The ‘Exit Womb’ is the first site I visit that won’t let Hector inside- at least not to the main attraction. The woman at the front desk says she’s happy to watch him while I play and continues to say, in a tone that is overtly coy, that ‘Exit Womb’ is no place for rabbits.
“Hardly a place for men,” she adds.
I sign a waiver without reading it and push a carrot into the front of Hector’s kennel before moving to the ‘changing room’ where I assume I’ll be donning some sort of cheesy costume but, instead, am fitted with an apparatus that covers my mouth and nose and trails a plastic tube. The woman disappears momentarily, warning me that I may experience some initial lightheadedness as oxygen begins to flow into the mask and the next thing I know I’m waking up somewhere dark.
‘What can be said about the exit room and its haphazard appearance on the Wayside? We are all seeking escape, sure enough, but what traveler has the time to engage in the premise of such a thing- to have the friends or to be willing to put up with the strangers necessary to humor the scenario? Successful escape rooms are, without exception, well within the mainstream in theme and location. Those that persist on the Wayside are exceptional or exceptionally degraded.
‘The Exit Womb’ is both. It presents an escape-room styled journey for a party of one and in doing so it targets an audience so niche that it may as well not exist. Only a thin stream of public education funding (and a loyal group of likely fetishists) keeps the doors open and the paint on the walls. The author recommends that the interested traveler insist they see the mask cleaned in front of them but otherwise has no advice to those who understand ‘The Exit Womb’s’ premise and choose to engage.’
It’s warm, of course, and humid. I stand and my head spins with excess oxygen and sensory deprivations. A bassline pulse sounds and dim, reddish lights begin to glow on the ceiling. The inner walls of ‘The Exit Womb’ are all curves, though, not anatomically accurate to the graphics I recall from middle school sex education. A series of glowing buttons with numbers stands out as a likely fabrication, as does a tattered map of the world.
“Welcome,” a soothing voice calls, “I’m glad to see you’re awake. This is the first day of the rest of your life…”
I twist to try to pinpoint the speaker and finally recognize it near a camera behind me. The bassline sounds again.
“You look like you’re just about ready to get out of here, little guy. In order to see the outside, you’ll need to complete a series of puzzles…”
I black out and wake up several minutes later with a thrumming headache.
“You’ll want to watch your umbilical cord, fella. Tangle that up and the journey will be over before it’s begun.”
I feel myself growing woozy again and realize I’ve propped myself up on the mask’s tube. Oxygen streams out again as I adjust. The room comes back into focus.
“If you get stuck, just kick mommy’s tummy and she’ll give you a little hint. Your first goal is to track the flight of the stork. Good luck!”
What follows of ‘The Exit Womb’ is neither fun nor particularly amusing.
The puzzles are those one might find in any exit room but stretched painfully to fit the theme. Over the course of an hour I decode messages in UV reactive ‘cervical mucus’ and deduce my own due date from a series of ‘if this, then that’ style clues. I activate the ‘cervix’ itself and emerge into a hallway (while a voice chides me for squeezing through legs-first). By the time a trap door opens below my feet, stripping off my mask and transferring me, via slide, to the lobby, I am sweating, hungry, and vaguely annoyed. The woman at the counter slips me a 30% discount for my next go around but I ignore the offer and retrieve Hector, narrowly dodging a hand-shaped paddle on the exit turnstile. I sit in the parking lot and leave a two-star review.
Hector is only just waking up by the time I have him secured to the bike and he sniffs hungrily at the carrot, which I had begun to eat myself. I offer him the stub and he accepts only after I promise that our next stop will be a lettuce farm of some sort.
-traveler
