We Are Doing Something
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When the overnight cleaning crew at the abandoned mall discovered they were all artists, writers, and philosophers surviving on minimum wage, they stopped just maintaining the empty stores and started transforming them into something else—a cornucopia of necessary and useful things nobody knew they needed.
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"You have made here and now," Moth Delacroix said, looking at what Lint Chin had done with the old Radio Shack. Circuit boards everywhere—walls, ceiling, making patterns like prayers or diagrams of God's nervous system. Or his father's brain on the MRI, metastasized, three weeks to live, no insurance for treatment anyway.
"Not me," Lint corrected, grinning wild. Wild like hunger. $7.25 an hour, overnight shift, no benefits. "We are. We are doing something."
That was it. The shift. The moment everything went from you to we, from are to are doing, from dead mall to—whatever this was becoming.
It had started messy. Dorothy Loom writing poems on receipt paper—thousands of them, lifted from Office Max dumpsters—plastering them in the old Payless where she'd bought her daughter's last birthday shoes before the custody ruling. Georges Gardener dragging mannequins from three different stores, making them dance or fight or fuck—hard to tell, hard to tell if it mattered. His MFA from Yale: $73,000 in debt. Current income: $11,900 a year. Will Beau filling notebook after notebook—composition books from Dollar Tree—with memories of stores. His own memories. His dead wife's memories that she'd whispered during chemo. Veronica Spool unspooling actual thread between entrances, making webs, mazes. Thread from the closed Jo-Ann Fabrics. Her grandmother had worked there thirty-one years. No pension.
"We're not just cleaning," Veronica said one night, standing in thread up to her knees, her back spasming from mopping forty thousand square feet. "We're doing... what's the word? Cultural reproductive... something?"
"Labor!" Georges shouted from inside Claire's where he was making mannequin children play with abandoned jewelry. Real jewelry some teenager had shoplifted then ditched. Fourteen karat gold. Would have fed him for three months. "Like housework but for ghosts!"
"Ghost work!" Will yelled back.
"Ghost economy!" Lint added.
"GHOST MALL!" they all said together, then laughed like maniacs. Like people who'd been awake for twenty-three hours. Like people who'd eaten ramen for six days straight.
Ourtour Vessel, the oldest—sixty-three, philosophy PhD from Princeton, living in his car—started crying. "This is it. This is the... the ontological... the reality thing."
"What reality thing?" Dorothy asked, receipt poems falling from her pockets. Each one a thought someone had while spending money they didn't have.
"We're saying this is how things ARE. Not perspective but... existence actually works like this. Through garbage becoming—"
"Beautiful!" Moth interrupted. She'd been beautiful once. Model. Before the car accident. Before the settlement that didn't cover shit. Before Oxycontin. Before heroin. Before recovery. Before this.
"Necessary!" Veronica added.
"USEFUL!" Will screamed, throwing his notebooks in the air, pages everywhere, falling like snow, like his wife's hair during chemo, like the leaves of the trees they'd cut down to build this mall in 1987.
They stopped meeting before shifts. Started living their shifts. The mall became their laboratory, their cathedral, their cornucopia overflowing with EVERYTHING. With nothing. With the space between everything and nothing.
"We're maintenance workers but—" Georges started.
"Caretakers!" Dorothy interrupted.
"For the discarded!" Veronica continued.
"Not just stuff but—" Lint waving his hands, the arthritis getting worse, no insurance for treatment.
"Concepts! Memories! The whole—" Will spinning in circles, dizzy from hunger or exhaustion or both.
"EVERYTHING NOBODY WANTS WE WANT!" Moth finished, and they all started dancing. Dancing at 3 AM in an abandoned mall, minimum wage workers with advanced degrees, with dreams that had been foreclosed on, with bodies breaking from work that barely paid for existence.
The security guard found them like that. Dancing in the old food court that Lint had filled with hundreds of microwave ovens—all from the dump, all displaying different times, all beeping randomly. The sound of time having a nervous breakdown.
"What the hell—"
"We are doing something!" they all said. Not in unison. Overlapping. Chaotic. Beautiful. Necessary. Useful.
"You see a mess—" the guard started. Hector. $13 an hour. Three kids. Wife worked at Amazon warehouse.
"We see connections!" Veronica said.
"Intervals!" Ourtour added.
"The space between—" Dorothy gestured wildly.
"RELATIONAL PERCEPTION!" Will shouted, having just learned the term from a library book. The library that was closing. Budget cuts.
