‘Every city has one obvious path to the underground, be it an open drain or a manhole-cover askew. Every entry bears signs of trespass- enough to goad the onlooker. The allure of these places only just outpaces their foreboding, so that a rain storm or a particularly dark night or the smell of something decomposing nearby is enough to turn the curious away. Entry requires determination or desperation or an unlikely alignment of circumstances: the perfect day and the perfect fool, willing to risk themselves in the realization of a journey with no apparent destination.
The unapparent destination is ‘The Drain Place’ and no city’s ‘Drain Place’ is like another. It is as likely to be a black market as it is to be the residence of a single, otherwise uninteresting denizen. It is often the studio for eccentric artists, sometimes a museum for dangerous collections, and rarely the dumping grounds for top secret government material. It is sometimes a zoo- a safari more often than that. ‘The Drain Place’ is never a maze, though a maze commonly precedes it. ‘The Drain Place’ is dangerous, nine times out of ten, but the danger is more likely a result of the environment or the allure than the place itself. The environment, because ‘The Drain Place’ can be dark and prone to flooding. The allure because ‘The Drain Place’ is commonly guarded by those who have nothing in the world but for their knowledge of ‘The Place’ itself.
A comprehensive guide to the nation’s ‘Drain Places’ would represent obsession in several volumes. The loss of money and life and time: it is not in the purview of this undertaking.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
The facility that houses ‘The World’s First Splashless Urinal’ is massive and its acreage is uneasy. The air around it buzzes with chemical drought and flies. Hector and I pass several small clouds of insects, in fact, each in a structurally uncomfortable swarm. We pass trees that grow with fractal corners. Birds that hop in tight circles. The world leans into the urinal complex in a way that makes the shallow slope up to the parking lot feel precipitously like a downward fall.
As is the case with all self-service Wayside attractions, I am both relieved and intimidated by its vacancy. Hector and I enter through a sliding glass door and struggle to keep our feet on the tile inside.
‘It is at great expense that the world has solved the splashy urinal problem, in concept if not in practice. ‘The World’s First Splashless Urinal’ began as a bit of an academic joke- a throwaway scholarship sponsored by nearby universities that encouraged emerging STEM freshman to consider the myriad variables necessary for creating a urinal: fluid dynamics, diversity of audience, resource efficiency, and aesthetics. The results were rarely as interesting as judges hoped, normally a series of overdesigned porcelain bowls, most of which were indistinguishable from the common commode.
Amy Montero, a student of astrophysics, is credited as producing the entry that changed the purpose of the scholarship. Her design required a series of engines working in tandem to create a vacuum. A sensor at its base would detect the arrival of a urinator and breach the vacuum so that anything, ideally urine, driven past a certain point on the floor would be forcibly pulled into the tank. The vacuum urinal was loud and violent. It tore through a mannequin during a demonstration. It crushed a judge’s hand. The vacuum urinal did not win Amy the scholarship, but it did draw the attention of a massively wealthy anonymous patron who, academic legend has it, agreed to provide her the staffing and equipment needed to perfect the same design.
‘The World’s First Splashless Urinal’ debuted just a decade later, much to the consternation of Bremsford County officials who had been led to believe it would be a water park. Crowds arrived en masse but long lines and sensations of vertigo soon repulsed would-be visitors. Bremsford County refuses to acknowledge the site with signage and the shadowy bureaucracy that claims the facility has rebuffed attempts to have it torn down.
Stakeouts have noted the annual appearance of a sleek, white limo and a man with graying hair. He emerges from ‘The World’s First Splashless Urinal’ with the ugly self-satisfaction of the obscenely rich and the careful trot of a full bladder.’
I expect to get lost in the facility, to be led down a series of winding hallways and urinal themed hurdles. In reality, the outer door opens upon a small, sterile lobby and a second, inner door opens upon the urinal and the sink. The inside of the facility is completely silent- more than completely. As I stoop to comfort Hector, I realize that sound is fleeting and that it curves toward the urinal, that the urinal, which is only a dark oval in the wall, is tugging everything toward it.
There are no warning signs. No instructions for use. There are no levers, in fact, no noteworthy plumbing. The bathroom air is soft and sterile. The grout is clean. There is a dispenser for gum, condoms, and disposable toothbrushes. A toilet paper roll hangs empty on the wall.
