Orbits: A Contemporary Fantasy of Pattern and Apocalypse (Part 2 of 4: Departures and Decline)

There's a lot of pressure on an assistant manager to get things finished at the end of the night. After the last customer leaves we've still got an hour of re-shelving and cleaning to do. There's money to count and paperwork to file. The staff wants to go home and corporate doesn't want us sucking up payroll, either.

When the last customer doesn't leave, it doesn't take long for the night's tasks to feel overwhelming.

Nancy was furious. Her affection for her Bartlebies evaporated the moment they interfered with going home. She found me upstairs, double-checking the restrooms for lingering customers. She hissed, "They're still here!"

"You're kidding."

"How are we going to get them to leave?"

One glided past bakery case while the other two orbited history. These two were closest to the exit, so I approached them first. "We're closed!" I said, shouting with the false politeness one uses with the hard of hearing. "You need to go, now. You can come back tomorrow, if you want." I shuffled and bent my knees, keeping myself in its line of sight as he gazed at the carpet.

Nancy ran around affixing post-it labels. Just numbers this time. "So we can keep track of which ones are still here," she whispered.

"Relax," I told her. "Go straighten the computer books."

We locked the doors and recovered the store while I called mall security. The kid showed up half an hour later. "Oh, these guys," he said. "We never see them anywhere else in the mall."

"I know. We've asked you about it."

"What do they want?"

"Who cares? I just want them to go home."

He tried the same conversation I used. "It's weird," he said. "I don't think he's listening to me. Are they deaf?"

"Oh, just get them out of the building," Nancy said. She rounded up Ernie and Reggie. Together with the security guard, they took Planet #2 by the arm and pulled towards the door. The robes stretched a bit, but the body underneath didn't respond. The rest of us piled on, pushing from behind. It felt like we were trying to roll a boulder uphill. There wasn't much give to the flesh. It was hard to tell if its body was solid muscle, or bronze.

"Wow," said the security guard. "That's really something."

"I'll call the police," I said.

Another half-hour for the cops. Two officers. I took their badge numbers and names for the report: Jenkens and McNay. "These guys trespassing?" McNay said. "Any idea who they are?"

"We'd love to know," I said.

Jenkens approached #3. "What's this?" he said, pointing at the post-it note.

"That's how we tell them apart."

He shook his head, bewildered. "Sir? Mam? Hello? You have ID?"

#3 was unimpressed with his questioning.

"Sir, this store is closed. You don't have to go home but you can't stay here." That old chestnut. Jenkens laughed at himself and Reggie joined him. "Sir, I'm going to pat you down now and see if you have any weapons or ID on you, okay?" He did the usual security-frisk thing, although it was awkward as the planet kept walking towards biographies as he did it. Jenkens stepped back. "That outfit doesn't even have any pockets," he said. He patted the top of #3's head and then pulled at the brim of the hat.

"They don't come off," I said, "We've tried."

Our timer for the overhead lighting clicked off at 11 PM, leaving the store dim with just the overnight bulbs burning. We were usually out of the building by now. A minute later the alarm company called to ask why we hadn't activated the burglar alarm yet. I gave them my codes and told them it wasn't an emergency. They didn't have to notify the police. There was no point in telling them the police were already here.

The cops conferred with the security guard. #3 had wandered around the corner.

"These guys are in here all the time, I understand," said McNay.

"Yes."

"And this is the first time they've caused you any trouble?"

"Other than creeping a few people out, that's right."

"We could issue them a no-trespass order. But I wouldn't know how to fill out the paperwork. We'd need an ID for that. Or one of them would need to talk to us."

"Can't you just carry them out of here?"

"Those are big guys," he said. "I think we'd need more officers."

"For Christ's sake!" said Nancy, "So get more officers!"

I told Jenkens and McNay that we couldn't go home until we cleared the building.

Jenkens said, "I guess you could stay open all night, huh? Any way I could get a coffee?"

---

So things got serious. They called for backup. Two more cars, lights flashing red and blue hysteria across the parking lot and through our giant plate-glass windows. Four more officers, a couple of tasers drawn, handcuffs ready.

It felt wrong. Like I was betraying the Planets. But the officers had to be careful. Weird behavior like this, could be drugs involved. Could get violent. You never know. The cops ordered us to stand behind the cash registers and drop to the floor at the first sign of trouble. They moved out into the store to track the Planets down and haul them out.

But they were gone.

The last officers to arrive had left the front door unlocked. I watched the security footage the next day, and saw them leaving, three ponderous bodies moving silently towards the parking lot while my staff took instruction from the cops by the cash registers. The approached the door gradually, like soap bubbles circling a slow drain, and slipped out into the night. They seemed to pop in the flashing lights of the squad cars before they vanished into the darkness.

---

A few weeks passed without another sighting, and we wondered if they'd gotten the hint, somehow. You're more trouble then you're worth. We don't need your kind here. Nancy said "good riddance," and Reggie said he felt kind of bad about it and Ernie just shrugged. Most of us had other things to worry about, like how to get to work. Gas prices jumped from two dollars a gallon to six. The Dow tumbled 40% overnight and then kept falling. Those of us who'd invested in 401Ks wondered why we'd bothered. And then the President told the country there was no reason to start hoarding food, so a bunch of people did. Grocery shopping was borderline dangerous, and it didn't help to hear that gun sales were through the roof, too.

When the planets came back on a Saturday afternoon, I didn't mind. They made things felt normal again.

Nancy said, "It's just a matter of time before you have to kick them out again."

"We never kicked them out," I said. "Technically." What did she want me to do about it? Corporate's Loss Prevention department had spoken with the police about that night, and they came back to us with the impression that the whole thing had been a prank. I wasn't sure who they thought was pulling the prank: us, or the guys in the shiny costumes. It seemed an odd prank, drifting around a store for hundreds of hours. But I was just an assistant manager. I'd learned it doesn't help your career to go around opening your mouth when higher-ups are expressing their opinions.

---

They came back on a Tuesday morning. Early. Before we were open.

We put out new releases on Tuesdays. There were over 100 merchandising projects in the queue (I'd checked the night before) and my head was full of strategies and plans for getting them finished, so it barely registered with me that the door was unlocked when I got there. Reggie had closed the night before. But the security alarm had been armed. If anyone had come in overnight, we'd have gotten an automated call from the alarm company. I entered the building with Nancy and Ernie, confident there wasn't anyone inside.

That's why I shrieked like a Japanese schoolgirl when a Planet drifted out from behind the tall New Age shelves.

The planet who startled me, of course, didn't react at all.

I couldn't waste a morning's payroll dealing with these jokers. The company had just announced plans to close a handful of stores. Our hours had been cut by a third, but clearly the payroll people hadn't talked to the merchandising people, since merch was assigning more projects then ever. The Winter "get fit" promotions were coming down to make room for the pre-Summer selections. "Adult coloring" was out; interactive role-play romances were the next craze. We had to knock down a run of shelves to put up a display of erotic aids. (I worked for a bookstore once, but we have to change with the times.) But first, new releases. No time to waste. We set the displays and prepared for the day as if nothing had happened. We didn't get everything done before we opened, but we rarely did. We did the best we could, like always.

Later that morning I checked the cameras. They showed the planets drifting in around 5:30 that morning. No struggling with the locked door. Their movements were slow and steady enough that they never tripped the motion detectors.

I called Reggie to give him the news. He was aghast. "There's no way. In twelve years I've never left without locking up."

"I don't have to file a report," I said. "Nothings been taken."

"No," he said. "Call the police. Show them the recording. File the report. If they ever do steal something, we'll need a record of what happened today. I'll take the heat for it."

I should hope so, I thought. You left the damn door unlocked.

"Got it," I said. "You take the heat and I'll do the paperwork."

---

Officer McNay arrived as I was burning the security footage to CD and submitting my report to corporate. He looked exhausted, like he'd aged years in the past few months. Unshaven, bags under the eyes. I could smell stale sweat through his uniform.

"You had a break-in?" he said. "Same guys as before?"

"They came in before we were open. It wasn't really a break-in."

"Was the door locked?"

"Our closing manager might have forgot."

"Then what's the big deal? Did they take anything?"

I was getting a headache. My staff was still beavering away on projects downstairs, leaving just one cashier to handle a growing line. I should be down there, not mucking around in the office. "We were obviously closed," I said. "They stayed in here for hours, with the lights off and no staff at all."

"What do you want me to do, arrest them? We tried that before, and they disappeared. Pretty funny, that. You want us to try again? Want to shut down, clear the building, secure the exits?"

I shook my head. "We just want to file a report."

He rubbed his temples. "Why don't I come back when someone's actually broken the law?"

