On Beyond Bullocks
It was a beautiful, sunny, windy day. It was ten o'clock in the morning, and it was Evie Pleasance, striding down Main Street, long white hair flowing in the breeze. She had come downtown to do a little shopping and she had never been happier.
All her long life she done her shopping at the Bullock's on Main and First Street. It had everything she needed, and when it didn't, she usually didn't need it. Today however, she needed a kitchen towel to replace the old blue face towel she'd been using that had become frayed past putting up with.
As she walked along the block between Second and First Street, she noticed some commotion on the sidewalk ahead of her. A man was on a ladder set up against the Bullock's building, and a little crowd was gathered around the foot of the ladder, looking up.
When she came up to the crowd and looked up herself, she saw that the man was replacing the Bullock's sign with another one which said: Beyond. Instead of the old fashioned, graceful script lettering of the Bullock's sign, this one was in big, bold, blue block letters and included a striking logo of parallel lines receding into the "o" of Beyond.
Some of the people in the crowd were shaking their heads and saying no good could come of this change in ownership. But Evie didn't get to be as happy as she was by being alarmed by changes. She smiled quietly to herself and anyone who happened to notice her, wended her way through the crowd and went in through the big glass double doors.
Inside, things hadn't changed very much yet. Some of the store clerks were up on ladders changing the signs over the various departments, but the signs said the same things they had said before, just in different lettering. The first floor had a large cosmetics counter in the center, and the women's and men's clothing departments on either side. She stopped briefly to look at a nice pair of shoes that were on a table next to the aisle, but the ones she was wearing, though old, were comfortable, and she walked on toward the elevator at the back of the store, taking in the bright colors of the blouses and the luxuriant fragrance from the cosmetic counter.
At the elevator, she pressed the "up" button, and when it arrived, she got in and pressed "2". As it was going up, she noticed the muzak wasn't playing the usual string arrangements of big band numbers, but a flowing organ piece that reminded her of church music. More changes, she thought.
The elevator doors opened at the second floor, which had always been devoted to children's clothing and linens. She walked wistfully past the racks of cute little overalls and dresses, charmed as always by the miniature versions of adult clothing, and momentarily saddened by the fact that she had never had children. She turned away and walked toward the linens side of the floor.
And was surprised to find that apparently the new owners had decided to move the towels and bedding elsewhere and replace it with the gardening department. She looked around for an employee to ask about it, but naturally at that moment there was no one in sight. But she had always kept a tidy little garden in her back yard, so she wandered among the plants, figuring the linens would be on the next floor.
Instead of the usual rows of pots with little stakes telling you what the plants were, there were long wooden troughs filled with earth, and flowers and shrubs of all kinds grew in them. She walked up and down the rows, and noticed that the troughs got lower and lower with each row, until finally they became beds in the floor itself. In the center of one of them was a large, smooth barked tree that went straight up through the ceiling. She thought they had gone a little overboard trying to create a "natural" look. The last row before she came back to the elevator was planted with a variety of rose bushes, and the last bush bore blossoms of a dark, radiant shade of blue. As she waited for the elevator, she wondered why she hadn't noticed them when she first got off.
She got back on the elevator and pressed "3", the top floor. As she rode up, the car was filled with the sound of a children's choir singing something about how wonderful it was to ride on horseback. Though she had never done this herself, she thought the music conveyed how innocently wonderful anything wonderful was, and that this was very true.
On the third floor she almost gave up hope of finding her kitchen towel. As far as she could see on either side were rows and rows of bookshelves, and up through the center of the floor sprouted the tree from the floor below, branching out every which way and alive with the songs of birds. She walked along the rows of shelves, glancing at the titles, none of which she had read. But around the trunk of the tree were more books, hundreds of them, in high, teetering stacks. She went over and looked at these, and here were all the books she had read, several copies for some she had read more than once. There were two whole stacks of Trixie Belden and the Red Trailer Mystery. On the far side of the tree was a bench, and sitting on the bench, with a distraught look on her face, was a blonde woman who looked for all the world like Inger Stevens. Evie went over to her and asked if she had any idea where they were keeping the linens now. The blonde woman looked up at her and, sounding as if she was about to burst into tears, asked if she had seen a white rabbit carrying a stop watch. Evie regretfully told her no, and walked back to the elevator, reflecting that there were always people with bigger problems than you had.
Back on the elevator, she was now not entirely surprised to find that the lowest number on the floor button panel was marked "4", and that above "5" was a large button stamped with a sideways-8 infinity symbol.
She punched "4". The "Blue Danube Waltz" began playing on the muzak. The elevator kept going up for an unusually long time. When it stopped and the doors opened, she found herself looking down at the Earth from a height of about 200 miles. The trunk of the tree from the garden department came up and up through the clouds below. The elevator car was apparently now dangling from one of its branches. As much as she had always wanted to spacewalk, she was a great believer in wearing a spacesuit for the occasion, and hastily punched the "5" button.
As the elevator ascended, the ethereal strains of Ligeti's "Atmospheres" keened on the muzak. Suddenly a large window appeared on the side of the elevator. Floating outside was a large bearded man wearing a T-shirt that said "Why don't you make a movie of "Vanity Fair?" He was gesturing angrily and pounding on the glass. The window disappeared as the elevator stopped and with a loud "ding" the doors slid open.
The Milky Way galaxy wheeled below her. The trunk of the tree sprouted up from the Orion Arm and was riding along on its serenely spinning motion. All around her Evie could see the multitudinous branches of the tree, every limb carrying a dangling elevator car. They looked like Japanese lanterns, and like the little lights in the trees at Disneyland at night. The only sound csme from outside the elevator, an enormous, hollowly reverberating "bong", as if all of space was inside of a great bell. Once, once again, and finally a third time. Then, from far across the tree, in a wave the lights started going out, and as the wave of darkness approached her, she pressed the infinity button.
The doors snap shut. Though there is an intense humming vibration, the car no longer seems to be ascending. Wooden rods pop out of the front wall of the elevator at head and waist height, extend along the sides and attach to the back wall. A cedarboard shelf thunks into place above the waist-high rod on her right. In stop-motion sequentiality, the shelf fills up with stacks of socks, underwear and T-shirts, and hangers line up along the rods carrying pants on one side, a preponderance of dark plaid shirts on the other. The remaining space and overhead shelves become filled with cardboard boxes and, on the floor, a green footlocker. The doors become a white-painted folding door. As the vibration stops, she notices she's holding a hand mirror and, looking into it, finds she now looks like Meg Tilly. Justifiedly fearing the worst, she opens the door and steps out of my closet.
She looks around, at my posters, my books, my oriental rug, my arabian drums, etc. With a sardonic eyebrow lift she eyes the computer print-out of Meg Tilly in "Girl on a swing" thumb-tacked above the monitor. She comes up behind me as I'm clacking away at the keyboard, and, thrusting the mirror in front of my face so that I can see both myself and her in it, whispers fiercely into my ear "What's the meaning of this?"
I nod towards the monitor screen and say: Watch. And type:
Another small crowd has gathered, this time inside the department store called Beyond, in front of the first floor elevator, around the body of Evie Pleasance, who has died of a stroke or some other quick death. There's a small, ironic smile on her face, and her head is resting on a neatly folded kitchen towel.