Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. Somewhere on a Menceda, Nebraska, three
twenty one a M. I can't tell you exactly which
exit anymore. My map is flecked with drops from the
weather and nuts scratched in places I don't recall making.
The ring's been coming down for ires, soft and ceaseless,
sometimes thickening to a drumbeat in the car roof. I
keep the engine running for heat and park under the
only light that works, a sodium vapor halo, flickering a
patch of torn up blacked up by the rest stop bathrooms.
The lot is empty before a splinted road crew pickabidling
by the dump bins, windows fogged out here. Even when
you can see nothing but shiny pavement and farmland flattened
by distance, it feels like being at the age of
something else, like the world's been drained of context, leaving
only the bare geometry of concrete and darkness. I tap
the recorder, checking the red blink, my usual ritual for
these audio locks. I'm somewhere between wide awake and a
grinding kind of fatigue. The state you reach after six iOS.
Driving at night where the road tells you the rain
lights up just enough that I can hear the humming
of the bulbs overhead see dell Lie trembling on wet asphal.
I noticed something newer, faint kill the light scure a
bouncing off the back of vending machines near the rest
stop building. But what draws me isn't the vending area,
or even the smell of a verused bleach leaking out
the bathroom vents. It's the paper mounted between the cinder
block pillars sit back beside the picnic tables, out of
line with the rest, one of the old booths with
a square plastic code, an outdated phone book dangling from
a rusted chain, and the keeper worm brassy by use
of hands. It's an artifact. Nearly every stop has once
surviving pay from tied into some state contract. May be
just too much assle to rip our. But tonight, even
with everything quiet and the far lane of the highway
invisible behind trees, there's something off about it. I cross
the lot, stepping around a puddle, gravel pressing into mushoes.
The rain's cool, not stopped, and it beads on the
hard black surface of the booth. That's when I see
a pulsing red led in the phone cradle. Miss it
waiting old bell atlantic style, the kind you'd see in
motels or apartment lobbis in the nighties, but never on
a public rest stop phone. The phone's face play to
scratch so deep the numbers look like fossils, but the
message light is new. I take out my recorder, thun
the power, and press the voicemail button with a plastic snap.
The playback is a static first, a bend of mushy nothingness.
Then behind it a voice filters through sleep starved hurry,
trembling with statical aced anxiety. I I don't know who
if you're real, listen, something's here. I think I miss
the right spot. Nobody's coming. Next switch seven miles relocate
Please can't can't hear me? But to the voice fractures
breaks apart in static. Then a mechanical whisper takes over
cold an exact Next switch seven miles relocate. My mouth dries,
I thumb back, replay the message, more bursts of static,
a chattering sound like a really failing or a mock
coat in a lamp. I look around, rain pulls in
the grooves under the light. The only odible life is
my own breath, catching in my jacket collar. What a
rational night, I might have wondered if this was just
a prank. But the message is too specific, the voice
to afraid for theater, and the mechanical undertone too wrong,
too clean and clipped for any human modulator. It's three
twenty something, a m miles from any open shop, with
no sign of anyone else for IROs. The message light
blinks steadily, as if goading me to retrieve one more fragment.
The unease slides under my skin, a heavy insistence that
I am standing one step across some dividing line. I
record the audio, a ritual in a comfort. My hands,
wet from the rain and shaking, slide the recorder back
into my pocket. The payphone winks at me patient. I
step backwards on to the slick blacktop. My car looks
smaller than before, the world folded down to oblique jumuchee
booth car light. I realize, in that rain spattered silence
that I have become the only listener in a story
that's begun without me knowing. So I do the only
thing I can I stopped talking. My words at first
are small and uncertain, but I document the sensation, the
way the static didn't fit the setting, the certainty that
the place is empty for what may have just happened here.
I say it plainly, for the tape. This is the
start of something that isn't by chance, not here and
not to night. Four years is A part time reporter
and late night highway traveler have taught me that the
world is full of pockets of strangeness hiding in planes sight.
But until now I never imagine the exsit lain itself
might be the threshold. My name is more ferrous. If
anyone is listening, if you ever cross this stretch of
a minus eighty, you'll find the prone where I left it,
and perhaps you'll hear the message pulsing on and on,
waiting for the next traveler. Most nights I'm no more
than a sum of routines patched together by insomnia, on
a taste for stores that other people are forgotten to tell.
One sky turns black and the highway opens up. I
feel the pull of motion, like the inside of my
head smooth out with every mile, and the world reveals
it seems the weak places where other landscapes could spill
throu I'm thirty four, child of them Midwest, lately estranged
from both partner and family courtesy of a restlessness, I
tell myself his journalistic spirit. In truth, I move because
stopping reminds me how them my connections are, and because
the stores. I find that these margins come alive only
in transit. My gig is and glamorous. I patch together
audio segments and hand scrawled notes for a podcast with
a few thousand listeners, some syndicated night on public radio
and the occasional quirky Amercana feature piece, light shifts, odd
town diners. There the world of the truck stop, the
in betweens. This latest trip started because I wanted a
loveless place's segment in the life blood of highway culture.
Not love stores or ghost tales, just tru recounts from
midnight denizens who live between exits. I plan a loop
from to Moint, out into western Nebraska and back. The
subject would be the people who patch these rest stops together,
maintenance workers, fuel clerks, snowplow drivers, reality at the wire's edge. Unsurprisingly,
almost everyone I ask for interviews thinks I'm odd at best,
but a catch more good tape than you'd expect. A
gas station manager outside Dougalola walks me through the razor
warren knife marks on his lunch counter, explaining each as
the invitation for a new employees for shift a trock
and named you in a California Plates bracelet stacked halfway up.
Her forearm tells me about the night she recognized a
regular on her route after three years, and how neither
of them had the heart to nod lest the spell break.
Sometimes I let the recorder run friars, letting the back
run sounds of diesel or wind stack upon the tape,
proof that life continues even at rest stop. By her.
There are rituals and ridden roads of survival. I keep
for batted thermosts that survived more miles than my lost car.
Always filled with gas stationan coffee, the kind that smells
burn two iOS after E fill it. I scan the
vending racks for the local chips, the further west, the
weird of the flavors. If the rest stop has a
lost and fan, I check it gloves missing a mate,
A hard back bible warked by the way that a
key ring with four flash drives and oddstickers, each objected
in a claim story. Last night, I spent half an
hour walking back through the rest stop at Sutherland, Nebraska,
picking over the cracked toils by the vending machines, and
wandering along the grassy verge where the sodium lights flickered out.
The attendant, a man with thinning hair and hands drye
to reptile skin. Let me photograph a shelf of items
lost that week. A child's mitten, a phone battery, a
kitchen souvenir with a shattered plastic model of the Saint
Louis arch. He wouldn't be on tape, but his stores
tangled the familiar with something else. People waking to find
themselves forty miles further down their road than they can remember.
Phones at Baker's, I is suddenly ringing, a dog barking
at nothing, just beyond the edge of light, whether it
is the time of night or just the uncurrent. In
these places, I start to think of the highway as
a liminal zone outside in between, neither here nor there.
Every risk stop, every exit ramp is as much a
border as a destination. The world here is a loosenet.
