MallWalk

After the flood, Blair shouts Conrad’s name into the void and befriends the silence that answers.

The now dead mall once known as The Royal Galleria occupies the whole of Blair Van Auken’s memory. He strives through the fog of years to recall the start of that November day when he and his best friend, Conrad Cliff, came down from the K-Mart on the long escalator toward the carousel. Signs of Conrad’s deteriorating mental state were evident from the beginning, but Blair ignored these warnings and turned his focus on a girl who smiled at them. Conrad and Blair’s mutual melancholic exercise carried them through the mock Medieval mall, down the North Hallway, toward fate.

Confused animals thrash in the flood waters. We try our best, as Dr. Peter Kimley suggests, to tell the story from the shark’s perspective, among many others. No matter our angle, the scene is wet confusion, horror, and death. Is God watching from above, as His waters prevail over the mall? Or is that just the eye of another survivor, clinging to life in the false sky? And when Conrad finally reaches the dead avenue from which he began, what is his plan? Or was there ever a plan? For any of us?

Conrad finds himself within the body of the mall, at the bottom of the strange portal. Is it delusion or epiphany? Either way he emerges from a cloud of smoke and chooses his weapon for the final deluge. Multiple witnesses tell of that moment; the whir of the jackhammer, the burst of the pipe, the wall of water. Details seem spurious but accounts rarely differ. Meanwhile, Blair tries to seize the moment, against the nature of his flighty mind, until the moment drops from the sky and seizes him.

The dark of the movie theater, the light of the arcade, our two boys’ melancholic quest bifurcates into love and death, romance and oblivion. Blair navigates the sudden fortune of teenage affection as Conrad obsesses over an arcade cabinet from the 80’s. Little is known of the lost game Otranto, but our research presents some clues to its content. Dark dungeons, living paintings, giant knights, and an ill-fated tragedian who shares a name with ours. Moments before madness, before finding further depths into which we might descend.