‘The ‘West-Kentucky Man Zoo’ is either a joke or a century-spanning crime. It is, as the name suggests, a place to peruse men and women in captive habitats, painstakingly constructed to resemble living rooms or office cubicles or fast-food restaurants. The ‘Zoo’ layout maintains a modicum of tact in typing exhibits by personality trait rather than physical characteristics, though it does rely heavily enough on the negative aspects of the human experience to be ‘just a little preachy.’

A photo history of the ‘West-Kentucky Man Zoo’ is available near the gift shop, revealing the establishment has been owned by the same family since its inception. Following in the founder’s bitter footsteps, each generation re-shapes the ‘Zoo’ into an overly-critical commentary of the generation that follows making this a site worth visiting once every fifty years or so.’

“Look,” I tell the guy, calling down to him 20 or so feet below, “Look, I’ve got my cell phone right here. I’m going to call the police right now if you don’t give me some sign this is an act.”

“It’s not an act, man. We’re prisoners here! You ever see any of us walking around town?”

“I’m just passing through,” I shrug nervously, “Seriously, I’m not big on the idea of calling the cops but I’ll do it if you’re actually trapped.”

“I’m actually fucking trapped! Call the damn police!”

“It says on your plaque-”

“Fuck the plaque, call the police!”

“Yeah, but it says you’re… uh… a prime specimen of millennial hysteria- a mental breakdown in an office environment. So, I mean, if this is an act…”

“It’s not an act!” he yells, prompting me to key in the numbers, “Call the police!”

“Okay,” I say, my thumb hovering over the ‘call’ icon, “If it’s not an act then how come nobody has called the police before? You’re saying I’m the only one to come through here that’s considered it? This place has been in business for decades!”

“Jesus Christ, they all do what you’re doing now! I’ve been having the same conversation with you assholes for months now. I’ve-”

“You look like you’re falling for this.” A young woman and her daughter join me at the guard rail and she smiles at the scene below, “They brought him on this year. A real pro.”

“Thank god,” I sigh, loosening my grip on the phone, “I thought I was going crazy.”

“She works for them!” the man yells up, “Fuck you, bitch. Let me out!”

“I suppose my daughter works for the zoo too?” she calls back, and the man below knocks over his rolling desk chair in a rage. “Locals get cheap season passes,” she explains, “And Sarah loves the place. I think she’s going to grow up to be an actress.”

“I’m gonna work here!” the kid chimes in with a mouthful of candy.

“Don’t you say that you little bitch!” the man from below screams, “God damn it, man, don’t listen to them!”

“Do you have a quarter, mithter?” the girl says, “I want to feed the offith man.”

“Don’t beg, honey,” the woman says, “That makes you just like the people here.”

“I don’t mind,” I tell her, searching my pockets, “I’m just happy that this… that I was confused.”

(“You’re not confused, fucker! Get me out of here!”)

“Isn’t this a little… intense for a kid?” I ask as the girl puts the quarter in a slot near the rail and turns a crank.

“Nothing worse than what she hears on the radio these days.”

A doughnut rolls out of a machine above the recessed habitat and hits the man below. He shrieks and shakes crumbs from his wispy blonde hair.

“You’re going to be okay?” the woman asks. The girl tugs at her hand, begging to move on to the next exhibit.

“Yeah,” I say, “Yeah… I just got caught up for a second.”

“You’re not the first,” she says, “The police get calls from here all the time, so if it’s going to weigh on your conscience, you might as well give it a try.”

“I’m fine,” I insist, and I pocket my phone to drive the point home.

The ‘Man-Zoo’ is not a good place for me in my current condition. I wait until they’re gone and turn to go back out the way I came but the guy calls from below.

“You still up there, man?”

I peer over the ledge and see he’s collected the broken remains of the doughnut on his desk.

“She told you to go ahead and call them, right? She told you to call the police because they get this shit all the time but they don’t, god damn it. It’s just another part of the play they’ve got. It’s called reverse psychology.”

“I know what reverse psychology is.”

“What’s the harm in calling the police? Either she’s right, and they know to expect this sort of thing, or I’m right and you’re saving a life. You’re bringing down this shithole. What’s the harm?”

“I get what you’re saying,” I tell him, feeling the vague uneasiness return, “But I really can’t get involved with the police right now.”

“Just call them and bail. They don’t need to know it’s you.”

“They can track my phone…”

“So-fucking-what? You’re the hero of this hypothetical. Just call!”

“I’ll… I’ll call from a payphone after I leave,” I tell him, backing away, “That way it’s anonymous.”

“You think I haven’t heard that?” The man’s yelling again. “You think I haven’t heard that same spineless…”

Eventually the man’s voice is too distant to make out or, possibly, he stops yelling. He sold me on the shtick, right? No need to keep up the show after I’m gone.

An actor, I tell myself.

A good actor with a job that pays him for doing what he loves.

-traveler

Suppose the path is a circle, like the movement-activated room at the ‘Voice Depository.’

Bear with me.

Suppose there is a place with paths, two paths or a hundred paths- it doesn’t matter. Suppose there are paths and every path is a circle and every circle is the same but bigger or smaller, depending on how it is layered. Look:

Any two people walking the same direction on any one path at the same speed will never meet, though, possibly, they will walk in each other’s shadows. And any two people, constantly in each other’s shadows, are walking on a small path which, considering the nested nature, must be nearer the center. Look:

So, what are the implications of the path and the all-seeing eye? What is the implication of the center, assuming it is not simply a pit but the paths layered so thickly as to be inseparable from each other? Can it be that the stranger and I are so close to the center as to be nearly touching, or that the longer and short paths around us are so close that he has learned to move between them?

