Excerpt: The Kaliko Shelf

525, 526, 527…and one straggler. 537. That was it, then.
A number like that was more than Jemi would ever have dreamed of counting back when he was a pup in his mother’s den. Six—that was the number of nipples available for suckling, and any number higher than that was exorbitant and a little obscene. A hundred was almost more than he could comprehend until his greatest of human friends, Robert Moll, had explained it to him with one example after another. Numbers that large weren’t meant to be held in the head, Jemi came to realize. What you could do was to remember the feeling of hugeness at witnessing a number spelled out—a hundred leaves on this sycamore limb—and try later to recreate exactly how dizzy it made you feel when the number or one like it pops up again.
What made Jemi sad was the knowledge that now, five hundred thirty-seven was anything but huge. It was tiny. It was enough for one inch worth of sandwich and a spin in the aqueducts. And that’s it. Five branches of a mighty tree reduced to such a piddle of worth.
This place really is obscene, Jemi thought for the five hundredth time.

[Table of number of digits in a number and the feeling it produces]

He shook his body to clear out the thought. It wasn’t obscene—or if it was, so what? It was still the greatest place Jemi had ever been, by far! To live here was to live in a dream. The wonders were uncountable, the joys myriad, the people as endless as the goods they bought and sold. There could be no number large enough to represent the value of living here, and that fact, Jemi told him, could justify any act that brought him to this point. There was no point in wondering how much it had cost him to come. No matter how much the price, it was not excessive. So why ruminate on the tag? And stop thinking of the Kaliko Shelf as obscene, he told himself. It’s not. It’s brilliant. And obscenity doesn’t matter anymore, anyway!
He was spread out along a lacquered table, his hind body flaccid, his forebody active in thought. Normally when he stopped to think in a food court, he would sit by the railing and watch the goings on beneath him. Here that was impossible, since he was on the third floor, almost the very bottom of the tremendous edifice that was his world. Everything about the aesthetic of the court said ‘bottom’. The beveled lines of wood tapering upward between the shops. The flat glass ceiling toward which they led, bespeckled with smoked round discs that reminded Jemi of a decorative floor, which in fact it was—people on Level 5 walked by above, their various kinds of shoes and feet barely visible through the multi-layered blur. The baseboards were quartered logs, hearty and earthy as if the floor itself should be made of dirt. The colors were earth tones as well, and the lighting all seemed to edge subtly upward. There was no sign of the video arcade Jemi knew lay somewhere beneath the floor. When one was down so low, everything suggested upwardliness. It was as if the mall wanted all its customers to rise to the same level and hover there, bobbing and bumping about until the seasons turned. But then, Jemi didn’t know if the seasons ever turned. He’d only been in the Shelf for three weeks, give or take a week. Do they even have seasons here? he wondered.
There were maybe thirty tables in this circular nadir, and those on the edges had rounded sides so as to fit the circular theme. Jemi’s eyes fell on a restaurant called Tamale selling food advertised as ‘volcanic’ in heat. The word stumped him for a few moments, but he recognized its similarity to ‘volcano’. Was this little food court really at the bottom of a volcano? Could the searing sauce from the Tamale kitchen overflow and burst at any moment, gushing across the court, triggering other, similarly caustic elements in other stores and triggering a volcanic eruption? Would Jemi and everyone else be hurled upward through the smoked glass ceiling, bursting and bleeding and scattering the people above? Suddenly, this cozy place seemed like a cavern with inherent dangers. He knew it couldn’t really happen—almost knew, that is, since so little was certain anymore. But yet again, there it was—the aesthetic pointing toward up.
The mink flared his ears down for a flickering moment and emptied his lungs in what passes among his kind for a sigh. He gathered his money back into his sack. There were maybe a dozen other people currently shopping or eating around him, while at least twice that many kept the court running. He tried to ignore the aching of his right shoulder and his left haunch, and tried to suppress the pull his stomach exerted on him toward the various fast food restaurants. He was hungry, but he had only enough coin left for maybe three more meals. They couldn’t be impulsive meals; they would have to count.
Maybe running out of money was a blessing. For the first time in weeks, Jemi felt inwardly calm, despite his pains, his fears, his troubles, and his incessant questions. He was resigned to having insulted Nature itself by failing to ascertain that the Kaliko Shelf was not bigger than the rest of the world combined, even though everything he knew told him that idea was preposterous. He had failed to retain any dignity. Failed to make a plan. Failed to truly justify the betrayal he’d committed that had brought him here, or to gain any hope of learning the fate of his nation, whose sovereignty he had been trying to save on the diplomatic mission that had taken him here—to the Antipodes, the southern end of the earth. In so many ways, he had failed, and the weight of it was real. He lay down his head and he let it seep through him. The innermost layer of his skin was hot. His throat was impained. He throbbed with shame, and brooked no thought of stopping or of worrying who was watching. This was his purgatory at the volcano’s core, and it had to clear him of pride…or of the wrong kind of hope. Otherwise he would succumb to foolishness, for there was very little time left before foolishness turned to starvation and death.
Jemi pushed himself to his feet, still wracked with tearless sobbing, and dragged his bag off the table with a depressingly dull clatter. He made an impulse buy then, after all. He forked over 300 of his 537 and ordered a hot tamale.

[Volcano diagram?]

The tamale was only an inch long, and stuffed with tiny chunks of turkey, mole coloradito, and hot chile peppers. It did bring tears to Jemi’s eyes. He ate in silence, savoring his penance, deluged by at least three kinds of pain.