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

‘There is nothing forbidden about the fruit that rots on the branches of ‘Delaney’s Orchard.’ On the contrary, the ‘Orchard’ happily offers its fruit to any who might take it. But ‘Delaney’s Orchard’ is also a cemetery and the roots of its trees are known, on occasion, to churn out the bones that rest beneath them. So there is nothing strictly forbidden about the rotting fruit, but there is a certain taboo.

There is also the rumor that, on occasion, the citrus fruits impart sour premonitions, and that those who taste them become so fearful of their impending misfortune that they seek out crises for the relief of having them over and done.

It’s said that, on occasion, the peaches will contain the middle knuckle of an old skeleton in lieu of a pit, that biting through to the bone of the fruit is no different (tactilely speaking) than biting through to the bone of a human being. This knowledge is a poison that makes a peach of soft-skinned friends.

It’s said, on occasion, that the apples are as grainy as an old television screen.

A local science teacher collected worms from ‘Delaney’s Orchard:’ worms for dissection. Each had developed a skeleton of its own- a thin squirming spine and ribs like the legs of a centipede. This quirk of nature was celebrated briefly and then buried in the appendix of an encyclopedia (a process not unfamiliar to the residents of ‘Delaney’s’). On occasion, the skeletons of worms make their way to the surface and embed themselves in the soles of visitors (rising through rain-softened earth, they say, though the author would argue that it’s more a matter of turnabout).

The trees in ‘Delaney’s Orchard’ waveeerily in the wind and, on occasion, they seem to wave of their own accord, shaken bythe poltergeists of migratory birds that choked on the bones of the worms in a naïveenthusiasm for foreign cuisine. In their confusion, the bird-wraiths sometimes landupon the tree upside-down and shake the roots instead (churning out the bones,as previously noted).

Temporary entry into ‘Delaney’s Orchard’ is free and interment is cheap. The fees pay for the toil of a skeleton staff (so to speak), who work to bury and re-bury the dead. They work day and night and their work is never done.’

-excerpt, ‘Autumn by the Wayside’

‘The world is through with playcenters. Its children have become too fat, its parents too hurried. They retire now, a slow migration to the American west where a prismatic limbo squirms and coils and degrades in peace, leaching its bitter revenge into the countryside.

Just three hours west of Brookings, ‘The Playcenter Recycling Facility’ twists like an ancient worm, emerging from the earth in knots of lurid plastic and psychedelic, sun-bleached towers. A small warehouse presses itself against the boundary of the property and purports to be the key functioning piece in the recycling process, but the rainbowed landscape only grows, bulging further into the sky with every year.

Trespassing on the ‘Facility’s’ grounds is forbidden, in theory, but every few months a bright tube hangs down over the fencing or burrows up from the dirt, pressed outward by the growing mass. The curious may enter here but are advised to listen for the ‘Facility’s’ employees, who come around occasionally like gardeners to trim back the encroaching maze.’

It’s a few weeks of circling the area before news of an emerging tendril surfaces on an otherwise abandoned internet forum, another day of surveilling ‘The Playcenter Recycling Facility’ before I feel confident that its cameras aren’t functional, or if they are, that nobody responsible is watching. Three people enter the through an orange tube that has erupted on the ‘Facility’s’ eastern side. One person exits and I can’t say for sure whether it’s one of the three.

I am the fourth to enter on my watch, slipping into the dark orange tunnel and following its curve under the fence. My goal is to find an exit early, to squeeze along the outside of the ruinous architecture, but there is no clear exit- only the occasional window, the size of a child’s smiling face.

I become irrevocably lost and spend the night in a tower, curled in a dirty quilt. The boundaries of the facility seem impossibly far away. The sunset casts shadows in colors previously unknown. The plastic sings a creaking song and eventually I sleep.

Daytime in the ‘Facility’ is oppressively warm and the greasy handprints of past children slide from the walls and pool in unlikely places. I am haunted by the spectral scent of french fries and burgers while my own food, what I brought with me, is rationed in portions that only serve to make me hungrier.

The idea that I might die in the ‘Facility’ ceases to be a joke.

I find, at the center of the tubing, a massive lake of plastic balls and I watch long enough to see it shift. I refuse to enter, but having found it once I spend the next day avoiding it, taking new paths, climbing and sliding, only to find myself returned to its shores. There is a force like gravity at the center of ‘The Playcenter Recycling Facility,’ and it holds me there for a time.

Hungry and tired, I find myself facing a slide in dark purple. It is steep and I am high, high up in the labyrinth. It will take me to the exit, I think, or to the lake. It has the promise of finality about it and, at its precipice, I am ready for an end.

-traveler