The Multidimensional Topology
of
Department Stores
by
Spencer Pate
If you’ve ever been in a
department store, you probably know that it’s next to impossible
to get out of one. They never have just two or three floors:
Their topology extends through the eleven dimensions of string
theory, their escalators expanding into the orders of infinity,
their elevators contracting into infinitesimally small points
with the density of a black hole. Department stores are tangled
mazes with no end. There is no kindly Ariadne to provide you
with a ball of twine that will lead you out, twisting around
corners and slithering between racks of clothing.
All I wanted to do was
to purchase some underwear.
Since department stores
are based on non-Euclidean spacetime, as soon as I walked in and
turned around, the entrance had disappeared. A trained
mathematician will note that parallel lines do not exist in a
department store; all lines intersect each other twice.
Furthermore, the angles of a triangle can add up to more than
180°. You don’t want to look at space dilation effects like
this for too long; they cause your eyes to water. Time acts
differently in department stores as well. Minutes inside last a
day outside, while sometimes a person can spend years of his or
her life inside such a store while only an hour passes back in
normal spacetime.
After I realized there
was no way out, I consulted the imposing, color-coded department
store map. The layout of the store looked simple enough;
underwear was located on the second floor. All I would have to
do would be to find an escalator, grab a pack of underwear, pay,
and exit into the shopping mall on the upper floor. Perhaps I
would have no difficulty in escaping this monstrous labyrinth.
I was wrong.
The hours, or days, or
years I spent wandering aimlessly blur together in my mind. I
passed wrinkled, jewelry-bedecked old salesladies spraying
noxious clouds of perfume into the air, concealing the narrow
path in front of me… I wearily trudged through the racks of
women’s underwear, a section of the department store so large
that it resembled an endless field of some strange and eldritch
crop designed to simultaneously conceal and reveal the bosom… I
fled through the rows of shoes - work shoes, dress shoes, casual
shoes, golf shoes, and even tennis shoes, all of them giving off
the acrid smell of leather and rubber . . . I observed great
herds of expressionless mannequins, all evidence of time effaced
from their smooth plastic bodies… I entered into tiny, cramped
dressing rooms strewn with clothing and hangers as if a
miniature tornado had swept through… I witnessed vain women
like magpies fighting over shiny objects and lingering
avariciously over glass cases of glittering diamond and
zirconium rings, gold and silver necklaces as heavy as
millstones, and earrings that dangled like pendulums… I saw
endless dull shelves of black and grey shirts, pants, and suits
made for every body type imaginable, big and tall and short and
slender, racks of ties and belts like miniature nooses, matching
bedroom sets and linens, white pillows and towels piled up like
mashed potatoes, manly tools and gadgets, useless bulky exercise
equipment and shiny kitchen appliances. The pathway I followed
crossed over itself, branched off into several different routes,
or sometimes narrowed and disappeared completely. I was trapped
in Borges’s Library of Babel, only with the detritus of consumer
society instead of an infinite expanse of books.
And the humanity!
It appeared to me that
many of the other people in the department store had been in
there for their entire lives: They ranged from roving bands of
well-dressed thieves who preyed on the lost and unwary to
self-sufficient societies living in ecological niches like the
dressing rooms or the bed and bath department. Then there were
the Sherpa guides who waited at the bottom of escalators to
assist those who needed help ascending to the next level. By
sheer luck I had discovered an elevator, but I was worried that
it would take me deeper into the depths of the beast, into its
immense heart of darkness from which there is no escape. Now, I
had no desire to continue searching for underwear; I only wanted
to leave this place and never return.
I decided that gaining
the aid of a Sherpa guide would be my ticket to freedom. One of
the Sherpas agreed to help me climb the largest escalator in the
store - it led all the way to the top floor where, hopefully, an
exit would be located. Like all department store escalators, it
was out of order. The guide had never been to the summit
himself, but he had heard stories of men losing their lives on
the route to the upper floors. His name was Tenzing (evidently
a popular name among Sherpa guides), and although he spoke
little English, he managed to communicate to me that it would be
a treacherous ascent to the top of the store. Tenzing was a
short, stocky man with arms and legs roped with muscle from
years of strenuous climbing. His thick black beard and mustache
were clotted with frost from the frigid upper altitudes of the
store’s escalators.
Tenzing carried a
backpack full of supplies and food for our long journey. We
climbed for an entire day, our shaking legs pushing us up stair
by stair until we could carry on no further. The department
store had no day and night - the harsh fluorescent lights above
stung our eyes, and we could afford to sleep for only a few
hours because Tenzing’s supplies were running low. When I
awoke, I peered over the side of the escalator and realized the
dizzying height to which we had ascended. Beneath us people
darted around like minnows in an immense pond. I reeled back
for fear of falling into the abyss below.
On the second day of our
expedition, we passed several grinning, bleached-white skeletons
on the escalator, each one desperately clutching some treasured
piece of clothing they had never had the chance to buy. Tenzing
and I uneasily looked away whenever we encountered a pile of
bones. As we went on, the air turned thinner and breathing
became more laborious, like drinking a thick milkshake through a
coffee stirrer. Cold winds whistled past our ears as we
struggled to hold onto the railing. My extremities were going
numb, and slippery ice had begun to form on the cold steel
stairs of the escalator. We rested for a short while and then
continued on.
I began to have
hallucinations.
What if the department
store were God, a circle whose center is everywhere and
circumference is nowhere? What if the store actually
encompassed the entire world, or the entire universe? Could it
be infinitely large, a manifold of spacetime folded in on
itself? Suddenly, my legs buckled beneath me, and Tenzing
grabbed me before I could fall. He picked me up and began to
carry me the rest of the way up the escalator. Soon, I could
see the end of the escalator, a glowing halo in front of us.
Tenzing stumbled and crawled the rest of the way up the stairs,
with me slung over his shoulder.
When we finally made it
to the top, our exhausted bodies collapsed to the floor. We
were on the upper level. Tenzing looked around frantically with
a horrified expression. He screamed, ran toward the top of the
escalator, and threw himself over the edge. Blood pounded in my
head. Tenzing would be plummeting, as in a nightmare, into the
void.
What had caused his leap
to certain death?
I began to take in my
surroundings. A brightly-colored department store map, jewelry
cases filled with metallic baubles, women’s underwear of every
imaginable color and style — I was back on the first floor!
There was no upper level. The building was a giant Möbius
strip. It had no beginning and no end; the store was a gigantic
loop, a zero, containing everything and nothing. Tenzing had
taken his own life out of despair. He realized that there was
no exit, no hope.
Then I came to a
realization
of my own: We created this labyrinth of material things, and we
can get out of it too. It’s a conscious choice - you make your
own exit.
I began to laugh, and
the department store started to melt away, like a candle flame
that flickers and sputters and finally goes out, leaving behind
a thin wisp of smoke rising to the sky, like a dream being
forgotten as the sleeper awakes, like your eyes adjusting to the
dark so you can see what’s really there.
