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A Seven-Story Building with a Vacant Lot on Either Side

Jenene Ravesloot

    A building with at least seventy-eight thousand square feet total, and she’s impressive, even if all the doors are boarded up and some of the windows are bricked in. You can tell she was once a beauty: classical revival style, white glazed terracotta facade, ornate finishes, nonstructural columns, and elaborate capitals with recessed windows at the top. It’s hard to appreciate her now. There’s nothing but boarded-up doors, bricked-in windows, blank windows, windows with shredded curtains, or torn window shades, and I swear someone behind one of the windows up there on the north side of the building like the ghost of P. J. Sexton. Sexton, I explain to Jake, was the first owner of the land that the empty Circuit Court Building now resides on. He was rumored to have been poisoned with arsenic in 1903. So, I say to Jake, Maybe that’s his lonely ghost up there. Jake and I both want in and I can’t see a way in. It’s impossible. Whoever owns this building is real smart, too smart. Yeah, this place is nothing but a white glazed terracotta facade with brick, wood, and glass—a white glazed terracotta facade with no access. Forget the fire escape in the back that hangs like a broken arm. It’s not about to take us anywhere fast. There’s some gang graffiti on the west brick wall behind the iron stairs of the fire escape, white overlapping letters that move down the wall that remind me of Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, and those windows. We stare at that fire escape and a bum who pulls a suitcase on wheels down the rutted dirt alley behind the building. He scans us once and is gone. Things get quiet. No wind. No cars on the street. No ambulance sirens. No barking dogs. No mewing cats, just silence, and my hair standing straight up on the back of my neck. Jake must feel it too, because he’s moving across the empty lot as fast as he can, flat feet flapping, and I’m not far behind—two rats running along an invisible wall at midnight.

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