Off the Wall

You find them among the side streets off side streets, the places that are never traceable by GPS, where you can never get pizza deliveries. You can only find them on foot, but better that you never try.

But if you do, you may find them where the hulks of cars are stacked like dirty dishes, in garages of white plaster, where the concrete in the bays is so slick with old oil that you could skate across them in your running shoes. Their hair is thin and snarled, and their overalls stiff with grime. They are the automancers, and you really do not want to meet them.

But if you do, be sure you bring the first part of the price with you. No need to tell you what it is, if you have come so far. Nor I would not encourage you with specifics, any more than I would suggest you come without it.

But if you come, pay the first part of the price before they ask. You will not want to hear more of their voices than needful.

When you have paid and are calm again, they will cram their sleeves above their elbows and demand that you pick a car from among the wrecks. Choose well, but do not take long in making your choice, in case they choose for you instead.

But no matter who chooses, they will read for you. What they will read is the rust, the warps, and the punched-in hollows. Pondering the cylinders, your heart’s health is seen, and your lungs in the manifold of the exhaust. Scrawled in the corrosion of a battery may be the span of life that is left to you, and in the web of cracks across a windshield the blindness that will leave you to stare at nothing in the final months of your life. No matter how you felt when you hunted them out, by the time you leave, you will not want to hear.

But your ears will not help but hear, nor will your eyes forget, although in the middle of many nights after, you will wish they could. And a time may come when you look for the automancers again, this time carrying matches and oil.

But if that time comes, better hope that your feet no longer remember the way. They say that automancers’ shapes are fickle in the full moon, that they sport then, headlighted on the highway. They say, too, that a man who spoke against them lingered seven years on the road in their service, his belly pitted by potholes and his will kept by the holder of his keys. They say many things about the automancers, and many of them are true, including the contradictory ones.

When the craving to find them a second time is upon you, better that you remain at home. Better that you surround yourself with friends, if any remain when they learn of your visit (and they will always know, no matter how much secrecy you pride yourself in having). Rather than finding the automancers a second time unwanted, better you stay where you are and let them find you, when the time comes to pay the second half of the price.