Things became strange, reader. At some point, somewhere along the way, things became strange and I wonder if that’s because I’m on a path so short in circumference that normal things have to squeeze in with their shadows just to fit. It would have to be a short path, or else the likelihood of the stranger and I running into each other…

Maybe it isn’t the shortness of the circle, but the dizziness that comes from walking it over and over again. If not dizziness, then attention to detail, an understanding of nuances for having seen the same things over a hundred times. If not nuance- a runaway imagination. An unhealthy man with an unhealthy hobby.

This trip has not been good to me. It has not been healthy. Ambiguous ends do not well justify such taxing means but, now that I have started, I’m not sure how to end with any sort of grace.

It’s hard to believe there isn’t something out there- an answer, a wall, a god. The enormity of the universe, the emptiness of space, the circular nature of time, the relative silence of late evening- they all seem to suggest otherwise. ‘Sorry to disappoint,’ they say, ‘This is it.’

But it’s hard to believe them.

-traveler

What a relief it was, as a child, to be through with our parents’ insistence on medicine, to mistake relative wellness for health. It is a truth of adulthood, that sickness is a river and health is the rope-bridge that we navigate above it, a bridge that weakens invariably over the years, a bridge that we inexpertly patch each time a plank gives way and we fall through. We wish for medicine, then, we would take it eagerly, no matter how sickly sweet, no matter how it catches in our throats. until there is no medicine left on earth that can strengthen us. We wish for medicine when we realize that the river will certainly outlive the bridge, when we realize that, even if the river dries, well, it’s still a long way down.

I cling to my medicine, a long-familiar dosing that keeps me going even in the good times. I dip a little more, for the pain, and find it difficult to return to the old measure. A dip becomes a pit and I am lost for a while, there, in the darkness.

‘It’s an effective gimmick, that you find the door of the ‘Voice Depository’ locked, that the only indication of how to proceed is a plastic ring, dangling from a short piece of string where a bell would normally be. A hesitant pull opens the door and elicits the entry message, delivered in a voice one might attribute to a world-weary six-year old.

‘I’m sleeeeepeee…’

The ‘Voice Depository’ is a collection of sound-boxes, torn from dolls and plush animals and arranged as an interactive exhibit. The self-guided tour reads like a gentle conversation with an elderly neighbor- a series of confused memories with occasional points of intense clarity. Niche sects of modern day pagans claim the voices can be read like a scattering of bones or cold dregs of tea. They have published their own ‘suggested’ walkthroughs, tailored to questions you might have for the mournful boxes and their seemingly disparate messages.’

There is nobody to greet me at the information desk just inside the door. A sign, there, informs me that the ‘Voice Depository’ is run by volunteers and that, this week, I am being hosted by ‘Gray Fellowship, #103.’ I stand, for a moment, to see if anybody will object to my entering and, when nobody does, I take a pamphlet and push through an aged turnstile.

The ‘Voice Depository’ categorizes its collection by ‘activation method’ and, within each section, attempts to arrange the pieces chronologically by suspected manufacture date. The collection in the ‘strings’ room hangs from a high ceiling, each box hovering a yard or so above its corresponding sign. I pull one at random:

“My name is Billllll.”

The height difference isn’t much but it’s enough that the voice, already slowed with age, seems to retract ominously as it speaks, floating, as it were, toward the ceiling. I retrieve a crumpled piece of yellow paper from my pocket, notes I made regarding the bitter online disputes of the pagans, and see if Bill’s voice features in any of their claims. It does not.

Much is said about a particular area of this room, where five boxes hang confusedly over four signs and one hangs an inch or so above the rest. The outlier is clearly old, its string cut and knotted together in several places and its song-voice worn down like a rock in a stream. I pull it and hear a deep, slow verse:

‘III fellll for youuu…

Like rain upon the roooad.

I wait in puddles…

Until you can be told.’

I pull it again:

‘III fell throoough…

The lane where it erooodes

I stay in trouble…

Under the dusty roooad.’

This is the heart of everything written about the ‘Voice Depository,’ the varied interpretations of what the particularly old boxes say and whether they say the same thing each time. Neither of my recordings are particularly unique, in fact, this box is referred to as the ‘Lost Lover’ by those committed enough to name them. I pull a few more (Good morning, mommy!) for the sake of saying I had (We’re BEST friends!) but find nothing particularly inspiring among them (Looks like trouble over the ridge…).

I look up, far up, into the confused mess of string at the center of the ceiling. There is supposed to be a hidden box there, a box called…

“That’s a myth!” someone says behind me, an older man in a jean shirt and a leather vest. “The ‘Devil’s Voicebox,’ right? Never been there.”

“You’re the volunteer on duty?”

“Yep. Carl’s my name, member of the One-Oh-Three Grays.”

“Bike club?” I guess.

“Sort of,” he says, “Gray Road Theorists believe that certain roads in the U.S.-”

I should have known better- it’s a safe bet to assume any gray-themed fraternity is one of their bunch. Luckily, Carl’s not an evangelist.

“Your voicebox, though, that’s a myth. I suppose you’ve already tried out this little guy-”

‘I’ll tell youuuu…

The pain I have bestowed.’

