~4.31~

Shopping centers weren’t exactly John’s scene. He’d never spent much time at the Mile Mall. He would have preferred a stretch of unpaved park to a pedestrian center, no matter how artfully designed it was. Now he walked straight ahead until he came to the edge of one of the fountains and turned to look at the crowd… people hurrying past, talking on cell phones and listening to headphones.

Most of them weren’t looking at the statues or the architecture or the plaques marking historic locations. The big chain stores had steadier traffic than the local ones. For all the money that had been spent developing this supposed cultural landmark, the Jericho city fathers might as well have just built a conventional mall.

“O brave new world,” John declared. “That has such people in it!”

A businessman who happened to be walking past, talking on a tiny earpiece, stopped in his tracks and gave John a perplexed look.

“Brush up your Shakespeare,” John told him. The man flipped him off, and John bit his thumb at him in response, then turned and climbed up on the edge of the fountain, seized with an irresistible impulse to inject a little culture into the bodies of those who seemed inoculated against it. “What a piece of work is a man,” he declaimed. “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals… and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

“Hey, Mac,” a police officer said, strolling over. “You need a permit if you’re going to do street theater.”

“All the world’s a stage,” John replied. “And all the men and women merely players.”

“Save the sound and fury for somebody who cares,” the cop said. “Don’t give me a hard time, okay?”

“Sorry, officer,” John said, bowing and then hopping down. “If we shadows, etc.”