Gone Girl

life. I still remember the thrill of her going to apply for a job at that most wondrous of places – the mall! – leaving one Saturday morning for the job fair in her bright peach pantsuit, a forty-year-old woman looking for work for the first time, and her coming home with a flushed grin: We couldn’t imagine how busy the mall was, so many different kinds of stores! And who knew which one she might work in? She applied to nine! Clothing stores and stereo stores and even a designer popcorn store. When she announced a week later that she was officially a shoe saleslady, her kids were underwhelmed.
    ‘You’ll have to touch all sorts of stinky feet,’ Go complained.
    ‘I’ll get to meet all sorts of interesting people,’ our mom corrected.
    I peered into the gloomy window. The place was entirely vacant except for a shoe sizer lined pointlessly against the wall.
    ‘My mom used to work here,’ I told Rand, forcing him to linger with me.
    ‘What kind of place was it?’
    ‘It was a nice place, they were good to her.’
    ‘I mean what did they do here?’
    ‘Oh, shoes. They did shoes.’
    ‘That’s right! Shoes. I like that. Something people actually need. And at the end of the day, you know what you’ve done: You’ve sold five people shoes. Not like writing, huh?’
    ‘Dunne, come on!’ Stucks was leaning against the open door ahead; the others had gone inside.
    I’d expected the mall smell as we entered: that temperature-controlled hollowness. Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt, the scent of the outdoors inside, where it had no place being. The building was heavy-hot, almost fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images: It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping-cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A raccoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to a women’s bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes.
    The whole mall was quiet; Mikey’s voice echoed, our footsteps echoed, Stucks’ drunken giggle echoed. We would not be a surprise attack, if attack was what we had in mind.
    When we reached the central promenade of the mall, the whole area ballooned: four stories high, escalators and elevators crisscrossing in the black. We all gathered near a dried-up fountain and waited for someone to take the lead.
    ‘So, guys,’ Rand said doubtfully, ‘what’s the plan here? You all know this place, and I don’t. We need to figure out how to systematically—’
    We heard a loud metal rattle right behind us, a security gate going up.
    ‘Hey, there’s one!’ Stucks yelled. He trained his flashlight on a man in a billowing rain slicker, shooting out from the entry of Claire’s, running full speed away from us.
    ‘Stop him!’ Joe yelled, and began running after him, thick tennis shoes slapping against the ceramic tile floors, Mikey right behind him, flashlight trained on the stranger, the two brothers calling gruffly – hold up there, hey, guy, we just have a question . The man didn’t even give a backward glance. I said hold on, motherfucker! The runner remained silent amid the yelling, but he picked up speed and shot down the mall corridor, in and out of the flashlight’s glow, his slicker flapping behind him like a cape. Then the guy turned acrobatic: leaping over a trash can, shimmying off the edge of a fountain, and finally slipping under a metal security gate to the Gap and disappearing.
    ‘Fucker!’ The Hillsams had turned heart-attack red in the face, the neck, the fingers. They took turns grunting at the gate, straining to lift it.
    I reached down with them, but there was no budging it over half a foot. I lay down on the floor and tried threading myself under the gate: toes, calves, then stuck at my waist.
    ‘Nope, no go.’ I grunted. ‘Fuck!’ I pulled up and shone my flashlight into the store. The showroom was empty except for a pile of clothing racks someone had dragged to the center, as if to start a bonfire. ‘All the stores connect in the back to passageways for trash, plumbing,’ I said. ‘He’s probably at the other end of the mall by now.’
    ‘Come out, you fuckers!’ Joe yelled, his head tilted back, eyes scrunched. His voice echoed through the building. We began walking ragtag, trailing our bats alongside us, except for the Hillsams, who used theirs to bang against security gates and doors,like they were on military patrol in a particularly nasty