“I got that one,” I tell him, “Just looking around.”

“Well I’m off my smoke break now in case you need anything.”

Carl trudges off as the Lost Lover ends his third rendition, rising just a little over its brethren.

The button room, which displays the innards of squeezy-type toys, hold little of interest. A lot of laughing, a couple burps, all noises you might expect of things made to be coddled. One stands out from my notes, a box that is supposed to scream, but sounds, to me, like staticky laughter run through fading wires. We hear what we want to hear, I suppose.

I brace myself before entering the room of movement activation. Inside are the boxes of toys that look out for you, that activate when you walk by. This is the room of tea leaves, as it were, because walking directly to the center, rather that following the roped path, puts you in range of all of the exhibits at once and, well, I think witchylady33 will say it better than me:

‘There, in the cacophony of child-speak, your future unfurls.’

I don’t believe in much. Things I expect to happen often don’t and, just as often, it seems, things I hope wouldn’t happen, do. I don’t know that my experience in the wayside has prepared me or made me a better person or worn me down or made me humble. I look back on my own writing, a year’s worth, now, and wonder if I have changed at all or if I carry on much as I did- the same person in different places.

I hold my breath and step into the room, directly into the center, and I wait and hear nothing at all and I continue to hold my breath and wait until it becomes clear that nothing is the only thing that is going to happen. I am in the middle of a round room and a hundred little boxes eye me with their sensors and say nothing.

And, in the silence, something occurs to me.

-traveler

‘The niche success earned by a handful of ‘dining in the dark’ eateries has had the unfortunate effect of inspiring several businesses with less suitable models to turn off the lights and hope for the best. For most, this spelled the embarrassing end of an already-failing enterprise but ‘Ma’s Midnight Petting Zoo,’ with a name better suited for a swinger’s club, has proved the plucky underdog of the bunch.

‘Ma’s’ survives, in part, by cultivating an air of mystery, mixing a little ‘peeled grapes are eyeballs’ in with their ‘interacting with nature is important’ mission statement. This also serves to downplay the real mysteries. Who is Ma and how does she maintain an omni-presence on all tours? How are so many animals represented in a building that, judging from the outside, couldn’t allow for more than a thousand square feet? And what exactly is the nature of these animals, given that nobody has ever seen one enter or exit the zoo?’

‘Ma’s Midnight Petting Zoo’ opens with an airlock-type room, a room that you enter and are stuck in until the door behind you shuts and casts you into darkness before the door in front of you, leading to the lobby, unlocks with a subtle click.

‘This is fun,’ I tell myself, fumbling forward to the second door, ‘This is part of the experience.’

With the second door closed behind me I stand, in further darkness, and breathe quietly until I notice the breathing of someone else in the room.

“Hello?” I ask, and young woman’s voice responds.

“Oh!” she says, “Sorry, I didn’t see you come in!”

There’s a second’s pause before she speaks again.

“We’re trying that joke out. How was it?”

“Apt,” I tell her, toeing my way forward, “But it might be better to let people know where you are.”

“That’s what I said,” she continues, “Let me sing you to the counter.”

The woman sings a nursery rhyme I don’t know and I follow the voice with my arms outstretched, grasping at her like some malicious, creeping spirit. I stumble several times on obstacles that are not there but always manage to catch myself in the spinning darkness. Eventually I bump into something solid and the woman ends her song.

“Did you bring a friend?” she asks.

I reach back behind me, suddenly, sure that the stranger is there.

Nothing.

“It’s just me,” I tell her, “Why?”

“Pleasantries,” she says, “That’s fifteen dollars, then.”

I have my credit card halfway out of my wallet when the woman stops me.

“Cash only. We have a sign here but, well…”

I put the card back and try, in vain, to suss out differences between the bills by touch alone.

“You can just hand some to me,” the young woman offers after a polite silence, “My name is Elle, by the way.”

“You’re wearing night-vision goggles or something?” I ask, blindly holding the money ahead of me.

“No,” she says, “See?”

Elle’s hand appears on mine and she brushes her face across the underside of my wrist. The unwelcome intimacy is relieved, in part, by a quick return to business as she plucks the bills from my hand and types loudly on a cash register.

“Your eyes adjust,” she says, leading my fingers to the change, “It takes a while, but your eyes adjust.”

Elle sings me to the entrance of the zoo, a less intuitive process that involves my keeping her voice exactly behind my back as I move toward another door. When I find it, Elle’s singing drops off and she yawns.

“There’s a guide rail just inside and to the left,” she says, “Keep your hand on that and move forward. Ma will catch up to you in there and give you a little information about the animals.”

“Are there normally more people here?” I ask, but she does not respond.

“Elle? Hello?”

No answer.

I take a breath and exhale.

The heavy smell of a barnyard greets me on the other side of the door. I find the guide rail and wait, uncomfortably listening to the small noises of a hundred living things. When I tap my finger, something huffs in the dark nearby and I feel the inquisitive sniffs of some creature on my hand. I recoil, and am lost.

“That’s Henry,” a voice says, “He’s our resident goat. Must like what you had for lunch.”

“I haven’t eaten lunch,” I say.

“Must like you, then. Why don’t you find the rail and we’ll continue.”

It takes me a moment, the guide rail seeming further away than I moved. Back in position, the invisible goat takes to sniffing my hand again and Ma lets me stand there, experiencing it.

