Ivan Vladislavić - The Restless Supermarket

*

It was Munnery’s idea to remove the Restless Supermarket to the countryside, where they could work on it without fear of injuring passers-by. They had decided to act more circumspectly in such matters, and so the implications of the removal were first examined from every angle. What if it harmed the very people it was meant to help? What if it led to shortages in the surrounding suburbs, to a critical want of staples, to starvation? When such questions had been answered to everyone’s satisfaction, the renowned transposer went to work. He found an abandoned aerodrome in the hinterland, at the end of a country road, and put the Restless Supermarket down there, lock, stock and barrel. On the vacated site, Figg inserted a small section of the Rainbow Chicken Farm to tide the locals over until more permanent measures could be taken. Then the Proofreaders boarded their bus, specially chartered, and took the slower route into the interior.

Even from a distance, when the old control tower had just appeared on the horizon, the Restless Supermarket could be heard grumbling and groaning. Fluxman drew up in the parking lot near the delivery bays, and they disembarked into the noisy air. Then he led them inside and down a corridor to the manager’s office. On the other side of a flimsy wall, they heard the contents of the building churning like an angry sea, and some of them slumped a little, and some puffed out their chests.

A closed-circuit camera, the sole survivor among a dozen installed to combat shoplifting, was still relaying its impressions of the store to a television monitor on the manager’s desk. At first, it appeared to them that this camera had also broken down, and that the screen contained nothing but meaningless static. But then among the squirming motes they began to distinguish fragments of sense, flickering here and there, and they drew fearfully closer and gazed at the screen as if it were a window into the inferno.

The interior of the Restless Supermarket was barely recognizable. The entire space was seething, alive with an indiscriminate, indefatigable jumble of tins, jars, bottles, packets, boxes, bags, all mingled into one substance, whose textures eluded them, being simultaneously soft and hard, fuzzy and sharp, perishable and indestructible. Each element remained vividly itself for as long as they focused on it, and then dissolved back into the irreducible compound as soon as they relaxed their attention. It was like trying to watch one wing in a wheeling flock or one brick in a striding wall, although such things gave no inkling of the frenetic movement, the ceaseless and senseless changing of places with which the products had been charged. Occasionally, the ribs of a shelf gleamed white in the roil, or a chequered floor tile flashed like a tooth.

They stood there mesmerized, and might have gone on standing there until they lost all will to act, had Fluxman not roused them by clapping his Phone Book open on the desk.

Quickly, before they could lose heart, they constructed makeshift desks of cardboard cartons, laid out the documents they had brought with them in their portfolios alongside jars of pencils and rubbers and rulers, and gathered inventories, advertisements, ledgers, marketing plans and flow charts from the filing cabinets. Munnery and Levitas launched into the engineering, locating salients in the soup, righting gondolas and levelling refrigerator units, realigning shelves in the proper parallels, with aisles of the optimum width between, rearranging sections and departments to create a rational flow of custom. Wiederkehr repaved and Figg repapered. And then the two together set about repacking the shelves, tidying up the debris as they went.

It was an enormous labour. The product substance was hard and soft, impenetrable and yielding, solid and liquid. It resisted their efforts to cut into it, to separate parts from the whole. A single item grappled from its clutches and put aside on the end of an empty shelf, in a little white clearing, would maintain its integrity for a moment. But then the substance would begin to exert its viscous attraction, and soon the item would be jiggling and turning on its base, and floating free again into the general mass, where it would be whirled away into restless anonymity. The shelf itself would come loose and be lost in the uproar. The categories had to be built up painstakingly, row by row, line by line, and all the while chaos threatened to overwhelm them.

The Proofreaders worked in shifts. When they were exhausted beyond endurance, they lay down and slept with their twitching hands clasped between their knees. When they were famished, they transposed a tin of something from the stock.

At last, patches of stillness appeared in the tumult. And then a solid shelf or two. The seething died down a little. One day, the space between the shelves and the rafters cleared momentarily and revealed a row of dangling signboards: Tea & Coffee, Breakfast Cereals, Dairy Products, Pet Food, Household Cleaners … The Proofreaders gave a weary cheer. Already, in the mind’s eye and the mind’s nose, they saw the master chefs of Alibia walking enraptured down the gleaming aisles and smelt the aromas of feasts to come. But the battle was far from won. The superstructure was refractory. The gondolas floated off half-laden. The dairy went sour. The overtaxed shelves collapsed. The products kept bubbling back into substance. No sooner was one aisle restored to order, than another rose up clamorously, shedding labels and price tags in promiscuous profusion. From his headquarters in the back room, Fluxman rallied his colleagues again and again. He would not submit. And at the end of a week, the basic shape of the enterprise had been secured.

Night had no meaning in the Restless Supermarket. They laboured on, raising up pyramids of tins and cans, stabilizing barrows of fruit and vegetables, racking and stacking, piling and puzzling, until the shelves began to settle down, rising up and subsiding in waves, as if by general assent, as if a rumour of defeat had run like a swell from aisle to aisle.

Glaring absences became visible. Baked goods were required, said Munnery. They brought in quantities of Chelsea buns, Madeira slabs, Lamingtons, pita-bread with hummus. What about the liquid refreshments? They brought in whiskey, wine in boxes, soda water, ice. Everyone needed something special, some little extra. They added mops, marinades, wonton dumplings, asparagus spears, noodles in the shape of shells. Wiederkehr became quite inventive, importing strings of vanished delicacies he remembered from his childhood. He and Figg devised entirely new dishes, and arranged the ingredients on the shelves by menu, season and refinement of taste, constellations so subtle that only gourmets would appreciate them. Meanwhile, Banes was making his way down the aisles for the last time, straightening labels and marking down prices. Something like peace and quiet descended and endured.

It was then that they noticed the absence of Fluxman. As soon as the tide had turned, he had left his post and gone into the butchery. The air smelt of blood. There was mopping up to do. He must excise sawdust and broadcast desiccated coconut, just as an interim measure. He must delete sub-standard carcases in the freezer room. Munnery found him there, sweeping behind a stiff downpour of plastic curtain, and gave him the news: the sun had risen over the Alibian Sea and the Restless Supermarket was at rest.

*

Although the Wetland Ramble was gone from Fluxman’s yard and a patch of forest rustled in its place, a muddy breath still clung. In the stench that blew into his study, a mixture of dung and waterweeds and feathers, gnawed bones and half-hatched chicks entombed in eggshell, there was a lingering reminder of captivity.

Having risen to shut the window against this poison, he stood gazing at the beeches silvered in moonlight, while a flock of noisy gulls scattered into the heavens. Then he returned with a sigh to the blighted landscape of the Book. The breeze had rifled spitefully through his pages. As he leafed back to his bookmark, his eye fell on: