I lose money, but not so much that I lose my room at the motel. A week passes and, with it, several more games. I lose less, but my relationship with these men remains purely transactional. I see their interest wane as my money does. Eddie is the exception- he seems like the sort of guy that could use a friend. I do what I can to fulfill that need.
The apartment in which we play has a room set up for the game. There are layers of ritual underneath the crushed cigarette butts and plastic chairs and I trip over myself trying to maintain these unspoken traditions. A man always coughs when someone enters the room, for instance. A toilet-stall cough- a polite, if unnecessary, acknowledgment of another soul’s presence. I have the cough, now, and I could not let Eddie into my room without a small croak.
Someone must always be smoking. This one was difficult for me- I learned only as the room became tense watching a curled cigarette turn to ash on the edge of a plate, a full pack having materialized near my elbow and a matchstick having perched itself between my lips. I lit up (my first in a long time) and the collective sigh of relief snuffed the failing cherry at the table. I won the next three rounds.
Behind each chair (and, so, behind each man) is a picture of a nude woman and it is customary to call these women by their names and to ask them for luck when the deck draws foul. The men at the table regard these foldouts with worship and fear. Upon returning, too early, from drinks on the porch, I found a man, Caleb, on his knees in the room, pleading with a woman named Candy that he win the night’s pot. Perceiving me in the doorway, he coughed and rose on stiff knees. He had been weeping, but he was not ashamed. I regard Candy fearfully, now. I dread the eyes of the women on my back and the eyes of the men on the women. They are everywhere- looking out from the magazine racks in the check-out lanes, peering from the calendar in the motel lobby when I go for a cup of watery coffee. Always the picture of a woman, always the eyes of a man. Eddie points them out to me, sometimes. He laughs and rolls his eyes.
Ilaugh, too, and I cough and smoke and stare and ask the women favors and callthem by their names. They see through me and I begin to lose, but my lossesendear me to the men and so I stay the course.
-traveler
No, no. This long autumn has tried to turn me away before. No wall has been too high to climb, no bramble too sharp or thick to press through. Now this- kept from a place for lack of a friend, for a failure to be in the know. There is time for friendship, I think. For the lowest bar of friendship, anyway. I dredge my resources, picking through the leaves and mud of the Wayside until I’m sure that I’ve narrowed the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ to a region that spans four counties. I rent a room in the center at a motel that accepts long-term guests. I pay by the week. I set out to make a friend.
It has been too long.
The woman in the room next to me will die there. She tells me as much, but anybody standing in her doorway would know without having to ask. She is painfully old and her sickness hangs in the air around her like a dark cloud. I dare not go into that room and she dares not leave it. We are of different worlds.
The farmer in the room on the opposite side is a young couple the next morning. They are friendly and impermanent- good for practice, though I see them toe the threshold of my room and I wonder what cloud hangs about me.
I drink, alone, at bars. I read books in the park. I take the bike apart and put it together again, exchanging pleasantries with a group of older men who sit and sip coffee at the edge of the parking lot. They see through me- are disturbed by my appearance each morning. I am a ghost, here, narrowing my haunts.
Itake a seasonal job at the local store to make up for three-week’s failure-pay at the motel: bagger,stock-boy, department store jack-of-all-trades. It’s simple work, unionized ifI stay on after the holidays. I wash my uniform in the sink and dry it in theshower. People learn my name.
Myname is the bait, a distraction from the looming prison above it, from the flimsystick-and-string trigger. Sometimes the anticipation is such that I hold my breath without realizing, turningblue as I slide boxes of turkey stuffing onto shelves. The world is filled witha nervous darkness. Hold your breath long enough and it creeps in from thesides.
Another stocker emerges from the shadows and mistakes my sudden exhalation for a gasp of fear.
“Easy,man,” he says, “Didn’t see you was in the zone.”
“Just wasn’t expecting anyone there.”
“You play cards, man? Got a game tonight, need some players.”
“Sure,” I tell him, “Where?”
He wavers at my eagerness.
“You know how to play?”
“Yeah.”
“You play for money?”
“Sure.”
