We start by organizing a quick summary of all the variable page 131’s in our collection of Shitholes. The Editor tears them from the spine and we use a stapler at the nearest post office to form a crude new ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’ The Editor laughs at the result, like a phone book left out in the rain.

“We spent so much collective time…” she mutters, “So much thought on the order of entries. We didn’t agree on a single thing.”

Shitholes is not an intuitive book. The entries aren’t alphabetical. They aren’t organized by state or region. I thought, for a while, there might be an underlying categorization, something philosophical, but the groupings held their shapes like clouds in the sky. The meaning I thought I understood was meaning I had projected onto it. I never saw the same cloud twice.

My first mistake was assuming that the author had organized it and, if the author was some version of myself, my second mistake was assuming I would know his thoughts (or some version of them). I don’t understand the Editor, though. I can’t discern any shape in her clouds. There may well be a storm building over me and I would be none the wiser.

“When we did this,” she says, and shakes her head, “When I did this the publisher wouldn’t sign off on the obvious arrangements. The first time it was just vaguely location-based, right? The second was the same, just really fucking specific, like with a table of contents coded to fucking maps. We’ve got to compete with the internet. I thought that’s what they wanted.”

The Editor finds a pair of scissors on the counter and begins to clean the jagged pages of Shitholes 131. A postal worker clears his throat behind us somewhere but we both know better than to turn.

“And then my emails were just pinging back like thirty seconds after I sent them a new draft- like, ‘We appreciate your continued work on the project but we don’t believe the target audience will find the current structure intuitive. Reliance on printed GPS can be difficult to translate to electronic applications…’ Shit like that is what I’m saying. Like, I’m desperate enough to find the coordinates of all the damn places and to organize them by latitude and longitude and throw together a chart for the table of contents and they spend less than a minute figuring it’s a no-go. And then after a month of this…”

The Editor reacts suddenly, pulling her finger away from the pages like she’s been bitten by a snake. She holds out her hand and a thin, bloody line appears across her index finger.

“Paper cut?” I ask, but she is deathly quiet as the blood wells to a drop.

The Editor has ended herself for lesser things, but never in a place so public. The heft of her revolver appears to me beneath her jacket, seeming to move under the leather. Its grip is curved in the gesture of beckoning, its deep cold is begging for the heat of release. A popping balloon will always make me jump and I will never grow used to the sound of gunfire. I brace myself anyway, clenching my stomach and folding my shoulders inward.

The Editor wipes her finger across the front page of the new book and grimaces. She presses down hard to stymie the pain, and when she speaks I realize that my hands are covering my ears.

“What?” I ask.

“Do you have a bandage?”

I don’t know if it’s the Editor’s intention, but the first page of Shitholes 131 is a place not far from the post office, a place we had both already noticed in the gloom of early morning. She scratches dried blood from the paper so we can read the entry together:

‘A woman grew up in Southern Illinois. She grew up in a small town but moved away after high school. She made money, enough to fill a warehouse (though she kept hers in a bank). With a sliver of her success, she returned to her town and built ‘The Land-Locked Lighthouse,’ refusing to place her name upon the thing. It shines for 30 miles on a clear night and pulses behind the winter fogs.

It has become a minor attraction, simply for the oddity of the thing. It draws families in from their road trips and they stay in the town and wonder what the woman must have felt of her home, to spend so much money on a thing that may only provide the smallest boost to the local economy. Must be quite the place.

The locals know otherwise, of course. They’ll illustrate, to you, the distinction between what it means to spotlight a thing and what it means to shed light upon it. A lighthouse is as much a beacon of danger as it is of safe-passage. There is no doubt this one signals warning.’

-traveler

I’m not a traveler at all, not like you. I was born in Wisconsin and I never left the state. All the others were born everywhere else, each one in a different state, I think, and I don’t think they left. They’re out there now but we never meet. Each time one of us dies another is walking by an empty lot and the empty lot me knows all about the dead ones and it makes it hard to think. Harder each time.

It does make it easier to leave. I never tell anyone I’m going.

But it starts in the empty lot because it’s quiet there and most people leave you alone and it takes some time to deal with the baggage of the others and by the time we get to the end there’s a lot of anger. Some of us had it better than others for no reason at all. The world just had it out for some of us.

