The Palace of Nothingness
Titus stopped for lunch at J. J. Redhook’s Crab Cabin. Writhing masses of these “crabs” actually more of a lobster sized cousin to the silverfish with porcelain white armor waited in mesh holding bins in the water outside the cabin, bobbing half submerged. This body of water was a large cooling tank formerly used by the now closed down Plastech Foundries. These days, the above mentioned white crabs called its murky depths home, seeded with the help of Mr. Redhook, who also grew a sort of tendriled weed in the pool, which when cooked had a noodle like consistency and agreeably salty taste. Titus had had a bowl of this weed plus a single pale ale. Now, he left the Crab Cabin with a large coffee to go.
He stood at the fenced perimeter of the former cooling basin, sipping his coffee, which steamed in the chilly air. He loved a good coffee but found that even bad coffee like this had a certain junk food charm; unacceptable at a nice restaurant but perfectly fine for carnivals, park concession stands, crab cabins and their ilk. The cold, dreamily slurping waters of the large tank steamed as well, in great clouds around the legs of J. J Redhook, which half projected out over the pool. The white noodle like weed mostly grew at the pool’s bottom but here and there, tangles of it like the hair of drowned women spread out over the surface. The red paint and glowing windows of the wooden Crab Cabin were a friendly warmth in the misty, towering grayness of the surrounding city of Punktown.
By profession, Titus found the Crab Cabin interesting. He found the looming Plastech Foundries, in whose shadow J. J. Redhook dwelled as a little red parasite feasting off its remains, even more compelling. He was a Properties Investigator for one of Paxton’s leading real estate companies. Space was at a premium in Punktown, which could only build up, out and down so much. He scouted out, examined and initiated the purchase of troubled or abandoned property that could be changed into a new housing development where an old one had burned, a new mall where an earlier had failed, a parking garage for a Spartan, icy office block where an outdated factory had once churned with greasy, sweating life.
He took in the cityscape which all but walled up the sky alive, as softly out of focus as a distant mountain range. His reaction to a failing or failed structure was curious, even to him. He loved buildings, architecture. It pained him to see a beautiful Choom theater which predated Earth colonization shut down after a hundred and fifty years. But another part of him perked up in eagerness at the opportunity this presented. A darkened school in which children would no longer swarm energetically, a plant like Paxton Printing now hollowed out and stripped down like a flayed whale while its robot workers were recycled and its live laborers despaired for another place to make their living—these images filled Titus with melancholy. There was nothing quite so lonely as a deserted building… unless that was a deserted house.
And yet, these buildings provided his livelihood. And when he encountered them, they made his heart beat faster, and brought out in him something like a fierce possessiveness to stake a claim on them before someone else did. He was a hunter who mourned for his prey, but was very good at tracking it down.
It wasn’t the Plastech Foundries, with its many sealed up windows like myriad blinded eyes, he was here to have a look at today, however (its future was tied up in complex litigation; he had already checked)...but another structure, in the same general neighborhood, and he had begun drifting in that direction now.
He had discovered the building while renting an hour on a commercial satellite through his home computer to scour Punktown’s secondary industrial sector, mostly given over to office and warehouse space these days. He had laid various templates of the city over his satellite view of the area, trying to ascertain the structure’s ownership. One map would seem to indicate that it was within the boundry lines of an old Choom textile mill, but another appeared to show that it was an outer building of an early Earth owned steelworks complex. One template claimed it was not there at all. This had led Titus to call up earlier satellite photos of the district. There was the building, in every view, dating back decades, and just as enigmatic in each one. Was that its vehicle filled parking lot in one view, or was that another parking lot for the steelworks? His computer could pin no name, no label to the building, which despite its good size seemed to have reposed in a kind of serene anonymity through many years of growth and decline.
Finally he had poured over the very first survey shots of the Choom city which Punktown had swallowed up, shots taken during the earliest colonization efforts. And the building seemed to be there, but maybe not. It looked familiar, but different. As Titus went back over the various pictures, it seemed to him the building had changed subtly or even drastically in appearance over the years. Different owners, refitting it for their own needs, or a succession of different buildings built on the same spot?
In the earliest shot, the mill or factory had a good half dozen great brick chimneys, and maybe it was thick smoke from these that gave the structure a darkened blurry look, smudged, as if it had been caught in a photograph while moving very quickly.
