What carries our history? And how accountable are we to it if we are its only witness?

This one, too. This one, too, offers him its sonic fingerprint, how he’s come to describe it. The forensic moment, its unveiling as culprit and accomplice and witness all. The building described itself once as Bombay Tubing; now an architectural supply and “Rapid Repair!” sandwiches it, the occasional bangs or scrapes along with the steady hum from Bellevue working themselves to imprint upon these lore-sponged bricks. But none of this distresses Esmond; not any more. A building’s unheeded dactylograms echo old intimacies as memoir. Esmond has no need to see the abandoned starling nest to his right: he hears, echoing still, seven generations of them across the past nine years, jumbled warblings and desperate imitations of jays to hold off predators, a jarring reverberation of barred owl violence at their end. And all this, even this, two icebinding/thawing winters of nest ago, lay far beneath the grayer rotations and whines and chuffings of steel saw on steel cylinder.

Esmond’s porous skin takes in the moisture of brick over a century old. Then he withdraws, for he has learned long before that the tactile constrains, these mostly Chicago Common and some deeply-stained Clinker—and he closes his eyes, knowing that sight, too, blurs his aural scrutiny. Decades of copper-brazed hum, one machine in a nearby corner spinning in increasing eccentricity across 15 years before exploding into bloody resolution, and later, maybe as he was born, cooling fans at last overlapping, their blades each at different RPMs, passing the sounds between them in erratic rhythms, a beating interference of wave and pressure. Hollow singing of steel pulled through tungsten carbide; viscous squelch of tallow and mineral oils forced through their centers.

” . . . until such time as the world cracks open and deafens all of us, erases even our endings.​”

And the lives of the men here. Did pre-fans era “Wysocki” know that his time here would be etched in these walls by the hundreds who would declare his name as curse? (Esmond could not discern his first name, spoken perhaps never here.) Could “Moose” probably-Thomas, he of the spinning tragedy, believe that no matter what his family understood of him, this acoustic dust would preserve him in its fading reflections until some bulldozer finally arrives? Ah, other names were harder to sift, to lift from these walls. Our footsteps are here, though, these still.

At once Esmond realizes that the world is room, its atmospheres tangible walls, containing the gatherings of species and swarms of gesture between them . . . until such time as the world cracks open and deafens all of us, erases even our endings.

Dissolution without discernment. How many could read them, anyway? Esmond feels the rough scrape of his boot against damp concrete as a thick whuff. His own movements marry themselves into the air, the stone, the abandoned conveyor belt which still insists its thud into the rafters with each landed coil. His Vibram lug sole will never match that power, but the breathy rubbery friction sits now atop the rest, louder only for its foreign freshness, but fading soon enough against the narrative memoria here. 

He has marked it, Bombay Tubing’s ancient fingerprint, altered it forever, however minute. No longer will three newborns die from an owl’s predation without his Asolo boot scrape as eulogy. If he was able, he knows, he might hear yet his own curses of his mother, the bang of the store door at Harmony House he exited in fear and guilt, his own eccentric and echoing plot across the planet.