Radio Shack Eucharist
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Moth found Lint hammering circuit boards to the ceiling at 2:47 AM, which was a problem because they were supposed to be cleaning.
"The fuck are you—" She stopped. The pattern he was making looked exactly like her dad's last MRI. Not similar. Exactly. How did he even—
"I know, I know." Lint didn't stop hammering. His hands were shaking. Arthritis or exhaustion, hard to tell anymore. "But look, just... do you see it?"
"See what?" But she did see it. She saw her father's tumor spreading across the dropped ceiling of a dead Radio Shack, and it was somehow the first beautiful thing she'd seen in months.
"I don't know what I'm..." Lint dropped the hammer. It bounced twice. "Sorry. I'll take it down. Regional's coming Thursday anyway."
"Don't," Moth said, surprising herself. "I mean. Fuck regional."
That's how it started. Not with a manifesto. With Moth saying "fuck regional" and meaning it.
Dorothy had been writing on receipt paper for three weeks before anyone noticed. Not poems exactly. More like what poems threw up after eating too much reality. She worked them into the walls at the old Payless with wheatpaste she made from flour stolen from the pretzel place that never quite died.
"Says here... 'my daughter my daughter my daughter my daughter,'" Georges read one night, squinting. "That's just the same words over—"
"It's different each time," Dorothy said. She was crying again. She cried a lot since the custody thing. "Look closer."
Georges looked. The handwriting changed with each repetition. Smaller. Larger. Desperate. Resigned. Furious. "Oh," he said. "Oh, fuck."
"Yeah," Dorothy said. "Fuck."
Georges had been moving the mannequins around for no reason except it beat thinking about his student loans. $73,000 for a Yale MFA. Current income: $11,900 a year. The math was hilarious if you were dead inside, which he mostly was.
"They're fucking," Veronica said one night, finding him arranging three mannequins in what used to be Claire's.
"They're dancing," Georges corrected.
"No, from over here they're definitely—" Veronica walked around. "Oh wait. Now they're fighting."
"Yeah." Georges stepped back. "Yeah, I don't know what they're doing anymore."
"Same," Veronica said, and laughed. Not a good laugh. The kind of laugh her grandmother made when they told her no pension after thirty-one years. "Hey, you got any food?"
"Will brought ramen."
"Will always brings ramen."
Will was in the food court writing in composition notebooks he'd lifted from Dollar Tree. Not stories. Lists. Everything his wife remembered about each store before she died. She'd loved this mall. Loved it like only someone who grew up poor could love a place that sold things she couldn't afford.
"Orange Julius had a secret menu," he said to no one. "She swore they did. You had to know the girl who worked Tuesdays."
"What was on it?" Moth asked, mopping around him.
"I don't know. She never said. Maybe nothing. Maybe that was the secret."
Vessel—Ourtour was his real name but everyone called him Vessel because he'd mentioned once he felt like a vessel for something, then couldn't explain what—sat in the old Barnes & Noble writing philosophy on the walls with a Sharpie. Direct onto the walls. Sixty-three years old, Princeton PhD, sleeping in his car, writing about minimum wage with a marker that cost more than he made in an hour.
"This is..." he started one night, then stopped. "I had a thought but it's gone."
"Write it anyway," Lint said.
"But it's gone."
"So write about it being gone."
So Vessel wrote: "The thought I had is gone, $7.25 an hour, the thought I had is gone."
"That's fucking beautiful," Dorothy said, and meant it.
"That's fucking stupid," Georges said, and also meant it.
"Same thing," Moth said.
Hector found them like this one night. All of them supposed to be cleaning, instead doing... whatever this was.
"You know they got cameras, right?"
"They don't work," Lint said. "I checked."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've been building a giant tumor on the ceiling for three weeks and nobody's said shit."
Hector looked up. "That's supposed to be a tumor?"
"It's also a brain scan. Also a circuit board. Also—"
"Also you're all gonna get fired."
They looked at him. Seven twenty-five an hour. No benefits. Getting fired from this was like getting evicted from hell.
"Your cousin," Georges said suddenly. "The one who went to art school. Lint told me."
Hector's face changed. "What about him?"
"Nothing. Just. You get it."
"Get what?"
Georges gestured vaguely at everything. The mannequins. The receipt poems. Will's notebooks. The thread Veronica had been stringing between stores like the world's saddest spiderweb.
