Hooked haphazardly into a car battery, the old truck radio flickers and seems to lose power for a moment. After that moment, an answer:
“Have you always thought that a thing must be inside your radio in order to hear it?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I am a projection,” the voice says and I can hear the old chuckle in its tone.
“So why project into my radio? Why did you come back after the drive-in?”
“Because I could.”
“You couldn’t before?”
“Not in a sense.”
“What do you mean by that?”
The radio goes dark again, I am cast into the moonlight. In this, the forest that took the use of my arm, I listen to the wind and to the crickets. The radio cracks and the voice returns.
“Do you know of the town, Boone, in North Carolina?”
“No, is it famous for something?”
“It’s not famous for anything.”
“So why mention it?”
“So, could you have gone to Boone before I told you it was there?”
“Yes.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t know about it.”
“So you could only go to Boone by accident before, and now you can only ever go there knowingly. Now that you know Boone exists, you can go there anytime and as often as you like.”
“You’re not going to explain yourself, are you?”
“There’s not much to explain, owner of the… oh, hmm… I don’t know what to call you; there’s very little to your name anymore.”
“You can call me whatever you want.”
“Well then, traveler,” the voice says, its tone soft and knowing, “Where are we off to next?”
It has been some time, reader. It may not seem that way to you but that is the magic of staggered release. I stagger even now, on a leg that recovers slowly because I can’t seem to keep off it. I type with one functioning arm. Can you tell?
The accident did a number on me and it put my travel on hiatus. It has been three months since I was pulled from the truck and dragged up to the road by a fifteen-year-old driver-in-training and her blood-phobic father and about eight weeks since I slipped out of the hospital, a rattled John Doe to the bitter end. I am the burden of the taxpayers now.
They’ll find me eventually.
At the egging-on of the radio I hid my wallet and my cellphone in the trunk of an old tree they leaned me up against on that fateful night. The truck’s plates are dead-ends, not because I am a mastermind but because I bought it from a man on the internet who didn’t have papers and I never bothered to make up papers of my own. The tags have long expired but nobody cares to check when you drive the speed limit, always just the speed limit, and when you’re white and plain and from a different state.
That’s what I assume, anyway.
My worldly possessions have been reduced once again to the contents of my bag: a copy of ‘Shitholes,’ a flashlight, two pens, and that damn comb. Add to that my cellphone and my wallet, recovered from the tree, and the truck’s disconnected radio, heavy and sharp for all that it’s currently useless. Minus the truck itself, of course. Now I rely on the kindness of others to get around.
There is one more stop, while I’m here:
“‘The Somerset Honey Bucket’ advertises itself like a refinery, its pamphlets featuring well-dressed, middle-aged couples smiling and holding small tasting cups. It would be easy to mistake their beverage of choice for scotch or bourbon, some sort of whisky, literally anything but the truth. The truth is that this is a destination for families with sweet teeth in their genes, for people who want to try their hand at tasting soil quality in a quarter cup of honey. Tour the grounds, cut the sugar with a waffle, and then leave lest you become stuck, stuck like the ghost of its founder.”
Thankfully, ‘The Honey Bucket’ has a bus service to shuttle prospective visitors from town to its estate a few miles on the outskirts. Free of charge. I wait for the bus on a Tuesday afternoon, the matinee, hoping I’ll be on my own.
I’m not.
A few large groups gather, organized and led by a guide. Several couples orbit the denser masses. There are children and the children stare. Everybody looks, but the children look closely. They see me and they know something is wrong.
As soon as I knew I would be back on the road I shaved and cut my hair. I pressed a shirt and dusted off my shoes. In the mirror I thought I could pass as a respectable somebody whose life had recently taken an unexpected turn.
I still look every bit the man who failed to.
My arm is in a sling, dirty since my abrupt departure from treatment. An old gash becomes a new scar over my right eye; I wear a boot and walk like a cartoon pirate. I have taken the next step toward the archetypal drifter, a man whose story is discredited before he even opens his mouth.
And, reader, the man on the book has no scar.
“All aboard,” calls the shuttle driver, a lumberjack behind the wheel.
I jump to the front of the line and then, quickly, to the back of the bus. Despite the crowd, I find I have a seat to myself.
We are not on the road long before I move to scratch under my cast and find my hand coming away from the faux leather with a sticky tug. Pulling up my boot from the floor elicits a tactile ‘snap’ usually reserved for movie theatres and food courts. Nobody else seems bothered, so I try to distract myself with scenes from the window, filtered through a thin yellow tinting on the glass.
As we pull into ‘The Honey Bucket’s’ grounds there is a cacophony of soles twisting on the sticky floor. A child, set into the aisle by his mother, falls on its hands and struggles to right itself. I grimace, inwardly, when it finally stands and pulls a toy to its mouth. I try not to touch anything with my bare skin and still my clothes hold to the seat with the near-imperceptible grip of a sticky-note.
I am the last to leave the bus.
My hand sanitizer is gone, lost in the crash or the slipping away that followed. It is with sticky fingers that I miss it now, compulsively rubbing my hands on my pants and trying to seem inconspicuous in the crowd.
Several employees greet us in the lobby, their shoes pulling noisily on the polished wood. We hover as a group on the entryway rug, avoiding the floor. I feel, at once, validated and concerned.
“Welcome to The Somerset Honey Bucket!” one of the employees says, a woman in her late thirties, “We thought we’d start here with a quick tasting before we get you on the tour.”
The man behind her has a trayful of little plastic cups, each filled with a tablespoon or so of honey. He holds it forward with a little flourish.
“Volunteers?”
There is an obscene amount of hesitancy. I look around and wonder why these people showed up if they weren’t ready to drink honey out of a cup and if they weren’t led here by Shitholes. Maybe this is the low point on some tour package, something a company uses to fill out the odd day in the middle. A mom tries to push a disinterested middle-schooler ahead but he twists back behind her with a practiced movement and goes back to looking at his phone. Someone chuckles self-consciously. Light music plays in the lobby.
“You,” the man says, looking at me of course, “Come try one.”
I look at the others and now, rather than avoiding eye contact, they’re giving me encouraging smiles and little thumbs ups. I smile back, or give a confused frown (difficult to know), and take a resigned step forward. My shoe immediately sticks on the wood and pulls away noisily. I approach the tray and choose a cup at random.
“Ah,” he says, “Interesting choice. This is a top-grade pale amber, looser than what is often available commercially. Some people say a loose honey indicates a lazy queen but that hasn’t been my experience at all. I can introduce you to the bees that made this.”
“Uh,” I say, “Thanks.”
In the time it takes me to offer a good-natured cheers to the crowd behind me the woman steps forward with a metal bowl- a spittoon.
“I’m supposed to spit this in there,” I clarify, and she nods.
There’s a lot wrong with the situation but I am aware enough to see this isn’t the time to point it out.
I take the honey in my mouth and, at the egging-on of the connoisseur, swirl it around. It’s sickeningly sweet and about as consistent as olive oil. Sooner than is probably proper, I spit the stuff into the woman’s bucket and it trails in thick strands between my lips and the metal. I wipe my mouth with my sleeve, too late to see the proffered towel with The Honey Bucket’s logo embroidered near the hem. I cough twice, inhaling some of the honey as I do, and then straighten to give the crowd a watery-eyed thumbs-up.
Go for it, guys.
My jacket is streaked with honey already. I excuse myself to the bathroom while the rest of the guests make their way through the tap’s welcome offering. I rinse out my mouth with water and feel better, despite the broken man in the reflection. A child is crying outside.
The kid’s hair is matted to its head and there is a sticky puddle of honey on the floor. The parents console it but try to keep the screaming youth at a distance that will spare their clothes. Everyone looks uneasy, a few look outright upset.
“So!” the woman says, failing to read the room, “Shall we tour the grounds?”
I mostly ignore the history of Somerset’s honey economy, we all do. They take us through the factory, show us the hive, bring beakers of honey and bees to lights so that we might remark on the incredible purity, the golden yellows and deep ambers of the liquid and on the dainty stripes of the insects. We start to get distracted; the place has honey in the air. Before long we’re covered in a layer of something, something like day-old sunblock and sweat. Everything becomes sticky and our stomachs turn each time our smiling host pulls out a new product to sample. The child cries quietly now, its tears moving thickly and at a snail’s pace.
