The Empty Room
I found Adam and Selby sitting on the rusted white metal chairs on the Demnescus’ front porch. It was a warm day, and blue – promises of summer – but choking on pollen. My nose felt stopped up by a cloud.
“What up?” I asked.
“Let’s go,” Adam said.
“Where are we going?”
“To the other side of the viaduct.”
He gestured to the large earthworks at the end of the field across the street. South Street crossed its crest, thirty or forty feet up, and the banks were punctuated by two gaps; one with Sellers Creek passing through and the other marked by a muddy two-tread track.
“I don’t think there is anything on the other side,” I said. “I mean, when you look down from over there you just see trees and stuff.”
“Nope. It looks like that but you can’t see down. What’s really there.”
“So what’s really there?” I turned to Selby.
“I hear there’s a junkyard where the taggers and scrappers go. I mean, people walk back there all the time. Go four-wheeling over there. I’ve seen Demetrius and George go back there. And winos. I never have.”
“And now you want to?”
“Adam wanted to break into St. Christopher’s Hospital–”
“Listen,” Adam interrupted. “It would be sweet and–”
“– and I told him this might be better. Less risky. Besides, I want to see it too. We used to have a garbage collector that… but anyway…”
They looked at me, waiting.
“We could’ve called anyone, you know,” said Adam. “But we didn’t!” He amended quickly. “We called you.”
“Fine,” I said. “Fuck it.”
This is my new religion. I’ll call it Fuckitism. Do whatever. Consequences don’t really matter.
My friends stood up at once.
“By the way,” I said. “Quanla was asking about you, Adam. Maybe you should give her a call.”
“Quanla?”
“Tuck your pants into your socks,” said Selby. “There’s gonna be ticks back there.”
I pulled my white socks up over my jeans, even though it made me feel like an idiot.
We walked down the porch, crossed Poteca Street, and then the green patch of park that stretched before the viaduct. We passed a basketball court with chicory forcing its way through the pavement and the netting ripped and ragged. We passed the chipping flight of concrete stairs that climbed up toward South Street, choked with tall grass and weed trees and with loose pipe railings that had split free and wobbled in the air. They’d make great nests for yellowjackets in the summer. As we neared the viaduct arch, young cottonwoods and hawthorns closed around us and the ravine creased toward a single rutted path of compacted dirt, loose stones, and black trash bags. By now the viaduct loomed over us like guarded castle battlements.
As we stepped under the arch, the air filled with a stagnant, pulpy, rotting smell of soil, vegetation, something rotten, and something fermented. The ground seemed to be a mixture of dirt and deteriorated mulch, peppered with liquor and wine bottles, cigarette stubs, a few ruined dolls and mattresses, and discarded shoes, and discarded flip flops, all piled into small mounds that leaned upon the piers stained with lurid graffiti. We saw the taggers’ marks – “Kurston’s Hurtin” in prim neat letters, bubbly bulbous “BETIE” and white-spotted “SLICK” – and the inescapable gang tags. The blue scythe of the South Side Reapers. The pink and blue Xs and Os of the Chalks. The black shamrock of the Satan’s Masters. Some serious artists had also come down here. An elastic geometry of orange and gray rectilinear shapes spanned the base of one pier from end to end. An elegant blue-and-white cross, half covered with the Masters’ tags. A sad looking skull with inward sloping cheekbones and worried brown eyeballs.
“Shit Selby,” I said. “You never knew this was back here?”
“I knew it was back here. I just never needed to see it, you know?”
When we emerged on the other side, I felt as if I had stepped into another country. I mean, another world. The strangeness of it impressed itself upon me, and I took those next few steps with a sense of stifled awe, as if anything bold, or even breathing, would mar the texture of the absolute reality that unfolded beyond the viaduct. Because what is this?
To our north, the ravine climbed rapidly toward Intervale Road and the edge of Downtown. Old furniture – couches, and chairs, and tables, and shelves – had been hurled from the lip and lay moldering at our feet. To the south, piles of pungent mulch swept off toward Sellers Creek with spongy pools of stagnant water staggered in between, choked with grass clippings and already buzzing with mosquitoes. The trees were young and wounded, their bark shredded away in spots, and partly pulped, unable to find purchase in the mottled soil from which to strive for the sun. Skunk cabbage fringed the margin. The interstices were peppered by the heavy droppings of new budded seeds. Far off, across the creek, we saw the rotting wreck of what was once somebody’s mansion. Closer, on a wireless telephone pole, hung a bright orange sign: “TURN AROUND. NO DUMPING.” Overhead, electrical cables crisscrossed, and we heard the low thrum of angry currents, recursive and synchronous.
My first coherent thought said something like this place is evil, but I was hearing it wrong. I was leaping toward an obvious explanation, while what surrounded me was far older and more transcendent than mortal evil. I felt dizzy and put my hands on my knees.
“Well, we saw it,” I said. “Can we go back?”
Selby and Adam were incredulous.
“We just got here!” Selby was saying.
“We haven’t even seen the junk yard yet!”
“Fine,” I said. I gestured up the road. “Lead the way.”
The road led down the ravine toward the distance, where I could see I-63 passing overhead, supported on its massive concrete piers.
“Remember John?” asked Adam. “Where we went the night before school started, to see where that car crashed?”
“I remember…” I murmured.
“This is all crazy!” said Adam. “It’s like Mordor if Mordor was wet! I can’t wait to see the junk yard!”
