His wife left for her job a half hour earlier than he did so she never seemed to encounter their downstairs neighbor in person. He himself tried to avoid running into her when he left for work in the morning and often peeked down from the window over the kitchen sink to see if she was outside getting into her black beetle-like car before he left his apartment. Sometimes he watched her walk to her car and start it and leave before he did the same. Though apparently unattached she was not an unattractive woman, young and with long, curly dark hair, and evidently a nurse because she wore a white uniform under her coat and white pantyhose. Under other circumstances he would have found that beguiling but she was too unsettling for him to desire her overtly.
Despite his efforts to avoid contact sometimes they set out to start their cars at precisely the same time and on one of these occasions he’d asked her just exactly what she was hearing that upset her so much. Did the floorboards in their kitchen squeak too loudly? All she said with an intense and meaningful expression was, I hear you moving around up there.
One weekend night around eleven when he closed a sliding drawer in the bathroom after removing nail clippers a wrecking ball crashed against one of the walls downstairs. Another boom followed and another with a rhythm as if this wrecking ball were swinging as a pendulum. A ululating shriek rose up to accompany it. This giant’s booming heartbeat and banshee screaming went on for minutes. His wife looked into the bathroom at him from the living room where she had been watching TV and both of them were paralyzed unblinking while they listened. At first he wanted to call the police because he thought the woman downstairs was being raped or murdered by an intruder. Then he realized she must be lying on her bed or maybe on the floor pounding the wall with both feet and screeching out all the air inside her because she hadn’t liked the sound of the bathroom drawer on its slides.
He missed when his wife would work nights because he’d liked coming home and having their little house all to himself, but just before the move she’d switched to a day shift like him. She scolded him if he came home too late. You know we have to eat and clean the dishes before she starts complaining. But he still customarily didn’t come home until an hour or more after he’d got off work. He’d find an excuse to pick up a few things at the market or he’d go to the library to soothe himself with the smell of old books and maybe take one home guiltily like a pet he’d found. Or he might walk in the rambling cemetery where his mother would take him for picnics as a boy. Cemeteries had never frightened him because of that. He just thought of them as beautiful parks full of sculpted blocks and tablets. (And that particular cemetery had never been infested with tree spiders, though others in town were.) He sometimes drove to look at his old childhood home, that is until it was razed and a bank was built in its place. One would think the citizens of Gosston were rich for all the banks but he knew that wasn’t the case for most, just as it wasn’t in any other town besides Gosston. The banks didn’t so much safeguard the money of Gosston as horde it.
One early evening when he’d finally come home from driving aimlessly around town after work, as he was getting the mail out of their box in a row of four boxes at the bottom of the steep hill the house perched atop, he glanced across the street at an old mill or factory nestled against a pond that from here looked man-made. Maybe the water had powered a turbine in the distant past. Gosston boasted even more ill-fated, shut-down factories than it did banks, as if the latter had sucked the life out of the factories for their own and left the carcasses. Some of these factories had been repurposed for apartments or offices while others had not. He’d never gone across the road he now lived on and over the guardrail to have a closer look at this apparently disused building, but gazing at it now he felt the compulsion to do so stirring. It was as though he was running out of other places in town to go before he had to come home.
He determined then, before he got back in his car and drove it up the precipitous driveway to the parking lot of the house he rented a quarter of, that tomorrow after work he would park his car on the other side of the road and hope his wife, having come home earlier than him as always, wouldn’t look out a window and spot it there. He planned to step over that rumpled guardrail barrier and go down the incline with its shabby trees and brush-snared rubbish into the great deep hollow where the pond lay, and the factory looming from its edge.
He turned from the factory and reached his hand to the door of his car, and flinched when he saw a great white snowball come bouncing down the curve of his driveway. It was a silk globe as big as a boulder and he feared it would impact with the nose of his idling car, explode and shower his vehicle and himself with swarms of small dark spiders. Before he could open his door and duck inside, however, a surge of breeze swept the rolling balloon up into the air and it sailed over his head. He swiveled to watch it float higher and saw it was followed by a chain of a half dozen smaller bubbles in a retinue of gauzy full moons, all of them drifting off into the sky in the direction of the factory and then beyond until they either flew off into purpling dusk or alighted in the silhouetted tree line that was like the fanged mandible of night.
Without turning from the kitchen sink where she stood washing and breaking apart something green and slippery, as if she were trying to drown and dismember some giant insect with veiny wings, his wife simply said, Late. He wanted to say he couldn’t be too late since she was still preparing their meal, but he refrained and only stood staring at her from behind for a moment as if he hadn’t looked at her straight on, rather than merely peripherally, for a very long time. She was short and had a block-like shape, with hair dyed blond and tight blue jeans on a sexless body in an attempt to look much younger than she was, and thus so resembling so many of the women he worked with that every day he could conceivably mistake a dozen of them for his wife from the back. He understood the same could be said of himself, in regard to all the bespectacled round-bellied men with graying and thinning hair at his company who looked like they had been mass produced at the very plant where they worked.
