The first customers trickled in, yawning and sighing as they sat. Chair-legs squeaked against the floor. Maryam walked from table to table, pouring, smiling, listening. Gossip was shared more quietly these days, thanks to the war. Few felt comfortable bragging of success, or grumbling over a minor misfortune, when so many of their loved ones were in peril. The Mediterranean blockade had stretched the villages of Lebanon to the breaking point. The remnants of last year’s harvests had all been sent to the Imperial supply lines—and now, just as the spring crops began to ripen, came news of locust swarms unlike anything seen in a generation. They flew in clouds that blocked the sun, fell upon fields and stripped them bare in minutes. It seemed clear that no matter how much money Little Syria’s residents managed to send home, no matter how many coins they added to the collection plates, it wouldn’t be enough to ward off starvation.
They spoke little of it, among themselves. It was too difficult to talk about, too weighted with guilt and worry and helplessness. Instead they turned to matters of the neighborhood, and vented their frustrations there—which meant that Maryam didn’t have to listen for long before she caught the word Bedouin as it flew past her, flashing like a silver bird.
She angled toward its origin, a table in the corner, listening as she approached:
It’s been three years now. How long will he let the Amherst sit empty?
It’s a waste, and an eyesore, with all the windows papered over like that.
One might be forgiven for thinking he was up to no good in there—
And then Maryam arrived and refilled their cups, and asked if they’d heard that Faris and Habiba Mokarzel had decided to move to Detroit. Who, she wondered, would be left to run their restaurant? It was a good location, and it would be a shame to lose such a successful business. But then, perhaps someone would offer to buy it from them. With that, she danced away again while the men sat back, pondering the idea.
So went Maryam’s vigil each day, as she sought out each whisper, deftly uprooted it, and planted something else in its place. But the strain had taken its toll. Worry and fatigue dimmed her spirit. When she looked in the mirror, she saw new creases in her brow, new threads of silver advancing through her hair. But she couldn’t rest, she simply couldn’t—not when the Amherst exerted such a pull on the neighborhood’s imagination.
Since Boutros’ death, the building had taken on a new and foreboding personality. All the windows were covered over with butcher paper, five floors’ worth, from top to bottom. Groans and creaks rose at times from the depths, and the occasional muffled reverberation. The chimney-top still shimmered with heat, and snow that landed on the rooftop melted instantly, even in the coldest winter. Delivery trucks came monthly with their coal and ore, but there were no visitors, no customers—only its sole resident, a moving silhouette glimpsed occasionally at night, through the papered windows.
It was the most tantalizing of mysteries, and only natural that Little Syria should whisper about it—but what would happen if she allowed the whispers to spread? Her neighbors, powerless to stop a war elsewhere, would invent a battle nearby that they thought they could win. They’d convince themselves that the Amherst was a danger and its owner their enemy; they’d force their way inside and confront him—and then what? There was no way of knowing. No one had spoken to the man in years. The Golem, too, had vanished. Occasionally Maryam thought of the broken concrete in the alley behind the Amherst, and wondered what had happened between them—but she didn’t linger upon such thoughts for long. Their world and its considerations, she’d decided, were not hers to influence or understand. She would instead concentrate on her loved ones, and protect them from the danger that they would otherwise insist on rousing.
The Amherst’s owner, the man who’d caused so much consternation, stood at the forge with his hands buried in fire to the wrists, and looked up at what his building had become.
It was no longer a factory loft, not by any stretch of the imagination. The floors themselves had long since vanished, and the stairwell enclosure too: the boards ripped apart, the joists burned to ash, the plaster walls demolished, the stairs uncoupled weld by weld. In the months after Arbeely’s death he’d torn down every bit of the interior he deemed unnecessary, every pipe and wire and conduit, until all that was left was the support columns, a grid of brick pillars rising through five stories of empty air. Ready, at last, for his true work to begin.
It had taken him some time to settle on a design. Perhaps he couldn’t build his river-pebble of steel and slag, not yet; he had only the Amherst, and its boundaries suggested a different purpose. He thought of his glass palace, abandoned in its desert valley. The necklaces he’d once made, with their silver wires and discs of colored glass. The Pennsylvania Station concourse, its arches that shaped the sky beyond. The steel pebble, with its suggestion of a building without corners. He’d fuse them all together and create something entirely new, the first and only one of its kind.
The central column came first. He crushed the iron ore a handful at a time and reinforced the middlemost support pillar with steel, smoothing it onto the brick, building it up one layer at a time. He developed a feel for the mix of iron to carbon, adjusting its strength and pliancy as he went. The slag he set aside for later, a hill of glass growing slowly beside the forge. Inch by inch the steel ascended—and as he strengthened the column, he encircled it with a spiral staircase that grew rung by rung