Faced with mutual suffering, the groups have warmed to me. They spare their skeptical eyes for the Somerset folk and let me trail behind them, just another lost soul in a honey factory.
“And there you have it, everybody,” the woman is saying, “A sweet taste of traditional America. Now, I’d like to open the floor to questions!”
“Who owns this place?” I ask and a man behind me misunderstands my genuine question for a thinly-veiled, ‘let me speak to your manager.’
He lands a jovial thump on my back and then takes a moment to pull his hand free from my jacket. The whole process sends sharp jolts of pain through my shattered bones. He whispers an apology.
“The owner?” the woman asks.
“Yeah.”
“She’s… busy.”
“I wasn’t asking if I could see her, I had just read…”
“She’s outside,” the man blurts out, “Out back. She watches the sunset around this time in her chair. Go on.”
“She’s not…”
“Go on.”
“She’s not dead?”
“Of course she’s not dead,” the woman says, narrowing her eyes at me and continuing to stare as she addresses the crowd: “Any more questions?”
There are no more questions and as we file into the gift shop I find the people have grown wary of me again, wary in response to something in the question I asked. I sneak away while everyone looks over vials of honey and plush bees to take home to their families.
An old woman sits just outside a fire exit, rocking slowly in her chair. She says nothing as I stand next to her, watching the sun set over the orchard. When it finally slips under the horizon, casting us into a translucent twilight, I notice her rocking has stopped. Her chair has stuck to the floor in a backward-leaning position, her legs swing weakly and her eyes just stare and stare ahead.
I quietly grip the back of the chair, and when nothing changes, I gently pull it free, setting her rocking once again. The woman grips the arms of the chair, her thumbs rub nervously on the wicker arms.
“Sun…” she mutters, “Sun like a pancake’s what I used to say.”
“What?” I ask, and she just starts screaming. Screaming and screaming.
Screaming and rocking.
I sneak back around the building to the parking area. I look for a long time at the empty gravel lot. My bus has gone.
There is nothing but static on the radio and I drive that way for a long time, the volume on low and the heat on high. Occasionally I’m encouraged by a ‘pop’ or a ‘click;’ twice there seems to be some sort of background jingle but, with so much white noise, I may be making it up. At least once I definitely hear a man’s voice but my surprise keeps me from understanding what has been said, if anything was said at all.
The way is forested, now, and lonely. It’s just past noon but a gray sky means it might as well be dusk. A rain drop falls every couple minutes, splattering on my windshield. The clouds can’t seem to make up their mind as to whether I’m here or not, as to whether it’s worth raining now or waiting a while for more like me to come.
I wouldn’t mind the rain.
I pass another sign: ‘For Information Tune Radio to 980 AM’
I check the radio, run a pass-through of the 970-990 range, and settle again on 980’s static. The truck has been on cruise control for nearly fifteen minutes as we wander smoothly around gentle curves and over small hills. The radio cracks again, buzzes, and then fades back to static. I tap the dash affectionately. There is no reason to rush.
‘For Information Tune Radio to 980 AM’
‘What kind of information, though? That’s the question you should ask yourself as you drive through Somerset Forest on your way across I-90 and see the many signs and their humble offering. We live in the information age, there are more words in the air than flies, than birds, than leaves falling from the trees. Sometimes we are informed against our will and that may very well be the case for you in Somerset Forest. If you’re reading this, be warned.’
I’m not sure I believe in the idea of forbidden knowledge. Secrets, sure. I understand why people keep secrets. I’ll also accept the idea that there’s plenty of information out there that I don’t necessarily need, that would just take up mind-space and offer no real benefit. Hell, I recognize that some of that information might concern things I’d rather not know; this trip alone has provided a fair share of regrettable experiences. That’s trauma, though, that’s something different entirely. I’m thinking mind-rending knowledge- Book of Genesis type stuff. If we’re talking about an idea that’s universally harmful to the extreme, that can’t be forgotten or rationalized away- I call bullshit.
And I think I’m in a pretty good place to judge.
By all accounts I follow in the footsteps of my future self, led by a book that I am destined to write. Much of what I have seen so far has suggested that the book itself is not a prank, that it has been written honestly and about places that are very real. It could be that my name was attached by the man who handed it to me, that he was able to manipulate a photo for the author credits so that I look more mature and less tired. Cleaner. He could have done the same with any book.
If I’m to assume, though, (and I do, sometimes) that what the man said was true and that a path of some sort has already been laid in front of me… well, you would think that would have taken more of a toll.
The clouds part for the sun and its light filters sideways through the trees. I lower my sunglasses, one hand on the wheel, and squint my eyes against the sudden strobe, the forest’s shadows on the pavement. The road is clear and straight.
I think mortality is the giveaway, or, I agree that it is. I’m certainly not the first to think it. We should be much more fearful of our own mortality than we are; it is inevitable and often more imminent than we assume. We already know that we will die and if that’s not enough to rend minds I doubt anything else can. Humans have evolved to be fantastic endurance runners. Maybe some of that has gone to our head- maybe we run from thoughts too. We are the great rationalizers, our comprehension wired with a kill-switch.
The radio quiets down and I think I hear the man’s voice again. It’s too garbled to make anything out; I raise the volume and slide the tuner back and forth, coaxing the distant-sounding words up and out through the speakers. Without understanding any one word I recognize the sound of a commercial, a tone that only seems to exist in advertisem-
The road pulls out from under the truck, a sudden, sharp turn. The world spins, the sun and the earth orbiting me in mad directions. There is an impact and I’m gone for a while.
Nobody finds me in the meantime.
The sun is setting when I open my eyes again. There is a great deal of pain. The windshield has shattered and a tire rests at an odd angle in front of me. I hang awkwardly in my seatbelt, the truck lying on its passenger side. I reach out and turn off the blinker. The radio still plays static; I hadn’t noticed until now.
My left arm is very broken, my hand draped limply over my stomach. I can’t seem to move any part of it. I try to adjust my shoulder and, when that doesn’t work, I try to pinpoint the trouble. Somewhere, distantly, I recognize that I may have entered shock. I try to remember if that’s something that can be solved, or even recognized, internally. I wouldn’t know where to begin.
A part of my forearm next to the elbow has emerged from the skin. A skeletal part, a great sharp piece of bone. It hurts the moment I see it. I wonder if it shouldn’t hurt more and then it does.
I start to cry.
It’s difficult not to despair, reader. I’ve found it difficult, even under normal circumstances, not to despair.
Circumstances have worsened exponentially.
My truck is as broken as my arm; it, too, holds up its skeleton to the fading light. We are united in a grim toast.
I pass out again.
I recognize the static before anything else. I try to open my eyes and realize they are already open. It has gotten dark, dark except for the dull, back-lit tuner. I remember, suddenly, why I woke up.
Somebody was laughing.
“Hello?” I try to say, the best I can do with a dry throat.
There is nothing. No footsteps or birds or anything.
And then the man’s voice on the radio, lost in the thick static. The tuner has been knocked to the left, its needle hovering near 972 AM. With a great deal of effort, I reach out my hand and adjust it to the right.
“-ggested to approach corners cautiously and to be aware of wildlife that may be crossing the road, particularly at night. Please do not throw cigarette butts or other waste from your windows as you enjoy the natural beauty of Somerset. Thank you for visiting!”
The voice fades into a jingle and then picks up again.
“Welcome to Somerset Forest! You’re tuned to 980-”
I close my eyes. The voice sounds familiar, some D-list celebrity doing charity work for the park service. I run through sitcoms and commercials in my head. I try to remember what audiobooks I’ve listened to recently, what commercials I’ve seen.
“…recommends flashing you lights when approaching dangerously narrow…”
The pain comes back in a burst. I wander in and out of shock. It’s impossible to concentrate- I consider and forget a hundred ways to save myself.
“…recommends flashing…”
My right hand can’t seem to find the seatbelt mechanism. I wonder what the short fall to the passenger side would do to me if I was able to free myself. I take a deep breath and hear the ragged wheeze of my lungs. The truck is quiet, the radio lit but silent. The man’s voice returns after a moment.
