Aisle
1
The Spawn of, well, I guess you could call it Evil
It starts with a shovel.
Others tried with a palm. A forked stick. A hacking axe. The pick.
They refine their tools. Stone for wood. Bronze for stone. Iron for bronze. Then steel. From steel they add the magic of steam. Of electricity. Of hydraulics and gasoline and Diesel fuel.
But they always go back to the humble shovel.
On this stage, a shovel of gold.
For work, the beasts. Great beasts to push and pull and prod and tear and move, driven by the few men who sweat an honest day’s labor.
From above, far above the stage lit with spotlights on the beasts on the fringes and one on the sole golden shovel in the center, the creator sees, and sees it is good.
Ground graded, holes dug, comes the concrete. Sinewy bands of concrete poop out of dirty, elegant trucks. Concrete sluices into plywood forms, leaving the grain of the living wood in the artificial rock of ages. Concrete and steel and wood and dirt.
Here and there, bits of rock. Errant soda bottles, tossed into the forms by idled workers, tossing when the bosses weren’t watching. In this particular creation, one worker One worker writes a note, stuffs it in an empty Pepsi bottle stoppered with a wad of paper:
Kilroy Was Here
Now bars of steel poke from the concrete like quills from a road-killed porcupine. More concrete comes, pours out as spotlights from the heavens play on the machinery.
The creator, watching the spotlights, is pleased.
And the stage grows, as if it were a world.
But not quite yet a world.
For the thing below, swarming with machines and men, still grows, slowly taking the shape of the thing in the creator’s mind. The thing drawn on thousands of bits of paper: The natomy of the future of commerce, the future of culture, the future of the insignificant town of Edina, where all will come, few to despair.
The thing rises from the ground. Workers crawl into its innards and shell like ants. But all in reverse. Not pruning then burying bits of flesh, but adding, always adding, building the thing from earthy building blocks, carelessly scattered by a Mother Nature, buried in the earth’s crust by a caretaker too busy building a planet to worry about planning for the future.
As the thing rises, is capped, painted, hidden and adorned like a temple to bury a thousand pharoahs of Egypt, from its sides spread the black cap, to welcome visitors far more numerous than the workers, destined to enter the thing, decorated with tile and marble, carpet and light, hiding the functional skeleton, circulatory system, poop shaft, stomach, brain.
And they will come, the creator said. For he declared: It is the Merchants Who Will Save Us. Will provide us with culture. With amenities. With a home and loving arms and pillows and sheets and sodas. They will come.
And come.
And come.
And come, until things like this spread over all the earth. Some will age and die, rot, wither, disappear. But always to be replaced by others. Always others.
High in the clouds, as spotlights swarm on the thing like fireflies, the creator weeps.
And below, as the beasts and workers trundle off the stage, out of the spotlight, the thing is finished.
So beautiful.
So beautiful.
Over the steel and concrete skeleton workers applied Italian glass mosaic, Cherokee Georgia marble, Wisconsin sandstone, imported Swedish green marble, black walnut, Brazilian rosewood, teakwood from India.
And the people come, to be blessed by the thing. To enter its many mouths, breathing a cool breath filled with the odors of cotton and nylon and pretzels covered with cheese.
Under the guiding eye of the rooster, they march from their cars into the Eden from which he, the creator, believes mankind has expelled itself. Here is the magnificent walled garden of past civilization, created for the new breed of human explorer. He did not feel the least uncomfortable with the appropriation of Godly metaphor in its creation. He, like God, created a four-walled garden, “Westward in Edina,” he joked. Like the Eden of old, his Eden has four rivers that flow from the four quarters of the earth, but his rivers are rivers of cooled air, even in winter, cooled because the hot bodies of those entering therein combine to melt ice, to warm stone; bodies wanting to be cooled by that made a reality of the original Eden’s fleeting promise.
Then the man felt it.
The lurching of the stomach, the spinning forward in time, like a brain addled by fever, wandering the hallways of a home he knew but couldn’t remember and where, in his fevered delusion, he feared tornadoes in the hallway.
Tornadoes are coming.
The thing, his creation, he sees, will survive. Revered by some. Invisible. Omnipresent. So innovative and creative as to be taken for granted. “I could have thought of this,” many would say, entering the thing the master created. Many, indeed, claimed to have invented it before the Master. But the thing is his. His with which to clothe, to feed, to suckle, to educate, to enlighten. His with which to relieve the burden of human existence on a frail, cold planet where briars and thorns issue from the ground, rather than fruit and flowers, as in the garden. A place where it was never too hot. Never too cold. Where food is plentiful. All is beautified with the natural treasures of the earth, finally unburied and stripped of concealing bark.
