My first impression of ‘A Collection of Solid Metal Cubes’ is haphazard. The cubes are positioned as though they’ve simply landed where they were thrown, though there are a lot of solid metal cubes to see and some of them are bigger than me. My second impression is something like dangerous, because I had to sign a waiver to walk among the collection and I also have to wear a hard hat which would, I suppose, protect me from about 30% of the cubes in this collection but which would do very little to save my fragile body from the rest. Which is not to say I trust the small cubes, either. They are, by and large, holding up the larger ones and a number are jammed at odd angles like cocked dice.
The internet says the collection is haunted by the ghost of someone who died among the cubes. It’s not something I thought too much about before I stepped into the lobby where there is one wall entirely dedicated to vehement refutations of the ghost (but not the death). It all ended with some ‘tips’ for when the ‘ghost’ might be spotted, all of which were some form of ‘just ignore it.’
I hear a voice nearby- a man saying “Help.”
I grit my teeth and turn to check it out.
‘A bit of a strange one, this collection. Billy Ellis claims he never went out of his way to collect solid metal cubes but that he found a small specimen in the summer of 1978 and, pocketing it, initiated some sort of torturous pattern wherein his everyday life is often interrupted in some way by a solid metal cube and that these predicaments can only be solved by his adding it to the collection. The seed cube, that initial little box, is said to lie somewhere in the center of the collection still, and when asked why he hadn’t tried to part with it, Ellis suggested that a much larger metal cube had shifted on top of it, making it quite difficult to reach. When he was reminded that the larger metal cube’s shifting onto the smaller one seemed to match the same perpetual-obstacle pattern that led to the collection in the first place, Ellis coughed up three small metal cubes and began to weep.
These days, Ellis mostly keeps to a small house, tucked away on the same property as the collection. He can sometimes be seen moving between the two locations, no doubt adding another mysterious find to ‘The Collection of Metal Cubes,’ off I-90 just after it leaves Washington.’
The man has his finger wedged between two small cubes which are, themselves, wedged between two larger cubes and so on and so forth. The setup looks like it’s got enough potential energy to flatten a car but the man promises he’s only just a little jammed, that he was reaching for his cellphone when the pile shifted. I ask him his number so I can call the phone and he tells me the battery’s dead. I ask him if he’s the ghost and he says ‘no’ but seems a little put out.
“Did you read something in the lobby that said I was a ghost?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“Do I look like a ghost to you?”
I take a step forward and motion to his leg, which is just a little more transparent than a person might suspect of a solid, terrestrial creature.
“Yeah.”
The man’s about to retort when we both hear a family with kids coming out of the lobby. We agree, without having to really say it, that it’s best for me to go. I don’t want some stupid kid taking out a loadbearing cube while I’m nearby, and he doesn’t want to put the work into convincing me he’s not a ghost just to perform some ghostly mischief.
This is the way I like my visits to run: weird, but agreeable, which is why I’m more than a little upset when I find a small metal cube in the toe of my shoe the next morning.
-traveler
