The East Valley Park shopping mall is a dying beast that now seems absolutely massive for the paltry amount of people who wander through it day-to-day. The floors are eggshell-colored tiles that somehow remain polished, I would imagine from lack of use. As a kid, the incessant clacking of shoes on the vinyl flooring was violence inside my exhausted tween skull, like being locked into a giant room full of tap dancers. Other shoppers’ footsteps could echo so far that the sound reached me long before I saw the walker, and sometimes I never saw the walker, and it’s easy to imagine being followed as the soft tapping of phantom footsteps constantly trailed off in the distance.
Even though I went frequently as a child — I had little choice at first since my parents did the driving, though my sister and I roamed around ourselves as teenagers — within the past few years I’ve visited this mall only once. My goal was not to get locked in for the night, as it was a cool August 9pm and there was a particular store tucked away in a back corner that I needed to find before closing. An article I was throwing together about eighties new wave music dredged up hazy memories of it, and I needed to see if the spot still existed, get a fresh picture of it in my head. I was beginning to forget this space and I needed it back.
So far as I was aware, I spent most of that night by myself, even though I kept hearing footsteps.
I did see one real person that night. My phone only had a few sputtering moments of battery remaining, and I was passing by the food court. A tinny Eurythmics B-side played over faint speakers. The way the song’s name escaped me was irritating, because at one point I would’ve known. An older woman, mall security from the looks of the uniform, had taken over a bleached pink dining table, one of a couple dozen which otherwise sat empty. She hunched over a late dinner. And she glanced my way, wary, when I walked by.
“Hi,” I said, because she wouldn’t, a soft echo adding a touch of reverb to my voice. But she greeted me back.
“What are you doing out here?” She asked, her wariness loosening if only out of curiosity. She ate a simple sandwich out of Tupperware, brought from home. Every kiosk in the food court was shuttered. Only the Sbarro in the back even had a sign still up. That stirred something in me. Which is embarrassing to say about a Sbarro, unless you’re referring to your stomach’s attempts to digest the pizza. But the sign had barely changed since I was a kid. I saw a flash of a crowded mall around that sign, the static of blending conversations, people with plastic food trays scavenging for empty seats, harsh sunlight pouring through the skylight, the stank of deep-fried meat and greasy cinnamon rolls. But then it all flickered away. Just a silent, desolate Sbarro on a dark summer night.
“I used to come around here a lot,” I told her. “Just seeing what’s still here.”
Her face grew almost impossible to read. Pity, maybe.
“There’s nothing still here,” she said. “A few stores that the owners forgot to close, but that’s all.”
“Which stores?” I pressed.
She shrugged. “Outlets, mostly. The pizza place,” she pointed across the food court, “although I never see anyone behind the counter these days. Used to be a girl who’d just sit around on her phone all day. I figure she realized nobody would notice if she just stopped showing. Somehow I haven’t done the same yet.” I must have looked overeager, nodded too much, because she looked unimpressed that I found her answer so engrossing. “I’m only here until the paychecks stop coming, to be honest with you. This place should’ve been bulldozed a few years ago, but I think everyone’s just forgotten it’s here.”
“It’s a long shot, but do you know if a record store is still here?” My words came out fast, much quicker than her tired cadence. She was in no rush.
“A record store? Nah, I don’t remember.” She returned to her sandwich, staring intensely as if willing it to taste better. I thanked her, and she warned me that she’d be leaving soon and I shouldn’t linger, and so I kept walking.
My phone survived another fifteen minutes before battery death. In that time, I hadn’t passed another soul since the security guard. Over the railing of the second-floor walkway, I watched a vacant landscape of electric light over faded neon walls and that eggshell tile flooring. Most storefronts were abandoned, with maybe half a dozen stores left in a space that fit two hundred of them. The few that remained were shuttered, the gratings pulled down and the lights out. But the store I wanted to see didn’t need to be open. I didn’t need to go inside. It just needed to exist.
Footsteps tapped off in some direction I couldn’t identify, and even though those feet could easily be on the other side of the mall, it spurred my own feet. I still had a ways to go and precious little time left before closing.
Some member of the mall’s skeleton crew staff had queued up an endless playlist of eighties music to play from hidden speakers, which sounded metallic and lost and very old. The way the music drifted through those lightly air-conditioned caverns, the sprightly and yet sad synths from Tears for Fears’ “Pale Shelter,” a once popular but now lesser-remembered child from their first album, felt countless miles away. It’s a song I hadn’t heard in years, and it was like receiving a primeval MTV broadcast which had traveled over decades to reach this forsaken shopping center, collapsing into the ether as it finally tripped and stumbled into its destination. Underneath the music, when I listened closely, I heard a low rushing sound, either the air conditioning or the mall itself softly breathing.
