He takes a left. He will drive back and find the freeway.

Then his breath catches.

She rises and spreads before him, white stone walls stark in the peach colored dawn. Along her sides, thousands of tiny windows wink at him in the rising light. Some are broken; these stare at him, black and insane.

She is surrounded by tall weeds. Over the front door, the words “Windsor Machine Works” are spelled out in thin steel letters, stark and streamlined, lush with the tragedy of a brilliant, aborted future.

Below those letters, there are larger ones, painted on a warped sign nailed across her front door. The sign is old and battered, pocked with birdshot and curlicued with graffiti. But he can still read what it says.

It says, “For Sale.”

He parks slantways, jumps out of his car. He walks the cyclone fence surrounding until he finds a beaten down place; he tears the leg of his slacks climbing over it, carves an ugly gouge in his calf. No matter.

She is made of white limestone as supple and smooth as a virgin’s thighs. Her black twisting ironwork is crisp and devilish. The crumpled yellow newspapers crouching at her feet are supplicants satisfied by the simple blessing of her shadow; the glittering shards of broken glass bottles are like jewels, carelessly discarded.

He climbs onto a low crumbling wall beneath one of the windows. He presses his nose to the grimy glass like a child hoping to see elephants.

Inside, the building is a vast emptiness of square iron pillars and cement, thousands upon thousands of square feet of space. On the concrete floor, stagnant puddles glimmer, rainbowed with oil, reticulated with webs of settled dust. There are bolts in the cement where huge machines once anchored, straining against their own torque.