It is nail-biting, inching toward ‘The Intersection with No Sign.’ It is the drawn-out stress I haven’t felt since speeches in high school, sitting in my desk while Mr. Mickel hemmed and hawed over who ought to go next, knowing I should volunteer and get it over with but failing to raise my hand all the same. All approaches to ‘The Intersection’ are blind up till about half-block before, the left and right concealed by the towering office buildings of downtown Dallas.

The radio cuts in and out. There is supposed to be a pirate station, one that dedicates itself solely to traffic at ‘The Intersection with No Sign,’ attempting to coach vehicles into order from an unknown birds-eye perch. That station is quiet today, which is not uncommon but certainly inconvenient. Traffic is bad. Cars move slowly ahead. The height of the RV allows me to see a brief glimpse of the chaos ahead. A compact car has been signally right for nearly three minutes. It decides, last minute, to go straight. An oncoming truck bullies its way forward. The two graze. Horns begin to honk as the two drivers exit their vehicles to assess the damage.

At least they don’t live in their cars.

‘Every attempt to add signage to ‘The Intersection with No Sign’ has failed spectacularly, it being a running and highly conservative joke about the price of personal freedoms and small government and such. This extends, even, to measures that would ease traffic around ‘The Intersection,’ modifying certain one-way streets so that it would not be so vital to rush hour traffic in one of the city’s busiest strips of road. 

No, ‘The Intersection with No Sign’ is the pet disaster of the locals and it is something of a spectacle when the planets align and approaching cars zip smoothly past each other, caught in a shared dance that is equal parts skill and happenstance. 

Of course, ‘The Intersection with No Sign’ averages seven fatalities each year. Hardly the most dangerous destination on the Wayside, we leave it to the reader to decide whether this particular juice is worth the squeeze.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

‘Forgotten, at times, among the myriad extinctions of our age, is a near-global mourning of the loss of the ‘third space.’ For the uninitiated, a third space is a location outside of one’s home and workplace, normally meant for socializing- a place for meeting friends. Malls traditionally filled the role of third space in America and we’re finding that they were something of a keystone in the intricate social patterns of humans, particularly young humans who are not yet welcome in bars and are still too cool for their local library. The malls haven’t disappeared entirely, of course, but those that survive are largely unwell, riddled with empty stores and tumorous stall-based merchants. They, like a terminal grandparent, do not appeal to children. They repulse them. 

Young people, these days, would rather stay home than visit a mall. They would rather stream videos to their phones, cradled between their legs in a comfortable chair while a flatscreen television screams boomer media into the void on the horizon. Kids these days would rather vape in their cars and argue about the best flavors of marijuana edibles. 

Kids these days would rather skip third places entirely, and they have begun visiting the forbidden ‘Fourth Place,’ and this is a concern for us all. 

‘The Fourth Place’ is considered an American destination because it can only be accessed in-country. For all other intents and purposes, ‘The Fourth Place’ is a location outside of space, a flat white plane with little variation in terrain or atmosphere. Bodies do not seem to exist in ‘The Fourth Place.’ It is a realm for consciousness alone and it is both vast and crowded. Thoughts arrive uninhibited in ‘The Fourth Space.’ They are shared via entanglement, an act that youths tend to perform with no particular consideration of the dangers involved. Studies have shown that participants in entanglement sometimes exit with foreign thoughts- with ideas that could not have been their own. Sometimes these thoughts are good. Other times they are cruel.

This is the appeal of entanglement: the integration of strange thoughts. 

‘The Fourth Space’ has several branches in most states, a full list can be found in the appendix. Responsible travelers should complete a mental audit before visiting, via their preferred meditation technique, as youthful consciousnesses have been known to swarm unsuspecting newcomers with uncomfortable mental narratives and earworm jingles that no earthly song can exorcise.’

Entrances to ‘The Fourth Space’ occur naturally. That’s what the current science says, anyway. Most have now been monetized, of course, they having been discovered on private lots in an age before regulatory laws could catch up to such things. I find a cheap entrance so far up north that I may as well be in Canada. It’s cold, for autumn, and the entrance is in a tin shed. A sign inside asks visitors to leave ten dollars in a jar. Honor system. When I arrive the jar holds one dead fly. I empty it on the floor and put my money in. I enter ‘The Fourth Space’ via a hole in the wall. My body is not left behind, but it isn’t with me either. Everything goes white.

Then the voices.

