‘It’s said that there is a tale for every visitor on the shelves of ‘The Library of Urban Legends,’ though the trick, of course, is understanding which is written for whom. Take, for instance, the story of a woman who shook hands with a thing that lurked in her apartment’s garbage chute, only to be pulled inside when she (objectified, first, and later devalued) became garbage herself. Or the man who tried to stage his own kidnapping, who locked himself in the trunk of his car and died weeks later (drinking his own urine and chewing his belt), not because his neighbors did not hear his screams, but because they heard and chose to ignore him. Or the story of a man who shaved his head so smoothly that the world was reflected there just as it was around him (though warped by the curvature of his skull) and who became haunted by thoughts of passersby and their reflected bodies stretching across his scalp, dancing wickedly like candle flames and offering offense to their progenitors. Or the child who slipped into a manhole (its cover lifted and concealed by a flooding street) and who can be seen splashing about on the underside of puddles in the city, the treads of her shoes heavy with mud.
For whom could these tales hold morals?
It is difficult to say whether ‘The Library’s’ run-down aesthetic is by design or due to budgetary restraints. On the one hand, many of the legends (hand-written and folded into haphazard pamphlets) have been lost to hungry insects (or censored by them, who’s to say?). On the other, ‘The Library’ proudly touts what is has dubbed ‘The Whisper Bank,’ its first venture into the digital age. Three kiosks now allow visitors to experience the urban legends as they were meant to be, whispered by voices that seem to half-believe what they are saying- that seem to await the approval of the listener before laughing, as though the story were a joke, or sinking into despair with the understanding that they may very well be real and that the world may have a dreadful sense of irony about it.
Standing in ‘The Library’s’ towering core, it strikes the author as strange that legends of the past spoke of great deeds, that the stories we tell each other now are necessarily tragic.’
I arrive, finally, at ‘The Library of Urban Legends’ and recognize that I have passed it many times. It is situated in a repurposed grain silo, narrow platforms and thick shelves spiraling up the length of structure, terminating in darkness. The outside is clean and smooth- a clever urban camouflage. A run-down silo would attract people, people like myself, who have an eye for the Wayside’s eccentricities. A maintained silo in the countryside may as well be the opposite of a lighthouse on the coast: a building that deflects attention.
For all the work I have put in to finding this place, I have to force myself to stay. It is cramped, claustrophobic. The kiosks whisper incessantly through headphones that dangle off their pegs and the noise creeps up the cement like an infestation of ants. The stories are as unfriendly as the building, as unfriendly as the man who sits at a desk near the door and watches me, wordlessly, though I assure him I am only here to look for one thing.
I look for something like ‘Autumn by the Wayside,’ a part of me still hoping either that there is some fiction to what I have seen or that the same symptoms of the country’s madness have been captured in these papers. A single overlap would be enough to prove that I am not the sole witness to all of this, that someone else has glimpsed it too, even if only through their peripheries.
And I find it.
Someone has written of the drive-in. Someone else has written of an angry, impotent scarecrow in the center of a corn maze.
Someone has written of me- a man with the appearance of a broken porcelain doll, repaired by children. A man whose arrival portends strange events- sometimes violent ones.
Someone has done more than write- someone is following me, curling her toes in my boot prints and sleeping in beds that I have warmed. She is behind me, somewhere, has been for some time, and she is sure that I am as toxic as the exhaust from my bike.
-traveler
