retail therapy by Zachary Pryor

ZACHARY PRYOR - 8 SEP 2021

PHOTO: PEXELS

I went to Kmart to find God. Perhaps I should have tried harder to find it at church? Kingdom kids, youth groups, indoctrinated fellowship over tea and coffee. All I knew is that the Cathedral wasn’t for me — early Sunday mornings, cold wooden pews, and four apostles frozen in their stained-glass windows. I cringed as the man in a white frock pontificated and screamed.

Western religion had never seemed to make up its mind on what to do with our bodies. Our wonderful bodies that gave us so much life but were apparently riddled with contractions. Born in violence, repressed in sexuality. Genocide, fine. Stoning someone to death, fine. But coveting your neighbour’s wife, bad. And don’t get me started on the whole notion that waiting for sex until marriage would lend itself to some sort of ethereal experience. Utterly bizarre.

And, because I was born straight, white, and male, the bible gave me this magical get-out-of-jail-free card to behave like a prat and it seemed all would be forgiven. Well, the fact that life’s not fair and the odds were unfairly stacked against anyone who didn’t look like me just didn’t sit right.

There was also something eschatological about the twisted doom and gloom that filled the daily news — fires ravaged Australia for months, those explosions in Beirut, more than one album surprise released by Taylor Swift, the second impeachment of an orange demagogue in an ill-fitting navy suit who’d been banned from using Twitter as a bully pulpit, the storming of the Capitol and the lingering, long pandemic (Pandemi Lovato as my friends would say) not far from anyone’s lips — this is it, isn’t it? The end of the world. Fuck. I really needed to find God.

Everyone said Kmart was the place to be. Low quality. Irresistible prices. Shelves full of stuff. Surely, God was sitting there on the rack. Their website said they had a sixty-day return policy. Maybe if I found God and it didn’t fit, I could send it back?

One sunny day, with the sky an endless blue, I pulled up to the centre and made my way inside. Luminous, bright, white lights flooded the store. A helpful looking man in a lumpy blue shirt and goofy smile greeted me as I passed through the entrance.

‘Need any assistance?’ he asked. His name was written in red biro on a sticker fixed to his chest.

‘Paul,’ I said. ‘I’m here to find God.’

One of the tiny white pimples on his forehead was about to burst. He looked confused and said, ‘Ah, I don’t think we sell that here at Kmart.’

‘Why not? You sell everything else.’

He shrugged, maybe they hadn’t covered this product in his induction. I set off, in search of a deity.

The store made me dizzy. Heat clawed at my neck. Overwhelmed by choice, my stomach churned at the plastic sameness in every aisle. The innocuous stench of artificial lemons and bleach clogged my nostrils.

Could God be tucked in with the chocolate? The sporting goods? The vacuums? Next to the Elsa doll sitting proud in her little plastic box? In the discounted books? Maybe over by the music stand? I picked up a Beyoncé CD — my friends said she was a God, but she just looked like a Queen to me.

I trudged up the bedding aisle. Exotic Moroccan tassels and terracotta coloured triangles were all the rage. And then over to home décor, with bland stock pictures of yellow flowers and monstera leaves in blond wood frames. Maybe I could find God in the arts? My parents, ever the aesthetes, certainly thought so. Picasso this, Rembrandt that, Monet there. Nope, not here.

My search for God filled me with sadness. Turns out Kmart didn’t sell everything after all. With this impending end to the world, what was I going to do?

I had hope, once, twice — but then I realised we are mere mortals, at the whim of the politicians playing their fatuous games. The lockdowns, the protests, the ongoing lies. The disbelief about climate change and hesitation around vaccines. Trust science. Trust the process. Trust what Sue around the corner read on Facebook about magnets and keys sticking to your forehead after you’d had the jab. People more concerned with profit and power than putting themselves out. I grew up in the twilight years of John Howard and George W. Bush, before the failed promise of modern liberalism and rise of neo-conservatism. I started interning in a time when the system had forgotten the workers, by the time I started my first ‘real job’ we were dwarfed by technocrats and big data and AI. I couldn’t solve the deadly, unsettling problems we faced by skulking round all this plastic.

‘Did you find God?’ Paul squeaked as I made my way out of the store.

‘Not here,’ I replied, feeling a spring in my step as a new idea formed. ‘I’m going to try Bunnings.’

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