Like the music, the entire mall just felt out of step, disconnected or hanging on by a thread to the outside world, everything filtered through a dusty lens before it reached me. It would’ve helped if I could see people around. A store clerk slouched over a lurching tower of folded jeans; a slumped soul just off a late shift, twitching an unlit cigarette through their fingers; anybody would’ve been nice.
But there was only me and this music, which was mostly what you’d expect from new wave: sensitive baritone singers who sound sad even though their songs are upbeat and shamelessly synth-heavy, crooning about photos of lost lovers or just one more night or more abstract topics that sound profound and vaguely political. Listening to it now, it’s some of the dorkiest stuff I’ve ever heard, but it was all I listened to as a child, and I absolutely adored it. Maybe I still do.
That music is where my head was at while I loitered beside a fake plant on the mall’s second floor, under a black skylight that showed off how fast the sun had set. Ostensibly, I was here to research a piece about eighties new wave, one of many freelance pieces to put some food on the table while I was in between jobs, a gap that grew in my stomach as the days passed. The story was, or would be, a retrospective on what’s still remembered and what’s been forgotten, the resilience of Joy Division or Duran Duran on current playlists versus the heat death of MTV hitmakers like ‘Til Tuesday or Animotion in popular memory.
But really, I think I just wanted to be here. Walk the halls, find the old record store, shuttered or not. I’ve never lived too far from here — on the contrary, my parents eventually left the county and my older sister left the state years ago, but I only moved across town. Yet like everyone else, I forgot the mall was here, I let it fade into its quiet little exit on the freeway.
Or, I never quite forgot it, some aging and blurred memories are here. This is where I first heard so much of this music. Music sticks in your brain, even if you can’t remember the context, or even the song titles. Although I like to believe I’m pretty good at that.
So I couldn’t help but loiter. I was back. As my feet clacked along the promenade, I could stop at forgotten storefronts and pick out the places I remembered as a kid. The taste of cheap pizza had manifested on my tongue since leaving the food court. I used to eat all sorts of crap there, enough junk food to shave a few years off my life, mainly those oily slices of Sbarro that my sister and I would order. The Sbarro was still there, the king of an empty food court. I still had a Sbarro. Good for me.
By the time I’d crossed a decent portion of the mall’s floor plan, the music coming through those wretched speakers switched over to a similarly gloomy song. Bananarama, “Cruel Summer,” one of their early hits, although nowadays their music survives mostly in women’s razor commercials. My sore legs readjusted to familiar surroundings, and the path to this old store began returning to me. Which was perfect, because the color-coded maps on the mall’s directory stands were drowned in graffiti. The only visible info I caught was closing time, 9:30pm, which meant I had somewhere between fifteen and five minutes before the lights went off.
Walking just out of step with that set of phantom footsteps, a steady sound — like they were keen to leave before they got shut in, something I’d worry about in just a moment, not yet — I turned a few corners and found my old haunt.
To my surprise, its interior was bright, fluorescent orange and its doors wide open. Once my eyes adjusted to all that orange, I saw clothing racks now sat in place of record stacks. An off-white and blank sign hung neatly over the doorway, so this new store had no name.
Standing outside the storefront was nostalgic. It may not be surprising that my favorite spot in the mall, the magnet I’d wander off to whenever I got free of my folks, used to be a record store. I’d stay here as long as I could, flipping through albums by XTC, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Human League, it goes on. The first record I ever bought with my own shoddy teenage paycheck was — though I kept it to myself — a single by the Thompson Twins. I admittedly had a thing for the Thompson Twins, sappy as they were even by the era’s standards. For years, I was secretly jealous of an older friend who claimed he saw them open for The Police. Thompson Twins were the “Hold Me Now” folks, but the little seven-inch vinyl I bought here was a different song, more upbeat, still loaded up with schmaltz. I genuinely can’t remember the name of that one. Which is absurd to me, I played it more times than I can remember, wore out the grooves as it drowned out money troubles and drunken divorce threats and the usual stuff I’d hear downstairs while my sister and I were holed up in my room. That record’s long since disappeared after so many years and moves between homes, but I only realized a day or so earlier that I’d forgotten the name.
I’m a music writer. Or, I was whenever I found work, when I could publish retrospectives and oral histories and pretentious think-pieces anyplace that paid. I can name a thousand B-sides and outtakes, from good bands and shitty ones alike, but this is the record that got me there and it’s gone blurry.
