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

We are inside ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ for an hour before I realize we will learn nothing from the people there. They couldn’t help us if they wanted to.

‘Preface

This is not a destination guide, reader. No one place between the covers warrants visiting on its own. This book shares more in common with the average trail guide than it does with any popular travel publication. It attempts to do the work of a trail guide for roadways, the half-mad cardiovascular system of America with all of its cracked, weeping asphalt and all of its cracked, weeping people. It attempts to describe the way between things and, in doing so, the book has become as mad and winding as the road.

I’m sorry, for this, but there is no other way.

I don’t understand how ‘Zeitgeist’ came to know about my writing or in what form they will publish it. I don’t understand what they want when they ask me to write a preface. This must be what a ranger feels when they are tasked with describing their park in short sentences for a single sign at the trailhead: entice the reader- and warn them.

Let me entice you.

Strangeness is inherent to the periphery. A speeding vehicle strikes a deer. The animal drags its body to the outer edge of the forest and succumbs to death. It becomes strange, there. Its shape changes. It fills with new life. It becomes a niche ecosystem for things neither afraid of the traffic nor of the woodland predators. It exists, for a short time, in limbo. And then it is forgotten.

The wayside attractions are much the same- repulsive and fleeting. To purchase this book, to follow it as a guide, is not to become the driver or the deer. It is to become the weird life that inhabits the corpse in the interim.

Let me warn you.

Carry water, always. Tell your loved ones where you are going and when you hope to return. Carry a blanket and a length of rope. Tell your loved ones when you are going and how you hope to return. Carry a flashlight and fresh batteries. Tell your loved ones how you are going and why you hope to return. Carry a shovel and something sharp. Tell your loved ones why you are going and where you hope to return. Carry a map- any map.

Carry water.

My limited understanding of German suggests that ‘geist’ is just as likely to translate to ‘ghost’ as it is to ‘spirit.’ My limited understanding of things unknown is that there is a huge difference between the two. The spirits of the forest. Team spirit. Fine spirits. Spirituality. There is nothing in these words to suggest menace. Or death. Ghosts, on the other hand, are always dead and often unhappily so. Maybe that’s why we lean on ‘spirit’ in our understanding of ‘zeitgeist,’ though my own experiences would suggest that lost time can be as bitter and haunting as the restless dead.

A preface is strange, reader. Like the ranger’s sign, it must be written by someone who has already completed the task it defines. It’s the reader’s beginning and the author’s end.’

There is an art to looking busy and everyone inside the small office that constitutes this branch of ‘Zeitgeist Publishing’ excels at it. I excelled at it in a past life, which is why it only takes me the hour to see through the charade. A man scribbles on a note pad and throws out the pages. Blank paper pours from the copier and a woman arrives to cycle it back into the machine. Several people appear to be mouthing silently at phones in the back and they end their calls as I pass on my way to the restroom. The man at the front desk keeps us waiting and, assuming that’s his job, he’s the only one currently performing it well.

The Editor is quiet and I take the silence as apprehension until she readily agrees to investigate on the way back from the toilet. We find her office, or, we find the editor’s office and her name is on the plaque. It’s empty until she enters and then she seems to vacillate between the Editor I know and the editor that she should be.

“I think I’ve been here before,” she says, opening a drawer and setting her gun inside, “Isn’t this where we started?”

-traveler

We arrive in a Zeitgeist hub town and as we coast around the corner toward the supposed branch’s address, I feel the Editor’s fingers digging into my sides. They release, suddenly, as we pass. It appears, by all accounts, to be open.

Of course, after weeks of travel, the Editor begins to lose her nerve. I see it in the way her hands shake at the gas station, rattling the ice in her plastic soda fountain cup. I hear it in deep breaths she takes when she thinks I’m not close enough to notice. The Editor, faced with the end of journey, is panicking. All of her work has been with things unfinished.

She jumps on the idea of taking a hotel room for the evening (“It’s getting late,” I say, “They may not be open much longer.”). She grips me again as we pass the branch on the way, straining her neck to catch a glimpse of… what? Another self? I look too but I see the windows of Zeitgeist Publishing are mirrors and turn back to the road before I can make eye contact with her. The door seems to be opening as we pass but I don’t see the person leaving and, if the Editor does, she keeps it to herself.