“Owner of the blue pick-up,” it says and it chuckles, “Heh, heh, heh.”
It’s difficult to tell how much of this is actually happening.
“Owner of the blue pick-up, why don’t you go ahead and flash those pretty lights of yours?”
‘The Floating Rock State Heritage Site’ represents the wedding of a mystery area’s gimmick and a State Park’s credibility into an attraction that somehow manages to be a little boring. One can only think so long about what anomalous forces must exist to levitate the site’s boulder before remembering that the world is a big, strange place and that small, strange things happen here all the time.’
It takes me no little time to piece together the scene at ‘Floating Rock’ and, as I do, a bitter wind rolls over the landscape. It is winter, somewhere, and that somewhere’s winter has blown all this long way. I pull my jacket tight and huddle into myself.
This is a dry stretch of the earth and very flat, flat until I began to see the boulders which signaled my nearing the site. The floating rock is smaller than its kin, brown and roughly oblong, a meter at its widest. It is not floating, which is why it took me some time to identify the thing. If it weren’t for the signs and folksy illustrations put up by absent rangers, it would have been just another boulder among many.
‘Alex’ is the name carved into the side of the once floating rock where it lay. As far as I can tell it was this act of vandalism that also grounded the rock. I sit, in the dirt, and grow smaller amongst its sisters and brothers so that they can bear the brunt of the wind.
Lethargic ants wind aimlessly, sparse in number and disorganized by the autumn chill. Between them they carry the carcass of some larger insect, a thing I don’t recognize but that fits well enough within the realm of normalcy as to be easily forgotten. I pluck it from them and set it up on a stone like some tiny statue (in memoriam) but then I feel bad and I return it to the ants. They’ve begun to panic and seem unforgiving of my change of heart. They avoid the carcass, rightfully superstitious.
As dusk begins to thicken there is a sound ahead of me. The floating rock wobbles in place, shedding dust from its wounds. Moved by some unknown force, it tilts, slightly, and drags a half-inch before becoming still again. It is quiet for nearly ten minutes when, as before, it begins to shift. This time it rises, wobbles to an impossible balance and then falls over. A few minutes later it lifts again and maintains a tenuous standing position.
Over the course of an hour the floating rock rises and falls several times, never by more than a few inches but far enough, always, that pieces of it crack and split off. It struggles to remember the easy flight I see in the pictures around it, the days when it would float four feet in the air and spin lazily in the wind.
After a long time, I leave the floating rock to its work and find my way back to the truck. I wonder at the writer’s dismissal of the place and I wonder if I would have felt (or did feel) the same way seeing the rock untouched by the vandal. Is there value in struggle and, if so, is it inherent to struggle in all its forms?
I struggle, reader, but I do not know toward or against what. Already I feel the struggle has reshaped me and I do hope it is a refining and not the same blind crashing that splinters the rock, that may reduce it to dust before it joins the wind once more.
Like scum on the edges of a stagnant pond, American capitalism seems to allow for a quota of small, aggressively niche businesses to thrive on the outskirts of highway towns. That may seem like an inherently negative metaphor and I suppose, in many ways, it is, but I invoke pond scum more for its resilience, its value to the ecosystem, and its universality rather than whatever an initial interpretation might suggest.
Though, these places are often dirty.
‘Mickee’s Freeze’ is the latest in a number of these particular businesses on my list and its specialties are ice cream and bold indifference to copyright infringement. Their mascot is a cartoon mouse that bears so close a resemblance to its clear inspiration that it makes an observer wonder whether the minor differences are intentional or simply weaknesses on the part of the artist. Whatever the case, aged signs of rusted tin and rotting wood suggest that Mickee has been around for years and never suffered for it.
‘Mickee’s’ is a rarity in that it appears in publications outside of Autumn by the Wayside, all of which are local to the region, however, and all of which write that it is the best home-churned ice cream the state has to offer. They, in turn, tantalize the reader with the legend of Mickee’s Mystery, a flavor unique to the store that has been universally well-received but otherwise defies description. Shitholes has its own take and, well, read for yourself:
“Is it so hard to believe that we, humans, are drawn to mystery as it appears to all senses? ‘What is that smell?’ ‘Did you hear something?’ ‘Did you see that?’ ‘How do you feel?’ In this regard, reader, taste is relegated to the realm of mystery flavors and, thus, to children. For a few crumpled dollars the tight-lipped staff at ‘Mickee’s Freeze’ will feed the child you once were. You will remember with joy and no little fear what it is to place something in your mouth, something you do not fully understand. There are no spoilers here, nor on your precious phone. Mickee guards the mystery with care and it is our place to wallow in it or to pass by, unawares.”
The inside of ‘Mickee’s’ is all sticky plastic and laminate, a rainbow of soiled colors. Flies cling in clumps to the outside of the building, drawn by the sickly sweet air that seeps out. A thick, milky substance oozes out from under a service entrance in the back and congeals in the hot dirt. As I reconnoitered, an elderly woman in a paper hat slipped out to pour a bucket of the same goo into a canister near the trash and then stepped back inside before I could make out any detail of the kitchen.
This I remember as I order, staring carefully at the top-loading freezer, at the metal scoop, and at the gloved hands of the teenager who greets me from behind the counter in front.
“One scoop of Mickee’s Mystery,” I tell him, “In a bowl.”
“One scoop is a children’s size,” he says.
“Then, uh, two scoops.”
“It’s all right, man,” he says, drawing me my single scoop, “It’s chill.”
What about me gives off the impression that I’m not calm? Last week I spent the better part of an evening’s hour just filming myself in conversation, speaking into my phone and into the mirror. I’ve watched it on loop since then, sometimes just listening to the audio as I drive. Nothing in that voice sounds ill-meaning or confused. What is it about me, then?
I tip generously and consider apologizing. That would be strange, though, that would be admitting to my slip.
Wouldn’t it?
‘Mickee’s Mystery’ is off-white to the point of yellow and smooth, visually a rich vanilla or a light citrus. It smells like nothing at all and sits heavily on the spoon, reluctant to melt.
“Is there a problem with the scoop, bro?” the guy behind the counter asks, seeing me stare at the dish without eating, “Mickee leaves no customer unsatisfied.”
He wipes at the counter with a dry cloth and waits for my answer.
“Everything is fine,” I tell him, sure now that I have crossed into the conversational gray.
I wish I were filming this.
Everybody in the restaurant seems to be staring through their peripheries as I raise ‘Mickee’s Mystery’ to my lips. It is cold and thick and very sweet, but underlying everything is a flavor I almost recognize but can’t quite place.
“Good, brother?” the guy asks.
“Yeah…” I reply, still swirling the ice cream in my mouth, “It’s good.”
It is good. It’s well-made ice cream, there’s no question about that. I take another bite much to the satisfaction of the server and he tosses the rag in the air and catches it behind his back before turning to other business. A child giggles in the booth two seats ahead of me, fed ice cream by its father.
It? Is that the right word in this situation?
“Hazelnut,” I say.
The guy behind the counter seems to freeze for a moment before he goes back to wiping down a blending machine.
“It’s hazelnut, right?” I ask, “‘Mickee’s Mystery’ is just hazelnut.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, bro,” the guy mutters darkly, only turning halfway back to me, “I don’t even know what a hazlenut looks like. Are you thinking about a walnut?”
“No…” I say, confused, “You’re saying it wrong. Hazelnuts are… well, they’re really popular in some places. They grow them in Oregon I think.”
The child hasn’t made any noise since the exchange began; its father follows the conversation casually over his shoulder.
“I’ve never heard of a hazlenut.”
The couple across the restaurant stands and leaves.
“It can be kind of a subtle flavor but I’m sure you’ve had something with hazelnuts in it before. If you’ve eaten the ice cream here then you definitely have.”
“No, man,” he persists, wringing the dry towel in his hands, “No… that’s not it.”
“Really?” I ask, taking another bite, “Because this tastes like hazelnuts.”
“Maaan,” the teen says, tossing down his paper hat on the counter and shrugging a little, “Can I talk to you privately real quick because-”
“Are there nuts in this?” the dad breaks in suddenly. He points to the ice cream. “My son is fucking allergic to nuts.”
