to do was irrelevant. We were just here, a strange page in history and one that I was glad my daughter would transcend even though her generation would surely only create a more absurd reality to supplant this one, I couldn’t help but to be glad to be accompanied by its representative.

On our way back through the mall, my daughter and I ran laughing the entire way. The skeletons in the Halloween Store and the damp smoke outside had lost their threatening qualities and dissolved back into the general nonsense that the world has always been completely awash in.