The tips of Ursula’s fingers and toes charge with static electricity as she walks through the Plexiglas-lined cavern entrance to the South Slope Mall, the way a cockroach might feel crawling through the innards of a television set. Five levels of dimly glowing stores line the lava-rock corridors, snugly crowded beside and atop one another like skulls in a catacomb, receding toward an intersection a quarter of a mile off.
Stereorama, Le Clique Chic, Jujuland, Rocket Sport, Bestsellers, Veronique’s Boudoir, The Sole Man.
Everywhere shadowy forms mill about, hauling gargantuan bags along the serpentine corridors, wandering into and out of doorways, pausing to lean over the balustrades, gazing down at the shoppers below. Still others slouch on benches and over eatery tables, seemingly having given up all hope of ever finding their way back to the city above. The Underworld theme is spoiled, perhaps, only by these shoppers themselves, who are on average fleshier and more rotund than would seem permissible for undead shades. And yet the necessity of lugging around all that extra weight could be seen as a kind of infernal torture in itself, as if for every fraction of eternity longer they spent here, an imp would scuttle up and stuff another pound of fat into their voluminous shuffling buttocks and sagging abdomens.
Tenderbird, Juanita’s Golden Taco, Mermaid’s, Long Yum Lick, Sofruti Treats.
The names of the stores grow more senseless the deeper into the mall she gets, gradually losing any definite connection with the merchandise, as though they had been spontaneously and randomly generated by some long-obsolete, overtaxed computer spinning its tape reels and spitting out slotted cards in a room the location of which no one even remembers.
Boogalooga, Nice n’ Stuff, Qwertyuiop, Take Me Here!, Biggy Barn, Gottalotta, La Bonne Storé.
If her will to survive were stronger, she would turn and run to the nearest exit, wherever that is—these places are designed to disorient, and the exits are kept well hidden. Probably she would end up taking the wrong staircase anyhow, and ending up in one of the subbasements where mentally handicapped workers are paid two dollars an hour to toss all the separated items from the public relations–contrived recycle bins into a heterogeneous pile for shipment in unmarked trucks to the volcano’s mouth.
Haha Lala, Pretty Neeto, Bungalo Hut, Sneejak’s, Whatsamattayou, Quickelnickel, Fimsolec, Ocneskow.
The endless corridors remind her of the mausoleum where her grandmother’s ashes are stored, a place at once unmanageably vast and meticulously organized, with all the ashes distributed according to religious affiliation: Catholic halls lined with suffering Christs, Protestant halls adorned with simple crosses, Hindu halls bristling with Siva arms, atheist halls decorated with abstract paintings and potted plants. It’s in one of these last, godless hallways that Gwennan put her own mother, and there that she fully expects her daughters to put her when the time comes, and there that she fondly hopes they, too, will join her one day. She has reserved spaces for them all. This plan for their eternal storage was the issue of utmost importance in Gwennan’s mind last night when Ursula called her to talk about Ivy. Ursula’s idea was that if the two of them confronted Ivy together, they just might be able to cajole or if necessary even bully her into committing herself. But as it turned out, Gwennan not only already knew about Ivy’s website, but was an avid fan.
“Commit her?” she exclaimed in a way that made Ursula feel like a criminal. “She’s an artist, Ursula. She’s a performance artist, and she’s good. I knew she wasn’t going to be in that hospital for long. I always thought she had this in her. You should be out there supporting your sister, not trying to put her in a nuthouse.”
Gwennan could have left it there, but then she wouldn’t be Gwennan.
“Sounds to me like you’re just jealous as usual,” she added.
The idea that Ivy was doing performance art had not, until that moment, occurred to Ursula, but she immediately understood why Gwennan would see it this way. It fitted Gwennan’s definition of art—something done to repudiate the world in a public way—to perfection. And where the Boopleganger had failed to carry out this essential mission, Gwennan must now, in some chilly corner of her mind, be thinking that her own daughter Ivy would at long last succeed. Taken alone, this discovery would have been bad enough, but in fact it led her to an even darker hypothesis—namely, that in a sense Ivy was Ursula’s very own Boopleganger, that what Gwennan had done with that deranged patient of hers, Ursula had done with her own sister, helping to turn a beautiful girl inside out in order to make a point about the ugliness she herself saw everywhere. The seeming unbreakability of this chain of logic threw her off balance, and all her ideas about how to get Ivy hospitalized again fell apart. Unable to speak, she was forced to listen to Gwennan rant about her new hobby: day trading Internet stocks. She was making serious money, she said. The trick was not to get stressed out about it, and in this, she contended, her training as a Buddhist helped her immeasurably.
Ursula nodded to herself.
“I’m going to hang up now,” she said.
“Fine,” Gwennan replied. “Oh, listen, if they go public with Ivy’s website, let me know. I want to get in on the ground floor.”
