by John Maclay
The building was triangular in shape, and so was far smaller than it appeared from the street; it had been built, fitted in between two others, in a time in which city space was to be jealously guarded and used, not casually cleared for expressways and windswept malls. The first floor was the old shop; a narrow, closed stairway led the young man and his guide to the second, whose loose, faded wallpaper and rug-marked floor identified it as a living room of sorts, with a smoky kitchen-place in one corner. Climbing again, their feet on worn wooden steps, they found two low bedrooms and an ancient bath under the flat roof. That, on the surface, was all there was to it: and what there was, looked to be falling apart from age. They descended, the shape of the building disorienting them, forcing them to turn the wrong way for the next flight of stairs, and threatening to put one of them back into a rainy-day dream.
“What do you want for it?” the young man finally asked. The real estate man’s face was his reply; it was back in his modern office downtown, far away from places like this which he was forced, infrequently, to show. He broke his professional manner, out of affection or pity for his misled prospect. “What do you want with it?” he must have thought of saying, but contented himself with, “On places like this, you make an offer.” And so, for a few thousand dollars, the gray building changed hands, again.
It had been built, or come into being, on the eve of the Civil War, when sweaty stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, tinners, and plasterers had suddenly transformed a weedy patch of clay into something that was a creation of industrious gods, but had no god. That need, promptly, had been supplied: a silversmith’s family had moved in, gray-clad soldiers had marched past, a beautiful young daughter had died one crystal January night, and her spirit, drifting through its brick walls into eternity, had left something of her in them. Then it had passed to an interim owner, after the origin and before the history the young man knew; a shadowy, single man whom some had accused of practicing the black arts. But whatever the disembodied spirits that had been within it, the building had accrued sufficient fleshly, and even banal, ones through its 130 years: those of Friday night dinners, long hours of small craftsmanship, or hot city nights spent trying to sleep. All this the young man inherited when he signed a simple piece of paper.
The day was clearer, less gray, when he set to work. The old woman’s effects, and most of her trash, had been removed, leaving the place, as the real estate agent had specified, “broom-clean.” But it didn’t take long to see that, in this case, a broom hadn’t been nearly enough. During the next few months, the young man would stop at the building on his way home from work, don coveralls, and labor long after the light from the tall front windows had faded and been replaced by that from dim, bare bulbs. He would walk out again in his good clothes, baffling passersby with his dirty face and hands. In the midst of such sessions, his mind would be so concentrated on the task before him that all else would cease to exist. But there were unexpected joys, as well.
There were rotten ceilings to be taken down, yielding fine dust which made him black beyond the hope of a single shower, and bones and rags chewed by long-dead rats.… He discerned an ancient pattern in the filthy cloth.
There was wallpaper to be scraped off, with the scratch of the knife and the pile of ribboned leavings at, and on, his feet.… Again the ancient patterns were revealed, layer upon layer.
There were floors to be sanded, following the impossibly-noisy machine, struggling to prevent its free flight across the room.… He kicked up an Indian-head penny, and rejoiced.
There were plumbers to be waited for or met on rushed trips; men who had to do for the building what he couldn’t do himself.… They dug a huge hole in the sidewalk, and unearthed an orange clay pitcher, which they tossed into his waiting hands.
There were windows to be cleaned…to a point, for he found them permanently etched by the dust, by the years, by the evening sun.
There was the tin roof to be patched, ascending through a tight hatchway in the third-floor ceiling…to an expansive view of the city, outlined against a red winter sky.
The joys, of course, were of the city, and of the past.
Once he stood in the doorway of the building, his building now, looking up and down the river of the street, as he had characterized it on that first, rainy day. There was life in it, in the passing people and cars, and history, not only in them but in it. They passed through it, the young man thought; but just as surely it moved past them, both on their way to unknown destinations.
Another time, he was painting next to a window, peripherally looking through it, and suddenly he seemed to become a man who had painted or papered the same wall in 1925, or 1895, or 1861. Just as suddenly, then, he seemed to glimpse the view, of chugging Fords and flappers, or carriages and derbies, or marching gray soldiers, which each man had seen.
And even more, one brilliant day when he sat alone in the building, in it, alone with it, the spirits seemed to come, real, almost tangible; he could see them shifting in a patch of sunlight on the floor.
At last his work was finished, and it was time to rent the place to someone who would become next in its chain of permanent occupants; who would add to it even more than he had, not only that someone’s work, but his life. The young man would return to his reading, which he had been neglecting; he had been reading its walls. But before he turned over the keys, he sought, presumed to seek, one more experience, one experience, which would crystallize all that the building had been, had been to him. Perhaps that shadowy, single man of whom he’d heard had practiced the black arts; perhaps that beautiful young daughter who had died in it would come to him. Perhaps…a sign.
There was one more night, and one more place to be cleaned. He descended the rickety stairs to the dirt-floored cellar, where under a single bulb he groveled in the dark unknown. Dustpan and broom in hand, he sought merely to smooth things out, to make them presentable for his tenant. That was when he noticed the shallow depression, the hole.