Sometimes you wake feeling caught a sense domestic life hasn't
prepared you for I suspect the other nocturnal travelers feel
the same, even if they won't articulate it. The loneliness
is not just absence, but a state of mind, a
hypersensitivity to every flickering light, every car passing in the distance,
with its headlights briefly catching your own. I sleep in
my car mostly window cracked, radio dials spun into the
lower static, chasing drifting stations. Sometimes all that comes through
is the garbled rise and fall of forces and languages.
I canpin down sometimes late nights, sermonizing our radio hosts
who shows aren't listed in the f M guide. With
the seats folded down, I nestle under a too thin blanket,
reap lane tapes until my body insists on an easy half,
dreams the road outside never entirely forgotten. It comforts me
to think I'm documenting something invisible, the patterns of life
after midnight, the minor traditions and chance connections that tie
the midnight well together. I didn't expect, honestly, that anything
would connect these rituals to something sharper, to their first
message and the un knowving sequence that would follow. Only
in retrospect do I see the lead in. But patterns
anounce themselves, sometimes long before you understand what they mean.
Two days after the pay for an incident, I'll listen
back through my tape, trying to trim the hesitations and
keep only the oddities. The payphone message won't leave my head.
There's a time stamp digitized as part of the recording system.
Two fifty six a m. Just over an hour and
a half before I pulled into the lot. Something about
the voice, the way it breaks, the word torulocate. It
clings to my mind with sandpaper urgency. My phone buzzes
a little later that morning. It's a notification set up
for local news and missing person's alert from the county sheriff.
It's fake. Coincidentally, a thirty two year old male last
seen at the same rest stop at two thirty a m.
The car was found engine cold, door open, but no
sign of struggle. They always say there's no sign of struggle.
That gets me combing online archives, local forums, patches of
old Facebook groups for chilling sores. The pattern is understated,
easy to miss, but if you map the missing person's
reports for the last seven years along this slice of
a minaceti between Lincoln and Aglola, there is a subtle thread.
All the disappearances cost air between midnight and four a m.
Always at those little state runrest areas. None of security
footigh that covers the entire lot. Most have a gap
between the bathrooms and the fathest parking spots. Not all
are officially reported. Some are just whispers, trucos going unaccounted.
For a woman hitchhiking out of North Platte vanished off Payil.
On a sub forum diverted to mysteries of the American Highway,
I find post referring to vanishing points of places where
nobody misdisappears quietly with almost nothing left. An older postless
a half dozen sights by mile marker, each with a
link to a news clipping or blurry surveillance. Still one
shows nearly and too lot, the dark figure walking out
of the camera's cone of light. My breath comes shorter,
as as s if through. It is possible none of
this ties together. It could be the natural drift of
the transient, the constant shurn of the highways. But the
loang reage in those posts is too precise, too full
of warnings whispered in a dialect of the road. It's
as though everyone posting knows there is a code, worries
about naming it directly compelled a push aside my original
intention of recording the fulcore of Midnight Americana. Instead, I
give into the gut certainty that these empty stretches are
not merely backdrops for loneliness, but are active participants in
a patter in their network of absences mapped along the
shadows of the interstate. It's a private leap, but I
mark up my map with red pen the missing the
time stamps, every clue I found so far. I look
at the print out of the rest stop slot plan,
tracing the sight lines where camera coverage blows. The emotional
charge grows, paranoia mixing with purpose. If there is a connection,
someone with something must be orchestrating these vanishings along a
chain of safe stopping places, all relying perhaps on those
same cabrablind spots and our collective lack of attention. That night,
after iospent chase includes and dead ends, I dictate a
voice note will laying in my back seat radio dial
turn low. I describe a moment when for the space
of a breath. I see a person standing upright at
the far edge of concrete from the corner of my eye,
perfectly still, led only by a flicker from the malfunctioning light.
A blink gone. I tell myself it was a branch
wind and a sign, but I don't believe it. My
ionnees feathering against the darkness. I make a vow into
the recorder to trace this pattern whatever it costs, and
to be careful will come for shades into blindness. Investigating
a mystery out here is all work and mostly unsatisfying.
IROs driving past half abandoned gas stations for tracing lots.
When nothing happens at all, I start with the plan
systematically return to every rest stop that appeared in my
online list, documenting what I can. I take digital photos
of the papons and their blackouts, walk every row of
parking spaces under the dying lights, record the sounds of
vending areas. When I spot another person maintenance crew, janitor,
night clerk, I approach with my press pass, always announcing
that it's just a documentary on highway life. At several
stops east of Kearney, the maintenance staff clam up as
soon as I mention missing persons. A janitor in a
reflective vest fortiss of the trichy energy doesn't meet my eyes.
When I press about disappearances, he murmurs some of these
stops are for passing through. Only before I can follow up,
he s ducked into the men's room and doesn't come
back out till my car is half redominated slope at
the rest area outside Lexington, a phograph the bathroom stalls.
Flashes of dull light bounce off the graffiti. A few numbers,
some angry initials, and something more deliberate, A small symbol.
Two diagonal lines intersected by a crooked ass etched with
a bowl point into the partition near the seed. I
remember seeing something nearly identical the night before it to
rest stop a hundred miles away, same shape, same crude hand,
pure as if it's a common tag. I text the
photos to my friend Clara, a photographer and archivist. That afternoon,
she emails back a comparison. The photos are all but
the symbols match, traced in different stalls across different stops.
Always near the lost and found are closed to camera
blind spots. The pattern disturbs and excites me. Symbols circulating
like a private language hidden in filth and neglect. Maybe
just a hobo coat may be more. I resolved to
as truck drivers and late night regulars what they make
of it? Full talk the truck stop coffee counter. I
strike up quite conversation with two long hol drivers. They
don't permit taping. One shrugs and changes the subject. The other,
a woman with faded to choose, says, some folks hit
the road and never look back. Ways through the rose.
Sometimes you hear about em, sometimes you don't, She hesitates,
lowering her voice. If you ever hear a phone ringing
about self, keep walking Before I can prod, the discussion
closes off. I linger, hoping they elaborate, but the opportunity's gone.
I spend another dusk, following my own pattern, circling old
rest stops mapped at the night before, looking for something
anything others have missed. The reward is eithern nothing at all,
or something deliberately hidden. One abandoned lost and found box
screwscha pulls up my interest. This one, a deserted wayside
east of Gothenburg, is unusually clean. I unscrewed the latch
inside a plain white scrap of paper, folded with geometric care.
I unfold it breath held inside o three numbers ninety five,
one hundred eighty three, two hundred twenty four written in biro,
and the recurring sigel from the bathroom's trace next to
the largest. The numbers could be miles, mile markers, or distances.
I photograph it, then pocket the paper. The box is
otherwise empty. I watched the reflection of my own figure
in the dirty window. Restless feelings show forward by clothes
rather than method. Each discovery adds energy, as if I
am moving down a current knot of my own, making
back at my car. I scan the seabe radio, hoping
for idle trucker banter, or more likely white noise. For
the space of a minute, I catch a coded stream
a mechanical voice. Maybe our two cy bees is pitching
their voices. Low switch mile one eighty three roloquet. The
phrasing is eerily similar to the pay from voicemail shatter overlaps,
dissolving into static and clicking, but the cadence is careful,
almost rehearse. It mingles uneasily with the sensation that these
clues are not left for just any one. Are the
vanished selected then for what and by whom? Salted throughout
my notes and audio files is a growing theory about
consent to do these people volunteer for erasure or are
they drawn in by some circuit of acting messages and triggers.
