‘‘The Nighttime Insect Experience’ is nothing but a rundown motel and it does the bare minimum to convince any would-be visitors otherwise. Advertising exclusively in phonebooks and the thin magnets that clutter the refrigerator doors of elderly relatives, ‘The Nighttime Insect Experience’ is every inch the grainy off-white it appears to be in pictures, flaking like a dry scalp, hunched like a sick dog. The old motel sits on the earth like a happenstance pile of autumn leaves- one careless (and inevitable) kick from crumpled extinction.

‘The Experience’ comes as a sickly surprise to most who, in the Irony Age, assume authenticity and detriment necessarily equate to redemption via gritty eccentricity. In many cases (most cases, even) the decomposition of an enterprise is irredeemably ugly and devoid of meaning. The motel’s name and its suggested purpose is not an attempt to be clever in the traditional sense, but a last-ditch effort to lure in a few more dollars before the looming demise, a plot as ill-conceived as it is ill-meaning.

Like most bad motels, a night in the parking lot would be infinitely more comfortable, save for muggings and foul weather. The place is a minefield of brittle life, the carpets sandy with broken exoskeletons and peppery droppings. There is an implication of mold on every surface and a suspicious movement in every corner that suggests a thousand things hide lazily, as though inconvenienced but ultimately unthreatened by guests.

‘The Nighttime Insect Experience,’ its owners, employees, and unironic guests, are an ugly symptom of a rich nation’s dormant poverty. Like a bedsore, it exists not to pass judgement but to serve as a vulgar warning that something is wrong on a larger scale. Like many bedsores, it goes unnoticed by those that might serve as caretakers.’

– excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

There are places and times where the sun never sets.

No, that’s not true.

There are places and times where the sun sets and lurks below the horizon, creating a perpetual half-day. One such half-day begins as I reach the end of ‘The Long Dark,’ exiting near Burrow and pressing the bike further, to the first no-name town and, past that, to the first side-of-the-road clearing underneath the sky.

It’s 2:00am and the sky is a back-lit gray. It’s cold and the air is still. I wrap my sleeping bag around my shoulders, lean back against the bike, and watch something that looks like a fox skirt the field. I fall asleep despite my better judgement.

The angry muttering of the Stranger’s truck wakes me. My cellphone reports the passing of several hours, though nothing else about the morning has changed. I rise on cold legs, legs that are stiff with disuse, and the crumpled-spider shadow shifts like dry leaves underfoot.

I watch the Stranger’s truck pass the clearing, rumbling like a small landslide, and I hear the engine’s hesitation just seconds down the road- a slowing to idle, an idling that becomes a pointed reversal. I have done nothing to hide myself, I’ve done the opposite, even, so now that the Stranger knows to look, he sees me right away. He parks carelessly and leaves the truck’s door gaping. It breathes stale air and smoke into the morning.

This is not the Stranger, but a shadow of the man the Stranger was- pale, hunched, and impossibly fat. The thing that slides itself from the frame of the truck is a dire amalgamation of the man I knew and the thing he has been running from. It is, like me, a being with no shadow, and it lurches in my direction on bow-legs and stuttered breaths. It can hardly follow me at a walking pace to the edge of the clearing, but it tries. There, we begin to circle.

In my traveling I’ve been subjected to a good deal of information on circles. Spiritualists and scientists alike see the universe in cycles. Circles act as wards against and prisons for demons and the otherwise demonic. A circle is just as likely to represent wholeness as it is to represent nothing. The Path is a circle, I think, or many nested circles. All this aside, I learned what I believe of circles in the only semester of college I ever attended, when an idiot I called a friend drank too much and we walked him in circles to keep him awake, or when the same idiot suffered a concussion for diving into a shallow pool, or when he experienced panic at the thought of growing older.

