‘The King of Strangers sits on the floor and believes that the earth is his throne. He shakes his legs, so restless is the King that his home travels under him. Leader of trailer parks and mobile homes, of sun-bleached beer cans and abandoned mailboxes, the man will not suffer sleeves or shorts. The man will not suffer.’

-excerpt, Unattributed Writings on the King of Strangers

I am pulled across a makeshift bridge, set precariously between broken windows 26 stories above the earth, by men with buzzcuts and carpenter-style jeans. I am taken into the shifting building, now settled, and into an elevator that moves upward in jerks and twinges as though powered by men (it is). I am pulled out of the elevator and cast out into an open space.

The floor is curiously dark, the ceiling curiously high. As I find my bearings, I see that the ceiling above me, and many ceilings above that, have been torn away to create an amphitheater of ruined offices. A man dangles his legs from a floor high above me, backlit and silhouetted. He looks forward, through the tall glass and out over the city of strangers.

The man gestures and the building begins to move again, sliding noisily between its neighbors. Engines rumble below. The man turns his head to me and I feel the gray, commercial carpeting curl uncomfortably below my palms.

The floor is not dark- I am in his shadow.

“What brings you to my city, traveler?”

I try to think of a believable lie before realizing I don’t actually know the truth.

“Somebody wrote about it,” I tell him, “In a travel guide.”

People begin to mutter, strangers that I hadn’t noticed, standing on the floors between he and I. The building jolts and an office chair rolls out from behind the King of Strangers. It falls several stories and shatters at my feet. I stand and take a step back before tripping on a ledge. Upon closer inspection, it’s the edge of the man’s shadow, which seems to sink several inches below the lit floor.

“Just a week before this, one of my men was looking for a traveler without a shadow,” he says.

“I have a shadow!” I tell him, and I wave my arm, hoping that the counterfeit is paying attention. It remains motionless and then, as though snapping to attention, it raises the wrong arm.

The King of Strangers gestures again, his shadow bringing its massive hand to the dark wriggling arm behind me. It plucks the limb from my shadow and darkness spills from its body, leaking into the carpet. My shadow shivers and tries to crawl away but the Black Tailor’s stitches hold it in place.

The King of Strangers continues:

“My man was the shell of himself, weighed down by a past that wasn’t his own. I offered that he stay here, in my city, but he refused. He left in the night, afraid that he might subject us to the thing that walks the path behind him.”

“He brought that on himself,” I say. My shadow has curled into a ball, its crooked limbs pointing inward like a dead spider. I resist an urge to do the same.

“He admitted as much, himself.”

“Why are these building on tracks?” I ask, trying to gain some sort of footing in the conversation.

“The city was built on a chessboard and my men and I are playing the machine. It draws power from our moves in order to make its own. We ride in the white queen, toward an unsuspecting pawn.”

A squat building stands in the tracks, five blocks down.

“What happens when we reach it?”

“Disaster,” the King says, “It takes months to clean up a lost piece.”

“Why play?”

“To win,” he says, “To see if there is a prize.”

“If there isn’t?”

The King ignores me and we creep closer to the little store in our path. It’s a pawn shop- the rich mastermind behind this place had a sense of humor.

“What are you going to do with me?” I ask.

The King says nothing, and then he says: “Everything has an end, from the individual to the cosmic. There is a path-”

“A path you burn.”

“A path we widen,” he says, “A path we create. Do you think the forest provides trails to its campers? There have always been men that go ahead, to cut back trees and stomp out the ground, to make sure that no animal too wild crosses paths with a person too unwitting. There would be no path without the strangers, there would be a beginning, an end, and a great horrible expanse between them. When we finish the game, we will know if this city is our end. I think you know, already, that it is yours.”

The strangers take hold of me, again. We leave the building to its slow collision course and drive to another, where I am locked away with my dying shadow to await the return of the Stranger I know.

