The Knife Thrower (16 page)

Perhaps because of the size of the new department store, the large number of plazas and cultural areas, the services and entertainments, the sheer assault on our nervous systems of nineteen floors and four basement levels of merchandise, we didn’t at first take special note of the new departments scattered throughout the store in what we took to be a spirit of whimsy, of exuberant invention. Such was the department of streams, pools, and waterfalls, located in a suddenly appearing alcove of the landscaping
department, or, on the fourteenth floor, between men’s hats and notions, the gloomy department of caves and tunnels, where dim fluorescent bulbs set in the cave walls shed a purplish glow over the rock formations, and price tags hung from neatly labeled stalactites, flowstone, cave coral, twisting helictites. One of the more mysterious departments lay beyond a soft brown world of night tables, dimly glowing lamps, pulled-back bedspreads displaying flowery sheets, and four-poster beds with arched canopies and heavy curtains. At the end of a narrow path of bunkbeds filled with tigers and elephants, there suddenly appeared a high, whitish area that seemed to be under construction. Here and there on the floor stood broken marble columns and blocks of cracked stone, against one wall was a flight of crumbling steps leading nowhere, at a shiny wooden counter in one corner sat a man in a gray suit and maroon tie who seemed to await us.

It was generally conceded that opening day had been a striking success. Oh, there were doubters among us, doubters who felt that the whole thing should be torn down and forgotten, but on the whole we were inclined to be hopeful. To begin with, it was clear to us that the consortium had created a serious rival to the mall. And in a move obviously intended to broaden the eroding customer base of the traditional department store, the new emporium directly challenged the deluxe specialty store by offering, in addition to its abundance of moderately priced goods, a wide range of high-priced specialty items, from sequined evening gowns and chauffeur’s livery to jeweled chess sets and imported jade palace dogs from the Imperial Palace of Beijing. We were attracted by the Grand Court and the renovated fountain, by the meandering aisles, by the clever replications, by the brashness and energy of the whole
enterprise; and if we were inclined to reserve judgment, to withhold our approval, at the same time we were prepared to return.

We returned with the sharp sense that we had barely begun to explore the store, that further explorations were in fact necessary if we were to penetrate its still elusive nature. Within days we noticed that the store was already changing. Aisles here and there had been shifted slightly to make room for new merchandise, departments that we did not recall seeing had sprung up or were about to open, it was said that plans were already under way for a penthouse and a floor beneath the four basement levels; and in what was either a restless desire for expansion or a calculated effort to avoid tedium, small changes had been introduced in the design of individual departments.

But it was above all the unusual departments, which we hadn’t observed closely on opening day, that now drew our deepest attention. It quickly became evident that these were not witty or bizarre architectural elements designed to raise smiles of appreciation or frowns of curiosity, but were serious departments in their own right, intent on sales. By the end of the first week the department of streams, pools, and waterfalls had begun doing a brisk business, mostly from suburban customers with large properties who were able to select from a wide range of meticulously distinguished styles: twelve models of brook or stream alone were on display, from the shallow rocky straight bed to the deep sandy winding bed. The caves and tunnels of the fourteenth floor were intended not only for privately owned hills and slopes but also for cellars, attics, and playrooms. We returned to the high, whitish place that had appeared to be under construction, only to discover our error. In a thick catalogue fastened to the counter by a chain, the sales clerk
pointed to an array of ruins: all the architectural orders were being offered for sale, including carefully differentiated Greek Doric and Roman Doric, as well as three varieties of Corinthian capital, reproduced either in the original stone or, less expensively, in a synthetic equivalent, and in various stages of ruin. For this was the department of classical ruins, from which one could also purchase friezes, broken pediments, crumbling arches, picturesque fragments of temples and mausoleums. At the back of the book were photographs of the Parthenon, the Colosseum, a Roman aqueduct, all in lush garden settings. Patiently the sales clerk answered our skeptical, ardent questions. Everything in the catalogue could be ordered; all parts were manufactured in repro factories and shipped direct. Only the other day a Texas oilman had ordered the Colosseum for his ranch. The majority of orders came from corporations looking for innovative ideas in the landscaping line; a software company in New Mexico had recently ordered the Baths of Caracalla and Hadrian’s Villa for its ten-acre business park, and another firm in southern California had ordered the entire Acropolis, sturdier than the original and guaranteed against pollution, set by the shore of an ornamental lake. The average customer was of course more likely to want a ruined column for the hall or back yard.

