M. Hobson: Domovoi

The manufacturing floor smells like stale urine and pigeon shit. As Ryan walks through the wide door and into the building, the space swells around him, the filtered light through the dust-caked windows cool and blue, the cement floor vast and undulating, like a calm body of water.

His footsteps echo. On the floor there is a pile of repair manuals from the 30’s for a machine of indecipherable purpose. The manuals look as if they’ve been stored in a bucket of old oil. Blackberry vines thread through broken windowpanes. The iron pillars are cobwebbed with ribbons of rust.

He thinks about the dump trucks and caterpillar tractors that will soon line up outside. He thinks about how the weeds will be cut away and the rusted pillars pulled down, and the oil-slicked concrete cleaned with foaming buckets of tri-sodium phosphate. He thinks about multi-use dwellings, white space, windows. He thinks about how everything dirty will be made clean, antiseptic, new, smooth. He closes his eyes and spreads his arms and imagines himself expanding, expanding.

At the back of the room is a set of stairs. He moves over to them carefully, avoiding the puddles and piles of grimy debris. In the rafters overhead, he hears baby pigeons squeaking weakly, and the sound of wings.

The staircase is a jury-rigged affair. Ryan mounts the stairs, carefully feeling each board for soundness.

He stops after a few steps, looks back. The door is still open and the warm afternoon sunlight is inviting him back, calling him to come out. But it is hot out there, and in here it is cool. He notices the smell again, the strange smell of honey and steel. He looks up the stairs. At the top there is a hollow-core plywood door with a jagged-edged hole in the center. He imagines rotting construction, thin-walled offices and empty filing cabinets.

It is dark at the top of the stairs.

He keeps climbing.

The door opens onto a hallway, its linseed lineolum flooring warped and curled. Four doors open off the hallway, two on either side. He opens the first door. There is an office beyond, nothing in it but a mouse’s nest and some chewed-on newspapers.

He looks in the second office. It has a heavy metal desk in it. There is a window that looks over the factory floor, but it is covered with plywood.

There is a woman in the third office.

Ryan jumps when he sees her, slamming back against the door with a rattling thud. She is sitting with her back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling as if expecting it to do something. There is a look on her face, a look that is both empty and full, like she is thinking very deep thoughts about nothing.

“Jesus,” he whispers, his heart pounding in his throat. “Who the hell are you?”

She drops her oil-colored eyes and looks at him, not blinking. She is, Ryan notices, as far from beautiful as a woman can get. She is shaped like a bell; her ass is immense, her waist lumpy, her shoulders strangely narrow. Her breasts poke out through her too-tight tank-top, and they’re small and hard and probably sour, like unripe persimmons. Her arms are thick with muscle.

“Winnie,” she says, lifting a hand. In it, there is a bottle of vodka. She takes a swig of this and holds the bottle toward him.

Squatter, he thinks, with a mixture of disgust and glee. The first secret to be stripped, the first boil to be lanced. He knows how to deal with squatters.

“You’re going to have to leave.” His voice is firm and unshaking, full of money.

“No,” she says.

“I’ve bought this place. It’s mine now.”

Winnie does not move, but stares at him, a grim little smile playing over her lips.

“Yours, eh?” she says.

Ryan thinks about going for the police. But it is hot out there, burning and dry, and in here it is cool. So instead of leaving, he does something stupid. Something he knows he should not do. He reaches out and grabs the strange woman’s arms, tries to pull her to her feet. He halfway succeeds before she wrenches herself backward, pulling him off balance and sending him tumbling to the dirty floor.

She moves quickly, coming up over him. With a balled fist, she punches down viciously, catching his chin. He puts up his arms, shields his face. The world is a confusion of movement and pain as she hits him. Her fists find his softest spots, unerringly, hard. He closes his eyes.

“Yours, eh?” she shrieks again and again, until her voice finally retreats down a dark tunnel.

He wakes up choking.

The woman is pouring vodka down his throat.

He gags, shoving her hand aside. He is lying on the floor. He wants to jump up, but he cannot; he is stiff and sore. He can barely move. She is sitting next to him, legs stretched out before her. In her hand, she has a long heavy piece of wood that looks like it came out of a ruined place in the wall. She is tapping the wood gently against her knee.

He looks at her lap, stretched out beside him. It is vast, doughy, clad in worn-thin sweatpants. He tentatively reaches over a hand to touch it. It is warm, like pudding encased in a heating blanket. Winnie says nothing, but takes a drink of the vodka. Then she hands it to him. He takes his hand off her leg and takes the bottle, drinking from it delicately. She offers him a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke. But he watches as she puts one in her mouth, lights it carefully, exhales the smoke in a thin stream.

“Why are you here?” Winnie asks.

“This place is mine now,” Ryan says, his voice uncertain. “I bought it.”

“You bought it.” She says the words flatly, a statement, not a question. She seems to find them humorous, but she does not smile; instead, she flares her nostrils.

“Why?”

“To . . . to clean it. To make it new.”

“What if it doesn’t want to be?”

Ryan blinks at her, as lost as one of the gals at the assessor’s office.

“What are you talking about?”

“What if it just wants to be what it is? What it has become?”

This makes Ryan laugh, a loud barking laugh that echoes through the empty building.

Winnie snarls, her lip curling. She lifts the wood, brings it down hard.

He curls his arms around his head again, and again the world retreats in darkness.

When he wakes up, she is gone and he is alone.

He limps down the stairs and out of the building, down to where his green Lexus is waiting. It is night, a thick hot summer night. Where did the whole day go? He has the most horrific hangover he’s ever experienced, and he aches terribly.

Running his tongue over his lip, he can tell that it’s split. Touching fingers to his eyes, he can tell that they’re blackened.

When he gets to his green Lexus he looks at his reflection in the rear-view mirror. It’s worse than he thought. There’s a red welting crease over his cheekbone, and both his eyes are as purple and blue as overripe plums.

First, he uses his cell phone to call the police. He tells them about the crazy squatter in his building. He wants her cleared out. He is a man of substance, goddamn it! He has pumped millions into the local economy over the past decade. He is on a first-name basis with the mayor.

Yes, he is willing to press charges for assault. He wants her locked up for life. Maybe in an insane asylum.

Satisfied, he flips his phone shut. Then he drives to his fiancée’s condominium. She is wearing green silk pajamas, and she looks as smooth and beautiful as fresh plaster. She looks at him blankly, without interest, without surprise, without anything. She does not even comment on his battered face. In a flash of blackness, he shoves her to the ground and makes passionate, unpleasant love to her on the bleached oak floor of her entry hall.

Then, sitting naked on her distressed leather couch, her black portable phone pressed to his ear, he calls every contractor he knows. The most brutal, the most efficient, the most pragmatic, the most no-nonsense.