On his lunch hour, David often found himself staring at the food court escalator and trying to figure out exactly how many people it had carried by that time each day. He never went so far as to actually count the number of people, he was never that bored. He just liked to think about how many people mindlessly stepped on the moving staircase, not really considering anything more than where they were headed. A woman in a rush to return a dress before her own lunch hour ended. A kid running to catch a movie on time. A teenage boy turned around backward on the device, walking against traffic, to either impress a girl or annoy his parents. A toddler holding his mom’s hand, trying to stay upright despite the unfamiliar pull of the steps, the ground beneath his feet moving in an unnatural way.
From where David was sitting, depending on the day, his view of the mall escalator affected, almost to an obnoxious degree, how he felt about people in general. Working retail at the most popular location of his bookstore’s chain for five years had taken enough of a toll on David’s goodwill toward people anyway. By and large, he’d probably seen people at their worst. (Well, that’s not true, he reconsidered, imagining murderers and warlords who were probably much worse than even his least polite customers.) David, staring at an escalator and thinking, realized today that he’d probably seen ordinary people at their everyday worst – when they were most moody or selfish or demanding or annoyed. A clerk is someone to serve you, and sometimes they serve the added benefit of being a doormat you could wipe your feet on after the rest of the world just buried you in dirt. (David allowed himself to think in such hyperbole, just as long as he didn’t say it aloud.)
David had a thing about feet. Not a fetish. A thing. A birth defect left him to walk pigeon-toed. The only way he could walk normally was if he concentrated on his movement and thought through each individual step, how to direct your heel first and how to point your toe out. The whole process of walking correctly was tedious, thus, and walking incorrectly better suited the speed of his thought. With his toes pointed inward and his hips shifting with an awkward lurch, David could move through the mall at a steady clip, closer to the speed his mind wandered – though his mind occasionally ran. (David himself had not been able to actually run without severe pain for several years.) So he found escalators interesting, people with normal gaits lucky. For every child who gaped open-mouthed when David shuffled by, David stared in envy at athletes or joggers’ legs and muscles, viewing their ease and strain with an appreciation that he felt others might not understand until their own bodies had worn out.
David had developed a reputation for being someone who stared at people creepily, without guile or secrecy. His co-workers put it plainly and said he had no game whatsoever. David couldn’t explain his behavior to them. And his staring caused awkwardness so often, he started to wonder if his friends were right. What if he wasn’t just fascinated by other people’s bodies, other people’s stories, other people’s movement? What if he was just a pervert?
But when watching the escalator in the food court on his lunch hour, he understood his own motives full well. The angle he had, looking at people step on and off the steps from the second floor, showed him a masterful array of perfect geometry. The people were dots moving along a group of lines if you looked directly down on them.
David also imagined that, from the perspective of the steps themselves, the travelers were just a collection of ankles that all seemed the same. All that thought people had gone into picking out their shoes, finding shoes that said something about them, their individual style, the sort of exercise they wanted to do that day, how the perfect shade of brown loafer might match a favorite belt, what a mother wanted her baby’s feet to look like now that he was able to stand, mattered little to the steps they stood upon. To the steps, everyone was the same, everyone was just enough of a weight for the steps to handle.
David himself wore corrective shoes with a one-inch lift in the right sole. Even his ankles looked different because of that.
But to the steps, that would make no difference. To them, David was just two feet to be carried along a path, a product on a conveyor belt going from points A to B. He wasn’t two different sized feet at the end of two different sized legs. He wasn’t a promising talent who emerged out of his high school class already published. He wasn’t 29, still holding a job that didn’t require him to use his bachelor’s degree in journalism, which now felt more like a bad idea rather than a badge of honor he sought to explore both writing and truth with equal, idealistic (naïve) fervor. He would look at the escalator and wonder how many people’s stories it had helped move along.
David figured that from the perspective of the steps and from the view directly above, all the riders on the escalator were basically the same, a set of feet or heads like dots traveling through a shining, silver rectangle. He was one of them, the mallgoers, but they were all the same to the device, all the same to the basic tenets of anthropology, all the same to God. Sometimes it comforted him to think that we’re all small to the universe, even though our lives are infinitely important to us, from our own eyes, while we’re seeing them play out.
David stepped on the escalator himself to head from the food court back to the store. His break was almost done.
+++
Benjamin Carr is an editor and ex-reporter from Atlanta who writes in Waffle Houses and Target storefront cafes on three-day weekends. His work has appeared online in The Guardian, Ain’t It Cool News and, most recently, Loose Change Magazine.