Mall of Me

The mall had been dying for nearly twenty years, but nobody told the lights that. Every second or third fluorescent panel buzzed overhead with the stubborn insistence of a body whose life support machines had not yet been unplugged. I hadn’t been inside the Harbor Mall since I was seventeen. I was forty-four now, and my father had been dead for three days. All of those facts felt connected.

#

I’d spent most of the afternoon with my mother sorting dad's things into boxes labeled KEEP, DONATE, and TRASH. Fifty-one years of marriage, reduced to these categories.

“Your father never threw anything away,” she said as I held up a tangle of five different colors of extension cords. I almost pointed out how we were now throwing him away, but I dropped the braid of cords into a DONATE box instead.

Sometime around six, I found the photograph. Four of us at a dull, pastel-colored table in the Harbor Mall food court, maybe 1999. Tommy was holding up both middle fingers, Brian was halfway through a slice of pizza, and Jason was looking away from the camera because some girl had yelled his name as she walked past behind us. And then there was me. Seventeen, thin, with a terrible haircut, wearing Dad’s Orioles jacket without permission, and grinning ear to ear like an asshole. A grin like everything important was still ahead of me. On the back of the photo, my handwriting spelled out: GET OUT OF THIS SHITHOLE. Mom found me staring at it and smiled.

“You boys practically lived there.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t look up at her.

“They're tearing that whole wing down soon.” Weirdly, it was the saddest she had sounded all day.

I put the picture in my pocket. An hour later, instead of going back to the hotel, I drove to Harbor Mall. I told myself I wanted to go for a walk and clear my head, but that was bullshit. I wanted to see if the place felt like it remembered some part of me.

#

The old Sears was a massive fitness center now. The movie theater had all the interesting parts gutted and had turned into some kind of church. The fountain was a dry mural of hard-water stains and pennies fused to the bottom by years of mineral scale. I passed empty stores and wasn’t sure whether I was actually remembering what used to be there or just inserting my biography into the empty spaces. Sam Goody, KB Toys, and that sporting goods store where I stole a baseball glove.

The food court wing was blocked off. Waist-high metal barriers stood beneath a sign. AREA CLOSED. RENOVATION IN PROGRESS. Beyond them, all the lights were off. I stood there longer than I should have. Through there is where the photo was taken. We always sat at the same table near the skylight, beside a fake ficus tree and an Orange Julius. We’d meet mostly on Friday nights with our pockets full of twelve-dollar allowances, no plans, and no reasons to go home. We would sit there and map out our futures. California, New York, businesses we would own, bands we would start, girls from school we thought we would marry, and a million other things that never happened and we never became. I looked over my shoulder and didn’t see anyone.

My phone flashlight swept across stacked chairs, abandoned kiosks, and tile dust. The skylight above was blacked out by the December sky outside. As I walked deeper, the cone of light passed over a pair of shoes underneath one of the chairs at one of the tables. I stopped, raised the light, and saw someone sitting at one of the tables.

“Hello?” My voice echoed through the lonely food court. There was no response. My first thought was that I had found someone sleeping back here. My second thought was that I was about to get murdered in a food court because I wanted a look at the place where I ate soft pretzels in high school.

“Hey.” The familiar voice came out of the figure, moving enough for me to realize that it was a man and that he was eating something off the table. As I walked around him, I felt like I forgot how to breathe for a second.

He squinted into the light. “I’d offer you some, but I don’t know if you still don’t like olives.” I nearly dropped my phone as I stared at myself. Well, not exactly myself, but definitely a younger version of myself. Twenty-two or twenty-three, I think, with thicker hair and a narrower face.

He took another bite. “Jesus,” he said. “You look tired as shit.” Something clicked overhead, and a bank of fluorescent lights flickered on directly over us. Behind him, the old Sbarro glowed to life. The menu hummed, and a girl worked behind the counter in her red-and-green, logoed polo and white visor.

“That…” I started remembering how to breathe again. “That place closed twenty years ago.”

“So?” Younger me shrugged.

I turned back to him. “What the fuck is happening?”

“Compared to what?”

“What?”

He smiled at me with that asshole smile that I hated. My asshole smile that I hated.

“You ask too many big questions now.” He chomped food while he spoke.

“Who are you?”

He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin that almost immediately fell to pieces under the weight and volume of the grease it pulled off his face. “I’m what happened when you stayed with Claire.”

“Claire?” I asked the space around us as much as I asked him.

“Yep. Our Claire.”

We dated briefly during senior year and decided to break up before leaving for college.

Younger me dug into his pocket and pulled out an absolutely ancient cell phone. He held the phone up to me and smiled again. “Wanna see the kids?”