Hector started laughing. Couldn't help it. Started helping too. Moving things. Adding to the chaos. The abundance. His cousin had been an artist. Killed himself when he couldn't pay back the art school loans. Hector understood something about beautiful garbage.
Victoria's Secret became a temple to every body type—mannequins fat, thin, broken, repaired with tape and love and rage. GameStop turned into a graveyard where old systems grew flowers (actual flowers, Georges found seeds in the dumpster behind Home Depot). The bookstore? Dorothy filled it with receipt poetry, millions of tiny thoughts covering every surface like scales, like feathers, like—
"DRAGON SKIN!" she yelled one night. "The mall is becoming a dragon!"
"Yes!" Lint screaming back. "A dragon that eats emptiness and shits—"
"CORNUCOPIA!" everyone together.
They wrote on everything. "Even Divinity is concerned with the earthly." "Something woven together through work." "We looks at world with deeper." Not "look"—"looks." Grammar breaking. Like them. Refusing divisions.
"This pretentious or—" Dorothy started.
"Who cares!" Moth dancing with a mannequin. "We're making importance through attention!"
"Through MESS!" Georges corrected.
"Through beautiful useful necessary EVERYTHING!"
Word got out. Urban explorers came. Kids from the art school. Kids who couldn't afford art school. Took pictures. Completely missed it. Posted on Instagram. #RuinPorn. Missed that it wasn't ruin. It was birth.
"They think it's art," Dorothy said, but laughing.
"It is!" Moth said.
"But also labor!" Veronica added. Her hands bleeding from the thread. From cleaning. From making.
"Also prayer!" Will continued.
"Also breakfast!" Georges said, eating cereal from a display bowl. Expired. Still good.
"ALL AT ONCE!" they screamed.
An old woman showed up. Hallmark uniform. Thirty years selling cards. Laid off. No severance.
"I heard you're doing—"
"WE ARE DOING!" everyone interrupted. "ALWAYS DOING!"
"Can I?"
"You already are!" Will handed her receipt poems, thread, mannequin parts, a microwave displaying the wrong year. "Pick everything! Use everything!"
She started crying. Started creating. Started doing.
More came. Dozens. Former retail workers—$7.25 to $11 an hour, no futures. Current houseless—the mall was warmer than outside. Rich kids looking for meaning—finding it in other people's garbage. All becoming we. All becoming doing.
"This about establishing community of—" Veronica started formal.
"PRACTICE!" everyone yelled.
"Way of being together in—"
"RESISTANCE!"
"To what though?" new person asked. Tyler. Trust fund. Guilty about it.
"To just... being," Lint said quiet. Then louder: "We're not being. We're DOING!"
The mall became impossible. Every store transformed. Spencer's full of things nobody needed but everyone wanted once they saw them—lamps that didn't work but meant something, calendars from wrong years but right somehow, everything useful for the soul if not the body.
"We have made—" Lint started one dawn, the sun coming through the skylight they'd shattered for air.
"No!" everyone corrected, joyful despite exhaustion, despite hunger, despite everything. "We ARE making!"
"We are doing!"
"We are creating maintaining transforming—"
"We are the reproductive labor of dead culture—"
"We are beautiful garbage people—"
"We are necessary!"
"We are useful!"
"We are CORNUCOPIA!"
Present continuous. No boundaries. No divisions. Even their grammar refused to stop, to separate, to make sense the old way. Just the endless practice of transforming what's discarded into overflow, abundance, into more than anyone could need but exactly what everyone was starving for without knowing it.
The mall filled. With stuff. With people. With doing. With the sound of creation that never stopped because stopping would mean accepting divisions and divisions were what they were resisting just by being we, just by doing, just by making here and now into something that had no edges, no end, no—
"WE ARE DOING SOMETHING!" they all screamed at dawn, at dusk, at 3 AM when the world was sleeping and they were most awake, most alive, most overflowing with the terrible beautiful necessity of turning nothing into everything into we are doing something forever.
The city tried to evict them. The we had grown to hundreds. They chained themselves to mannequins. Kept doing. The news came. The we spoke in overlapping voices: "We are doing something." The city gave up. The mall was theirs. Is theirs. Will be theirs. As long as they keep doing. Which is forever. Which is now. Which is we are doing something.
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We are all making cornucopias from what's discarded, transforming emptiness into abundance through the simple revolutionary act of shifting from I to we, from being to doing, from maintaining to overflowing with the beautiful garbage necessary useful everything that nobody knew they needed until we started doing it together, forever, without stopping, without divisions, just endless joyful doing despite the hunger, despite the pain, despite the $7.25 an hour that says we're worth nothing, proving we're worth everything by doing something.
