The Editor stands like a scarecrow in a field of some unknown plant. She stands with the rigid stillness of a predator, a short line on the horizon. It could be anything out there, but I know it’s her. I had stopped to eat a sandwich from a gas station deli. It oozes mustard and oil into the napkin, leaving a smell that will be on my hands for days. The sandwich ages poorly. It begs to be eaten. I don’t know what to do. I am rigid with the stillness of prey.
The line of her body shudders with a step. It could be any movement, but I know it’s a step- a step in my direction. A small stream of mustard now runs between my fingers and over the inside of my palm, the glacial mass of it melting between folded slices of sun-warmed salami. She is walking this way. She wonders if I will run and I find, in that moment, I’m wondering the very same thing.
‘‘The Interactive Fight-or-Flight Activity Area’ is like a haunted house in that it’s designed with the express intention of funneling would-be customers into a series of interactions that will activate their most basic instinctual response to threat. Philosophically it exists on the same spectrum as a your community meditation center (though well on the opposite end) claiming to stimulate a simple cathartic reflex that has been otherwise lost in the tangle of evolved response.
Unlike your common haunted house (or, for that matter, your community meditation center), ‘The Interactive Fight-or-Flight Activity Area’ encourages the customer to submit fully to their responses, either engaging physically with their would-be assaulter or making a desperate escape. This is part of the process, they insist, and the result builds toward a classification system the mysterious parent company seems to be compiling. Why, you might ask, would it be important to know who will fight and who will run when push comes to shove?
Why, indeed?’
The Editor stumbles to my patch of the earth. Her left eye is sharp, it cuts me to the bone. The right eye is a window into a vacant room. The pistol is there but she doesn’t seem to bother with it. We stand still for a moment.
“You all right?” I ask.
It’s the first thing I always ask.
“No,” I tell her after a minute, “You’re not.”
The Editor nods and drags herself to the bike. She has chosen to fight, though what she fights for or against remains a mystery to me.
-traveler
