Daedalus

            You go in all prepared to be aghast—you’re in the junkyard, finally, looking for the vortex, and Sanford over there is sitting tight, unobliged to anything you got. And in your hands are what used to be a clipboard and a pen—your dad’s dad’s way of investigating—morphed now into a camera pad with various sensors and split-screen data informing you of humidity, acridity and sundry measures of the fair and foul.

            You wish you had a bloodhound, for company at least, but half the mystery of this place is the ultrasonic whistle that emanates from the stack of stuff spreading over six acres. Sanford has designed this labyrinth from decades of accumulating scrap metal to deck out his fallow farm. His salvaging license and system of sewage have always been up-to-date; he rarely interacts with the town yet is broadly known as a legal proprietor—a Sanford & Son without an actual son. While local disposal services have long since deferred to corporate routes, he’s been grandfathered into every legislative change, in part because of libertarian advocacy groups, the likes of which he has never joined. Never had to.

            And this is why they called you, fellow loner in a wolfpack world. You don’t need to pour over his file, his filings of legal rights to do what he wants with his land. Sure, you’ve been briefed and given a mandate—in a word, to figure him out, starting with his architecture, structures of junk that Google Earth is too late on the scene to probe. Find out if he’s dangerous or just daft. And leave him wondering who might come back.

            “Who would that be?” you reasonably ask. Well, ‘wondering’ in its best iteration is meant to be mutual. Wonder that question in kind, keeping it close to the vest, of course.

            Nothing on your camera pad detects the presence of corpses, and you figure your nose would serve as adequate technology in the absence of a dog. A state-wide spike in missing persons had pushed this contract to your inbox—you’d been on many of those cases anyway, individually and so far without a breakthrough. You’re known for patience and substantiating a sure thing only if it’s sure. Your hero is Hans Blix, when colleagues go for Hercule Poirot. And yet, on days like this, on Sanford’s land, you aren’t sure that what you emulate will guard against the weirdness of this job.

            “With respect, sir, we have a warrant to inspect your property.”

            Sanford is uninterested in the paperwork, but wants to know, “who’s ‘we’?”

            Good point. You represent a process, abbreviated on this sheet of paper that the district attorney’s office drafted as malleable as could be. “The D.A., in concert with Health & Human Services,” you reply, conscious that he’s actually noting the lack of an assistant: a Watson, a sheriff’s deputy, an imbedded journalist, even a trained canine he’s done so well to keep away.

            He scans your face instead of the paper. “What is it you’re looking for?”

            “Missing persons.” Full stop—you’ve rehearsed this. You don’t want to play cat-and-mouse with this Daedalus, as he appears to be.

            “Don’t got any,” he imparts, and “wouldn’t want the upkeep.”

            Hmm. What does he want to keep, up or otherwise? You turn his sense of scan to the pile you plan to enter—there’s a rough entrance there and there and maybe over there, but to what? “What have you made here of your salvage?”

            “Don’t you have that definition on your warrant?”

            “Your business is acknowledged, but how you organize your ware is not so clear.”

            “Not so clear for whom?”

            Fair question, worth a pause. You haven’t memorized the warrant—the mere 450 words of it—yet you more than get the gist of what it says and how it must matter to even this stoic-to-saturnine soul. “Not so clear to the parties interested in these missing persons.”

            “Am I a ‘person of interest’ in this case?”

            “If so, there would be more police presence.”

            “And you are, yourself, a police officer?”

            “No.”

            “A snoop?”

            “You might say so, in a legal sense.”

            “So, go to it, Snoop.”

            Your mind supplies a ridiculous ‘Dog’ to complete the epithet, wondering if Sanford might know that celebrity. Greater question: does he access the outer world from here, with all the defunct machinery that betrays a sense of using anything that might work, let alone work the cyberspace. His is a mountain of stainless-steel inventions, not a cloud of silicon speculations. Or this much you speculate. “It may take some time,” you suggest, sweeping an arm toward the heap.

            “Waste not, want not,” he says inscrutably; the idiom echoes in your mind as you approach the ‘over there’ entrance as an opening gambit.