I walk the shadow of the Stranger in circles as the sun rises again to brighten the unending day, hours and hours of treading the border of this little space so that I know every bent blade of grass and every divot and pebble. I walk until my legs become indignant- they swell and ache. I walk until my toes blister in my boots. I walk until the false shadow finally tears from my socks and blows away like a dark, ethereal tumbleweed. I walk until the sun sinks again and the thing from the truck gasps and wheezes and follows, its own feet bleeding freely into the dirt until the clearing is darkly bordered.

I don’t know what to expect, but eventually, when the day becomes delirious, I look back to find that the only thing pursuing me is my own shadow, thicker, perhaps, than I remember.

I sleep fitfully in the cab of the Stranger’s truck and, finding it haunted, ride the bike back through ‘The Long Dark’ and toward the end of my journey.

-traveler

‘Sometimes the placement of a spider’s web necessitates a leg that stretches into the branches, a single, foundational strand that is separate from the rest. ‘The Long Dark’ is the American strand, tense with reaching into Alaska and cold for being kept underground, a monstrous, pre-treaty highway between the continental states and their wayward cousin. It is desolate road, widely abandoned, minimally maintained. There is nothing on this earth so desperate as to make its home there and so ‘The Long Dark’ is also reasonably safe for travel.

There are phones attached to the walls of ‘The Long Dark,’ phones placed in five-mile increments for break-downs and other automotive emergencies. Each flashes red and each is made dusty by disuse. Unfortunately, for all the phones in ‘The Long Dark,’ there is only one entrance and only one exit and they are far, far apart.

It is not uncommon to hear stories of ‘The Long Dark,’ of being stranded there. They tell of ghosts and rats and quiet, reptilian sighs in the shadows, of voices on the phones and the lingering scent of death. These stories are untrue, but they convey, with a certain poetic inaccuracy, what it is like to be there, waiting for rescue, amidst the flashing red and the smell of old asphalt.’

Just a short ride into ‘The Long Dark’ I stop to remove my helmet, thinking that the stifling air is my own breath, the smell of healing gums and dry spit. It helps, some, and it means I begin to hear the phones ringing as I pass- not every phone, but enough to realize they ring for me. Somebody is trying to reach me from the outside.

The ringing stops halfway through, and I know the Stranger is following again. For the first time in a while, he and I are on the same path.

But now I’m leading.

-traveler

‘The King of Strangers sits on the floor and believes that the earth is his throne. He shakes his legs, so restless is the King that his home travels under him. Leader of trailer parks and mobile homes, of sun-bleached beer cans and abandoned mailboxes, the man will not suffer sleeves or shorts. The man will not suffer.’

-excerpt, Unattributed Writings on the King of Strangers

I am pulled across a makeshift bridge, set precariously between broken windows 26 stories above the earth, by men with buzzcuts and carpenter-style jeans. I am taken into the shifting building, now settled, and into an elevator that moves upward in jerks and twinges as though powered by men (it is). I am pulled out of the elevator and cast out into an open space.

The floor is curiously dark, the ceiling curiously high. As I find my bearings, I see that the ceiling above me, and many ceilings above that, have been torn away to create an amphitheater of ruined offices. A man dangles his legs from a floor high above me, backlit and silhouetted. He looks forward, through the tall glass and out over the city of strangers.

The man gestures and the building begins to move again, sliding noisily between its neighbors. Engines rumble below. The man turns his head to me and I feel the gray, commercial carpeting curl uncomfortably below my palms.

The floor is not dark- I am in his shadow.

“What brings you to my city, traveler?”

I try to think of a believable lie before realizing I don’t actually know the truth.

“Somebody wrote about it,” I tell him, “In a travel guide.”

People begin to mutter, strangers that I hadn’t noticed, standing on the floors between he and I. The building jolts and an office chair rolls out from behind the King of Strangers. It falls several stories and shatters at my feet. I stand and take a step back before tripping on a ledge. Upon closer inspection, it’s the edge of the man’s shadow, which seems to sink several inches below the lit floor.

“Just a week before this, one of my men was looking for a traveler without a shadow,” he says.

