I needed some khakis. So I headed to the mall. I figured on browsing some CDs, grabbing a slice of pizza at the food court, then meeting my wife and kids for a movie. I left a note on the kitchen table: "Meet you at the food court at 12:30." With that, I left.

It took me two and a half days to get there. In that time, three cigarettes and one beer can were thrown at me from passing cars. I stepped over, around, or onto the carcasses of seven possums, six cats, a dog, a squirrel, three deer, a raccoon, and a thing I could not identify. I got spit on by a llama and lashed by a canvas strap hanging off the back of a dump truck as it passed me going sixty miles an hour. I beat back a rottweiler with one mighty swing of my staff (aka walking stick). I was honked, hooted, sworn, and swerved at. My feet bled. When I arrived at the mall, I could not hear out of my right ear, my eyes were dry and scratchy, my right knee ached, and my back was a complete mess. There had been no sun in those two and a half days, but my skin felt raw, my hair coarse and wooden. I was dizzy and listless from diesel fumes. I'd walked sixty-four miles--not an amazing distance for an average man, but clearly I had done what no man had done before, at least not on purpose. I had walked to the mall to get khakis.

It had to do with malls. It had nothing to do with distance. Nobody walks to the mall. Nobody. If you live next to a mall, you drive. Everything about the suburban mall--the location, the design, the traffic pattern, the shopping demographic--says "drive." In fact, the only people who do walk to the mall are people in danger or dangerous people--in short, I decided, me.

In the days before I left, everyone told me it was a stupid idea, pointless, fraught with risk. My brother called me an idiot. My golf partners cackled. Many people worried what would happen to me in the city. Another group of friends saw the isolation of the country as more threatening. My wife wanted to forbid it, thinking it incredibly stupid, a blatant invitation to dismemberment, a prelude to disappearance. I told her I'd be okay, that I wasn't afraid. I was plenty brave enough to handle what came my way. "You think you're brave," she said. "You've always had a car. It's easy to be brave when you have a car."

Before I left, I calculated the odds of the different events that might confront me. I had settled on this much: There was some small chance that I might die and a fairly good chance that I might get hurt. Pretty much like any day, I decided. But on a walk to the mall, certain key events were distinctly more possible than others. I scrawled out the odds on a napkin.

Hit by a car: 1,000:1

Hit by a train: 100,000,000:1

Hit by an 18-wheeler: 1,500:1

Hit by a drunk driver: 900:1

Gang violence: 4,000:1

Drowning: 100,000,000:1

Find money (>$50): 2,500:1

Stopped by a cop: 2:1

Beaten up by a cop: 250:1

Driven to edge of county by cop, told not to return: 50:1

Assaulted: 70:1

Knife pulled on me: 90:1

Abducted and brutalized: 1,250:1

Disappearance w/o trace: 4,000,000:1

Dog attack: 6:1

Assaulted with firearm: 1,000:1

Coyote sighting: 250:1

Discover body part, as in Blue Velvet: 50,000:1

Gunshot in general direction: 60:1

The risks seemed remote but somehow palpable. Outside of sore feet and the promise of my usual back prob-lems, I could not see what might come my way in any particular sense. I need-ed khakis.

I left before the sun came up on a foggy morning in late October. My town was all pumpkins and political placards. Huge chunks of jack-o'-lanterns, smashed by nighttime vandals, littered the sidewalks like shards of pottery. I liked the comfort of watching people's kitchen lights snap on as I passed their houses on the darkened streets. My walking stick clumped a heady beat. I congratulated myself: I was going to learn something out here. I could see a meditative aspect to this. I was going to shrink my world, simplify my life, gain a better sense of my limits, myself, my nation. I was on my own little trip to me. I'd never been to me before--particularly not to get khakis. As I passed the first McDonald's, I had the distinct sensation that I might just set a trend. Headlines. Color pictures above the fold in USA Today: mall walking sweeps the nation!

Beyond the neighborhoods, off the last of the sidewalks, having left my cozy house--my wife and children sleeping their way toward waffles and coffee and school buses--I knew that I had been dead wrong about the odds of being hit by a car. After little more than an hour, I found myself walking straight into the morning commute, people headed to their jobs on the narrow-shouldered, curving little county roads outside my town.

