The town of Redmond Bay was evacuated in 2013 when a fine cloud of feathers formed on the corner of Main and 3rd, growing exponentially until it encompassed the better part of a the downtown area. This cloud has not since dissipated, though online sources suggest that an hour’s rain drives the cloud into the ground and grants a short reprieve from the noxious air.
It’s convenient, then, that I pass Redmond Bay as the Pacific Northwest’s early autumn heaves itself from the gray ocean, spitting and slobbering like a mad old man. Convenient to find the streets of this ghost town dark and gleaming.
I wear a mask, one of those thin, papery half-orbs you can pick up in any pharmacy having, vacillated between this and something several times the price (and undoubtedly more effective). The tissue barrier grows absurd in the shadow of a quarantine sign that has resisted the years of mossy encroachment. Its letters cut through the afternoon darkness, reflecting red in the headlight of the bike.
“WARNING: DISASTER AREA. AIR IS UNSAFE FOR BREATHING”
‘It would be three years before the displaced townsfolk of Redmond Bay would learn that the ‘1st Annual Pillow War’ was instigated by ‘Sleep-Time Tech’ for the sake of marketing- a secret sifted from the bankrupted ruins of the same company. Their flagship product, a pillow made of blended down, was a tough sell in this, the hypoallergenic age. How to get people to recognize the airy softness of their pillow filling?
Why not a pillow fight?
The iconic ‘Bilderberg Photo’ is associated with the beginning of ‘The Redmond Suffocation.’ Two men are frozen, center-frame, their pillows bursting at the base of a bronze statue- Edmond Bilderberg, who founded the town. A woman has fallen in the background, one hand on her chest. Behind her, an unidentified body already lies prone on the bricks of Redmond’s central square.
The occasional resurfacing of the ‘Bilderberg Photo’ draws tourists to the outer-limits of the quarantine zone. More than one morbid pilgrim has been pulled, alive, from the dark city in the years since its abandonment. Countless missing are presumed to have entered and remain unfound.’
A storm passed over Redmond Bay just before I arrived, tearing at my gas-station parka on the ride up and dwindling to a drizzle as I approached the quarantine. It’s a gamble, already, to take the advice of the internet in matters of breathing so, while many speculate that a light rain is enough to keep the feathers out of the air, I set a timer for half an hour and promise myself I won’t walk more than 15 minutes away from the line of safety.
When I was a child, maybe eleven or twelve, I spent the night in the library- part of some initiative to keep kids reading. It was your typical pizza and junk food shit-show with most of the kids being assholes or getting homesick, but when things wound down and the lights went off and we were all supposed to find our own nook of the library to curl up in, well, that was something special. To see that place in darkness and to find peace there- it’s a memory I hold like a security blanket decades later.
Redmond Bay is like that. Though the tones are admittedly grimmer, I find the same peace in its corners, the same darkness behind the glass store fronts. I let myself into a grocery store where much of the stock remains and consider the harm in taking a few cans of food for the road. My meddling stirs the dust from the shelves, a dust that has settled on every surface. I cough twice, comparing the nutritional benefits of two chicken-noodles, before a pin-prick pain in my chest alerts me to danger.
Outside of my reverie, the dust has collected into a thin, white fog, the torn feathers having crept into the store in the five years of abandonment. I try to hold my breath but the prickling in my lungs forces another cough through the mask, a wet, red cough.
Things blur as I try to run. My legs buckle as I round the old bakery and I see the body of a man in the checkout aisle, a candy bar gripped in his desiccated fingers.
‘He played this game before me and he lost,’ I think.
‘I’ll show him,’ I think.
And the world goes black.
–//–
Rain wakes me, my body saturated and cold. My lungs play a sickly harmonica. Each breath is a battle and the sky above me is gray.
Consciousness returns in waves, building to a coherent high tide. My shirt is pulled up over my chest and gravel scrapes at the bare skin of my back. As I try to make sense of my surroundings I realize I’m still holding the can of soup. I let it roll away and the noise of the metal on the pavement brings my inching travel to a halt.
After a few quiet seconds, as I fail to find the energy to do anything but breathe, the friendly tug pulls me another inch toward the edge of town. In the long hours of wheezing and dragging I catch glimpses of my shadow, splayed weakly in the growing dark. It has been playacting all these months but now it wants to live.
And it needs me.
-traveler
