It�s a mirror, a small one, reflecting the sky through my legs, a square of blue against the mind-numbing burnt orange brick. This I slip in my pocket. I smile, pleased at such pretty litter, and then I notice a doorknob around the corner.
The back of the factory faces in a poor angle to catch the sun, and the brick looks muddy and discolored. But there is a doorknob, a mucky iron bell of a doorknob and, more importantly, a mucky iron door to match. It�s propped open with a cinderblock, and I walk in.
The factory is striking, which I hadn�t expected. For something that produces only bendable strips of metal, it�s got an eerie beauty. High-set windows call in streams and streaks of sunlight to play across the old machinery like gold shots in a gray glass. The machinery itself is bold and blocky, involving mashers and things that shaved off the wire, making it thinner and thinner until you could ply it any way you like. The floor is dusty and grandiose and noticeably old, and my footsteps leave tracks like I�m walking in fresh snow. The walls are a greenish color, long faded, and the roof has open beams like a barn. I�m running my fingers through the dust of one particularly huge machine and feeling the power of years ago slip through my fingers. I�m doing cartwheels in the center aisle, underneath the sun like a half-mad Greek goddess. I�m pulling myself to the ceiling beams from the tallest machine, running and swinging frantically, trying to feel out the way I can evade the suffocating, tomblike beauty of this place.
I do all these things from the doorway, staring into the depths and gloom of the factory, watching how the sun pierces the dust in a way that is almost painful, and I see the ghost of me trip and fall from her place on the beams. She has a long way to go and I track it with my eyes.
She isn�t waiflike and doesn�t leave a waiflike mess, and when I do move into the factory I step around it, avoiding the faintly present splatter like I avoided goose poop nearly five minutes ago.
I peek into the corners of the factory, and I feel this veil of despair over everything, as thick as the dust and the graffiti on the walls, outdated and in fluorescent spray paint. These days, graffiti is art only, but these words are poorly scrawled for no reason. Misguided teenagers from the 80�s, eh?
But there�s a despair in the graffiti as well, and instead of juxtaposing gloom and defiance, the colors mix with the gray-green of the walls, looking like they were always there, like they were meant to be there. I walk around the perimeter soaking all this in, and then I�m stuffed to bursting with this factory life. I elect for a way out, but the door seems to be on the whole other side of this mammoth room, with a twisting alley between machines to traverse. I crawl through hunks of metal and plastic switches. Electrical cords. The space between machines is so narrow that I can barely see my way walking there. The sun doesn�t hit here, but crawling through the machines is almost worse. The many claws and catches of the ancient works hold my clothes back and scratch my arms and legs, snatch onto my hair. I feel like Sleeping Beauty, with the thorns all around her castle, right? Even though she slept through it all, it still surrounded her. Thorns grew into her hair and her clothes, surrounded her like a coffin, or a lover.
Finally I am through this forest of defunct machines, and the doorknob is in my hand. I give the factory one last glance, no longer in thrall and in a feeling more akin to disgust. Mildly, with overtones of terror. I no longer like this place.
The knob turns easily, feeling much more well-oiled than it was as I entered. I swing the iron door through and step out, but not into the sunlight. This is a small room, cinderblock walls a dull yellowish and nothing but a chair in the center of the room. I barely get a glance around, though, when a chittering thing fires itself at my face, and I scream. My mouth is full of a horrible taste and one prying claw is poking through my lips, scrambling madly on my teeth and gums to hang onto my face. Something releases and a liquid that smells like death trickles onto my nose. All this time I am flailing and screaming, blindly searching for the thing with my hands. But the terrifying part: I can�t snatch it. My eyes are slammed shut, and the leg continues to thrash in my mouth, but my fingers cannot grasp it. The few times I make contact, the fur feels like oilcloth, like it�s been greased, and it slips away. Another claw slips under my eyelid and I feel my scream echo in the empty walls. My hands scabble and use my own face as a brace for this horrible creature. I grab it firmly, and feel the rip as the claw extracts itself from my eye. A little blood runs down to my chin, mixing with the creature�s urine to drip on the floor. There is a crushing stillness to follow my panic, and I look at the thing writhing in my hands.
It is just a bat, sleek and small. This room would make a good place to hide: no windows (in fact, nothing really in it at all except the chair and a tall mirror leaning against the far wall, on which the glass is tarnished and dead-looking).There�s a dank softness about the ceiling tiles which I imagine would appeal to a bat. And now that it�s in my hand I feel a weird tenderness towards it. The little bat was just protecting its territory.
The room is too dark to see much, so I turn around and open my hands in the doorway, foolishly. Instead of flying towards the open sky, the bat turns and goes right back into the room, and I close the door with a hurriedness that isn�t entirely necessary. The rest of the factory oozes a grin at me: what are you waiting for?
I am crawling back through the machines, trying to haul ass on all fours, occasionally lying down to squirt myself through a tube like the columns of metal they shaved down in this factory, when I have to stop, suddenly.