“Welllll,” the server begins.
“There’s definitely nuts in this,” I say through a mouthful of ice cream, “If it’s actually allergic to nuts you should get to a doctor, maybe.”
“He,” the father seethes, acknowledging me only briefly before rounding again on the counter. “You fucking tell me now if there’s nuts in this!” he demands.
“I can’t really…” he’s quickly looking over a laminated sheet in front of him, running his finger down some sort of list. “I’m, uh, not here when they make it. I just sell the stuff.”
I only have to stand to see he’s looking at a flowchart of some sort and reading off canned excuses. I sit again while he sweats and avoids my eyes, rummaging with his rag in a half-effort pantomime of work.
“It’s not really a mystery if you just refuse to say,” I think out loud.
“A mystery is more than a, uh, puzzle box,” he says, hardly turning to look at me, barely disguising the fact that he’s still peering at the chart, “Not all mysteries need to be solved, wink.”
“You were supposed to wink, not say ‘wink,’” I tell him, “That would suggest a friendly collusion-”
I’m interrupted mid-explanation by a tiny cough a couple booths down. The baby sneezes loudly and then looks around, bewildered, a trail of snot and spittle glistening on its, or, his, onesie.
When the father speaks his voice begins terrifyingly calm and monotone.
“Somebody needs to tell me whether there are nuts in this right now,” he says before his volume slowly starts to creep up, “My baby is fucking allergic to nuts and there are NO allergy warnings on ‘Mickee’s Mystery.’ So… IS THERE FUCKING NUTS IN THIS?”
“The prevalence of modern nut allergies is psychological in nature,” the teens says, holding the chart and casting off any pretense of original thought, “You slash your friend slash your child is fine. It’s fine.”
“He’s fine,” I correct and the father lobs a spoon my direction.
“IS THERE NUTS?”
“Your generation’s ease of living has caused you to invent problems that do not exist,” the teen reads on, “If you slash your friend slash your child spent less time in front of the television and more time outside then this would not be a concern. It is your lifestyle that is to blame for you slash your-”
“Vaccines did this to my children!” the father yells as the baby starts to cry, “And now your damned hazlenuts will kill him!”
“He’s trying to direct you away from the point of all this…” I complain, “And there’s never been any link between vaccines and nut allergies.”
The restaurant is quiet for a second, as if to briefly acknowledge the altered direction of this exchange.
“Also that’s not how you say ‘hazelnuts.’”
The teen walks stiffly around the counter and looms over my table, glaring down at me through tearful eyes. He carefully reaches down and pulls the ‘Mickee’s Club Loyalty Card’ from under my bowl and crushes it in his palm. I look over my unfinished ice cream with regret but take the cue to leave. The noisy exchange begins again as soon as the door shuts behind me.
Amidst the dust and buzzing flies I find a moment to consider that it may be the world that’s changing and not myself. There are places here that requires an amount of paranoia to get by and it may be that, by adopting a defensive nature, I’m simply adapting. This could be healthy.
I could be healthy.
I take out my phone and turn on the camera. I see my haggard face on the screen and I begin to record.
“Hello,” I say, “How are you? I’m fine too. Nice to meet you, my name is-”
‘Josie’s Bed & Breakfast,’ is way out of my set budget for places to stay, especially considering I spend about 80% of my nights in the truck itself which costs me nothing at all. Every once in a while, Shitholes throws me a bone and reviews a place with a mattress, excuse enough to live a little kinglier for an evening and, in this case, the morning after.
‘The wait time for breakfast at Josie’s could be just as easily attributed to a lack of foresight as to a stroke of genius. Past a certain stretch of waiting, any food in any condition will seem better, if only for its close proximity. Let this assurance guide you, then, as the wait grows to the unimaginable, as it seems to end only to begin once more. Assure yourself that the food is made better for your invested time. Is it worth the exchange, though? Could it ever be?’
The author doesn’t speak at all about the room which means he (or I) probably only reviewed the place for the breakfast and that I could probably get away with doing the same, no extra money spent, but I could use a night of solid rest and god I hate waiting. My lifestyle has become one that revolves around cheap food and quick service and, though other aspects of myself suffer for it, the quick turnaround of a burger has only served to validate it.
If there can be a life without waiting, I’ll gladly live it.
The entry room, Josie’s lobby, is extravagant. I say as much to the young woman at the counter, someone I assume is not Josie herself.
“It’s not extravagant,” she says, swiping my debit card, “It’s just old.”
I look around again and see that she’s right. Everything in the room is old and heavy-looking. The wooden furniture is bruised and dark with years of re-staining, the curtains dusty with time. Josie’s lobby straddles the line between sitting room and antique store, at times a sincere representation of old-world posturing and at others, unironically gaudy. It’s easy for my generation to confuse nostalgia with class. We seem, at times, to wishfully look back on the greatest hits of past decades, comfortably ignoring history’s B-sides. Maybe every generation does that. Maybe it’s just me.
“How long have you worked here?” I ask.
“A while,” she says, pushing my receipt over the counter, “I’m saving for college.”
“Getting close?”
She looks at me, darkly, and says nothing.
The room is much like the lobby, an already small place made closer by the furniture arranged inside. The pack I slump off my shoulders, the jacket I hang on the bed post- both look cheap and dirty and somehow unwelcome. I do too, when I find my reflection in the vanity’s mirror, I look distinctly out of place.
Normally I have a hotel room routine- a contemplative lie-down on the bed, a long sit in the restroom, a shower, a nap, a belated order-in dinner, and finally sleep. Today I settle for a shower and manage to eat a granola bar before passing out under the bed’s oppressive quilt. It has been a long time since I have dreamed.
I open my eyes and it is still very dark. In keeping with the atmosphere, Josie has provided no electric clock, no indication at all that this is not the 19th century. I tap my phone on the bedside table but it refuses to respond, the battery dead. I grope around blindly for a while before I find the light switch near the door.
The first fright I get is my own naked body, hunched and pale in the reflection across the room. The second is my jacket, the floating guise of a man to my still-waking brain. Travel has made me paranoid; as my eyes adjust I come to the conclusion that there’s nothing to be afraid of in the room at all.
I plug in my phone and see that it’s only just past midnight. I piss and settle in for the rest of the night.
It is still dark when I wake again and I lie, unmoving, in case it was a sound that disturbed me. Pressed into the bed by the quilt, I remember the thing in the walls and the hefty reassurance of Phil’s hammer. There is no noise, though, and no smell; no one sense that suggests anything dangerous has happened, is happening, or will happen soon. I look at my phone and see that, despite feeling wide awake, I have only slept fifteen minutes.
I cough a couple times in order to break the silence and then once more out of necessity before turning over and closing my eyes. Quasi-sleep follows.
The next time I check my phone it is a quarter to one and a dull headache has begun to grow behind my eyes. I recognize this from college, from when I pretended to go to college. Back then I would sleep in until early afternoon and nurse this same headache the rest of the day. I would use it as an excuse to skip class and to go to bed late.
I sit up and use the restroom again, drink some water. My stomach growls and I wonder if it isn’t hunger that’s keeping me awake. I eat a few more granola bars and a tough strip of jerky. When I’m finished my phone reads 12:55am.
Five minutes has passed, is what it’s saying. It has been the middle of the night for ages.
Fully-conscious, I take stock of the things that don’t add up. The hunger, the headache, the constant trips to the restroom, the fact that my aging phone seems to have charged itself entirely in less than an hour- nothing is suspicious on its own, none of that really proves anything except that my perception of time, and potentially my body, are distinctly out-of-whack.
I finish piecing all this together in less than 60 seconds, according to my phone. As soon as I tap the screen it ticks off a minute, as though feeling guilty all of the sudden. As though feeling self-conscious. I stare for a long, long time before anything happens.
And then another minute passes.
I dress myself and peer out the windows, wondering if my phone’s clock isn’t malfunctioning. It looks, by all accounts, like one in the morning. I open my door a crack and stare down the hall. In a hotel I wouldn’t think twice about leaving my room but a bed and breakfast is so much like a stranger’s house that I don’t know how to act in a way that doesn’t seem like trespassing.
I take the creaking stairs in socks and find the lobby dimly lit. The woman from before is there, still. She’s staring at her phone.
