Mortarville by Grant Bailie

Author:Grant Bailie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2011-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Terminal Mall

That is the name of the mall I work in. In honor of what it used to be, in honor of all the working parts that have been filled in with concrete or covered over with brick and drywall. Once trains rumbled, tickets were sold, and commuters commuted from happy home to lucrative career. They walked up and down faux-marble steps beneath obscure Roman gods cast in cement, holding cement scale models of engine cars, dining cars and cabooses in their massive cement hands. The Gods of Industry and Transportation and Business. The Demigods of Traffic and Taxpayers. The steel tracks that once groaned with the weight of the masses have been plucked from the ground, to be bent and reassembled into an attractive sculpture on the center floor of the mall. The sculpture is of a man swinging a hammer. It signifies something, but does not really look very much like a man swinging a hammer and sometimes people—out-of-towners mostly—will ask: “What is that supposed to be?” A man swinging a hammer, we have been taught to answer. The sculpture is titled, “Man Swinging a Hammer.” It was created to honor our glorious working past, back when things used to work gloriously.

When I stray from the safety of my office, up stairs, through the greasy haze and out into the mall, I will pause to gaze from an upper level balcony at this kingdom I command. Though command is too strong a word for it. As is kingdom. Mostly I move people around and try to keep the overtime down. I make schedules and then change the schedules when the workers tell me about doctor’s appointments they have made, or funerals they must attend, or family reunions. And sometimes I think, if I kept better track I would be able to catch their mistakes and inconsistencies, point out to them that given the number of funerals they have found it necessary to attend in the past, any reunion now could be held in one booth of a local coffee shop. But I don’t keep better track of things.

People still shop here, but mostly it is the derelicts wandering back and forth, filching a few pennies and dimes from the wishing well fountains placed in several corners of the mall. Their pockets are dark from the wetness of their stolen money. They carry shopping bags from purchases made half a decade ago.

There are guards on the floor, or at least, there ought to be. There should be one right there, making slow methodical circles around the sculpture of the man with the hammer. There should be another one on the level I am observing from, patrolling the circumference of the mall. Depending on the time of day, two more should be in the food court and a third should be making rounds on the top level, occasionally poking his head outside to make sure the exterior walls are not being defaced or falling down on their own accord.

But sometimes the guards are sleeping on boxes in the back corridors.

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