The MWL was wandering in midtown one day when something called to him. Reminding himself that he had his ladder on his back, he prepared to swing around very carefully to see to whom, or to what, the voice belonged when he realized that he had felt rather than heard the words, which seemed to have avoided his ears and simply appeared in the middle of his head.
What he thought he heard was, "I am desirable, desire me," but he wasn't sure. It could have been "I am buyable, buy me," or even "I am needable, need me."
The first time this had happened to him, he felt queer and singular, but he had made inquiries discretely among the people he knew, and almost everyone had had the strange experience of being enticed by some Circe lurking in a store window or display case.
"In the city every person is Ulysses," his friend Reb Dunzel had reminded him.
He knew if he were very still the voice would try to lead him to the place from which it was calling him. It never was clear however, until the very last minute, what was sufficiently attracted to him to single him out from the millions of people in the city or at least the 25 or so in his immediate vicinity, none of whom showed any sign of hearing anything at all. The uncertainty of the object of desire, and of the outcome of the turned-on-its-head-hunt, was both exciting and scary.
For a while, he felt silly circling aimlessly like an orphaned and dispossessed homing pigeon. The voice seemed to be especially playful and mischievous, taking him through the front door of a number of stores with its voice clear and vibrant and abandoning him to silence in front of racks of vibrators or shelves of brassieres and drip dry underwear. After stringing him along for a while it finally took him through the doors of the main entrance of Macys.
He felt foolish just standing there, waiting for the voice to talk him up or down, or forward or back, while tourists and sophisticated ladies in sneakers swirled and eddied around him.
The most important thing in department stores he reminded himself, breaking the internal silence he maintained while waiting for the voice to signal him again, the most important thing is not to attract attention. He followed his own advice. He tried to be inconspicuous as he walked over to the information counter, which was not easy because he was in work clothes and carrying a ladder.
"I...I want something," he stuttered. The young lady with the ribbon in her hair and a thin but eager smile was more than willing to help him find it.
"We all do, don't we?" she remarked. "What is it that you're looking for?"
"That's looking for me," the MWL thought, but what he said out loud was "I don't know exactly," and he screwed up his inner ear trying to decipher the outline of the mysterious voice, still teasingly silent.
"Well could you describe it to me?" she inquired.
"Uh, Uh," he stumbled. "It's not very big," Actually he was sure of that because the voice was strong but not large. "I can carry it," he stated with absolute certainty. "It's very lovely," He just took for granted that it would be, although something in his head said quietly, "Don't be so sure." He felt better with these bits and pieces of a description, even though he knew they were fictional.
The girl in the information booth tired rapidly from trying to make a complete and coherent picture of an object of desire from the fragments of information he gave her.
"Yes, yes," she said, impatiently, "but what does it do? What do you do to it? And what does it do for you?" she demanded to know in rapid fire order.
The man with the ladder stopped dead in the face of this onslaught of questions. Suddenly the only thing he wanted to do was escape into the anonymity of the stream of people around him who knew what they wanted and were heading straight for it; he suddenly realized that asking for information at an information booth was a confession of the worst sort of incompetence which justified almost any degree of impertinence by the person being queried.
"It just sits there," he blurted out, "and you can eat it or wear it and it makes you feel good," snatching the answers from the highest branch of his head without stopping to ask himself if they were ripe for picking.
"Seventh floor," the girl manning the information booth said without blinking an eye and without the least idea of what he was talking about. "And sir," she added, with a P.S plated with gracious relief, "you'll have to leave your ladder at the check in counter."
As he left, the girl in the information booth shook her head solemnly. She had decided when she started this job at which she had been working for over a year and thought of as a career, that even though people were entitled to information merely because they waited in line in front of her for it, the job did not require that the information be accurate. She found that people were as satisfied with information of indifferent quality as they were with the facts.
"Next."
As soon as he turned a corner and was out of her sight, he stopped and shut out the store's noises and tried to tune in the object that was calling him. But all he got was a static of perfumes and jumble of feminine voices talking about pocketbooks and hats. He stood there for a while until he heard a deep male voice asking "Can I help you, sir?" It was a security guard.
