Orbits: A Contemporary Fantasy of Pattern and Apocalypse (Part 1 of 4: The Planets Arrive)
It still feels like the old days were the normal days. I'm probably just showing my age. Back then, most of us had jobs in the suburbs. We'd drive to those jobs in cars. Gas was less than $25 a gallon. And people would go shopping for fun, of all things.
Back then, when all these things were normal, the damnedest thing happened.
And that damnedest thing went on for so long it started to feel normal, too.
This is the first part of a four-part story, very loosely inspired by my experiences as a manager in a large corporate-chain bookstore.
This was originally shared at Wattpad.com. I own all rights. I plan on sharing these here over the next few days, as close to noon EST as I can manage. I have a few other fiction projects in the pipeline which I intend on sharing exclusively here on Steemit.
The cover image was painted by the talented @donnadavisart.
Our booksellers had lots of names for them. Our general manager, Reggie, called them monks. Their silvery-white outfits were a hybrid of robe, jumpsuit, space-suit, and footie-pajama, with trousers that were one piece with their baggy shoes. An ascetic's uniform. Like monks, they didn't want anything. They didn't eat or drink or purchase products.
Nancy christened them "Bartlebies," since they didn't do anything. Melville was her favorite writer and she loved explaining the reference. Bartleby would prefer not to. The Bartlebies came and went. You couldn't expect anything of them.
Our regulars called them lookie-loos because they never bought anything. They never even picked anything up. If one of them slowed down in front of a shelf, there was nothing to do but wait. You couldn't talk to them and most people didn't want to. The apathetic expression on their chubby, sexless faces was unnerving, if you weren't used to it. Tapping them on the shoulder didn't to any good, either. You could just as easily get the attention of a cloud.
Or a planet. This is what I called them, Planets, because of their ponderous bulk, the smooth way they drifted around, and the domed hats they wore, with semi-translucent brims that looked like the rings of Saturn. They didn't so much walk around the store as orbit, tracing the geometry of some ineluctable equation. If you looked down on them from the second floor balcony, planets is precisely what they looked like.
It was so odd, seeing them glide around, that back in the early days Reggie speculated they were part of a mass-hallucination. They were so otherworldly, maybe they weren't really there.
Reggie's history of drug use had left him with some far-out notions. (No one winds up in retail because they're perfect.) But I felt the same way. I even checked the security footage. They were on it. I downloaded the videos to my phone and brought them home to my wife, Sarah.
"You sure get some characters in that place," she said.
We rarely saw the Planets come in. We'd look up from a shelving cart, or turn around from helping a customer, and one would be there, drifting along the balcony railing, or floating past the homeschooling materials, or riding up the escalator. (That's as fast as they ever moved, on the escalator.) Once we saw the first we'd track down the second, transecting the cafe line, say, and the third, staring blankly through the magazine racks. There were always three.
Was it always the same three? They were indistinguishable. There could have been thousands of them out there, haunting our store in shifts.
Sometimes they'd cluster together. Sometimes two would circle the same department, with the third off to the side. But usually they just traced their separate paths. It was randomness - Brownian motion at a glacial pace.
Their movements were a regular topic of conversation in the break room. Jess would say, "They were all in the bargain department today, right between cooking and the Last Chance cart. I've never seen them so close together! I should have taken a picture."
Then Eric would say, "One followed me into the elevator yesterday. Longest 45 seconds of my life. They smell like cinnamon and oranges. Have you noticed?"
Nancy: "I've never gotten close enough to smell one. Did you talk to him?"
"Do you talk to people in the elevator?"
"Good point."
Customers complained. If I was working in the office, my first indication that the planets were here would be a page that someone wanted to speak to the manager. They'd want to tell me about the creepy guys, or the fat men, or the inappropriately dressed customers. I wasn't sure how it was inappropriate. They didn't show an inch of skin beneath their jump-suits.
"Thanks for expressing your concern," I'd say. "What did they do to upset you?"
They were blocking the displays, or scaring their children, or walking through the bathroom stalls. No, not when they were occupied. Just standing there with the door open, not using them. By the time I went to check, the planet had moved on.
All retail managers (especially assistant managers) are trained in acknowledging a customer's concerns and then promptly forgetting them. With the Planets visiting, we honed this skill to perfection. We couldn't just accuse them of anything. Sure, aimless browsing might be an insult to corporate retail, but that was an insult we suffered from all of our customers. At least the Planets didn't leave the stacks of books and magazines most of our customers left behind. We never had to clean up after them. They didn't even hog the comfy chairs.
They were aloof and rude? Well, maybe they were deaf. Maybe they had taken a vow of silence.
Complaints bubble up, though. It wasn't long before someone got the corporate number and the district manager heard about them. They complained that a "scary white man" had walked across the kid's stage in the middle of story-time. Then he just stood there, pacing in circles. What really pissed off our customer was that our kids' manager didn't make him leave. She just moved the kids over to the floor! The scary guy just stood there, staring at the wall! What if he was a pedophile? What kind of environment were we trying to provide?