Soon I was thinking, How do I describe this moment? What word would I use to characterize the absolute and sudden fear of a Buick, driven by a coffee-sipping, Garth Brooks--listening, just-got-out-of-bed-and-forgot-to-pay-the-

gas-bill-thinking factory worker on his way to his 7:00 a.m. shift, coming at me as I balance myself on a three-foot shoulder and hope to God he doesn't go for the cassette player at that moment?

The Buick was by me soon enough. There was a sound, I think. The word whiz--futuristic and musical--doesn't quite capture it. Traffic like that cuts. It hisses. It throbs by. It howls. Like this:

A red Buick crested the hill, angled along the wet curve, and ripped by me, three feet from my knees, bruising the air around me, pulling me ever so slightly closer to the road I had so quickly learned to hate.

No whizzing at all. None. Just dead-ly Buicks, followed closely by mini-vans, pickup trucks, cement trucks, flatbed trailers, Jettas, Tauruses, Sonatas, Eclipses, and Ventures. Before long, I realized that the odds of my being hit by a car were nothing like a thousand to one. I was going to get hit by a car. I needed my napkin back. I was thinking:

Hit by a car: 9:5

All that and eight more miles of this shit before I could get to a road with some kind of shoulder.

Deep country is a tough walk. The roads are badly engineered. The sights don't change quickly. From a car, a piece of farmland is a thing of beauty--row upon row of corn growing umber beneath the late-autumn sky, a tree line ever changing in the distance. In a minute, you're by it. Walk the deep country and you start to see farmland for what it is, the way a farmer sees it, maybe--as work, time, sweat. There is no aspect of change in the landscape when you walk, or the change comes so slowly that it hardly seems like anything more than a reminder of how little change there is. How slowly the world turns! This is a largeness tinged with litter--cups, straws, napkins, paper clips, receipts, tennis balls halved by lawn mowers, sandwich bags hemming the fence lines--one that brings on, for me anyway, an edgy boredom.

When I tried to catalog what I saw--a trailer in the distance, a small house wrapped entirely in plastic, a television set in a creek, a possum split open, its tongue so red I thought it was an apple--I could uncover no order to the splay of things. At this rate, I'd never get there. I'd be late, at the very least, which would piss my wife off plenty.

The distance behind me seemed too small; with every pause, I lost pace. And each pause seemed more pointless than the last. Near a tiny bridge spanning a dry creek, I found a note and picked it from the mud to read it.

"Joe," it read. "You said you were getting out of work early. But your car is still here. If you want me, I'll be at home, making dinner and . . ." Something--sand or dirt--obscured the rest of the words, but when I brushed the note clean, I saw that the grime was actually maggots. I dropped the note without ever really locating the drama. Worse, I had just wasted twenty seconds, twenty paces.

I looked ahead and saw where I would have been had I not picked up the rotten love letter of Joe and the maggot woman. I jogged to catch up with myself, just a fence post or two ahead.

Soon I figured out that I was thinking like a car person, a commuter, the standard sixty-mile-an-hour human. I was trying to keep my own best time against myself, like the father who won't stop the family station wagon because he wants to get in 550 miles every day in order to make the Grand Canyon by Tuesday. I was confusing time with distance.

You can imagine it, I suppose. Gum wrappers, nails, sports pages, tampons, fingernail clippings, lug nuts, plastic drink tops, fan belts, cigarette butts. I saw all of this because I found that I liked to look down when I walked. It was the only sense of movement I got. I watched my own feet and told myself to look for things, echoing the vapid truisms of the optimist, the antique collector, the old man with the metal detector: Surely there are treasures in the forgotten places. I tried, I really tried, to tune in to my surroundings. I also sought to avoid the raw sewage.

In fact, I found only seven notable objects on the walk to the mall:

A religious tract called "Holy Joe"

The maggot-woman note

A tin letter T

A full bottle of Southern Comfort

A bracelet that said wwjd

A fifty-cent piece

A plastic eyeball

These were the only things I picked up and kept, but even then I got sick of carrying each one and ended up tossing them out when I got to the city. Except for the fifty cents, which I spent on a piece of roasted chicken at a Bigfoot, and the bracelet, which I tied to the top of my walking stick.

I found no treasures, uncovered no mysteries, stumbled on no human corpses or body parts. The roadsides were just covered with tiny pieces of crap. The yards of inexplicably twisted metal. The delicate, rain-worn glass shards. The spray of pistachio shells.