He knelt, and began to dig. Long since, he had quit worrying about getting dirty, because dirt was only the natural layerings of the past. The black earth felt cool and moist on his hands, and in his mind. Sensing his reward, knowing why, he dug…then touched, cleared, and pulled.
It was a green glass bottle, half-filled with a clear liquid. Poe’s cask, or the genie’s flask, containing the elixir of the ages, but now, in the 20th century, more real than any story! It held the yearned-for medium, from the past and to it. For a moment, clutching it, removing the cork, he thought of the painting of the mountain lake, that first gray day. Should he drink, and die, from what was probably brackish water…or be transported into mystery? Would he meet the ghost, the ghost of Number 708 itself, and embrace him?
But the young man poured the liquid onto the earth, covered the hole, and cast the bottle aside. He ascended the cellar stairs, smiling, knowing the secret: that ghosts did not need to be manifest, because they were, quite simply, everywhere. They dwelt with him always, right on the backs of his eyes.
AN IRON MAIDEN
It was a hot day in August, hot as blazes, and Dave was helping to remove the first-floor cast-iron front from a 19th-century building that was being demolished downtown. He’d tried and failed to save the building, so now he and three friends were at least salvaging and preserving the pieces. What they were doing was illegal, and he was standing watch for cops in between lugging heavy column parts to his van. But it was a Sunday, the street was almost deserted, and they weren’t being disturbed. With their work clothes and hard hats, they probably looked like official demolition types anyway.
Bill, a short, wiry guy, was the ringleader, and he’d convinced Dave and the others not to get permission from the demolition contractor or the building’s owner, saying they’d only be held up for an indemnity bond. And it was Bill who was heroically doing most of the work, using a cutting torch to burn off bolts and free up the iron. He wa
s coughing and sweating and his face was blackened, but Dave was dripping too. He’d weighed himself that morning, and having done other such work in the summer, he knew that by evening he’d have lost five pounds.
His van at full capacity, he made a trip to his garage to drop off the load. That was something he’d learned, to get away with the goods as soon as possible. The other guys had trucks, and he could have waited till they all were filled, but it would be stupid to be busted then and lose everything. As he drove the five miles, with the air conditioner blasting and his hands aching, he had time to reflect.
Most people would find what he and his friends were doing to be totally outside their experience and stupid indeed. Who cared if elaborately-molded, hundred-plus-year-old column capitals were smashed and hauled off to the dump? But Dave thought the present owed a debt to the past, that what others had built deserved to be saved.
It was adventurous, as well. Smiling, he recalled a solo operation, contrastingly on a freezing January night, when he’d taken some iron window surrounds from another dying building. That time, the streets had been crowded with people, and he’d had to casually carry them to his van, as if they were nothing more than office mailing tubes, so as not to arouse suspicion. But he’d had trouble controlling his facial expression, his muscles, and his walk, since those “mailing tubes” had weighed a hundred pounds.
Now, he stashed the goods, getting even dirtier and sweatier, and drove back to the site. Bill was finishing up and the other vehicles were loaded, with one pile remaining for him. As he heaved the pieces into his van, he heard his friend observe that they were unfortunately damaged, because someone had sledgehammered off the projecting parts so they could mount a sign on the front of the building.
And that was when it all turned, and Dave realized what the building had also been to him.
How could he have forgotten? he wondered, as congratulations on the good work were exchanged and he said good-bye to the others, but lingered behind. Still being cautious, he moved his van a block away from the scene of the crime. But then he stood across from the ruined building, and remembered.
He’d recently told a woman friend that outside his boring job as an accountant, the most important things to him were old buildings, and sex. She’d laughed at the combination, but now he decided it wasn’t far-fetched after all. Indeed, on this sweltering August day, it seemed it was being brought all the way home.
That was because, years before, he’d been not only at, but in, this iron-fronted building. And the now-vanished sign had been for a dark bar with a throbbing jukebox and topless dancers.
He’d wandered in there after a particularly frustrating day at work. He’d been early, the only customer and before the girls arrived, and he’d sat at the bar and talked with the manager, a stout, fortyish woman in a dress that showed off her huge breasts.
Aching for relief, and entertaining a fantasy, he’d hinted, after a couple of beers, that since no one else was there, he and she might do something. But she’d smiled and told him if he wanted what he must have been staring at, an even better example was on the way.
And it, she, was, Dave recalled, when the show began. The very first dancer was short and slender, but she had the largest breasts, for her size or otherwise, he’d ever seen revealed. Moreover, after her performance, and prompted by the smiling bartender, she came down and sat with him in a dark corner of the bar. And for twenty bucks, she let him explore all he wanted.
It took two hands to hold just one of them, and the hand that was toward her back discovered more. She was a freak or a gift of nature, and he thanked fate he’d found her. All his tension drained away as he went on to bury his face between them, inhaling her sweet perfume and probably indulging some deep-rooted, maternal thing. Or perhaps her breasts were like the architectural marvels he loved. At any rate, he went home and never came back to the bar, deciding he couldn’t repeat the best.
