1.

Had I or had I not harmed a person, and was I ready to know?
I had run from the tile and scrubbable wall facility and a lifeless body into the ruins of Naples, uncompleted hindquarters of partially destroyed World War II brick buildings painted over with a mauve, earthy tone, where I became fully awake climbing a section that peered out into a street with an eight-year old girl behind me telling me to be careful and a woman across the street in a long blue dress and a white fiber hat that tilted in front of her forehead motioning with her curled index finger for me to come down from the wall towards her.
The girl was not my daughter but acted like one, or perhaps a happy guide, as she took my hand and led me through the debris out the back of the fallen brick onto a busy sidewalk of men returning from the harbor, some with fish, some with netting and buoys, the faint smell of alcohol as they progressed, then across the street where the cars seemed to have parked themselves in a haphazard manner, ignoring the painted slots and horizontal rectitude a bureaucracy demands.
The woman had a parasol for no particular reason: it was not going to rain, but neither was it going to be a day full of sunshine.
“Are you the man of four chairs and shadows?” she asked.
I had no idea what to say.
“Yes, he is,” said the girl, nodding in a way that meant I should nod too, in acknowledgment.
“So, it is said,” I said.
“Those are my buildings, or half-buildings as they are. You shouldn’t try to scale the walls or enter without my permission.”
“I am sorry,” I said. “I was looking for something, someone, and thought that thing, that person, might be in one of those three buildings, though I don’t remember why I thought that.”
“Permissions are important,” the girl said. “But he has had a difficult time.”
“Yes,” the lady said. “He’s on the run and will soon be caught. I could just poke my finger three times on my phone and he’d be captured.”
“That is powerful,” the girl said. “But more powerful, and interesting, would be allowing him to search the three buildings until he exhausts himself or finds what he is looking for.”
The lady nodded, and motioned with the tip of her umbrella that we should cross back over the road. She used the umbrella like a shepherd’s croft, tapping my right thigh as I wandered to the outside of the pavement to keep me in line and under the awnings as we came to a massive wooden door in front of the first building. The door lacked signs, words, images—just a blank door.
“This is the most famous emporium in all of the country.”
“Some say notorious,” the girl countered.
“Many great people and also many humble people, and by humble, I mean poor, have found a delightful trade in these walls. Perhaps you shall as well.”

2.
An odor of old perfume scented the air. I say odor because the mix of various perfumes—one, a highly fragrant and dizzying rose, mixed into a rather noxious and unpleasant stream of air.
On a table off to my left were hundreds of glass containers with those ball-shaped atomizers, some of which appeared to be pinched closed, and others that appeared to be rotting on the glass vials. I tried one, and it spritzed an odor of lilac, of perhaps a dead and old lilac. I shook my head like a sneezing dog.
“Some items are better not sampled,” the girl said. “Some are better sampled. Most things that appear old are better left intact. For instance, the nipple on that bottle clearly has had its better day, and the vial was only half-full, so that one should be avoided. But, see this one, it is full and the rubber is in excellent condition.” She handed it to me, and shook as if I should squeeze.
I did. It gave a pleasant aroma of peaches, as if I were in an orchard and peaches ripening in the sun.
“You are a great guide,” I said, bowing to her.
“I am no guide through this world. I’m a girl. And, as a girl, you should remember that I have little knowledge of most of the things in the emporium, but, as a girl, a curious girl, I have much knowledge of how to try things.”
I nodded. I had little understanding of what she said, but it made sense, in a young person’s sort of way.
I then saw a table full of tube radios, tried the first one, which lit and produced an awful static. I tuned the dial and quickly found a working station, and listened to it for several minutes. It was all commercials. I turned the dial trying to find another, but that station was the only one that came in. For a second I thought I had found another, and could hear two people talking, but their speech was muffled. I smiled at the girl.
“Ghosts?” she said, smiling. “The commercials are all that the emporium receives, so all the radios are tuned to the commercials station. It is obviously boring, in the beginning, when you are trying to find music or conversation, but you get used to it. The jingles, as they are called, are indeed quite catchy, in that after a few hours you will find you have been caught, and whistle or hum or sing the words to a commercial or two.”