I am far from settling this in my mind. The
next night, my phone buzzes with the NEWSBRSH notification local
authorities are seeking help locating a woman scene at the
Ilk Creek rest stop ease of Sutherland, a place I
visited just two nights before. Security footage, vehicle description. The
details are of the same pattern, vanish between one and
four a m. No physical trace. I check, but the
cara angle is again at the lip of the lot.
Nothing captures her last moments. That's when the dread lodge
is deep. Proximity sharpens risk and I realize I've haunted
these and tricks is long enough to be seen for
each detail I gather. The sense grows that I am
not just learning, but being cataloged. In turn. Late in
the next week, everything escalates. I coax a sympathetic off
GT Highway patrol in a NAMERD acted here for the secinter.
Shearering security footage from a stop just before Kearney. It
takes some wrangling, but I promise to keep it off
a record. The grainy time stump video runs on one
of his department's old tablets. A handful of vehicles, ordinary
motion blowed by the slow scanned camera. Nothing at first,
but then stuttering frames shows shadow, a slight human shape
that should be just behind the sedan and loading bags
off the left side of the frame. It's present in
two segments, always and nearly the same spot by the
loss and Found box. I scroll and re scroll, trying
to sharpen the contrast, but the shape never comes into folks,
never close to a real face or body, only the
certainty that some one or something is present there, avoiding
the reach of the lens, moving from camera to camera
at several stops, sometimes almost exactly timed with when the
missing person's cars appear. The realization twists me. I've evidence,
a sliver, but real. The Shadow's not random. It's as
if it wait to orchestrates the comings and goings. I
stay up late, replaining the voicemail message from that first
night using a freewerd audio filter a process frequencies beyond
human voice range. Something emerges beneath the trembling static, chopped syllables,
heavily modulated machine perfect diction, feeding back and forth. The
coordinates row exit lane, properre transfer, I shaver. The co
ordinates match exactly to the rest stops on my current
northwesterly line. People begin shutting me out. My emails goin
answered sources, forget theppointments. When I ask Clara for another
set of photo comparisons, she sends just a brief reply,
some one's watching these, mar I'm sitting this one out.
Sorry for a mother's silence. Trokojyune, few months ago, told
me to listen, leaves a single voicemail on my bonafahne.
Don't answer any calls from the exit lane, don't stop
for flashing lights, keep the windows up, no return number. Finally,
the suspicion, the true turn, the feeling I have been
identified is more than a passive observer. If you keep looking,
it'll see you, warns a janitor at ELM Creek after
I show him the bathroom sigill etched on my phone.
There's nothing I can off to hold him in the conversation.
His hands are shaking. One afternoon, half way between exhaustion
and mania. I try to talk myself out of continuing.
I promise to return to my original story, to call family,
to leave the mystery to local police. Still, I find
myself free, routing, parking at the boundary of another empty lot,
watching for shadows, compulsively, each checking, each paypron for the
flicker of a message light. The compulsion is as physical
as hunger. Now, whatever mechanism or intelligence is straining together
these vanishings, I am on its radar. Whatever the risk,
I am tangled in its mesh. I record the moment
for his sharp and tinged with something like AWE may
be fear. I think I'm inside now, not just as
a reporter or something else. I don't know whether ends,
but I can't pretend I don't see it. If there
is an exit lane for people who don't want to
be found, I'm already past the point of safe return.
The messages are calling me, and the lights on every
phone pulse with possibility. If there is an exit lane
for people who don't want to be found, I'm already
past the point of safe return. The messages are calling
me and the lights on every phone pulse with possibility,
the days spilled together. After that, I start sleeping less,
keeping my car windows rolled up against more than just
the rain. Every time I stop, I convince myself it'll
just be for gas of coffee, nothing more. But the
rhythm shifts. My restlessness, once voluntary, now feels imposed on
a blank stretch of a Mennesti West are naturally alert
even after dawn. Every signpost and patch of roade blowers
with hints of intention. I can't dismiss another coal box,
another payphone, another place I could disappear if I stepped
in step with the wrong rhythm. I reach out to
the Regional Highway department official channels, at first bland requests
for public grecos on maintenance cycles and incidant reports. They reply,
but only to the most pedestrian questions. My follow ups,
tinged with references to communications, infrastructure and emergency responses, get
no answer. It's almost comical. The bureaucracy protects itself against curiosity.
But something else is at work here. I ask for
details on the installation dates of the paperents. The emails
are bounced between departments or returning generic PDF that never
include the models or years. I request. Two days into
this dead end, I look onto another thread. A facility's
manager at a truck plaza, a woman in her fort's
named Linda, agrees to chat over the counter after her
morning round. I keep the recorder discreet, though she knows
it's on. People like to see the red light. It
gives their words some way funny. Eat those old forms,
she says, package sugar into her coffee state contract. Maybe,
but I swear the lin's never been serviced. Teck from
the fift is. Wires broken half the time, but they
never let you remove them. Some addit comes through. You
fix the light bulb next to the phone, or you
get written up. She laughs, eyes tired, mouth turned up
at one corner. The Rhad's got its own memory, keeps
it signals even when nobody's listening. I show her a
photo of the sigilllection the stall wall. Careful to hide
my motivation, she shrugs, after a lawn look, that's not
one of our regulars. You see Carving's hearts swears sometimes
rocker numbers, but you get other staff sometimes hobo code
secret signals. How where folks used to pass warnings? You
know middle of nowhere. You gotta leave words so the
next lost soul can read it. I prod gently, anyone
ever vanished from here without explanation. She stiffens, then places
her coffee on the counter. It's the roads that vanish,
not the folks get tired. Take the wrong slip road,
miss your rump. You could end up three eggsits off,
not knowing how you drove the distance. Memory holes. But
if you mean gongane, not that I know, not official.
Just don't park with the windows down, not these days.
I press further mention The recent alerts. Her eyes narrower.
I heard talk cut shrewd photos. Night men said there
was a big a cuv no plates idling down by
the west loot three nights running. That's not our business.
Do you call it in? It's gone before anyone gets there.
She falls silent, then nods at my recorder. Some stores
aren't good to keep. If you take my meaning. As
I leave, she squeezes my arm. If you feel like
the roads trying to ghost you, don't let it stay
on your route. Stick to the interstate. And if you
hear anything strange on your radio, turn it off. Don't
talk back. I step out into late morning, chilled by
her directness. My file of dead ends is growing at
the same rate as my sense that this is all systemic, engineered,
not just a confluence of oddlock and vanishing people in
the car, A plug in the recorder again, locking Lander's words,
overlaying them with an automatic map generator app. I've started
to trust more than my own paper routes. Patterns I'd
only half seen continue to emerge. The missing and the
sigil muck stops almost form a chain, never a straight line,
but with repetitions at curious intervals, seven miles here, sometimes ten,
but always along stretches, with miles of nothing in between.
I spend afternoons coming for stacks of aging microfilm at
the Kearney Public Library, the kind of work that wears
out your back and the roads your ability to trust
linear time. As Saffer lets me and early shrugs at
my lack of credentials, lots of high whist errors, they
start blending together. She offers, sliding reels across the counter.