So Jack called up and asked me, what the hell?
I told him as little as I could, leaving out our nick-names, our speculations, how many complaints we'd already fielded. Were these guys shoplifting? No. They never touched a product. Were they threatening? Hardly. A threat would be a kind of interaction, and they didn't interact. Were they creating a quality-of-life issue? This was harder. They made people uncomfortable because they were different. As a corporation, we had pledged to embrace diversity. We couldn't ask an African American or a Muslim to leave because they made our other customers uncomfortable. Jack reviewed the security footage I sent him and called the customer back. People of all creeds and races are welcome in our stores, he explained. And sorry, it's not our obligation to understand what those races and creeds are.
The planets arrived unpredictably. Mornings, evenings, mid-day. An hour Friday, all day Tuesday. Their schedule was as unpredictable as their motion. But it was frequent enough that they faded into our background. Customers kept complaining, but for us they were as innocuous as an abandoned shopping trolley from the mall.
One day Nancy was merchandising a display of messenger bags in the gift department. One of the Planets slowed to a stop next to her stack of cartons. It stood, semi-frozen in this way they had of pausing before they turned in a new direction. Its arm was out, fingers still but relaxed, as if lost in thought. Nancy was keyed-up, over-caffeinated. We'd assigned a lot of projects to her queue that day. Rather than wait for the planet to move, she hung some bags over his arm while she kept unpacking and breaking down boxes. The Planet obliged. At least it didn't flinch or change course in any way. When she was ready, she slid the bags back off its arm and transferred them to the display.
I rushed over a moment later. "You touched it!" I said. This had seemed unthinkable, a moment before.
"The Bartleby?" she said. Her mind was already on to the next project. "I guess so."
"What did it feel like?"
"Like a coat-rack," she said.
Word spread: we could touch them and they wouldn't do anything. We stuck post-it notes on them. If one drifted towards the music department, I'd address a note to that cashier, slap it on the Planet's back, and make a bet with my co-manager on whether the cashier would get it. One slow night we took hats from the lost-and-found and put them on over the Planet's domed heads. (The brims of their original hats might wobble or quiver, but the tops were glued in place, as if they'd grown there.) Some of my booksellers slid puppets from the toy department over their gloves. I'd see a planet staring gloomily into space with Peppa Pig over one mitt and a fuzzy bunny over the other. I had to put a stop to this because I couldn't have the Planets drifting out with unpaid merchandise.
The novelty of this wore off quickly. Still, it made us feel good to identify them, to give each of the three some individuality. I taped numbers to their backs, one, two, and three. Nancy got more creative: Bartleby, Billy Budd, and Pierre. The notes always vanished by the next time they came in.
Where did they go when they left? They disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived - or they just walked out when we were distracted. Once in a while we'd see them drift into the mall. They were always long gone by the time one of us had the freedom of a break to follow them. A customer followed one into the parking lot once, but his view was cut off by a tour bus, and by the time he got around it the planet must have gotten into a car and driven away. We asked mall security if they'd seen them around. Of course not. When was the last time mall security saw anything?
It didn't matter. We started to like seeing the planets around. Our regular customers did, too. They brought something unique to our store. We had 700 locations in our chain, and none of the other managers had seen anything like this. "Planet days" felt special, somehow. We started talking to them, comfortable in the knowledge they'd never talk back.
They'd been with us through Winter, wandering through every promo display that corporate dreamed up to squeeze business out of the post-Christmas lull. By April, it felt like they should be on the payroll.
That's when the problems started.
I remember the night of May second because I had to write up the incident report for corporate. It was around the time of the oil crisis and the Internet crash.
It was closing time.
And the planets wouldn't leave.
I loved this story. And thanks for sharing my cover ;)
Of Course!
Very nice story - waiting for the second part!
(And cool video, thanks!)
Thank you! I'm just polishing it up for tomorrow.
Quite simply, I LOVED this!!! I can't wait for the next instalment.
Thanks so much, @onetree! It means a lot to have someone read and comment. Especially a fellow retailer!
The woman in the video must be some sort of publicity stunt hire for Paul Sheldon's "Misery" series. My mind is unable to process the information any other way without further lowering my contempt level towards the humanoids.
Yeah, I think that video was staged. It looks like the staff was in on it even though many of the customers weren't. Still, it's not too far afield from what it's really like working there.
We hired a manager who had run a Gap clothing store for 30 years. He said he couldn't believe how much crazier the bookstore customers were.
I knew it! You write really nice and it's about something bizarre and unique. It is more interesting to me to read it because you said it's based very loosely from your own experience. It tickles my brain to imagine you meeting and interacting and solving these "planets" XD.