If People Have Touched it, It’s Dirty
By 7 p.m., I felt like Edgerton Mall was the seventh level of hell and I’d already been there for the prescribed eternity. It had apparently started to rain outside because people had wet hair, there was a prevailing funk of damp cloth, and the floor, none too appealing to begin with, was slippery and streaked with mud, as were the previously snow-white paths to Santa’s thrones. Other than those clues, for all I knew of the outside world, the Great Wave had finally crested the mountains and washed away everything on earth except the mall. And I’d only been there five hours. I couldn’t fathom how people could work an eight-hour day in this place, locked away from everything that mattered in their lives, everything that wasn’t valued in bills and coins.
As long as I was wandering in and out of stores anyway, I searched for solutions to the seasonal conundrum that Tyrone had brought home to me: What to buy? For Rina, I saw and rejected a “Dear Daughter” necklace, engraved with a sentiment that I found simultaneously cloying and embarrassingly accurate; a set of empowering refrigerator magnets about strong teenage girls who had their own refrigerators; and, most surprisingly, a collection of small stuffed toys based on human organs: putatively cute, smiling little livers and kidneys and bladders and hearts with weensy, creepy hands and feet. I actually almost bought those, but sanity prevailed. There’s no point in giving a horrible gift unless you have a great one to follow it with. In one store, the inevitable thrift shop of off-brand, mid-level, mildly outdated tech (called, in this case, iShop), I found something I did buy, but it was a minor note in the hoped-for Christmas symphony of gifts, a collection of little Bluetooth tags that let you use your phone to find your keys or whatever else you’ve lost. After a moment’s deliberation, I got one for Ronnie, too. Here we were, on the next-to-last night before Christmas, and I hadn’t bought anything for her, either.
Acting on an afterthought, I pulled one of the sets from the bag and looked for directions. There weren’t any. I asked the geek who’d waited on me, an ambiguously old-looking guy with the face of a dodgy teen and a halo of prematurely silvery hair, where the directions were, and he said in a tone that suggested that I’d already asked him that same question seven hundred times, “You DL the app. The instructions are in the app.”
I thought about asking whether the app was free but I wasn’t sure I could handle any more techno-scorn, so I just said thanks and wandered out of the place. Once I was on the safe side of the door, I looked at the sign and noticed, in a retro matrix printer font beneath the store’s name, iShop, the words wink simmons, proprietor. I figured maybe he was just pissed off at being named Wink.
Earlier, during an hour or so that seemed to last forever, I’d talked to about a dozen store owners and managers, encountering an impressive uniformity of gloom. All was not well either in Edgerton or in bricks-and-mortar capitalism in general. Yes, they’d been stolen from, most of them; yes, they were suffering record losses; no, neither the mall’s security systems nor their own employees had flagged many of the thieves. I tested that last assertion on my own and found it to be true: the success rate of my post-Bonnie’s Bric-a-Brac shoplifting experience zoomed to about 65 percent. I’d also developed some theories about how to block one’s actions from the prying eyes of the security cameras, unlikely as it was that Wally was watching the monitor I happened to be on as I bagged my swag, rather than one of the thirty-one others, or, for that matter, his iPhone.
Elementary-school easy, in other words. The question was probably why more stuff wasn’t getting kiped.
I was standing once again on the third tier, looking down at the shoppers—the crowd thinner now that it was dinnertime—and trying to figure out what had caught my eye before about the way the crowd moved, when my phone rang again.
Unknown, it read. I punched in and said, “Yeah?”
“What have you learned?” Vlad said.
“I’ll call you when I have something specific,” I said, and hung up. It rang again immediately.
“Do not hang up on me,” he said. “Never. And do not think you know what is specific or what matters.”
“Okay, here’s what I know so far. It’s a good thing the world’s nuclear secrets or the keys to the kingdom aren’t kept here, because this place is a thief’s theme park. Two-thirds of the doorways aren’t alarmed, including the ones in and out of the mall—”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I filled a shopping bag with stolen merchandise from stores all over the place and went through one of your outside doors twice. After stealing all that stuff. Your alarms stink. Your surveillance cameras are old, low-res clunkers and you don’t have enough people watching them. There are corners all over the place where you can stash stuff and recover it later. You name it, it’s broken.”
“This is what I mean,” he said. “Nothing you have said matters.”
“Then perhaps you could take a moment and provide me with a job description.”
“I could have told you all of this at lunch today. Those have been the conditions for years. It was cheap to install and maintain, and until this month it held losses from theft to an acceptable level.”
“Acceptable to whom?”
“I am the only one who matters,” he said. “I will give you a small pat on the back for having learned all this, but it is something any cheap thief could spot. I was hoping for more.”
“And you might have gotten it if you’d bothered to share some of this with me.”
“Feh,” he said. “I had no idea it would surprise you. There is no mall from which it is impossible to steal. This is the issue: shoplifting for the past six weeks is up three hundred percent from average—”
“Hundred and twenty is what your security guy—”
“Mr. Bender, tell me, do I give a shit what my security people think? Where do you think that idiot got his number?”
“Right,” I said. I leaned over far enough to rest my forehead on the railing, hearing my mother say, If people have touched it, it’s dirty.
Vlad was still talking. “And I gave him that number for a reason, and you don’t tell him otherwise. Yes?”
“Fine.” The railing was cool and smelled vaguely fudge-like.
“You had best pick up your feet a bit. Trot, if you will. Time is flying.”
“Not here, it isn’t.”
“But it is for you.”
I stood up. “I have to tell you, Vlad, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“I am not Vlad. Did you think this was a lifetime job? A what’s the word?”
“Who cares?” I said.
“Sinecure,” he said. “It is not. You have a deadline, and you should take that word seriously. Both syllables.”
I ignored the threat for the moment, although it took an effort. “And would you like to share my deadline with me, or is that also something I’m supposed to figure out for myself?”
“Of course not,” he said. “Christmas Eve.”
“I take Christmas Eve off.”
“Yes, Trey said you were difficult.”
“And look how well she’s doing.”
“She is doing much better than you and your family will be if you do not—”
I wasn’t hearing him anymore. There were black spots like burn-blossoms on film, expanding before my eyes. “You know what, you pretentious, overdressed Russky thug? Fuck you and your blue blazer, too. Everybody has to die sometime.”
I hung up, almost gasping for breath, and a few seconds later, the phone buzzed to signal a text. Figuring that Tyrone had thought of something he didn’t want to say in front of Rina, I brought it up.
It said: but our children should not die first.