The Nix(37)

At the mall—the tremendous, bright, vast, air-conditioned cathedral of a mall—they were looking at dishwashers, but Faye was distracted by various other home appliances: something that made it easier to store leftover food; something that made it easier to grind it up; something that prevented food from sticking to the pan; something that made it easier to freeze food; something that made it easier to warm it up again. When she looked at each item she clucked a surprised Huh! and inspected it, turned it over in her hand, read the box, and said, “I wonder who thought of this?” She was wary around these things, suspicious that someone else had created a need in her or had identified a need she didn’t know she had. In the home-and-garden section it was a self-propelled lawn mower that got her attention, bright and macho-big and fantastically shiny red. “I never even thought I’d have a lawn,” she said, “and yet I suddenly want this very badly. Is that wrong?”

“No, it’s not wrong,” she said later, in one of the mall’s other kitchen stores, picking up the conversation as if she’d never stopped talking. “There’s nothing wrong with it at all. But, I don’t know. I feel like…” She paused, held some white plastic object in her hand, stared at it, some device that achieved perfectly julienned vegetables. “Doesn’t it seem absurd? That I can just buy this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is this really me?” she said, staring at the thing cupped in her hand. “The real me? Is this who I’ve become?”

“Can I have some money?” Samuel said.

“For what?”

Samuel shrugged.

“Don’t just buy something to buy it. For the point of buying something.”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t have to buy something, is my point. Nobody really needs any of this stuff.”

She reached into her purse and produced a ten-dollar bill. “Meet me back here in an hour.”

He gripped the money in his hand and marched off into the mall’s blazing white light. The place was unknowably large. It was like a big, breathing animal. The sound of a child or children somewhere distant yelling or crying became part of the omnidirectional din: Samuel had no idea where it was coming from, where the child was, whether the child was happy or sad. It was simply a disconnected audio fact. It was inconceivable that there were not enough stores at the mall, but someone decided there needed to be even more, thus the small stand-alone kiosks that occupied the middle of every thoroughfare, selling specialized and sometimes gimmicky merchandise: little toy helicopters that the salesman demonstrated by flying them over the crowd’s worried heads; key chains with your name laser-engraved onto them; special hair-curler things Samuel couldn’t begin to understand; sausages in gift boxes; blocks of glass that appeared to have 3-D holograms inside; a special girdle that made you look thinner than you really were; hats embroidered with personalized messages while you waited; T-shirts laser-printed with your own photographs. With its hundreds of stores and booths, the mall seemed to make a simple promise: that here you would find everything you needed. Even seemingly esoteric things could be found here. Teeth whitening, for example, seemed like an unlikely mall purchase. Or Swedish massage. Or a piano. And yet you could find them all here. The mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream up your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.

Trying to find the perfect gift in the mall was like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book when the choices were absent. He had to guess which page to turn to. The happy ending was out there somewhere, hidden.

Samuel walked by the candle store and breathed one or two lungfuls of its cinnamon odor. The nail salon gave him a momentary toxic headache. The candy store’s plastic bins of jawbreakers called to him, but he resisted. The mall’s music mixed with the music coming from each of the stores, the effect being like a car going into and out of radio coverage. Songs faded in, faded out. Earlier they were playing something happily Motown. Now they were playing “The Twist.” Chubby Checker. One of his mother’s least-favorite songs—a fact Samuel didn’t know how he knew. And he was considering the music and listening to the music coming out of the stores and he actually saw the music store across the food court before the idea finally struck, and he couldn’t believe it had taken him this long to come to it.

Music.

Bethany was a musician. He ran to the store and felt embarrassed that in all this time he’d been asking himself what he could give her without asking himself what she might actually want. And this felt egotistical and selfish and definitely something he’d have to work on personally some other time, when he didn’t have to find the perfect gift in like ten minutes.

So he ran into the store and was briefly disheartened when he saw that all the popular cassette tapes were around twelve dollars and thus outside his budget. But this despair did not last long because at the back of the store he spotted a bin labeled “Classical Music” and, below that, “Half Off,” which felt like providence. The cassettes here were six bucks and one of them—he was sure of it—was the perfect gift.

But as Samuel rifled through the clacking, disordered chaos of the clearance bin, he encountered a fundamental problem: He didn’t know any of this music. He didn’t know what Bethany would like, what she already owned. He didn’t even know what was good. Some of the names were familiar—Beethoven, Mozart—but most were not. Some were unpronounceably foreign. And he was about to go with one of the famous names he’d heard before—Stravinsky, though he couldn’t remember why he knew it—when he decided that if he’d heard of Stravinsky, then Bethany almost assuredly already owned every Stravinsky recording and was probably by now bored with them, and so he resolved to find something more modern, interesting, new, something that advertised his fascinating tastes and showed how he was different and independent and didn’t follow the herd like everyone else. So he picked out the ten most interesting-looking covers. Nothing with the portrait of the composer, nothing with an old painting or a photograph of a stuffy-looking orchestra, nothing with a conductor holding a baton. He went for the conceptual stuff: splashy colors, abstract geometric shapes, psychedelic spirals. He brought them to the counter and piled them in front of the cashier and asked, “Which of these would no one ever buy?”