The MWL knew the rules, He knew that the worst thing that could happen to you in a department store was to attract attention, and the worst attention to draw was the attention of security, because no matter where you went, you were passed from one security person to another and watched like a hawk until you began to feel that they knew something about you that you yourself were unfortunately only just about to learn, and that you might, in fact, be ready to do something untoward; and you began to watch yourself and that was the end of the joy of shopping.
"Where can I check my ladder?" the MWL asked. The guard pointed straight ahead. "I'll walk you there," he added, and cleared a path between packed shoppers watching a demonstration of a combination ice cream maker and sausage stuffer.
With the security guard waiting patiently by his side, he exchanged his ladder for a blue ticket with the word "Ladder" printed on it. "What floor do you want?" the guard asked.
"Seven," he heard himself say as naturally as the girl in the information booth had said seven, although he had no idea what was on seven and the voice, which had mentioned no particular floor, was as still as an empty box.
"I'll walk you to the elevator," the guard said pleasantly, relieved that it was going to be seven's problem. As the elevator door closed the MWL watched the guard moving to the little yellow telephone off to the side of the control panel.
The anticipation of having another security person stalk him over the terrain of the seventh floor depressed him so much that when the elevator stopped at six he followed the only other passenger out the door.
He wandered over the terrain of six until he felt he knew the floor's inventory as well as any of the sales people, and then he took the stairs down to five and repeated his search, trying all of the time he was in motion, to capture the small voice that had conjured him to Macy's. But it was quite still.
Almost helpless with frustration, he wandered up the stairs to seven. No sooner had he passed through the door of that floor than he heard the voice of the object of desire, calling him again, loud and clear. He followed it the way a boy might follow a cork bobbing in a clear stream, to the counter where it rested in a box of its own.
Once he saw it he wanted it. Not only did he want it, he wanted it terribly much. And luckily for him not only could he almost afford it but he had a credit card a gift from his mother that would let him buy it whether he could afford it or not.
Odd, political thoughts always seemed to bubble up in his head at times like this. He struggled against them because, although they came in reds and whites and blues, they always seemed grotesque distortions of real patriotic feelings and, he thought, approached sedition at least from the backside.
For instance, as he was reaching for his wallet, his attention riveted on the spotlessly dressed but gangling and unusually thin clerk, the thought pushed into his mind that real democracy is the democracy of credit even for people whose brains go bump in the night; and the freedom that America had perfected through years of boom and bust, war and peace, good times and bad, was the freedom to buy what you wanted, for more than you could afford to pay, even if you didn't need it: especially if you didn't need it.
"I want that," he said to the clerk, pointing to the object of his desire which rested naked in a box in a display cabinet, its voice alternating between a clear, bright trilling and gurgling, gently rolling rondoles.
"Yes, sir," the clerk responded a little too enthusiastically, "cash or charge?" The MWL looked at him as if the question held some implicit slur. Having reached the object of his desire the MWL was rapidly regaining his control over the rules, etiquette, protocol, and ritual of shopping of which the primordially preeminent was, "charge it, only the poor pay cash."
Like most people, the MWL never felt like he really owned a purchase until he got it home and unwrapped it in the privacy of his own living room. It was that solitary act of stripping off the public wrapping that made the object his.
The return trip down the elevator and the subway ride home were a blur, fogged by a mixture of an anxiety that someone would rip the package out of his hands, and anticipation of a sustained rush of pure pleasure that he was sure the ritual of unwrapping his purchase would bring.
The closer he got to home the further his anticipation of enjoyment ran ahead of his anxiety, and by the time he reached his house he had to remind himself consciously to shut the door behind him, otherwise the dog would get out and there would be hell to pay.
At first he tore at the box with ineffective, trembling fingers. Then he calmed himself and tried to hold himself back and take as much pleasure as he could from unwrapping the box carefully and delicately. He took considerable pleasure from the exquisitely efficient movement with which he pared the wrapping from the wrapped. With measured, deliberate movements, he separated the bottom half of the box gently from the top half.
At the moment when his anticipation of pleasure peaked and all of him stood exposed and he tore down the sheer but impenetrable veil between his vulnerability and the object of his desire, a cruel, frozen flush of surprise and shock came out of nowhere and bit him on the nose. The thing he had anticipated would bring him wave after wave of deep heaving, pleasure had become invisible; the box was empty.