You looking for any one in particular. I murmur a
vague answer about air report on local safety. She nods,
already turning away. The old newsprint shows more than the
modern digital archives allow. There are brief reports in the
back pages mentioning on attended vehicles, cold cabins, their belongings
left behind. One headline from the nineteen seventies baries the
leat mother missing unrainsilak stretch of a mincedi with tea paragrass,
describing her car at the pro weather and the obstruction
in the payphone system which reportedly triggered the first search
team's arrival. The word obstruction is never defined. Pattern nags
at me. The piphon's always at the periphery of the
rest stop. The lost and Found box is always within
fifty feet of the camera's blindest angle, Each symbol carved
where light fades exactly at the limit of official oversight.
Late that day, I sit at a trucker's dino with
a cold burgha paper placement growing soggy as I draw
possible routes on the back my hands WoT stop picking
at my ring finger. The isolation is heavy more than
sleep deprivation. The sense that I knew in the rhythm
of those who have truly vanished, simultaneously being drawn and
voluntarily stumbling into obscurity. I don't notice the waitress hovering
beside me until she drops a napkin with my check
scribbled on the bottom edge. A careful hand as ridden
people go missing everywhere, but you are not the first
to task about the watch, how the signals travel. She
avoids my gaze, bustles to another table. The tip of
panic rises, sharp and unearned. Every piece of new information
feels ment are not vound, but placed, as if there
is choreography to my questions and trajectories. That night, in
my car park, behind a run down Motel six, I
brave another coult on a number posted on one of
the missing person's fliers. Predictably, it dead ends to voicemail
the recording lawn. Since re recorded with the laconic please
leave a message. Out of curiosity, I leave a brief
coded question, have you noticed any interference after midnight near papons?
It's the kind of question that won't drop police attention,
but anyone in on the pattern would know what I'm asking.
I flipped through my files, growing ever more meticulous about
dates and times. As I scan through digital photos of
the stalls, I trace the cigil again and again until
the shape invades my dreams a curviness two slashes, always
rendered with a desperate hand. I note a creeping conviction,
the motif for pizts in places not visible from one another,
each at least seventy miles apart. At three a m sharp,
I waken. I doubt I ever slept properly. Phone paining
with it short anonymous texts, signals ride old wired, don't
break the pattern beneath it a link not clickable, just text,
a string of digits formated like a highway MIIL marker,
and another sigil rendered in text characters. I don't reply.
As I sit there, watching condensation beat across the glass,
I have the sense again something is waiting for me
to step off my chosen route, not just to see,
but to act, to answer a call, perhaps, or to
step into a message left precisely for a certain kind
of person. The CBE radio, mostly reliable for chatter, is
silent tonight. I toy with the dials, half afraid I'll
catch that mechanical voice again. Instead, the radio drops into
pure static. Then, just before I turn it off, delivers
one clip sentence the next which in seven miles prepare
for transfer. I don't recall dialing in, yet hears the
voice as if it has been with me all long,
listening for the perfect moment to announce itself. A flicker
in the parking lot outside jolts me upright. I keep
the lights off and squint through the glass of figure
so wetted to liberate, standing at the edge of the
cones of motel Neon, not facing me but the highway,
as if waiting for a rider, watching for some one else.
The figure's posture still almost alert, as if reading signs
in the wind. Then gone with a visible movement. I
check the lot again, envy sleep if I can call it,
that coms in half ways broken, each ere body urged
to check my phone. The dials the message light are
my own little digital recorder. I imagine the well thinning
planes folding in all those vanishing points, stitched together in
a membrane no official might ever perceive, but shaped exactly
to hold me in place by morning's arrival. A resolved
to formalize my notes are put together, a sequence recording
in case I need to pass the patent to any
one else. There is a growing sense and being asked
to know push to carry the line forward. At first
light a drive to the farthest deesrest stop mapped in
my file, far from the Jane Abegs, to see if
the messages repeat. Is a smaller lot wedged between an
old seed elevator and a field half flooded from last
week's reins. The place is so silent the only evidence
of occupation is a half collapse fending shelter and the
scarred paphon in its nook. I seal myself and approach
recorder ready. This phone has no visible message waiting light,
just the usual scoffing gum tape over the mouthbeasts. I
lift the receiver. The silence is absolute, the line dead
before an intermittent electronic click, like a really close in
an empty room. Click pause, click pause. I record it.
When I replaced a receiver, a chill passes through me.
I could be enacting a ritual, resetting a trap for
the next person, or signaling something to whoever or whatever
is behind a system. On the way back to my car,
I check the lost and fan box, locked but with
just enough gap to see a sliver of blue fabric
bald and pressed against the hinge. The loves may be
or a scarf. I note it to commit the color
to memory for later comparison. Each item a possible anger
to some one unheard of, some traveler cut loose from Patten,
who left behind only a pockephal fabric and their own echo.
I drive west for the next day, as braced for
the next sign, a repeating distance. Another rest up with
a familiar blind spot. Another codd graffiti carving wharelight veils.
I watch for the su velinimentioned, but every lot is
empty in the eyos I visit. My map now looks
like a nervous system. Lay flat, blinking red at each
missing person's height, blew at each form with a really
click yellow at each doll sigel. Mid afternoon, my phone
roarings and number with an Abascaria code, one of those
unassigned blocks you only see with Rube calls. I answer
hard in my chest. Wah. The voice of whisper belonds
to Chlora. I haven't spoken to her in days. Don't
call me again. Someone's been asking about the photos I sent.
I don't want to be involved any more. A pause,
then a strangled warning, delete everything I send you. The
ones who vanish, they don't just disappear. They become invisible
to their own friends, like they never existed. Stop looking, please,
the line dies. I try to call back, It won't connect.
That evening, as the sun falls, the prairie horizoned unto
golden blood. I tuck myself into the last saferty and
I know and tried to act as if the pattern
hasn't claimed me, as if I can back out simply
by refusing to search further. The urage is hopeless. Each
unexplained shadow, each relayed message, each person who quietly backs
out of contact, is one more strut in the invisible
structure I have assembled around myself. I log it all
for that tape, failing to re shure myself. This isn't
just a confluence of sleeplessness, strange nights, and a natural
drift into paranoia. I say it clearly, so someone will
know where I was in case I vanish into the
interval between switches. If I disappear, I tell the blank
are leave a message at the next form. Do not
trust the lines. The next night's drive is long, nearly
six iohs, broken only by fueling stops in the accidental
glance at each persted sign for hints of Elia mockings.
Every exit ramp holds its own minor terror. I catch
my face in the passenger's side mirror, half expecting it
to be altered or missing. At two five a m.
I enter another rest stop, this one unusually well lit
and staffed for a rare moment of human occupancy. A
uniformed cleaning woman turns to greet me. Her face is unlined,
unaffected by the ire. You're tracking the pattern, aren't you,
she whispers when we are alone in the women's bathroom.
There's familiarity, even resignation, in her tone. I nod, unable
to muster a proper response. She drives her hands as
never leaving the streaks on the mirror. If you can
stop now, they notice when you linger. They listen through
the relays, the old drivers. They'll tell you there is
a time to stop following messages, and a time to
keep her head down and drive straight through. I want
no more to press her names for rules for the key,
but she snaps the falset off, and before I speak again,
she slips from the bathroom as if she never entered
at all. The air challs, moisture beating on every reflective surface.
I CAx oight of the cigil again and newly fresh
bull point indentations clinting in the neon. Some one is
keeping the pattern alive, drawing it again. Fries that need
to know act at my cart. I check the recorder,
review my last few entrants, as half glazed with exhaustion
and amounting unamable fear. My logins for various online forums
begin to glitch. I can't access files older than a week.