“Why don’t you give old Henry a pat?” she says after a while, and I oblige. The goat takes to dodging my hand, relatively uninterested in it as an active entity. “That’s good,” Ma says, “Walk a little further.”

It’s impossible to tell where exactly in the room Ma is speaking from. It doesn’t sound like a PA system; her voice comes softly, always a step ahead or a step behind -far enough that I raise my voice when I speak to her, close enough that I worry I’ll step on her feet.

“This is our bunny box,” Ma says, stopping me again, “The softest thing you’ll ever feel.”

I reach forward and feel around to no avail. I’m about to speak up when a familiar snuffling appears on my hand.

“Henry?” Ma asks, “What are you doing there you silly goat? Are you looking for another pat on the head?”

Ma is quiet for a long time before I realize she’s waiting on me. I pat Henry’s head and continue.

“We like to have a little laugh early on,” Ma says, “A couple’a friendly jokes before we get to these scaley fellas. It’s mostly families through here, not big guys like yourself who probably don’t worry so much about putting their hand in a box of snakes in the dark. Just little garters, that’s all.”

I reach forward and immediately feel the head of a curious goat.

“Well! Our friend Henry likes your pats like he likes his carrots- plentiful! Speaking of which, we’ve got some carrots waiting there if you want to give him a little treat. Just a little to your right and about waist height on a tall guy like yourself.”

I grope around, frustrated, until I find the box and reach inside. Something there moves across my fingers and I jump back.

“There’s those snakes!” Ma says, “Guess poor Henry will have to go without for today.”

“I think I’m ready to go,” I say, addressing the room at large, “I’ve… got to be somewhere.”

“You don’t want to meet the others?”

“How many goats do you have in here to meet?”

“Well!” Ma scolds, “If you’re going to be a sourpuss go ahead and follow the guide rail a little further, turn left when it splits and then right again following that. It’s the shortcut we use when the little ones need the restroom.”

I navigate the dark maze of guide rails, a process that seems to take a long time, that winds me through a place that seems too large. After a while, Ma cuts in to guide me again.

“Slow down, now,” she warns, “You’re just about there and we wouldn’t want you to run smack into that door! The release lever is in the center, a fire-door if you know the type. Just a press on that and you’re home free!”

I try, for several seconds, to find the door but my outstretched fingers reach nothing so I take a few careful steps forward. After another second, I feel a sniffling on my fingertips.

“Henry!” Ma exclaims, “You little trickster!”

I am trapped, here.

-traveler

What does it mean that I’m always behind the stranger?

‘The ‘Franklin County Rex’ is one of many tyrannosaurus statues that haunt the United States’ vast and tangled highway system. Its feet and underbelly make up a microcosm of graffiti, layers of evolving and conflicted styles, but its upper body has always borne the same message, ‘Sick? Send for Tyrannis!’ the slogan for an out-of-business medical consultancy and a phonetic butchering of the state’s motto.

Longtime residents of Franklin County insist that the ‘Franklin County Rex’ is on the move, that it is nearer, now, to St. Albans than it has been at any time in the past. That St. Albans is more likely expanding toward the statue is not an acceptable explanation for those that favor the myth. They are happy to show you sepia pictures of the ‘Rex’ in near isolation and pictures now of the ‘Rex’ at twilight, when some of the city’s notable (and historical) buildings can be viewed as silhouettes on the horizon. The King of Vermont has expressed, on several occasions, a dislike of the statue, calling it an eyesore.’

The ‘Franklin County Rex’ is burning, to the extent that anything made of cement can burn. Its paint cracks in the heat and there is a fleeting illusion of scales. A small crowd, a very small crowd, has gathered upwind of the smoke to watch the Fire Department’s attempt to stay the flames. It isn’t going well; the statue burns with unnatural ferocity.

“Must be something in the paint.”

“Arson, no doubt.”

“Stupid high school kid’s idea of a prank.”

What do they put up when a statue dies?

No, wait.

What does it mean to always be a step behind the stranger and why is his shadow so thick and why does it stand at odds with other, more conventional shadows? I have started to wonder if it isn’t all related somehow, if, being metaphorically behind the stranger means being literally in his shadow, and if his shadow is literally so thick, if it isn’t also figuratively a hindrance. I wonder how far a man his size can cast a shadow, and if he casts it like a spell or like a flat stone across a still lake.

There is a crack and the ‘Franklin County Rex’ shifts forward.

The gathered crowd gasps and murmurs. The Rex has moved; it approaches St. Albans after all. I forget the stranger, for a moment, and his shadow lifts.

The statue falls forward, the brittle cement of the ankles giving out under the weight of its body. It breaks into several pieces, each extremity tugging out its own portion of an ancient rebar skeleton from the torso. The fire finally begins to die down (“Probably the dust.”) and the crowd disperses. The stranger’s shadow re-forms like a storm cloud over my head in a sky that is already very dark.

-traveler

‘If you take the time to stop and wipe the scum away from the sign that welcomes you to Willow, you will see it boasts a population of 10,000: a tremendous number, considering the circumstances. The circumstances are rain- yearly, unending drizzle, a precipitation that has continued uninterrupted since the town’s inception, nearly 200 years ago.

The local language is gallows humor, the temperament, gray. It is humid in the summers and dreadfully cold in the winters: a soft, wet cold that almost freezes in January. Almost freezes, but doesn’t. Do not expect the lush grace of the tree if you plan to visit Willow. Expect the mild unpleasantness of a sip of water from a glass that has been sitting out too long.’

It is not raining when I arrive in Willow and the people are in some sort of giddy panic. Schools have let out for the occasion, restaurants and shops are closed. Those that remain open seem roundly abandoned, their employees standing outside to look up, up at a sky that remains dark and cloudy, but does not rain.

My motorcycle is loud, normally, but it is louder in the streets of Willow. People notice me and the awkward way I have to hold on to the broken configuration of my handlebars and because there is so little traffic on the road, their eyes follow me a long, long way. I find an inconspicuous park and pull in there, cutting the engine in time to hear a distant drumming of thunder.

Light is not friendly to Willow, it highlights a century of grime in the crooks and corners of things. Earthworms wriggle uncomfortably in the grass underneath a sagging wooden play place. Moss hangs off every surface, a crawling ecosystem in its own right. The air is thick and wet and still, the ground: spongy.

I walk for a while and have nearly reached Willow’s main street before I decide that the shocked stupor of the people around me leans toward a tentative happiness and not the foreboding I had mistakenly attributed it to. A kid rattles down the sidewalk past me on a brightly colored bike, two men smile quietly on a bench, and a group of teens gather around a card game outside a café, jeering at each other and laughing. The people of Willow could not be strangers to dryness, their town is not so big that they couldn’t drive a short ways for an hour’s reprieve, but it’s something else entirely to see your own home in a new light, and the locals here are experiencing that today.

The owner of ‘Wade’s Wetware,’ Wade himself, has declared a spontaneous sale for the afternoon- 20% off everything in the store, but I seem to be the only interested shopper.

“You must think we’re crazy,” he says, ringing me up for a motorcycle poncho, “We haven’t had a dry day here in generations, maybe.”

“I don’t think-”

There is yelling outside or, if not yelling, some sort of reaction en masse. Wade and I are at the windows of his shop in time to see a hole stretching open in the clouds, clear and blue. A thick column of sun appears through the gap, almost tangible in the thick mists of Willow. Beside me, Wade is mesmerized; his face and fingers dirty the glass.

“Never thought I’d see something like that,” he says, “Sunlight on city hall.”

People are falling in love with Willow, their dirty little town, staring at the chapel’s stained glass and the color of drab flowers back in the park. I wipe off the seat of the bike, wet from the air, not the rain, and make my way out again.

Rain begins to fall just as I near Willow’s border, and I wonder what repercussions a couple hours of sun will have. None, I would hope, but we don’t normally shine a light on a thing for the better.

-traveler

“Well, we had been walking most of the day at that point- totally off-trail through thick jungle. Like nothing you would see stateside. It was hot, our packs were heavy, and we were more than a little lost. But we keep seeing her- this old grandma elephant, anytime we come to a place open enough to let her through. Our guide, he didn’t speak much English, but he explained the elephants had trails all throughout the jungle. He said it was dangerous, that he didn’t normally take foreigners along them, but that we seemed like we knew how to handle ourselves.…”

“What was he worried about? Leopards or something? Snakes?”

“Poachers. They’ve got a law down here, anybody can kill poachers on sight. Poachers act in kind.”

“Jesus.”

“So, we started down this trail the elephants took and that same old elephant appeared ahead of us. ‘She watching us,’ our guide said, ‘See if we the bad men.’ He said we should follow her, but keep some distance. She saw us there and started to speed up but every time we thought she might be trying to lose us, she would be around the bend, waiting to see if we were still there.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It gets better. The sun was starting to set and our guide didn’t want us to be out much longer. We convinced him to go a little further, even though we hadn’t seen the elephant in nearly an hour. I was sore, man. My arms were sore from kayaking in- I found out later I was walking with a concussion from before- but how often do you get a chance like that? Finally, we came to a clearing and she was there! She had a whole family with her, she was the oldest, but there were a couple little ones there too.”

“Aww.”

“Well, I say little, but they definitely came up to my chest. ‘She invite us,’ the guide said, and we stepped into the clearing. ‘Old lady knows the bad men,’ he told us, and he showed us where the old elephant had been shot and survived.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Well, they had found their place in the jungle. We stayed for about an hour and just watched the little ones warm up and chase each other around. The ‘old lady’ even took some of our bananas and shared them with the rest. I don’t know a lot about religion, but out there in the jungle with those giants, that was the closest I’ve ever felt to God.”

‘It is a mistake to assume that hardship makes one event worthier than another and, yet, it is difficult to speak of successes without detailing a painful journey that preceded them. Perhaps it is endemic to all hostels, but ‘Wander Haven,’ with its oozing pipes and creaking floors, reliably brings these stories to the forefront of the weary traveler’s mind. It is a place that would attract no customers in a sane world but, because a night there has been dubbed a ‘rite of passage,’ it seems to thrive.

The author’s experiences lead him to believe that a hard-earned success and a lucky one are equal on all scales except by judgement of strangers. There is an amount of masochism that is expected among travelers and establishments like ‘Wander Haven,’ which exist to satisfy some need for self-affliction, fuel it. It is this publication’s view that pissing contests should be avoided when possible, particularly when victory amounts to passing the greatest number of stones.’

The ‘Wander Haven’ is truly unapologetic, selling a variety of ‘I survived…’ type merchandise at the desk and charging about as much as a low-tier motel. In its poorly ventilated common room, I huddle, in a corner, over my copy of Shitholes and unabashedly eavesdrop on the large gathering two tables over. It is the convergence of several traveling groups, of everybody who has walked into this room but me. They are young, younger than me, and pretty, prettier than me. They are dirty in the way travelers are often dirty, but they are energetic and they are optimists. Their light shines brightly against the dismal shadows of the ‘Wander Haven.’