After we’d gone a bit farther, the slope pulled away to our left, and we couldn’t see it anymore because the debris of trash and slashings were piled higher and higher. We reached a spot where a massive sheet of grayed plywood fell over the mess and made a bridge to the other side. We climbed over the pile, passed a two-story stack of coffin-like splintered containers, and found ourselves standing at the edge of a ruin.
I think my jaw actually dropped. I really do.
I’d never seen anything like it, and I couldn’t believe that something so large and odd had existed so close to me, and yet I had never noticed it in all the times my father had driven me down Intervale Road on whatever errand. All the times Adam and I had ridden our bikes out on whatever adventure.
A sandy clearing spread out before us, and at the opposite end stood four forty-foot tall interconnected concrete silos, with rusted guardrails ringing the top. All across the clearing were piled heaps of junk: chain-link fences, PVC, salvaged wooden staircases, old tires, rusted-out cages, cast-iron piping, rubber-tubing, industrial sized garbage cans, cracked lumber, painted beams, copper spools, house-sized industrial machines, pressurized gas tanks, wooden support piers, cylindrical storage basins, half-assembled lawnmowers and tractors, steel pipes knotted together like spaghetti, a wrecker ramp, the front half of an X Nebraska Pickup, a tractor-trailer, fifty feet long, heavy with what must have been disassembled factory walls, metal shelves and crates, traffic cones, plastic nets, warped doors, steel container drums sheared in half, a broken RV, a broken X Cheyenne, a tanker truck resting on its back, a staggered combine, bicycles, tricycles, ladders, boulders, barriers, basketball hoops and deflated basketballs, astro turf carpeting, compacted cars, red and blue, cinder blocks, a sign that read, “VALET ONLY,” tossed machines, topsy-turvy, all metal all over, computers, printers, candy cane colored awnings, air-conditioners, hills and valleys of dust and dirt and shattered wood, an ore conveyor that leaned out over the emptiness, and a rust-tinged broken-down wood chipper.
“This is so damn awesome,” breathed Adam. “We have to make this place our own. We have to come here all the time. It can be our headquarters. Let’s check out the silos!”
And again, he was off, trotting through the mess of plastic and metal. The junk yard bore the touch of humans more visibly than the ravine behind us, but it still seemed wild and lonely, rust-ravaged and sharp-edged. I don’t want this to be our headquarters, I thought.
“Can you believe him?” I asked Selby.
She, too, seemed preoccupied by the scene before us. We clambered down from our perch and followed Adam.
The silos had been tagged, although the faded slogans – “Anthrax Rules!” – suggested that maybe nobody had been here in a while. A cave-like door had been smashed or carved into the nearest silo, with the open jaws of a shark painted around its fringes. We went inside, Adam leading the way.
The floor of the silo was covered with gravel that sloped down toward the opening. Slants of sunlight cut down from a grate on top that opened to the sky. Halfway up the far wall, an iron-door, too high to reach, opened onto the next silo, and we could see that a grate covered it as well.
We went back outside.
There was no way to get into the second silo, although there was a hole in its side halfway up and an opportunistic tree had completely filled the opening.
The four silos were joined by a concrete cube about twenty feet up. Ten feet below this stood a small metal shelf with an enclosed room at its center. Adam climbed a gravel pile and stacked some pallets at the top to hoist himself onto the shelf. He helped me up, and I helped Selby. We looked out and surveyed the clearing with all its mess, with the ridge of debris and all the stagnation beyond.
I still didn’t know what to say. I still felt my blood and skin shivering with the odd vibration of the high-voltage wires. I still wanted Lucy with me, clutching my sweaty palms. But Adam turned around and gestured to a door that led into a small room at the middle of the elevated box. It had been tagged with the blue-and-green sun of the Demonik Mafia, which I was guessing had been left more recently than “Anthrax Rules” below.
Adam rapped his knuckles on the door.
“Hello?” he called out, softly.
Nobody answered.
He pulled on the door and it opened with a squeal.
The empty room inside was dimly lit, but enough sunlight filtered through cracks in the walls for us to take a good look as our eyes adjusted. A hollow rectangular vent hung down in the middle of the room, which was pretty obviously a way to discharge the contents of the silos: just beneath it lay a trap door, rusted shut, and there was an elaborate array of busted iron levers and dials that had been bolted onto the wall to work the system. Two doors opened into the adjacent silos. One of the doors hung open, leading into the pitch black depths of the farthest silos, which evidently didn’t have a grate to let in the sunlight. The other door, which would’ve led into the silo with the tree growing out of the hole, had been welded shut, though the door itself was so completely rusted through that it had started to flake away onto the floor.
As our eyes continued to adjust, I made out some torn heaps of carpeting and metal links underfoot. The carpet seemed knotted. Tufty. Even greasy. I squinted to see better. What I had thought was a carpet was really clumps of matted hair, slowly disintegrating around the stretched out skeleton of a large dog. The metal on the floor was a chain stretched taut between a collar where the dog’s neck had been and a rung bolted to the wall. Less than a foot from the animal’s head lay the rotted scraps of a bag of dog food.
Related Feature: One Question: Connor Coyne
Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan. His novel Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City is winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2019 Young New Adult Award. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.” Connor has also authored two celebrated novels, Hungry Rats and Shattering Glass, as well as Atlas, a collection of short stories. Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published by Picador, Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. Connor is on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and in 2013 represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School. He maintains websites at http://connorcoyne.com and http://urbantasm.com.