legends · 7 min read ·
Route Recalculating
A navigation app keeps rerouting a night driver toward a town that is not on any map, and every attempt to leave only confirms he has arrived.
The app had never been wrong about the highway, so I didn't question it when it sent me off the highway.
I was driving to a client in Varrow, a contract that would have covered the rest of my year. The map showed a blue line running south off the interstate onto a two-lane road, then a gray dashed line where the road should have continued. The gray part wasn't marked closed. The app simply kept going, the way it does when it expects you to be carrying on.
*Route recalculating.*
It did this four times before the exit. The voice stayed calm and slightly bored. After the first time I stopped checking the screen and started checking the mirror, which is what nine years of night driving does to a person.
The turn appeared as a small black road with no name. The app called it Shore Spur. There was no shore within forty miles.
I took it because the other option was a service road that ended at a fence, and because the fuel gauge had been lying since Tuesday.
· · ·
**Navigation log (saved from history, 21:14–21:52)**
- 21:14 — Head south on Route 9.
- 21:21 — Continue on unlabeled road.
- 21:23 — Recalculating.
- 21:31 — Destination: Varrow, Clerk's Office. 38 min.
- 21:33 — Turn left onto Shore Spur.
- 21:33 — Shore Spur (no mapped surface).
- 21:40 — Arriving at Haley.
- 21:40 — Haley is not a saved location.
· · ·
The road bent around a hill of scrub oak, and the headlights found a fence on the left, then a second fence on the right. Between them the road went on, pale and dry, with no lines. The gravel made a sound under the tires like someone chewing slowly, and I noticed that I had stopped humming along with the radio because I'd turned the radio off.
Haley appeared where the hill fell away. A grain elevator. A white church, its bell rope tied up to a cleat. A diner with its lights on. One gas pump under a tin canopy, with a handwritten sign: CASH OR PATIENCE.
I laughed out loud. The car was empty, so the laugh sounded wrong.
The pump took my card without asking for a PIN. The receipt printed slowly. My name was on it, spelled correctly, with the time, 21:44, and beneath that the word *Welcome*.
The waitress in the diner was in her sixties. Her name tag said Ruth. She did not offer her hand. She set a cup of coffee on the counter in front of an empty stool, and I noticed the surface of the coffee was not moving, though the door had just opened and let in a breath of cold air.
"You're on the list for the Clerk's Office," she said.
"I'm going to Varrow. The app said Varrow."
"Varrow's real. Twelve miles on. The road you wanted runs under the reservoir now. You'd have driven into it at thirty." She poured her own coffee without looking. "The app sends people through the gray part when it wants them. Haley's been off the map a long time. Somebody has to be routed here so it shows up again."
I looked through the window at my car. The screen was lit. The blue line ran out of town toward Varrow. I could see, from here, that the line had a small hitch at the point where it left the diner lot, as if it started in the wrong place.
"Why me?"
"Your route was already set," Ruth said. "That's all it takes."
Behind the pie case there was a door with a brass slot in it. A bell hung beside the slot. I could hear, faintly, through the wall, a radiator knocking in an empty corridor, and then the sound of something being set down very carefully on linoleum.
I didn't go to the window. I went outside, and I walked to the car without running, because running felt like a mistake I'd be able to see clearly later.
· · ·
**Navigation log (21:52–22:30)**
- 21:52 — Destination: Varrow, Clerk's Office. 11 min.
- 21:58 — Recalculating.
- 22:04 — Your arrival is confirmed.
- 22:07 — Recalculating.
- 22:09 — Varrow Municipal Clerk: closed.
- 22:19 — Recalculating.
- 22:22 — Destination: Haley, Clerk's Office. 4 min.
- 22:26 — Turn right onto Shore Spur.
- 22:30 — Arriving at Haley.
· · ·
I drove the gray road to Varrow. I could tell the difference by the way the tires sounded: solid blacktop, then gravel, then something softer that gave under the wheels like a mattress. The dashed lines on the screen ran beside the road in neat rows, and where the actual road bent, the dashes kept going straight, cutting across a field I could see through the windshield.
After forty minutes, the headlights picked up the grain elevator.
I passed it. I passed the church with the rope untied, swinging a little as if someone had just let go. I passed the diner, and Ruth was in the window, holding two cups. Her mouth was moving. Through the glass, I couldn't hear her, but I read the shape of it.
*Still in range.*
I drove for another hour and passed the pump four times. The first time, its sign said CASH OR PATIENCE. The second time, PATIENCE ONLY. The third time, the sign was blank and the receipt slot had a single slip of paper hanging out of it, my own name on the top line.
On the fifth pass I stopped trying to get out and looked at the dashboard instead. The blue line had collapsed to a single pin, placed exactly over my car. Beside it, in the small font the app uses for street names, was my own name and the word *Arrived*.
The route had not been set to take me away from Haley. It had been checking whether I was still in range of it, the way a phone checks for a signal. Every time I left, the pin dragged a little, and every time I came back, it settled.
I pulled into the diner lot and turned off the engine. My hands were not steady on the wheel. The car's clock read 22:58.
Through the window, Ruth lifted her cup to me. At the back of the diner, the door with the brass slot was open a few inches. In the corridor beyond it, the plastic chairs were occupied now. People sat in them with receipts in their laps, and every one of them was facing the window, facing me, and none of them were breathing in the way people breathe.
The last chair in the row was empty. Its receipt was on the seat, face up, with the time printed on it as 22:58 and my name beside it.
The phone on the passenger seat said *Recalculating*, once, quietly.
I kept my hands on the wheel and did not reach for the door. The engine was off, and the car was still warm, and the windshield was beginning to fog from the inside, slowly, the way it does when someone is breathing close to the glass on the other side.
I wrote the rest of this on the back of the receipt, in the car, with the dome light on. I'm writing it so that someone on the road will know Haley is still open. If you're driving the gray part, don't stop at the pump. Don't answer if Ruth calls your name. Keep your eyes on the blue line, and if the pin lands on top of your car, turn the engine on and go, even if the road in front of you is the wrong color.
I'm leaving the receipt on the dash. The pin is on the car now.