His eyes narrow but the trap has already dropped around him.
“All right, bro. Sunset Condos #9. Come by after your shift. Name’s Eddie.”
He points to his name- embroidered in lush green thread. I point to mine, scribbled on a plastic tag.
Eddie’s not there when I arrive, but they’re expecting me all the same.
“Who’s this broken-faced asshole?”
“A friend of a friend.”
-traveler
I lose weeks searching for the ‘Library of Urban Legends’ but find nothing about its entry real or truthful. Nobody I speak to has been, but many know someone who has. Because I know nobody, I am forbidden from finding it.
-traveler
The worn treads of my bike do not take well to the streets of Bakersfield, Indiana- a place known, colloquially, as ‘Fast-Food City.’ The pavement darkens half a mile outside its borders, appearing wet despite the driving sun and releasing thick vapors that hang lethargically as a low fog. A small brush fire burns on the side of the highway, emitting angry hisses as I empty the contents of my water bottle into it. The flames spread until I stomp them out.
There are more fires leading to the exit ramp, fires that would require more than the work of a single man’s boots. I ignore them and take shallow breaths as I pass through the smoke.
The bike skids coming off the ramp but I hold a wobbling balance and blame the poor visibility. It skids again at a stoplight, the tires sliding across the road as though caught in an early autumn’s frost. I stop, again, and run my fingers across the asphalt. They come away slick with grease.
‘‘Fast-Food City’ is home to a neon skyline and a rubbery, prismatic sunset. To say that pictures do not do it justice would be misleading, because the pictures are beautiful and, in a just world, they would reflect the degeneracy of the place that once called itself ‘Bakersfield.’
The fall of Bakersfield proper began in 2012 with the completion of a spiraling highway off-ramp that fed into its outskirts. Unsurprisingly, the few fast-food restaurants there began to see a dramatic uptick in drive-thru business and their growing fortune caught the eye of the city’s entrepreneurial crowd. Something went wrong (what that something is has been fiercely debated in economic circles) and the growth of Bakersfield’s fast-food industry hit no upper limit.
When the few vacant lots had been filled, the need for on-the-go burgers and tacos and dippable pancakes was still enough that it was lucrative to transition existing businesses to meet the new demand. Coffee chains expanded, like a cancer, to consume the grocery stores they had once been embedded in. Banks began to deliver sub sandwiches through their aging pneumatic tubes. The sewage system began to clog with oil and fat.
‘Fast-Food City’ exists in a sort of capitalistic feedback loop. Its infamy now attracts as many customers as its restaurants and it chugs along, adapting to the strange niche economy with the purchase of specialized machinery to warm its congealed arteries in the winter and to regulate the apneatic release of its hostile atmosphere.’
The roads become perilous with a slick, rainbow sheen so I pull off to the side and proceed toward the center of the city on foot. I am the only one walking and I attract the uncomfortable gaze of passing drivers- they watch me weave my way around gray puddles and collected piles of fryer scrapings. My clothes grow heavy and my mouth accumulates an uncomfortable coating from the air.
Most of the restaurants I approach have been sealed up except for one or two drive-through windows. Through the film on the glass doors I can see that many of the dining areas have been converted into dormitories. The businesses themselves exist in ‘neighborhoods.’ There will be nothing but cheap tex-mex for a few blocks before some invisible border marks the edges of a sandwich district.
I squeeze through an alleyway and into something that must have once been a massive parking lot. Now it’s dotted with coffee booths, each manned by a single barista. They, at least, seem open to serving a man on foot. The woman I order from is friendly. She doesn’t let on that there is anything strange about this place or work. I want to ask her where she sleeps- whether she grew up here and knew Bakersfield before the fall. I’ve worked customer service, though, and I know what it’s like to be asked personal questions by a stranger. I know what it’s like to have my place in life outlined by a person I serve. I’m not here to save anyone or to tear them down. I’m here to see the fountain in the middle of town and to wash the greasy coating from my insides with a coffee and to leave.
