It isn't snowing outside. It isn't snowing inside. But people are expecting both.
Pacific Place mall is quiet. No crowds of shoppers jostle each other's brown paper bags. There are no bottlenecks at the escalators. A grumpy-looking man with a bulging backpack, desert fatigues, and a camouflage Santa hat walks by Williams-Sonoma, where a clerk is talking about how busy it had been earlier in the day. "I think everyone wanted to get in and out before the snow hits," she explains. "The Center is closing early today." The Center? "The mall." A clerk from another store walks by with a customer: "Ooh, in 10 minutes it's going to start snowing!" What she means is: in 10 minutes, it's going to start MagicSnow®ing. It won't actually snow (ActualSnow®?) for another three hours.
MagicSnow®, Pacific Place's annual art installation, transforms all four stories of the shopping complex into a giant snow globe. Snow globery is implicit in the building's design. It is open and spacious, a shiny maw of glass and tile, each floor a ring of retail space overlooking the hollow center. A suicide jumper could hop off at the top and window-shop on his way down. But this airy vastness also gives a sense of enclosure. The architecture forbids myopia, gives shoppers no immediate visual stimulation, no distracting baubles. Like a prison or a stadium, the mall forces its inhabitants to reflect on their specific place: trapped inside a giant commercial cave with hundreds (or, on this evening, dozens) of others.
At 6:00 p.m. MagicSnow®flakes (actually small clumps of tiny bubbles) drift from the high ceiling onto the heads below. "White Christmas" oozes out of hidden speakers. Children go bonkers, dancing, laughing, sticking out their tongues. According to the curators at Pacific Place, MagicSnow® is "biodegradable, nontoxic, nonstaining, eco-friendly," but one woman, looking panicked, brushes the fast-dissolving bubbles off her black leather jacket. Diners in the first-floor cafe cover their soups and salads. One couple holds hands across their table. Children continue to go bonkers.
On the third floor, a small, dark Cuban comes down the escalator. It is Pedro, the diminutive icon of eccentricity who stands on Sixth and Pine with his colorful baton; his hoarse, heavily accented rant; and his hand-lettered signs: "Seattle Police and Frye Apartments devil communist you are damn liar! Catholic you are Satan Father of Liar!"
He has been downtown, yelling nonstop, for decades. But, for the moment, he is reduced to a theatrical quietude. He stops at the balcony (his baton tucked under his arm, his sign wrapped in translucent plastic), watches the MagicSnow®, then turns and smiles. He silently walks across the skybridge, into Nordstrom, silently descends an escalator, then another, then walks past the handbags and Chanel accessories, then through the doors and onto the sidewalk. The grumpy-looking soldier Santa, with his camouflage hat, is leaning against the front entrance. Pedro quietly asks for a cigarette. Soldier Santa gives him one. They smoke and talk and, like everyone else on the sidewalk, occasionally look up at the sky, wondering when it's going to ActualSnow®.