At certain points, the world would sting me into awareness. Dogs rushed, all teeth and ugliness, and cows lowed. I saw a dusky fox glance back before ducking into a drainpipe. Hours later, a fighter jet tore over me.

Now and then, the sun broke through. In one stretch of highway, I found a dying deer thrashing in the grass beside the roadbed. I stumbled down to it and stood dumbly in the drizzle. She had been hit, probably some hours before, and thrown to the very bottom of the embankment. No one else could have seen her there, back broken, hoof bent backward against the weight of her leg. What could I do? What can you do, really, when you're walking to the mall, when your concern is getting there, not being there? I had no gun, no knife. It was two hours to the nearest phone, although on the highway beside me, cars with phones snapped by like the oiled bearings of a huge machine. Still, say I flagged someone down--whom would I call? I could hear the operator's question, the one they always ask in the movies:

"What is the nature of your emergency?"

And the lameness of my response:

"There's a deer dying."

But there's always a deer dying somewhere. There's always a last breath, a final turn of the milky eye. This was my moment, no one else's. The only real emergency was that I was there at all. I knelt in the grass and ate a 100 Grand bar. My presence seemed to calm the animal; her thumping slowed, and she began a series of slow, measured huffs. At one point, I inched close enough to lay a hand on her side. It was as smooth and cool as the other side of your pillow.

I waited twenty minutes for a last breath, until my right foot was asleep. The deer would breathe, then not breathe for four minutes, then suddenly breathe again or look up quickly. Any breath might be her last. I waited for one of those long intervals of stillness, then rose and did what any sensible mall walker does. I started up again. I had a long way to go.

When I came to the wider highways, where the berms were comfortable and broad, I began to look at the faces of the oncoming drivers. I could see conversations, arguments, songs being sung, burgers being pushed hand to mouth. The father lecturing his daughter in the car seat. The woman with the phone pinched between her shoulder and her ear. I knew those scenes, although from where I stood, they were only snatches, mere moments. Driving, you can look into the next person's life with some measure of impunity--you get all you can, all you want, before you turn away, pull ahead, fall back in traffic. When you walk, you're just another roadside attraction. I stared at the distant horizon, at the point where the road met the sky, and tried to imagine at what point people would spot me, how long they would watch, and when they would decide precisely who I was, what I was doing, and what I needed, before ripping past me.

They stared, as any driver does, straight at me for as long as they felt like staring, then pressed on. No one stopped. No one asked where I was going. No one offered me a ride. The cops didn't bother me. I hammered away, step by step, for seven hours. I might count the cars, or nod to the drivers, or shout at the top of my lungs. Once in a great while, people flicked burning cigarettes at me. Once, a yellow Mercury swerved at me and a full can of Hamm's sizzled out of the window, missing my head by a foot. Otherwise, nada. No one cared. I had walked out of my life entirely. I was gone. I tramped along, sagging and groaning, decaying and recharging, looking for the skyline of the city hidden behind the low clouds and wetness. Moving forward, I began to fall apart. Footsteps added to footsteps. I hit the beltway of the city. I did not care in the least.

On the second night (I'd spent the first at a friend's farmhouse), I passed a Comfort Inn and decided to push on for another leg of my journey, trying to get to the airport, where the motels were thick and certain. About a mile later, the darkness rose up, headlights flipped on sensibly, and suddenly the streetlights crackled to life. I sat outside a bowling-supply store and noticed a sign that said junction i-465. The beltway! The walls of the city! I limped along--across a patch of grass, over the layered, crumbling squares of cement and asphalt--jumped a steel pipe, and sat again, this time in front of a pool-table showroom. I began to regret having left the Comfort Inn so impossibly far behind me.

The world reared up. The cars looked like huge insects, dark, fluid, returning to the hive, the colony angry and unaware. I tapped the ground with my walking stick. The bracelet I found--wwjd--swung from the handle. The letters stand for a question, one that I hate, as it is so utterly pointless: What would Jesus do? Call a cab, I bet. From where I sat, Where would Jesus park? would have been a better question, or wwjw--Why would Jesus walk? Or wwjs--Where would Jesus sleep? I tore the bracelet off and hid it. It's probably still there, right next to the pool-table showroom. Go find it. On your way, ask yourself, Where would Jesus look?

I rested my head against the store. Bowling and pool. I'm in a city now, I thought, a district of sorts: the Game Room District. From inside the store, a cleaning woman tapped the window with a quarter. "You gotta keep moving," she mouthed. Don't I know it, I thought.