And I first heard it spin in the very spot where I was standing, before I went in and bought it so discreetly. It was strange standing in that spot again. I didn’t know if I liked it.
Now this oddball clothing store stood in its place, an orange-lit outpost on the edge of civilization. And they were open. So I let myself in.
First thing I noticed was that the air conditioning was stronger inside the store. It was almost cold. Second was that the store had shrunk somehow, the orange walls now lined with simple thrift store-looking shirts and a few sets of clothing racks out on the floor, where album displays used to sit. In the back was the cash register, and nobody behind it. Open or not, I was alone in here.
Whoever was supposed to work here, at whatever this was, maybe they’d reached the same conclusion as everyone else. Nobody would notice if they stopped showing up.
My body ached, partly because of the late hour. It’s an ugly, uncomfortable sensation to linger in a mall while it’s closing, when everyone’s tired from walking and itching to go home, to settle into an intimate space rather than its opposite: a mall. But I was here. I dragged myself out here on a lie I told myself that, now, years after CDs stopped selling, a vinyl record store might still be intact, maybe even pristine and unchanged. Maybe I’d find that Thompson Twins single I’d lost, get back to my roots, remember why I liked writing ridiculous articles about music. I didn’t know for sure that it wouldn’t be here — there was no info available online because I suspect no one else really cared. But the security guard was right. Eventually this mall will be knocked down, and if I didn’t check soon, the outside world might keep spinning too far past it to turn back. I was here on impulse, but it had to be on this night, while the front doors were still open and the lights were still on, before somebody with money finally acknowledged that nobody was home.
I spent a moment perusing the racks. I felt like I should. There was nothing here I especially wanted — these shirts were too fuzzy for me — but I had friends and family with birthdays coming up, that sister I hadn’t seen in some years who might appreciate a gift if I stopped by. By choice or not, we grew up in spaces like this, and in these spaces, we bought things. Sometimes we paid respects to the deceased by leaving flowers or writing eulogies. I was attempting to eulogize a space that happened to be a store, and if I could only pay respects by purchasing a cardigan, then that would be my lot. I checked the price tag on the furry piece of fabric between my fingers. Maybe not a cardigan. Maybe a t-shirt. Maybe in the clearance rack.
I assumed the clerk might be returning to close up soon, because somebody had turned the lights on today. With luck, I could prod them to make one last sale. And if I stayed within eyesight of a mall employee when they locked up, I had a much smaller chance of getting locked in for the night, which was a plus. No music played in here, a pitiful thing to say about any space where a record store once stood. So I just had the music in the halls outside. I listened to the end of that Bananarama song this way. And then the next song started up. I almost didn’t recognize it straight away. It wasn’t the Thompson Twins song, not my song, but I’d written about it.
The melancholy guitar riff came in quickly enough through the muck of that speaker system. A sad guitar lingered for several seconds before a deep voice mumbled in such a heavy German accent that I couldn’t make it out. Nobody could. Nobody even knew what the song was called. But I’d listened to it before.
This song was going to be a footnote in my article. It was a tangent I couldn’t help myself from including, a particular new wave song that — also much like this mall — was an ethereal relic of sorts from its decade. Nobody knew what this song was called or who wrote or performed it, which was a feat nowadays in the information age, but that was how it earned its notoriety. People only called it “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet,” after it surfaced on an online forum one day.
I’ll keep things brief, but since I enjoy telling people about it, what we know about the Most Mysterious Song is this: it played just once on a West German radio station in the mid-eighties, while a teenager was recording random songs onto a cassette tape. Years later, he digitized his entire cassette collection, all unlabeled mixtapes of popular radio-friendly new wave. And on one of these tapes, toward the end just after Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant,” comes this song. A wistful guitar riff, a deep voice suited to Gregorian chants instead mumbling out alternating clichés and eccentric melancholies in a muddy drawl that makes certain lyrics incomprehensible and lost to time. Nothing all that special, but when this mixtape finally went online, no one could ID the track.
Hearing the song, here, threw me off more than I initially realized. It’s esoteric, but to hear it broadcast across a mall on a night like this was extraordinary. I checked price tags without paying attention before noticing I couldn’t remember the numbers and checking again.
Listening to that song in such scratchy quality required focus, and that distracted me. And around then is when the footsteps started up again, louder and possibly closer this time. Ideally it would be the store clerk so I could grab something, anything, and go, maybe after asking if they’d wrap it first. Beside me, a brief, crystal-clear flash of a toppled over record stack; my sister came here with me once, but she was bored and careless and knocked it down without noticing. She was above the fandoms and music buffs, was happy to listen to whatever was on the radio. The way I’d remember songs and bands impressed her, in a nerdy way.
