A State of Suspension
By Jocelyn Szczepanaik-Gillece
What did it used to look like on the side of the highway before the strip malls?
Farmland.
Right, but before that? Forests? Prairie, like in the name of the outlets? After the settlement and before the discount shops? Hard to know; so many people went mad in the first winters and you can’t always trust their diaries.
Squint hard and try to catch it through the overcast light. Like how Philip K. Dick saw Roman ruins undergirding the Bay Area once he realized the empire never ended.
Or it was the sodium pentothal.
You’ll have to pull off to the side of the road to really see it. You’ve driven past so many times, so much of the side of the road equivalent to so much of the other side of the road.
There’s a glint that appears at a certain point in the highway when you cross over the Illinois state line. Something’s catching the late afternoon upper Midwest bronzed sunlight that striates the landscape and turns it to a sheet of corrugated metal left out to rust.
In the distance, looks like a pyramid of some kind. You’ve heard a rumor about it, that it used to be an old supper club, now abandoned. Open in the early ‘70s for those few Wisconsin Playboy aficionados who tipped back their old fashioneds alongside overcooked steaks and pretended Lake Michigan was made out of saltwater. They gave up the ghost long ago when the family farms were all bought up out of state. Drinking themselves to death in a corner bar eking out the last bits of the corporate payout.
The pyramid was covered in triangular mirrors soldered to one another; like everything else from that decade, it looked like a disco ball. And now it sits there in the middle of a cornfield, you’ve heard, rotting away on the inside like last summer’s crops. All you can see from the highway is the gleam that catches your eye if you look at exactly the right time. You’ve never stopped to seek it out. You’ve always just kept driving.
But today is the day. Today is the day you find it. Don’t worry about getting home in time to make dinner. Just look to the right as much as you can on the highway without fishtailing into a semi. Don’t miss the glint. As soon as you see it, get off at the exit where there isn’t even a gas station for miles and follow the road around in the vague direction of the brief flicker of shine. Just trust there’s enough in the tank to make it there and home later.
Field upon rolling field, because as soon as you cross into it, this state turns into a refrain. It’s quiet everywhere here but underlying the suffocating silence is the sound of voices singing its name: “Wis-Con-Sin.” The “Wis” and then the “con” and then the “sin,” but as soon as one syllable is sung another voice is shouting out the next. This place repeats itself.
It’s enough to drive you mad out here, like how Ed Gein started making lampshades out of people in the north woods in the dead of winter. But it’s not just the winter that makes people crazy – it’s those voices and their refrain. “Wis.” “Con.” “Sin.” Everyone hears it whether they admit it or not. All the bits of it at the same time, the noise of an automatic thresher turning grain to cow feed, turning cow to milk flow, turning milk flow to cow, turning cow to grain.
“Wis.” “Con.” “Sin.”
The voices sound out even though you’ve kept the windows closed as you drive toward the glint. They get louder and louder as you head west from the highway, the tangerine sunset temporarily blinding you until your eyes adjust because, unlike most of the weird fuckers here, you wear sunglasses. But you still hear the voices, disembodied and ritualized.
The road keeps widening and turning over onto itself like the state does and the fields on either side keep repeating themselves in a flattened cadence. It’s been at least six miles since the exit. You haven’t passed any houses, just some leaning silos. But the glint is on the horizon, still, a fata morgana of the prairie. You’ll get there.
It’s hypnotizing, the rusty light at the end of the day, the roads repeating themselves, the yellow lines that separate your journey from the potential of oncoming traffic, the odometer ticking upward, the syllables chanted. The early evening sun hangs in front of you, tremulous, waiting for you to draw nearer, lighting your way to the glint, the voices sing you along when there isn’t any radio but the AM stations broadcasting sermons of revelation and doom.
And then it’s there, right there, breaking up the monotony of the road that has been every other road. The pyramid, every portion of its soldered surface reflecting, on one side, the brazen pink of the late autumn sunset, on the other, the yellowed riches of dried corn stalks and hay.
