I’m not spooked by the offerings of ‘The Gift Shop,’ at least not as immediately spooked as several testimonials suggest I ought to be. Like any gift shop, the items on display are specific enough to mark the occasion for which they are purchased, but not so specifically tailored to individual experience as to be uncanny or even really all that meaningful.
And maybe it’s a quirk of my life that leads to this initial anti-climax. ‘The Gift Shop’ is a Wayside destination and its offerings are souvenirs from roadside diners and shitty public rest stops and strikingly beautiful forests. I can see how it might be strange for someone who has lived a normal life to find postcards addressed from their kitchen and snow globes featuring the building in which they work. That’s the experience most people have, here. My journey has made it redundant. Or maybe this is its truest form. There aren’t many gift shops off the Wayside. Maybe this is how ‘The Gift Shop’ justifies its existence as part of the fragile highway ecosystem.
It’s a comforting thought, actually, because that might mean that I’m the key to aligning it.
‘Have you ever found a slip of paper on the floor of your home? A slip of paper with a series of numbers and a logo for ‘The Gift Shop’ thermally printed on the back? Fear not and keep that receipt on hand. Without it you won’t be able to claim the picture taken of you in your living room, on the toilet, sleeping soundly in your locked room, or doing any number of tasks, private and mundane. The longer you wait to claim it, the longer it sits up there on the screen for any old passerby to see.’
What gets me first is the realization that the cheap, dark-furred rabbit plushies are not dark-furred at all but sun-blackened little Hectors. With that, the uncomfortably intimate picture begins to unfold in all the little details I’ve overlooked. A t-shirt with all of the names of destinations I’ve visited so far. A bottle opener inscribed with the date I sobered up for good. A take-apart toy truck. An angry Stranger doll. A manga series where I am cast as the cynical protagonist and Hector is my wise-cracking pet.
All of the personalized pencils and pocketknives and key chains are in my name. All of the taffy is spun in flavors that I’ve tasted on the trip. Honey. Tree sap. Asphalt. Blood. There is a boardgame in the shape of the all-seeing eye. It looks boring. Everything is overpriced. The cashier is cloying in his salesmanship. I buy a pound of blood taffy so he’ll leave me alone and am off again before he can trick me into buying more.
It occurs to me, late in the evening, that I don’t think I’ve ever tasted asphalt. Not really. The thought drives me to the road which tastes much as I suspected it would.
– traveler