I escape in the night, breaking one of the seven remaining pieces of Alice’s coffin in the lock. Four days pass in the City of Strangers before I’m able to retrieve my bag. The shadow drags behind me, warped and deflated, leaving a splattered trail of darkness that I fear will out me, but the strangers give up the hunt quickly and return to their game.

On the fifth day, just hours before I locate the bike, I hear the jingle of a belt buckle and feel my hair stand on end. The Stranger I know has arrived with the thing that haunts him. I write in the darkness, in the blood of my new shadow, a message only I would understand. I address it to my worst self.

I tell it where I’m going and I prepare for a long ride.

-traveler

The seventeen-story gamble is this:

I am on the top of a 43-story building. Men swarm into the ground floor.

They are coming for me.

My initial instinct is to somehow bar the broken doorway to the roof, but the men would overpower me and whatever haphazard barrier I could create. The next best option is to hide- not on the roof, where there is nothing but dust and bricks, and not on the top floor, where they are sure to check first. Which floor, then?

The nearer my hiding place is to the ground, the more likely I can sneak out during a more thorough search. The further down I run, the more chance I have of meeting them headlong. I settle on the 26^th floor, seventeen stories down. It’s less than halfway, and ascending will be slower. I will have time to hide.

The stairs fly by and I fall several times, blinded by cobwebs and slipping in the dust. I burst into the empty office space of the 26^th floor and flee down a likely hall toward a trickle of daylight. A building moves outside the windows, the lower strangers returning to their work. Cement and steel blot out the light like some industrial eclipse. The floor shakes like it has seen the end of the world.

A row of lockers stands uninstalled in the men’s bathroom. I shove my pack into one and press myself into another, falling back into it with ease, a crumple of cloth and bones.

I wait.

When the strangers find me (and they do) they spy the shadow first. It lies in front of the locker, the absurd silhouette of a man in a tight place.

-traveler

I wake up in a city that could be anywhere, its buildings tall, silver, and unfinished. I am in a park, an urban park, the sort of metal and cement venue that only distinguishes itself from a car lot by the people that frequent it. A chrome statue marks the center, an abstract mess of composite shapes.

The city is quiet, and I am alone.

There is a gap in my mouth where my bottom-center teeth used to be, the gums there are sensitive and tangy.

My bag is leaned up against the bench where I sit, where I jolt awake, that I stumble off of. The bike is absent and the sudden panicked realization of being stranded sets my head throbbing. I close my eyes and squeeze my temples. I run my hand through my hair but find there is none left.

The shadow is no help- it processes change on a cosmic scale, its own dark hair shifting in the wind. I look at myself in the statue, my reflection stretched along the curves. I have the scalp version of a five o’clock shadow, a neater trim than I have ever worn. My tongue flicks through the holes in my mouth and a wave of nausea strikes me. I spit, without meaning to. I dribble and squeeze my eyes closed again.

An engine rumbles to life somewhere in the city, the rattle and thud of an old truck. A stranger’s truck, with an engine that sounds like an angry muttering.

‘‘The City of Strangers’ is evoked with the same tone one might use for ‘the body of a man.’ The city itself is roundly lifeless, the stillborn creation of a very rich mother who died in labor. It was abandoned long enough to become feral, re-discovered and tamed by cruel masters, men who call themselves the strangers, who require a place to be unmolested in their strangeness.

‘The City of Strangers’ does not grow or change. The strangers enter and exit the city at random and move with the sureness of ants about their nest. That their purpose exists is evident, but it is alien, unknowable to those outside of their own. They are frightful, the strangers and their city, a sneaking malignancy that rides the undercurrent of the Wayside.’

No, there was no passage regarding the strangers before this. I’m sure there was not. I have scoured the book for anything that might advise me on the subject of the capital letter ‘Path,’ straining words past reasonable interpretation if there exists even a sliver of connection. That it’s riddled with secret passages doesn’t surprise me, I’ve expected as much before, but why drop the pretense now?

The truck falls silent and I survey the park and the city that surrounds me. This place is no safer than any other, open viewing to anybody that might glance down from a window above. I need to find the bike and I need to move, to move in any direction. A man standing still is more suspicious than a man standing alone- one of the many small truths I’ve picked up along this trip.