Fake or not, I believed the story the internet tells about this song. There are countless pieces of media that were broadcast just once and never recorded, and they’re completely lost from our histories today. This one happened to survive, a reminder that our cultural memory is just the tip of an iceberg, and what’s underneath the water is impossible to recover. I think there’s some allure in preserving a piece of that iceberg. Before it sinks.
But as the song played, far off and distorted, something about it bothered me. I felt my stomach knot and I couldn’t seem to relax my shoulders. Maybe it was the sad and forlorn quality of the song itself, mawkish but too earnest to mock. Or maybe it was the shock of hearing it played again in the last place I’d expect, for what felt like an audience of one.
Or an audience for two, the clacking footsteps grew close enough that they must be approaching the store. I looked up from these clothes I couldn’t seem to focus on, waiting to see who came by. But the mall was still. After a few seconds of waiting, the tapping ceased without anyone showing their face. It was the damn acoustics of this place, I thought. Normal laws of physics don’t work quite the right way here.
Then the footsteps were behind me and my heart shot up in my chest. They were so sudden and so near that I swore they were here, inside the store. It jolted me enough that I yanked the t-shirt I was examining off its clearance rack hanger and dropped it to the ground. I checked over my shoulder and saw exactly what I saw before. An empty clothing store.
The chorus of the song, a through-line to some purgatory of forgotten things, played for the final time before shifting into its lengthy outro. The footsteps continued, still so close, even though they couldn’t be. That clearance rack t-shirt I’d just yanked off was draped over my shoes. I wondered if I’d really end up buying it. It might be easy enough for me to simply walk out with it. The lone guard, if she was still here, which I was beginning to doubt, didn’t seem like she’d make an effort to stop me if she caught me. And if these footsteps weren’t hers, then it’d been half an hour since I’d left her at the food court. I felt certain she wasn’t here anymore. The reassurance of company, that primal feeling of safety in numbers, had left me some time ago.
I knelt down to pick up the shirt. As I did, someone’s foot passed by the other side of the clothes rack. A pair of black-and-white sneakers under the cuffs of blue denim jeans, in motion. I swore louder than I meant to and almost tripped over my own feet.
I forced myself up and nearly shoved aside the clothes rack to look. But nobody was there. No shoes on the ground, either. It’s odd to say, but those tattered, mistreated sneakers were familiar to me. I remembered who wore them.
Since I couldn’t see anybody, I shut my eyes and I listened. Those distinct footsteps strode out through the open doors and back onto the vinyl hallway outside. Without looking, I could visualize which way they were heading.
On instinct, I glanced at my phone for how much time I had left until closing, and it was blank, because it was dead. The mall might lock up at any moment, and I didn’t know how long this would take, so I moved. I left the shirt in a wrinkled heap and I mimicked the footsteps, following them into the hallway.
It’s hard for me to put into words why I did what I did, my head was foggy and my thoughts were as faint in my own head as that music from its tinny speakers. But I was taken by this unshakeable feeling that this pair of footsteps had something that belonged to me. Not the sneakers, I never cared about those shoes. It was the footsteps.
I followed the sound down the walkway, keeping my eyes shut, trying to pinpoint the noise as it echoed around me. My weary legs would have to carry me through this familiar space without a misstep over the railing and a drop to the first floor. When it became clear that my own footsteps were in sync with this other pair, my legs broke into a jog, then a cacophonous run.
A subtle change came in the footsteps’ din and cadence as they mixed with my own, they became slower and more staccato. Walking down metal escalator steps. I knew the ones. I couldn’t be more than twenty feet behind them. I opened my eyes. Nobody.
I sprinted down the motionless escalator, skipping two steps at a time and then briefly four when I lost balance and stumbled down the last few steps with my weight shifted too far ahead of me. I caught my footing in time. The footsteps had grown no faster since I started pursuing. They could be scarcely aware of me, for all I knew.
I almost had them, the pattering and gentle squeaking of sneakers on tile. The air changed as I approached them, the smell of baked pretzels and perfume stands and the claustrophobic sweat of crowds. As I reached the footsteps and opened my eyes, what stretched before me was a row of brightly lit stores with their doors thrown open and customers marching in and out, packed clothing stores and gizmo kiosks and restaurants. The footsteps I was chasing took up space now, an outline of a person in the middle of the mall. And I walked right up and grabbed their shoulder and, my grip harsh, I spun them around. Their shoulder was tangible, but it was soft and boneless, and they were a chalk outline, a sketch of something only half-formed, wearing my old black t-shirt and denim jacket and my old blue jeans and my old sneakers. In their hands was the vinyl I’d bought so many years ago, the one I’d lost, that I couldn’t remember, still here after all this time, the band members and their giant eighties hair on the cover, the name too blurry to read.
