SOME VACANT THOUGHTS

THE EMPTY QUARTER

Words & Photos by Douglas John Imbrogno

SANTA CLAUS NO LONGER ARRIVES at year’s end to prop local kids upon his throne beside him at this old mall’s Center Court and ask what they really want for Christmas. Nor will the Easter Bunny be here when Spring chicks ‘peep!-peep!’ and the last ice sheaf of a too-long Winter melts into a gone-memory, the shyest kids quailing at their grandma’s side when the monstrous yellow rabbit invites them close. There is no Center Court since the center no longer holds. At least, right here, right now.

THIS PLACE IS MOSTLY GONE, with its no-longer relevant name in West Virginia’s capital city: Town Center Mall. The town, its center, has moved on. Since you first clicked this page open and read this far, a skinny, bald-headed centibillionaire who sails the seas in a half-trillion-dollar yacht just made $50 million, selling Italian shoes, prom dresses, protein powder, licorice whips & deck umbrellas. His big-box trucks are on their way already across America and the world—maybe to the Amazon itself—to deliver what you used to buy at this gone-gone-gone mall.

I USED TO LIVE HERE, you might say. If you’re of a certain age, ‘I’m going to the mall’ meant not only you were going to shop for stuff, returning through the front door with bags overstuffed with shirts, a belt, recordings, boxer shorts or lingerie. Even a lava lamp from Spencer’s Gifts, if you’d a proto-hippie sensibility or maybe were just a stoner in the suburbs, cruising past the sex-toys, one-eye looking, one looking away. Heading to the mall may mean you were going to hang and walk, to wander with a posse. With would-be girlfriends or boypals and with hangers-on. Maybe you were a hanger-on, the pilot fish shadowing a sleeker, cooler shark. On the first floor, then swimming to the second, if you had a bi-level mall like this one. Which has a third, too, where a Food Court remnant lingers and you may still eat a pepperoni pizza slice or chicken finger.

FOR THIS MALL IS NOT completely dead. Up on the second level, you may still ‘Build-A-Bear,’ if that’s your kid’s thing or yours. And the Hot Topic up there, too, alleges you may still yet be hot. Although for those who strolled the Golden Age of Mega-Malls, hotness may be a faint recollection, as we tidy unruly, thinning hair in the bathroom mirror and wear black to un-reveal our bumps & lumps. Even a ‘30-PERCENT OFF’ sign can’t entice people of an age to enter in search of long-gone temperatures. We’ve other, older topics on our mind passing through a desiccated mall.

THERE ARE LADIES & GENTS who clean here, so there is still something to clean-up. And one of the remaining stores can send you home with Madagascar-cherry scented hand lotion and aloe vera shampoo, were you the sort to drive or stroll to a barren mall to attend your bath & body needs. At another forlorn outpost, a lone employee in a phone shop hunches on a stool, studying her iPhone in a customer-free space. The entry of a candidate consumer, at least on such a Sunday afternoon, must be an occasion unto itself.

THAT FEELING — WHAT IS IT? Passing through this empty quarter left behind by capitalism’s noisy parade, a ruin of a heyday, now that its late-stage malformations offer other modes for amassing wealth and selling stuff. While ever signaling a sale to consumers looking to consume. It’s one variant of dystopian, these mostly boarded blank walls of former stores. Or the game attempt to decorate the gone bustle of scores of storefronts with historic photos & middling art. At first, it’s intriguing to pass through. As if you might still hear faint bustles of ghosts, ten thousand footfalls & the easy chatter of a town come to grab & nab whatever it may need. If only just to meet that most ancient human need, to be around others of your kind in near proximity.

YET AFTER COMPLETING YOUR VISIT — for there’s a lively second-floor museum for music and sound which has the mojo still to attract half-a-hundred folks on a weekend afternoon — you are glad, after documenting all this emptiness everywhere else, to be gone. A mall full of hundreds of human beings bouncing like self-powered pinballs store to store, level to level, is another matter from one that confronts you with a sole figure in the distance, looking for something that is like as not no longer there. What’s that word? Sepulchre. That’s it. Whose synonyms are: tomb, vault, burial chamber, crypt, catacomb, mausoleum, sarcophagus. It is good to push out of this former center-of-the-town. To find the sun still shining bright and round and yellow-gold above. To wonder where the center has gone off to.

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