Shapes Industries

Tourists

The sun has been up for about eight hours when David finally crawls out of bed. He is well rested albeit his late evening. After coffee and cereal, the only day's activity is searching for a job. The cash reserves are healthy, but at some point he'll have to venture out for food and home supplies. He sets about tidying up, moving small piles of junk from the desk to the floor until a satisfactory amount of space has been made for one notebook tablet, a glass of water, and a pen. Not knowing where to begin, he starts with a list. Every skill that could be applied to the work force is listed. Every contribution to society made, every financial aspiration and occupational desire is tallied under corresponding columns, labeled and underlined at the top of the page.

Twenty minutes later, David is staring aimlessly at the desk surface, thinking about the rooftop of the parking garage. His mind flutters back and forth between finding a job and adventuring, until his focus is so unstable that he gathers up his things and walks out of the building for a cigarette. There's a nice curb he can sit on outside, to watch cars drive past while thinking for a minute.

A job search is a little something like a mission. More of a project, really. David considers the possibility of making his job search the one and only prerogative in his life. To dedicate an amount of energy to the task usually reserved for passionate affairs or mad men. If there were something in his life that could force it upon him, give him no choice in the matter, lead him from one task to the next until he were employed, and moving on up to a nicer home, it would be much easier to see all the steps lining themselves up, from resume writing to death. No aimlessness, doubt, or confusion, just the rails of a timeline governing his direction in life, straight, simple, unforgiving. Maybe choice is the mind ruiner, in a world of two kinds of people, the indecisive and those with duties thrust upon them by circumstance.

The sun is a constant reminder to work, to labor when the day is new, and the air is bright. When the sun is out, David feels the obligation to get something done, to make some kind of advancement, to achieve an agenda tangible or imagined. This guilt prods him along to quickly snub his cigarette, and leave the curb side to continue work on his job list. The need to feel as if something has been completed outcompetes his desire to walk around the city with his camera again, and the consideration between chores and adventure reoccurs again and again until the sun begins to fade and his apartment is tidy and clean. His tablet is full of phrases such as "Goal Oriented" and "Rapid Learner." Outside, a light rain begins, and David can't be bothered with tasks any longer. He has done enough, and the weather is permitting of exploration.

Life seems to be back in order as David takes stock of the change. There are still many things, things on the wall, floor and ceiling, and littered about on various surfaces, but it now feels tight, lean, light and organized enough to fool anybody into thinking what a driven, self-purposing man he must be. The most important person to trick though, is himself, so that he can be free to adventure tonight. The guilt of his immobility fades long enough to call up an old friend.

Magnus shows up in an old Cadillac, wearing a black pea coat and talking about two buildings in the middle of the city where the views are fantastic from the top. The rain has stopped, and there are a couple hours of daylight left. The roof of a skyscraper is a hell of a step up from the parking garage. David is quietly ecstatic. He grabs his bag, slings the camera over his neck, and they drive downtown listening to classic rock and roll. Anything else wouldn't feel right, not while sitting in the red leather seats of a five-thousand pound luxury sedan. The choice to wear a suit and tie is starting to feel like a great decision, perfect for a night out sneaking about in buildings. They will be tourists from out of town, here to see the sights for just one night.

Soon they've parked, and made their way into the first building. The main floor is spacious and clean, its floor has just been waxed, and the elevators have gold doors engraved with a floral pattern that slides into the wall as they open to let Magnus and David in. There are twenty-five floors in total, but the elevator stops at twenty-three. The utility staircase takes them the rest of the way, and Magnus pauses to slip the lock at the very top. He explains that the doors in this city are very old, and thus, easy to open without a key.

They are in the elevator utility room. The walls are mostly bare, and giant steel mechanisms quietly whir and hum. There's a switchboard with glowing green and red lights above each panel, and gallons of lubricant stored in barrels. The smell is of burnt metal, as if shocked by electricity, and with slight tones of earth and brick. It's stale, but warm and strangely comforting; what David imagines the old world must have smelled like, when the greatest currencies were sweat and faith. The two of them poke their heads around, both snapping photographs absent mindedly, listening to the sounds and waiting for a consensus to move on.

