As a student of architecture the young man had made an unfortunate comment about the competency of Pisano for his work on Pisa’s most famous tower. As punitive instruction his professor assigned him the duty of cataloguing all of the world’s leaning towers, particularly those that foundation had begun to fail during construction and what measures their creators had taken in order to counteract this. Extra credit would be given for any additional information on towers that had crumbled.
It was during his study of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri that the student noticed something was awry. Reality itself seemed askance, as if by studying the calamities of perfection he had pushed the world off its axis.
It came as a great surprise to his disciplinarian when he arrived at the hall, carrying the papers of his research, moving forward at a normal pace, but with a four degree tilt to the right.
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I watched the taxi drive off, then looked around. I guessed I wasn’t too far from Moreau’s scooter repair shop. The west end of town was still the Old Town, but had never been kept up in the same way as the city center. A few minutes east of here, past the perimeter ring of the tram stations, the warehouses have been renovated into luxury condos, but here they were left to loom with their coal stained faces. I stopped staring up and started searching for a way down to the alley below.
Through an opening in the bridge’s eastern concrete balustrade were stairs that led down to the alley. Judging by the crushed cigarette butts and empty pint bottles, there had been some human activity on the stairs recently, giving me more confidence that I had made the right choice in trusting Alon. After a single switchback the stairs ended in the alley, a stream running down the canyon of its center, black from the night and whatever had been cast into it. I walked underneath the bridge and headed towards the light.
As I got closer to the pallid street lamp, I felt more than heard the bass emanating from the warehouse next to it. Like a metronome that sends out minor earthquakes it moved the air and rumbled the street. Taking this as another encouraging sign I kept moving, coming eventually to a single doorway, lit by the same kryptonian light as the alley. An aryan giant stood next to an entrance, his pale, bald head radiating out like a moon, the rest of him hidden by black pants and turtleneck.
He didn’t pay much attention to me until I got close. I kicked a can to make sure I didn’t sneak up on him, but he only stared at me with a combination of boredom and hostility, the kind that turns into a hatred of strangers if you leave a man on guard duty too long. I did what had always worked best on me when I was in his shoes and treated him as if he were human. After a “bonjour,” though, my question of how business was doing didn’t elicit any kind of response. Taking out my billfold I went for another tactic that I had seen work for others in this position; I flashed a little cash. While it didn’t make him more talkative it did grant me entry after paying what was probably an inflated cover charge.
The ground floor of the Factory lived up to the name, a cavernous space that reminded me of a multi-story parking garage, all cement floors, square pillars, and exposed ceilings. It was painted with industrial warning signs and stage lights. The latter moved around as much as the shifting crowd that danced out in the distance. They surrounded a stage that looked to be made out of metal pipes and speakers so large they would have made Ozzy Osborne proud.
I had rarely felt more out of my element. It helped to have a purpose. After reminding myself of what that was I headed towards the crowd, feeling older and uglier the closer I got. Standing at the rear there were a few people yelling conversations into each others ears, mostly young men wearing office clothes just ratty enough to be cool, or simple t-shirts and backward baseball caps. Most, though, particularly the women, were facing the stage, dancing to a house mix spun out by the platform’s sole occupant, a tall Swede with a tornado of hair barely held in place by the massive headphones he wore. Between the gyrating of the dancers and the club lights they formed a mass of silhouettes whose details only became visible under the occasional blast of psychedelic rays.
The likelihood of finding anyone in that sweaty mess was next to nil. Before I collided with the mass of terminally hip people that composed the riot I spotted a bar that was tucked back through several cement arches. I headed that way.
The eddies of bass the speakers were putting out carried me to the bar, which appeared to be nothing more than a series of crates stack together and painted black. The bartender, a sweaty young woman with hair the color of the Red Cross was hustling behind it, getting drinks and making change at a pace that put most of her countrymen to shame. She was primarily handing out water bottles, which told me that the crowd was probably on something other than alcohol. Not far off another hulking man wearing black pants and turtleneck stood still, his lack of movement and clothing indicating he was another member of the club’s security. I wondered how many of them were unseen in the warehouse’s dark corners.
I took all this into account as I mentally charted how I was going to navigate my way through the bar’s patrons. While planning out that tactic another part of my brain tried to figure out how I’d ask the bartender any sort of useful questions. Between my poor French and the sub-dermal pulse of the music, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to communicate the most basic questions, moreorless try to get a description across.
I was pondering the impossible auditorial physics of the situation when I spotted a familiar black and white checkered pattern on a scarf floating by. Refocusing on the person wearing it I found Balaclava walking not far from me, the taller Algerian on his other side. They had someone between them; the supporting of that downed figure turned the difference in their heights into an awkward shuffle. It also provided enough of a distraction that the Idiots didn’t notice me.
I stepped behind a nearby column, only leaning out enough to see they weren’t headed towards the exit but off somewhere deeper into the Factory. I gave them a bit of a head start then followed.