I am drunk.

“I’ve hated every jungle I’ve been to,” a woman says, replying to the young man, “They’re stifling. Can’t see shit.”

The young man shrugs. He seems to enjoy hearing her swear.

“I’ve been back in the states all of a month,” she continues, scratching at a tattoo on her ankle, “And it’s fucking stifling here, too. In the three months before that, the only time I had something over my head was when it got too cold to sleep outside a tent. Give me the stars back!” she finishes dramatically.

“How was the trekking?”

“Fuck,” she says, “Hard. It started out hard and I told myself it would get easier but it just got harder. Each time you finish a climb you hear about something just a little higher with a view that’s just a little better. I met some guys along the way and we decided to do a climb one of them had done before. ‘Who needs a guide?’ they said, ‘There’s only one way to go.’”

“You got lost.”

“An understatement. We turned off a trail and got on the wrong ridge, ended up fucking tip-toeing across with a wall on one side and a sheer cliff on the other. Rain came in, as you might expect. Soaked the tents before we could get them covered. Rain became hail, hail became snow and it got cold. I was colder that night than I’d ever been. Everything was wet, nothing would burn. I put on every dry piece of clothing I had and hoped the water wouldn’t come up over the mattress and into my sleeping bag.”

“But you survived.”

“That’s not the end of it. I finally fell asleep, fucking shivering, and I wake up in the middle of the night to this creaking. No wind, no trees nearby. My brain’s trying to piece the thing together and just as I realize it’s one of my poles bending under the fucking snow, the whole thing collapses on top of me. I end up crawling into the guys’ two-person tent, you bet they fucking loved that.”

“And you still miss it?”

“Well, the next morning the sun came up and I got out of that fucking stuffy tent as fast as I could. I stepped out into the snow and the sun and I was finally fucking warm. Up on that peak you could see for miles- not a cloud in the sky. The mountains around us were white from the storm, the sky was bright blue, and there probably wasn’t another person in three miles.”

“And you saw God in the mountains?” someone jokes, jabbing the elephant guy.

“God was in the fucking storm.”

A solemn sort of quiet passes as the group seems to let out a collective breath. One of the men, at the far end of the table, breaks the silence.

“You don’t really notice the character of places until you’ve gone through something like that, huh?” he asks, “You just take shitty situations personally and shut down to whatever might be redeeming about them. How many people would walk into the lobby of this place and just walk back out without ever giving it a chance?”

They all nod and I take a drink from my water bottle, thinking it’s time to start on the road to sober. The water goes down wrong and I choke and cough and make a scene in the relative quiet that had existed in the room before. When I’m able to breathe again I turn to see everyone looking my way.

“You want to join us, man?” the elephant guy asks after a moment.

“No…” I sputter, “I should head to bed.”

“You look like a guy with a few stories.”

“Not me,” I tell him, “I live a pretty… straightforward life.”

“I saw you come in on that bike parked out front,” the mountain woman insists, “What happened to your handlebars?”

“Stupid driving,” I tell her, “And a sharp turn.”

“You race?” she asks, and I sigh.

“On that thing? Look, I was checking out this stretch of road a few hundred miles east of here that’s supposed to be, uh, shorter than it is. I’d taken it a few times because, well, in order to disprove something you’ve got to show your work and I kept cutting milliseconds off my expected drive time.”

“You think this road is like a teleporter or something?”

“Not me,” I insist, “But some people think something kind of like that.”

I look around the table and see I’ve already lost a few of them but, because the blonde guy is still listening, I continue:

“So, some of the people reporting this said that if you take the curve just right, you hit this series of little bumps and divots that reverberate up through the wheels and sound like a song- they build highways like that in Japan I think. Anyway, that’s supposed to trigger it.”

Even the blonde guy is starting to look doubtful now.

“Long story short,” I say, “I thought I had finally gotten it right, like, there was this rhythm just on the edge of the road that sounded like a song coming up the spokes of the bike. I thought I had gotten it right…”

And then I was somewhere else entirely.

“And then… uh, a squirrel ran out. I stupidly, well, you know…”

“Nothing stupid about that,” blonde guy says, “You’re out there long enough and you realize that the lives of animals are as sacred as our own.”

“Yeah…” I say, running my hands through my hair, “Yeah…”

“Where’d you hear about that road?” mountain woman asks, but a door slams above us before I can answer.

There are frantic footfalls in the stairway before another woman bursts in and runs to blonde guy.

“There’s something in the wall up there,” she says, “Like a fucking mold dog!”

“It’s probably just a spider…” he croons, but she hold up a boot that looks like it could have spent a year on the side of the road.

“It ate my fucking boot, Donny, it’s not a fucking spider.”

“It came out of the wall?” I ask, “Through a hole about a foot across?”

“Have you seen it?”

“Something like it.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Leave it the boot,” I say, standing to go, “And tell the story when it’s been long enough to be funny.”

-traveler

I lose another tooth along the way- a sharp turn on the bike and my face on the handlebars. There are scrapes and bruises too, but the tooth… I don’t find it. Its brothers are shaken and they ache.

God, they ache.