He and his wife had never had children and he wondered sometimes how their life might have been different if they had. Would they have been happier or would the additional financial stresses and commitment of time and energy have caused them to divorce by now? As it was they had never fought badly enough for either of them to have even uttered the word divorce. They didn’t seem to possess the passion to become that angry or discontented. Sometimes she criticized him for remaining in the same relatively low-paying job for these many years, for lacking ambition to the point of apathy, but he supposed it was this quality of acceptance that had kept them united. He wondered which was the worse condition of the two for a person to possess: apathy or dissatisfaction.
He wondered if he was dissatisfied with his apathy, or apathetic about his dissatisfaction.
As he eased himself down the incline, occasionally holding onto the bone-white trunks of birches to help maintain his balance, he speculated as to whether the extensive hollow in which the factory resided could be a crater where a meteor or asteroid had collided with the world tens of thousands of years ago, with the pond having formed at its nadir. If a heavenly body had created this depression, might it have carried radioactive elements that today polluted the pond’s water, or even primitive alien life that had evolved into secretive creatures that throve in the pool’s murky depths? Already a boyish sense of adventure had taken hold of his mind, his curiosity becoming more intense the deeper he descended into the pit.
At one point while catching his breath he twisted to look back up the incline to check if he could see the house he rented an apartment in, balanced high on its hill across the street. He feared his wife might be watching him in confusion and disapproval from one of its windows even now. He found he could not see it, however, as he had ventured far enough into the bowl that its upper edge blocked his view of his home, not to mention all the intervening trees. He faced forward again and continued downward until the ground leveled out an
d he stood before the pond, with the factory on the other side of a stream that disgorged into the body of water. He realized this stream must be the Gosston Canal. It separated him from the factory like a castle’s moat.
The left flank of the long brick structure abutted a desolate-looking road that vanished into dense trees. Running the length of the right side of the factory was a narrow strip of parking lot, entirely empty and with long weeds growing through cracks veining its pavement. The parking lot bordered the edge of the pond with its black surface as undisturbed as a table top. A clock tower rose above the rest of the factory’s flat roof and was twinned in the obsidian pond as if painted on glass, but where its face should have been there was only an empty black skull socket now as though the clock itself had dropped out and been lost under the water. His imagination still stimulated, he pictured the clock lying on black muck at the bottom of the pond with its arms even now turning unseen as the years passed.
A metal bridge with blistered paint spanned the drowsily flowing canal from this side to the other side and as he started across it he chided himself for not owning a camera to capture these intriguing images, but he hadn’t felt sufficiently motivated to preserve his memories in photographs for quite a few years.
He reached the far side with the factory now rising more imposingly above him, especially its blind tower. From here it looked as though the front entrance lay directly below the tower, within an archway, but he spotted another door nearer to him on the left side of the building and it was toward this that he started walking. Even as he did so, though, he asked himself, You don’t mean to try to go inside, do you?
He assured himself he would only test to see if that metal side door was locked. Purely out of curiosity.
He found the door was unlocked. He also found that his curiosity was not quenched.
He pushed the metal door open with his clothed forearm not so much because he needed to put the weight of his chest against it but because he was reluctant to touch its rust encrusted surface and possibly abrade his skin. It screamed on its hinges like a dying animal aroused to one more complaint of misery before subsiding into unconsciousness again. He pushed it open only far enough to pass through the gap without his body touching.
The smell packaged up inside the building was profound. It spoke of machinery and oil, of moldering cardboard and garbage and something like the damp leaf litter of a forest floor, combining into a kind of dumpster smell, but with other elements lingering like leather and tanning chemicals. He knew those smells because in the early years of his long and varied work history he had been employed as a leather cutter for a boot manufacturer and then later a pocketbook company, both here in Gosston and both long since closed down. Whatever the individual source of these olfactory strata, they combined into one stench so complicated and pervasive that it oppressed him almost to the point of queasiness. But he was not to be dissuaded and tried to breathe shallowly only through his mouth.
He had entered the building into a shipping area with a pair of shuttered garage-type doors further along a wall of bricks painted white with a second coat of grime upon that. A third and more irregular covering for the walls was graffiti done in the cartoonish manner of tagging, as if the rural outskirts of Gosston might actually be home to dangerous gangs marking their territory instead of simply bored white teenagers romanticizing a harder way of life. Coherent words were hard to distinguish in this garish overlapping jumble that was like a visual representation of the miasma permeating the room. One word for instance, ballooned purple and blue to deformity like a bloated corpse, apparently said GOMEZ but it might have been GONEZ or even GONE?.
Across one of the shuttered shipping dock doors someone had painted in red letters, easier to read than any of the others: DON’T GO OUT THERE! He contemplated this with a little smile of perplexity and muttered, Too late for that now.