The abandoned city is difficult to navigate, it having no street signs or store fronts. The roads and sidewalks warp from the pressure of the dead forest below them, spiders take up residence inside the dusty traffic lights, and whole blocks remain vacant between structures. The ground is criss-crossed with thick metal tracks that seem to keep the underground life in check. They run down the roads, under the buildings- strange. A rat leaps out at me when I stoop to examine a place where the tracks meet a skyscraper. There is space, there.

I stand when the rumble of a truck returns, it thunders between two buildings several blocks ahead, appearing and then disappearing with only a few seconds warning. Another follows, something slithering noisily from the open bed. I jog forward to investigate and see that both were laying down chain, that chains already cover the asphalt. Voices reach me at the intersection and I see movement down the street. I retreat through broken glass and, finding all the doors of the city unlocked, make my way to the roof in order to survey my surroundings.

It is a long walk, punctuated by generous breaks and anxiety-fueled moments of quiet waiting.

At the top, where the door has fallen from its hinges, I see the roof of another building shifting toward me. I rush to the edge and see that the strangers have it in tow, absurdly moving a massive structure along the tracks of the city, pulling it with chains and trucks and sheer manpower. They fill the road below like a mad parade. They scream at each other.

I move to see from a better angle and the shadow slips up the side in front of me, pressing a stray brick off the ledge. I watch, unable to move, as the thing drops toward the crowd. The shadow shifts guiltily, thicker than it was before I drank the ‘Suicide,’ and the brick lands, knocking a stranger off his feet with an ugly spray of red.

The strangers come for me.

-traveler

‘Greed has long been the bedfellow of alchemy, the ancient tradition thriving on gross excess of riches and spirit. It is no different now, in this era, and here, in the Wayside, where there is nothing of necessity and an excess of want, where, if things were just a little closer, even stranger locales might emerge.

For true excess, the author suggests a stop-in at ‘The Fountain of Youth,’ just off I-10 in Eastern Arizona. An otherwise ordinary convenient store, ‘The Fountain of Youth’ boasts the largest operating fountain drink system in existence, spanning three of its four walls and offering soda in flavors long retired and brands so divisive that they rarely exist under one roof. Cup sizes are American standard, which is to say, ranging from large to absurd, and refills cost just fifty-cents.

Connoisseurs may be interested in ‘The Cookbook,’ a sticky binder of crowdsourced recipes, recipes, here, meaning sickly sweet combinations of ‘The Fountain’s’ offerings. Conspicuously absent is the concoction known by many names: ‘Graveyard,’ ‘Tiger’s Blood,’ and, commonly, ‘Suicide.’ Equal parts of every soda, the ‘Suicide of Youth’ is said to rot teeth and grant visions of future trouble.’

The ‘Suicide of Youth,’ as Shitholes calls it, will only fit in the largest cup size available at the ‘Fountain’- a gallon bucket with a flimsy plastic lid.

“You can refill it for fifty cents,” the cashier reminds me when I scoff at the $20 price tag.

I look out the window at the window, at the flat, abandoned landscape, and I wonder if I will ever have reason to come back.

The cashier shrugs, as though in response to my thoughts, and rings up the heavy vessel.

In a slip of shade near the parking lot, I pry the lid off the cup and study the mixture. It took several colors before settling on a thin brown about a third of the way through the pouring procedure, only to become clear again when the last soda was poured (‘Diet Orange Blast’). It fizzes wildly in the sun, like the applause of a tiny audience, and it distorts the reflection of my face so that I barely recognize the man I see there.

This may be the symptom of a larger problem.

It’s been weeks since I have looked into a mirror. Maybe months. I put my helmet on before mounting the bike- I forgo washing my hands in public restrooms. There were unconscious actions until I realized I was performing them. Now they are just actions.

The man in the soda looks nothing like me.