"This is nothing like what my cousin did," Hector said. "His stuff made sense."
"Did it though?" Moth asked. "Before he—"
"No," Hector said quietly. "No, I guess it didn't."
After that, Hector started helping. Not with the art or whatever it was. But he'd say when regional was coming. Move things so they looked more like cleaning supplies, less like an installation. Once he brought his kids' old Happy Meal toys and left them in the GameStop where Georges was planting actual seeds in old game cartridges.
"Why?" Georges asked.
"I don't know," Hector said. "Felt like they belonged there."
The thing grew. Not the art. The thing. The thing they were doing that didn't have a name because naming it would kill it.
Martha showed up one night still wearing her Hallmark uniform. Laid off after thirty years. "I heard you all were doing something," she said.
"We're not doing anything," Dorothy said.
"We're doing everything," Lint said.
"We're doing..." Will looked up from his notebooks. "I don't know. Something between nothing and everything."
"Can I help?" Martha asked.
"You already are," Moth said, which didn't make sense but Martha nodded like it did.
Martha started taking the receipt poems and sewing them together with thread from her sewing kit. Not into anything. Just together. "Thirty years of 'Happy Birthday to someone special,'" she said. "Thirty fucking years."
"That's poetry," Dorothy said.
"That's not poetry, that's—" Martha stopped sewing. "Actually, maybe it is. I don't know anymore."
A kid found them. Art student. Keller or Kellan or something. Started taking pictures.
"This is amazing! It's like, the death of capitalism but also—"
"Kid," Vessel interrupted. "You got any food?"
"What?"
"Food. Do you have any food?"
"I... no?"
"Then shut up about capitalism and help me move this mannequin."
The kid helped. Posted the pictures online. Called it "ruins of late capitalism" or some shit. Missed the point completely. The point wasn't that capitalism was dying. The point was they were still alive despite it. Seven twenty-five an hour alive. Eating ramen for the sixth day straight alive. Making things that made no sense because sense was a luxury they couldn't afford alive.
More people came. Not crowds. But enough. Other overnight workers. People who'd been laid off from the mall when it was alive. Unhoused folks who'd been sleeping in the loading dock anyway.
"What are you doing?" they'd ask.
"Fuck if we know," became the standard answer.
Tyler showed up one night. Or Taylor. Had money, felt bad about it, common story. "This should be in a gallery," he said.
"Galleries don't pay minimum wage workers," Georges said.
"But this is art—"
"This is work," Moth corrected. "We work here. This is our job. We're at our job."
"But—"
"You bring any food?" Will asked.
Tyler/Taylor brought food after that. Understood that was the price of admission. Not understanding. Food.
The city sent eviction notices. They kept cleaning. Kept making. Kept doing whatever it was they were doing.
"We should organize," someone suggested. "Make demands."
"Demands for what?" Dorothy asked. "More than seven twenty-five an hour? Health insurance? A future? Those aren't demands, those are fantasies."
"So what do we do?"
"This," Lint said, hammering another circuit board to something. "We do this."
One night—must have been month six or seven, time got weird—Moth stood in what used to be the center court. The mall had transformed into something unrecognizable. Not art. Not an installation. Not a statement. Just what happens when people stop distinguishing between the work they're paid for and the work that keeps them alive.
"We did something," she said to no one.
"We're doing something," Lint corrected, like always.
"We are something," Dorothy added.
"We are—" Will started, then stopped. Laughed. Not a good laugh. Not a bad laugh. Just the laugh of someone who'd been awake for twenty-three hours making something that would never sell for anything because it was made of everything that had already been thrown away, including the people making it.
"We're here," Moth said finally. "Seven twenty-five an hour, and we're still fucking here."
The mall doesn't end. Can't end. The story doesn't have an ending because rent is due on the first and they'll all be back tomorrow night, mopping and making, cleaning and creating, maintaining what's dead while proving they're alive. Seven twenty-five an hour alive. No health insurance alive. Yale MFA delivering pizza alive. Philosophy PhD sleeping in his car alive. All of them together at 3 AM, doing something with nothing, making we out of I, making enough out of not enough, making it through another shift, another night, another year of this.
The last thing Vessel wrote on the wall, before the Sharpie ran out, before his shift ended, before he went back to his car to sleep for three hours before his other job: "The thought I had is gone, $7.25 an hour, but we're still here."
That's it. That's all. That's everything. They're still there. Still here. Still.
