~2.15~

While Mama debated the future of tribe’s lost boys and girls with the witch of the Old Forest, Ivan stretched his legs with a brief stroll around the plaza. He wasn’t used to being seated, cooped up inside a metal box all day. He sometimes fancied he was a big cat, a proud Siberian tiger… meant for hunting… meant for moving.

He never strayed too far from Ginger’s shop, of course. Tigers could never be tamed, but they could be trained, and the tiger that was Ivan knew his duty too well to neglect it.

It had turned into a pleasant day, the air nipping but not biting. The mall was busy, but not packed. There were children, of course, running around and hanging around. Not too many. Just… never the same few glimpsed in a row.

The Mile Mall had always struck Ivan as a point of convergence, of confluence… not just between the de facto cities of East Jericho and West Jericho, but between the visible world and the unseen one, the crass consumer culture of modern America and the secret subculture of the streets. The mall belonged to tribe but it did not belong to tribe.

Malls were by their very nature in-between places… people might say that they were going to the mall, but they really meant they were passing through it. Even the stores changed. Sure, there would be a Hot Topic and a Cinnabon stand somewhere, just to prove to a skeptical world that it was indeed a mall that they saw before them.

Nothing was permanent in a mall, except the mall itself. Nothing was certain. Nothing was stable. That put the mall’s permanent inhabitants in a tenuous position.

When things went bad, they would go bad here.

Listen to me, Ivan told himself. I am becoming philosophical in my middle age.

He didn’t often think to himself in concrete words.

Even Ivan himself, in his own head, couldn’t help but hear the Boris Badenov accent.