Hector and I return to the ruins of ‘The Sunburn Experience.’ The ashes have been swept away by the wind, but its charred half-walls still mark the perimeter of the building where Hector spent most of his life. The rabbit seems fine. I thought he would be nervous- that some core instinct would have pegged this place as dangerous. It’s only the human in me. I’m projecting my own concerns on the animal.

I’ve been worried for a while now, ever since I discovered the onion paper pages of ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’ I’ve said before that it seems to grow longer the longer I read it. I’ve said before that it has expanded and splayed against the curling paperback. I found a picture of myself with the book when this all started. It was slimmer, then. A compact little travel guide with thick stock pages. Now I know those pages come apart. There are entries within the entries. Sites within sites. I have been reading the sub-pages and, when I can get to them without tearing, the sub-sub-pages. Now that I know how to look, I can see more text in-between.

I’m no closer to finishing this than when I started.

‘The discerning traveler will note a basement level displayed on the interior maps of ‘The Sunburn Experience,’ the only remaining clue that such a place exists. Other mentions of the basement have been edited out of brochures or taped over on signs: very deliberate attempts at erasing public knowledge of the place entirely. Some would attribute the unedited maps to conspiracy. The likelier explanations are incompetence or apathy or an understanding that, if someone has made it as far as the lobby, they will not be dissuaded by missing information.

Like everything made secret, the basement of ‘The Sunburn Experience’ holds a wonder: a source of daylight in miniature. Like every wonder on the Wayside, it has been wasted on dangerous and lucrative pursuits.’

The trouble with the ruins is that the trapdoor is less immediately clear than it would have been if the building was standing. If the guide is right, the door wasn’t meant to be easy to find to start. We wait for nightfall, hoping that the source of daylight will stream up through cracks in the floor. It does not and I assume, too early, that whatever was down there was lost with the rest of the building.

Hector disappears in the middle of the night, and he doesn’t come back. If it were anywhere else, I would let him be, but because he has a history, here, I shake off sleep and set out to find him. It isn’t hard. He’s nested on the bare floor in the northern corner of the once-lobby. I pick him up, finding his underside unnaturally warm, and there, beneath him, is the latch.

The ground radiates heat.

Beneath the floorboards of ‘The Sunburn Experience’ exists a miniature star. It spins in a room of broken mirrors, segmented by office dividers and shelves of dried-up suntan lotion. I find a pair of those little goggles and squint to keep them in place. Hector is nervous at last- I leave him on the surface for a quick look around but hardly make it more than a couple rungs down before the heat makes my skin tighten. I think of all the dangerous things the human body can do with too much sun and take a last glance. A man’s skeleton, bleached white, rests against the far wall. Several rabbit skeletons litter the floor. I don’t know what happened, here, or when it did, but it’s plenty of reason not to leave fingerprints.

I wipe the rungs of the ladder on my way back up and join Hector at camp, where he’s resettled in the sleeping bag. I peel the onionskin between ‘The Sunburn Experience’ and ‘The Terrestrial Star,’ and read about a quirk in the parking lot- a patch of asphalt that has split and cracked in the shape of man’s face- how it seems to discharge and arrange loose pebbles into neat rows of teeth no matter the number of times they’re pulled away. I split the pages again and read how every thousandth tooth contains a cursed gold filling. I tear the page trying to split it again, but I see more text. It will take finer tools than my fingers to delve deeper without doing damage.

-traveler

‘Nobody gloats quite like the owner and doorman of ‘The Roadside No-Mystery House,’ who takes it upon himself to follow visitors about the premises as they investigate, trying to find anything about the house that might be considered strange. The trap door leads to a wine cellar. The hollowed-out book is a victim of rats. The distant human moans are the sound of wind in the chimney. The rattling at odd hours can be attributed to old pipes. Pings on personal EMF detectors are false signals from an electronic hobbyist group that stores their equipment in the basement. Animal corpses that collect on the lawn can be attributed to a pack of feral cats that roams the area. Missing tourists disappear due to ‘the nature of the wandering soul.’

It would be convenient for the gloating man to be the mystery manifest, but he lays himself bare with the slightest provocation, telling his life story the way a nervous high school student cites an essay. Everything is backed up by evidence twice over. He narrates his worst moments, illustrates them with mugshots and bankruptcy declarations and divorce filings and criminal records. He has no secrets and he gloats, unceasingly, about the sheer mundanity of the present. He gloats like a man who understands that a good life is one without surprises.’

­-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

Hector and I manage to take a road all the way to ‘The Heart of the Forest.’ It’s new asphalt- the smoothest ride we’ve had all year except for all the distractions. Things like gingerbread houses. Like lurking men in hooded cloaks. Like beckoning animals and women with backwards feet. Like spring-fed ponds with treasure sparkling in its bed. Like birds singing in such a way that they might be speaking words.

That sort of thing.

‘Say what you will about it being cheesy or overdone, ‘The Heart of the Forest’ served as the inspiration for all those weary tropes that seem a little too familiar- a little too on the nose- in this, the civilized 21^st century. One might as well say that the moon is cliché for hanging in the sky, given all those times we’ve seen it visited, colonized, and blown up in films. Nobody would suggest the moon needs to build upon what it already has going.’

