The Dreamland Mall

The Dreamland Mall exhales; its breath cold and steady like a stream.

It knew, deep down, that it used to be a beautiful place: dark lacquer tiles that shone like a mourning widow’s lips, brick pillars that shot up into arched, windowed ceilings, and big hanging baskets of plants that cascaded down like waterfalls. It was a fractal: hallways upon hallways, growing narrower and narrower.

In the center of The Mall was a play place. Rusted yellow bars arched up toward the ceiling, cartoon plastic trees littering the fake-grass floor. Spherical towers with spaceship windows suspended on ladders of red metal; children’s hands smeared in the dust. The soft play tunnels resembled staring down a gun barrel, with darkness extending endlessly. Slides shaped like fish. Sitting up near the entrance was a statue of a green dragon, the red irises of his eyes so faded that they had glazed over white, like the shade of newly cut glass, and he stared at the world blind. He was holding a sign, covered in a thin layer of grime, as though dipped in old sewage water.

“HAVE FUN! MUST BE UNDER 51’! PARENTAL SUPERVISION REQUIRED (No drop-offs; all adults must be present with a child!) GET READY TO PLAY (remove your shoes and wash your hands before entering the play place), PLAY NICE (use gentle hands when interacting with each other.) PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE.”

A cardboard copy of Goodnight Moon lay on one of the benches, a wooden seat stained to match the color of the floors. If you opened the book, the cardboard would creak like an old house welcoming its owner's home, but you are not there, so you cannot hear it. A cubby of shoes, once rainbow-painted, now had many chips in its mask; it looked as if someone had tried to strip the paint. In the bottom right corner, one pair of shoes remained: tiny pink light-up sneakers, size four. It knew they could not belong to anyone. The only scent in the air was chlorine, as if someone had just entered a pool. The only sound was fizzing, like strong hydrogen peroxide tipped into a wound, whitening the skin.

The Dreamland Mall inhales the scent and feels the burning in its lungs. A brand being impressed into its skin with the curse that comes with sickness. It takes it in, like one takes in the burning of secondhand smoke, the sting that attacks the eyes as a halo of grey swirls around your head.

If you were to pass the play place, which you can’t because you’re not there, there would be a janitor’s cart, a mop perpetually dripping, leaving a ring of water on the floor. Sometimes, if you look down, the water morphs into words. Sometimes, you can see The Dreamland Mall start to give brief messages. Quiet asks that are never fulfilled. “Help me,” it says, “Help me.”

The Dreamland Mall never achieved glory, but if it had, the fountains would have been something to behold; a woman bragging about her high school prom, though you can’t really judge her since the dress was covered in shining glass beads. The fountains were these large, swirling things, shaped like infinity-eights. They had black tile and vantablack grout, and the water used to come up and out of them like a synchronized swimming show, water spilling out of puckered lips. The light came down from the skylights above, and the water would catch the light, turning into crystal. It sounded like the exhale stream. But now, the only crystal was an ashtray sitting on a half-crooked table; the ash spilled out onto the floor. The fountains themselves had country-shaped white stains, and the spouts were covered in green and grey; seaweed wrapped around the Dreamland Mall’s throat.

Its organs are rotting. It smells like the remnants of a rotting pumpkin, sweet and foul, mingling with the smell of a dead rat and rubbing alcohol. Sometimes it smells like death, the stale scent of hospice walls and hand sanitizer and the way cold winter smells. But only sometimes. 

Sequestered in a corner is a semi-circle conveyor belt that somehow goes somewhere. There is an old sushi roller made of bamboo, covered in a thin layer of mold and white fluff that had made it its home, like the dust bunnies hiding on the walls. There were stools of red and gold, plates of rice and rotting fish ping-ponging back and forth from one side of the conveyor to the other. Flies followed it, migrating like birds going south or jellyfish floating from one side of the pond to the other so they could get to the algae. Flies followed, but never landed. There is a sign here, too. Handmade with a wood burner.

“$10 per person.”

Embedded into the wall at this food court is the ice cream shop, a high-end place that uses gilded gold everywhere. A sign was still propped up, the paper poster peeling from the plastic. It had a white ice cream cone on it once, covered in a tempered chocolate shell. But now the white looked grey, and the chocolate looked like licorice. The counter was sticky from melted samples. The ice cream stained the hands of The Mall like it was covering its hands in blood.

The Mall knew that people would eat together here, once. There would be children running around, dragging their parents by the edge of their clothes to get to the play-place faster. People would be sitting at the tables littered around the infinity fountains, with baked potatoes at their seats. There was this one man who came in every Tuesday at precisely 4 pm on the dot, and would order a birthday cake ice cream from the ice cream shop. The Mall knew there was something wrong, deep in its rattling bones, when the man started coming at 4:05, and then stopped coming at all.

As you walk along the axons that are stretching from New York to LA, in between old, grey vendor stalls, you may come across Birthday. Birthday had a pale pink storefront, looking like a dollhouse outfit; shoes for The Mall’s feet. It sold sweets, but the place was empty now. There were nothing but old rows of what used to be fake wicker baskets, the wood ripped out to reveal salt-and-pepper concrete floors, revealing The Mall’s age, and nothing was left of what Birthday was except a singular crumb on the floor.

The Mall missed the woman who worked there, missed it like how one might miss their mother. Even if the fountains that had made up its heart had stopped pumping blood, its heart felt heavy. Sunk to the edge of the ribs and dangled there like a spider hanging from silk. If she had known that the Mall had breathed, would she have put cookies on the floor for it? Tossed it out into the hallways so that it could gorge itself and eat? Tears could not prickle camera eyes.

She smelled like sugar, and her shoes squeaked against the tile floor as she walked to work every morning.

The reaper had come like a bullet.

The Dreamland Mall knew that it did not just have food places. There was also a clothing store. The clothes were fancy black-tie dresses and white wedding suits. The main model was a brunette woman with perfect, airbrushed skin. She always flashed the same perfect smile in every picture, as though someone had copied and pasted it over. In the quieter moments, the building liked to imagine what her life would have been like outside of the world of the TV screen. It liked to imagine that she was a well-renowned doctor, that she had cured cancer (it barely knew what cancer was, but it wondered if that was the feeling that was crawling over its skin, if the cancer was the hollow emptiness it felt, the paralysis it felt in its hips). It liked to imagine that maybe she was a mother with several kids. Its head would float above the clouds, and it always found itself shocked when no one knew who she was at all. But The Mall knew who she was, and it called her Cherry.

Maybe in your wanderings you’ll find one of the glass elevators. You can see the whole mall around you, as though you’re standing from the top of an observatory. The elevators rattle and scream— and always have — threatening to snap a cord and plummet. There are TVs in the elevators, static-filled. There are people on the other side of the screen, and sometimes the building taps the glass to get their attention. The shows are unfamiliar, a tip-of-the-tongue type thing, where everything is cast in the blood-orange glow of the 1970s. But the elevators are preferable to the escalators, ladder steep. You threaten to topple down if you lean forwards wrong. The stairs are the safest method to get around.

It knew all of these things, and it missed all of these people, but The Mall also didn’t like the eyeless boy. It really wished he would come back. 

In The Mall’s memory, the eyeless boy wore a blue shirt, and his eyes looked burned out. Like someone had taken a lighter to paper. It thought he had green eyes once, but he doesn't anymore. It thought that maybe he had lost them; that they had fallen like marbles and scattered. The Mall also thought that maybe he had ripped them out. Maybe he and it had been steeped into the same cup of boiling water. They had both lost their eyes. He came in on Sundays, when everyone else was at church, and prison bars covered the storefronts. He liked to pet the walls; an unwanted and prickling touch rubbing at the skin. It made the Mall want to start hitting things, throw itself down on its own tile floors and feel the cold bleed into its muscles. Felt its own fingerprints as it peeled at its collarbone, trying to crawl out of its own skin, trying to be something it wasn’t. It wondered if it could like the touch, if a lover was touching it. What was a lover anyway? What was love if not fragments of the humans that used to use its ribs as a playground?

I don't think you would like him either.

The eyeless boy liked to touch without permission, but it was evidence of a person beyond the ghosts that walked between the walls.

The Tape Store no longer had a name, and The Mall wanted to tear out its own grey matter and rearrange it to see if it could maybe remember. There was only a thin layer of dust where the sign should have been. It was always dark in The Tape Store, and it was covered floor to ceiling in old VHS tapes. Box TV’s were dangling in the corners, and The Dreamland Mall liked to watch cartoons on them, black and white flickering, and the feeling of bubbles coming from the static, brushing underneath its hands like a cat. It tried to glue together porno tapes and romance movies to try and learn what love is, and it couldn’t understand the appeal. Why would someone want black widow kisses? The Mall loved the people that would walk around in its belly. The building liked its purpose.

