She stood in our cramped little bathroom, a bag of cosmetics in hand. Putting on her makeup while asking if we should
buy a couch meant she'd already made up her mind that we were going to IKEA today, and asking me if we ought to go was her way of saying “Get your shoes on.” It's dizzying, all the versions of meanings available to the listener.
I hung around in the bathroom doorway for a minute and watched her draw a thin, defining line of colour around her lips. In my eyes the line she drew, the ends of her lips, eyes, chin, nose, and hair, all the defining edges of her face, rippled wildly as if someone had just tossed a stone in the reflecting pool of her image.
“IKEA is somewhere in Richmond?” I scoffed. “We're going to jump in the car and drive to somewhere in Richmond to buy a couch?”
She snapped her makeup case shut. “Precisely.”
Now she'd found the store, spying it from the bridge, and within minutes here we were, parked three spots from the door, right next to the handicapped spaces. I don't know how she does it.
Pause for a moment just inside an IKEA entrance and close your eyes. You'll notice the air at any IKEA has that same ubiquitous blend. A lot of information and marketing is communicated through that smell, but the demands placed on our vision by the cornucopia of furniture and gizmos is usually too much to let anybody really put a nose to work. What's most striking is the uniformity of that smell, no matter which location you find yourself in or where you are in the vast warehouse space. The odour is always the same cheap cocktail of vinyl, pine, plastic, particleboard, and cotton, always distinct but never unique.
Tracy and I entered through the store's automatic doors. The air immediately clung to us, travelled with us, and made a veritable biosphere of manufactured smell. What the uniformity in my nose says is this: hey, relax, there are no wrong turns in IKEA. Everything goes here. Nothing is bold or discrete enough to be out of place, mismatched, or in need of judgment. All your needs can be found in this jigsaw of compatible smells, all of it under warm track lighting. No design is necessary, and there is no need to imagine a future or variation. IKEA is a total and enclosed system of comfort. Smell it, dig it, relax in it.
Beyond the automatic doors we spelunked into a connected cavern of sound. I could hear strollers, arguments, bin clatter, heels on laminate flooring, each sound nearby and distant, all at once. No matter how closely you attend to individual sounds, here and there are irrelevant ideas, both indistinguishable to the ear in IKEA.
Space gives away, too. The blind measure space by time travelled through it, instead of by sights as they pass. That's why IKEA and malls in general are havoc for me. In IKEA Tracy and I move forward and sideways, pause and push on. Then we retrace steps to go back and compare prices and colours. The wandering design gives me the illusion that, at each bend in the path, space replicates itself. It is not one room but many rooms and many more rooms, each without an indication of what could come next. No sign of exit or entry can be detected, so the focus is singular. Shop. Or in my case, get lost.
I took Tracy's elbow, and we weaved past the ballroom and up the stairs and started our search for the couch zone. The
odor and noise and darting crowds were already too much for me. By the time we reached the home office furnishings, I'd already become somewhat of a crank. Actually, belligerent.
“So this is where the neighbourhood went,” I sneered. “They put a roof over it, took the walls off the stores, and made it one big safari walk.”
“I guess so,” Tracy said. She sounded preoccupied. She was looking for things.
“Why do you think they want everybody to dehydrate in here? Maybe the real money in IKEA is made at the ice cream stand at the end. It's so goddamn dry.”
I took a few more snide potshots, even described my boredom, until Tracy had heard enough and told me so.
“Look, if you're going to tag along just to throw barbs, I'll take my elbow back and let you do this on your own. It may not be fun for you, but we need to buy a sofa.”
“I'm just joking around.”
“Sure, but you always do this. We need a sofa butâ”
“Couch,” I said.
“Whatever. We need one, but as soon as we walk into a store, you immediately begin to snarl at everything. It's not fun for me, you know.”