We stop at the center- the heart of ‘The Heart’ I suppose. The Rangers have set up a safe-zone there, paved all over in cement and park benches. Heavy duty garbage cans form a perimeter, way more than would ever be necessary. A sign suggests they disrupt the narrative pull of ‘The Heart of the Forest’ just by being out of place. I’ve read, elsewhere, that they’ve got to change the perimeter out every once in a while, since ‘The Heart’ has a tendency to evolve and push out some fable about elves that lure children into dumpsters or what have you.

There’s a rattling in one of the cans as soon as I think about it. I try not to think about it and the sound dissipates.

The Rangers’ signs offer all sorts of warnings about ‘The Heart of the Forest,’ mostly harping on the Red Riding Hood “don’t leave the path” sentiment. That’s the trouble with the Rangers. I’m not sure they have ever understood what exactly they’re dealing with. As soon as they tell visitors not to leave the path, they sow danger on the peripheries. They create a new branch of the Wayside.

-traveler

‘The practice of shaking one’s hair out into the grass operates with the common assumption that a bird will use the hair to build its nest- a straightforward, circle-of-life type excuse for a fairly benign practice. And it’s true, only, it’s not true the way people think it is. The specific, truer-truth is that birds as a species don’t engage in this practice. The truest-truth is that there is exactly one bird that collects hair and fingernails for its nest. Hair and fingernails is all it uses.’

The nest of the Fingernail Pigeon takes up the entire rooftop of a towering hotel on the outskirts of Omaha. The hair and the fingernails droop down over an old neon sign and clatter in the wind like swarming insects- like tiny, percussive wind chimes. Tumbleweeds of hair and nails are said to be found at far as fifty miles away. Hector and I encounter our first just a few miles from ‘The Nest.’ It claws lightly at my jeans until the wind changes. It rolls off toward the highway to be crushed like a dry beetle.

The hotel only begrudgingly acknowledges the existence of the Fingernail Pigeon, which is considered endangered despite proving to be functionally immortal over decades and decades of sightings and the occasional botched poaching attempt. I ask for a room with a bird’s eye view, which is sort of code for wanting to see the unspoken thing. They charge $10 more for the privilege and throw in a pair of old binoculars.

The guide ‘Birds to Watch and Birds to Watch Out For’ describes the Fingernail Pigeon as being ‘somewhere in the middle’ of its titular scale. It’s been known to swoop down and tug and at egregious hangnails and it occasionally makes a play for hair that hasn’t naturally fallen, but neither case has ever resulted in more than a minor injury. And there’s just the one Fingernail Pigeon, so it’s likely not in most people’s general vicinity anyway.

On the other hand, it’s not a particularly rewarding ‘watch.’ It’s an ugly bird, its feet pink nubbins and its feathers crooked and frayed. It’s often seen carrying hair and fingernails tangled about its body. It tends to stare back, after a while.

This last part I find very true. I get an eyeful of the Fingernail Pigeon in its nest early on and go back to the bed to read for a while. Hector engages it from the floor, staring up until it, eventually, stares down. It’s funny, at first, but over the course of an hour the Fingernail Pigeon climbs through its nest of hair and nails to sit just outside and stare back with the sort of blank malice one sees on mannequins. When I try to close the shade, it flutters its wings against the glass, tapping and scratching.

The hotel refuses to let me change rooms.

I try to ignore the quiet standoff in the corner and eventually I do get some sleep. When I wake, the Fingernail Pigeon is gone- off to find more hair, I suppose. Hector has fallen asleep on the floor and he’s slow to rise and stiff around the joints. The rabbit’s getting old, I think. Too old to be picking fights.

-traveler

‘Not many of the Wayside’s stopovers lend themselves to the online experience, but ‘The California Manual Library,’ which boasts an impressive print collection of nearly every English manual to date, really ought to have been digitized years ago. For one, it’s a fire hazard resting tenuously in a state that is on fire for most of the year. For two, its collection, though somewhat mundane, is unrivaled. It is the American Library of Alexandria, waiting to be lost. For three, and like many Wayside attractions, few people ever visit ‘The California Manual Library’ on purpose, meaning that its practical value has been relegated to a semi-interesting restroom stop off the interstate.

Rumor has it that ‘The California Manual Library’ resists digitizing due to an amount of forbidden knowledge that, on the open web, might call the wrong sort of attention to itself. It’s the author’s opinion that anyone who would want to do it harm would have lit the match decades ago.’

I’m halfway through a ream of paper that claims to be a manual for pumping blood through the human body via contractions of the heart when I feel my own heart begin to studder. I focus on it and in my panic I’m able to compress.

Once.

Twice.

Good.

As soon as I go back to the manual my heart stops again. I squeeze with my cardiac muscle, too hard this time, and feel my arteries stiffen with pressure. I calm and squeeze again. Again. Again.

With fifteen minutes’ practice I’m able to put the function of my heart on the backburner of my active mind and bring a sliver of my focus back to the cardiac manual. I study an appendix for reengaging the heartbeat as an automatic process and have it down in half an hour or so but when I think back to the passage that switched me to manual, I find the world going black again.

By closing, I’ve trained myself in both processes, which may seem like an accomplishment but is really more trouble than it’s worth. I find a manual for my phone and finally figure out how to turn night mode off. I read about all the wrong things I’ve been doing with Hector’s diet, which explains the gas. Still, the circulatory override sits there in the back of my brain. It’s there even as we pass the state line, a sore tooth that can’t be pulled. I buy a cheap set of headphones at the next gas station and set to burying it as best I can.

-traveler