The stranger does not call immediately. He was shaken too- his shaking shakes me. A veritable earthquake. I drive uneasily after that. Too slow on a motorcycle is just as dangerous as too fast. You have to believe in the physics of the thing to make a turn- lean in a way that should make you fall, steer in the opposite direction, and have faith that this time will be just like the last. You won’t fall, you will turn the right way, you will straighten out.

If you don’t believe, it might not happen.

‘‘Paradise Row’ breaks from the horizon like the sun, the tip of its discount plastics store man and earth’s middle finger to the sky. You will have known it was ahead of you, the gargantuan outlet mall advertises for miles in every direction as though anybody traveling this particular strip of road could choose to miss it entirely.

If a capitalist system were to be given the traits of a living thing, ‘Paradise Row’ would undoubtedly be somewhere near the end of the digestive tract, a place where waste accumulates for its last wringing of nutrients. ‘Paradise Row’ is the where capitalism tries to sell the people its poop, and where people flock to consume that poop, to pay money for it.’

Spite and necessity keep me from taking the author’s point to heart. The botched turn tore open the right leg of my last pair of jeans and the hodgepodge safety pins I had on hand won’t last. Why not feed the beast, author? Even your book has a price on the cover.

I putter into the parking lot at ‘Paradise Row,’ busy for a Wednesday afternoon, and spend a moment weighing my options on a map. Outlet malls, in my experience, are just strip malls dialed up a couple notches. They lack the comforts of a true mall: a roof, a reliable layout, a place to buy sugary pretzels. The map more or less confirms my suspicions. I settle on a place a few stores down, a place called ‘JEANS & Co.’ because jeans are exactly what I need and I’m curious, too, about what sort of company they keep.

The shoppers at ‘Paradise Row’ don’t much like the look of me. My face is still swollen from the lost tooth, my clothes are tattered beyond what is fashionable, and my pack is a transient’s tumor, stuffed and edged with my whole life’s possessions. I would have chafed at this attention earlier in my journey, but I have formed callouses.

And I have medicated myself, following the crash.

A little something extra until the pain passes and the swelling is down, that’s all. I tug at my shirt pocket, where the comb case was before. An old habit, dying slowly. Or, maybe, a present habit, losing a vestigial limb.

Still, I feel a growing uneasiness under the medicated fog as I wander along the sidewalk toward ‘JEANS & Co.’ The stores of ‘Paradise Row,’ I notice, do not have windows, or, they do have windows, but they seem to be obscured from the inside.

I pause near a water fountain and pretend to read another map. There are lines at the front of each store and, given their turn, shoppers seem to open the doors carefully and just enough to squeeze inside. Those who exit are red-faced and harassed- they stumble out onto the cement and brush off an invisible dust.

A man approaches me at the map, he is dressed in a light blue polo with ‘Paradise Row’ embroidered tastefully on the breast. This is a man that tucks his shirt in- not a man to cross lightly.

“Hi there, sir! Have you heard about today’s sales?”

“No,” I say. Another man pushes into the store behind him.

“I’ve got a brochure here,” he says, “Coupons worth a total of $300 and all redeemable at ‘Paradise Row!’”

“For ‘JEANS & Co.?’”

“Sure! Buy one pair, get the other half off. Looks like you could use a new pair!” he laughs.

I make a point not to smile and the man holds out one of the brochures, as blue as the shirt he wears. I reach out to take it and I tug once, twice, but he holds it tightly in his hand. I look up to see he is staring at me, staring intently into my eyes. He reaches out with his left hand before I can withdraw my right. I feel his grip on my wrist- hard and meaningful and maybe even painful. It’s difficult to be sure of pain in this state. The man holds my arm dearly and we both hold the brochure. He trembles with a whole-body rigidity and then releases me all at once.

“You know what to do now,” he says, his voice sincere, hardly a whisper.

He tips an invisible hat and turns back to greet others. I put some distance between myself and the man before I flip through the brochure. The coupon for jeans is near the back, part of a full-page advertisement for the place.

‘We’ve Moved!’ it says, and the accompanying illustration shows a pair of cartoon jeans striding to the center of the complex, the inner layer of ‘Paradise Row.’ In this simplified overview of the mall, free of branding and logos, I notice what I hadn’t before. The complex consists of two circles, one inside the other.

The all-seeing-

“Hi, sir!” a woman says, “Have you heard about-”

I stalk quickly away, pretending not to have seen her, and I keep the brochure visible in my hands, hoping it will ward off the others.

The windows of ‘JEANS & Co.,’ like those of the other stores, betray little of what is to be expected inside and I hesitate behind the man waiting at the door.

“Is there some sort of sale going on?” I ask, trying my best to appear less drugged-out and road-rashed than I am, “What’s with all the lines?”

“Whoa, buddy!” the guy jumps a little as he turns.

“Sorry, I turned over on my-”

“You’ve got a full booklet there, my man,” he says, pointing to the brochure, “Still got all your deals in there?”

“Uh… yeah.”

“Razor World? Scooter World? Food court tickets?”

“I haven’t used any of them…”

“Not your free scoop at ‘The Lil’ Creamery?’ Your spin on the ‘Deal Wheel?’”

“No man…” I tell him, “I’m just here for some pants.”

“How do you like cutting lines?” he asks.

We are the only two people outside this store.

“Like… go in before you?”

“Yeah,” he says, “Like that.”

“And you want…”

“Your booklet,” he says, quickly.

My hand tightens absurdly around the brochure.

“Half the booklet,” he says, “No, the whole thing- but you keep your coupon for jeans.”