“I have a shadow!” I tell him, and I wave my arm, hoping that the counterfeit is paying attention. It remains motionless and then, as though snapping to attention, it raises the wrong arm.

The King of Strangers gestures again, his shadow bringing its massive hand to the dark wriggling arm behind me. It plucks the limb from my shadow and darkness spills from its body, leaking into the carpet. My shadow shivers and tries to crawl away but the Black Tailor’s stitches hold it in place.

The King of Strangers continues:

“My man was the shell of himself, weighed down by a past that wasn’t his own. I offered that he stay here, in my city, but he refused. He left in the night, afraid that he might subject us to the thing that walks the path behind him.”

“He brought that on himself,” I say. My shadow has curled into a ball, its crooked limbs pointing inward like a dead spider. I resist an urge to do the same.

“He admitted as much, himself.”

“Why are these building on tracks?” I ask, trying to gain some sort of footing in the conversation.

“The city was built on a chessboard and my men and I are playing the machine. It draws power from our moves in order to make its own. We ride in the white queen, toward an unsuspecting pawn.”

A squat building stands in the tracks, five blocks down.

“What happens when we reach it?”

“Disaster,” the King says, “It takes months to clean up a lost piece.”

“Why play?”

“To win,” he says, “To see if there is a prize.”

“If there isn’t?”

The King ignores me and we creep closer to the little store in our path. It’s a pawn shop- the rich mastermind behind this place had a sense of humor.

“What are you going to do with me?” I ask.

The King says nothing, and then he says: “Everything has an end, from the individual to the cosmic. There is a path-”

“A path you burn.”

“A path we widen,” he says, “A path we create. Do you think the forest provides trails to its campers? There have always been men that go ahead, to cut back trees and stomp out the ground, to make sure that no animal too wild crosses paths with a person too unwitting. There would be no path without the strangers, there would be a beginning, an end, and a great horrible expanse between them. When we finish the game, we will know if this city is our end. I think you know, already, that it is yours.”

The strangers take hold of me, again. We leave the building to its slow collision course and drive to another, where I am locked away with my dying shadow to await the return of the Stranger I know.

I escape in the night, breaking one of the seven remaining pieces of Alice’s coffin in the lock. Four days pass in the City of Strangers before I’m able to retrieve my bag. The shadow drags behind me, warped and deflated, leaving a splattered trail of darkness that I fear will out me, but the strangers give up the hunt quickly and return to their game.

On the fifth day, just hours before I locate the bike, I hear the jingle of a belt buckle and feel my hair stand on end. The Stranger I know has arrived with the thing that haunts him. I write in the darkness, in the blood of my new shadow, a message only I would understand. I address it to my worst self.

I tell it where I’m going and I prepare for a long ride.

-traveler

The seventeen-story gamble is this:

I am on the top of a 43-story building. Men swarm into the ground floor.

They are coming for me.

My initial instinct is to somehow bar the broken doorway to the roof, but the men would overpower me and whatever haphazard barrier I could create. The next best option is to hide- not on the roof, where there is nothing but dust and bricks, and not on the top floor, where they are sure to check first. Which floor, then?

The nearer my hiding place is to the ground, the more likely I can sneak out during a more thorough search. The further down I run, the more chance I have of meeting them headlong. I settle on the 26^th floor, seventeen stories down. It’s less than halfway, and ascending will be slower. I will have time to hide.

The stairs fly by and I fall several times, blinded by cobwebs and slipping in the dust. I burst into the empty office space of the 26^th floor and flee down a likely hall toward a trickle of daylight. A building moves outside the windows, the lower strangers returning to their work. Cement and steel blot out the light like some industrial eclipse. The floor shakes like it has seen the end of the world.

A row of lockers stands uninstalled in the men’s bathroom. I shove my pack into one and press myself into another, falling back into it with ease, a crumple of cloth and bones.

I wait.

When the strangers find me (and they do) they spy the shadow first. It lies in front of the locker, the absurd silhouette of a man in a tight place.

-traveler