There is no chance for anything to splash. Like Montero’s vacuum model, anything near enough the urinal is simple pulled into it and lost to the terrestrial earth. I wouldn’t know how to guess at the thing’s inner workings. There is something deadly about it- a sense of radioactivity, but also of the opposite. That nearness to the urinal is vitally draining, somehow.
It’s difficult to leave. It takes an hour to just to make it back to the motorcycle. I’m not sure where the time has gone but I am exhausted. Hector curls in the back of the kennel and is asleep before I secure him to the bike, heart thudding slowly beneath his leather.
-traveler
‘Predecessor to the drive-thru wedding chapel is Connecticut’s ‘Sin and Spin,’ a car wash style amusement ride that promises all the moral destitution of Vegas in a tight, five-to-ten minute reveling. Though the mix-and-match options for sinning are near infinite, each trip ends in a short absolution that guarantees all vehicles and mortal souls emerge squeaky-clean in the eyes of the man, woman, or non-binary deity upstairs.’
The manager of the local car rental service is kind enough to let me park the bike in their lot while I borrow a sedan for the day- an absurd, but necessary expense if I’m going to check this place off my list. The car is already sparkling clean, of course. It’s so clean that I pull off at a park and rub a little dirt across the hood to ease the petty voice that insists I get my money’s worth.
‘The Sin and Spin’ turns out to be a smaller facility than I imagined for all that it promises an assortment of experience. It is about the size of any other car wash I’ve seen, in fact, and like any other car wash it consists of a run down looking booth, a tunnel, and a cement lot that’s been sized to accommodate a line that never quite materializes. The only indications of ‘The Sin and Spin’s’ novelty are an inflatable devil that beckons potential customers from the road and a list of a la carte services that has been crudely photoshopped to reflect the theme, offering, for instance, ‘hell’s hot wax’ rather than the terrestrial hot wax one might normally have applied.
I am increasingly sure that I’ve wasted money on this and I say as much to Hector, who sniffs at the new car smell from the back seat.
“Hallo, traveler!”
The woman in the booth turns out to be a machine, one of those fortune-dispensing robot spliced into the UI of a ticket purchasing system. Her wig has gone ratty and her jowls hang waxen and sun-bleached behind dusty wind-
“Hallo? What are you staring at?”
Shit, she’s a person.
“Hi,” I say, “Sorry. Uh, first time at the, uh, ‘The Spin.’”
“Oh ho, don’t be nervous traveler. Absolution awaits at the end of your journey. What dark desire do you wish to have fulfilled this afternoon?”
I wait for a moment, scratch my forehead under the skin of my baseball cap: “Is there, like, a menu or something or…”
“No menu! You tell me what you want and ‘The Sin and Spin’ makes it happen!”
“Are there price differences between…”
“LUST?” she shouts, “Many young men choose from a variety of lusty desires, sir! What say you?”
She begins typing something into the console and I see a man peer out from the entrance of the tunnel, his muscled abdomen rippling and naked.
“Not lust! What about…?”
I wrack my mind for sins and leap to the first I remember: “Wrath?”
I venture a look at the tunnel again and see the man has gone.
“Wrath, you say? Have you the stomach for wrath?” She’s already printing the ticket, bored by the act or just tired.
“I think I can handle it.”
I reach for the ticket but she grips it tighter and looks me in the eye.
“Whatever happens, you must remain in the car to the end, yes? You must receive absolution! We are not liable if you exit the vehicle inside!”
“Right,” I say, “Stay in the car.”
“Stay in the car!” she shouts as I roll forward and into the sharp, inconvenient right that’s required to line the tires up with the track.
Once the track has hooked into the undercarriage, I shift into neutral and look up to find that the inside of ‘The Sin and Spin’ has gone completely dark, as though someone has drawn a curtain across the exit. The model man is gone- there is, in fact, nobody around to make sure that the car is properly aligned. I roll down the window and shout over to the woman in the booth:
“The is safe, right? Like, it’s a ride?”
She pretends to ignore me, as though the sea-shell silence of ‘The Sin and Spin’s’ gaping entrance make it impossible to hear shouting 15 feet away. The track moves slowly- more slowly than seems necessary, and no indication of life escapes the tunnel. I try shouting again:
“What’s your refund policy? This won’t damage the car, will it? This is a rental and I bought insurance. You know they’ll come after you if something happens.”
The suggestion of potential liability gets the woman’s attention. She shouts something back through the glass that I can’t quite make out. The two of us wrestle with our restraints- mine, the sticky seatbelt and hers the rusted latch of the booth. I step out of the car and jog over just as she’s swung the door open.
“It’s safe, man!” she pants, out of breath just opening the door, “Probably gonna spook that creature of yours though.”
I look back and see the car has disappeared.
The muscular man (who, later, claims to be the woman’s son-in-law) reappears just in time to keep me from plunging into the tunnel after Hector. A gate drops down and a door slides closed and I berate the owners, demand that the car be returned, and threaten to call the police (which I, of course, would never actually do). They offer weak assurances that ‘The Sin and Spin’ is probably fine for animals, that Hector’s blindness is probably to his benefit, and when the shouting crescendos they, too, threaten a 911 call but seem equally unwilling to back it up.
The car emerges from the other side of the tunnel two hours later, clean as anything. I open the door and shift it into park and turn back to look at Hector, who is wide-eyed and still. A half-hour’s sunshine is enough to get him back to eating lettuce but he’s still jumpy as I push him into the kennel.
We stop to top off the tank on the way to return the rental and few cups of blood splatter my shoes when I open the hatch to the gas cap. Hector hisses from the seat, thumps about until I clear it away with station squeegee.
It’s not the first time I wonder if this is not the life that Hector deserves.
-traveler
‘The Rumor Mill’ is exactly the sort of business I don’t enjoy visiting. It’s a consulting firm- a place with no real products to browse and no showroom to speak of. Its lobby consists of a desk, three chairs, and a very patient man in a suit that is nicer than anything I own. The décor is sterile in a way that probably feels comfortable to those of a higher socio-economic class. It’s kept cold with the assumption that anyone who is supposed to be waiting won’t be waiting for long.
I wait.
What I hate about a place like this is the scene that occurs when a guy like me walks in and asks for a tour. They know I’m not going to open an account, that I couldn’t scrounge together the money for even the most basic of their services. They suspect I’m crazy or ignorant or that I have the wrong idea about what they do- that I’m hear to launch a petty smear campaign against an ex-lover. Speaking strictly of cost-benefit, though, they’d rather waste half an hour of an intern’s time toward entertaining my visit. The script will be hostile and apologetic, designed to make me wonder why I came.
Hector has started to shiver in his kennel and I’m just about to ask after the thermostat when a woman in a pressed suit emerges.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, sir. Right this way.”
‘‘The Rumor Mill’ currently holds the patent for a chemical cocktail that, diluted in pool water, will turn cloudy green in reaction to urine. It is responsible for the popular notion that walking under a ladder is bad luck and that touching baby birds will make them repulsive to their once-doting bird parents. These represent some of ‘The Rumor Mill’s’ greatest successes- little myths that shame or scare people into common sense behaviors. Don’t worry about pee in the pool. Don’t knock over the ladder because you couldn’t be bothered to go around. Don’t touch wild animals. At some point in history, some person or group of people cared deeply enough about these issues to pay ‘The Rumor Mill’ to do something about them. ‘The Mill’ designed and seeded the myth, molding the behavior of the masses with the sheer power of storytelling.
Initially a four-person operation, it might concern the reader to know that ‘The Rumor Mill’ has expanded to nearly 400 employees over the last decade. Concerning, also, is the fact that the rumors mentioned, here, are those that have been de-classified by ‘The Mill’ to serve as exemplars in their portfolio. Current projects are necessarily confidential but, based on ‘The Rumor Mill’s’ expansion into legend and conspiracy, it’s safe to say that business is good.’
The woman and I walk down a hallway that passes the restroom and terminates in a single small office. The office is sparse and even colder than the waiting room. Two picture frames are angled toward the woman as she sits and adjust the chair. Both frames are empty.
“What can we help you with today, sir?”
“I was just hoping to get a rundown of the business or, like, a tour I guess. I’m a-”
“Journalist?”
“A travel writer.”
The woman narrows her eyes. “There isn’t much to see but what you’ve seen so far. As for our business,” and here she pulls a tome from an otherwise empty drawer, “I can quickly take you through a list of our accomplishments. I’m sure you’ve heard about the pool dye. We are also responsible for ‘wait 30 minutes after eating’ in the swimming genre and have lobbied for the sexualization of hot tubs and saunas if you’re curious about the water theme, overall. Opening an umbrella inside of the house wasn’t us but we’ve since absorbed the firm that designed that rumor. Have a look.”
The left pages of the books have simple rumors- that running the vacuum over its cord will electrocute the user, that spiders crawl into one’s mouth while they sleep, that trimmed hair will grow back thicker than before.
