That whole area was really hopping during the war, one of the gals had said. Ryan imagines women in hobble-skirts, men in baggy canvas twill trousers, paunchy old managers in vests with watch-chains looped from button to pocket. All gone now.

The manufacturing floor smells like stale urine and pigeon shit. As Ryan walks through the wide door and into the building, the space swells around him, the filtered light through the dust-caked windows cool and blue, the cement floor vast and undulating, like a calm body of water.

His footsteps echo. On the floor there is a pile of repair manuals from the 30’s for a machine of indecipherable purpose. The manuals look as if they’ve been stored in a bucket of old oil. Blackberry vines thread through broken windowpanes. The iron pillars are cobwebbed with ribbons of rust.

He thinks about the dump trucks and caterpillar tractors that will soon line up outside. He thinks about how the weeds will be cut away and the rusted pillars pulled down, and the oil-slicked concrete cleaned with foaming buckets of tri-sodium phosphate. He thinks about multi-use dwellings, white space, windows. He thinks about how everything dirty will be made clean, antiseptic, new, smooth. He closes his eyes and spreads his arms and imagines himself expanding, expanding.

At the back of the room is a set of stairs. He moves over to them carefully, avoiding the puddles and piles of grimy debris. In the rafters overhead, he hears baby pigeons squeaking weakly, and the sound of wings.

The staircase is a jury-rigged affair. Ryan mounts the stairs, carefully feeling each board for soundness.

He stops after a few steps, looks back. The door is still open and the warm afternoon sunlight is inviting him back, calling him to come out. But it is hot out there, and in here it is cool. He notices the smell again, the strange smell of honey and steel. He looks up the stairs. At the top there is a hollow-core plywood door with a jagged-edged hole in the center. He imagines rotting construction, thin-walled offices and empty filing cabinets.