Time stands flicker. A color coated map of my rut appears, corrupted,
entire Swath's missing. I close my eyes, breathing deep, and
realize all at once, I am already off the map,
already entranced between a world that tolerates return and one
that keeps only the restless, the seekers, the insomniacs who
can never quite admit that safety might mean accepting an
unfinished story. What started as curiosity is now compulsive for
compulsion shop and by absences more than discoverers at the
edge of sleep. Every roads I go could be invitation
or warning. Every click in the wire a summons to
move seven miles further, ever, closer to the next vanishing point.
The only thing keeping me here narrating blade pitched in
the poles between exits is the belief that some one
will eventually listen and recognize the signs before they have
no choice but to answer. It's morning, but the sun
barely bothers to show through the glass. I'm at a
truck stop easter brewl in a booth that smells of
brewing coffee in overuse disinfectant. My map is spread out
across the chip table top, a maze of red, blue,
and yellow lines that no longer seem to correspond to
any logical highway system, at least not one any one
would print in post. My hands are unsteady, haven't probably
slept in days naturally? The waitress glance is over cautious,
but avois my eye. Even the previously comforted background shuffle
of tired travelers warms meet less. These days, the world
feels thinned, dowt fragile in its regularity. I clinched the
familiar weight of my recorder in my palm, willing it
to become a talisman. The proud Knight's encounters replay in
my head, Klara's terrified voice, the warning texts, the silent
motel visitor. Every instinct is shrieking at me to drop
all this, to flush the evidence. A race of philes
pretend curiosity never drew me into the teeth of something
so quietly, perfectly orchestrated. But I know myself too well.
If I left now, the half known pattern would haunt
me forever, unresolved, devolving into something even more corrosive than
fear regret. I sip at coffee. The burnt dregs were
off against my tongue. Items spread before me, my notebook,
sticky with the residue of vending machine snacks, the folded
scrap of numbers and sigel, the kee chain clip to
my back. At the pertokens of an investigation that has
bent reality into shape both unfamiliar and inescapable, I try
to remind myself that I am still on the outside,
that I could walk away. But every highway face, every
passing into states, sign has begun to look like part
of the same recurse of Lupeach, with its own signal,
its unsilent warnings for the observant. When I step out
on to the lot, the air is sharp and dry,
the kind of wind that carries everything not bolted done
into the next county. I study the lot with new anxiety.
A black Hessuvien stickoed a wash sits by the far fence,
engine idling inside a figure's outline, barely visible for mirrored gas.
I check my phone for messages, for more warnings, but
it's blank except for all weather alert. The message light
in the phone in my jacket pocket winks in the
corner of my vision of phantom after image that slides
under my skin like static before storm. I call Klara's
number again and again, each time unanswered. Each call adair
echo that taints the air. Nothing is quite the same
since the night before. People I thought allied are retreating,
and I can't decide if that means I'm getting closer
to the truth or if the network, whatever it is,
has found a way to mute my impact before it
grows annihilator. With my rock marked in my resolve, shackly reconstructed,
I pull onto the highway for the first time. I
feel the pressure of being observed, not just through the
obvious technological channels, but by the rhythm of the road itself.
Exits and junctions that once offered comfort out trigger worry.
The implication that visibility has its own price, that being
seen was only ever safe when I had nothing to see.
It's a different flavor of dread, one that I an
emits every part of the landscape. At one stop, our
road crew member broad shouldered, sumburned, and nods at me,
then quickly averts as gaze when I ask about the pathones.
None of them work right, he muttered. But you know
that already, don't you. When I returned to my car,
my gulf compartment is ajar. Nothing is missing, nothing added,
But the seat is colder than it should be, slick
as though a window was left crack just enough for
the night's jill. Paranoia maybe, but PARANOI keeps you alive,
or at least moving, I added to my notes, refusing
to let even the smallest dodity go un accorded. The
next rest area is nearly empty, warped in the unreliable sunlight.
I circle the lot on foot, scanning the solemn line
of trees for any shape that doesn't belong. The paypooton
is out of order, receiver dangling. The loss and Found
box contains only a blank note, bad a pen, and
a single black love. Still anxiety does not ease That night,
I check into a small motel on the outskirts of Sydney.
The disk clerk recognizes me from a previous visit, but
is even more reticent than before. Can have too many cushs,
he says, closing the ledger, brusquely. People are round here
like peace and quiet. His eyes flick not at me,
but the spot above my left shoulder, as if tracking
some one passing. Just behind my room is narrow window
facing the back gravel lot. I checked the door twice,
wid a chair under the knob. As I unplugged the
table lamp to charge my phone, a surge of static
kisses from the baseboard heater. I set my recorder in
the sill, letting it run in case any late night
signal tries to worm its weight into the silence. Rest
is fragmented a brief, shallow cycles of alarm and drift.
At some point I wake to a noise, or perhaps
a silence too complete to be mundane. Through the thin curtains,
I see no one in the lot, but on the
inside of the window's condensation, someone has outlined the familiar
sigil drawn by finger tip from the inside. I shudder,
wipe it away, resolve to keep moving back in my
car before sunrise, I find a torn corner of a
flyer tapped under the wiper, just the numbers one hundred
eighty three in a stylized switch error. The rest is
smere by dieu. I pocket it, too exhausted to process
anything beyond the sense that I perform in someone else's choreography.
I set up a meeting with Pete, the highway patrolman
who once provided footage, arranging to talk in the expansive
ipinness of a truck scale parking lot. We exchange awkward greetings.
His his uniform is fresh, his face drawn with new tension.
Don't do this here, he hisses. I scanning for witnesses.
It's not safe, ye know too much, files go missing,
calls and recept it, people following you by sight and
by signal. I nod, pressing him for more, asking about
Operation Exit Lane, about Silk police files and recurring incidents.
He shakes his head, voice shaking. He won't find records.
Even the old guys keep it, sip those stories, though
some of us swap a matha double shifts, profcols, hidden messages,
old radio codes still running somewhere in the system. Stuff
from the seven is never shut down completely. There's a
naming the selection. Sometimes people vanish with a reason, sometimes
because they tugged in the wrong thread. I push harder,
drawing the sigel on my notepad, asking if he's seen it.
He blanches, folds his hand over mine. Don't put that
on paper, not here, not anywhere. Whatever you're playing at,
get clear, Ferris. People who chase to send up ghost
to not just missing records, erased. Friends forget him like
they never ran the tape. He departs abruptly, leaving me
in the gravel lot as a crow flickers overhead, coachering
off the metal scale platform. I drive on, shaken more
convinced ever, that my name is on some unseen all.
No one talks to me for the rest of the day.
Calls got to static, emails vanish on that overnight, more
pieces disappear, maps corrupted at audio logs with gaps, contacts
deleted from my phone, PARANOI hardened too determination. I cross
reference my notes one last time, tracing the lost ruts
of the vanished. When I look up, the darkness feels absolute,
the only hint of motion in the low whine of
a distant trik. One constant in a whorld, with all
of the familiar patterns crumbling under invisible pressure. I realize
there is a choice ahead, one of agency, of how
to respond to what becoming unstoppable. I could bolt, but
the system now where will follow. I could turrender, let
the story die, and hope I go with it. But
against the pressure of fear, the story sharpens, clear as
broken glass in my hands. I resolved to see this trew,
even if that means step is straight into whatever waits
at the next exit lane. The next seven iras are
consumed not by motion but by evidence. I station myself
along old service roads, mapping each suspicious gap between official
rest stops or of Alain the cold hands, sketched notes
and et of fading sharp eye lines. As I pieced
together my own crooked map, something subtle but deliberate emerges.