The Mall had a stage in it once. The guy looked like some political comedian who screamed on television, but distinctly not. His face became an oil paint smear. The entire comedy show is outside, in the courtyard-- how did I not think to mention the courtyard? It looked like a stage near some fairgrounds. He did bits about all kinds of things, about Artificial Intelligence, and bruised tangerines, and the way the water ran red. He liked to argue with people in the audience whenever he was wrong about something. But the stage was now covered in leaves, caving in with the warping from the crimson ribbon water.

And what about The Bookstore? This three-story thing that had books on every single shelf. Every single book in existence was here, and The Mall wished it knew how to read. It knew its signs because they were etched into its heart, but it would trace the letters with beady camera eyes, and they became an indistinct blur. The bookstore had owls painted on the walls, and an old cafe that seemed to never have anyone working it. The bookstore stretched on for miles, and most people would get lost in the labyrinth of shelves. And a girl would sit at the circular tables and read books for hours and days on end.

That girl is me.

There is a girl who is barely a girl, now recording this world between worlds. Writing down every memory of this creature that is lying down in its own pool of blood, wheezing out a steady death rattle. I write because I cannot offer it anything else, I cannot even offer it the comfort that comes with confessional. I cannot fix the broken fountains, I cannot bring back the people who disappeared. I cannot teach a building to read. I cannot teach myself to stay.

I don’t know if The Mall ever understood what it was that I am doing. Maybe I thought I was speaking to it whenever I turned a page. Maybe it thought that the books themselves were their own kind of food, something that I was spoon feeding it whenever I was cradled in its ribs. The books are still there, the tables, the mall. The building embedded into dreamland.

I leave it with the stories it can never read.

And contrary to whatever it may think, you and I both know that The Mall has no hands in which to pull you close, no arms to try and cradle you. No mouth to plead for you to please come back home. It can use sugared and polite words and let out heaving sighs that rattle the whole building, but beyond that it does not have much of anything at all.

The Mall now only has me.

And it craves people walking in its halls again. Craves them like how someone craves water so much that liquid starts to taste sweeter when it hits the tongue.

Eventually, you step out into the other food court, and there is the parking lot. Behind you is the building that looks like the tan, rolling hills of a high school, lacking windows except in the ceiling. And you wish you had a camera to shake the memory until you could see it and hold it, but instead you have to settle for keeping the picture in your mind and pray that the Dreamland Mall does not get too lonely with you gone. And in front of you, there is just an empty parking lot. Faded white lines. The occasional palm tree, looking like the same plastic in the play place with the same shine as the floors. The lights were now dead, leaving everything in a void, and the fog rolled near the edges of the woods. Everything stretches into everything to the right of you; everything stretches into forever to the left of you. Flickering camera flashes hiding pageant smiles. There used to be cars in the parking lot, in every shade of every color, an ombre that would reflect like stained glass onto your fingers.

The Mall would be like a dog, waiting in the window, hopping back and forth between its front two legs, waiting for your car to pull into the driveway. And it would excitedly twirl around, practically hitting itself with its tail, so that it could lead you to the play place and the train tours, and so that it could serve you buttered baked potatoes on a paper plate.

The Mall remembered when people would read stories to it, it could watch old musicals and listen as the VHS tape rolled. Perhaps someone could tell it the names of the people in the elevators. Perhaps it could meet Cherry. It would be given cookies and ice cream, and the flies would finally have a spot to land.

Maybe all of the humans would finally come home.

But no, you can see for yourself, it’s forever stuck in after hours. 

If you step away from the page, you are stepping away from The Dreamland Mall, leaving it with emptied and dead halls. I linger here, in the grave of a God, and pray to the stars that I can preserve the image of everything in my mind. But the mind is like a room, and maintaining memory is like tossing a pencil into the mess and trying to remember where you saw it last.

The Mall makes a low moaning sound, a steady continual sob. The pipes sputter as it tries to take in air. It has lost everything, and now it has no worth at all. It can’t find the pulse in its own chest. There’s grave dirt between the nails because it keeps digging, the grass underfoot kicked up and askew.

It cannot keep you here.

It cannot force you to stay.

It can only wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait. 

The Dreamland Mall inhales.