Depressed, he leaves the restaurant, its zinc bar and gerbera daisies, and rides the elevator down to the street. The valet brings him the green Lexus and he turns on the adult contemporary rock. Loud.
It doesn’t help.
Later, lying on a dirty mattress and drinking vodka from a bottle, Ryan will dream of this night. He will dream of the wind rushing through his hair like warm fingers, of the ceaseless rhythm of crickets blowing past, of the smell of leather seats covered with dew. For this is the night that he finds her.
But that is later.
This night, he drives through the town, tapping a finger against his steering wheel, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He drives past many of his buildings, hoping that one will call out to him, invite him back, but none of them do. So he drives into an ugly part of town, a dangerous part of town, a part of town that wasn’t safe or savory even during its best years.
He drives until pink and gold dawn fingers the hills, until he begins to think that he should go somewhere, to an actual destination. To his fiancee’s home. She has bleached-oak floors in her entryway. She will serve him herbal tea with a shortbread cookie.
He takes a left. He will drive back and find the freeway.
Then his breath catches.
She rises and spreads before him, white stone walls stark in the peach colored dawn. Along her sides, thousands of tiny windows wink at him in the rising light. Some are broken; these stare at him, black and insane.
She is surrounded by tall weeds. Over the front door, the words “Windsor Machine Works” are spelled out in thin steel letters, stark and streamlined, lush with the tragedy of a brilliant, aborted future.
Below those letters, there are larger ones, painted on a warped sign nailed across her front door. The sign is old and battered, pocked with birdshot and curlicued with graffiti. But he can still read what it says.
It says, “For Sale.”
He parks slantways, jumps out of his car. He walks the cyclone fence surrounding until he finds a beaten down place; he tears the leg of his slacks climbing over it, carves an ugly gouge in his calf. No matter.
She is made of white limestone as supple and smooth as a virgin’s thighs. Her black twisting ironwork is crisp and devilish. The crumpled yellow newspapers crouching at her feet are supplicants satisfied by the simple blessing of her shadow; the glittering shards of broken glass bottles are like jewels, carelessly discarded.
He climbs onto a low crumbling wall beneath one of the windows. He presses his nose to the grimy glass like a child hoping to see elephants.
Inside, the building is a vast emptiness of square iron pillars and cement, thousands upon thousands of square feet of space. On the concrete floor, stagnant puddles glimmer, rainbowed with oil, reticulated with webs of settled dust. There are bolts in the cement where huge machines once anchored, straining against their own torque.
He stands, his cheek pressed up against the glass, closing his eyes. He imagines walls hiding unimaginable decay, steel beams crumbling to dust, tinder-dry insulation chambered with mouse nests, wires wrapped in fraying cloth. He can feel the sunlight as it pounds into her.
He’s in love. Again.
He buys the Windsor Machine Works building that day.
A birthday present for himself. It surprises the gals down at the County Assessor’s office to see Ryan Ceres camped on their doorstep when they open the doors. He is unshaven and there are shiny purple hollows under his eyes.
The gals in the County Assessor’s office tell Ryan that if the building is for sale, they can’t figure out who’s selling it; no one has paid taxes on it since 1963. It seems, in fact, to have no owner at all.
This greatly puzzles the gals, for they cannot conceive of such an odd thing. It is an offense to their unimaginative natures to think that anything can escape taxation for that long. They chatter about it amongst themselves as they prepare the paperwork.
He blinks, realizes that the gals are staring at him. They are staring at him so hard he wonders suddenly if he’s said something aloud that he didn’t mean to. He wipes a hand across his brow, flashes them his sandpaper smile. They wouldn’t understand.
Pulling out his leather-covered checkbook (which they understand completely), Ryan writes a check for the entire amount of back taxes, and just like that, the building is his.
As he’s driving back across town, he is joyful. He is in a state of transcendent bliss. The day is perfect blue, and he has the top down and his sunglasses on. The warm wind is snaking through his hair. Adult contemporary rock blasts out of his speakers. This moment is the absolute peak of his life.
A sudden thought strikes him. He flips open his tiny titanium phone and presses it to his ear. He calls Jose (his locksmith, always on the move) and arranges to meet him at the building.
Arrangements made, Ryan flips his phone closed and taps the steering wheel in time to a Celine Dion song.
When Ryan arrives back at the Windsor Machine Works, Jose is already there, bending over the open trunk of his always-breaking-down Justy. Jose is sorting through picks and tension tools and extractors. Choosing his implements carefully.
Ryan is flooded with inexplicable anger. The thought of another man sniffing around her doorstep enrages him. What if he’d decided to tamper with her before Ryan had got there? What if he’d decided to put his unkind picks into her unwilling locks?
“How long have you been here?” Ryan asks casually.
“Just got here,” Jose tosses off. “‘Bout to leave, though. Bad neighborhood. They shoot you for nothing around here.”
Ryan imagines punching him in the nose.
Jose doesn’t speak as he makes the key. When he is finished, he fits the bright new thing into the old door, and turns. The door swings open, releasing a smell of ancient oil and something else, strange and indefinable, like steel shavings rusting in honey.
“What the hell are you thinking, man?” Jose says. He stands with his hands on his hips, squinting into the gloom. He shakes his head as if trying to shake off raindrops of impending doom. “This place will finish you.”
Ryan snatches the key away from him with a growl.
“Get out,” Ryan says. “Get the fuck out.”
He does not watch or wave goodbye as the Justy clatters away.
He walks past the front desk, pushes open a creaking door, and he is on the manufacturing floor. The gals at the county assessor’s office say that their oldest records indicate that this building was used to manufacture machine parts during the First World War.
The manufacturing floor smells like stale urine and pigeon shit. As Ryan walks through the wide door and into the building, the space swells around him, the filtered light through the dust-caked windows cool and blue, the cement floor vast and undulating, like a calm body of water.
His footsteps echo. On the floor there is a pile of repair manuals from the 30’s for a machine of indecipherable purpose. The manuals look as if they’ve been stored in a bucket of old oil. Blackberry vines thread through broken windowpanes. The iron pillars are cobwebbed with ribbons of rust.
He thinks about the dump trucks and caterpillar tractors that will soon line up outside. He thinks about how the weeds will be cut away and the rusted pillars pulled down, and the oil-slicked concrete cleaned with foaming