When the last door opens onto a rubber-matted roof top, where the center is occupied by a giant steel structure holding three signs with the building's insignia emblazoned in red neon, and the air smells more like the clouds than the pavement, David walks the perimeter fence in a combination of vertigo and awe, taken aback by the height and perspective of something he's never seen before; the city from its own point of view, what the buildings themselves might see if they had any other experience to compare it to. The occasional water droplet is still flung into his face by the wind, but the weather has otherwise calmed enough to try and climb the ladders of the building's sign. Looking up, the structure is a lattice work of I-beams and catwalks, each crossing over each other in a triangle pattern for nearly one-hundred feet. The two of them start on their way up, and the wind immediately threatens to tear them off the ladders. The going is very slow. David feels his heartbeat in his tightly clenched fists, as they move one over the other, from rung to rung until the next platform is at his side, and he rests. He is only half way up, but the views are incredible. As he looks out at the other buildings, the river, the streets with cars meandering through them, he leans his head through the bars, and is suddenly given the impression he is floating without a body. He can only see air in front of him, no structure or building from which he might be standing.

By the time they reach the summit, the sun has started disappearing behind the horizon, casting great red streaks across the river surface. Buildings around them are starting to turn their lights on in randomized checkerboards of yellow rectangles. Only a few rooftops are taller than the one they're on, and Magnus points at the biggest.

"That's the place we're going next."

It has what David can only describe as castle-like balconies of large yellow pillars, leading up to a flat roof covered in blinking antennae, much bigger than the ones at the airport he saw last night. The building is gigantic, piecing an air space that looks foreign, threatening even, as if the clouds around it were darker, presenting an ominous warning to anyone foolish enough to get so close to heaven.

Before they descend, David tries to get a few photographs of the view, but his hands are shaking from the climb, and the wind is steady enough to ruin each shot, until he gives up, and deletes a large handful of blurry images from his camera. Magnus can testify to tonight's successes, if the need ever arises.

Within the hour they're back at the car and driving down main streets of the city. The music is silenced and the windows are down. Cars can be heard on the distant highway, groups of people are laughing, a beeping noise echoes from a parking garage. The exhaust note of the Cadillac is rough with age. What might have once been a silky purr, is now low and muscular; the rusty muffler is unable to sugar coat the giant engine any longer. Magnus pulls up to a closed garage, and waves a badge over a nearby sensor. The door opens unto a ramp leading down into the basement, and before they descend, David leans his head outside, and sees the towering building above them, the clouds near the top are still dark and foreboding. They pull ahead and all he can see now is concrete painted white, dotted with fluorescent bulbs.

They ride to floor fifty-five in a freight elevator. David considers asking how Magnus has access to the building, and where he found the badge that opened the garage for them, but he doesn't. He instead watches the elevator climb floors, each number ticking through the display. Floor fifty-five is an office, with giant paintings of fruit and wild animals, oaken desks and leather chairs. The only light comes from windows in a darkened corridor, resting in beams on the carpet, reminding David of a time before electric light, when the world would have been lit by the sun, moon, and fire. A romantic period of time, he imagines, full of flickering orange glow and their long shadows.

Through another door and they're in a room full of large vents, pipes and gages, utilities for a sizable portion of the building. Humming and hissing are constant, sometimes a machine tinkers or clanks. First they are going to investigate the building overhang, a small patio-like section that sits below the main roof. They step outside, and see nothing but sky. The walls surrounding them are just above head height. David grabs onto the ledge, pulls himself up, and immediately the city floods his senses, a rush of cars, a thousand lights, some of which are blinking and switching colors, every rooftop of every building hundreds of feet below him, the street itself with people and shop fronts even further below. The wind is sucking his breath away, spot lights affixed to the building several stories down are blinding him, but the whole of the city is visible from his perch. David is transfixed by its tidiness. There are highways of red and white light, slowly flowing along, winding a path cut through houses and shops and trees and parks. He picks out an individual car waiting at a stop light and wonders what its occupants are up to, where they're going, what they might think of their own lives in comparison to his own. Behind him, he can see the main roof just further up the building side. He can see the tops of the antennae and a strange flashing reflection illuminating their slender stalks. He can see the gathering of dark clouds as well, but from this close, they appear more the surface of the sky than a dangerous portal.