An airplane crested the signage, lowering itself heavily, passing to the south. I followed. I found a sign, tiny, orange, facedown. house for sale. Yet another reminder of the world barreling forward. Somewhere, presumably nearby, someone was moving on, packing up. Coming and going. My knees hurt. I realized that it was too dark to be wearing black. I had only a general sense of how far I had to go. Two miles, maybe three, then a long cut across the airport grounds and over the beltway. It might as well have been Oz. Still, one thing was certain: Close as the Comfort Inn might seem to a driver, I would not turn back.

The walker never turns back. That would mean covering the same mileage three times--the same banal scenery, the same acres of signs and moronic slogans, the same unseeded lawns, dented guardrails, the very same aging, overused, extremely dangerous roadways. Twice? Three times? Not a chance. It's a big nation--a big, loud, ugly nation--and it's always out in front of you. When I passed that motel, it effectively passed out of my world. Tired, hungry, and a little unsure of where I was, I clung to my motto. For the mall walker, there is only the road ahead.

Eventually, I found a rhythm. Did you think I wouldn't? For one thing, I arrived in the city. For another, I grew stronger, and I now had lots of places to rest. Benches. Diners. Libraries. Bank lobbies. Bus stops. People started talking to me, if only in grunts. There were windows to look in and walk/don't walk signals at the end of each block. At last, someone offering advice! Blessedly, there was a hodgepodge of sidewalks, which I clung to like a wolf on its piss trail. This was the territory I had needed for so long.

No one knows distances. People know time. Checking out early on morning three--I stayed at a grand urban hotel called the Canterbury--I asked the desk man how far it was to the Fashion Mall. He calmly whipped out a hinky little map and explained that I would have to get on the interstate and take it out to the eastern edge of town, where I should get on the beltway and go north. "It's about twenty minutes from here," he said, "if the traffic is clear."

"How far is it, though?" I asked. "How many miles?"

"I don't know." He turned the map and looked for a scale. "Maybe twenty miles on the interstate."

"I mean straight north," I said. "How far from here to there? In miles."

He cocked his head. "Don't go that way. That's a dangerous drive. Use the interstate."

I explained that I was walking, that I was meeting my wife at 12:30.

"You're walking?" he said. "To the mall? Why?"

I told him about the khakis. I told him I was walking. I insisted I would be okay but that I needed an exact sense of how many miles were ahead.

"You don't want to go up there," he said.

"Yes, I do." This was beginning to piss me off. Here was a guy who, if I had called down fifteen minutes earlier, probably would have run out to get me a particular brand of shoelaces if I had asked. But now he refused to hazard a guess on the mileage I had left. He didn't even want me to go. He lived up there, on the near north side, he said.

"Don't walk around up there."

"Thanks," I said. "But I'm going. How many miles is it?"

He shrugged and sighed his final sigh. "Ten, maybe. Twenty. Maybe twenty-five."

On the street, I turned northward and made out for a bagel shop. There was a panhandler pressed in against a parking garage. "Can you help me out?" he said.

I shook my head and moved by him, the way I had learned when I lived in the city. That was an old memory! I felt nostalgic for my own tough-mindedness. Urban warrior, ready for anything.

But in line at the bagel place, I had an idea. I took out a ten and ran down the street to the panhandler. "I have a question for you," I said, handing him the ten. "How far is it from here to Eighty-sixth Street?"

He looked at the ten, turned it over once, and put it in his pocket. "Where you headed?"

"The Fashion Mall," I said. "Do you know it?"

He pursed his lip and thought.

"That's about eleven miles. Maybe eleven and a half. It'll take you the better part of five hours."

I checked my watch. Seven fifteen. With any luck, I'd be right on time.

No matter where we live, the mall lies at the outside of our world. On his pilgrimage, the urbanite trips outward to the mall, driving away from the city, toward the open space and the gentle horizon of suburbia, with a hint of the country in the landscaping beyond it. The small-towner perceives the journey as moving inward, driving toward the energy and the possibility that the city represents, without the sticky mess.

