This must be told. Postmodern author David Foster Wallace once lived at 35 Houghton St, where he blew ganja fumes out of a second floor window under the fever dreams that led to the brickish Infinite Jest and which I have decided to honor with a cache that lies, or more accurately, persists – because "lying" implies a certain static inertness, a kind of bovine contentment, that simply doesn't capture the sheer, almost pathological there-ness of the thing – around an intersection of what was once, perhaps, a moderately ambitious suburban development that time, entropy, and the slow, insidious creep of late-stage capitalism rendered drably anonymous. This shingled forest of triple deckers bursts, like an appendix overfull of surreptitiously gnawed fingernails, with residents that poke up and around like bees tessellated in a museum exhibit honeycomb sliced in half and visible through glass for hypersugared grammar school children to glance at and move on. We're not talking bucolic New England charm here or even storied Cambridge, folks; we're talking the kind of liminal, asphalt-scented full-on Somerville that most people hustle through, glassy gazes fixed resolutely on glassy phones, desperate to escape its blandishments and/or subtle, soul-crushing despair.
The cache is located, or rather, it resides, because "located" implies a kind of neat, cartographical precision that the actual site in no way possesses given the relativistic jitter of the GPS satellites in invisible view, peering down from their MEO ellipses 12,550 miles above our climate-warmed rock, between a sandwich of #FF0000 metallic commands, one short and arresting, one longer and forbidding.
The treasure itself – and "treasure" feels inadequate, a word too burdened by piratical romance and cartoonish gleam for the grimy, deeply un-glamorous reality of the thing – isn't a chest of doubloons. That would be, to put it mildly, derivative. No, it's a meticulously sealed, hermetically so in fact, tin of chokeable mints. Within its industrial-grade, almost brutally utilitarian confines, is a for-the-time-being pristine log primed for the taloned scratchings of cheap office pens. No digital signatures here, because the analog stuff is where the real horror lies, the sheer, tactile weight of stiff cellulose awaiting your timestamped moniker, a conduit for announcing that you, like Kilroy, were here.