“Well, it's not fun for me either,” I said. “I don't see anything in here. My day is gonna be me being dragged around for a couple of hours, as if I have any opinion on this stuff. It all looks the same to me. Wavy.”
Tracy was frustrated and jerked her elbow out of my hand.
“Why can't you at least indulge me a little?” she asked. “I like doing this. I like to shop, sometimes. If it all has to be
about you, stay home and let me enjoy this if I want to. I like to find things for our home. Is that so bad?”
I didn't want to argue, especially not with us clogging the aisle the way we were.
“Fine.” I said. “I'll keep my boredom to myself. Sorry for not getting into the whole IKEA thing.”
But I wasn't sorry, that much we both understood. We could at least move on to the couches and, hopefully, home.
Tracy gave me her elbow again, picked up her pace, an aggressive driver, and towed me around couples as they exited into the pit stops of complete bedroom displays. I squinted at the displays, a blandness of distortion, and felt, for some reason, my annoyance begin to dissipate. We skipped from display to display, just as we'd jumped from radio station to radio station. The front lines of my resistance receded with every picture frame and knickknack I picked up. I was acclimatizing.
Like most people, I suspect, I've often wondered if I could live in IKEA. Certainly everything I need is here. Once again I picked up the thread of that idea and followed it around my mind. Doing it was at least an amusing way to substitute for the lack of variation in smell and sound.
Maybe I could pitch my services as a living model. I could be employed to live here and show interested customers what it looks like to pass your time in various displays.
“See the peaceful expression on our model's face as he sleeps on a blond, pine, queen-sized bed complete with head-board and autumn print duvet and pillow cases? How much do you think he paid for that peaceful expression? $800?”
From under blankets, I'd stir and yawn on cue, breaking the theatrical fourth wall.
“Good morning! I sleep well at night knowing I paid only $499 for this complete set.”
My job, as a living model, would both advertise a dull and affordable IKEA lifestyle and model disabled independence for interested government and nonprofit agencies. IKEA could employ disabled people around the world to live in their stores. IKEA would be a sort of school for disabled youth. Students would come to study strategies for independent living, then take up a short residency as a practicum. Module One: Kitchen Life, Module Two: Bedroom Ergonomics, and so on. IKEA would receive, in turn, a warm-hearted and socially supportive PR image.
I was busy mulling over this idea when Tracy abruptly exited the store's thoroughfare and eased us into an oasis of chairs, stools, and couches. She signaled me to let go with a slight lift of her arm. I dropped her elbow. Quickly she maneuvered around the couches, narrowing the field of choices. Waiting, I opened my white cane and floated about the aisles, a free radical obstructing the flow of customers through the IKEA bloodstream.
Tracy called me over, and I followed her voice to a large brown glob between a number of other large brown globs.
“What do you think of this one?”
I stared at the brown shape for what I estimated to be a thoughtful moment. Pretending to inspect the goods, I walked around the couch. I scratched my chin and hmmmed
under my breath. If the brown glob had tires, I would have kicked them.
“I don't know,” I said, as if juggling a myriad of decisive factors. I put my hand on the upholstery. The cushions felt puffy and more or less couch-like. I sat on it. No sound, a slight give in the cushions, nothing surprising.
“Well,” I said decisively, “you can comfortably sit upright, and it's relatively long, so I'm going to say it must be a couch.”
“Duh, but what do you think of the colour?'
Tracy knows I can see some colour, but sometimes it's unclear, when she asks for my opinion, if it is done more out of duty to that bit of sight I have left or out of a sincere belief in my judgment. In the past I have worn purple and green, claiming they were blue and gray. The colour of this couch was fairly black and white, though.
“Brown?” I asked. “What is there to think about brown?”
“I really like the colour, ” she said.
“Brown? What's so great about brown?”
“No, buddy, this isn't brown, this is camel.”
I screwed up my face the same way I do at emo-metal.
“Camel? I hate beige.”
Tracy hauled me off the couch and over to another. “This,” she said, “this is more of a beige, and that's camel. There's a big difference.”