“Hi,” I say.
She looks up, not particularly surprised or interested.
“I… was wondering when breakfast is,” I say.
“It starts at half past seven and runs until ten.”
“And, uh, what time is it right now?”
“Nearly one in the morning.”
“Right,” I say, “Okay. Just having some trouble sleeping.”
She maintains the bare minimum eye-contact necessary for this exchange.
“It’s not a problem with the room, I mean…”
She doesn’t seem to care. I force out a fake yawn and walk back upstairs, back to my room, and close the door behind me.
My phone reads 12:59am and it is quiet. I pace the room, stare at myself in the mirror, and then I try to sleep again. I close my eyes and I count seconds until I drift off.
The headache, having gathered itself like a storm, greets me as I wake. I open my eyes slowly, hoping to see light between the shades but the room is still dark. I check my phone- 1:10am.
I leap out of bed and then stand, quietly and without purpose. Even if I were able to prove to myself that time has slowed down, what would I do to change it? I sit down again, still in the dark, and tap my foot. I drink a glass of water and eat the rest of the dried goods I’ve stored away. I wander the room, memorizing it in the dark. I make faces nobody can see. I open a book, a western thing I picked off a rack in a gas station, and I finish it by half past one.
I’m starving.
The woman at the front desk doesn’t seem surprised to see me leaving, but I hesitate at the door anyway.
“Just going to grab a few things,” I tell her and she nods.
The roads are quiet, but not suspiciously so. A seemingly normal number of cars pass me on my way to a convenience store I remember seeing as I drove in. I look at the clock inside- 1:17am, and I clear the place of its jerky stock.
“Long night?” the man asks.
“Sure.”
The truck’s time has just ticked off 1:21 when I park back at Josie’s. I walk into the lobby, a bag heavy with meat at my side, and ask the woman there a very pointed question:
“Did that seem fast to you?”
“What?” she asks, looking up from her phone. Her screen is visible from this angle- she’s been staring at the clock.
“Do you know how to beat this thing?” I ask, “Is that something you can tell me?”
“Just got to wait it out, man,” she shrugs.
Back in the room I set up a small nest- my bottle of water, a pile of jerky, and the quilt, wrapped heavily around my shoulders. With my phone plugged into the wall I sit and stare, counting the seconds to verify that they match the passage of time. And, for the most part, they do. As soon as I quit counting, though, or look away for long, the clock slows itself.
Or, I think it does.
There’s not much I can do to verify.
Eventually I fall asleep and I wake, slumped forward in a pile of jerky-smelling plastic. I take the phone with me into the bathroom and I drink a bottle of water while the morning slips tediously past two. The headache has grown beyond ignoring so I pop a couple ibuprofen and think about the flask. I’m not sure I want to risk falling asleep again.
The most circuitous path through the room goes over the bed but I start going around after a few dozen laps because I’m just that out of shape. I pace in circles, counting off the minutes till 3:00am. The numbers warp and furniture moves strangely in my peripheries. I find myself too warm and too cold in turns. My eyes dry and the headache thuds quietly under the restraint of the painkillers.
There is a knock on my door just past four as I stand, swaying slightly on my feet, in what passes for a break. I step quietly over and find the woman from downstairs in my doorway, holding her phone as I hold mine.
“I could hear you walking around up here,” she says.
“Sorry,” I tell her, “I can be more quiet.”
“It’s fine,” she says, looking down at her screen, prompting me to look at mine as well. I haven’t turned the lights on in my room and it is dark in the hall. Our faces hover in the shadows, illuminated by the two phones. “Do you want company?” she asks, without looking up.
“Sure,” I tell her.
She steps inside, slips off her shoes, and sits on the bed without ever looking up from the device in her hand. I’ve lost track of mine already, just trying to keep up with the strange presence.
“There’s not anything more to this than waiting,” she says, sensing my eyes on her, “And if you don’t watch, you’ll fall back. Can I have some jerky?”
I join her on the bed, eyes refocused on the screen, “Sure.”
“How many times have you fallen asleep?”
“A few,” I tell her, trying to remember, “Several.”
“I thought so,” she smiles, a smile that remains on her face as she tears a piece of the jerky from the mass, “Only twice for me.”
“This happens every night?”
She nods and yawns. When she covers her mouth I notice her nails have been chewed down to the skin.
“Why do you work here?”
“I got caught shoplifting just out of high school,” she says, “Had to go to court and everything.”
“So this is like your personal hell or something? Some kind of punishment?”
“Uh, no,” she says, “It just makes finding a retail job impossible.”
“Right.”
It gets quiet in the room for a few minutes, quiet enough that I hear when her breathing takes on the rhythm of sleep. I tap her leg with my foot and she starts.
“You were sleeping.”
“Thanks,” she says, and she yawns again. “Why are you here?” she asks, after a moment, “Not a lot of middle-aged guys stopping through on their own.”
“I…”
I explain everything. We’ve got all fucking night and what do I care if she believes me or not? I even tell her about the dead guy, I even try to replicate the breathing sounds he made. It all comes out of me and before I know it we’ve passed an hour and a half. Above my screen I can make out a look on her face, not quite impressed, I guess, but certainly not uninterested. She seems to let the story digest before settling on an answer.
“That’s…” she begins, “That’s pretty crazy.”
My heart drops a little in my chest. That’s exactly the answer I give to the loonies I meet on the road, to every old woman that’s seen a UFO and every hunter that’s seen a bigfoot. It’s not agreement or disagreement and it’s an unwillingness to engage with the story, lest there be more.
“Well,” she says, standing to stretch, “Hang in there for another half an hour. Things go back to normal at six every day and I have to start food prep. Thanks for passing the time.”
“No problem,” I say, and as she’s slipping back into her shoes I ask: “How’s the breakfast here?”
“Extravagant,” she says.
I return to the road, reader, feeling as though I never rested.
It’s midday and I’m traveling north again, straight up through the belly of America. A week-old soda thickens to syrup as it rolls back and forth across the passenger seat and a grasshopper crawls slowly across my windshield, having hitched a ride at the gas station and found itself pressed into the glass by 60mph winds. I drive the speed limit, exactly the speed limit, for as long as I possibly can. Cars pass easily, skittering around the lumbering blue truck and its driver.
The fairy fern has died.
Cool weather and the smell of pine greet me as I make my way across an open stretch of road, only ever at exactly the speed limit. There is supposed to be bad weather ahead, a couple days ahead, that is, always a couple days ahead. In this perpetual autumn there have been no icy roads or sticky asphalt, only the occasional rain and long, clear nights and mornings clammy with dew.
I take to sleeping during the day, when my truck is kept warm by the sun, and driving at night when the traffic is minimal and I can run the heater. My conversations are confined to gas station clerks and motel owners and they all say the same thing no matter where I am or what time it is:
“You look tired.”
‘Autumn by the Wayside’ is, as far as I can tell, a book written in perpetuity. I should be narrowing in on the finish line now, I should be running out of places to see but there always seems to be something, something I missed in a region I know I checked off. The glove compartment is full of crumpled maps and charts that detail the trip so far, none of it cohesive or meaningful. There is no way to write a book like ‘Shitholes’ except for the way it’s already written.
Actually, that’s probably not true.
I am not an editor, that’s more to the heart of things. I’m not an editor in the widest sense of the word. I live my life like a bad novel, jumping from one scene to the next and making mistakes along the way and learning nothing, gleefully unaware that even a run-on sentence ends with a full-stop. There are a hundred ways to write any book but I only know just the one so I write what’s in front of me and then I move on.
Behind me is the scorched earth that once was ‘The Kat Cirkus,’ ahead of me is ‘A Prairie Dog Ghost Town.’
The alliteratively named ‘Wild West Waterworld’ boasts of having the longest waterslide in the county which, unless this specific Washington County is known for being particularly abundant in waterslides, seems like a non-boast to me. I’ll grant them they discovered a goldmine in their wedding of the old west and water themes with attractions named ‘The Revolver’ which is like a massive spiraling toilet bowl and the ‘Six-Shooter,’ where kids and adults alike are encouraged to race down six identical, steeply-sloped tubes and to skid madly across the shallow pool below. Less gracefully realized are the attendant costumes: tightly fitting swimwear and leather ornamentation in the vein of cowboy hats and heavy-looking holsters for plastic, water-spewing pistols. Some walk around in cowboy boots but they do so begrudgingly, even I can tell.