After a few photographs, it's time to head further up, through the utility room and past the last set of stairs. Again, there is a wall just above head height surrounding the top, but additionally, another wall on its inside, much taller, and supported on stilts, so that you may walk under it. This wall is surrounding a machine that sits on the center floor. The machine is a large box shape, nearly thirty feet tall, and stretching down the length of the roof. It's the ventilation system, and David knows the antennae are on top of it, so he quickly runs around its circumference, looking for a ladder or stairs. At the very back there's a set of steps, and he climbs them three at a time with camera in hand. Once at the top, the whole surface of the planet looms before him. The clouds seem to bend as they follow the curvature of the earth, stretching across his field of view in a gigantic leap. The flashing he had seen earlier is reflecting off of a tangle of steel. Large circular grates fill most of the space, and following along a section of floor piping, the mass of antennae and sky and metal come into full view. The floor begins to shake, and a loud whirring noise becomes deafening as the vents come to life. Fans begin pushing warm, moist air out from the building, fogging David's senses. The immediate sensation is that of a tropical jungle. The humidity is nearly unbearable, but here, so far above the city with nothing but the constant white flash of a light tower, catching the bottoms of the drifting clouds with traces of white, David is suddenly torn apart by the beauty of it all. He sits on a section of vent grating and breathes deeply for several minutes. The city can be heard, but not seen from here. A wind comes along and disturbs the strange calmness that had settled in. The antennae shake slightly, and fall still again. The tallest point of the city, and everything is motionless.

David does not know where Magnus is. He doesn't know much of anything at this moment, except that he is going to sit in this spot as long as he possibly can. It seems as if he has found the magic, in this place that is so unlike any other place he has ever seen, so unlike anything he might expect from humanity to build and maintain. A behemoth, with a tropical jungle of steel I-beams and radio equipment at the very top, blinking mad with light, and hidden behind walls so that none could tell what's happening here from the outside.

David climbs along a beam until he reaches the edge of the retainer, and glances out at the city below. His eyes are drawn to the highways, the same long stretch of red and white lights he had seen earlier, but something is different now. The city doesn't feel as neat and collected as it had, doesn't appear so much a unified body as instead a collection of individual events. The people crawling along the highway, flowing into the city, and back out of it, are each individuals, each responsible for the other's interpretation of the space as a whole. The city is not one simple thing to be understood and experienced. It's a million tiny things all happening in close proximity, and on the surface level of observation, this is perceived as a unified event.

David's thoughts are interrupted by a passing cloud. From the opposite direction in which he was looking, a cloud has swept in and muddied the air. The streets disappear from view; only the closest buildings and their roof lights can be seen through the thick fog. Flashing from the light tower has become more brilliant than ever, creating giant orbs of light for a fraction of a second, like streaks of electricity shooting out in all directions, vibrating on invisible currents in the air. The space around David closes in tightly, what was once the whole surface of the planet has now become a small, visible sphere of pipes and vents under strobe, pulsing in constant rhythm. Magnus is waiting at the door, leaving it slightly cracked, and waving for David to join him. After one last glance down the side of the building, looking straight into the oncoming spotlights and trying to catch a glimpse of the road below, it's time to call it a night.

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Chapter Navigation

(Introduction)

(One - I Own the Night)

(Two - Tourists)

(Three - Manifest Desire)

(Four - Crane Fields)

(Five - Decommissioned Power Plant)

(Six - Illusionary Delusion)

(Seven - Heart Cave)

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