Their names were Megan and Adam. I could see exactly which parts of their faces looked like Claire's and which looked exactly like mine. Well, not mine, but his. One photo showed them standing in waist-deep ocean water. One of them was of Megan asleep on his shoulder. The next picture was Adam sitting on my father's lap. This version of Dad was also twenty years younger and significantly healthier. He was laughing harder than I remember him being capable of. I had never seen that photo, or any of them, because that never happened and these kids didn’t exist for me.

“He loved them,” the other me said.

I handed him the phone back. “Of course he did. He always wanted grandkids.”

For several seconds, neither of us spoke. Then another light came on. A few tables away, someone was sitting with a full Styrofoam container of Chinese food. Me again, just older than the first me and obviously wealthier. His shirt was very expensive, as was his matching watch on his wrist. He looked up at me.

“Oh,” he said, smirking sarcastically. “Great.”

“What?”

“More of us.” He turned back to his food. The Chinese restaurant behind him illuminated. Then the pretzel place lit up, and the burger place came back to life. Each new pool of light overhead contained a new restaurant and a new me at another table. One had long hair, one had a wedding ring, one had tattoos everywhere, one looked ten years older despite apparently being the same age as me, one was thinner, one was fatter, one wore a suit, one wore paint-stained overalls.

The rich one seemed like an asshole, so I turned back to the younger one who married Claire. “How many are there?”

He looked up and looked far past me into the darkness. “No idea, dude.”

Another click of fluorescent lights being shocked awake, another restaurant opened again, a new me was at a new table.

#

At first, I interviewed them. I was treating my life like some defective merchandise and demanding to see the other models of myself.

The rich me, in the expensive shirt, took a job I had passed on in Chicago. Now he makes almost $300,000 a year. Two divorces, a daughter that never calls, and he had been in Singapore on business when Dad died.

The version of me with the paint all over his clothes quit his job at twenty-eight and became an illustrator and a popular artist. He worked on book covers and a children’s cartoon series that I vaguely recognized. He told me that he lived in an abandoned apartment basement and was three months behind on child support.

“You only have the one kid?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Ha!” The version of me at the next table over snorted. “Lucky bastard! I’ve got three ungrateful kids. I’ll trade you!”

Another one I talked to stayed in town and became a teacher at the same high school we all attended. He, Mom, and Dad hung out every Sunday. He took Dad to every chemotherapy appointment, and he was right next to him when he died. I hated him immediately. He knew something I didn’t, and it was maddening to me.

“What were his last words?” I asked.

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” My anger at him made me feel justified in not liking him. “I just want to know.”

“No, you don’t. You want what I have, and it’s pissing you off.”

I forced myself to calm down. “I just want to know what Dad said.”

“He said he was tired. That’s it. Oh, now you look even more pissy about it. Do you think his last words should have been more profound? Well, maybe you should have been there to hear them yourself.” The teacher looked down into his coffee, and whatever anger he had left him in a long, hard exhale. “I’ve spent the last twenty years wondering what my life would have been like if I left town.”

I laughed, “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“I’m not. You got exactly what I’m sitting here wishing I had, and you got out.”

The lights kept flickering on, and at some point I noticed that the food court was expanding to accommodate all these different versions of myself. The far wall was about eighty feet away when I first got here, but now it is hundreds of feet into the darkness. Tables filled the corridor and vanished into architectural impossibility. Restaurants opened from different decades, logos returned from extinction, songs from 1998, 2004, 2012 all played overhead, bleeding together as more versions of me appeared. I met one who moved to Seattle, one who never drank, one who drank too much, one who had a son who died at six. I stopped asking about children after that one. One had written three novels.

“I always wanted to do that.” I sounded ashamed when I spoke because I was.

“So did I, and I got to do it… just not the way I wanted to.”

Another one never left town and seemed infuriatingly happy about everything. Another one owned a vacation villa in Italy and seemed miserable all the time. Another one had no money, no family, and had the best laugh I have ever heard. The one I spoke to, who I thought had everything I ever wanted in life, could not stop staring at the artist. After a while, I noticed they had all started interviewing each other. I caught bits and pieces of conversations all over the place.

“How many kids?”

“You still talk to Tommy?”

“How much do you make?”

“What happened to your Claire?”

Phones appeared, and photos of vacations, graduations, bedrooms, homes, cars, dogs, and awards were all passed around. Everyone existed in one version of life and nowhere else. Somewhere during this convention, I opened my notes app on my phone.

Version 1: Claire. 2 kids. Unhappy.

Version 2: Chicago. $$$. Daughter hates him.

Version 3: Artist. 1 kid. Broke.

Version 4: Stayed. Teacher. Was w/ Dad. The happiest one?