I close the cup and, with some effort, pry the bike’s speedometer open. Inside are my teeth, just a couple, and I take one back to the shade where it is promptly dissolved by a straw-full of the ‘Suicide.’ There were rumors about this online, from a woman who claims to have lost all of her teeth but gained insight into all of her life’s corners and what waits beyond them. The trick, it’s said, is to take the drink in the back of the throat. It only seems to dissolve bone.

It’s said.

A semi-truck thunders down the interstate and a bird circles in the sky above me. I pick nervously at my skin and spit several times. Finally, I gather some of the liquid into the straw, holding it there with the vacuum created by my finger. I take care to wipe the outside down and I take several deep breaths, leaning with my back to the tree for support. I bring the straw to my mouth and-

“You can’t loiter out here!” the cashier yells from across the lot.

I start at the noise and my finger slips. I feel a sharp, dental twinge and then the world goes black.

I begin to see things, in the darkness.

-traveler

The false shadow seems to enjoy ‘Face-Journey: The Nation’s Largest Private Collection of Photo Stand-ins.’ It gravitates toward the stand-in shadows, brushes against them like some happy cat. It stretches as I walk, to linger and sniff out their absent faces. Sometimes it seems to hold their hands, but I can’t be sure. It’s most active in my peripheries and, hopefully, in the peripheries of others.

I don’t totally trust it, the new shadow. I trust it less the longer I carry it with me. It’s like an idiot friend, who may do something stupid at a moment’s notice. I wonder if it doesn’t miss being a more general sort of darkness, if it isn’t better suited for a closet or the back of a drawer.

‘Face-Journey’ has graciously set up mirrors in front of each stand-in, catering to the lone visitor. I try out several, a mermaid, an astronaut, an Abbot posing with a faceless Costello, before growing too self-conscious to continue. I sit on a bench instead and pretend to look at my phone, spying on the reflection of the shadow and finding that they, the shadow and its reflection, seem to be as tenuously connected as the shadow and I.

This trip has been plagued by tenuous connections, by places that are not destinations in and of themselves. The wayside is, by definition, only the distractions on the path to something more meaningful, but if the Wayside Park Rangers believe the path has a direction, a backwards and a forwards, then it must be leading away from something.

And to something else.

Shitholes is written about the wayside. It is the modern equivalent of the pirate’s treasure map, with the map’s viewer on one end and a non-descript ‘X’ on the other. All of its details are used up on the hurdles in between, penned in riddles as to be hurdles themselves. If I am headed for the destination, and that’s certainly what I imply to anybody who asks, then I can’t rely on Autumn by the Wayside to describe it.

I know what the Wayside Rangers want- they want to keep the path safe, to preserve its natural state. I can’t say the same for the strangers. They seem to destroy haphazardly, the same way the author writes, but I don’t think either is totally devoid of purpose. A man once warned me that the Stranger was moving backwards on the path.

And if the Stranger knows the way back, maybe he can tell me the way forward.

‘‘Face-Journey: The Nation’s Largest Private Collection of Photo Stand-ins’ is a mouthful and an utter waste of time. A photo stand-in can only ever be an extension of the attraction it was made for, offering a posing opportunity tailored to the moment. A child visiting an aquarium might lend its smiling face to the body of a fish, for instance. A teen visiting an ice cream factory may pose screaming with the body of a cow, an ironic reference to the horrors of factory farming. ‘Face-Journey’ strips these flimsy cut-outs of their context and piles them into nonsensical exhibits, where families proceed to take pictures anyway, pictures they will no doubt look back upon and say ‘Where was this? Was this at that lobster restaurant?’

The sole redeeming quality of ‘Face-Journey’ is its mascot, a photo stand-in made animate and three-dimensional through the magic of costumes and cheap labor. This furry, faceless being lumbers about the property, scaring children and posing absurdly with the actual photo stand-ins. ‘Facey,’ as it’s called, may as well be the mascot for the Wayside itself, representing a niche few enjoy, taken to an extreme few are comfortable with.’

-traveler