And now, lost in the endlessly branching and recessing corridors of the South Slope Mall, Ursula pictures her mother perched at her computer in the study of her suburban house, snatching up and unloading shares of her younger daughter. What a logical next step this would be, people across the globe investing in an image of a crazy girl lighting her cigarettes with their money, her riding on them and them riding on her and everyone together riding the bull market in delusion, a pyramid scheme they all know for exactly what it is but half cynically, half mystically hope to beat, hope to get in early on and get out of before the insanity ends, so they can wind up just a little bit closer to the top than to the bottom.
Ursula timidly requests her limbs to continue moving forward, but they are completely enervated. She collapses onto a nearby bench and watches the shoppers trundle by in either direction. Next to her, on a lighted display, an ad for Calvin Klein shows a very skinny black woman lighting a crack pipe against a white background. Across the concourse, behind the plate glass of the Postmodern Torse of Schwarzenegger Gymnasium, row upon row of mallgoers struggle on silver Nautilus machines to work off their excess weight. Outside the gym looms a limbless and headless bronze sculpture of the movie icon, twelve feet high and almost as broad at the shoulders, muscles squeezed between other muscles and stacked one atop the other without apparent order, like a mammoth accretion of candle drippings. A long bronze plaque curves around the sculpture’s base, bearing the words
YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR IMAGE
A teenage boy jostles her knees and mumbles an apology as he is pulled along by his girlfriend. He is busy looking at a light-board ad of a woman in a Naugahyde bikini. He glances at her breasts, then away, then at her legs, then away, then lips, away, hair, away, then breasts again, oscillating compulsively. Ursula wonders if the parts will ever form a whole in his mind, or whether that will even matter to him so long as he can just succeed in retaining for later use the specific breasts the specific lips hair breasts legs breasts. Still stranded by her despair, Ursula trails the kids with her eyes until they vanish into a storefront.
ARCADIA
She was beginning to doubt she’d ever find it. It’s a smallish-looking place, situated in a cul de sac where a nameless corridor ends in an unimproved cavern wall. She gets up from the bench and follows the kids inside.
The noise is overwhelming. Beeping, blasting, buzzing, screeching. As if the noise of the machines weren’t enough, or perhaps to counter it and carve out a space for their individual identities, many of the kids wear headphones, not up against their ears but around their necks, the miniature speakers leaking vaporous rhythms into the air directly in front of them. She knows she’ll continue hearing the noise for hours after she leaves, that it will go away only to come creeping back in the silence of night as she lies in bed, alone, waiting for sleep. She knows that it will combine with that other mechanical noise she’s been hearing, the tinny tune of the maze game running in Javier’s makeshift tent in his destroyed study. And she knows that in her dreams she will continue wandering through mazes within mazes in search of him.
She walks past a firing range of pistol games: a couple of black boys do battle with the Vietcong, next to an Asian boy fighting Arab terrorists. Farther down the aisle a stocky boy with olive-colored skin and a polyester shirt, possibly an Arab, fights his way through an army of pale zombies in a haunted compound. The zombies grimace and shriek as the gunshots appear in their bodies. They collapse, unwholesome piles of bluish flesh, dead for a second time. The boy grimaces as well, teeth gritted, face stretched in some places and creased in others. A green, bent-kneed troll drops from the top of the screen, teeth bared and claws extended. The boy jumps back. The screen turns red and freezes, and a countdown begins. Without hesitation he reinserts his game card to preserve his life and resume the battle.
The arcade is much larger than it looked from the outside. She turns and walks down an aisle of racing games—steering wheels and gas pedals, twisting roads and straightaways unfurling from vanishing points on candy-colored horizons. A pack of white teenage boys crouch forward on wheel-less motorcycles, tilting left and right and left again to the sounds of gunning engines as the screens light up their greasy, bug-eyed faces. She turns again and makes her way through yet another aisle, past hand-to-hand combat games on one side and a couple of full-environment machines on the other, roped-off compartments that buck and twist on hydraulic jacks. The largest crowds cluster around these, waiting in lines and watching the ongoing penetration of planetary defense systems on the outside monitors.
She looks for Javier, but all she sees is children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffeine and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hair gel and pimple cream and growth hormone–treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent sublimations. It’s all part of the conspiracy, she sees—all of it trying to convince them that they’re here to be trained for lives of adventure and glamour and heroism, when in fact they’re here only to be trained for more of the same, for lives of plunking in the quarters, paying a premium for the never-ending series of shabby fantasies to come, the whole lifelong laser light show of glamorous degradation and habitual novelty and fun-loving murder and global isolation.
Cadres in training for the Lite Age.
She turns around in search of a way out. There are no exit signs. The crowds press against her. A gauntlet of screens in every direction.