The woman points me in the right direction and offers me a day-old scone, which I tuck into my bag for later. I make it to the fountain just as the sun begins to set and watch its strange transformation. The water, or what was once mostly water, slops thickly into the base at daytime temperatures but congeals at nightfall, exiting the top in yellow, sputtering curls until the pump can no longer handle the strain and grinds to a halt somewhere below. Come morning, the fountain will warm and be fully functional by the time the restaurants are changing out their breakfast menus.
-traveler
Much of what I feared might be true of the ‘Museum of Cleverly Disguised Traps’ is confirmed when I find the entry door locks behind me, that a soft ticking like tightly wound gears throbs from the walls and the floor. Just three steps forward and a thin dart flies from the grounding aperture of an electrical outlet, embedding itself in my calf. The leg goes numb and becomes functionless. A self-paid entry machine around the corner refuses to unlock the next section of the ‘Museum’ until I feed it three dollars in quarters. It delivers an electric shock through the last coin before sliding back the bolt.
The door is heavy and difficult to move with a bum leg; it opens into the living room of an old log cabin- heavy furniture, wooden floors, and an electric fireplace. I stretch myself between the entryway and a stool, hoping to keep as many escape routes available as is possible. In the last moment I see that two of the stool’s legs are on hinges and I fall forward in my effort to set it back down without triggering whatever insidious device it is bait for. The door closes and the room is quiet except for the constant, subtle ticking of the walls.
From my position on the ground I see several trip wires and a section of the floor that is very likely a pressure plate. Like the chair, two of the stools are on hinges and another has its legs sawn most of the way through (which seems, to me, more of a prank than a trap). Most concerning to me is a small glass globe perched on a high shelf among several other knick-knacks. The arrangement of the items (and their being glued to the shelf, I find, having carefully dragged my dead limb across the room) suggests a hidden track of some sort- the start of a vicious Rube-Goldberg machine that becomes too complicated for me to fully understand as long as it remains dormant.
And remain dormant it will.
I take the globe from the shelf, with the intention of disarming the trap, but its base sinks into the shelf and the books below it begin to topple into each other. I reach out to stop them and prick my hand on something sharp- a hidden needle on the cover of the book. My arm goes numb and the final book falls from the shelf and strikes the pressure plate.
The floor opens beneath me and I drop through.
There is a bedroom below the cabin- a mattress softens the fall. I wait, with bated breath, to see if my violent entry has furthered the machinations of the activated Rube-Goldberg above but, if it has, its only result is the closing of the trapdoor above me. I check my unfeeling limbs for injuries and then eye the new area suspiciously. It is, by all accounts, a room in a modern, 4-star hotel. Leaning over the frame of the bed, I spy a door but when I throw a pillow in its direction the entire thing falls forward out of its frame and squashes the pillow flat. It closes slowly, with the predatory alertness of an alligator.
I have one more pillow to spare.
I wrap my hand in the pillow case and slide the drawer out of the side table near the bed. It, like the doors of this place, seems to resist my opening it. Inside is a Bible and, finding it free of needles, I thumb through the pages until I come across a scribbled note in the back.
“WE POWER THE MACHINE.”
I toss the Bible to the opposite side of the room and see it peppered with needles from an outlet under the desk. The desk itself collapses and a meringue pie, hidden in its base, is catapulted into the opposing wall at the head-height of the average American male. I grit my teeth and wait for the feeling to return to my leg, at least.
After half an hour, I see that the drawer has begun to pull itself back into the table and I understand the Bible’s note. I sleep in the bed and wake to find the ticking in the walls has ceased and that I am able to walk upright in stiff, careful steps. I pull the exit door down just enough to crawl through- winding the springs of the ‘Museum’ just enough to power the traps for a few minutes. I wait, and when the ticking stops, I make my way toward the exit in similar, stuttering excursions.
‘There is nothing subtle about a mousetrap- it relies soles on the allure of the cheese to capture its prey. So, too, does ‘The Museum of Cleverly Disguised Traps’ rely on its bait to convince visitors that they will be clever in visiting. So prepared are they to prove themselves better than the machine, that by the time they realize they have been baited by the challenge of simple traps, they will already be assimilated into the clockwork of a thing that is far more complex.’
-traveler