December 17, 2001

• Hover

  He’s 15 or 16 that kid. No one knows what to do with him, least of all himself.

  He left high school because the pressure was too great. He hates his parents because they represent his lack of independence. He’s too ashamed of himself to have close friends.

  At night, he goes for long walks alone through the same suburbia he saw from the roof of the elementary school so long ago. He wanders anonymous through the schoolyards, down the well-lit quiet streets, across the highway, through the tiny patch of forest that hasn’t been developed yet.

  There’s a park he likes to go to. It’s not much besides a big rectangular pseudo-meadow, its precise geometry determined by how many homes weren’t developed on the land. It’s ringed by the homes lucky enough to have been built. There’s a pair of soccer fields, a nonsensically winding paved footpath (the sort of design that looks good on an architect’s blueprint but has no place in reality), a playground area, nonsensically planted trees (to go along with the footpath), a tennis/basketball court. Every aspect of this park is designed with a purpose in mind; there is no wilderness here.

  In the northwest corner of this park, there’s a break in a chain-link fence which allows a pedestrian access to the satellite parking lot behind a shopping mall. And his favorite thing to do when he goes out in the night for a walk is to wander around the empty parking garages of the mall.

  The mall is the most unsuccessful mall in the history of the city in which he lives. No one goes there to shop, even at Christmas time. It’s inconvenient, impersonal, ugly. He thinks of this mall as his own. He watched it being built on the very ground of another mall he would explore in this very same way when he was younger. One must doubt the wisdom of whoever built the least-successful mall ever on the very ground where another unsuccessful mall once stood.

  But he loves parking garages that are empty. They’re husks; places designed to store the shells of hermit crabs when they do their shopping. Purely utilitarian. There is no beauty in a parking garage. There’s cold cement, a coat of paint made to last, an arbitrary numbering system for lost patrons. Glaring lights, empty stairwells.

  In later years, he will come to appreciate the poetry of the shopping mall and the parking garage, but for now, in their empty state they remind him of post-apocalyptic movies he’s seen. He imagines himself leading his people to the best parking garage after the bombs drop, where they can defend themselves against mutants and power-crazy militants. A strange violent conflict in a strangely silent world.

  He never acts out any of these fantasies; they all happen in his head. He’s just walking quietly through a parking garage for no apparent reason. The security guards don’t care about him. He thinks that maybe they recognize him and give him room, but they probably aren’t even aware of his presence. He’s learned how to hover, how to avoid detection by standing more still than people typically do. He’s transparent by simply being nondescript. He’s a ninja of the obvious.

  He climbs the empty stairwell. Steps echo. The tallest of the two garages is four stories. At the top, the metal door creaks, a satisfactory echo down the stairs. He’s careful to make sure the door doesn’t close all the way, or else he’ll have to walk down the ramps.

  He’s on the roof of the garage. The mall to one side, the windy rumble sound of the freeway to the other. The trees are tiny, the houses, the streetlamps, the security guard’s car, the movie theater nearby, the highway. Small and manageable. He stays there for an hour, just looking.

  He’s alone, because it’s better that way.

  • 5:18 am
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