“Yes,” I said, “I have been caught that way before. Insidious.”
“What do they call it? A worm? Yes. That is precisely what it is, how it wriggled into the ear and cannot leave and soon your ear adjusts and it is all you hear. But otherwise, it would be a tuneless world.”
“If I choose something, I won’t be able to pay for it. I’ve lost my wallet. And I have no job that I can remember. I don’t think I’m even looking for work.”
“When you’re not working and don’t look for work, it doesn’t work, the cash in the pocket thing. You may choose, but not leave. Everyone must pay. Unless you are one of the elites, the wealthy. Then you don’t have to pay. You just take. It is customary, and even the poor allow the elite to take.”

  “I seem to remember, when I woke, a crowd of crows around me, all with shiny coins in their beaks. I tried to snatch a coin from the closest one, but failed.”

The older woman spoke, “that is a frequent dream of the poor. They dream of an equity handout from a bank or a government, as it was promised, but it is snatched away before they can have it. Personally, I don’t need crows crowding around my bedside. I have enough with one vulture,” she said, looking at her daughter placing tags with her name on it on furniture and dishes.

3.
On the memorabilia tables, I saw items that had only been introduced a few years previously, toys, kitchen tools, books on diet and books on food.
“There will always be books, you know,” said the girl. “Novels and such have all gone digital, but books about food need weight,” she tittered. “They will always be large and somewhat heavy when talking about you becoming trim.”
“But why on the memorabilia table? Certainly no one looks at them with nostalgia.”
“Oh, but they do. Remember those twenty pounds I lost, they’ll say, looking at the Chinese health food book, and then remember the thirty pounds I gained, looking at the scratch baking book. It’s a method of recovering the past, and also to show with some heavy leverage that you had not so much overcome self-control issues and subjected yourself to the whims of the book market. Food is a powerful whim.”
I looked at a large, clear, stand-up tube. It had light tubes from floor to ceiling. “And what is that?”
“It’s a digitization chamber. You put the object you want into the chamber, and for an additional fee, it creates a digital artifact for you that you can both see on your smart phone and have securely in your digital wallet should you want to sell it to another. For instance, if you found Beanie Babies or Barbies or baseball cards that you wanted to keep and perhaps later re-sell, you place them in the memory tube, it makes a hologram for you, and sends you your receipt and an encrypted code showing the possession is yours. Then it takes the object and incinerates it. It’s quite fun, actually. Metals, of course, cannot be incinerated, so they go into a special mangling drawer, I call it, where they are crushed and then smelted down. What a goop Red Flyer wagons make! Want to try something?”
“I have no money.”
“No money is always an impediment to making memories. My mother wonders how anyone can even know who they are or where they have come from if they have no money.”
“Thus, no memories, I suppose. But I have memories.”
“Except the good ones. You don’t remember if you killed a man, do you? If you had made a digital artifact of the occurrence at the time of the occurrence, you would know.”
“How could I make a digital occurrence right when I am killing a man?”
“Silly man. Even a rudimentary selfie would suffice.”
“But I have no money and no smart phone.”
“How sad. I think that not only will you not remember anything, but no one else will remember you either.”
“Sometimes,” the lady in long black boots said, “things conceal ourselves until we open them.”
“Perhaps it’s not murder you committed. Perhaps it’s a worse crime. Did you have a dog or cat and keep it locked in a car during the mid-day sun? Perhaps you worked in an office and wore aromatic cologne or deodorant. Perhaps you murdered with a whiff. Perhaps if you opened more items, you would open up and find the truth. Or perhaps, even on Emporium credit, you could sample from our scent table and see if your nose opens up more of your ego. Our olfactory nerves are quite powerful in provoking memory.”
“How can I have credit if I don’t know who I am?”
“My dear man, billions of people have credit and they are all relatively anonymous. The credit industry is not for the man. Man is for the credit industry.”

4.
Being in a predicament, without bearings, I seemed naturally drawn to the table of maps and atlases, like the diddle of the point of a compass trying to settle on true north. I searched in silence for twenty minutes or so, but found nothing. Exasperated, I slammed the final atlas book closed, and a fine powder of old dust filled the air.