You park in the overgrown driveway and look up at the pyramid. It’s not as tall as you thought it was going to be, but when you think about it, it wouldn’t make sense for it to be any taller. A single level for several nightly turnovers of the dinner crowd, that’s all that was needed, the spire just for effect. Even so, it rises out of its field like a hovering UFO about to suck a cow up into its tractor beam.
You slam the car door and stare up at the structure. You can’t figure out how to get in. All the mirrored surface masks where an entrance might be, and maybe that was on purpose, so the most observant Lutherans couldn’t find a way to get inside and demand that the patrons stop putting on airs and head home early, it’s not seemly to dress like that, not here in God’s country.
So, all right, you’ll push on some quadrants like in the movies, maybe something will give and a door will slide open. You feel stupid here in the middle of a cornfield at nearly 6:30 in the evening on a weeknight, shouldering up against a disco ball pyramid that’s been shut down for decades. But you made it this far and the voices have gotten louder.
You push for ten or so minutes at each place you think might be a pressure point or a lever until you make it nearly all the way around the pyramid. You see the car again and you’re back to the beginning. You’re about to give up but you shrug and push once more at the first place you tried, and of course that’s it, that’s how it always is here, you have to start all over again from where you started, the “Wis” reverting to the original “Sin,” and that does it. Rusted hinges screech in pain and the hidden door slides open and you’re in.
The ambient dissipating sunlight struggles to get a foothold in the dark before the door slams shut behind you. And then that’s it, the darkness thickening like agar around you, crowding you so tightly you can feel it knuckling up against your arms, nudging your elbows aside and squeezing you at the ribs.
But there’s no one here, just the darkness, nothing to be heard except a long low hiss like a gas siphon somewhere far above your head.
Your pupils dilate, so far as you can tell, but you can’t see at all. You can smell something singed long ago, the ashen particles still hanging in the air since no one’s disturbed the atmosphere in here for years. You don’t even know which way to move because every way is forward and every way is back again to where you started.
But the noise up above is getting closer like whatever is hanging there is making its way down from the pyramid’s pinnacle toward your head. And it occurs to you, then, that the noise is remarkably similar to the voices that followed you on your journey here. It’s not a mechanical hissing at all, or maybe the voices were that, but what is certain, now, to you, is that the sounds are the same and they’ve been shrieking into your ears in their interminable threnody with increasing volume since you entered this pitch black pyramid where you can’t see anything but you can smell flesh burned long ago and you can hear the chthonic refrain that never pauses for a breath.
Out, you think. Just that word. Out. And you try to feel your way to the secret door but there’s no wall anymore, nothing to feel, just the clotted tapioca darkness that is both an untearable fabric and nothing at all.
Panic acidifies your tonsils. And you think that this must be what dawning madness feels like, unable to see a hand in front of your face, your nasal passages clogged with the choking remnants of ancient fire and fossilized animal, your ears suffused with an inescapable and furious dirge.
The hissing syllables cloak your head like a black bag. The smell of cremation coats your nostrils and your tongue. Underneath the ash a yellowish tone: sickness on the surface of skin. The funeral chorus pushes insistently against the borders of your brain, searching for a pressure point or a lever or some other way in.
This place, you think, this is what was here. Before the highways and the outlets was this place and this madness. And you know that you won’t find your way out because you’ve made your way again to the beginning. There isn’t any way to go but forward. There isn’t any way to go but back. You go on.
You feel nothing, no floor, no wall, nothing at all. You are hanging in the air impossibly, your limbs dangling, cushioned on all sides by voices and smell. It feels like the silence of a snowstorm sounds, the muffled calm that covers every surface and makes it look like every other one, a hushing façade likening one thing to the other until nothing is discernible from anything else.
Just before your edges cave in and you surrender entirely to the invasion of the voices, you think there is a relief in succumbing to the worst thing you can imagine. Because now there is nothing left to imagine. There is just the madness looping onto itself. This is just the beginning.
Jocelyn Szczepanaik-Gillece teaches film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.