But in the dream I can’t find the slot with my name on it. And then I slowly become aware of all the unfamiliar staff members who are looking at me and trying to figure out who I am. That’s when the truth seeps in: it’s not the eighties anymore, and I haven’t been a daily inhabitant of this office—a salaried staff writer for Texas Monthly—for a very long time.
Why do I keep having this dream? Though I’m a long-serving writer for this magazine, appearing in its pages more or less consistently for fifty years, I was an office denizen for only about a decade. But those were crucible years, and I think that dream has such a claim on me because it represents a time when, after years of serving a solitary apprenticeship as a writer, I was at last part of a surging group experiment.
“Writing?” I replied. I was surprised. In the dream—this was a dream, although of course I didn’t know that until later—it was clear to me that no one “wrote” anymore, that “writing” was a thing of the past. Everyone knew this. Too polite to embarrass the questioner by mentioning such an obvious fact, I said merely, “Oh, I’m not writing!”
I woke with an almost blissful sense of release. At the time of that dream, I had been a working writer for 34 years. I had published 13 novels—two mysteries, two literary novels, and nine Regency Romances written under a penname—and had been a freelance journalist for the New York Times for more than a decade. Now, for the first time ever, I wondered if, in fact, I could stop writing.
It was four days before Christmas. The holiday village stood roped off, but the mall no longer hired a Santa Claus. Soon, Gantert would upload his visit for a corner of the internet spellbound by an uncanny phenomenon of the modern era: the so-called dead mall.
To be clear, University Mall is alive. More than 80 tenants still operate here near the University of South Florida. But in the world of online mall fandom — documenting everything from malls’ sparkling heyday to trespassing excursions in abandoned malls — the term “dead mall” simply means a once-great destination in decline. Think sparse customers, dwindling occupancy and signs of decay, like stained carpets under the benches near a hollowed-out anchor store. University Mall fits the bill.
I couldn’t let it drown. I ripped off a piece
of my sandwich bag, lifted it to safety.