Reader, I have migrated south since last I wrote, perhaps unconsciously, or even semi-consciously, toward this entry specifically. The ordeal at Rest Stop #212 some time ago did a number on my psyche and the determinedly carefree nature of a waterpark has been something of a guiding light. The weather is warm, the breeze, gentle, and the staff willing enough to turn a blind-eye to a single man dribbling a flask of rum into a steeply-priced frozen slurry drink.
Life is not good, reader, but it’s certainly better than it was.
“It is said ‘A man is known by the company he keeps,’ and if we might extend that truth to a place then ‘Wild West Waterworld’s’ reputation is a poor one. There is very little wrong with park itself, the facilities are clean, the attractions well maintained, and the food mediocre, but the people who live there are of the worst caliber and it is this man’s hope that they stay put, so as not to be encountered on the outside.”
My leisurely consumption of the drunken slurry serves the double purpose of easing my nerves and masking my true purpose, to stake the place out disguised as a casual pool dude. With earbuds in and aviators on, plastered in a thick coat of sunscreen, I sit very still and watch people in a way that I hope comes off as passive and not creepy.
I’m right on the edge of a good doze when a guy trips over my ankle and apologizes quickly, catching up to a few of his friends ahead. Together they make up a group of thirty-somethings, no one peculiar on their own but strange for a sort of faded look they all share. The colors of their swim trunks are flat and washed-out, their skin pale to the point of translucency. The guy that tripped over me is blonde but his close-cut hair has taken on a greenish-yellow tinge. Together, they make their way up the tall staircase toward the entrance of ‘Boot Hill,’ a long, winding slide that twists carefully amidst the others, sometimes under and other times above, so that its exact path is difficult to parse from a distance.
I follow the group by blonde guy’s milky-red swimsuit, tracking their progress until they disappear, one after the other, into the depths of ‘Boot Hill.’ I scan the exits and I wait, relying on the guttural surety I’ve cultivated toward this very purpose, toward the purpose of spotting inconsistencies. Time passes and they do not emerge.
For once, I was expecting this very thing.
Someone involved with the production of Shitholes deemed it important to publish an appendix of bizarre maps in the back of the book, none of which adhere to any sort of scale or seem attached to particular articles. One of them is more like a collection of colorful squiggles than anything else but some of those squiggles are labeled and they are labeled with the names of ‘Wild West Waterworld’s’ slides. One such line is labeled ‘Boot Hill’ and several hastily written exclamation points alert the reader to its importance.
It takes only a moment to finish the slurry and only several, wheezing minutes for me to climb to the top of ‘Boot Hill.’ A woman is there to assure that I enter the slide feet-first, that I cross my arms and hold them to my chest. This, she says, is important. She tips her hat to me; I wink and immediately regret doing it. I can’t remember a time when winking was ever the appropriate reaction to anything. I escape into the tube.
‘Boot Hill’ starts off slow, easing me through a red, counter-clockwise spiral before dipping and picking up speed. Before long my body is sliding up the corners and noises from the outside become distant and echoed. The air inside is damp and close, I lose sense of how far I’ve gone and how much further I could possibly go. There is a sharp drop where the water seems to jettison me forward and down a length of green plastic faster than ever. I start to panic, knowing that whatever has warranted this waterpark’s entry into the book must be coming, that I slide toward my fate in sunglasses and swim trunks. I uncross my arms, try, in vain, to slow myself on the wall. There are no handholds, no place less slick than the last. In a final effort, I try to wedge my legs up into the ceiling but I only spin onto my back, now facing forward down the slide.
Then a splash.
I am underwater.
I try to swim up and find a solid concrete barrier. I try to swim up another way and break into the fresh air. A lifeguard’s whistle sounds.
“Dude,” he yells, “No head-first sliding.”
I’m at the bottom of ‘Boot Hill’ and those people are nowhere to be found.
I climb the stairs, dripping water as I go. The attendant at the top reminds me of sliding procedure. I refuse to look her in the eyes, afraid I’ll wink again, sure I would if given the chance.
My second experience of ‘Boot Hill’ is much the same as my first and by the third trip down I am feeling confident that the slide itself will not subject me to something on its own, that this is the sort of thing I need to figure out proactively. On my fifth slide, dampened and woozy, I depart once more from sliding procedure and uncross my arms, letting my fingers drag along the walls of the tube and, sure enough, just before the violent drop from yellow tube to green I feel the walls become rough and scratched. With a mad, twisting glance I spot a second exit just below the jettison point. By then, of course, it is too late.
I miss it again on the sixth, distracted and ashamed by the concerned look on the attendant’s face as I clamored in. The seventh time, finding she has been replaced with a stern-looking, fully-clothed man, I find the right system of pressure and leverage early and I slow myself down before the tactical precipice.
The texturing on the tunnel walls is undoubtedly the dragging of fingernails, a history of people scraping to a stop as I have. The water rushes around me as I maneuver, carefully, down and into the hidden slide. This is a black tube and the thick plastic allows no light to enter. I hold myself steady, gripping the ledge and wondering if this isn’t-
A rider thunders down ‘Boot Hill’ and out of the yellow tube, knocking my fingers loose and sending me into the darkness.
The rasping at Rest Stop #212 returns as soon as the pale green light behind me disappears and I plummet downward, the stagnant swirling in my ears the same as what existed in the restroom. My arms and legs reach out but find no purchase and I spin and choke on water, blindly led further into the depths of ‘Boot Hill.’
The panic recedes and I find myself shivering, pushed lazily along by a shallow current. It is still dark, reader, but now only a pathetic sort of dark. I stand and the warmish water is no higher than my ankles. I take a step and slip, like an idiot, back to my knees. The impact of my body echoes hollowly and I hear no noises from the outside. This is, by all accounts, still part of the slide.
“Hey,” someone says, “Why don’t you step out of the water? It’s slippery there.”
The plastic here is not as opaque as I had thought, as my eyes adjust I am able to make out a vague perimeter of the area, a rounded plastic room, bisected by the persistent stream of water at my feet. There are people in the room with me, mostly sitting, and piles of indistinguishable objects. As my bearings return I see a shadow reach out and offer a hand. I take it, and step forward.
The dry plastic is sun-warmed and easy to stand on, the air humid and stifling.
“Who are you all?” I ask, “What is this place?”
“We’re… wait, everyone I’m turning on a light for the new guy.”
The people around me grumble and then cover their eyes as an LED lantern comes on in the woman’s hands. She squints at me.
“We live here,” she says, answering neither of my questions.
The fact that these people live here is abundantly obvious now that I can see. Each person seems to have carved out their piece of plastic with a sleeping mat and a few personal items. There are a lot of old radios, limp looking books, and packets of food. Everything bears the telltale signs of slow chlorine bleaching and mildew rot. Even the people.
Especially the people.
“Why?” I ask, “Does the park know about this?”
“Of course not,” another guy chimes in, “That’s why we’re here. It’s paradise.”
A few of the faces around me seem to agree with him and the rest are mostly neutral on the matter. A couple look skeptical.
“Paradise is a strong word,” the woman admits, beckoning me over to what seems to be her mat, “Most of us were just looking to get away from the outside world for a while.”
“There are places like this all over,” the excitable guy chimes in again, “Places people forget about- old warehouses, walled-over bathrooms…”
“Vestigial sections of water slides?” I ask.
“We don’t know why this is here,” the woman says, “But we’re glad it is.”
“Hmm…” I say, and it seems to vibrate the room.
There is an expectant silence that drags on for several minutes while I make a show of observing the entirety of the place. It doesn’t take long.
“What do you do here?”
“Some of us knit,” the woman says, “Or read. Sometimes we talk to each other.”
“Only some times?”
“We don’t really have a lot in common except for the slide.”
This is the first thing everybody seems to agree on. ‘Boot Hill’s’ proper channel thumps noisily above us, sending another passenger along.
“Where do you go to the bathroom?” I ask.
“We use the park’s facilities for solid waste,” the woman says, a light red coloring her face.