By sheer happenstance there is a Zeitgeist Publishing product catalog in the drawer of the hotel room (along with a phonebook, the Bible). It’s a slim pamphlet, made up entirely of esoteric travel writing.

“‘Check Under the Bed’: a Guide to Cheap Hotels”

“‘An English-to-Forest Translation Guide’: Make Them Listen to your Poetry!”

“Biting Insects Back: Alternative Protein Recipes.”

Finally, near the back, is Autumn by the Wayside, its subtitle playfully censored by exclamation points. Its description is as follows:

‘How long can you be lost on a circular path? Follow the curious traveler as he attempts to find out. Tag along on his journey into America’s living room, where he digs into the spaces between couch cushions to find things otherwise forgotten. Follow him, and tell us where you are. He has been gone so long.

‘Autumn by the Wayside:’ a travel guide for those who mean to lose themselves.‘

-traveler

‘A small, mid-western university, Prairie College, is renowned for two things: producing well-equipped students of agriculture and a growing monument to failure that spreads across its expansive campus dubbed ‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ (or, sometimes, the ARM). In practice, the ARM restates a situation made relatively clear in the institution’s public documents- that the success of their small number of graduates is achieved at the cost of the large percentage of students that fail or drop-out. The academic targets of Prairie College are impossibly demanding and students are expected to fulfill physical farming duties in addition to coursework. The administration has leaned into this trend, creating something that shares more aspects with an obstacle course than it does with any other accredited educational program in the country. Its workload has been deemed psychologically damaging by several local psychiatrists who describe failed students as ‘irrevocably broken.’

‘Academic Rigor Mortis’ is the result of a particularly cruel policy, one that states that ‘Prairie College’ will not release documents for transfer before a student buries her completed physical coursework on campus, erecting a small headstone that displays their proposed (and unfinished) thesis to mark the lot. The ARM, then, is a field sown with failure and failure grows there, the paper and ink leaching into the earth and creating a dark chemical shadow.

‘Prairie College’s’ founding documents famously refer to its ideal graduates as ‘enlightened farmers’ and famously digress into something like a summons for a singular being: ‘The Enlightened Farmer.’ The school’s tightening filter, it’s suggested, will someday result in its final graduating class- a class of one. This student will end the ARM’s decay and, perhaps, the punishing educational cycle of the institution from which it extends.’

There was a time when I thought I may have wanted to be a farmer. I would tend the garden in the backyard and read books about the end of the world. Looking out over the ‘ARM,’ I wonder how long we’ve been preparing for disaster. Humanity is bracing itself for an apocalypse and the end-times are crowded with prophecies. The longer we draw this out, the stranger the world will become.

-traveler

‘‘The Thistle Garden’ has grown at the center of Bellstaff, Wisconsin for three decades and it has made the small town miserable for all those years. The thistle there (all North American varieties of the species as well as several prize-winning, experimental strains) is not bound by the garden walls. It runs rampant, having infiltrated the urban sprawl in the same way it seems to infest forests elsewhere in the country. It rises from split asphalt and twists itself into ivy. It lies dry and dormant under snowfall until a careless foot breaks through the frost. It grows like mold in backpacks and in the collars of old shirts. The air of Bellstaff itches with thistle and so thick does it grow that ‘The Garden’ may well be the town itself.

But, officially, it is not.

‘The Thistle Garden’ is an acre of tastefully shaped weeds and, because contemporary landscaping favors a wilder look than years previous, the thistle is allowed to grow until it leans just over the boundary of the walkway, creating an unwinnable maze. Few would think to enter ‘The Thistle Garden’ in shorts, but even jeans-sporting visitors report that the plants linger on their denim, an evolutionary long-con with no obvious purpose but to cause discomfort.

Nature’s senseless cruelty, in this regard, is mirrored in ‘The Garden’s’ keepers, who have constructed a playground in the center- the best playground in all of Bellstaff. To quickly catch one’s self at the end of the slide seems to be a natural talent held by most of the city’s minors, but this is not at all the case. Each of these children has been jettisoned into the thistle at least once- a tradition as deeply held as chicken pox and equally as important. They have learned and they encourage others to learn as well. Out-of-town cousins are rarely warned ahead of time and, though many consider this a vicious joke, you will find no one laughs while they rescue a child from ‘The Garden.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside