I am no more able to see constellations than the future. This was a revelation to a younger me who, on a weekend’s stay on the lake (the last hurrah of elementary school), realized that pretending to see something was easier than explaining I couldn’t.
I want to believe there are pictures in the sky, reader.
But I can’t see them.
I’ve read the books and I understand what should be there. In a splinter of galaxy set to paper, I can sometimes connect the dots myself. But not in the sky. I can hardly pinpoint the pole star.
Here’s a crazy thought:
Maybe that’s why I’m lost, why the road has been so long and inconclusive. Maybe the path is obvious to everyone but me.
‘Lifted halfway from the horizon, ‘The Public-Use Observatory’ rises menacingly from the highway- the west coast’s own bleak sun. The facility is prematurely aged by its proximity to the ocean, rusting at the creases in its frame and home to various seabirds. There is a gate at the parking entrance, though admission is free. The man that raises the gate looks as much a part of the environment as the booth he resides in.
‘The Public-Use Observatory‘ is open all hours, otherwise unmanned, and is, accordingly, built in the style of a public restroom- fortified in every aspect. The inside of the building is largely made up of cement and cheap, brutalist flourishes. Its walls recount a secret conflict between graffiti artists and a scouring brush, these hieroglyphic scars occasionally interrupted by the charcoal scorches of amateur arsons. The facility remains unfazed by these surface blemishes, it being a monolith and we being ants that occasionally explore its fissures. This is a temple of aluminum mirrors and flushless toilets.
The telescope level of this millennial ziggurat employs pure structural intimidation in the place of normal safety barriers. Massive exposed gears, operated by cranks on the floor, shift the lens about its hemisphere and crush the short-sighted vermin that have nested in the works. These represent ‘The Public-Use Observatory’s’ only confirmed casualties in its many years of operation.
For all its bluntness, nothing like ‘The Public-Use Observatory’ exists elsewhere in the world. Its accuracy and sheer invincibility make it the subject of papers in circles both cosmological and architectural. It is a private property and the little necessary maintenance is arranged by an anonymous patron. The only acknowledgement or dedication to be found is inscribed on the ground near the entryway. It says: ‘THIS IS IT.’’
A confession, reader:
‘I’ve been writing the entries as far back as August.”
Not much difference.
Alice guides me now, Shitholes re-writing itself or falling apart in the bottom of my pack. Her pick in the speedometer takes me to ‘The Public-Use Observatory’ and I follow, feeling freer for putting myself in her command. She, in turn, has become a gracious navigator, no longer pointing generally but signaling turns and off-ramps and reminding me to stop when my eyes are blurring with the length of the road.
There is a moment’s hesitation in the hand of the boothman when we turn into ‘The Observatory’ and I wonder if he reads my constellation blindness and pities me for trying. Absurd, yes. I can see the stars as well as anyone. For all the man knows I could be in the game for any celestial body. The gates raises, eventually, and I park. I stretch my fingers and examine my palms.
On the right, Orion in blue pen.
On the left, the Big Dipper in red.
“Foolproof,” said a friendly woman in a café, “These two are the easiest to see.”
That was months ago and I’ve gone over the little dots each night to preserve them, to memorize them, and, on a superstitious level, to encourage them to seep into my skin. People have recognized the patterns since and that’s only served to bolster me. I, a vampire of self-regard, steal into the night with their encouragements.
‘The Public-Use Observatory’ is a cold, echoing place, largely windowless and seemingly devoid of life. The caged lights in the mezzanine make the various informational signs difficult to read, but I learn from them the necessary crank rotations for aiming at and focusing on the foolproof constellations. Armed with this knowledge (having literally penned the coordinates on my wrists), I climb the stairs to the telescope and fail for an hour to see anything but the familiar pin-prick chaos of our universe.
A dab of hand-sanitizer does away with the scribbles on my palms, making a purple mess of my fingers. I pull a sheet of paper from the ground to wipe my hands- a tattered sign that lost its grip on the door.
‘Out of Order,’ it says, ‘(the stars).’
-traveler
There is a calm in wondering how a ruined thing came to be. I look for that sanctuary in the brickwork of a chimney, the hollowed bulk of an old stone cottage that stands in the forest. The chimney’s mason took care in the arrangement, adding decorative arches where lines would have saved time and bricks. Someone, long dead, was fanciful in their work. It’s difficult for me to reconcile the gruff mason in my head with the person who would choose these patterns- two rusted stereotypes at odds.
The dissonance is enough to send ripples through my meditation and, in trying to reclaim it, I blow dust from the ridges of the old structure. My lungs whistle and I cough, sounding, to the trees, like a cackling witch for all my wheezing.
Looking at my shadow, you might think I was bent over in laughter.
‘The superstitions of street punks, hobos, and Gray Road theorists align on this point: there are places in the world that feel heavier than others and, in their heaviness, exert a sort of force. These points anchor whatever geo-mystical/philosophical network happens to be trending at the time- the waypoints of your non-denominational ley lines.
There is no dearth of research on the subject, though ‘research’ should in most cases be defined with a picture of a map, scattered with tacks and string and blurry pictures of the American countryside. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm of zealots only serves to confuse the research-scape, effectively diluting any truth in the matter. To layer the varied believer networks one over the other until they were all accounted for, well, we would be left with an opacity that mirrors the task.
Underneath the labyrinth of the American highways and the fractal systems of public transit, there are certain locations that surface more often than not- coherencies in the otherwise rabid fever dream. ‘The Cottage Out North’ is one of them, nothing but the ruins of an old house that gasp for air in the underbrush. ‘A magical place,’ say the witches. ‘A place to cook,’ say the homeless. ‘An example of lasting architecture,’ say the preppers (the soothsayers of our time, for the world will end, eventually).
‘The Cottage Out North’ appears on so many iterations of the mystical map that it’s difficult to disregard its significance in the Wayside. Hardly comfortable, it is, by all accounts, a benign place- a stone in the river that will take your weight in crossing.’
My breath returns to me and I gather my scattered belongings. The bike, framed in the doorway, clicks and groans in the warming air. Crossing the threshold toward it, I wonder if summer may be around the corner.
-traveler
The town of Redmond Bay was evacuated in 2013 when a fine cloud of feathers formed on the corner of Main and 3rd, growing exponentially until it encompassed the better part of a the downtown area. This cloud has not since dissipated, though online sources suggest that an hour’s rain drives the cloud into the ground and grants a short reprieve from the noxious air.
It’s convenient, then, that I pass Redmond Bay as the Pacific Northwest’s early autumn heaves itself from the gray ocean, spitting and slobbering like a mad old man. Convenient to find the streets of this ghost town dark and gleaming.
I wear a mask, one of those thin, papery half-orbs you can pick up in any pharmacy having, vacillated between this and something several times the price (and undoubtedly more effective). The tissue barrier grows absurd in the shadow of a quarantine sign that has resisted the years of mossy encroachment. Its letters cut through the afternoon darkness, reflecting red in the headlight of the bike.
“WARNING: DISASTER AREA. AIR IS UNSAFE FOR BREATHING”
‘It would be three years before the displaced townsfolk of Redmond Bay would learn that the ‘1st Annual Pillow War’ was instigated by ‘Sleep-Time Tech’ for the sake of marketing- a secret sifted from the bankrupted ruins of the same company. Their flagship product, a pillow made of blended down, was a tough sell in this, the hypoallergenic age. How to get people to recognize the airy softness of their pillow filling?
Why not a pillow fight?
The iconic ‘Bilderberg Photo’ is associated with the beginning of ‘The Redmond Suffocation.’ Two men are frozen, center-frame, their pillows bursting at the base of a bronze statue- Edmond Bilderberg, who founded the town. A woman has fallen in the background, one hand on her chest. Behind her, an unidentified body already lies prone on the bricks of Redmond’s central square.
The occasional resurfacing of the ‘Bilderberg Photo’ draws tourists to the outer-limits of the quarantine zone. More than one morbid pilgrim has been pulled, alive, from the dark city in the years since its abandonment. Countless missing are presumed to have entered and remain unfound.’
A storm passed over Redmond Bay just before I arrived, tearing at my gas-station parka on the ride up and dwindling to a drizzle as I approached the quarantine. It’s a gamble, already, to take the advice of the internet in matters of breathing so, while many speculate that a light rain is enough to keep the feathers out of the air, I set a timer for half an hour and promise myself I won’t walk more than 15 minutes away from the line of safety.
When I was a child, maybe eleven or twelve, I spent the night in the library- part of some initiative to keep kids reading. It was your typical pizza and junk food shit-show with most of the kids being assholes or getting homesick, but when things wound down and the lights went off and we were all supposed to find our own nook of the library to curl up in, well, that was something special. To see that place in darkness and to find peace there- it’s a memory I hold like a security blanket decades later.
Redmond Bay is like that. Though the tones are admittedly grimmer, I find the same peace in its corners, the same darkness behind the glass store fronts. I let myself into a grocery store where much of the stock remains and consider the harm in taking a few cans of food for the road. My meddling stirs the dust from the shelves, a dust that has settled on every surface. I cough twice, comparing the nutritional benefits of two chicken-noodles, before a pin-prick pain in my chest alerts me to danger.
Outside of my reverie, the dust has collected into a thin, white fog, the torn feathers having crept into the store in the five years of abandonment. I try to hold my breath but the prickling in my lungs forces another cough through the mask, a wet, red cough.
Things blur as I try to run. My legs buckle as I round the old bakery and I see the body of a man in the checkout aisle, a candy bar gripped in his desiccated fingers.
‘He played this game before me and he lost,’ I think.
‘I’ll show him,’ I think.
And the world goes black.
–//–
Rain wakes me, my body saturated and cold. My lungs play a sickly harmonica. Each breath is a battle and the sky above me is gray.
Consciousness returns in waves, building to a coherent high tide. My shirt is pulled up over my chest and gravel scrapes at the bare skin of my back. As I try to make sense of my surroundings I realize I’m still holding the can of soup. I let it roll away and the noise of the metal on the pavement brings my inching travel to a halt.
After a few quiet seconds, as I fail to find the energy to do anything but breathe, the friendly tug pulls me another inch toward the edge of town. In the long hours of wheezing and dragging I catch glimpses of my shadow, splayed weakly in the growing dark. It has been playacting all these months but now it wants to live.
And it needs me.
-traveler
‘‘The Great Scrupulizor’ is a statue in the style of gaudy highway cowboys, built from the crotch up and hunched over a hill to hide the birds that live in the empty stumps of its legs. His shirt, once a deep navy, has faded to baby blue and the jolly red handkerchief about his neck has run pink in the sun. ‘The Scrupulizor’ holds a magnifying glass above the desert wastes, the thick fingers of his left hand prodding the sand for something he lost eons ago.
Locals tell the story of a woman who was immolated under the glass, evidenced by a dusty, black stain on the ground. They say she was a witch (implying ‘The Scrupulizor’ serves as bait and trap for vampires, wayward spirits, and other sun-sensitive evils). They say she wanted to die, that she was good, in life. They say she was beautiful and wanted the best for others. They say she was ugly and as hollow as the great statue that killed her.’
I dig in the sand under ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ glass, my back itching under the scrutiny of his great, magnified eye. Not a single grain of it turns up black, not after thirty minutes of scrabbling. A man across the highway takes note of me and stares from the diner parking lot, leaning on the cab of his semi and lighting new smokes with the butts of old ones. The ground becomes hot and the sun collects in prisms around me, shifting like the aura of a man possessed.
I give up before finding any evidence of the immolated woman and scrape the sand out from under my fingernails with the latest of Alice’s picks. When I’m through, I check the bike to confirm it still won’t start. The speedometer waggles in the direction of ‘The Great Scrupulizor’ and settles weakly to ‘0’ when I switch off the ignition.
Alice doesn’t want me going anywhere.
I drink the last of my water and prod the earth near ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ left hand, near where its index finger disappears into a tuft of dry brush. Something shudders inside the knuckle and heaves itself up through the palm, shaking flakes of paint from ‘The Scrupulizor’ and shrieking.
The man across the way lights up again and coughs.
The bike won’t start.
Once the thing inside the statue has settled, I walk the length of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ body and plod my way up the hill where a vulture clutches the statue’s right buttock, balanced on a copper rivet in the jeans. It spreads its wings as though to fly away but, seeing I’m no threat, reconsiders and wraps itself tightly in its feathers.
The legs of ‘The Great Scrupulizor’ are modeled through the thigh but taper off after the knee, his bleached denim giving way to rusted metal before terminating entirely in two, man-sized holes. The birds that inhabit this statue have mostly gone about their day but evidence for their numbers remains in feathers and dripping white stalactites. Nobody has thought to barricade these entrances, the dark of the inside of ‘The Great Scrupulizor’ should suffice in turning away any straight-minded visitor.
The treads of my boots gunk up pretty fast with bird shit which leads to a lot of slipping and brushing up against bird shit covered walls, but past the lower calf and in the shallow cap of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ knee I have the time and the space to consider the climb up into his torso and the shrieking thing exists somewhere beyond.
The climb isn’t so bad, aided by jutting rebar and sharp corners. Would be a real cheese-grater on the way down, though, a real tetanus gauntlet.
Things flatten out in the ass, again. The claws of the vulture scratch nervously above, aware that something shifts beneath it. I rest and start to wonder if I could make a life in this thing- a thought that comes to me in any tight space. I wonder if it’s water-tight. I wonder if someone would find me eventually.
Stuffy, though. Like all tight spaces.
And there’s the shrieking thing, of course.
I’m a careful person, but I make mistakes. I make one when I bring my flashlight over the arch of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ waist and lose my grip on it. I make a mistake when I leap forward to grab the light (this cheap, totally unworthy piece of plastic) and feel myself slide past any hope of stopping. My body bounces about the metal skeleton of the statue like a pachinko ball before settling on a course that takes me down the left arm.
Something screeches past me on the way down, going the opposite direction, something that’s all fur and wide-eyed terror. Then I hit the bottom, twisting my ankle something nasty on the inside of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ curled pinky. Below me, the skeleton of a woman in a scorched dress has pulled its way up through the unfinished point of the index finger. Alice rattles in her picks, content in having me witness another like her- someone lost in the wayside.
-traveler
On a white-sand beach, my body and my belongings amount to so much refuse. I sprawl there, fish-belly torso visible from space and round where I wish it was sharp. My buttoned shirt parts down the middle, jagged like the edges of an open wound, exposing flesh that is tender, swollen, and red. I close my eyes but see myself through the eyes of those around me and I become bitter and small- not at all unlike the ocean that shifts like a cat at my feet.
‘‘The Intimate Ocean,’ formed through the vigorous coupling of nature and performance art, manages to fit all the salinity and lunar movement of its larger cousins into an area just ten feet in diameter at high tide. Home to a small school of fish and a family of bluish crabs, the ‘Ocean’ hardly qualifies as a ‘pond’ in regards to size but makes up for it in questionable technicalities and the earnest condescension with which visitors treat the thing.
On any given weekend they arrive, visitors with knowing half-smiles and eyes that roll about in their heads to say ‘We, too, are in on it.’ They take up their small sand shovels or roll out lavish towels and, in the style of communal seating, cram together on the 31’ beach that encircles ‘The Intimate Ocean.’ They enjoy themselves, or, pretend to enjoy themselves, crafting miniature sand castles and reclining in mock worship of the sun.
The joke, of course, is that it is forbidden to mention the smallness of ‘The Intimate Ocean’ and outright blasphemous to suggest that, in regards to fun, the size of the thing is a limiting factor. As a society that has more or less embraced the ideal of the individual, the meta-climate of ‘The Intimate Ocean’ insists that we grit our teeth and smile when a stray foot collapses our moat or a careless elbow finds its way into our ribs because we experience the pain as part of a close, if temporary, community of beach-goers.
And when we do clear the sand from our eyes and look out over the ‘Ocean’ we see not the horizon, but the opposite shore.
And from a ways off, it does look nice.’
-traveler