The disappearances, the sigills, the lost and found boxes. They
sketch of patternot. Unlike a longer vanished high we live
that parallel to MINCEDI before it was modernized, a forgotten
transit artery, now fragmented into rest stops, offshoots and shriveled
you s roots in the library archives and new fine
piles and the growing mass of coincidence. An old maintenance
plan on Earth from a battered base binder maps the
rest stop utility lines in colored pencil. Some places never
updated beyond the initial nineteen seventis wires were routed, phone
lines doubled back routings which is marked only by code
or stylized. Thus, like the one from the stalls, it
rereads less like a piece of engineering and more like
a ritual design circuit, laying out not just passage, but
selection and relocation. The concrete clues keep piling up. A
trucker slump near the coffee earned at a rest area
between Chapel and Big Springs tells me and bidden. Some
places keep collecting holber marks, warning hands etched signs. Folks
used to think they were for the train, met gnaw
there for the road, swoppers for the water. Ones who
know there's a pattern, sometimes stronger than gravity. He winks
collects as a filled mug and slips out into the
pale but aw dark. It's hard not to feel both
seen and marked by this exchange. That night, I review
another discovery and email attachment from a throwaway in box.
The file is glitch. Much of it unreadable text, but
embedded as a schema operational notes, referencing selection signal art
OFFAT mitigation and the STEPWIS relocation protocol. There's nothing frivolous
in the wording. It's written like a checklist, a cold
art fact of deliberate process underlying every disappearance that has
driven me deeper into the circuit. I pour over all
rail coatbooks and highway workers engines and match the sigils
to a set of hoboed lifts loss standardized in nineteen
seventy five, symbols meant for those outside of official systems.
Modified signs for danger ahead and move quickly. In the
context of the rest stops, old warning signs become a
trap set by new hands or new mechanisms, may macking
the warnings of the past. Fatigue renders everything hallucinatory. I
lay out the clues, folding the maps O the line
of mark stops by Sex, Nebraska, like a second invisible
in the state for the first time I see it.
The vaoushings staggered at near equal intervals, snaking a path
that overlays a nearly forgotten railway, a little ghost route
dissected by modern infrastructure and repurposed is a network for
the selected. What starts as conspiracy thinking warps into something undeniable.
Every detail fits, the voice in the phone, the estrogels,
the hidden patterns of vanishment, the necessity of blind spots
and camera coverage, the old phone systems, and a log stubbornness.
At one the teen a m my phone rings, even
though the signal meter reads zero. A computerized, flattened voice
uses from the apiece exit lane, calling, prepare for transfer
seven miles ahead. The words come with absolute metallic authority.
The timber impossible to mistake for algorithmic accident. As the
call ends. My car radio off seconds before, costs to life,
filtering static and the cycling click click patterns so familiar
from before. I record the entire sequence, voice shaking as
I narrate, this is Maraferius. This is no longer an investigation.
I've been marked. Seven miles from here, they want me
to go false hammered. I drive back on to the
near empty interstate. The highways wage as pulse with threat.
The rumble stripes, those calves safety lines designed to wake
a drous a driver begin to drum a rhythm and
sink with a voice still echoing in my skull, my
hand's sweat, even though the air is cold. The range
of visibility narrows with each mile exit sign, mile marker,
shifting darkness beyond the sodium mark. I count off the
mileage six, five, four, the intervals closing down the normalcy
of night driving seven miles past the wrist stop, appearing
like a miroarch, no lad interior. No car is in
the gravel lot. The only illumination comes from safety beacons,
and above it all, a payphone at the very edge
of the line of light, pulsing message waiting radiance in
cold blue nat not rerid. I park at the edge
of the lot, engine running, nose on a razor edge.
Rain spatters again, droplets blurring my winchel the scene flickering
between momentarily normal and deeply fundamentally wrong. I step out
every sound, magnified gravel underfoot, the distant croak of a
hidden frog, a low electrical humper vasivistinidus. I slip my
phone and recorder into separate pockets. It feels richealistic, preparing
for something ceremonial or funereal. At the payphone, static pours
from the aarpiece even before I pick up. As my
hand makes contact, the recorder in my other hand kicks
on by itself, screen displaying a recording already in progress.
The voice on the line, synthesized but threaded with half
familiar kittens, utters next, which re locate seven miles prepare
this high. A second layer overlays it a high pitched,
frantic voice of my own distress from an all field tape.
I don't remember recording. It echoes my warning from that
soul air. If I disappear, leave a message at the
next phone. Don't trust the lines. The blood leaves my hands.
The static swells at the periphery of light by the
restroom doors. Something moves, a figure, perhaps human or perhaps not,
a solo, which shifts angular at first, then melting at
the edges, sometimes splitting across the site line in a
way no intact person could. There's a deep, synchronized clicking,
as if from half a dozen and seen relays. My
heart races, but my body remains rooted in place. I
am a participant now, not just a witness. I approach
the lost and fan box, expecting emptiness of the usual
collection of hatsing keys. Instead an envelope bress on top,
my name type on the front in perfect mechanical characters.
I open it, hand trembling inside a snap shot anest
and grainy of myself as a child on the front
steps of a house I haven't seen in years, holding
a red toyphone. I never brought this with me. Nero
scandal digitized it. Below the photo a single typed instruction.
He've now entered the selection sequence. My breath stutters, The
air around me compresses, the field of sensation, tightening down,
the world narrow into tunnel vision. Beside the box, the
observer now steps into full viewer's clothing, generic face masked
by the blow of a cap and shadow. It moves
as though trace in the established path, beats, never quite
touching the reflective shin of the pavement, gaze fixed not
on me but in the pyphone. When I try to shout,
my words dissolve into static, carried away in the wind
and clicking radio pulse. The observer or operator speaks its words,
perfectly filtered, the same mechanical voice as before. Now broadcast live.
You have a choice. Broadcast your findings and in a
shave your ownly location, or destroy all records abandon the
pattern and remain in collected the The circuit is self healing.
I stagger at mind spinning. What if every vanished person
was offered this proof of the pattern, a decision, a
way out that requires the surrender of all knowledge, all
accumulated story. Some vanish for safety, some for relief, some
by force. I wonder who was first, who was last,
on whether the record ever truly escapes deletion. The observer
waits body language a mistakably patient, as if it has
all the time in the world. The rain intensifies occurd
in isolating the rest area from whatever exists beyond. I
look once more at the photograph, at the envelope, at
the now open lost and found inside only blank cordiotapes,
each labeled with dates of vanishings I have on my
own list. Each set seems to hump faintly in a
blue light. I lift the recorder, then poised over wrecker
resolve hardening. The sense of being watched, multiplies the clicking
ramps echoing through the phone lines, and seebe radio as
if demanding a response. On instinct, I refuse to comply
with a false choice. Step backward, clutching every piece of evidence,
as though the physicality alone could anchor me. The observer
tilts its head, then vanishes, OAZ, just smearing into rain,
gone as quickly as it arrived. Every device on my
body surges with static. My phone, the recorder, even a
car's radio. My file strobe and vanish, overwritten by bursts
of coded clicks in the repeated electronic phrasing. Necks switch relocate,
the wall empties reality. Tilting for a moment as though
balanced on the wire, I stagger back to my car,
every trace of my investigation seeming to melt away as
I stare at my recorder, files blink from the directory,
and then only one short clip remains, my own voice,
uncertain and nearly swallowed by static. If I disappear, remember
this route. Powerless to retrieve what's gone. I pull on
to the interstate and accelerate away, adrenaline pounding for every fiber.
