THE FOLLOWING MORNING I settled into the schedule I kept for most of the residency: wake as K. Sohail arrived to open the mall (and my quarters) around 8:30, perform my morning ablutions and proceed to the food court for a breakfast of eggs and tea. Back at my desk, I would spend the morning honing my Progress Report until noon, when I returned to the food court for lunch (chicken, iced tea), before putting in an afternoon of further “work.” Then, dinner (lunch leftovers, sparing me another visit to the food court), the mall would shut down, and after a period of staring longingly into the dark, waiting for K. Sohail’s goodnight—swiftly deployed, yet dancing at the edge of something profound and thrilling.
Amid this routine, over those first seven days occurred a few moments of note.
On the fifth day of my residency, I met K. Sohail on my way back from lunch. She had a garbage bag stuffed to the gills slung over each shoulder, and when I asked her what she was carrying, she told me, without breaking stride: hair. And then she was gone, squeaking and jingling off into the recesses of the mall.
Hair from the hairdresser, I assumed. But that didn’t add up: not once on my trips to and from the food court had I noticed a single customer having their hair cut. Nor, from my quarters only two shops over, had I ever overheard the telltale snip of scissors or buzz of electric shears. Nor had I witnessed anyone passing through the mall with a freshly coiffed “do” or a salon-slick pomade. The only sign of life in the hairdresser’s was, in fact, the hairdresser herself, sitting in the back of the shop with her face hidden by a magazine—and even then she was motionless; the pages didn’t turn.
Sure enough, as I rounded the corner past the defunct clock and parched fountain and stole a quick glance around the twirling barber’s pole, there the hairdresser sat, still as a pillar behind her magazine, with no sign of customers or any evidence of a recent haircut having taken place. As always, the hairdresser was utterly alone, her scissors and combs stolidly at rest in their jars of blue juice. The scene could have been a photograph—no, a painting: not a scene excerpted from life, but an image plucked from the imagination without context or concern for what might precede or follow it.
So where did all that hair come from?
Back in my quarters, pen poised above the page, I turned the episode over in my mind. Was the mystery of the bags of hair entrancing enough to demand documentation? Though the whole thing was curious, it inspired only questions, and a Progress Report was intended for answers, declarations, the supremacy of facts. Besides, it felt wrong to implicate K. Sohail in my reports, since she was the one collecting them. Acknowledging her role felt indecent, like turning the camera around onto the cinematographer, or fleeing the country in a lover’s pants.
So I left the episode undocumented—for now.
The next day, on my post-lunch digestive walk—worrying faintly that, save the Episode with the Ornately Hatted Woman, I’d accrued no additional public engagements worth mentioning in my first Progress Report, which was starting to feel a little thin, no matter how many times I revised it—I discovered that the halls of the mall were totally empty. The crowds had been thinning all week and now even the occasional stragglers had vanished: if they had been in transit to locales beyond, perhaps they’d all arrived and were now happily ensconced wherever that was.
Having completed a circuit of the lower level, I circled back to the food court and the base of the escalators. They seemed so ghostly: one set lifted emptily and endlessly to the second floor, while the other cycled its vacant steps back down.
Up I went, and shortly found myself before the sunflower display I’d first encountered on K. Sohail’s introductory tour. Remarkably, the store was open. Whether whoever staffed the sunflower store (a sunflorist?) might count as “the public” or not, I was starting to feel a little desperate. All week all I’d done was edit the same Progress Report, and the effect of each subsequent revision was to eradicate the actual Episode. The document wasn’t just thin, it now read like a fabrication, and the person in it, the one who “worked” while the ornately hatted woman observed, had ceased to be me at all, but a character. K. Sohail was due to collect it the following day!
So I decided to introduce myself to one of the mall’s scant proprietors.
The sunflower store, it turned out, was actually a wholesaler of household decorations; its name was Kookaburra. A riot of knickknacks and curios and tchotchkes were piled on shelves or stacked in displays around the packed showroom floor. Sunflowers did feature heavily, painted upon the faces of clocks or patterned upon wallpaper or sculpted in copper on the handles of dessert spoons, and a great jungle of the things spilled from the vitrine into the store. Some of these towered over eight feet tall, their monstrous heads lolling up near the ceiling—stooping, it seemed, to inspect me as I crept beneath. I assumed that they were artificial, as none were potted and their stalks appeared to be fixed to the floor, but I didn’t dare touch even the smallest plant to confirm it.
Despite the ubiquitous bric-a-brac, one thing Kookaburra did not have was an employee. No one worked the counter or prowled the aisles or arranged the displays or pruned the sunflowers, and when I rang the little bell by the cash register, not a soul appeared. So I went over to the doorway marked Kooks Only, poked my head inside and, with uncharacteristic brazenness, announced myself to the shadows.
Waited. Listened.
No reply.
And then, on a faint gust of wind—from the ventilation ducts?—a loose tumbleweed of hair came spinning out of the dark, right up to my foot, and snagged on my shoe. I reached down to remove it. How coarse the thing was, like the bundled wire of a scouring pad. My hand retracted in revulsion. Instead of pulling it free, I wiped my foot on a nearby birdbath, though the hairball took several vigorous scrapings to dislodge, clinging to my loafer like a clot of burrs. Stranger still, that wiry little nest appeared to seethe for a moment before it caught another draft and went scuttling back down the hall.
What is more edifying than the admiration of another human being? To be liked, or even loved, is why we exist. Every morning upon waking we wonder, “Whom shall I persuade to like me today?” Of course affection takes many forms, be it a subtle nod of approval—excellent work, continue—or a juicy smooch on the mouth accompanied by sensual fondling, or a father’s preference for the sturdiest of his sons. Whatever your pleasure, it’s likely the pleasure of other people’s pleasure in you.
Say for example you are working—diligently, of course, for at least 30% of your waking hours, and perhaps even more—and a stranger comes strolling by. The sheer fervour of your dedication stops her dead in her tracks. “This one is taking his role seriously,” she thinks, reeling in awe. “He is a contributor and not a leech slurping from the open vein of society. I simply must pause to enjoy this moment, hat-fitting appointment be damned!”
Work is the lifeblood of humanity. But love is the lifebones (equally essential). For blood without a form is just a red mess on the floor. Also important are skin and musculature—food and water, in this analogy—and a nervous system/brain, which we might equate to, for example, engaging the public. For what is society without socializing? Nothing. Or maybe something else with another, lonelier name. It’s simply that powerful.
And what better way to engage the public than with one’s work? It comes full circle, like a snake eating itself to death. You make work, you engage the public, and love erupts like a volcano or a boil. Work, engage, love…work, engage, love…and so on, the basic recipe by which the greatest civilizations have thrived throughout history. The worst civilizations having employed a different, useless recipe, so theirs are now the ruins we plunder for gold.
In conclusion, 60% of the day spent making work and engaging the public almost isn’t enough! Because every wave of adoration that crashes over you is like a drug that whips you into a frenzy for more. I’ll say it again: love is a drug, and so is work. And what an inspiration that each member of the public, or a colleague, might love you for your zeal for work and catch the addiction, and return to her own work with renewed passion, burning with the fervent hope that someone will end up loving her, too.