And then things start to line up. Your face appears, we start to die, and with each ending the narrative clears a little until it’s just the last time we died and the path that brought us to the empty lot. All of our combined histories converge into something that’s like an arrow and that arrow points in the opposite direction of wherever we were heading at the time: back toward the book we finished editing years before.

Autumn by the Wayside

I find you each time the same way I found you the first time: I flip through Shitholes and visit the page I land on. We all came to different conclusions when we edited the book based on information given to us by the publisher and by our own, narrow lives so, even though we always stop on page 131, we always visit a different place.

And you’re always there.

Here’s the thing: we all work for the same publishing company. They can’t not know.

They can’t not know.

-Editor

‘There are many strange things to be dredged from the deserts of Nevada, but ‘The Neon Mound’ warrants an entry for being both relatively easy to find and relatively safe upon discovery. It is easiest to find at night, when the cooling desert air sets the old neon patterns clicking like a frozen lake in the sand and when the lights are most visible under their sheer draping of earth. It is safest when viewed from a distance, as rumor suggests the wind creates deep, secret pits under the glass and that unwise travelers will tumble through, finding the smooth web turns quickly jagged under any weight.

‘The Neon Mound’ is most likely a historical dumping site for Vegas’ flickering signage, but this assumption fails to cover some of the stranger aspects of ‘The Mound.’ What force could have changed the shape of the old glass so that it exists, now, like a crumpled tin can? What current electrifies the sand, so that onlookers can step barefoot among its roots as they flash like a distant storm?

Vegas will not touch ‘The Neon Mound,’ neither to preserve nor destroy it. It flickers on the outskirts, like a forgotten candle, burning low- a mundane thing with dire potential.’

The Editor is quiet for a day and then she starts talking. It’s all nonsense, at first- gibberish in a conversational tone. It doesn’t stop, not until she’s sleeping and even then it sometimes breaks the surface of her dreams so that I wake to her whispering in my ear. After a few days the words rearrange themselves into something I understand, the Editor’s base instincts overriding the disease. She’s been telling me about her life and it’s taking some time because she remembers each loop, now and she sees them side by side.

‘The Neon Mound’ is not the firework show I expected. It pulses intermittently, blue and white. It calms the Editor’s speech and brings her to the conclusion, which is to say, it brings her to her experience in the interim.

-traveler

The Editor stands like a scarecrow in a field of some unknown plant. She stands with the rigid stillness of a predator, a short line on the horizon. It could be anything out there, but I know it’s her. I had stopped to eat a sandwich from a gas station deli. It oozes mustard and oil into the napkin, leaving a smell that will be on my hands for days. The sandwich ages poorly. It begs to be eaten. I don’t know what to do. I am rigid with the stillness of prey.

The line of her body shudders with a step. It could be any movement, but I know it’s a step- a step in my direction. A small stream of mustard now runs between my fingers and over the inside of my palm, the glacial mass of it melting between folded slices of sun-warmed salami. She is walking this way. She wonders if I will run and I find, in that moment, I’m wondering the very same thing.

‘‘The Interactive Fight-or-Flight Activity Area’ is like a haunted house in that it’s designed with the express intention of funneling would-be customers into a series of interactions that will activate their most basic instinctual response to threat. Philosophically it exists on the same spectrum as a your community meditation center (though well on the opposite end) claiming to stimulate a simple cathartic reflex that has been otherwise lost in the tangle of evolved response.

Unlike your common haunted house (or, for that matter, your community meditation center), ‘The Interactive Fight-or-Flight Activity Area’ encourages the customer to submit fully to their responses, either engaging physically with their would-be assaulter or making a desperate escape. This is part of the process, they insist, and the result builds toward a classification system the mysterious parent company seems to be compiling. Why, you might ask, would it be important to know who will fight and who will run when push comes to shove?

Why, indeed?’

The Editor stumbles to my patch of the earth. Her left eye is sharp, it cuts me to the bone. The right eye is a window into a vacant room. The pistol is there but she doesn’t seem to bother with it. We stand still for a moment.

“You all right?” I ask.