Other than the preponderance of graffiti the room was stripped down to only heaps of debris and trash that seemed to have mostly crawled into the corners to huddle, perhaps adhering there to the sticky tar of shadows. High windows were covered in torn membranes of plastic once perhaps meant to retain heat but now only cataracts that dulled the already overcast sunlight to a foggy glow.
Crunching pebbles of beer glass under his shoes he crossed to a doorway in the opposite wall from which he had entered and found himself in a corridor with a high ceiling of bare joists and exposed pipes and lights with their fluorescents smashed out, but more narrow windows let in that weak milky light. He moved down this corridor, poking his head into various rooms along the way where doors stood open or had been taken off their hinges probably to facilitate the removal of machinery. Most of the rooms were bare but for more debris more shadows more incomprehensible graffiti.
He jerked his head of one room quickly, though. In here one of those web orbs hung down from where it was affixed to the ceiling like a gigantic mold-white heart, at least the size of the one that had come rolling down his driveway the day before and he might even believe it was the same one, having somehow made its way inside this building and squeezed down this corridor, squeezed through this doorway. The room was dimly lit but the sphere seemed to pulse subtly with the movement of its many denizens, like a living breathing planet. He reached in timidly and hauled this room’s door shut before continuing on.
The corridor ran the length of the whole ground floor and toward the front of the building he took the rooms he peeked into to be former offices. In fact he next encountered one large area subdivided into cubicles though any computers and filing cabinets that might have been in them were gone as were the chairs except for a couple of specimens cast into gloomy corners. He walked among the cubicles and in one he came across a photograph from an instant camera thumbtacked to a mounted corkboard. Its colors all faded to shades of yellow, it showed a baby smiling up from its crib but its eyes had been scratched out in the photo with a pin or maybe the point of a razor knife as if to obfuscate its identity.
At the back of this large office area just beyond the last row of cubicles he discovered a bare mattress on the floor, so discolored with mold and variously stained he felt he might become diseased just from looking at it too long. More than disgust he experienced a kind of resentment that teenage boys were apparently making love to attractive young girls, unappreciatively, in this place just across the street from where he lived in abstinence. When he was a teenager it had seemed that sexual matters were the secret province of adults, from which the very young were excluded. These days it was as though the situation had reversed.
He felt he could almost discern the sweat and juices of young bodies now in that complex mix of scents that formed the atmosphere of this place.
He spotted something poking out from under one corner of the blackening fungoid mattress and bent down to delicately pinch it and pull it out. As reluctant as he was to touch anything in here with his bare hands he suspected this might be a pornographic magazine or, judging from its thickness, book and that possibility engaged his keen interest.
What he lifted into his hands as he straightened, though, was a photo album. With the hope it might still contain pictures of a titillating nature, given the setting in which he had come upon it, he opened its cover.
It was immediately apparent that what he had uncovered was a wedding album, its pages filled with photographs preserved under clear plastic sheets. The colors of the photographs were faded though not to the extent of the baby photo he had discovered in the cubicle. Why this object would have been abandoned here he didn’t try to fathom but he paged through the album slowly with gaze flicking from image to image. Finally half-consciously he dragged one of the office chairs out of a corner and righted it so as to sit down as he continued poring over the album.
He was charmed by these photos and especially by the bride, a youthful beauty whose white dress and veil set off all the more her long dark hair and dark eyes. Her fresh face and petite figure had struck him from the first image. T
he groom was similarly young and attractive and he was jealous of this man though he couldn’t be bitterly resentful, because the groom’s smiling face conveyed how happy he was and how lucky he knew himself to be.
He stared hard at how the corset bodice of the wedding gown clung to the young woman’s slender waist and how the skin of her arms showed through their sheer lacy sleeves. Her hair spilled in permed coils over her shoulders and the proud mounds of her breasts. Toward the back of the album were a series of pictures that showed the groom kneeling in front of the bride so as to remove the ruffled garter from her leg before tossing it over his shoulder to the unmarried males, perhaps infused with her scent. Her shapely leg with its firm thigh and calf muscles was thrust out in front of her sheathed in a white stocking. He found himself growing aroused as he focused on her extended leg in this group of shots.
Whereas the wedding photos looked to have all been taken by a professional, the last page of the album featured several pictures yellowed like the baby photo, on the thick film of an instant camera. These appeared to have been taken at a hotel or motel at a later time, though not much later because the bride’s hairstyle and makeup were the same as in the wedding series. They had to be honeymoon shots taken by her fortunate husband that same night.
In one photo the brand new wife was posed on a bed with both arms propped behind her, leaning back on them with her legs together and cocked to one side. No white stockings this time just bare flesh and toes pointing toward the camera like her shy but mischievous smile. She wore a short nightie of silk and lace, valentine red. In another photo she was on hands and knees facing toward the camera and he looked into the darkness between her hanging breasts. In the last shot she was under the covers with one arm thrown back behind her head to expose her smooth underarm. She was waiting for her husband to put the camera down and join her.
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 5
