The editor returning to Zeitgeist is like a missing cog falling back into the works of a massively complex, deeply broken machine. She pulls a manuscript and a pile of sticky-notes from the drawer below the gun and places a call that rings on a phone hardly 20 feet from her open office door. In the brief interim, she makes several quick proofing marks on the final page of the manuscript and slides it into an envelope. The man she called steps past me to take the package from her and sets a basket on the desk, filled to overflowing with what appears, at first glance, to be garbage.
The man leaves and I shut the door behind him.
“What the fuck?”
The editor sighs and pulls a dirty paper towel from the pile. When she unfolds it, I see there’s writing on the inside.
“Sept. 21,” it says, “Saw blue bird hanging upside down from tree. Eight in a row?”
A rough illustration of the same is scribbled underneath.
“This,” she says, “Is the editing process. This is what your book looked like when we received it. It’s what would happen if you turned your backpack over into the garbage can and asked me to make something of it. More than that, it’s what did happen.”
“You remember all this now?”
“Yes…” she says, “I think so. It’s hard to explain. Something happened to…”
The phone rings and the editor’s arm has nearly crossed the distance when she stops herself. As soon as her hand touches the desk again the phone quiets.
“There’s a system in place here,” she tries again, “Zeitgeist is trying to… preserve these weird, shitty…”
She pauses again, but maintains the wherewithal to frown at her adjective choice before starting over.
“In a capitalist society, the fast-track to preservation is sales,” she explains, pulling another sheet from the basket, “There is writing here- here in the country I mean- so much writing that just doesn’t go anywhere. Nobody wants to take something like this and make it coherent because it’s tedious as fuck and…”
The ringing starts again and this time the editor’s arm shoots across the desk. She pulls the phone from its cradle and flings it against the door where it shatters into several pieces. The dial tone plays dully from the components still attached to the cord.
“It’s tedious because it’s all so complicated and it’s all so… fragile.” The editor clicks a red pen open and closed. “It’s like a… imagine a…”
“Imagine a path,” I say, and she nods.
“Yeah, imagine this untouched wilderness- pretty enough that it’s got to be sitting on an oil field somewhere. Imagine the government says we can keep it, but only if we make it safe for people to enter so they can see the beauty of it. And the danger. Now it’s your job to tame it- to cut a path into this paradise without collapsing the thing. In order to preserve it, you have to carve into it. You have to hurt it a little. You have to sell passes and stuffed bears. Does that make sense?”
A phone rings in the editor’s desk before I can answer. She’s about to open a drawer before we realize, at the same time, it’s the drawer that holds the pistol.
“Zeitgeist is doing for shitty writing what you do for shitty attractions,” she says, keeping her voice above the sound of the ringing, “Preservation by monetization. Selling to save.”
The ringing stops, again, and I rub my eyes.
“How did you keep coming back to life?”
“An editor can make changes to a piece as long as the spirit of the story is kept intact,” she shrugs, “I may have been heavy-handed early on, but I needed to understand where the story was going before I could set you on the right course. You’re a tough guy to track down.”
My eyes are sore and red under my thumbs. A headache has begun to form and it pulses with the dull warning of a distant thunderhead.
“What do you want?” I ask, and the editor pulls the top sticky-note from her pile. There, written and underlined in red pen, are two words:
‘An epilogue.’
‘It used to be that a traveler could happen upon a woman selling pirated DVD’s from the back of her blue pick-up truck. She was everywhere, this woman, in every state, along every highway. The woman never had the movie you wanted, but she could often recommend something like it that she did have. The movies were invariably strange- nearly unwatchable both for the quality of the video and of the content. When the woman’s ties to the gray infrastructure were called into scrutiny, research discovered the DVDs were, in fact, unique to each sale. A mass collection campaign has been organized to study the chronology and ‘mythos,’ as it were, of the ‘Roadside Attractions.’
The woman and her blue pick-up have vanished from the public eye and, while many blame the gray road community for forcing her into hiding, many more insist that the sudden abundance of esoteric streaming services have simply made obsolete another time-honored American job.’
-traveler