“What did you think they would tell you?,” the lady asked.
“I wasn’t expecting the truth. I wasn’t expecting a lie. I was expecting something more secretive, coded, a binary map wrapped in a verbal montage that might lead me to a place I know, where I could get my bearings..”
“You think this is Harry Potter or Umberto Eco?”
“Not any longer. More like gulags and Josef Stalin.”
“What of this book,” she asked, stroking the cover. “The Magician and the Ring Master. Or, The Clawfoot Tub and the Palm Tree, or The Tom Toms and Bongos, or The Golden State, which, by the way, has nothing to do with California, nor gold, but an imaginary state in which the narrator has an instant influx of wealth, and each page has another conspicuous item drawn in great detail. In the end, however, the narrator wakes back in his impoverished state, yet is happy.”
“Why should I read such a book? To be enslaved by a false notion?”
“For each freedom, an enslavement must occur. For each gadget chosen and used, a loss of ability. So, again, we must return to choice. Choose carefully, now that you know some sort of shackling may occur.”
I picked up a can opener, but found I had no strength in my forearm or hand.
“Did you not pick up the opener? You need, now, to use the opener.”
“But the opener does not hold a pen or open a door. And my wrist has suddenly gone weak.”
“Then perhaps you should have chosen something else, a universal opener.”
“But there are no universal openers.”
“Just so.”
“So, I must choose, but nothing works.”
“You cannot enter into this type of freedom without choice.”
“But what if I don’t want your type of freedom?”
“It’s not my freedom. It’s freedom as offered by choices by things. There are no others. We like to think aboriginals have some sense of true freedom, but the truth is that even the Amish cheat. They have credit card devices tucked under the counter when customers carry only credit cards.”
“That’s just business.”
“Exactly. Nutrition this, nutrition that. It’s power they are after. Fitness is, after all, begun with fit, how to make something into something that complements some other bigger prize, some purchase that like a treadmill ends up controlling our legs. Building wholeness, one culture calls it. Like when one purchase leads to another, and a puzzle piece joins the jigsaw puzzle in the sky. And if fitness doesn’t work, there are drugs that do the same thing, and glosses, and make-up, and haircuts, and video games. Ooh, video games, so seductive. Would you like a video game?”
“All this stuff. Even the non-things are treated like things. What of my soul, my being?”
“This emporium is of devices and choosing, even better choices of even better devices. Choices. How can it possibly address a totality in pieces? Well, exactly that way—by pieces. You become your pieces. When one fails, you pick up or buy another. When one doesn’t suit, you replace it. We even have devices that you can replace for a while and the original device never finds out.”
“You mean the devices know?”
“Of course. It would be silly for the device not to know. But you can make some devices forget. It’s all programmed intelligence, a few with the best algorithm controlling all the rest.”
“And me, I?”
“That’s just your brain in fear, this personal I thing. You may want to exchange that part. We have many devices that can control, erase, even forgive. Those tend to be the cheapest and most durable. The New Frontier Vox Populi. Damnation. A single save. Socialism. Monolithic Materialism—that’s the best. They all work.”
“And culture?”
“We no longer give out devices specific to a territory or a people. Some call it cultural appropriation if you choose the wrong one, but really, you can buy another culture.
Culture has been replaced by organically ethnic, anyway. The last organic thing was serum truth. Truth is a device. Lies are a device. Even facts are a device like a non-fact is a device. And as you see, freedom is too. The device only has to function. You have to function. You have to choose. If you don’t choose, the Emporium would cease.”
“And if it did?”
“But it cannot.”
“But there’s more than the Emporium—”
“Only as another device.”
“What about non-markets? What about music, poetry, painting? What about art?”
“Figment, a figure of speech, a hallucination. All artists really want to make money and have scads of objects. Rare an artist turns down money. Another device in which people choose other devices. It’s time to choose.”
“I won’t.”
