Walmart, Ice-Shrouded Graves & the Off Button

Old Roy dinner rounds are like crack cocaine for Milo the dog.

It's the Walmart house brand. When you read the side of the bag you find out that Old Roy was Sam Walton's favorite dog, that every evening after a long day spent running Mom and Pop stores out of business, terrorizing union organizers and bribing Hillary Clinton, Sam would hurry home so he could devote hours to developing the world's most perfect dog food.

Milo thinks he succeeded.

The only problem with Old Roy is that I have to go to Walmart to buy it. And I hate Walmart. Partly because I'm a terrible snob, partly because of their labor practices.

But mostly because the place is so vast and windowless, every product display designed to look like every other product display, that invariably I get lost. Yesterday I wandered around for twenty full minutes before I finally found the cash registers.

And wandering around Walmart for twenty minutes is eerie. I start having apocalyptic fantasies – suppose George Bush is right and Iraqi nuclear terrorists have just taken out the entire United States except for Walmarts! (Which, after all, are designed to look exactly like huge bomb shelters.) What happens then? Do shoppers breed so the earth will be repopulated? What does that imply for the future of Homo sapiens as a species?

I swang by Walmart on my way home from Soquel. Seeing Annie is always a treat but I worry about her, she seems to be becoming more insular and becoming more insular is all caught up in my mind with growing old and dying. Of course we come from particularly long-lived stock – my grandfather, Annie's father, was still smoking three packs of Old Golds a day up till two weeks before he finally died at age 86, cruising by NYC municipal bus to his various clubs, writing letters to the New York Times. Of course, my mother died quite young but then she was nuts, illness as metaphor. (I wonder whether Susan Sontag remained convinced of this thesis as she lay dying.)

Annie's given up bike riding as exercise and now walks two miles a day around the football field of a nearby high school. Though it was raining, she took me up there. We walked together. We got wet.

We also talked.

"Patty, you simply must read this book," said Annie. "You like books about ill-fated Arctic expeditions, don't you?"

"Who doesn't?" I said. "Snow. Hunger. Deprivation. Ice-shrouded graves. What's not to like?"

"Well in this one they had plenty of food but it turns out that the food was packed in cans with a high lead content. So they all died horribly of acute lead poisoning!"

"Interesting," I said. "I thought all lead poisoning was chronic."

"Oh, I do love my life!" said Annie with a little sigh. "Cuddling up on my bed in the rain with a pile of library books about ill-fated Arctic expeditions."

"You do see other people, don't you?" I asked, faintly alarmed.

"Only when I can't avoid it. Mostly on weekends."

I opened my mouth to say something.

"Oh, come on, Patty. That was a joke. Still, I do find that I'm happiest when I'm completely alone. Other people are so… draining."

"Really?" I said. "I find them energizing. I think I spend too much time alone."

"Well, of course. We're herd animals after all. That's our brain chemistry."

"But you don't."

"No. I find the constant level of drama and attention quite exhausting."

"Are you happy?" I asked.

"Very!" she said. "Are you?"

"I'm not unhappy," I said carefully. "Very small things delight me. Just the fact that as a human I have evolved this complicated interneuronal relay for registering sensory information, that my brain processes it into color and sound! That amazes me. But I often think that if humans came with off buttons, I would press mine. I'm not suicidal, I don't think. Because I wouldn't track it down. But if it were part of the package –"

"Oh, I'd never press that off button," said Annie. "Never! Because you know, Patty, this is all there is. If I could live fifty centuries, I would!"

"Really?" I said. "For me there's always this sense of is that all there is? So I wouldn't."

"We're very different," said Annie, and she laughed.

I had occasion to remember this conversation again when I finally found the cash register in Walmart.

Walmart was surprisingly empty that day. There were no lines at the register.

My cashier was a very young, very pretty girl whose expression was one of utter blankness.

I figured she'd been sitting in that exact same position for ten minutes or so because I'm sure Walmart forbids its employees to do stuff like read when there's no one around. No, they must sit in a perpetual state of eager readiness to serve.

Except there were no customers to serve. So she was frozen into institutionally mandated catatonia.

What a trap this place must seem like to her, I thought. And in that same instance got a whiff of all those places in which I'd sat similarly trapped over the years.

Is that all there is?

Although probably if that cashier had had an off button, she wouldn't have pushed it either.