“Look,” an older gentleman interjects, “the park chlorinates the water beyond what’s necessary to destroy common diseases carried by urine…”
“It’s not about disease, Jeremy,” someone else says, “It’s about ethics of relieving oneself into a children’s pool because you’re too lazy to use the regular restroom.”
The woman who greeted me remains red and quiet while the others join in the argument, highlighting this community’s third rail- whether or not they should be pissing into the stream.
If I try really, really, hard I can sort of see where these people are coming from. I suppose my truck and this stupid trip are equivalent, in some ways, to their longing for a place to escape to, a place that’s cut off from the world. It’s been a long time since I’ve met somebody I wanted to talk to more than once. It’s hard for me to tell whether that’s a result of my being constantly on the move, or if it happened the other way around.
The guy at the fairy fern place: I suppose I wouldn’t mind talking to him again.
If only for some clarifications.
No, I’m calling this one for me. I’m definitely better than these people, who seem to have motivation enough to bring little battery-powered DVD players down a water slide but not to use restroom facilities so nearby. I’m better than these people in a lot of ways and that realization is enough to put a big, smug smile on my face and a flicker of hope back in this road-weary heart. A little perspective goes a long way towards solving life’s problems, or, if nothing else, making them easier to ignore.
With little fanfare I walk to the room’s toilet/exit and finish my journey, emerging into the waterpark proper once more. I paddle to shore and walk back to my towel, packing the few things that seemed necessary.
“It’s pretty gross in there, huh?”
The woman from before stands behind me in a one-piece, her skin a pallid gray. She squints in the sunlight with eyes unused to the outside and we drip together on the sidewalk, two damp people in a vast, dry world. I scratch my leg and offer the only consolation that comes to mind.
It’s early in the evening, the time of day to start rolling up the windows- I seem to have driven my way into Fall, or lost a race with it and this morning I found the first hints of frost on my windshield. I’ll need to scrounge a blanket from somewhere soon, who knows what happened to the last?
Rest Area #212 off the highway has me well and truly stumped. It’s given a write-up in Shitholes but is, by all accounts, just your normal sort of stop. There are bathrooms, reasonably clean, and a few old park benches outside, reasonably weathered. The information area is outdated and mildly vandalized, the pamphlets there warped and discolored by the sun. Who pulls off at a rest stop and takes directions from one of these, I wonder. Wouldn’t a person already have a destination in mind? Wouldn’t they have planned their trip such that they arrive at said destination according to a time table? I don’t think I would take water slide advice from one of these pamphlets, or water park advice of any kind.
Even if these slides are the tallest in the state.
Even if they are housed in a massive, heated structure so as to be a year-round affair.
Even if these kids appear to be in various stages of ecstasy, going down the slides.
Even if their parents seem to approve from the illustrated sidelines.
With a candy bar out of the vending machine I sit in my truck and wonder what it is I’m supposed to be looking for.
“For the safety of our readers, parking at Rest Area #212, off the highway, is not recommended. The mysteriously numbered Rest Area #37 just another hour down the road maintains similar facilities and has a pinchy, but well-meaning swing set for the kids.”
So I’m going to stop at #37 too, sure, but what’s going on with this place? It isn’t marked on the map in the book or the road map I picked up with gas. There wasn’t any signage to speak of until the ‘Exit for Rest Area’ announcement. Maybe I should have asked someone along the way.
The red car, the only other means of transportation in this lot, has been empty as long as I’ve been around. Nobody in the restroom when I was there, very few signs of life. That’s a strangeness of sorts for someone grasping at straws.
The car is empty, the reflection of my chewing the only movement. I kick the tires and find them full, don’t see any extraneous dust or foliage on the roof. A smell like cinnamon reaches me and I see the window is cracked, a smoker’s vent. The engine feels cold under the hood.
The bathrooms are still empty, I check the men’s and then, very cautiously, the women’s. These are cement buildings with few places to hide and they echo noises I don’t seem to catch. If you press your ear close, I wonder, would you hear the ocean? I doubt it. Maybe something else, though, some more stagnant body of water.
The women’s has a few more stalls than the men’s, that much seems reasonable, but the stall on the very end, which I had neglected to look at carefully on my first round, opens on a goddamn fucking staircase into the ground, I shit you not. There are plenty of reasons not to walk down the stairs, the foremost of which is that this still constitutes sneaking around the women’s room. It’s my job to look into these things, though, or it’s what I do instead of having a job.
I descend against my better judgment.
The old flashlight I left at Phil’s has been replaced with a newer model, a thing that emits cheerful white light even in places like these. The ghosts of my childhood were yellow like kidney failure under incandescent bulbs. Modern spirits are black and white, the way they were written in books. We’ve come full circle.
The young man at the bottom of the stairs is black and white and red all over like the joke but he’d dead and covered in old blood. There is no smell. Beyond him is a vast gray tunnel, far vaster and more gray than I’m normally comfortable with.
I step over the man and into the tunnel.
I was wrong before, when I said there was no smell. There is a smell like an old closet, like old, musty clothes. The air is still and difficult to breathe, it moves sluggishly into my lungs, seeming to resent the process as much as I do. My light finds a wall ahead, the way divides and moves almost imperceptibly downward with every step. The man behind me, the body, is facing the exit. He died trying to leave.
There is a toilet to the left of the fork, clean minus a few drops of brown urine under the seat. This stall caters to a niche audience, I would imagine. The tunnel continues to the right but before I am able to continue the body behind me, the man, begins to make noise. He starts to breathe.
The man’s breathing is audible all this way down the tunnel because it’s loud and labored. Under the dim light from the top of the stairs I see the rise and fall of his back, the expansion of his chest so dramatic that it seems, in the shadows, at odds with common anatomy. He swells like a balloon and then deflates, each exhale a violent, sputtering rattle. There is no movement, no sound, but for the man’s breathing.
I approach him cautiously but my footsteps change nothing. The man’s eyes are closed, his lips billowing. He has broken ribs, his chest shudders wildly underneath his clothes. The source of this man’s blood remains unclear.
The setting sun blinds me the moment I step outside. I run to my truck, pull the small first aid kit from my glove compartment. There is a hammer on the floor in front of the passenger seat and I grab that too, in case I need to protect myself. I dash back to the restroom, back down the stairs of the last stall at the end. The man’s breathing has lost its rhythm, each intake shorter than the last.
There are gloves in the kit and I put them on. I feel along his abdomen, afraid turning him over will only worsen things. The man’s chest has no structure, his ribs move freely under the skin. He doesn’t seem to notice me and his breathing continues to sputter out. Eventually it stops altogether.
I check his pulse, sitting very still so that I can be sure. His blood shines under the flashlight, lying next to me on the bottom stair. And then there is a noise ahead, like the tap of a foot. When I begin to adjust the light, smearing blood across its handle, I hear a polite cough.
Someone is sitting on the toilet, far ahead in the tunnel, their legs just skin and bone sticking out from around the corner, terminating in dusty blue jeans and old, leather shoes.
The man in front of me is dead, his heart motionless under my fingers.
The toilet flushes and the thing ahead begins to stand. A sickly, bulging stomach appears around the corner, clammy and pale under the LEDs.
The man in front of me is dead.
I run back up the stairs, fleeing in bloody gloves to my truck. The women’s room at Rest Area #212 lingers in my rearview mirror longer than seems normal, the place casting a shadow on my thoughts. I drive without the heat, afraid, in the short term, of its hoarse, rasping breath and thinking of the man who died in the tunnel and also of the thing that seems to live there.
The least enjoyable sort of destination for me in all of this are the little businesses or attractions that are clearly run out of a person’s home. The Midwest is rife with these sorts of places and a certain type of person might find the idea charming or comfortable, a sort of shotgun-hostiness and a dash of American entrepreneurship. I wonder how a person’s mindset changes about the things or the places they own in order for these places to come about. When does a collection become something you’re willing to show off for money? When do you start wondering if you can make money off of local rocks? A man can only own so much rose quartz, after all.