In the end, ‘The Fourth Space’ isn’t quite as bad as it’s made out to be. It’s annoying, really, and annoying in a way that signals to me that I’m getting old. The Wayside is beginning to adjust itself, shifting to incorporate the uncomfortable run-off of new generations and, in doing so, shedding the skin I’ve grown familiar with. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have a place, here. 

And I’m not sure where else there is to go.

-traveler

The ripe smell of decay works its way through the air conditioners just as I begin to see signs for ‘The Rot Garden.’ I assume enough time has passed since incident at ‘The Root Garden’ that anybody who noted me as a visitor would have forgotten my face and I wouldn’t become entwined in what, as far as I can tell, it a name-based turf war between two totally different locations. The signs are not what I expect from the grunge punk food attack that occurred at ‘The Root Garden.’ In fact, the advertising tone is nearly identical to that of ‘The Root Garden-’ emphasizing natural processes and a side of nature few get to see. ‘The Rot Garden’ does capitalize on gross-out humor in its illustrations, however, showcasing rotting fruit covered in flies, old skeletons dancing in muck, and an earthworm mascot that pleads for visitors to his home. 

Only very late and in very small print do any signs mention you might consider eating some of this. 

‘It’s just like cheese, they tell you. It’s like yogurt! Or, ah, pickles!

‘The Rot Garden’ and every funny-food destination like it will go to great lengths to make their menu seem appetizing by way of comparison, but the fact that they’re needing to compare at all tends to set them apart. ‘The Rot Garden’s’ more modern, and somehow more persuasive, take is to associate itself with those fringe health movements that, in neglecting large swaths of the food pyramid, resort to fermentation for the natural bacteria the body needs. This includes the all-fruit and all-meat ilk, both of whom will be happy enough with the offerings of ‘The Rot Garden,’ which certainly has bacteria on hand.’

‘The Rot Garden’ is largely open air: a field, a dump, really, with the odd open-air shelter where one might sit and eat. A very small adobe structure rises from the ground in the distance: a cellar, of sort, for encouraging different kinds of rot. A tin shack stands at the entrance, for selling tickets. The perimeter is marked by sun-bleached dumpsters and a cloud of insects fogs the air above. 

It all smells terrible. 

The man in the shack may very well be one of the people who participated in the attack at ‘The Root Garden.’ He’s wearing a leather jacket and a band tee that’s faded and cracked to such an extent that I can’t read it. He reeks of body odor when he shifts, which is somehow a reprieve from the smell of the place at large. A living stench.

“One please.” I tell him as he looks behind me. 

“Cool camper,” he says, “You going to be eating?”

“Uh… is it recommended?”

The man suppresses a smile: “Of course.”

My stomach sinks. “Then maybe something small.”

“That actually makes the ticket cheaper.” He presses a stamp down on the ticket and hands it to me. “We like to encourage people to push their boundaries.”

The tour itself is largely unnecessary. Unlike ‘The Root Garden,’ which reiterated much of what I already knew, the couple that walks me around ‘The Rot Garden’ points out especially nasty molds and insects and describes some of the intersocial drama between employees, including a boss they don’t name but who will disappear for weeks at a time and then reappear with, say, a truck full of soft pumpkins. They don’t seem particularly reverent of the place as an institution or a biome. They swat flies and complain that the boss won’t let them use spray.  

Finally they bring me to a picnic table where four more employees join us. A tray with three divisions has been plated with small portions of rotting food: an apple, a strip of unidentifiable meat, and a cream that I hope is yogurt. 

“Eat up, man.” The guy from the front hands me a fork. “You want a picture? It’s included.”

I hardly hear him. “Sure.”

After several seconds hesitation, I dip the tines of the fork into the cream and cringe to see that its white surface gives way to something swirled red. I bring the fork to my mouth and, as it hits my tongue, the flash of a camera goes off and the six employees recoil.

“Oh my god, he did it!”

“That’s fucking nasty”

One of the men turns to throw up. The others hold their faces or slap me on the back. By the time I’ve had a chance to indicate I’m done, I realize I never had time to taste whatever they just fed me.

On the way out of ‘The Rot Garden,’ the man tacks my picture to the wall of fame. It’s not a bad picture, but it’s the only one there. 

-traveler

Accessing ‘Sky Dakota’ with a vehicle is expensive and time consuming with a vehicle, but not so expensive as trying to find a place to stay and what is time, really, except an opportunity to relax in what passes for my house? The only vehicular access to ‘Sky Dakota’ is a chrome and oil-smelling industrial elevator, a spot on which has to be reserved in advance. Lucky the ‘Deep Dakotans’ didn’t hold me up after that murder, I suppose. That would have been a waste.

