Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

He started walking, following the one-way arrows, heading south. He wasn’t far from downtown, but he was far enough that there was little to see — just a few sparse industrial buildings and a lot of fenced-off parking lots. He passed through a wide, nearly empty intersection, then another.

In a few minutes, he reached the river. The land along the shore was closed off from the road by a fence that appeared to stretch for miles, ending nearby at a cluster of high-rise apartment towers. Dobbs tossed his duffel bag over, then climbed the fence and dropped down on the other side.

Across the dense green water of the Detroit River was the dingy backlit skyline of Windsor, Ontario, the buildings all aglow. It was April, and every waitress in every diner across the plains had talked of little else but the arrival of spring. So far Dobbs wasn’t impressed. A chill had followed him all the way from the desert, never breaking. Now, standing on the windy shoreline, he fastened the button at the throat of his peacoat.

He’d spent the last week studying maps of the city. He knew the names of the streets, knew where they went. But the sights were unfamiliar, and the first ones he saw surprised him with their grandeur. Heading east, approaching downtown, he passed an old Gothic church with a towering green spire and limestone bricks that looked to have been chiseled by hand. Across the street, from a whole different century, rose a massive art deco building, all sharp lines and smooth stone block, arched windows trimmed in bands of bas-relief.

The city grew rapidly from there. Parking garages, towers, and offices of brick and glass. He reached a roundabout, circling a park. It was a peaceful, quiet place, ringed with birch and elm, paved in granite. The fountain hadn’t yet been switched on for the season, and at this hour, the shops and restaurants were still closed. But he could imagine people here, crowds.

He was in the heart of the city now. In the distance he caught a glimpse of the baseball stadium and the football field. Up the avenue to the north were the museums, the theaters, the opera house. Around the corner, the casino and restaurants. This was where the tourists came. This was where they stayed.

From his pocket, he removed a small square of paper.

Cross over the freeway .

The freeway marked the dividing line. Walking across the bridge, he could already feel the landmarks, the attractions, slipping away behind him. In the distance he saw a wall of graffiti bordering a compound of barren factory buildings clad in corrugated siding. The other part of the city, waiting to greet him. He kept walking, passing a cluster of crumbling brick industrial facades, vandalized, wrapped in rusted barbed wire. Then came a strip of storefronts, boarded up, tagged sill to sill in spray paint.

The note in his pocket said Go straight, quarter of a mile .

The avenue widened. On the opposite side was a group of warehouses, razor-wired parking lots stuffed with idling trucks. Faded block letters on cinderblock walls spelled out IMPORTS and EXPORTS, PRODUCE and POULTRY and MEAT.

The directions said Cross .

The sun was fully up now, but Dobbs was still chilled. At last he saw people: three men on a loading dock, gathered around cigarettes and steaming Styrofoam cups. A forklift beeped its way in the belly of the dark garage. They saw Dobbs, too, several sets of eyes following him as he went around the bend. Their expressions seemed to say where are you going? As if they knew something he didn’t.

But Dobbs already knew what lay ahead. Even so, he wasn’t quite ready for it, the moment the landscape changed again. It happened in an instant, as though a slide had been triggered before his eyes: a quick flash, and the warehouses vanished. The pavement gave way to weeds. The parking lots gave way to prairie. He’d simply turned a corner, and suddenly he found himself standing among barren fields framed by sidewalks. The city grid intact, but the city itself had disappeared. Empty. Whatever had once filled the emptiness was gone. Burned down, torn down, who knew?

Along with the maps, he’d gathered a few facts, a couple of which had stuck: a city of one hundred forty square miles, a third of it abandoned, the emptiness combined larger than the entire city of San Francisco. Boston. Manhattan. Almost two million inhabitants at the city’s height. Two-thirds of them now departed.

The directions said Keep going , but he couldn’t be sure where he was. The street signs had disappeared, too. There was the occasional house down one or another side street. Some of them had cars parked out front. Here and there among the weeds were the outlines of foundations. This must have been a residential neighborhood once. He tried to imagine what was missing: flower beds and latticed porches and picture windows framed in lace.

The directions stopped. He was supposed to have turned. But where? He went back, retracing his steps. What finally caught his eye was something just beyond a streetlight, tucked around a pair of crooked maples. From the side, as he approached, the place looked enormous, a dilapidated farmhouse shedding weathered gray clapboard. But as he got closer, he realized it was long but narrow, an old row house.

The place was all crazy angles. The front looked like a gingerbread castle, with a rounded tower honeycombed in hexagonal shingles. Every window on the front of the house was shaded by frilled, blue-and-white-striped aluminum canopies, which looked as though they’d been stolen from a boardwalk ice cream parlor. A rusty chain-link fence leaned in toward the house like a tightly cinched belt. Juniper shrubs that must once have been decorative now reached as high as the second floor, shielding the house completely from the empty corner lot next door. Between this house and the nearest neighbors were a couple of football fields’ worth of chest-high weeds.

There was no number on the house. None on the directions, either. But this was the place. It was exactly what they would choose.

The porch floorboards bent beneath him. The door was locked. Not so much as a wiggle in the knob. Reinforced and jimmy proof. There was not one dead bolt but two. The door was the only solid part of the entire house.

Downspout , the directions said. And so it was. They’d driven a nail through the gutter a few inches from the bottom. He slid off the key.

The inside of the house smelled of earth, of darkness. The windows had been papered over. The switches on the wall were dead. Once his eyes adjusted, he saw the place had been stripped bare. The hardware was gone from the doors and cabinets. Where before there’d been fixtures, there were now only holes.

Aside from securing the door and covering the windows, they’d done nothing else. The floor was crunchy with the shards of acorn shells. A couple of overturned soup cans had tumbled together into the corner. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture. There was no broom either, but he went outside and with his knife cut a needly branch from one of the overgrown shrubs. He swept the filth out the back door. Little by little fresh air trickled in.

In his dream, Dobbs was somewhere familiar, but he wasn’t sure where. He knew only that he’d been here before. The people were familiar too, but their features were vague. It was as if their heads had been carved in stone that had washed away over time. There was something Dobbs was trying to tell them, something important he needed them to understand. They stood in a circle around him, as if awaiting instructions, but they seemed to be ignoring his every word. And so Dobbs went around the circle, one at a time, knocking them to the floor, beating them with his fists. Each patiently awaited his turn.