I’ve never found zombies particularly interesting. The conventional zombie just doesn’t grab me, literally or figuratively. Somehow, the idea of hungry, slow-moving bodies without spirits is not nearly as scary to me as the idea of malevolent spirits without bodies.

I did once write a book in which the undead were wandering the world. That was not because I thought of the departed as scary. The undead in my book were more sad than anything, souls who were yearning to be set free from the needs of the living, not hungry to devour them. 

In my book, familiar locations gradually lost their connection with the living world and began to exist only as shadows of themselves, peoples only by the souls of the departed. And one of those locations didn’t even have ghosts in it: a vast, echoing shopping mall. A place where people never really lived, just passed through.

Which is to say that yesterday, I took a bus trip to that afterlife: King of Prussia Mall, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It’s the fourth largest mall in the USA.

The King of Prussia Plaza opened when I was 12, in 1963. Back then, only some of it was enclosed, but gradually the open air part was covered over and expanded, with a whole extra mall added in 1981 when my kid was born, and then expanded more in 2016, just in time for most malls all over the country to start failing and turning into ghosts and empty space. 

And yet King of Prussia lingers, still successful.

Journalists keep confidently asserting that walk-in retail is dead, and certainly when I arrived, the mall seemed empty, pale, and ethereal, with the vaulted ceilings and broad promenades of a corporate cathedral, but it was only because I had gotten there right after opening time. The place gradually filled up. Soon, there were plenty of dewy teenagers, grandmothers with small children, and other amiable stereotypes ambling along by the time I had been there a little while.

None of the stores were the ones that were tenants when I was a child. Wanamaker’s and Strawbridges were the anchor stores back then. There was a big Woolworth’s back then, and a Sears. They are gone now.

Some of the department stores that took their places were in turn replaced by other department stores, or closed down, and the small stores were replaced by other stores, so that like Theseus’s much-repaired ship, none of the original mall still exists, but it is still the same mall. It’s as if stores were accreted, like shells and seaweed on the beach, only to be washed away and replaced with other shells, other detritus. As I strolled, I had a vague mental skeleton in my mind of where things used to be at all the different stages of my life.

 I was there to go to a specific store, one of many “outdoors” providers that stock the sturdy, blocky clothing of the 1960s that are made in China now. The store was out of the canvas bags I wanted, it turns out, because the bags recently went viral on Tik Tok. I found a different, nicer canvas bag, though, much like several I already own, and bought a straw hat, and a pair of sneakers that look exactly like the ones I used to jog in during the 1970s. 

It was a vague, dreamy day, drifting through the various appearances of the past, watching the layers of time fold and unfold behind the storefronts, as if I was a shade myself, or a collection of shades, carrying the shadows of things I have owned before.

The mall was filling up, and it was time to go catch the bus home. It was a long ride back home from the afterlife in a half-empty bus, and I took a nice nap sitting upright, with my possessions around me.