Dopass.com

Like a factory out of the world wars, the building appeared a cross between a fortress and a red stone steamship. Three majestic smokestacks rose from behind the shabby facade. The roofline was crenellated with age, looking as though the place had been bombed out. The bricks had fallen in large bites to the rubble and debris below over many years. This exposed the bones of the old building, iron girders bracketing fragments of nighttime sky.

These ruins loomed at the edge of a sprawling, self-similar suburb. Boxy three-bedrooms painted in the same shades of rust, grey and olive marched endlessly away in all directions from the massive and crumbling edifice of red bricks. I slipped between two identical houses through dewy grass and up the embankment behind. There was a sagging chainlink fence haphazardly thrown around the property, but even this token gesture lay flat against the rubble where it sagged too far between bent poles. I stepped over it at one of these places and easily hopped the low concrete wall within.

I could smell wood smoke and hear a low radio within the abandonment. As my questing eye scanned the brick edifice I caught flickers of light across some high girders, a fire burned somewhere inside. This was certainly the place I was supposed to go, that was sure. It was a particularly singular structure, and the signs of occupation were also familiar. I was in the right place. I followed the wall until I found a door frame, and there I entered a open roofed hallway.

This place had been very large, but was divided into many halls and rooms with more of the same red brick as the streetside facade had been. The floor was dirt in most places, cracking tile in others. Along the edges of the hall little weeds and small grasses fought for a scraggly existence. The outer walls were easily 40 feet tall, but the inner walls were of varied height. Some were of sheetrock and paper, others of cinderblock, plywood and more brick. They were all incomplete. Each had holes a man could walk through and edges worn down. There was no place you couldn't see some bit of the open sky. At fairly regular intervals there were barrels, half full of burning bramble and paper trash.

I began to see small knots of people huddled in rooms near campfires and propane stoves. I smelled barbecue, cigarettes, and weed in the smoke. A few waved with a strange familiarity, as if they knew me. I passed someone in a hall that reminded me of a guy I hung out with long ago and he nodded conspiratorially. The next person to walk past me in the hall however, was a guy I did know. It was a friend that I had worked and partied with a decade before. I was surprised to see him, and said so after a bright greeting. He knew I was going to be there and had looked forward to seeing me, but had to go take care of something nearby. He said he'd be back shortly, and as he left he seemed to bounce down the hall. My old friend had been dressed oddly, in a bright green athletic jersey, piped with yellow and bearing the number 23. Also, he had bleached his short hair from what had apparently been green, as the dye still clung tenaciously to the frizzy ends.

I had a creeping apprehension that he wouldn't be the last person from my past that I would run into. I took a few more steps, turned, and found myself at a waist-height wall. After a moment I realized that what I was looking into was a living room set. A small frame of a room built of the same crumbling brick standing alone squared by open hallways. In the dead center of this room, on tattered, olive colored scuptured carpet stood my ex-wife.

She looked as though she had lived here a while. The room had some furniture, as it were. A ragged tapestry settee, a a glass fronted curio cabinet with a missing pane and at least two more cracked. She wore a faded flowered country dress that was as dusty as the walls. She saw me a moment after I recognized her. There was a hurricane lamp on a desk between the wall where I stood and her place in the room. She leaned forward and turned it up. She took the lamp from the desk and put it on the wall between us. She had a bag, and from it she took a largish glass pickle jar. This too, she placed on the wall between us.

In the jar were various oddments, a spool of dusty red thread, more than a few coins and buttons. Safety pins were tangled with a rubber band or two, there were pens and even a large metal pair of scissors, their black handles scuffed and chipped with use. There were other things too, all blending together in a tangled mess. I was pretty sure I saw a rusty nail and a postage stamp pressed between the scissors and the jar as she held it up to me. The glass shone with firelight, she said nothing, but offered the jar again, asking with her eyes that I take it.

I did not.

Dejected, she set the jar back on the wall between us, and I noticed we had an audience. Just outside of my periphery I could feel a crowd had gathered, either to see the outcome of our wordless exchange or to get their hands on some of what was in the jar, I wasn't sure. I could see no one but the girl until another woman walked into the room behind her and stopped, her hand to her mouth. This other wore a kitschy tourists' kimono in pink and green. It took me a moment to realize what she was looking at. But it became clear that her eyes were fixated on the jar, and there they stayed as though it contained jewels or gold.

The woman before me took off a spindly necklace and dropped it into the jar, and began to work the clasp on a matching bracelet. Her eyes went back to mine, pleading now, as she tried to remove the jewelry. I knew then that the jar held glamor, a jar full of promises. Each little object in the jar was one offered, a treasure to these that lived here in this ruin. The jar's contents became clear to me in one moment of insight, as it stood on the wall between us.

I knew the suburbs I had walked through to arrive here were to my back. As I turned away from the jar I felt the crowd move fluidly out of my way to converge behind me, between the girl and I. The wall was open and I could see a clear path to the outer wall through the rubble, so there I walked until I was on the grassy berm ringing the sprawling neighborhood of identical homes.

And I awoke.