We shook our heads, we grew thoughtful, we began to smile but felt the edges of our smiles crumbling; and as we entered more familiar departments, making our way through squash rackets, lacrosse sticks, and ping-pong tables, past TV/VCR stands, audiovisual cabinets, and stereo-rack systems with five-band graphic equalizers, past cookie jars shaped like smiling raccoons and umbrellas with wooden handles shaped like ducks, our sense of
something odd and inexplicable about the new departments, something in the manner of a violation, gave way gradually to the conviction that it was our own perception which was at fault. Far from being alien intrusions into a familiar world, the new departments were nothing but an extension of that world. For wasn’t it in the nature of department stores to offer for sale everything under the sun? Wasn’t the secret premise of such places that the whole world was a bazaar? The consortium, in a bold leap designed to counter the power of the mall, had simply extended the boundaries of the buyable. Nor was the idea of imitation or replication in the slightest degree alien in this world of synthetic materials and expensive reproductions of old-fashioned toys, famous paintings, and period furniture.

Yet even then, in those early days of excitement and discovery, we failed to grasp the startling boldness of the new managers, despite hints and glimpses that left us a little breathless.

It was precisely in those days, as we were feeling our way into the new store, that a harsh campaign was waged against it, originating from interests serving the specialty shops and the mall. The new store, it was charged, was poorly designed, filled with wasted space, and concerned more with atmosphere than with the efficient display of merchandise; the relationship of departments was confusing; the flashy new departments, by their very nature, could appeal to only a small number of customers; the plazas were tasteless, the architecture grotesque, the attractions absurd. Such easily refuted charges were no more than the familiar stuff of business rivalry, but concerns were voiced by ordinary citizens as well. Some argued that the store, despite its smattering of innovations, represented a return to the past; they accused the consortium of trading
shamelessly on our nostalgia, and pointed in particular to the emphasis on imitation and replication in the designs of the plazas and cultural areas and even in the merchandise itself. Others, acknowledging the attractiveness and success of the new venture, argued that the very completeness of that success was disturbing, since customers were often reluctant to tear themselves away from the delights of the renovated emporium and complained of a feeling of disappointment or irritation when they stepped back into the street.

Perhaps inspired by these attacks, perhaps prompted by our own doubts and desires, we set out in the course of the next few weeks to explore the new store in detail, to burrow into its depths, to permit none of its elements to escape our interrogation.

Above the thirteenth floor, old-fashioned wood-paneled elevators with brass fittings, operated by polite young men in dark red jackets and black pants, rose through the remaining six floors. And on every level, at two widely separated places, elegant escalators trimmed in mahogany and brass rose up, while beside them, at an angle forming an X, stairfuls of customers floated to the floors below.

We passed among dinner plates with pictures of blue windmills on them, footed glass dessert dishes filled with wax apricots, brightly colored ten-cup coffeemakers with built-in digital clocks. We wandered past glittering arrays of laser printers and laptops, past brightly painted circus wagons, rolls of brown canvas, and bales of hay, through mazes of pale green bathtubs, onyx sinks set in oak cabinets, pink water closets carved with cherubs. In the depths of the toy department, which covered most of the eleventh and twelfth floors, there was a sub-department that sold full-sized
Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, and roller coasters. Nearby we discovered an alcove of scale-model cities, including precise wooden and plaster models of Victorian London, Nuremberg in the age of Dürer, and Manhattan in 1925, each containing more than 60,000 separate pieces and capable of being assembled in a frame the size of a sandbox. In the bargain basement on the second underground level, there were alcoves and sub-departments selling imperfect mannequins, discarded display-window props, and selected marked-down items from the more popular plazas and restaurants: trompe-l’oeil vistas painted on cardboard, cobblestones made of fiberglass, papier-mâché bricks. New departments appeared to be springing up everywhere, as if to keep pace with our desires; and it was rumored that somewhere on the fourteenth or fifteenth floor, in a small department with a desk and a catalogue, corporations with fabulous sums at their disposal could order full-sized replicas of entire ancient cities.

Such rumors lent excitement to our investigations, but at the same time they obscured our sense of things, they contaminated our perceptions, so that among us there arose a new skepticism, which itself interfered with the direct evidence of our senses and delayed for a while our deeper understanding of the store.

In the meantime all but the harshest among us had begun to succumb to the new window displays, which were being carried to heights of daring and ingenuity unknown to us before. We heard that the consortium had hired from a gray, ice-bound city in eastern or northern Europe, where the pale sun shone for only two hours a day, a brooding and temperamental window-display artist, providing him with a staff of mannequin makers, automaton masters, miniaturists, stage-set designers, and window engineers, and
promising him an unheard-of freedom in developing the display windows of the new store. Every day one of the many plate-glass windows on all four sides of the block-long building was covered with a red velvet curtain, which rose the following morning on a brand-new display. One window showed a six-foot scale model of a thirty-four-story hotel, in which each of its more than two hundred rooms was lit up in turn, revealing in each instance an exquisitely detailed scene performed by miniature automated figures: a little man was murdering a little woman with repeated stabbings of a little bloody knife, a beautiful miniature lady seated at a vanity table with an ornate mirror was reading a letter and weeping hysterically, a young woman opened a closet and was embraced by a skeleton. In another display window, full-sized mobile mannequins in jeweled sunglasses and transparent silk bathing suits assumed elegant, languorous poses in a realistic jungle setting populated by live parrots and monkeys, as well as a disturbing lion that paced back and forth and only gradually revealed itself to be a machine. One of the more popular windows was a marionette theater, in which plays with diverse settings—a Mississippi paddle steamer, a Turkish harem, a Parisian fashion show stalked by a strangler—were performed by marionettes whose costumes had been designed by a celebrated couturier and whose coiffures were fashioned by their personal hair stylist. Despite such allusions to the sale of merchandise, many of the windows reveled in their freedom and quickly developed in purely artistic directions. A striking window of this kind began as a conventional display of animated mannequins in transparent raincoats and bikini underwear and grew swiftly into a series of variations on the theme of rain: a rain machine, a wind machine, mirrors, and colored lights combined to
form shifting patterns of wind-swept rain, as if the display artist were engaged in the exploration of a new art, an art of rain. Yet even such windows, which seemed to disdain the vulgar sale of merchandise and aspire to higher things, tantalized us by their very aloofness and made us search for secret relations that continued to elude us.

It wasn’t until the end of the third or fourth week, when the criticisms had diminished to a mere whisper, when even the doubters had to admit that the new store had about it an air of solidity and permanence, that we at last permitted ourselves to give way entirely to the lure of the new emporium, to abandon ourselves to the meandering aisles, the hidden alcoves. We applauded the adventurous window displays, welcomed the newest and most daring departments, wandered the floors delighting in every shift and change, in the always varied rhythms of the interior design. Departments of steel radial tires, salted nuts, snow blowers, shower curtains printed with reproductions of famous Impressionist paintings
(Luncheon of the Boating Party, Camille Monet and Her Cousin on the Beach at Trouville, Impression: Sunrise)
, and triple-track windows gave way to departments of Moorish courtyards, volcanoes, Aztec temples. These new and unconventional departments formed no pattern of distribution, but as we ascended escalators and strode through swiftly changing scenes, it came over us that the distinction between old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, was our own. The store itself made no such distinction, but simply offered its wide-ranging merchandise for sale. Was there really, after all, so great a difference between a wristwatch and a Roman villa? In the new emporium, with its noble and feverish desire to surpass its rivals and recapture, in the last decade of the twentieth century, the
vanished glory of the great department stores, you could purchase quartz heaters, power mowers, Venetian palazzi, electric pencil sharpeners, Scottish castles, cordless phones with ten-channel autoscan, flying buttresses, mulching tractors, Neolithic villages, aluminum siding, the palace of Sargon II, the Erie Canal, wax museums, submersible sump pumps, Sumerian ziggurats, islands with palm trees and crashing surf, ancient Troy, motorized wheelchairs, Viking burial mounds, the Great Mosque of Córdoba, lagoons, sphinxes, exercycles, black leather recliners, Upper Paleolithic caves with drawings of bison, three-ring circuses, the Colossus of Rhodes, bo-tree shrines, Coca-Cola bottling plants, Mutoscopes, zoom lenses, casbahs, African diamond mines, Benedictine monasteries, ice-cream makers, the Library of Alexandria, Zouave uniforms, opera theaters, five-speed drill presses, clavicembali, film-noir stage sets, deserts with mirages, cotton gins, hennins, steaming square miles of Amazon jungle, old piers with seagulls.