It’s the first thing I always ask.

“No,” I tell her after a minute, “You’re not.”

The Editor nods and drags herself to the bike. She has chosen to fight, though what she fights for or against remains a mystery to me.

-traveler

The next time I see the Editor I pretend not to. She makes as though to hitchhike, standing on the side of the highway with a woozy thumb in the air and a smile on her face. There is other traffic on the road, so it’s not a complete impossibility that I miss her.

But it’s a stretch.

I frame her in the side mirror and watch to see how she’ll respond. Chasing me will mean finding a new mode of transport, digging up my lead, making the long trips across the country alone until she can narrow the distance. It will be a lot more work than she’s become accustomed to, a return to form.

The Editor watches me for a short time, thinking I’ll stop or turn around or maybe just staring in disbelief at her bad luck. When she is hardly a dot in the glass she does it again- she turns the gun on herself.

How many of these women have appeared in morgues now? Has it happened in the same state twice? The Editor is wasting away. I don’t know whether it’s safer to travel with her, to keep her alive for as long as possible, or to travel alone, knowing each iteration is less stable than the last. I’ll have a few days to decide.

‘The modern tourist hardly dwells on the implications of a missile silo, hidden in the earth, as it is, like the upturned barrel of a gun. The system is designed to ease the mind of the normal fears one might experience when considering the country’s devastating power, placed their like a baseball bat near the door. We are allowed to know so little about them, allowed to think so little of what might happen if they were ever to be activated- so little can be said about the modern silos that it’s difficult to think anything about them at all, to even imagine they are really down there. We are told that most are decoys- that this is doubly true for those in our region. They are only scary when considered carefully.

The physical reality of the missile silo manifests in kind. They look like nothing from a distance, like a defunct pumphouse or an abandoned construction site from the road. The details surface only when one ventures past the curb. There can we see that the fences are sturdy and well-maintained and possibly electrified. There can we see the bootprints in the dust, the signs that warn strangers away and quote esoteric government codes with vague and violent consequences. There we can feel the weight of these things, the seriousness with which they should be taken.

‘The Open Silo’ does all it can to inspire this fear in its visitors without the potential for government interference. It claims to be a reconstruction above-ground of what is usually concealed below and it stands like a discarded shotgun shell, upright in the desert sun. Its features include the testimonies of those who have seen war in their homeland, accompanied by detailed specifications of the weaponry used to reshape their country. There is a library called ‘The Dire Conclusions to War,’ that details a thousand possible consequences of launching these missiles in the modern day, the entries there ranging from anti-war poetry to careful, scientific forecasting. There is a haunted village just outside, designed to replicate what life might be like after the nuclear storm finally arrives. It would be a gimmick if not for the seriousness with which it attempts this portrayal. It pulls no punches.

‘The Open Silo’ doesn’t do its job very well. The human mind can imagine the horror of war only after having experienced it firsthand. Its visitors (and there are few of them) can only ever be of two crowds- those who already know, and those who cannot.’

I don’t understand this woman. I don’t know which inconveniences she can live with and which will send her running for the grave. I don’t understand why the pistol is a factor in the Editor’s infinity- whether it’s the force that carves her path, or the forest that seeks to reclaim it.

-traveler

‘A certain small-scale hell exists in the form of a park bench along the Wayside. Provided, undoubtedly, with good intentions- cut with clean lines from American wood and polished to a sheen- the bench has lived out its better days in a single season of use and now decomposes, angrily, in the sun. The winter has sucked the finish from the bench and its planks have bristled, becoming ragged and splintery and light as volcanic rock.

‘The Park Bench Hell’ is nature’s mild protest at the ruthlessness of American infrastructure, at the thick asphalt scabs that itch under the summer’s heat, at being condemned to road verges and medians. It is the inflammation around a wound, the body’s cure-all reflex to perceived infection, making the once-welcoming environment not barren, exactly, but certainly inconvenient to the would-be malignance.