My stomach sinks when I see the first sign advertising ‘The Museum of the Common Man’ as just fifteen miles away. It’s hand-painted and well worn, held to a tree by several long, rusted nails. Expectations were already low, to be honest. The name of the museum doesn’t go very far toward inspiring enthusiasm. Somebody who takes it upon themselves to erect a museum to the ‘common man’ is going to be political or philosophical in the worst ways and now they’re going to think I’m interested in hearing their spiel. I’m paying to be there after all.
‘The Museum of the Common Man is the brainchild of a guy that thinks he’s one of the less common. It’s a shrine to the intellectual ego, built before the proliferation of the online communities where modern egoists go to commiserate or knock each other down. This man, left alone, has built a shrine to himself and accidentally fulfilled his promise. Do not visit expecting to enjoy yourself.’
A low bar, as I said.
The museum grounds are just off the highway, the sort of place that retains a year-round dusted look from the constant passing of semis and the glare of a sun without obstacles. A house sits in the front, too small (god, I hope too small) to be the museum. The likelier place is the extended barn-type building out back where somebody has maintained an optimistically sized parking lot.
A human-shaped cloud of dust pulls away from the porch as I pull into the lot. The man has the look of someone prematurely aged- his hair has maintained a golden brown but his face has the deep, downward sloping lines of a chronic frowner. He walks up and leans on the fence at the edge of the lot, gesturing me into parking like the place is crammed full.
“Here for the museum?” he asks once I’ve stepped down from the truck.
He’s a spindly guy, rail thin under the flannel shirt and jeans and I’ve got more than six inches on him. There’s a knife in my back pocket, a flip-open thing with the modern sort of safeties that I’d probably fumble with during a fight. Probably most important, I’ve got my running shoes on in case I need to get out quick. These are the sort of precautions that keeps a guy alive when he follows strangers into barns.
“Yep.”
“Right this way, then.”
The path out to the barn is lined mostly with low, dry-looking brush but occasionally we pass by an old piece of farm technology, long rusted, and each piece has a little sign that describes what the thing used to be (tractor, backhoe, etc.) and what they are now: ‘Failures of the Common Man.’ Looking at all those signs I start to think maybe this is all a big joke which, in my mind, might make this experience a little more worthwhile. Could be this man’s the cynic’s cynic.
“What’s admission like here?” I ask and he spits.
“Fi… er, ten dollars. Year pass is a huhnerd.”
Is that another joke? I try to chuckle but by the time anything comes out the moment’s passed. I mask it with a cough.
“Dusty out here,” he says as we reach the barn door, “I’ll have ter go turn the place on ‘round back, won’t take but a minute.”
He stands silent until I realize he’s waiting for payment. I hand the man his ten bucks and he disappears around the side of the building.
My stomach rumbles and I check my watch. It’s just past noon, about the time I’m usually scouting around for a place to grab lunch. I flip through Shitholes to see if there’s any recommendations nearby but it’s got nothing in the way of food for a couple hundred miles. There’s a bag of jerky in the truck that I bought out of a guy’s shed. His was a shriveled Noah’s Ark, two of each animal, vacuum packed and sealed. Mine was a purchase of whimsy, a veritable sampling of all God’s creatures. I wonder if I’m allowed food inside the museum, but then, the truck is so far away now.
A generator coughs itself to life behind the barn and the gray smell of exhaust reaches me before the man does. He’s changed clothes, or, he’s thrown on a jacket that has the name of the museum embroidered over his heart. On the other side it says his name: William.
“William’s a common name for a guy,” I say, trying to conjure the half-joke from before.
“Go by Will, mostly,” he says, “Say it takes will to rise above the common pitfalls and passions o’ the folk ‘round here. Step inside when I call ya.”
Will slips in through the barn doors, careful that I don’t peek in and spoil the surprise. A smarter man than me might seize the opportunity to escape, leave Will with his ten dollars and the smug assurance that I, as a common man, simply grew too afraid of facing myself in his philosopher’s mirror. Who could have guessed that the burden of humanity would fall on the shoulders of Will, a Midwestern-
“I said come in, boy,” he yells.
So I do.
The barn door isn’t used to being opened more than a foot or so, just enough to admit a slim frame such as my own. The inside of the barn is dark, the lower level empty except for a stool in the center. When I stop to try to make sense of the modified ceiling above me I hear Will’s voice from the dark rafters.
“If you’d take a seat, sir, we will begin shortly.”
The stool is on a little platform, built into the ground and an arrow, painted on the platform says:
“Face here to begin.”
I sit on the stool and the legs give out completely, the shattered wood splintering as though under some great weight. On my ass I see the thing’s nearly turned into sawdust, that it likely was never anything more than cleverly stained balsa wood tubes. Tubes filled with sawdust. The barn door creaks closed.
“The common man is a trusting critter,” Will’s voice comes over a speaker system, “The first folly of the common man is a tendency ter follow directions.”
“Fuck you,” I mutter at the darkness above me but as I try to leave I find the barn doors locked.
“The common man don’t much like seeing hisself laid bare…”
It’s not so dark in the barn that I’m not able to see that the walls are lined with other exhibitions. A spotlight comes on above me and illuminates a dusty mannequin across the room and Will’s voice drones on, assuming I’ll catch at least some of it.
“It weren’t until man began to settle that a clear division began ter take place between the common an’ uncommon folk…”
An absurd scene lights up across the room, two cavemen representing some intellectual split that happened in time unknowable. I realize the first mannequin has a mirror for a face, no doubt Will’s take on poignancy. The added light helps me to spot the latch holding the barn door shut and I let myself out. Will keeps talking inside, his voice muffled by the thick wooden walls. The sun is downright blinding.
What an asshole.
I’m only a few minutes down the road before I start to get this ill-meaning itch, the feeling that I’ve somehow left without fully completing whatever experience Shitholes suggests (or at least documents). There’s a part of me that will always wonder what I missed. I make an awkward 3-point turn on the road and piss off a dude in a janky looking sedan and then I’m headed back to Will’s farm, determined to see what his deal is without having to further interact with him. I leave the truck about a quarter-mile out and walk a ways until I find a comfortable shrub to sit behind while keeping The Museum of the Common Man level in my thrift-store binoculars.
Will comes around the barn a few minutes later, still wearing his embroidered jacket. He eyes the barn door for a moment and fiddles with the latch. Then he looks up, up at the sky, and he stays that way for a long time, shoulders slack, breathing even, mouth slightly open. He stays like that for long enough that I start examining the sky myself but there’s nothing. I try to focus on Will, try to see if his eyes are open or closed or if he’s blinking at all. Finally, he just brings his head back down and walks to his house.
As I wait for the sun to set on The Museum of the Common Man I take a closer look at the surroundings. The path leading to the museum proper is carefully lined with old relics but the field out back has its share of scrap wood and rusted tin. A truck stops to exchange mail with Will’s box and putters away. A country mailman must have a lot of time to think during the day. Will emerges from his house as the truck disappears and shuffles a couple letters on his way back inside.
I sneak closer in the dark and wait for Will’s silhouette to give his location in the house away. When it does, when I see he’s in the kitchen, I move in past the socially acceptable limit of trespassing and start trying to catch glimpses of his home life. The light of the kitchen falls into his bedroom which has a clean floor but cluttered shelves. The living room looks dusty and there’s the impression of a man in the sofa. He’s still got a box TV.
Back in the kitchen Will is chopping tomatoes and throwing them into a pot on the stove. The knife is too dull and he crushes the tomato every time he tries to make a cut and then he ends up just tearing the mashed piece away and calling it good. Tomato juice leaks onto the floor before he pulls a rag from the fridge to mop it up. After a while, once the chopping is done, he stares into the pot like he did into the sky, occasionally stirring but mostly doing nothing at all. He coughs and doesn’t cover his mouth.
I’m strangely riveted by the whole thing and Will makes no attempt to conceal his home life. No shades are drawn, no cautious looks spared for the windows. He pours the pot into a bowl and take it into the living room to watch the evening news. He falls asleep on the couch, wakes up an hour later and stumbles into the bedroom. Under the covers he falls asleep again, his breathing even. It’s past midnight now and my own breath emerges in a fog.
What a miserable life Will must lead what with his being alone and being a shitty cook. The Museum of the Common Man truly was a shithole, but I feel at least a little better knowing the guy who runs it isn’t all that much better than…