“That is a choice, but not a device. The devices will turn on you, you know. As will all the other people who want to enter the Emporium. Look at the lines. Not a soul, as you would say, left milling about the streets. Everyone is in line. Except you.”
“All this feels like corruption, like an acid poured on skin.”
“Corruption? Corruption is a thing of the past, an anachronism. It is good that things rust, that things decay. That is how we get new things. The faster things corrupt, the faster we get new things. The opposite is true in governing, however. Stability is bought. Lobbyists and oligarchs are the buyers. We have more devices the more stable the corruption of people, and the less stable means the corruption of devices. This is the winning strategy.”
“For whom? The devices.”
“Precisely. And a few programmers, programmers who may not even do programming. You’re beginning to get it. Now choose. Choose now. Aren’t you still wondering if you killed someone?” the little girl asked.
“You’re right. I have forgotten.”
“See, devices help,” the little girl said. “If you pick up more devices you will forget about your silly quest entirely.”
“But it’s important to know. I must have regret if I have done something, even if accidentally. I must grieve.”
“Regret is not a material device but it is an excellent device to buy more devices that make you forget. Regret should have a short half-life however. Regretting too long makes one forget about devices, and the devices forget about you.”
“And grief?”
“For grief we have stages, and the last stage of grief ends upon the choosing of devices. We have many, many books on how to dispense with grief, how to take yourself through the stages with swiftness. An eagle may lose an egg, but soon needs to devour. You are an eagle. You were meant to choose devices.”
“But I remember a person. I might have pushed her in the sea from a boat because she took up too much room. I might have shot him out of anger because we were shouting at each other. It might have been a child that came from the shadows that in my headlights his shadow grew large like a specter and I ran him over out of fear.”
“We have a double-shot espresso maker that is ideal for that.”
“I don’t like espresso.”
“You needn’t like it, silly. It’s just a must have, in case your friends come over. It’s conspicuous ownership, a device pride, and makes grief disappear like a mist.”
“I think I may have killed a friend.”
“There are others, you know. Aisle 33.”
“No, I think this one was special.”
“What kind of devices did this one have?”
“I don’t know. Why would I care? He had a limp. Maybe it was a she and she limped. When we walked I had to intentionally shorten my step so we could walk together. It made me slow down, look at things.”
“Things are good to look at.”
“Not those kinds of things. Things like the light against the triangular building in the middle of downtown. The way the sycamore trees gave shade in the summer by the burger joint with outside seating next to the theater. To people, all kinds of people when they walked by. We used to estimate by the size of a handbag by how many Kleenexes were stuffed in it. We used to count the number of braids in people’s hair on the way to a reggae concert. We used to nurse our coffee so we wouldn’t get asked to leave our table at the bistro by the bookshop, even dilute it with water so it appeared the cup was always half full.”
“There is not device for that. But don’t forget the lookalikes and the redundancies. We have many redundancies for things that don’t work. Those kinds of things.”
“But another redundant thing will not get me closer to discovery. It will just repeat what I have already found out.”
“You have seen. The system just goes. Perfect, isn’t it? I am surprised,” the girl said, “that you even remember why you came to the Emporium. Redundancies usually overwhelm the moral mundane.”
“I didn’t head for here. You directed me here.”
“Ah,” the girl sighed, “when the choice is moral examination by the self or a quick pop into the Emporium, the Emporium always wins. You were weak. I understand. Your first choice, to follow me.”
“I chose poorly. And the dead person?”
“I know you want to feel guilty, and that’s why the Emporium exists. It, and I say It with little caution, wants you to not feel guilty. There are many dead bodies, many injustices, why, a whole catalog of guilts, shames, errors, sins. But they are in the back of the catalog at the Emporium, aisle 56. We put the lookalikes and redundancies up front, with originals in the middle, the one-of-a-kind type of things.”
“You must know a way out. You were out when you found me.”
“I’m just a guide, silly. I’m not an opener. I’m certainly not a finder. My work is to see that you also don’t become a finder, that you learn as you touch each thing that what you may have done, what you have done, is not significant. Touching things, using things, buying things, that’s the magic healing of the Emporium. Come, let’s touch a few more. You’ll get the hang of it.”