The One Still Standing

Text and illustrations produced by the pipeline

ImaReadFolio 02 — 04

She worked the press in the long room above the noodle shop, where the floor smelled of oil from below and of paper from her own stacks, and where the single window faced east so she could time her runs by the way the sky went from black to bruised to white.

The press was small and stubborn and took only two inks at a time. She fed it the cheapest stock she could find, the kind that drank ink and showed its own fibers, the kind that municipal offices once used for notices nobody wanted to read. On that paper she printed obituaries for buildings.

It had begun three winters ago, with the bathhouse on Pine Lane. The eviction notices had gone up on a Tuesday; by Friday she had cut a stencil of its tiled roof and its crooked chimney, and that night she ran a sheet for every regular who had ever soaked there. Pink and blue, the two inks she could afford, laid down one after the other on the long bed of the press. They never quite lined up. A roof in blue, a roof in pink half a hair beside it, the building wearing its own ghost like a coat slipped off one shoulder.

She had thought, then, that she would fix it. She tightened the registration pins. She marked the corners with pencil. She held her breath through whole runs. The ghost stayed. By the third building she stopped trying.

In the months that followed she printed the noodle shop at the corner of Lin and Eighth, before its windows were boarded. She printed an entire alley, twelve doorways on one sheet, the doors and their shivering twins. She printed the laundry, the lamp shop, the dovecote on top of the union hall. She tacked the obituaries to telephone poles the night before the wrecking crews arrived, and in the morning people stood at the corners and read them in the rain and walked on.

ImaRead2

ImaReadFolio 03 — 04

The press prints a building that is still standing

ImaReadFolio 04 — 04

She laid the sheets out on the long table in the order she had pulled them and watched the ghost recede across them like a tide going out.

She understood, then, what the press had been doing for three years.

It was not a flaw. It was not a poverty of cheap parts and crooked pins. The trembling double had never been the building; it had been the press, grieving, getting the grief done early, so that by the time the wrecking crews came the obituary was already cool to the touch. The misregistration was the small, civic, mortal courtesy of a machine that had learned to mourn ahead of time.

And for the grey building that still stood, with its bedsheet and its lit streetlight and its woman beating a rug, the press had begun to mourn. It had begun, and she had reprinted, and each pass had pulled the ghost a little further out of the room, the way a hand pulled gently back from a shoulder.

On the dawn she remembered later as the dawn that changed everything, she was finishing a run for a row of brick storefronts on the river side. The first plate, pink, went down clean. She wiped her hands on her apron and set the blue plate in its cradle. The press took the first sheet and shuddered, and then it shuddered again, and then it pushed out a single page that had nothing to do with the brick storefronts at all.

It was the grey building on the east side. The seven-story one, with the long balconies and the water tank on the roof like a tin hat. She knew it the way she knew her own staircase. She had passed it that morning on her way in, and someone's bedsheet had been hanging from a fourth-floor rail, and the streetlight at its corner had still been on.

The grey building wore its ghost. Pink shoulders, blue body, one half-millimeter apart, the way every dead building she had ever printed had worn its ghost. Across the bottom, in the small typeface she used for all of them, was the date, that day's date, and nothing else.

She held the sheet by the corners. The ink was still wet. She felt, without yet thinking it, that something quiet had walked into the room.

She put on her coat and went down the stairs and across two streets to look. The grey building was there. The bedsheet was there. A woman on the second floor was beating a rug over the rail. There were no orange notices on the door, no fencing, no chalk marks on the brick. She stood on the far curb for a long time. Then she walked back.

She set up the plates again. She told herself the machine had picked up an old stencil, that some scrap had drifted into the bed. She ran the sheet again, carefully, watching the rollers turn.

The press printed the grey building a second time. The ghost was fainter. The pink shoulders sat closer to the blue body. Where before there had been a clear trembling double, now there was only a soft suggestion of one, as if the building had taken half a step toward itself.

She ran a third sheet, and a fourth. Each one came out paler than the last. By the fifth, the misregistration was almost gone. The grey building stood on the paper neatly, sharply, alone, the way a thing stands when nothing is beside it any longer.