Now, as he stood staring at the ruins of his architectural and sexual dreams, he felt it turn even more. Maybe the sweat was clouding his eyes or the heat and the work were affecting his brain, but he sensed something further than memory or fantasy was on the way. It could be hallucination, he decided, or even preternatural reality. Whatever, he was determined to greet it.
Dave trudged back to his van, brushed the dust off his clothes as best he could, tossed in his hard hat, and climbed into the driver’s seat. In addition to the last load of iron, he’d salvaged some beautiful pressed red brick and carved slate stones, braving the dangerous, collapsed interior of the old building to get one. As he glanced at them, he again wondered how anyone could so callously destroy the efforts of past generations.
But the remnants paled as his eyes reached the passenger’s seat, and his heart skipped a beat when he saw what, or who, was there.
The dreaming mind did funny things, he had a moment to reflect. If you went to sleep thinking separately of a dog and a ledger sheet, for example, you’d be likely to dream of a canine accountant.
But this was more extreme.
What he saw was the woman he’d been with in the bar, but now she was surreally made of iron!
And he had to smile when the thought came that that he’d surely also salvaged her.
Like the column parts, her nude body was grimy, rusted in places, and elsewhere covered with faded green paint. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, her seatbelt was even fastened, and her eyes, tinted with an apparent underlying layer of gold leaf, had a look of gratitude and anticipation.
And there were those huge breasts of hers, now incarnate in iron. Dave couldn’t resist the impulse to reach over and not hold, but rap on them with his knuckles, and when he did, they returned a bell-like sound that intoned the combination of his wildest dreams.
Then, on that otherwise silent day of work and reverie, the iron maiden spoke. And she wasn’t an instrument of torture like her medieval counterparts, her echoing voice instead filling him with the deepest peace.
“You’ve done well on all counts,” she said, smiling too at the bizarre thing that had resulted, and that life itself surely was. “Now take me home, and make love to me.”
And so he did.
Amid the ornate capitals that covered the floor of his garage, he laid her down. He’d had to carry her in, she not having been able to move, but he’d been given a supernatural strength to do so. Now she relaxed a bit, her face and her body shape-shifting as if she’d been differently cast in her mold. And her iron arms reached out to him, and her legs opened.
He went into her, as he’d wanted to but hadn’t years before. And now it was far better than it could have been then, because the combination he’d mentioned to a woman friend was mystically fulfilled.
To be candid about it, her amazingly tight iron receptacle was a heaven of all kinds to him. And her huge breasts against his chest, also upstandingly firm and for whatever reason he’d once seized upon them, completed his bliss.
“That was marvelous, lover,” the iron maiden sighed when they were done. “And you, too, are a man of strength in body and beliefs, a man of iron.”
During the weeks that followed, Dave worked his hands to soreness, scraping the paint not only from the salvaged column parts as his friends doubtless were doing, but from her. In the end, he had her down to a gleaming though slightly age-patinaed beauty that was even more pleasing to them both.
To avoid any prying eyes, he artfully hid her among the many architectural remnants he had in his garage. And when he uncovered her, she wasn’t always available, her love apparently being reserved for when he’d done some major, dangerous, heroic thing.
One of their best times was when he’d hauled off three tons of fine, carved granite from a building whose destroyers were surely destined for something other than what he and she enjoyed. And he only hoped his friend Bill, who was more heroic and though they’d never speak of it, had an
even better iron or stone maiden stored somewhere.
The vast majority would think he was crazy or laughable, Dave concluded, as he set out late one night on another caper.
Or they’d opine that what he’d then enjoy, he should portray as monstrous and horrific, not as the fulfillment of everything he truly was.
LATE LAST NIGHT
He was set down in the Philly bus station, on his way from Baltimore to Easton, in the middle of the night. He’d been dozing, lulled toward sleep by the security of not driving himself, the warm interior and gentle roll of the larger vehicle, and the cocoon-like environment formed by the high seat backs and the dark inside and outside the windows. For a while he’d watched the passing lights of lonely, anonymous towns, but then his eyes had unfocused, he’d turned inward. He’d been only dimly aware of the orange glow of the approaching city, then the bus’s plunging into a narrow tunnel to the underground station whose atmosphere again matched his consciousness.
Brushing his long, black hair back from his forehead, stretching his lanky, twenty-year-old body and rising from the seat, shrugging into his leather jacket and grabbing his duffel bag and guitar case, he stumbled down the narrow aisle and steps onto the oily concrete. Followed the other sleepy passengers through a door in a plate glass wall—windows between a dark interior and a lighted interior—and into the waiting room. His eyes still downcast, he noticed a dirty, tiled floor, punctuated by cigarette butts, then watched his booted feet climb a flight of stairs. A stop in the filthy men’s room, then some more steps, past a menacing guard, to the main lobby, where he mumblingly bought a ticket for the next local bus—hand plunged into jeans pocket to pull out crumpled bills—from a sleepy agent. Then a burger from the near deserted fast food place, a time spent sitting in a molded plastic chair, red, then down again to another, blue, in the waiting room.