I looked at the two brown things.
“Oh, I see. Well, what about that one?” I asked, pointing to another couch. “Or is that the same one I was just sitting on?”
“That's more of an oatmeal colour. Or maybe sand.”
“Sand? Is that off-white?” I tried to remember my favourite t-shirt from grade nine, a large, ill-fitting man's undershirt my mother told me was off-white when I'd always seen it as a plain white shirt. It still looked white in my mind. White always did.
“Sort of off-white,” Tracy answered, “but more like a cream colour, almost, but less yellow. Oh, hey! Let's look at those ones over there.”
I sat down on a brown couch and looked at all the other brown couches. “You let me know when you've narrowed it down. I don't think I'm much use here.” She left me to my thoughts, which were in many ways more comfortable than the couches. My thoughts each had a texture, shape, colour, and intensity, or lack of intensity, I could discern and savour. The couches didn't.
Physically, blindness leaves me here in a world where I am only certain about shapes and textures. All I could see were couches, but little else to distinguish one from the other. I still hated shopping and hated how generic the world appeared to my senses.
An old man in a blue IKEA shirt flopped heavily down on the cushion next to me. Maybe it was a green shirt. I don't know. He stretched and relaxed, legs splayed in front of him, obviously someone on a break. On his chest was a magnetic name tag. I pieced the letters together in the clean sliver of my good eye. I read just as I did in grade two. One letter at a time, then sounded them out together.
“Excuse me,” I said, “does your name tag say Plato?”
He folded his arms and grunted in affirmation.
“
The
Plato? As in
The Republic
?”
“You've read it?” he asked, a hint of surprise in his voice. “Boy, that dates a man.”
“And you work here?” I asked.
“Sure do. You need help?”
I wasn't clear what kind of help he was offering. A better defence for having kicked poets out of his republic would be a good start, but a hand with the couch choices might be more appropriate to the moment.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
He put his hands behind his silvery head and crossed his long, bony fingers.
Who am I kidding? I have no idea what he did. I just heard him move in his seat.
“Sure, as long as it's not a counselling question. I'm not a counselor. I saw you and your wife or girlfriend debating here. I don't handle that.”
“Huh?”
“You know, the counsellors, that's their turf. It's off-season. Don't you know about them?” I shook my head. “During the pre-Christmas rush, management hires a gang of marriage counsellors to roam the store and help customers who might be feeling stressed about large purchase decisions. Management asked me to supervise the service. They thought my so-called skills inventory made me the perfect candidate to supervise a team of self-help lemonade stands. Makes me
sick. I'd rather stock can openers. This is between you, me, and these brown couches, though, okay? Anyways, how can I help you?”
Obviously he was on his break, so I opted not to ask about the couches. But since I had Plato's ear, which is better than sitting next to Freud on the couch, I wanted to keep him talking.
“I wanted to ask, well, I just wanted to know how you like working here.”
“It's okay. The benefits package could use some work, but the people are nice. The whole experience has me thinking some ideas over again.”
Tracy called from farther down the aisle. She wanted to know if we were going to buy a matching chair or not. I said I'd be there in a second. Plato had taken a notepad and pen from his shirt pocket. I could hear the pen scratching as he made notes.
“What could IKEA possibly make you reconsider?”
“Well,” he began and flipped a few pages back through his notepad. He read a little, looked up, and pulled on his beard with a fidgety tug. “Well, something went wrong. I'm concerned that this is the kind of place where the Republic ought to have begun, at least in a small way. I'd like to think we are selling some of the day-to-day infrastructure for a utopia here, but I'm not so sure anymore.”
I squinted and surveyed the room, trying to see utopia. “I'm sorry, but I don't see it,” I said.
Plato pointed to my white cane. “Do you have any sight?” he asked.
“Just shapes and a bit of light and colour. Not much more than wavy shadows, really.”