“Hey, put me at number six.” A version of me was leaning over my shoulder, looking at my phone. He had a shaved head.

“What?”

“You’re ranking us, right? I want to be in the top ten.” He held up his own phone. “See. Here’s you:”

Me # 38: Single, no kids, decent job, Dad recently died, still pretty healthy, probably has savings. 7/10

“You… ranked me?” I felt offended in a way I could describe.

“We are all doing it.” He gestured around, and every version of me was reducing every other version to metrics. Marriage, money, kids, career, regrets, dead Dads. I thought we all looked ridiculous, but we really just looked like everyone.

I eventually found the table because it was still the only one with the fake ficus next to it that looked exactly as cheap as I remembered. The me sitting there was seventeen in my dad’s Orioles jacket, halfway through a basket of French fries and a soda big enough to drown in.

He looked up at me. “Holy shit. You’re us, huh?”

I sat down across from him. “Yep.”

“Damn.” He studied my face. “Sorry.. You just… Damn, you look old.”

“Thanks.” I forced a laugh even though it made me want to cry. He looked exactly as he does in the photograph. Like the entire world belonged to him.

“So,” he asked. “Did we leave?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He dipped a fry in a paper cup full of ketchup. “What do we do?”

I told him.

“That’s it? Huh. Do we like it?” He still held the fry, now doused with ketchup, and seemed completely underwhelmed with my response.

“Sometimes.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “What about a girlfriend? Wife? Kids?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Oh.” He looked down, and I looked away from him. “Is Dad still an asshole.

I made a laugh that sounded like it came out all wrong. “He gets better later in life.”

“Do we?” He looked at me with an unexpected intensity. “Do we get better?”

“Eventually.”

The answer seemed to satisfy him, and for a while, we sat and ate fries together. Over his shoulder, I saw a table I hadn’t noticed before. Three chairs, a booster seat, completely empty of people, with a little folded sign that said RESERVED. I got up and walked over to it. I picked the sign up and flipped it over to reveal more words. FOR WHENEVER THE HELL YOU FINALLY FIGURE IT OUT. Hundreds of my own faces seemed to watch me.

Seventeen-year-old me wandered over. “This is the one you’re waiting to become.”

I stared at the empty chair with the booster seat. When work settled down, when I had enough money, when I stopped feeling so fucking uncertain all the time, when I met the right person, when I was ready. Waiting to make time is the only way to ensure that time is never built. I reached out for the chair, and the mall speakers chimed.

“The mall will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please bring your final purchases to the register. Thank you.” Lights began to shut off one by one as the burger place disappeared into darkness, and versions of me began to vanish. When the pretzel place went out, panic ensued. Some versions ran; I heard one scream, " No," before his voice was abruptly cut off. Most of them were just standing around and watching me.

“What do I do?” I yelled out to all of them.

The teacher version laughed and yelled back. “How the fuck do I know?” The artist raised his cup to me as Claire’s husband waved sadly. For a second, all I could see were Megan and Adam in his face. One by one, they disappeared. Some of them I envied, and others envied me. Eventually, I was left alone with seventeen-year-old me sitting beneath the ugly fake plant.

“Was it good?” he asked. “Being us, I mean.”

The lights flickered overhead as I thought about Dad. Then Claire, then empty apartments, birthdays, friends I stopped calling for no reason that I could remember, mornings I woke up happy without realizing that happiness required any noticing.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Compared to what?”

He smiled at me and then blinked out of existence when the last light shut off. The old food court was abandoned again except for me. The impossible expanse of the space had shrunk back to normal, and I had to find my way out using the light on my phone. When I climbed over the barrier, a security guard shouted at me from halfway down the corridor. I apologized, and he told me the mall was about to close.

Outside, cold air hit my face. I sat in my car with Mom’s number pulled up on my phone. I finally called, and she answered on the second ring.

“Everything ok?”

“Yeah. I don’t know.”

“You sound strange.”

“I know I said I was leaving tomorrow. But I might stay and help finish up the boxes.”

“That would be nice, but you really don’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

She was quiet for a little bit and then finally responded. “Your father would’ve wanted you to stay and help.”

At the first intersection, left took me back towards Mom’s house; right led to the hotel. I turned left, but before the turn was even finished, the thought came to me: What if I’d gone right? I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The road curved, and the mall disappeared. A few miles later, the highway split again and for one terrible second, I could see both roads stretching before me. Two separate lives, then three, then thousands stemming from every turn I’ve ever made and every turn I hadn’t. Every person waiting at a table beneath a fluorescent light, certain someone else had gotten the better version of life. I blinked hard. There was only one road before me, and I kept driving.