Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby

Author:Matthew Derby [DERBY, MATTHEW]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC028000
ISBN: 9780316025898
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

Two

We lost our daughter in the new mall. Condescendingly overdesigned and implemented, it seemed the last place a person could disappear into. The wide, carpeted aisles and glass panels appeared to us as massive receptacles, built to draw us in and protect us, channeling us along from one store to the next in a carefully forethought pattern. What purpose could those sleek neon balustrades, the swatches of unbelievably bright, primary-color, faux-tribal murals, and forking, multitiered fountains serve but to deflect tragedy and grief ? It was incomprehensible that a body could find its way through this halcyon barricade, and yet we managed, somehow, to misplace her, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we put her in a place from which it became increasingly difficult for her to return.

I may have let go of her hand hours before we discovered she was gone. It was hard to tell in that place, immersed as we were in the flow of bodies around the center spire, the puffed, flared cylinder of canvas that brought a centrifugal force to the structure. The one thing I remember clearly was the leering orange clown face that topped a public trash barrel, into the gaping mouth of which a thin, gauzy woman had just inserted a foam tray heaped with a family’s worth of crumpled tissue paper and crushed drink cups. Our daughter feared clowns, so I was bending down to shield her from the looming bust when I realized she was not there at all, that the weight I’d been interpreting as her body tugging away at my arm had been nothing but two overstuffed plastic bags. I looked up at Karen, who put as much of her fist in her mouth as she could, as if to bite it off might somehow stanch the delirious onset of panic.

We paced the center court in ever widening arcs, peering wildly into the storefront display windows, because, the logic seemed to be, to look in the crevices, the dark, hushed rooms — the most obvious places — would be to cheapen the disappearance, to disrespect it. We took turns shouting her name, hands cupped to our mouths to channel the sound out over the heads of the passing crowds, the word as it broke away from our faces seeming only to rise and disperse flaccidly into the complex, fluorescent web above, bringing down the noise level, as if one’s voice could sweep a room clean of sound.

We found an Orange Jacket, a beefy, wedge-shaped white woman, who took us into a small, low room.

“Could you describe the child?” she asked, situating herself in a small yellow plastic chair.

I took the first stab. “She was like this,” I said, holding my arms out to my sides.

“When she walked, it was like this,” Karen said, walking around in a circle, hunched over slightly, taking small steps on the balls of her feet.

“And when she opens her mouth you always think she’s going to spit something up, but words come out instead.

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