***

            The corridor is translucent, sunbeams refracting off the curves of chrome and corrugated metal. By design, it seems, the sky peeks through fissures unclimbably high, and the winding path trades narrow passageways for lobbies relatively wide, places to pause and decide which new road to take in this ‘yellow wood’. You’ve been in such places before. Antelope Canyon, between the Grand and Glen, is striped in swirls of Navajo sandstone, a terracotta trove before any humans mined its wonder and wealth.

            Here in the junkyard, no one thing seems worth any resale, if the weave of many things begs a different evaluation. What has Sanford made here, and why? The breeze, both stannic and refreshing, whispers a possible response: this labyrinth is exactly the structure you hoped it would be, even in the dread of having to test its properties, as well as your own.

            The cinder gravel gives way at times to railroad ties and unmortared flagstones. The walls are a balancing act of engine casings, bedsprings, refrigerators responsibly without their doors (or padlocked to satisfy an ordinance, if not the curiosity of what’s inside). A jetliner wing takes the path up to an emergency exit—now entrance—to a fuselage that may have actually crashed on this land, perhaps in the 60’s, judging by its bulging rivets and yellowed gaskets around the windows. Inside, the floor is devoid of seats—strange to have a row of passenger windows for what might have been a cargo plane. Intuitively, you walk toward the cockpit, but the nose of the aircraft has been removed to connect to another, narrower fuselage—an oversized drainpipe made for a reservoir, perhaps. Its length discourages any lingering; the light at forty yards or so lures you to what must be a way out of this mock-up mall, preferable to retracing your steps.

            And you wouldn’t want to at this point: you’ve left no breadcrumbs, but the reverse playback on the pad could serve that function, if need be. You came to explore this sprawl in the name of the law and with all your instincts of childhood hide-and-seek extended.

            The courtyard is sublime: florid with wisteria, moss and ferns; dark blue berries in the nightshade invite a sampling, but you know better than that—you dig in your pocket for a last piece of Trident gum instead. The sky is unimpeded here, a cupola that appears to bless the journey to this point. Eye of the hurricane comes to mind, though nothing here seems so set on wreaking havoc.

            The camera pad makes a whirring noise and flashes an indicator of a high concentration of nitrogen in the air. Nothing you can smell, really; the metal all around has its own musk neither appealing nor repellent. The mouth of the drainage pipe is five feet above the ground—a leap you didn’t mind when entering this nitric oasis, but a tougher pull up if returning the same way. To your left, a more level arcade invites.

            Back in the darkness, your camera pad glows the irony that your battery level is getting low. Funny—you’re sure you had charged it full from the cigarette lighter on the long drive across the county. Sleep mode is an option, even selectively—the machine could still be on to detect nitrogen, for instance, but cease video recording the less-than-necessary points along the way. The camera pad can resort to being just a pad. I have sharp eyes and sound memory, you justify as you click whatever savers would make the most sense.

            The arcade is more circuitous than any path so far, and while nothing here lights up, Sanford had stored the shells of dozens of pinball machines, video games, whac-a-moles, air hockey sideways (to make for a wall), sledgehammer scales and digital dartboards. They serve as island pillars for a ceiling of thick camouflage netting—like they’d have in some M.A.S.H. episode, but the real McCoy when you calculate Sanford’s age and possible service in Korea (more likely Vietnam). Not that this particular netting would be his personal piece of that war—this place couldn’t be so precisely a scrapbook, a story attached to each scrap.

            Or could it? Each item must have come to the farm—nothing in a junkyard emerges sui-generis, except the vermin that might treat it as a whale fall. As each item came, whatever cash exchanged (as likely profiting Sanford to relieve the world of unwieldy waste), there had to be an inventory system and a vision for how to add it to the mix. Sanford couldn’t operate or repair most of these machines, even if he wanted to; he must have engineered a different way of using them, somewhere in the psychic span of amusement and bemusement.

            He must have had a plan.

***

            Footing is a problem now—part fatigue, part the lack of light in this ever-dusky microcosm. You sit down on a bench of kiddie train car, not imagining it sits on real track. More than that, it reacts to your weight and jerks forward suddenly, before you have a chance to bail out. Above is the roof of the kiddie train car, and above that the camouflage net; the sides of this canyon blur an array of utility goods and industrial hardware—a microwave oven mounting a furnace, a corkscrew staircase skewering an assemblage of transistor radios. The rolling carriage seems a throwback to Willy Wonka’s boat, minus the absurd phantasmagoria. You’re aware that you’re in the same place you entered, still in control of your purpose and pace, trusting to some extent that the wonder of Sanford’s design will lead you to reasonable conclusions.