Hold no doubts, reader, the nature on the side of the road does not want you to enjoy it. Every blade of course, brown grass hidden among the greenery is a reminder to keep your shoes on. The ants that emerge under your dirty jeans arrive to keep you from sitting. The carefully placed bird shit, the strange stinging insects, the staleness of your sandwich just seconds after it meets the outside air- this is nature declaring it is capable of ruining a human the same way it ruins park benches, through a thousand miniature violences and infinite time.’

“Fuck.”

The Editor pulls her arm back quickly, yanks her shirtsleeve down over her elbow. She’s opened a bag of potato chips and stripped the plastic from a gas-station ham and cheese. She hasn’t touched either, choosing, instead, to become deeply angry at my assertion that pre-popped popcorn is stale out of the bag, no matter the brand.

“What is it?” I ask, holding out a hand to steady her arm.

She pulls out of my reach and examines her skin.

“Splinter,” she says, “I hate these things.”

“I think my knife has a pair of tweezers,” I say, but the Editor shoots herself and slumps forward into her abandoned lunch.

Blood pours between the slats of the table and across my jeans as I struggle to extricate myself from the bench. I throw up in the grass.

-traveler

‘What is it they’re farming out there? Too short to be corn, too tall to be any number of ground vegetables. You’ve been driving for a while now. Your passenger wakes up long enough to confirm it isn’t wheat, isn’t any number of American cereals. They’re asleep again, unable to answer questions about the strange farm equipment that appears. You know so little about modern farming. You can’t imagine where they pull enough water to satisfy this field, for instance. You don’t know how much water a field of any type needs. Is an acre more or less than a square mile?

Why are there never people in these fields? Why are there so few birds? Why is the equipment unmanned? When was the last time you met a farmer? How do you know they weren’t lying to you?’

The motorcycle coasts on empty for several nauseous miles before the sun finally sets and we find an exit from I-38. We emerge several states from where we started and loiter, for a while, in the parking lot of a gas station. A woman walks her dog in a patch of grass as her child chooses candy inside.

“I’m not sure we learned anything from all that,” the Editor admits, flipping through a copy of Shitholes, “I don’t think that was useful in the least.”

I chew up the last of Alice’s picks and spit the splinters into the gravel. It’s been a while since she said anything to me. I hope she’s resting now.

“You all right?” the Editor asks.

I nod, and we set off toward the next continental breakfast.

-traveler

The Editor and I come upon an RV campground before dusk and grow domestic for a while. We wait out a storm in a round mobile home that would sooner crumble than move from the spot, crouched, as it is, like the dry husk of a cicada. We are both so tired and so unused to the stagnant sunset that neither of us recognize time passing. We set up the living room with second-hand carpets and a scuffed coffee table. We share a bed, keeping a respectful distance between our bodies even in sleep. We take turns washing dishes and, sometimes, we order out for food and grumble at the time it takes to have a simple pizza delivered to the door.

We argue. We fight. Our words spill out in front of the neighbors, in front of the neighbors’ kids. The thin walls of the trailer can hardly hold them. We fill our fridge with vegetables we rarely eat. I grow a little fatter. The Editor grows pale.

The Editor takes to leaving the pistol on the coffee table and I find it casually pointing my direction each time I enter the room. She tells me it hasn’t been loaded for months (“Months?” I ask, “How long have we been here?”) but I don’t know where else she would keep the bullets. I’m sure they are there, in the gun, nestled in the barrel’s perfect slots. I thumb the head of a loose screw and wonder if its curvature isn’t the same as the sleeping lead.

When I move the gun to a shelf I don’t realize I shift it out of the Editor’s easy reach. She’s cradling it in her hands when I see it again, the step-stool chair still drawn across the room to the wall. I stand in the doorway with a pizza box balanced on my palm.

“Finally on time,” I was going to say, having retrieved it myself on a motorcycle that may not have seen use in the last year.

We fight again, the worst we’ve had, and we both determine to leave the other but, because we only have the one means of escape, we go together. And the further we are from the RV Park, the less we remember of our time there.

‘We are led to believe that there can exist a hybrid existence between the permanence of ‘home’ and the opportunity of ‘travel.’ But home is a place, reader, and though it might change it cannot be everchanging. We are animals that require a bolt hole, running from something we know is always just behind us or hiding from the same omniscient predator in caves of our own design. Nature will drive us to safety, and it will always run an ‘RV Park’ aground, scraping the wheels from mobile homes and seizing the engines meant to tow them with poverty and clotted oil.’