“I… want the ice cream too.”

“I’ve got a daughter at home, man.”

“Ice cream and pants or no deal.”

“Fine,” he says, “Fine. Jeans are at the end, ice cream’s on page 4. The rest is mine.”

The man watches greedily as I flip through the brochure and find my coupons and he punctuates my fumbling attempts to tear them out with nervous hisses.

“Don’t rip the barcodes,” he reminds me, “Watch the expiration date.”

When I’ve finished, I hand him the booklet with the tips of my fingers, fearing a repeat of the last time, but the man grabs the paper and ushers me ahead to the door.

“You’re a thin guy,” he says, walking away, “You might be able to squeeze in now if you try.”

When he’s rounded a corner I turn to the door and prepare to heave it open, having watched others struggle with an apparent weight. A sort of luck means that my body is in the way when the door swings open easily and a tall stack of denim, that had been relying on the door for support, begins to topple toward me. I catch it as a muffled voice from inside reaches me.

“You need to pay for your merchandise before you can leave sir!”

I hold the tower carefully and scooch inside, carefully pulling the door closed behind me. It is a tight fit and as my elbow digs into another, more solid pile of folded jeans, I hear someone groaning from the other side.

“Careful over there,” she says, “I’ve barely got room to breathe as it is.”

‘JEANS & Co.’ is a denim sea. It is difficult to navigate, more swamp than maze but certainly taking cues from both. I wade carefully between blue pillars, navigate under acid-washed arches, and keep my distance from other shoppers, who eye me suspiciously through torn legs and open flies. I lose sight of the door, of any wall that is not fabric. Occasionally the ceiling disappears as well. I hear a screaming but, by the time I reach what I suspect is its origin, the screaming has stopped and there is nothing but a ragged pair of knee-length cut-offs and a handful of human hair.

I find two pairs that fit, trying them on in a secluded alcove near a drooping rack of overalls. My waist is considerably diminished and I had forgotten the small comfort of well-fitting clothes. I stay in that dark corner of the store for a long while, resting and looking forward to a time when my new pants will be as soft as the weather-worn pair that now clings desperately to my shrunken frame.

-traveler

‘The man will remember me, reader.

The owner of ‘Eats’ is a man that claims to know a great deal, and it is men like this, men who are so caught up in knowing, that they aren’t much aware of the day-to-day details. They forget the names of their drivers, of distant, poorer relations. They forget employee birthdays- not individual birthdays (though they forget those too) but employee birthdays as a concept. They resent being reminded.

Of anything.

Their knowledge becomes a wall between themselves and the world. They carry the wall and speak through it and eventually forget that the voices on the other side are people like them.

It was my intention to include an interview with the owner of ‘Eats’ in this guide but the situation went awry. Suffice to say, the man will remember me.’

It has been a good long time since I have experienced the sort of nervousness that stretches several days, looming like a dark cloud over the landscape of my life. I have been plenty scared- I have been terrified- but terror leaves the body quickly and often with a great rush of relief. Terror gets me out of trouble. Nervousness hangs on me like shackles; it leaves me raw underneath.

It serves no purpose.

I am always nervous when I speak to someone who embodies an approximation of the zeitgeist. It seems, to me, a dangerous thing to align one’s beliefs too enthusiastically with those of the present. Beyond dangerous, it is blindly empowering. A train powers across the earth by the virtue of relying on tracks. It does not need to concern itself with steering, only with how quickly it is moving forward. The nature of a train is such that it will not be able to stop for something laid across the tracks, that leaving the tracks unexpectedly will be necessarily violent and damaging. The nature of the zeitgeist is the same.

I take the author at his word, that the owner of ‘Eats’ will remember something about their run-in, and I decide to continue in his footsteps. The owner’s house is well known about town. Not infamous, exactly, but enough of a local landmark that I don’t seem too suspicious asking. I drive by once before giving the man a call- a real gaudy place, not what I expected at all. A lot of purple paint. A seasonally appropriate flag waving just under the stars and stripes. Looks like Father’s Day is coming up. Who knew?

I call the house and explain I am writing a travel book. I tell the owner, Richard Jones, that I’m writing a travel guide and wanted to feature ‘Eats.’ I tell him it will only take a minute or two.

And he cheerfully agrees.

He doesn’t even ask my name.

I am nervous, reader, and I park my bike several blocks away so that I can build up the nerve to reach the door. I am nervous as I step under the man’s flags, flapping noisily. I hesitate on the stoop but eventually bring my hand to the bell. It rings cheerfully behind the curtained windows.

I wait, nervously.

The warning sound of a patrol car’s siren stops me from ringing it again a moment later. It has appeared in the street like a blue ghost, attentive and unmoving. I turn around and look both ways down the block and then back at the car. Sunlight on the windows obscures the officers inside. I can’t tell, at first, if I’m the suspicious one here.

When I reach for the doorbell again, the siren whoops and the passenger door of the patrol car swings open. A man steps out, an unsmiling police officer. He does not expect that I will run.

And I do.

Terror sends me fleeing through the neighborhood as it has led me through forests, fields, and highways before. I run without looking back and, somehow, manage to escape. I nervously return for my bike some time later and, some time after that, I do a little more research.

Turns out I was visiting Richard’s new place- the one before it burned down a couple years back in an act of arson. The suspect, a man that spoke to Richard shortly before the fire, was not found. The papers published a police sketch, though, and looking at it is like looking into a mirror.

-traveler