He was plunged instantly into the most abject depression. Not only did its invisibility make the object of desire incapable of satisfying the want it had aroused, but it was mute, although he thought that he could hear it humming. And then his anticipation and vulnerability to pleasure collapsed under the gravity of this new and odd physics into a dense, heavy fury.
He was furious at the invisible object and he was furious at Macys which he was sure would deny that the thing he had purchased had become invisible and would certainly accuse him of making up a preposterous story to advance a fraudulent claim on the store, and he was furious at himself for being so caught up by it that he had not used any consumer common sense at all. He knew all of the rules against impulse buying and he followed them religiously when purchasing something as small as a loaf of bread or a pastry. He was angry and his anger sucked up the bitterness of self blame.
He fantasied an alliance between the now invisible thing and the store, in which the latter made a neat profit by giving the thing the freedom to advertise itself directly to people's heads and then, after it had enticed some poor soul to buy it, it would make itself invisible. When the poor innocent purchaser returned it, claiming it was invisible, the store would bemusedly and sarcastically counter with the claim that the buyer was delusional and offer to refund the individual the cost of the used, empty box.
He determined not to be taken in and began to nourish this determination, feeding it fat details from a continuous stream of fantasies. He closed the box carefully pulled the wrapping over it again, and set out for Macys. The subway trip took double the time it usually required because the train stopped mysteriously at 28th street to pick up aliens someone yelled and waited. This dead time on the subway gave the MWL time to steel plate his determination by rehearsing over and over what he was going to say to the manager of the returns department.
He anticipated a ferocious scene, and it was only the trains rumbling out of its stalled condition that stopped him from actually screaming at the gray haired old lady with spotted hands and thinning hair sitting opposite him whom he had chosen to play the part of the returns manager in his mind.
The trip from the subway station through the main doors of Macy's, passed the still smiling lady wedged into the information booth, up the stairs to the returns office took no time at all. A journey propelled by anger and compassed by bitterness takes no time to reach its destination, the Chinese say, only the return trip home is slow and painful.
He managed to blurt out only a small piece of his story to the woman who was stationed at the entrance to the returns office when she abruptly interrupted him. "Go down the hall," she pointed with a piece of the sandwich she was eating, "and see Mr. Gratice. He handles this kind of thing." The way she said, 'this kind of thing' made his nose run and a chill run down his spine.
"It's invisible," said the MWL bursting into the office with Mr Gratice's name on the door, beginning story end backwards and nearly hurling the hastily rewrapped box down on the large spotless and empty polished top of the desk in the middle of the room. Like a wooden ocean it nearly swallowed the slight figure of the occupant of the office whose light blue suit and apricot scarf belied the seriousness and gravity of his position.
"It's invisible," he repeated and spilled out the entire tale without giving the man behind the desk a chance to interrupt him and leaving nothing out, although on hindsight he thought it would have been much better to have omitted the part about hearing it call to him.
When the story was completed the small man behind the large desk that the MWL noticed had his name and the title 'Manager of Other Things' on it, said sincerely, "Of course, I understand completely. Could I look at it?" he asked.
"I assure you it's as invisible as air," the MWL insisted as he opened the box. But it wasn't. There it was in its full glory, as desirable as ever and calling to them both it seemed, loud and clear.
"But it was invisible before," the MWL protested, "at home it was."
The manager of Other Things at Macy's looked at him sympathetically. "It happens sometimes," he said quietly and in a voice devoid of the slightest implication that the story was exaggerated in the least, or false in any particular. "I don't think it will help to bring it home again," he added. "Somewhere between here and there it will become invisible again. We will take it back, of course" (and pull out its tongue, he thought to himself.)
The MWL sighed and took the credit slip with a sense of resignation because he knew it was a hopeless case and he would start feeling the call of the thing again as soon as he walked away and as soon as he left the store would feel that he had made a mistake returning it.
In the elevator going down he wondered what the store did with items like this that were returned, whether they stuffed them in a closet for a while then threw them out, or returned them to the manufacturer with a note saying they were invisible or just donated them to charity and let grace worry about it. On the subway going home he had three seats to himself to think about this because he sat with his hands tightly over his ears from 34th Street to Spring Street even though it did not help at all.