I gave him a copy of the disk anyway. He took it with a shrug. I followed him out of the office, squeezing past one of the planets as we walked along the balcony. By 10:30 the store was crowded with people who had lost their jobs, looking for places to hang out during the day. We had businessmen sitting in the aisles, reading mysteries or self-help books. One family spread a picnic out on the carpet, like this was Central Park. More traffic, less sales. We didn't really want all these customers in the building. But we didn't want to start kicking people out, either. For the managers it was always a hard call. Who will spend? Who do we move along? Meanwhile we were all working a lot harder to make less money.

McNay must have picked up on some of this. He stopped at the top of the escalator. "Look," he said, "Two years ago, I'd love to look into something like this. It would be a nice break from answering phones or chasing down traffic violations, you know? But these days..." He paused, scratching at his stubble. "Look - between you and me - I recognize a lot of your customers. Some of these people live in campgrounds. It's fucking March. You know how it feels to chase these guys around the streets all day? Where the hell are they supposed to go?"

I consideredwhat to say. In customer service, you can't go wrong with flattery. "I'm glad you're out there, sir."

"I'll hang on to the disk," he said, "But why don't you wait until you have a real problem before you call us again."

---

Half the stores in the mall closed that fall. The concourse felt gritty, dangerous, under-lit. Metal gratings were locked down over empty spaces. Sears was turned into an activity center for at-risk youth. A Baptist church moved into the Best-Buy, and one of the Macy's was converted to an indoor gardening cooperative. They grew and sold vegetables, but everyone knew their real cash-crop was marijuana.

The cost of paper skyrocketed. The prices were changing so quickly that we had to print new bar-codes for the books and sticker over the old. Customers peeled them off. We had to explain that, sorry, we couldn't honor last week's prices. But we did have a frequent-buyer program that gave them 10% off!

The Planets drifted through it all. A few times a week, or every day, or just sometimes. Day or night now, didn't make much difference. "Are those guys still here?" Our district manager made a joke of it. Jack had lost half of his stores. "We can't close this location. Where would those weirdos end up?" Compared to some locations we were still treading water, financially. It helped that the mall gave us free rent and electricity. They couldn't afford to lose any more stores.

The Planets came in past closing so often now that we took to staffing the store at night. We never figured out how they always managed to open the door, but it was like that heavy dead-bolt didn't apply to them. At least the free rent from the mall made up for the additional payroll. We entertained the idea of actually staying open at night - for about five minutes. Reggie pointed out that being open 24 hours a day would just turn us into a homeless shelter.

It was eerie working there at night. We tried to stay productive, writing schedules and catching up on paperwork, shelving alone while the store was empty. But there weren't as many books moving through the place anymore. Shelving took a couple of hours at most. We went from having too many projects to not enough.

Corporate didn't want us in the building alone, for safety reasons, but they didn't want to pay for a manager and an employee, so they did something that was unheard of a year before. They encouraged us to bring friends in for the night. It was a smart move, since most of our friends were the people we worked with. They'd end up shelving books for free so we could spend the rest of the night hanging around, cooking pizzas in the cafe and watching movies on the security monitors. We held a few mini-dance parties. As long as things were tidied up by morning and we'd gotten something done, corporate turned a blind eye.

Needless to say, there was a lot of sex going on in the store in those days. We'd bring our wives or girlfriends in, and seek out the crannies we knew weren't covered by security cameras. The manager's office was the obvious choice, but the emergency exit stairwells or the space under the receiving room counter worked just as well. There was an illicit thrill to it, that feeling that we were getting away with something.

And for corporate, it was cheaper than paying for an all-night security service.

Those were good years, come to think of it.

In the early days, Sarah used to ask why I worked so hard for a company that paid so poorly and demanded so much. Maybe I could have done better. I could have used those years to go back to school, get a job outside of retail. Instead, I kept driving to the mall and punching in.

It came down to the people we worked with. Nancy, Ernie, Reggie, Eric: good people came and went and great people stayed. It wasn't like other stores.

And then we found ourselves lucky to have any job at all. The country went to shit around us. It would be insane to leave any company that still wrote paychecks. And this made the friendships feel even more valuable. Maybe we were just selling books and toys and coffee and giving a desperate town a place to spend their afternoon. But we kept showing up. It felt like we were all towing some line against the inevitable.

That's why we stayed.

That, and we all thought the Planets were going to do something someday, and we wanted to be there when they did.

Eventually one of them saved my life.

---

Thanks for coming back for part two of Orbits.

The cover image was provided by the talented @donnadavisart.

The video below is a charming old adaptation of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, the story which inspired Nancy's nickname for the Planets. It's one of my favorite stories, by Melville or any author.

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Quick link to: Part 1

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