Ironically, darkness is my first impression of ‘Sky Dakota.’ The elevator itself is pitch black and, for obvious reasons, I’m not encouraged to run the engine during the hour’s ascent so I don a headlamp and page through the Guide and wonder what happened to all those paperback books that I’ve picked up at gas stations and read halfway. Sometimes I worry that the Guide grows via the consumption of other texts. Sometimes I worry if it’s jealous and makes them disappear, regardless of personal gain. Sometimes I worry I’ve given too much life to the Guide, and sometimes I worry that I’ve underestimated it as a living thing. It grows, doesn’t it? Surely I should be done by now. 

In fewer words, the travel authority of ‘Sky Dakota’ suggests that elevator users in need of a toilet are welcome to relieve themselves onto the surface Dakota below. I don’t plan to but, having consumed my body weight in diet soda on the way over, I give into the urge as soon as I feel like I’m out of view of anybody who might be hit. From this height, it would disperse right? I can’t be the only one that has felt a drop of water fall from a clear sky. 

I fall asleep in the camper with a clear conscience. 

‘As the toileting situation suggests, ‘Sky Dakotans’ don’t think much of their terrestrial brethren or of people who decide to come and go, residents or otherwise. The travel authority communicates this in a number of ways, including an insistence on being the original Dakota despite having not been heard of or seen by any continental citizen before the year 2013. ‘Sky Dakota’ claims to be richer and happier than other Dakotas, which it refuses to name on paper. It claims to own large swaths of sky that should belong to the federal government. It claims to have donated Mt. Rushmore and the Nekoma Pyramid to the lower states. It concedes the Crazy Horse Monument to Earth, its completion now long overdue.’

I wake when the elevator jolts to a halt. The door opens and I’m surprised to find that ‘Sky Dakota’ looks a lot like the Dakota I departed from. As my eyes adjust to the light, I see a printout, newly attached to the camper’s windshield with adhesive that won’t easily peel off. It explains that my plates were run during the ascent and my background made me ineligible for entry into ‘Sky Dakota,’ citing legal incidents and low moral character. They’ve included a snapshot of me sleeping in the camper, presumably at the top of the elevator. ‘Sky Dakota’s’ cloud-capped towers are reflected in the passenger seat window. My mouth is wide open and I’m drooling onto my shoulder. Soda cans litter the floor. 

I’ll get into ‘Sky Dakota’ someday. 

But it’s going to take some doing.

-traveler

I panic when I come to and bash my head on the quartz just like I was trying not to. Someone is whispering nearby, so close that I suspect they must be in the hole with me. They’re not- they may be at the rim. I finally remember where I am and scramble out of the whole before a goat puts me under again. I check my phone and see it’s only been a few minutes. I snap near both my ears a couple times to get a sense for what damage has been done. They seem well enough. 

The quartz is thinning to veins again when I find the body- the body of a man- hung over the railing. Blood stains puffs of down that emerge from a sporty-looking vest he’s wearing. His mouth is stuffed with cloth and tied in a gag. He must have been stabbed. Nobody in ‘Black Elk Depth’ would have missed a gunshot. 

I worry for a moment about what to do and remember, belatedly, to check the path behind me and ahead in case the attacker is still nearby. Beams of light reach me from across the rim but the way above is dark. I think about calling for help but remember the danger of someone being at the summit. I worry that digging through the man’s pockets for a phone or a wallet will be implicating. I can’t carry him, so I don’t. 

I do leave a note, keeping it vague and indicating only that I’ve found the body and will reach out to the police when I regain cell service at the top. I place the note a few turns lower than the body to give the people behind me a head’s up, like a physical content warning. There’s no way around it except the way we came. 

I have a long time to think about the murder on my way up to the rim. I wonder if the man’s blood will dry or drain into the summit. That would be a nasty surprise for anyone coming later. I wonder if I might have saved the man if I moved faster. Maybe I would have been killed, myself. The goat might have saved my life and I have no way to thank it and any thanks it would understand would make it too friendly. I worry that I’m becoming too jaded for kindness. 

This has worried me for some time. 

I do call the police when I reach the surface. I ask if I should stay and they assure me that I shouldn’t. The ‘Deep Dakota’ plate is still parked when I leave. I wonder if it’s the victim or the perpetrator or just someone out taking a long piss in the stone desert that surrounds us. 

Headed back to the interstate, I turn on the radio and am surprised to hear the same sugary pop that’s playing above. I turn it off and exit to the surface in silence. 

-traveler