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I crossed the River Styx in the pouring rain, in the Dillard's parking lot, ten AM, January 1st. 2010, headed for the double plate-glass portal to post-industrial consumerist inferno. I was wearing yellow lenses for contrast on the daredevil highway strip that delivered me to my hell. I entered onto a Dantesque dreamscape populated by yellow-haired couples scavenging among the overproduction of an economic model in decay, their glassy-eyed, hungry look belying their overfed physical forms, unable to see the utter futility of their actions, this morning or any other morning until their last days.
Stopped cold in my tracks, I surveyed the scene as if in some Coleridge opium nightmare under the unearthly sulfurous yellow fluorescence. Intermingled with the ashen, jaundiced countenances were intermittent flashes of recognition. Very first in line, my mother's neighbor, Harley Granddad, tattoos writhing up his forearms, blue jeans and pointy boots, and his forty pound grandson, dragging forty pounds of king-size comforter in some neutral color and pattern behind. My son's piano teacher, evangelical Santa cult devotee, drops a couple hundred dollar "Christmas" vase. It doesn't break, but sounds rather musical. The Zombies in earshot all look, and clap. Is that my brother when we were nine and six, goofing at Sears Roebuck, or him with his wife, at forty-something, all bleary-eyed after the previous nights rituals and the previous couple years of foreclosure and bankruptcy?
After what seemed an eternity, my tortured eyes finally came to rest on the one beacon of natural light in the yellow sea of econo-zombies, my Beatrice, my wife of twenty years, the consummate retail professional. Her flame-colored skirt swayed at her hips as she rotated between two registers, conducting affairs with her Italian flair. Lines of these consumerist shades writhed back through the aisles of disheveled merchandise, two by two, with their boxes and bags and five-hundred dollar, pre-lighted Christmas trees, as if they really believe there's going to be a Santa Claus yet again next year. Won't they all be dismayed when, gradually, it dawns on them that Santa's not coming to America anymore. Their credit has worn out in China. Those of them, that is, that are still alive next "Christmas". Juveniles in intellectual development, always waiting for Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or Jesus, to save the day, right up until the day they die.
They're already dead; I'm standing here looking in disgust at their Final, repetitive scene. Old women dragging surrogate Santa sacks of Chinese imports across the carpet like peg-legged pirates with bags of booty. Old men with tortured faces muttering under their breath about being home in time for the "game". Covetousness on display. "Are you getting that?" Snatch. Zombies actually pilfering from other Zombies' little piles that they are organizing on the floor. Unable to manipulate the simplest of mathematical equations to allow them to decipher the deleveraging fiasco of their rapidly compromising way of life, they ask quizzically, "How much will it be?"
My wife's graceful, delicate fingers flash over the keys of the calculator, visually confirming for the bewildered Zombie what she has already calculated in her head. "You have no idea, ma'am, no idea..."