And the worship of the masses pleased him, despite the coming tornadoes, the illness, the empty pit in the stomach. But worship, he knew, has a stronger tendency to alter the thing worshiped rather than the worshipers themselves.
He accepts that. He has faith in the thing he created. Knows it will last through aeons, likely to be preserved as some latter-day Petra on the laked plains of Minnesota, a landmark for all time.
The merchants will save this country, he said, long ago, still said, fevered in dreams. I’ve seen it happen. They will save us.
But the tornadoes come.
But other things came, spawned by the tornadoes, the fever, the rush. Other things burst from the ground, without evident help from workers or metal or bulldozers or Styrofoam cups filled with coffee.
With magic wands and portolets a few bring forth from the dirt a new kind of temple, scattered all across the land, soon more numerous than schools, from whence students flee to enjoy the peace and enlightenment newly offered.
They accomplish what the Maker dreamed in bulk: they turn concrete into gold.
Then asphalt.
Then cinders.
Then ash.
They turn cinders and ash into gold.
And leave the cinders unadorned, except with a coat of paint, grey or brown, using the money to build new temples in new cities and new countries spreading over the new face of the Earth, craving the newness as Man once craved water.
The Maker, despite his torment, feels a flicker of pleasure. That is a good thing, a fine thing. His prophecy. The merchants will save us, he intoned. The merchants will save us.
He hears the chant returned, by thousands, by millions.
The merchants will save us.
The tornadoes spawn more things, and more things, and more things. More ash and cinder temples, surrounded by bootblack where car upon car upon car upon car come and go. The thing spreads form suburb to city to city to suburb to even the smallest towns. And people rejoice, and are happy, live and die in the shadows of the things that come. They enter smiling, always smiling.
And more things come.
The Maker stands high above the stage, drowned in a thousand spotlights.
And the things keep coming.
A hundred thousand spotlights.
A million spotlights.
The stage, once filled with tantalizing shadows, mystery, promise, grew in the enormity of light. Ten million spotlights.
Colors on the stage begin to fade in the glare.
Workers and walkers do not wither in the heat. But as the lights multiply, the workers’ and walkers’ shadows waver and flicker, then their silhouettes, flicker as in a mirage. Details of their faces, their crooked teeth, their bent noses, their slicked hair, their staring eyes, fade.
A hundred million lights.
Now, few shadows.
Then, he said, but then I’m not sure what it is. Was. Will be.
It?
This thing. A slinking, creeping, slouching, stinking thing, small as a mouse in the underbrush, large as the clouds, hiding in the shadows but always in plain sight. It is worse. Worse than anything else he ever saw or could create. I won’t pay alimony for these bastards, he said. And he didn’t really see it. Hear it. Smell it. Felt it, rather, like damp sheets to a sick man, a scream out of a nightmare that blends into an innocent nighttime noise that reassures when you wake fully and recognize it. But you stay awake for a while, afraid if you fall asleep, the noise will return.
A man in a white robe appeared at the Maker’s elbow. Viktor, the man said, You’ve always had a vivid imagination.
I know, Viktor said.
But this, he added. Where does it end?
The white-robed man smiled at Viktor kindly. “Ever hear of infinity?”
He awoke, startled, in an unfamiliar bed, drenched with sweat.
An old man in a battered nightgown. He swung his feet to the thick carpet on the floor, shaking his head as the eeriness of the dream faded. He rubbed his eyes, stroked his goatee. Briskly stood up, scooted slippers on his feet, wrapped himself in a hotel robe, walked to the bathroom. Gargled.
A knock at the door, and a dapper man entered, younger than the first.
“Mr. Gruen, it’s Alan,” the other said. “I heard you in the bathroom, so I hope you don’t mind me coming in.”
The man in the bathroom made an affirmative gargle.
Alan sat at the writing table, pulled a folder from his case, shuffled the papers inside the folder, waiting nervously for the man in the bathroom to emerge.
“Open the window to the east, please, Alan,” the man in the bathroom said.
Alan leaped to the window, drew back the curtains. Morning light streamed between the two stiff linen curtains. A quarter mile distant, an enormous granite and concrete box lay on the horizon.
“You’ve certainly got a nice view of it from here, Mr. Gruen,” Alan said, staring at the box. “And you won’t believe how excited people are. I’ve brought the morning papers from Minneapolis and St. Paul. They’re here for you to read.”
Silence in the bathroom.
Viktor, water dribbling from his chin, stared into the mirror. Recalled the dream. The tornadoes.
“Mr. Gruen,” Alan asked.
He shook his head, placed glasses on his nose, smoothed down his hair. “I’m ready, Alan,” he said. “Always a little nervous. At ground-breakings.”
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