A Pall on the Mall

They're selling laughs now. They're trying to.

You acquire a daily familiarity for numbers you used to never pay attention to, such as the consumer confidence index. You listen to those "This American Life" podcasts that all your smart friends keep raving like lunatics about, in which Ira Glass and his nervous Nellies try to explain our global economic calamity. You learn about things like "consumer paper" loans. (So that's how Office Depot does it . . .) You finally read the Economist, after all these years of claiming to read the Economist. You figure out how many zeroes are in a trillion. (Twelve.)

You have dreams in which Paul Krugman and Michael Lewis make brief cameos. Neel Kashkari, who oversees the books on the federal bailout, is named one of People's Sexiest Men Alive. You start to see, at last, how it's all connected, like a game of Jenga. (Jenga: The Deflation Edition -- families everywhere will find hours of fun!) Remove one piece (i.e., Christmas shopping) and the entire structure collapses.

But what if you don't want to shop anymore?

That's life in the shopocalypse. (Not our word. "Shopocalypse" was coined by Reverend Billy, a New York performance artist who has evangelized across the nation's malls and power retail centers every Black Friday for years, which he proclaimed "Buy Nothing Day," preaching the message of the so-called Church of Stop Shopping. Happy now, Reverend?)

* * *

We soak up the doom. We also buy a sweater at Lord & Taylor, and we like it until we bring it home, and then see it as a sweater of doom. We go to Montgomery Mall, the Wheaton mall, the Springfield mall. We go high-end and low-end. We eat pizza and then we eat Chick-fil-A. We go to the malls with Apple stores, and we go to the malls where we try to remember if this was the mall where people get kidnapped from the parking lot.

In Tysons Galleria, the scene is so empty you could get a film crew and use it as a location for a science-fiction movie, maybe a zombie movie. In L'Occitane, looking over fancy soaps all by our lonesome, listening to even more remixed Christmas pop of yore, this time Eartha Kitt singing "Santa Baby," only really, really slow. It's a dirge now. (Santa. Baby. An outer. space. convert. ible. too. bright. blue.)

Over by the Ritz-Carlton hotel, Harold's is in its death throes. In its time, Harold's, with 42 stores in 19 states, was venerable prep-wear supplier, the kind of place for people who thought they lived in Connecticut but didn't. People who found Ralph Lauren to be too fashion-forward. Harold's employees got told the news Nov. 7.

We buy a couple of dress shirts. There's not much left. The vultures have come and gone.

It's a sympathy purchase, we suddenly realize -- the stuff you buy as a way of saying farewell? Lower prices are supposed to make you feel good. Now, lower prices make you feel worse.

"Sorry about the cheap bags," the clerk says, putting the shirts in a white plastic grocery bag, the kind you get at Korean delis, with red letters that say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

You're welcome, welcome, welcome, and goodbye.

We stagger out feeling like lucky survivors, for who knows how long.