Each drifts toward the mall along a separate geography, the delicate and dim lines of his world gradually giving way to the harsher cut of billboards and commercial facades, the crisscross of wires, the multiple lanes and turn signals. In either direction, the districts themselves begin to resemble malls, every doorway a vital little business, beckoning the shopper, the client, and the passerby. Each business is connected to the one next to it and the one across from it by the churning economy, the bustle and prowl of shoppers. All these choices. All this stuff. Crusty bread, massage equipment, sushi, hardware, books, eyeglasses, tool rentals, bird supplies, golf clubs, big and tall, vintage clothes, café au lait, and software. Walk it, and the world starts to look like a mall. They designed malls to look like the world, but are you kidding me? The world is a mall.

Then, just when you've forgotten where you're going, there--in the distance--the top of a department store makes itself known, like a ziggurat; the potent promise of even more commerce rises in the distance.

When I first caught sight of the mall, I felt no sense of relief. It was a mile away yet. And besides, I was still awaiting an epiphany. It would happen, any moment now.

I nudged forward, taking it step by step. Same crap, different road. Same drivers, different day. My mind throttled forward to the moment when I would arrive. If I kept up the pace, there was still a chance that I'd be right on time. For a while, I was tempted to run.

As I walked down the exit to Eighty-sixth Street, within a half mile of my khakis, I stumbled on the most interesting event of the whole trip: a huge ball of snakes, no more than a hundred yards ahead. Wow! The cars were rumbling by it, blind to the action of the roadside. Fools! I congratulated myself for the first time since my earliest steps on this journey. Only the walker, the mall walker, was this tuned in. I approached slowly, kicking myself for not having frames left in my disposable camera to capture the one moment of real surprise, the one moment when nature asserted itself in a rush of biblical allusion! There, at the gates of the palace--serpents! Such warnings do not come often. They are to be sought; they must be earned. Maybe this was a journey of self-discovery after all.

I kept myself from running to the snakes, a little afraid, wanting to linger, but after a few steps I could see that I was just staring at more trash--a tangle of Salvation Army neckties, it turned out. At least a hundred of them, maybe more. Dammit. Nothing biblical in a mass of giveaway ties. There are no warnings in yards of paisley. I knew wjwd. He'd turn them into snakes, then go trash the money changers in the marketplace once more, just for old times' sake. I kicked at the ties. Snakes! What an idiot. What was I looking for, anyway?

At the exit, so close to it all, worlds collide. The cars glide into their proper lanes, prowling for parking, seeming to nuzzle against the building, which is, truth be told, nothing much from the outside. The mall looks like construction-paper boxes thrown down and colored by a child. Ziggurat, my ass.

At last, close to my destination, I find people who are walking, to or from their cars, and in that band of space--that hundred yards between parking spot and automatic doors--the automobile is finally forgotten. These people are movers and shakers, passing wisely from one transaction to the next. Credit cards, kisses, balloons, tender pieces of chicken cooked in barbecue goodness! All of it awaits.

The last few steps are the ones we all take just before the welcoming suck of air-conditioning, the surge of the shoppers, the delicate perfume of the candle shops. In that moment, once again, I am like everyone else.

Before I enter, I can see I am just one pulse in the throb of the economy, a rogue cell in the body of this city, traveling the forbidden capillaries, the venae and beyond, into the tight, uninviting tissue of a world not made for such journeys. Poor, exhausted me, searching out metaphors to the end.

I should add that, at last, I have a better sense of pace. When I touch the door of the mall, it is 12:27. I am dead on time.

Inside, I ride up to the food court and order my slice. I have the urge to tell someone, anyone, my business. "I walked to the mall!" I want to declare to the pizza guy, "I did it to get some khakis." But he will think I'm a nut, so I clam up.

I do what I always do at the food court: watch people. Eyeball beautiful women. Look for a stray newspaper. I finish my slice. And suddenly, it seems, it is one o'clock. My wife and kids are late. Way late. Predictably, I begin to worry. It's an hour-long drive. There are real dangers out there.

Just as I'm about to get up to call them, my sons sneak up behind me and touch my shoulders. They always greet me like that, delicately, with just a touch. I snatch them up, squeeze them, rough it into them that I am so glad to see them, that I love the feeling of their bones. My wife kisses me. "Sorry we're late," she says, shrugging. "Traffic."

We head off, the four of us, into the body of the mall. The boys run ahead. Their mom window-shops turtlenecks. I duck into Banana Republic to buy my khakis. They are titled, the way clothes are these days, appropriately: "The Traveler." On sale. $29.99.

Not bad.

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