“What’s the point of the spider thing?” I ask.
“That was a special case,” the woman smiles, “A woman trying to convince her husband to wear his CPAP. Got a bit out of hand.”
The latter half of the book is devoted entirely to handshake etiquette. Competing palm temperatures, grip strengths, and durations.
“There is a perfect handshake,” the woman shrugs, “And people pay handsomely to keep it secret. Can we talk about your budget?”
Several seconds slip by as I think about how much longer I want to do this. The answer, it turns out, is not even one more second.
“No budget,” I say.
“Ah, well, thanks for coming in.”
The woman extends her hand and I take it. My fingers buzz pleasantly and the next thing I know I’m back outside, feeling as though I’ve met someone important and wasted their time.
-traveler
The ‘Exit Womb’ is the first site I visit that won’t let Hector inside- at least not to the main attraction. The woman at the front desk says she’s happy to watch him while I play and continues to say, in a tone that is overtly coy, that ‘Exit Womb’ is no place for rabbits.
“Hardly a place for men,” she adds.
I sign a waiver without reading it and push a carrot into the front of Hector’s kennel before moving to the ‘changing room’ where I assume I’ll be donning some sort of cheesy costume but, instead, am fitted with an apparatus that covers my mouth and nose and trails a plastic tube. The woman disappears momentarily, warning me that I may experience some initial lightheadedness as oxygen begins to flow into the mask and the next thing I know I’m waking up somewhere dark.
‘What can be said about the exit room and its haphazard appearance on the Wayside? We are all seeking escape, sure enough, but what traveler has the time to engage in the premise of such a thing- to have the friends or to be willing to put up with the strangers necessary to humor the scenario? Successful escape rooms are, without exception, well within the mainstream in theme and location. Those that persist on the Wayside are exceptional or exceptionally degraded.
‘The Exit Womb’ is both. It presents an escape-room styled journey for a party of one and in doing so it targets an audience so niche that it may as well not exist. Only a thin stream of public education funding (and a loyal group of likely fetishists) keeps the doors open and the paint on the walls. The author recommends that the interested traveler insist they see the mask cleaned in front of them but otherwise has no advice to those who understand ‘The Exit Womb’s’ premise and choose to engage.’
It’s warm, of course, and humid. I stand and my head spins with excess oxygen and sensory deprivations. A bassline pulse sounds and dim, reddish lights begin to glow on the ceiling. The inner walls of ‘The Exit Womb’ are all curves, though, not anatomically accurate to the graphics I recall from middle school sex education. A series of glowing buttons with numbers stands out as a likely fabrication, as does a tattered map of the world.
“Welcome,” a soothing voice calls, “I’m glad to see you’re awake. This is the first day of the rest of your life…”
I twist to try to pinpoint the speaker and finally recognize it near a camera behind me. The bassline sounds again.
“You look like you’re just about ready to get out of here, little guy. In order to see the outside, you’ll need to complete a series of puzzles…”
I black out and wake up several minutes later with a thrumming headache.
“You’ll want to watch your umbilical cord, fella. Tangle that up and the journey will be over before it’s begun.”
I feel myself growing woozy again and realize I’ve propped myself up on the mask’s tube. Oxygen streams out again as I adjust. The room comes back into focus.
“If you get stuck, just kick mommy’s tummy and she’ll give you a little hint. Your first goal is to track the flight of the stork. Good luck!”
What follows of ‘The Exit Womb’ is neither fun nor particularly amusing.
The puzzles are those one might find in any exit room but stretched painfully to fit the theme. Over the course of an hour I decode messages in UV reactive ‘cervical mucus’ and deduce my own due date from a series of ‘if this, then that’ style clues. I activate the ‘cervix’ itself and emerge into a hallway (while a voice chides me for squeezing through legs-first). By the time a trap door opens below my feet, stripping off my mask and transferring me, via slide, to the lobby, I am sweating, hungry, and vaguely annoyed. The woman at the counter slips me a 30% discount for my next go around but I ignore the offer and retrieve Hector, narrowly dodging a hand-shaped paddle on the exit turnstile. I sit in the parking lot and leave a two-star review.
Hector is only just waking up by the time I have him secured to the bike and he sniffs hungrily at the carrot, which I had begun to eat myself. I offer him the stub and he accepts only after I promise that our next stop will be a lettuce farm of some sort.
-traveler