A tentacle of light gingerly feels its way through the dark room, extending and contracting as it tentatively explores its surroundings, or maybe a finger of light executing ornate patterns, signing its name with a flourish as it wanders across the asphalted floor (if what’s asphalted can be called a “floor”), gliding over grimy, silvery gray surfaces belonging to the building’s stash of corrugated steel, finding a pair of discarded work gloves or some lopsided work boots, illuminating girders of reinforced iron that lie arched in perspective like giant strands of clumped spaghetti, falling on rust-flecked, splintered planks browning with age (totally different from the blond, resinous wood found in new buildings). Carefully, your eyes follow the beam thrown from your pocket flashlight (your bicycle light doesn’t work), so you don’t accidentally bump into a stray rafter or a piece of iron jutting out from a pile. The light hits the capper machine, whose red paint is flaking, and which apparently forces, with its thick hydraulic pistons (the only things that sparkle, polished, shining, and new, almost shockingly so, when the light strikes them, against all the worn-out, rusty, dirty, or greasy blackness about), pistons that force two moving edges toward each other with such power that iron girders snap in two like flower stalks.
Something completely different than what one normally associates with the word “office”: polished desks with intercoms, appliances that hum or clack, flickering computer screens, men in suits who cradle receivers while they bark information to a colleague: no, this is more like a cabin or barracks set right in the middle of the huge hall; you grasp the loose door handle, which creaks as you turn it, and recall that the light switch is off to your left. Turning off your flashlight, you flip on the overhead light (though between the first light’s disappearance and the second’s appearance, there’s a moment of total darkness, so short you don’t actually see it, even though it was there): a simple wooden desk, whose scratched and stained surface is covered with papers loosely organized into haphazard piles, some of which (all the same color) are stuck on a spindle; a telephone, a small portable radio, two ball-point pens (blue) marked with the firm’s logo, not to mention tape, scissors, twine, sundry other low-level bureaucratic paraphernalia; a regulation desk chair, whose seat is so worn that both the foam-rubber padding and the plywood base are showing, which is shoved up against the desk; and, hanging on the walls, shipping lists organized by code, price tables, pictures of sports cars and half naked women, a medicine cabinet marked with a faded green cross. Besides a spindly metal stool, the rest of the meager furnishings consist only of a radiator, a gray metal locker, and a porcelain sink with a mirror. The latter is probably the reason there’s another station key back here (danger of leaks), located next to the valve and fastened by a chain to the water pipe; as instructed, you insert this key into the mechanism, your portable overseer, and turn it clockwise, making a creakcreak sound, just like an antique mantle clock makes when it’s wound. When you stand up and release the station key so that it clinks against the water pipe, you can’t resist looking into the dirty, faded mirror. Man, you wish you had wrinkles. You want to be old as soon as possible.
You make faces in the mirror, all by your lonesome inside the vacant warehouse inside a vacant industrial complex surrounded by a dark spring night (the scene unfolds before your inner eye like a film would, like a film shot from an airplane, a bird’s-eye view: first there are rooftops and roads, street lamps, the whole district spread out before you like a map, then the lens zooms in, closer and closer, until finally the camera pierces the warehouse’s ceiling, the office’s ceiling, and finds you standing there in front of the mirror, and there’s not a creature stirring); of course, no one in the world can actually see or know what you’re doing here, you’re alone with your reflection. The thing is, however, you really, really don’t want to be alone right now, you wish that she were lying awake and thinking of you now, right now, no, you wish that she’d walk in now, right now, right this second, that she’d miraculously walk in and say hello and say your name, because now, right now she couldn’t help but see you, and not just see you, but talk to you, since it’d just be the two of you alone in the little barracks-office right in the middle of the vacant hall, then you could talk to her uninterrupted, face to face, and not just talk, no, you could take her hand, tenderly lift it and say, Oh look, you’ve got a scratch, this is no place for you, you’d take her hand and she’d smile ruefully as you did it, and you’d pull her close, and you’d put your arms around her and kiss her, gently, gentlemanly at first, but then harder, and she wouldn’t pull away, no, you’d stroke her neck, stroke the hairline at the base of her neck while you kissed her mouth (at this point you couldn’t use your wretched voice, not even if you wanted to), you’d dig your fingers into her hair and kiss her, just a cautious peck on the lips at first, but then with your tongue, harder and harder, and. You’re embarrassing yourself. You break off your own fantasy. You think that there are too many people in the world, people overshadowing one another, tripping each other up; in the huge, uninviting cafeteria or in the institute’s break room, she can talk to anyone she wants, look at anyone (any man, that is) she wants, but here, here in this warehouse, if she’d actually been here, she’d be forced to talk to you and you alone.
You have a really odd voice. She had hardly ever said a word to you, but then she’d said that, the thing about your voice, and she’d blushed when she realized what she’d said, because what she’d actually said was, You have an awful voice, an unbearable, squeaky, whiny voice, it’s like a saw, like a hacksaw cleaving straight through the listener’s skull, and you know it’s true, unfortunately, you’ve had to endure your own voice on tape, it’s dogged you since you were small, that squeaky, whiny voice that forced all the adults around you to cover their ears whenever you threw a tantrum, and later, when you were all grown up, your (few) girlfriends made a Herculean effort, you saw it, not to stick their fingers into their ears and scream Shut up shut up whenever you got irritated or excited or nervous, all because of your stupid, whiny voice, a hysterical woman’s voice trapped in a man’s body. Maybe you should’ve been a mute reflection, the reflection of a tall and powerfully built man in his early twenties, maybe everyone should just be mute reflections so they could avoid hearing the awful voices trapped inside.
It’s like the sound of a thumb paging rapidly and nervously through a phone book. You tense your body and strain your ears, as if the auditory sense were a muscle too, though at first you figure that you must’ve heard wrong (being a night watchman has taught you that darkness and silence can transform the most insignificant, harmless little sounds into terrifying giants), but then you hear it again, almost exactly the same sound, and it even lasts longer this time, you still can’t pinpoint its location, and you feel a vein begin to pulse against the sweatband on the inside of your helmet. (We had three burglars last winter and they all got away scot-free; if you look close, you can still see the crowbar marks (he’d pointed at the door and sure enough there were some small, rectilinear marks chipped into the light wood around the lock), one of them was always skulking around nearby, anyway he came in through that window there (he’d pointed) but since I always have my dog with me now I hope I run into him again someday I’ll just say Get ’em King and King’ll be on him and he’ll take a hunk out of his arm and if the guy puts up a fight he’ll take a hunk out of his other arm and I bet the thief’ll thank God when the cops finally come to haul him away (he’d chuckled in enjoyment at the thought, the night watchman, that is, who’d trained you on your rounds)). You finger the barrel of your gas pistol, but you leave it holstered, perhaps out of pride (or perhaps because your fear of looking like a stupid coward is greater at the moment than your fear of the unidentified sound, or perhaps because you’re trying to keep calm by underreacting), but still you walk at something resembling a hurried pace toward the sound (which you can’t hear anymore). Narrowing your eyes, you focus on the conical beam of light cast by your flashlight as it darts here and there at a staccato pace, tapping its way forward like a blind man’s elongated cane, though not tapping at random, since you already know the location of all the different machinery, as well as all the cabinets and doors; you fumble your light over the cabs of the big trucks parked in front of the garage doors, and you catch a glimpse of fuzzy dice hanging from a rearview mirror, but otherwise you find nothing out of the ordinary. Then you hear it again, a steady fluttering sound, and then you see it, a shadow that transforms from a vague dark clump to a circling body, when it takes off from a steel beam and begins to fly, a dark silhouette against the transparent fiberglass panels way up on the ceiling (dawn is apparently underway), you search with your light and, finally, you find the bird, which immediately (you even catch a gleam off its beady black eyes) flies off into the half-dark.