The headlights catch mile markers, but each sign has been
defaced with the sigill overpainted, burnt, and etched by some
invisible hand. Every exit ramp now looks identical, suggests the
same bleak possibility. I drive for Erros, dug it by
the sense I am in permanent transit between two worlds,
seen only a when required, gas stitions become less accommodating.
Faces turn away without recognition my attempts to lope back
into my podcast I met with theirs. Files lost beyond recovery.
Photo rolls display only blank black squares, each audio file
glitched out to a monotone drone. Chlorou's contact disappears from
my lists. Peace number no longer connects the forums where
the vanish once posted, or either broken links or display
nothing in their archives. Even my own back up notebooks,
printed in frantic anticipation of months like these, now appear
water warped in bleeding through the pages the dates I
am readable. I try uploading the files to an anonymous host.
The connection times out, mighty mails bounce back undelivered. Social
media so recently filled with curious followers, now hosts on
the account not found warnings for those who previously reached
out to me about the pattern. My life is contracting
being written out of every channel I once trusted. That night,
a trucker's lounge in Colorado, I overhear two drivers recounting
a story from the Nebraska rest stops. Someone tried to
put together a story got road lost, never howe from again.
My name is not mentioned. I try to interject, my
own voice, dead in my throat, the conversation slides past,
as though entransparent. On the drive north, I notice more
marked vehicles idling at the furthest corners of parking lots.
Every so often a silhouette stands at a piper and
turning its back as I approach, vanishing. By the time
I reach the spot, details begin to haunt me. The
color of gloves in the lost and found, the angle
of camera mounts, the exact alignment of papron keepers. Each
becomes a coded warning to though was still paying attention.
I recount the sequence again and again into whatever recording
device will still accept, my voice, mapping the rat of
my ownermveling. Each night I circle the same exits, caught
in an eddy of my own, making sleep a shorter, shallower,
broken by a persistent awareness of shadows at the edge
of my vision, sellen, always just outside the lamp light.
I begin to dull who is more real, the vanished
of those compelled to remember them. A week passes, I
catch myself writing my own name on a new knoepad,
training it into muscle memory against the threat of forgetting
who I am and why all of this ever began.
But to night. As storm clouds twist over the empty
highway outside chay End, I pull off the road at
silent rust area. The only light is the flicker from
the booth, the blue glow of awaiting message. I recorp desperate,
but already servant that this next message is in intended
for any one but me. If I disappear, remember this route.
The fall out is immediate. Clinical. The presence that has
trailed me for weeks with draws in an almost physical way.
I sense it the way you'd scent a gust of
cold air retreating from the boundary of a camp fire.
My electronics are dead weight. The radio produces only silence
now the sea beach hatter gun entirely at the payphone.
The message, like having pulse since I write, stutters and fades.
The rest area bleeds of character at detail. My map,
when I unfolded, shows no mocks at all, as if
every interval, every sigil has been erased by careful hand.
I rifle through my remaining evidence. Where there should be
a photo, there is a scrap of blank, faded paper.
My recordings have been replaced with endless loops of static.
Even my car keys fill unfamiliar it slick instead of warn,
as though I swapped them for an iar identical set.
An unmarked cruiser pulls into the lot, headlights dowsed, neither
approaching nor leaving, simply existing at the periphery. When I
look directly, the car is gone, but its impression remains
au blind's the memory, a hollowness between the spaces of
the known and the contingent. Exhausted, I locked my car
and rest my forehead against the wheel. The sense of
something having crossed out every line of my story is totalizing.
A final brief flicker of wilfulness passes drew me, a
last imposterosis, or reclaim whatever portions of myself I can
still verify as authentic and untouched. Now I take action.
I tear the remaining blank cassette from the lost and
Found box and slided into my recorder. I lean into
the payphone end in a husky, deliberate voice, recite every
detail I can recall, names, sigils, routs, numbers, even my
own chout of phone memory. Each word is waged careful,
a spoken line of defense against further rasure. I smashed
the cassette into the piper and coinslots so it can't
be easily retrieved. Then burn the last pages of my
notebook with a cheap Motel lighter, Smoke curling up into
the sodium blow as flames creep across the bout a
journal cover. I tossed the whole mess into a rose.
I'd bin and watch until only char remains, no salvage
for any hand, digital or otherwise. I returned to my car,
gripped the steering wheel with both hands, feeling the pulse
of dread freedom mingling in my finger tips. I start
the engine, head lights slashing the dark, and drive into
the night. Each mile marker reflects a ghost of the sigil,
but none is precise. Forward is the only compass I
can trust. Now. In a hush thuff follows, the rain
begins again, erasing my tire tracks and washing the air clean.
I glance once back at the rest area at the
blue message. Light is dark, the paper an idol. My
story is gone from every official archive, but the residue
clings in memory shop as the first static on a
blank tape. I drive on alert, a single name in
a network of absences. I drive on alert, a single
name in a network of absences. Three days pass without
incident or message. The silence itself becomes its own signal
and negative pressure, as if the network has fully withdrawn
or is simply resetting the bands of my world. When
I stop at rest areas, now there's a sense of
being in a simulation of my own memories, each layout familiar,
each interaction flattened, mechanical people's eyes not quite meeting mine.
Even my own reflection in the restroom mirror waivers after
a second, as if overlaid with static. The urge to
reach for my recor order is nearly compulsive. But when
I do, every new and try wreck is only a
thin veil of white noise stitch to the end of
whatever words I try to get out. I chase the routine.
Cheap coffee at the service station outside Julisburg, Colorado, leaves
grounds clinging to my tongue. The server gives me the
wrong change, neither of us acknowledges it. A linger at
the counter, hoping for a scrap of clue, a mistake,
a rush word, but there is nothing all signals all
possible handles or rescues from others who might know have
been perched. A day later, outside Larami, I make one
last attempt up with notes to a well guarded condat
and old university friend, who owes me a dead of silence.
The file transmits progress bar crawling so slowly it feels
like the iOS themselves are stretched thin. It completes at
last confirmations green flickering, but a minute later her reply
arrives uncharacteristically cold. This file is empty, just white, noise
and static. You should get some rest. All trust, all
outreach is as solving, like sugar crystals and old coffee.
I find myself downsizing, shadding things that uncomie, old notebooks
already blurred, thumb drawers that now hold only corrupted texts,
coat filled jackets where pockets used to be a comfort.
I got my car clear away, every flier, crumbled coffee
cup interview transcript lighter. I fill no free, or simply
more aerodynamic in the current, more easily swept to wherever
the message wants to carry me. Sleep comes rarely and
never deeply. Most nights, I drive until the gas gage
needles toward red and then pull over at the first
open lot. One night after a hard wind strip run
west of Sydney, I wake without memory of stopping My
phone's time. Nine nap shows blankness for a two hour interval.
I check the Odomeita, then trace my route backward on
the Batto map. The markings I left days before are gone.
