Skate Me To The End Of The World

 I had to go to a mall a few weeks ago. I got laid off in March (no big deal, I'm interviewing now and will likely have at least one offer in the next week) but driving for Uber in the meantime leaves me searching for bathrooms. I dropped someone at a city mall the other day.

Pre-COVID, I'd been there many times, to buy tennis shoes, or toys for Christmas shopping, or to see a movie at the multiplex, once to go ice-skating the first February I lived here. It's one of the mall skating rinks that Tanya Harding learned to skate in back in the eighties. The place was always pretty busy. There's a nursing home and assisted living place next door, so there were elderly mall-walkers at all hours of the day, and, like every mall, teenagers everywhere.

Now it's a ghost town, and it's creepy. They don't turn all the lights on, and the top floor was completely vacant. 90% of the stores on the first floor are gone, boarded up. Some of the storefronts have been taken over by one-off shops catering to one small ethnic group or another -- a Halal grocery store; another store seemed to specialize only in Korean pop culture trash. The guys working the little kiosk/carts looked despondent. One guy had brought in a lawn chair and was openly applying for jobs on a laptop while he sat there next to a cart full of dumb cyber pets. Most of the carts appeared to be manned by young men from Israel, judging by the prominent Israeli flags that adorned the carts.

After I hit the restroom, I walked the length of the place. I wanted to see the ice rink.

It was still operational, barely. Maybe a dozen kids were on or off the rink at any given time. But there was this old couple, had to be in their late sixties or early seventies, skating gracefully with each other around the rink, performing some delicate maneuvers here and there, practically waltzing. I watched them for a while, and the sunshine coming in from the skylight seemed to follow them around the rink. There was a soundtrack, obviously meant to attract teenage skaters, but after a few minutes it changed, and Miles Davis' "Freddie the Freeloader" floated over the rink. And this couple didn't change their pace at all, just held each other and waltzed on the ice in a ray of sunshine in the middle of a dark and dying mall.

Thoughts of fiddling while Rome burned flitted through my head. It's summer, a heat wave, and here's an ice rink with one couple on it meant for two hundred people, in an air conditioned mall that is 1.4 million square feet and currently serving maybe a hundred souls. There was something upsetting about the image. I imagined what it must look like to them, how they must have been coming to that mall to ice skate for thirty years or more, and a little thing like 90 degree heat outside and the mall's imminent failure were all the more reason to do so that July day, at 1:30 in the afternoon, on a Wednesday.

I felt disjointed, like I’d misplaced something, or maybe it was the loss of anonymity, of being one of so few people in such a large place. Leaving, I passed a custodian painting over graffiti on one of the plywood panels boarding up a closed store.