Elevator to the Pit:

Fractured nights at Fulton Street

During my three-year crash-out in the Punk Magazine office on Fulton Street, it was a full-time job convincing myself that I was leading a rational, viable lifestyle. Ridiculous! No kitchen, no bathroom—the whole arrangement was built on sand. One word to management from a snitch would’ve put me back on the street. Who could relax under such pressure?

I tried to ignore it by wandering the neighborhood and immersing myself in its history and minutia. But nothing could help me at night…

Here’s the latest chapter of The Trouble With Apartment One.

—B.F. “Brian” Späth

NASSAU AND GOLD

There exists, I said, a bronze memorial plaque, half-hidden in an alcove, mounted upon the brick wall of a building on the south side of Fulton Street, commemorating the old Edison Power Station of Lower Manhattan, whose colossal generators once lit the avenues and chambers of the entire city.

On my idle wanderings along the sidewalks of Fulton Street, I have often lingered before this marker, compelled by a wayward curiosity at these immense and forbidding turbines—and perhaps also seeking an oblique distraction from my ruinous state of exile.

And on the north side of Fulton, between Nassau and Gold, there once stood the old Strand Bookstore—that remnant of the lost city—that wavering oasis…

I was in the habit of lingering there—losing my self in the somber Reliquaries of Print—finding respite from my dreadful circumstance—and taking solace among the stacks of Remaindered Books…

It was on one of these forgotten excursions, I said, that I came upon, in the dusky aisles of the Strand, a book of photographs of this self-same Edison Power Station: a cavernous hall where gigantic turbines loomed—disturbing in their very scale and strangeness—entombed in a monstrous web of grim and faceless engines.

From a nearby bin, another volume fixed me with a stricken gaze—a cast-off copy of The Second World War in Pictures:

From out of the carnage a specter arose unblinking:

The ruins of a stately church somewhere in France—yes, I think that’s right. It lingered upon a blasted field—forsaken—its walls torn open by the bombs—where Broken Saints lay felled amid the rubble.

A shadow engraved itself upon my soul, I said:

A Pagan Ceremony performed among the fallen stones—where banished Gods were conjured from The Ether—under a pale and poisonous sky.

When the last accountant has slammed the ledger shut At Day’s End—when the final letter has been tossed into the mailroom—when the last resentful drudge has fled the building, I said—

This is when the Bennett crosses over into the limbo of The Night Airs…

That is when I draw the blinds and curtains, I said—for the windows stand exposed—and any idling stranger on the roof might parse the Damning Secrets of my room!

And this is when I bind myself in scraps of dusty linen—and take my place upon the floor—beneath the fragile canopy of the card table, I said—

Where I worry through the darkness in the fractured night of Fulton Street…

My attention fastens on the hallway just outside the door—it inhabits Another Sphere entirely—a realm beset by unfamiliar currents, I say—where every sound takes on the solemn weight of trespass…

Suspicion blossoms up, I said, as tremors seek me out from distant floors:

The loathsome hiss of the elevator banks unnerves me—

Against my will, I behold myself ensnared amongst the slithering cables—suspended over a bottomless shaft…

And though with commendable effort I resist—I find myself descending nonetheless:

Down past weary landings all sealed up for the night—past iron shutters tightly bolted—past dusty folding doors—

And still down, I said: past rumor and suggestion—past long-departed tenants, past a row of Nameless Portals…

And at the very bottom lies a barren trench, I said—the walls gone black with mold and dereliction…

From the depths there rises a dreadful humming—ominous and unappeased—

No machinery is discernible—only the ceaseless tremor—as though something labors in the darkness unrelenting…

And whenever I’m forced to run the gauntlet of the lobby—whenever I flee The Bennett Building in despair—and especially whenever I pass the eerie Night Desk trembling—

I sometimes pause and note the basement door’s ajar—

It bears the faint reflection of a host of flickering sparks, I said—and a rumbling from the boiler…