Where once there was a web of vanishings, sigills and
coated warnings, now only the grid lines remain. On a hunch,
I revisit the rest stop where I first heard the
mechanical voice. The law is freshly swept, lines newly painted,
not a single tie mark or scrap of litter. The
payphone has been replaced by a gleaming modern communications pull.
No message center, no receiver, just a smooth blue coal
bottom and the universal distress icon. It yields nothing but
a pre recorded with a warning on endless lip. I
ask one of the janitorial staff, a young man in
a roadside maintenance vest, whether he remembers the old phone
that used to stand here. He cuts his eyes sideways
and shroukes a gesture devoid of meaning. Been like this
for years, he says, for a stripped of effect. Nobody
uses payphones any more. Near the vending machines, an old
woman rummages through her large paris for change. She glances
at me, then at the wall behind the machines. A
lot of folks asking questions. Lately, she mutters, and quickly
adds people move on always do roads for going, not
staying her words, cling to lawn, echoing the rhythms of
the circuit. I find myself walking the lot's perimeter, pressing
fingers to the concrete, scuffing my shoe against the curve
for a sign, a scrawl anything. There's nothing, even the
palmsyst of graffiti. So long a marker of transcence and
mourning has been powwashed away in this sterilized vacuum, the
absence of evidence his is a rebuke, or may be
a final kindness. The drive north is punishing. Snowflour is
shearing obliquely across empty lanes. The sea bee scanner is dead,
no chatter or coded, and vitia. I try cycling through
a frey frequency only at the edges, when dawn threatens
but does not quite arrive. Do I catch a minute's burst,
a low sequence of mechanical clicks, then a sudden break
the voice when it arrives is distorted almost beyond recognition.
Last call transfer sequence incomplete, wrote unverified. I slammed the radio.
Often keep my eyes fixed on the wavering white lines
of the road during any sign or shadow to appear
and claim me. The consequences accumulate not in dramatic cinematicuscades,
but in how the world resists my touch. My podcast
portal is in every attempt at streaming cut short with
an error. The forms were posted, questions about lost truckers
and phone oddities now display only now results to its purge,
profiles anonymized. My former interview subjects are unreachable, Emails bouncing
phone number is no longer in servers. Even my own
shadow in certain lights seems pale and faint, as if
whatever algorithm controls the database, that the world is slowly
deleting all active instances of my identity. But the decision
point prescribed at that haunted rest stop naws at me,
broadcasts or destroy. But what if the third path is
to live out the story and perpetual quarantine marked but
not claimed. Every possible action at taate Nafiel's already foreclosed.
Even the platitudes of closure or moving on ring hollow.
You do not simply move past being partially race. For
all that, I keep the habit of documentary and vigilance.
I talk to the air, to the dashboard, muttering the
details that seem increasingly unmoored, locations, my markers, faces, names.
Sometimes I start telling the whole story from memory, a
feudal attempt at selforification. The compulsion is all that remains.
There are night when I hear my own voice coming
back a dryaco and the static making the same desperate
promises to remember to warn whoever might be next in line.
A coal cludy Friday finds me in an ear empty
lot outside Pine Bluffs. I sit in a car for Iro's,
watching the approach and departure of vehicles, each more nondescript
than the last early afternoon affleets dam parks. One space away.
A woman slides from the driver's seat, gray Parker ball cap.
She crosses toward the bathrooms her gate, confident and slow.
Before I entering, she glances over her shoulder and mounts
a word unreadable. When she emerges, she heads directly for
the paypron. Kiosk runs her finger along its narrow digital screen,
and then disappears, not looking back. When curiosity overcomes me,
I reproach my reflection in the black class of the
Kioski's blurred features uncertain above the screen, the blue aledy
flashes twice, then holds steady. I touched the display and
pull my hand back, shocked to sharp drill the unmistakable centavosum.
The world rushes into Suddenly, when the chime of a
distant car door my own pulse in my ears, I retreat,
breathing hard. The phone never rings. On the last night
of the following week, etched thin by sleeplessness, I catch
the rare signal of all on edge of Cheyanne in
a frostbit parking lot, my own berniform pings wants. The
number is unlisted, the message blank, but for a barely
audible recording, it plays just three words modulated and metallic
next where trilocated. I delete it automatically, hands trembling, as
if the act itself can break the cycle. But as
I sit there, recalling the moment the message first found me,
the fatigue and fear rurage into pure certainty. I have
been put out of orbit, not for punishment, but to
protect the system's core function. I have become a contaminant
to the pattern, deny both entry and oblivion, but also
unable to fully bear witness anymore. Resolving to test the limits,
I choose the most ordinary action available direct highway, no stops,
no listening for static, no deeders. I leave the record
a running narrating allowed each Monday mile, refusing to grunt
then seen operators, the circuit or the compulsion the satisfaction
of ritual. I stop only for gas. I do not
look at payphones. A reply to no messages at each
exit ramp. I pass the urge to glance to turn in,
pulls hard at the noves in my jaw, but I refuse.
I pass ten twenty thirty blanc mile intervals without incident.
Yet in the back of my mind and nagging contradiction multiplies.
Nothing happening is itself known anomaly. Paranoia establishes its own
feedback loop, simulating the autonomy the system just denied me.
When fatigue sets in a pull into rest area illuminated
by overbright al ed every angle bated in blue white light,
I remain in the car, windows, fogged, engine, tick in
cooling metal, and then for the first time in days,
ordinary life asserts itself. A maintenance truck arise back into
the edge of the lot. Two workers trudge to the
phar toilet block, muttering about pipes and a blown fusee.
Their banality shakes me here at last, a people whose
LODs appear in touched by the pattern, who do not
see me, do not care, whose presence grounds the world.
In practicality, I realize I can choose this, at least
for a moment, existing as one faces traveler among thousands,
the erased in the remembered marking miles and mutual anonymity.
When I finally leave the lot remains unchanged, the blue
lights steady. My only legacy of fleeting private sense of
having resisted, however briefly, the pulsing invitation of the exit lane.
But even this ordinary action feels performative, like a dance
synchronized with invisible signals. I can neither if I nor
reject outright. Whatever map I once carried in my mind
has been redrawn. This reality, thinner and lighter, for the
missing weight of clues and warnings, is its own final boundary.
In my rare view mirror. As I return to the
blank road, a last, faint after image appears, the sigil
just visible in the reflection of a passing highway marker,
swelling and then vanishing against a smear of my rear window.
I do not slow turn around. As night falls and
the distance between rest stops grows, I speak one last
note into the bat of a corder, still here, still driving,
no calls, no messages, then toss it on to the
passenger sea, allowing the tape to run down to silence.
My only job now is to keep moving outside whatever
sequence remains for those still within the network. At the
next intersection, my head lights illuminate the green into state,
children marked and change. Yet as a pass a brief lick,
a glimmerse in my memory, a slot for payphone, now empty,
bathed in the cold glow of a sodium lamp. No
voice emerges, no static, no coded message. Still at the
verge of waking or dreaming, I sense the boundary both
thinner and more impenetrable than ever, a circuit completed not
by acceptance but by refusal, and so I drive on,
no destination, no message waiting, just the persistence of motion
in a world where the only escape is to remain
unclaimed and collected, and name carried forward in the gaps
between signals, forever turning the dial for call that may
never come. And that is the end. Thank you for listening,
and I will see you in the next one.