            Namely: you’ve noted no evidence thus far of human remains or anything untoward. You type in that note for the need for a timestamp, and alarmingly the camera pad goes dead.

            On cue, as if conscious, the kiddie train car glides to a stop on the beveled tracks and tilts your pliant body to the slopes of an erstwhile skateboard park. The metal here is polished to a zealous degree, and you roll more comfortably than you remember so doing on toboggan hills or simulating Jack and Jill on a summer day. Sliding down is a temporal whiz; trying to climb up is a Sisyphus task, and the outlay of the curves don’t encourage a return to that train. At this point, you’ll need to trust that the course has its exit, whether Sanford conceived of a mercy clause or you just barrel through as you’ve always done—private investigator of public concerns.

            In a fleeting attempt to climb up the canyon, you grab hold of a rusty bumper—auto sarcophagi are everywhere, in bits and pieces or tantalizingly whole. You’re scaling successfully until the license plate on a higher chrome bumper pulls off from its screws and sends you tumbling. You decide somehow that this is a celestial sign—the plate in the scrapes of your hands reads ‘Missouri’ above and ‘SHOW-ME STATE’ below, with RU4 C2B blue-blocked in the middle. Drat! you realize that the camera pad would easily be able to trace the previous owner, if it hadn’t up and gone dead. Take cheer: your photographic memory is still intact—that preceded your advent to this job, anyway, so why not fall back on that gift?

            Fact is, you’re getting tired—a Dorothy-in-poppy-field instant fatigue. It may be the nitrogen wafting this way; you seek out a pillow and find, instead, a boxful of mousepads, promoting that silly LG logo, along with Life’s Good. “You’ve won, Sanford,” you mumble before hoping this sleep will court dreams.

***

oooooooooh—own it:

you know you can hardly control it,

got you moaning at mystery moons,

kind of late for a change of tune,

but you groove toward it

now.

now.

now—now you’re dreaming of a lonely wolf

now—now conceding that you’re not aloof

but you groove toward it.

now.

oooooooooh—own it:

well, somebody’s got to patrol it,

just to question your protocols,

how to temper Niagara Falls,

as you groove toward it.

now.

now.

            Shaking the tingling feel over your closed eyelid, you realize the sound around you is the patter of insects, flying, alighting on your head and torso as their Gulliver. Goddamn, you stand up and curse to no one’s reception but yourself—Sanford could possibly hear if he’s playing along at home.

            You shout to channel him: “You’ve won, Master Scrapman. Now let me out!”

            Steel silence behind the buzz of roach wings. You notice the sky in the slits of the camouflage has become overcast, even dark in cumulus pockets. It will rain soon, and as much as the caverns provide cover, there’s no telling how a flash flood would act in this gargantuan sieve. You realize your cellphone has patiently waited in its sheath at your belt, tapping its foot, so to speak. Mere static responds to your speed-dials, even a last resort 911. There’s not even a courtesy message to say, your call is being scrambled right now; please hang up and try again later. Impulsively, you throw the blame handset away—up through the netting as if it might pathetically appear as an unlit flare, or message in a bottle, a flag of surrender for Sanford to see.

            Never knew why you’d want to get into this scene—sticking your nose into other folks’ business. It’s not like you’d pine for stories to tell, most of which must remain confidential, or, on higher occasions, classified. Maybe you wanted to be the story others would tell: a Lewis or Clark of detective lore, pioneering modern mysteries for the edification of… it’s hard to know.

            Those missing persons, and their families, friends. That’s what you’re doing this for. That’s what the warrant says and why you’ve come this far. They’ll get something out of this effort or—dare it be said—this sacrifice. They’ll know by your log that your last interaction was with Sanford, and your issued Jeep remains in his driveway, and GPS surely can escort them here. Electromagnetic trash compactors can’t eradicate everything, medieval sentries they are.

            They, like their ware, never had any love for you. At least that’s the feeling right

now.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)