But I couldn’t ask for it. I only got to see it for a moment, before I realized the music had stopped.
The halls were empty. The stores were shuttered. Rich smells collapsed into a blanket of must. My outstretched arm held nothing. Lights quietly began to flicker off, one by one. It was nine-thirty.
A very, very long moment of silence followed, before a sorrowful, punchy keyboard came on over the speakers. Prince, “I Would Die 4 U.” The lights could shut off automatically, but there might’ve been no one there to shut off the music. Maybe it would keep playing until the bulldozers and wrecking balls finally arrived. Maybe it might keep playing after, somehow.
Adrenaline has a funny way of punishing you for summoning it, of reminding you that you’ve gotten older. Sharpened cramps from my run struck me in my thighs and stomach and chest. I leaned against the metal grate of a sterile, gray room which was once a Spencer’s Gifts. For several minutes, I panted in near darkness against the empty shell of that Spencer’s Gifts. Once I could breathe without it hurting, I hauled my weight back onto my own feet.
A temptation to go back and check the old record store, wait for everything to return, for the forgotten to fade back just long enough for me to snap a picture, refresh my memory, just look. But this space was dim, it was closed, and I suspected nothing would be coming back. I could wait here forever until I disappeared with the mall, but I felt unwelcome now. The cavernous halls felt predatory. A sinkhole for memories.
I cramp-walked with a slight limp to the scratched, translucent glass doors at the mall’s front entrance, under the last few lit fluorescent bulbs. I was prepared for the doors to be locked, in which case I would return into the sprawl and spend the night searching for blunt objects to break my way through.
Just when I placed my hand on the door, I heard the nostalgic, tinkling flourish of a piano over the speakers.
As the somber opening riff of that forgotten Thompson Twins single hit, I threw the doors open and slammed them behind me, hearing only the first hint of a guitar, muffling out the rest. I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t think I would leave if I heard any more.
And then I was outside. No security ever came by to lock the doors. Maybe nobody’s locked those doors for a long time. My car was just visible from where I stood, sitting by itself at the far end of a massive, empty parking lot.
My loose grip lingered on the handle, struggling with a sensation that once I let go, the entire mall might slip out from beneath reality, or float off into someplace else. And my shoddy memory would become its sole keeper, because no one else would do it, because it’s a shopping mall and who really gives a shit? Besides me. And then, because my shoddy memory was so shoddy, it would slip away from my thoughts until I couldn’t recall how it looked, or how it sounded, or that it had taken up space. There was no way to rip it onto a cassette, hold it here against its will for an audience of the vaguely interested. It would truly become untethered.
My hand fell off the door, and my closed fingers bobbed in a slight “there, there” motion because nobody was around to watch me look foolish. It was now empty space, a vacuum. Malls are cynical, they’re for spending money, they’re not for memories. They’re not real. Or, they weren’t supposed to be.
The dry summer breeze was tinged slightly cold, and it was refreshing to breathe unfiltered air. The chirping of crickets and the buzzing of wind and the shadows flickering in all that surrounding darkness felt less harsh than the artificial bright lights and synthetic landscapes behind me. Traces of that artificial light escaped the glass doors and lit the concrete at my feet, but otherwise it was night in a quiet parking lot. Without ever turning back to look, I watched the glow at my feet of the last fluorescent lights softly dim to nothing.
It was peaceful out there as I walked to my car. On this concrete, my footsteps tapped but didn’t echo, the noise firmly contained beneath my two feet.
I considered asking my sister about the old record, I could take a long drive up in a few days and shoot the shit and bring it up. She’d never remember the name, of course, I used to play her the records and she listened so she could hang out in my room, to calm me down when I’d shut myself inside. She’d never remember the name, but I should go see her and I should ask.
I sat down in my car, and I shut the cold metal door and I felt the cheap cloth seat beneath me, and I started the engine and I turned on the radio and I listened to music that I might never hear again.
Jonathan Kesh is a writer from San Jose, California, who currently lives in Queens, New York. He holds an MFA in fiction from The New School and is currently the Books Editor for LIT Magazine, The New School’s alumni-run literary journal. He’s had bylines in The Rumpus, Inlandia, Mashable, and Content Magazine, among others. He’s also worked as a middle school teacher.
Website: https://jonathankesh.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Keshception
