There were no balladeers present when the doors were closed, the white sign hung behind the industrial glass of the service door with a black “X” and nothing more. No songs were written as the new workers—the formosan and dry-wood termites, the powder-post beetles, and the carpenter ants—set about their dismantling of the floors and walls. The strings of lutes and guitars were not plucked as the native grasses rediscovered the strength to reach upward. No audiences leaned forward with anticipation at the steady spin of the globe or almanac regularity of the shifting weather patterns that gave unofficial measure to the skilled, unpaid labor afoot. Yet the work was done, methodically, mercilessly, until nothing remained but the brick face and the girding and the glass, suspended in its metal frames, and those parts of the roof insubstantial enough to avoid the demands of gravity and proper dignity.

Located as it was, the neighborhood so effectively forgotten, there were seldom visitors. Trees grew thick in their security and seclusion, touching their roots to the footings of the old place—timidly, at first, but eventually with the ferocity of young lovers lost in the passion of novelty. Their love inevitably faded, new passions uncovered in the earth, but not before they’d choked and smothered the concrete into a crumbling memory of its former functionality.

The building sighed, its empty and bagless bellows of a body curving into itself with the exhalation. It twisted with the patience of buildings, minutes of years, seconds of lifetimes. It sighed not in sadness but in a satisfaction known only to buildings and widows that had been left to themselves, their belts loosened, their days of going out behind them. In time, arbitrary as it was, the weight of its surviving head set its spines to curving downward, and the clouding of its windows offered gradual mercy to eyes that no longer recognized their surroundings.

The deaths of buildings receive few obituaries. Inasmuch, and luckily, such deaths are often forgotten, if noticed.

As land reclaims its rights, so, too, given time, do humans. For instance, drawn by the view of the moon through the birds’ nests and vines of the roof, the teenagers of neighboring areas discovered the wonder of clumsy gropings within suggested walls. They built monuments from the husks of stolen six-packs, punched out verse in the remaining glass with illiterate but imaginative knuckles, and, above all, made wakeful music and vitality flow through a frame that had been long in forgetting to feel and hear.

It was their place, the teenagers, for several years, a whisper of a place, exclusive and intoxicating, severed from whatever function it had long ago served. There were no men left who knew the feel of the old machines, and the machines themselves knew only hopes of futility, having been hitched to rides to living buildings long before the births of these new tenants. The faces changed, as did the t-shirts. The conversations, however, remained fireplace familiar.

But there are always accidents.

A hand is held too tightly. A plea goes unheeded. An airflow is constricted. It’s a constant classic, even if unique—if only for a time—to a place. In an instant the children were gone. Other whispers had come, so strong and painted red with the shock of spontaneity and the rhythm of alcohol that the only remaining courses were self-evident to any who heard. Other tenants briefly came: policemen and newsmen, but none could be expected to stay—not with a world still turning, not with the demand for images of and solutions to the constant classics remaining as high as ever—and so the place became a whisper again, but this time exclusive only to darknesses best left unlit.

Entire towns shifted space in the flow of time. Other buildings died, were reborn, died again, were remembered in passing and forgotten with the constant passings of men, their fates made somehow softer by their not being the first. Roads crumbled. Worlds came and went with the regularity of seasons. The forest grew.

Archaeologists and hikers and poets alike were wont to set camp in the whalebone emptiness of this abandoned place from time to time, but they often left before true nightfall, sensing a name they could remember only in the fabric of their DNA—a cry, a graceless burial. With the honesty of livestock at the edge of a hurricane they’d pack their kit and move along, and the building would sigh its sigh. No longer substantial enough to heave its own breath, it had claimed the dense canopy surrounding it for lungs and had taken to thinking of itself with the freedom of the non-corporeal, through the collected minds of the little things—scurrying and winged—that made their homes in leaves both high and low.

In the generational rust of things discarded can be found a wisdom with little use for space or time. The thoughts of a thing become indistinguishable from those of other things, of other times, and of other climes. In this way, it’s hard to know for certain if the building thought, or if it had given itself over to the thoughts of the whole of Discardia, but in its dreams it felt whole. Though it came to know well the lay of grounds well contemplated by battleships and fifty gallon drums, it knew best the truth of its dreams. Taking ages to form, the dreams of this discarded thing—submerged, at times, beneath endless gallons of saline sea, and dry, at others, marking vacant outposts for the passing knights of fallen empires—came in phases and were tied inextricably to the ancient dreams of another, the dreams of an anecdotal entrepreneur named Milton Prescott.

Prescott was a self-made man cum self-made broken by his penultimate venture and greatest failure. Though certain of the need to act, he had spent span of nights restlessly rolling within his sheets, fighting choices so obvious that he must only have been fighting himself. Closing the factory meant more than simply laying off his handful of employees. It meant admitting failure, a thing he was not apt to do. Yet despite the insomnia brought on by fear, Prescott eventually gave in to sleep and, in such, dreamed. He dreamed, then, the dream of a thing of stone and of steel and of glass and of wood, a dream from across so much time that to attempt a measure would be to cast doubt on the truth of it, and when he woke, he woke with strength, reassured by a voice far wiser than his own that his course was true and that all was, would be, and had never been anything other than well.

So it was that, on an unremarkable morning in some remote year, Milton Prescott hung a simple sign with a black “X” behind the service door window of a little factory at the edge of town and made his return to the world of potential to start again, to rediscover success, and to be forgotten, if only by the minds of men.

Timestamp: 07.12.07 at 04:07 PM. Filed under: Fiction.