It was in an old gymnasium, still imbrued with the dust of our youth, that we met again to mark the passage of time, to come together so we could keep the past from disappearing entirely. Not all of us had made it, many lost to calamities we thought of ourselves immune to when we were young; mental illness, drug abuse, suicide. None of these had any of the glory that we had presupposed would shroud any early deaths.
We hid from these tragedies by laughing at the foolishness of our past decisions, tomfoolery and pranks that might have ended in disaster, but didn’t, goals more bold than wise that had been judiciously abandoned. Tracy, though, cooled all of that by flashing her hand, the hoop of the promise ring still there. There was no marriage ring to replace it.
I remembered being in the same Baptist church as she, raising my hand to take the same vow she had. But I had given it away to the first woman who smiled at me, the exhilaration of consummation eclipsing any guilt I might have felt. When I met the woman I would eventually marry she still believed the assurance of my ring, though, and that was just the first of many lies that had ended with us parting ways.
I stared at Tracy with her bitter pride, and I couldn’t help but wonder which of us had lost more.
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Thinking about the puzzle of the girl, her Corsican, and all the other parties involved made getting through the rest of my shift tough. I scratched at my blazer, itching to get out of it, hovering in the dark of the slot machine sector, but always near the border of the Rococo architecture of the grand hall. I watched the besuited French elite of the city walk by, plodding or gliding or drunkenly rambling over the Versailles marble and Savonnerie carpets, past the gilded furniture and alabaster staircases, saying hello to the men they knew and ignoring the ones that were there with their mistresses.
It was enough to make a man weep for humanity. It was at least enough to make me glad that Cheryl and I never had children for fat parasites like these to rob their future.
For some reason that got me thinking about Balaclava and his voyous. Or maybe it was the only thing I came back to after pawing through everything that was going on that didn’t involve me waiting around for something to happen. Either way, when I finally clocked out I practically hopped out of my casino blazer and back into my coat, grabbed the umbrella Sophie had given me and headed west of town.
Impossible to tell from inside the cavern of the casino, it had stopped raining. It was a still a few hours till dawn, the concrete of the city’s streets exuding a deep kind of cool. It was pleasant, with just a hint of the coming summer heat, so I headed out to the Promenade. I walked a few miles along its cobblestones with the lingering lovers, trippers, drug dealers, and prostitutes, occasionally rising up to my full height to scare away the would-be pickpocket or mugger. No number of cops could keep the less savory elements of the city out of Old Town. After all, that’s where the money is.
When I got far enough west that I figured someone might know, I asked about the Factory. After the second or third nighthawk a stringy young woman with lazy eyes and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth gave me directions. It wasn’t close, almost out all the way out by the river.
It was still too early for the trams to be running so I stopped at one of the blue-signed taxi stations that were scattered about the city. The driver, red-nosed and bundled up in a thick brown jacket, quietly slid into the front seat as he saw me approach. I got in.
I started to give him directions while he fussed with his seatbelt and put the car into gear. He nodded in understanding at each step of my instructions, the tiny cab puttering from the curb, away from nocturnal pedestrian traffic and into the Promenade’s auto ways.
Nearly to the river the driver pulled off the thoroughfare and onto a road headed north, the thrumming of the tires announcing the change from smooth concrete to rounded cobblestone. A little time passed with each reflection of the streetlights on the rain-slick streets until he stopped on an overpass and announced my fee.
Without stepping out of the car I glanced around at our surroundings. It could have been the right area for a place called the Factory. Four squat warehouses, old enough to be stained from the years when this area had industrial output, windowless and grim, stood at the corners of the bridge, joined by identical brothers that marched off in the four directions. Down below the overpass, an orange light of indeterminate source illuminated a narrow alley, the uneven run of its cobblestones heading off into the dark in either direction.
Seeing my confusion, the driver pointed west
off the overpass, down the alley, the light there only showing steam pipes, worn bricks, and trash cans. “L’usine,” he said, indicating again with a thrust of his finger. I decided to trust him and took out my billfold for payment.
I thought about how nice it was to have spent quiet time in a car without anyone threatening to kill anyone else and asked for the driver’s card. According to the schedule hanging off the dash he was on till 7:00, but he still paused at my request. After a moment, he gave a fatalistic shrug and handed it to me. It said his name was Alon Felistone. I thanked him, left a decent tip, and got out.
The bakery flooded in the sixth day of rains and left Marjon without a living. When the levee on the fifth district broke, the water came flooding in through the basement windows fast enough that it knocked over the bread racks, inundated the ovens, and sank the cashbox.
She grabbed two of the two loaves she had made with her own hands and held them above her head as she fled. She kept them dry there even when she crossed water so deep she had to hold up her chin to keep from drowning, past fleeing rats and debris so wet and dark it was impossible to tell what it was.
Marjon finally made it to the higher ground of
the sixth district and sold the two loaves to a man who paid a fair price with soaked currency. He gave her one loaf back and gestured for her to eat, and the two sat on what was now the embankment of the district, watching the detritus of their lives and the lives of their neighbors float away.
Chewing methodically, the man patted himself down in the way people do when they have forgotten something. When Marjon looked at him questioningly he said, “I lost my keys.”