-traveler

We re-trace I-38 until the pavement lifts off of the ground and completes a dramatic vertical loop, the crest of which is at least 200’ in the air. I suggest we avoid it entirely by navigating the dry grass just off-road but, as I edge the bike’s leading wheel off the gravel, a washed-out state-trooper car further along the way flashes its lights and that’s that. I don’t want police involvement, no matter the absurdity of the situation, and the Editor is suspiciously quick to agree. We turn around and head east, again, the both of us holding our breath as we pass the cemetery, the both of us remembering a day-old hangover as we pass the bar.

The sun never quite sets, here. The horizon never approaches. We drive for a long time along a stretch of road with a lazy cartoon backdrop- the same trees, birds, clouds- until a speck in the distance becomes the busy parking lot of an event space. A banner overhead reads, simply:

‘GUNS’

‘The mutant offspring of the ‘Free Market’ and ‘Constitutional Rights,’ there is always a gun show happening somewhere in America, always a crowd of people to attend it.

It’s a funny thing: relatively few fatalities have been reported at gun shows. On the other hand, like a rash that foreshadows a deadly fever, firearm-based fatalities inevitably rise in their wake as though these events exist at the eye of some subtle storm that stretches across time. They are a haven for scheming, for pre-meditation. A place for subtle nods and quick handshakes. They were not always this way but they are most certainly that way now and, not unlike the weapons that exchange hands at gun show, their once-purpose is greatly overshadowed by the consequence of their misuse. So, maybe not funny.

The shows vary greatly by region, but a few universal aspects stand out among them. They bring about an atmosphere of smug camaraderie among attendants and a subtle paranoia regarding the rest of the world, as though the act of non-attendance is suspicious in and of itself. There will always be trucks in the lot outside, vacant and idling. There will always be men standing nearby, though not so near as to assume ownership of the trucks. There will be accessories to firearms for sale- racks, packs, and ammunition. There will be meat for sale alongside the guns that killed the animals. There will be a smell like smoke in the air. There will be a tangible craving for cigarettes.

The author would suggest avoiding gun shows to the extent that its possible, though, having seen one ahead, they will likely be the safest place in miles.’

“I just want to use the restroom.”

The Editor insists that we attend, that we pay the $5 entry fee, and she promptly forgets about the bathroom. She insists on displaying the pistol openly once we’re inside, opening her jacket dramatically wide. Nobody seems to mind.

She zips her jacket closed as we arrive in the vendor area.

The guns for sale are outrageous. Many seem warped, as though by a cancer that knows only that firearms are made to kill. They sprout auxiliary barrels. They glisten with knives. Stocks bulge to form clubs and shells cling to cobalt as though held there by magnets. In another section all of the guns are designed to point backward, toward the shooter. The more winding the path of the bullet, the more intricate the barrel re-direction, the more expensive the gun.

“How convenient,” the Editor jokes, prodding a spiraled revolver.

“Guaranteed to do the deed,” grumbles a man behind the counter, hardly more than a pile of dry cloth.

“Wouldn’t it explode?” she asks.

“Two paths to the same place,” he coughs.

The Editor brushes her fingers across the cold metal and startles when I press her forward. There are guns for sale that claim to take ammunition of any caliber, with great input valves that shuffle bullets like a coin counters. There are, in some corners, machines that claim to be guns, machines that take shells and have triggers but have no clear means of output.

“Dare you?” a sign hanging above them asks and, with varied emphasis below, “Dare you?”

Neither of us dare. We leave the gun show, weaving through a labyrinth of idling trucks to the bike and the familiar weight of its trailer. Having determined that there is no point traveling backward on I-38, we press on.

-traveler

Further back on I-38 we stop so the Editor can investigate what I assumed to be a military graveyard, its headstones white as teeth in orderly rows. She returns sober and aghast at something she refuses to articulate because it has no entry in Shitholes and therefore has no bearing on my journey.

In the false privacy of her helmet I sometimes hear the Editor calculating their number. It seems she’s never satisfied with the result.

-traveler