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By Root 504 0

understood why Gwennan would see it this way. It fitted Gwennan’s definition of art—something done to repudiate the world in a public way—to perfection. And where the Boopleganger had failed to carry out this essential mission, Gwennan must now, in some chilly corner of her mind, be thinking that her own daughter Ivy would at long last succeed. Taken alone, this discovery would have been bad enough, but in fact it led her to an even darker hypothesis—namely, that in a sense Ivy was Ursula’s very own Boopleganger, that what Gwennan had done with that deranged patient of hers, Ursula had done with her own sister, helping to turn a beautiful girl inside out in order to make a point about the ugliness she herself saw everywhere. The seeming unbreakability of this chain of logic threw her off balance, and all her ideas about how to get Ivy hospitalized again fell apart. Unable to speak, she was forced to listen to Gwennan rant about her new hobby: day trading Internet stocks. She was making serious money, she said. The trick was not to get stressed out about it, and in this, she contended, her training as a Buddhist helped her immeasurably.

Ursula nodded to herself.

“I’m going to hang up now,” she said.

“Fine,” Gwennan replied. “Oh, listen, if they go public with Ivy’s website, let me know. I want to get in on the ground floor.”

And now, lost in the endlessly branching and recessing corridors of the South Slope Mall, Ursula pictures her mother perched at her computer in the study of her suburban house, snatching up and unloading shares of her younger daughter. What a logical next step this would be, people across the globe investing in an image of a crazy girl lighting her cigarettes with their money, her riding on them and them riding on her and everyone together riding the bull market in delusion, a pyramid scheme they all know for exactly what it is but half cynically, half mystically hope to beat, hope to get in early on and get out of before the insanity ends, so they can wind up just a little bit closer to the top than to the bottom.

Ursula timidly requests her limbs to continue moving forward, but they are completely enervated. She collapses onto a nearby bench and watches the shoppers trundle by in either direction. Next to her, on a lighted display, an ad for Calvin Klein shows a very skinny black woman lighting a crack pipe against a white background. Across the concourse, behind the plate glass of the Postmodern Torse of Schwarzenegger Gymnasium, row upon row of mallgoers struggle on silver Nautilus machines to work off their excess weight. Outside the gym looms a limbless and headless bronze sculpture of the movie icon, twelve feet high and almost as broad at the shoulders, muscles squeezed between other muscles and stacked one atop the other without apparent order, like a mammoth accretion of candle drippings. A long bronze plaque curves around the sculpture’s base, bearing the words

YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR IMAGE

A teenage boy jostles her knees and mumbles an apology as he is pulled along by his girlfriend. He is busy looking at a light-board ad of a woman in a Naugahyde bikini. He glances at her breasts, then away, then at her legs, then away, then lips, away, hair, away, then breasts again, oscillating compulsively. Ursula wonders if the parts will ever form a whole in his mind, or whether that will even matter to him so long as he can just succeed in retaining for later use the specific breasts the specific lips hair breasts legs breasts. Still stranded by her despair, Ursula trails the kids with her eyes until they vanish into a storefront.

ARCADIA

She was beginning to doubt she’d ever find it. It’s a smallish-looking place, situated in a cul de sac where a nameless corridor ends in an unimproved cavern wall. She gets up from the bench and follows the kids inside.

The noise is overwhelming. Beeping, blasting, buzzing, screeching. As if the noise of the machines weren’t enough, or perhaps to counter it and carve out a space for their individual identities, many of the kids wear headphones, not up against