The Mall Pulls You In

by Miles Klee

My mom tells me the mall nearest my hometown in New Jersey, long past its prime and emptied out, is due to close for good. Of course she is the one to inform me—my dad always hated the mall, its maddening geometry and hiveish activity, the sense of recycled air and idle waste. But I often wangled my mom into taking me when I was young, and no matter what I convinced her to buy in the course of a spin around the complex, I knew that on our way out we’d stop at Burger King for cup sodas. 

A “cup soda” is a fountain soda, but it seemed ridiculous to call them that. They were cup sodas. In any case, I was a Coke fiend, she drank Diet, and we agreed that bottles and cans of the stuff are awful in comparison to what jets from the machine, over plenty of ice—you really had to emphasize how much ice you wanted, causing the server to appear a little puzzled, since many customers want less ice. Besides, who are these weirdos going to Burger King and ordering only sodas? Did they not notice the vending machines right outside?

Then you were out the exit, into the parking lot. 

It was rare to get a close parking spot at a popular mall in New Jersey, so the walk to the car stretched on to eternity. Often the weather had changed while you’d been inside; my current fantasy has it raining lightly. And it was while walking through the columns of cars, quietly sipping a cup soda, thinking of my new shirt or jeans or CD, that I began to remember the walk into the mall, an hour or two before, the anticipation of what you might get and the absolute certainty that you would later have this time-warp trance, the pleasure of the cold fizzy drink in your hand, a sense of retracing your steps and the fleeting day. When you left the mall, something was finished, and everything that happened inside had happened too quickly. An experience of the mall had slipped through my fingers again, our ritual complete.

How else can I convey that the mall was about the parking lot? The great desert of asphalt in which the oasis of commerce sat. I have never stopped being amazed that the first time my parents let my younger brother carry his own money (a $20 bill from our grandmother), they gave it to him as we got out of the car at the mall, securing it in his tiny pocket, and found at the mall entrance that he’d managed, somehow, to lose it somewhere in the lot. The money never saw a store. He was distraught, our parents annoyed, and I was pretending it wasn’t funny, but all of us were impressed by the Bermuda Triangle of the parking lot. It could swallow money up. On a scorching day it felt as if you might sink it into it yourself. The atmosphere above it became wavy with hot fumes, like gravity bent backward.